#ALL of the reader characters are stupid. the suns are stupid AND the moons are stupid too

[midnight-mourning]

🎃☀️🎃🌙 Dead Ringer ☀️🎃🌙🎃

Hi @baby-bloos!! I was your Secret Skeleton this year! Wrote you a little something spooky in the Sleuth Jesters universe, I hope you enjoy!!

Tagging @naffeclipse and @sunnys-aesthetic since it's y'alls au/aus (if that wasn’t okay please let me know!), I hadn't read Sleuth Jesters prior to making this, very much enjoyed what I did get through before I started writing, hope I did your characters/story some justice! 

I made a few little tweaks to stuff just to fit more with the storyline I was going for (the characters are the same, just some small plot things are adjusted) but obviously Sleuth Jesters and the Detective Au belong to the respective lovely people mentioned up above ^-^

Small content warning for a tiny bit of blood mentions and oil protrayed as blood mentions, nothing super major, just adding to the overall spooky vibe.

Had to post solely on Ao3 for better readability (she got long lol), have fun!

Word count: 8313

Talking about the story under the cut (slight spoilers)

I hope you like it Bloos!!! And again hope I was able to give SJ & the Detective au the spotlight they deserve >_<

Was very nervous to post this ngl 😅 but I like how it turned out! I'm a big fan of the murder mystery trope and couldn't help but incorporate it into my gift :)

[aurumalatus]

you take the stars (i'll keep the moon)

kinich x reader, angst, major character death, discussions of chasing death, non-linear storyline

summary: the first time you both die, you both come back. it's only the first time.

Dying is so, so cold.

You never ask Kinich what it felt like for him. He doesn’t talk about it either, and you’re not so socially stunted as to not know what that means. For a while, you think you’re on the same page about it all.

But Kinich seems to take it differently, at least afterwards. Whereas the exposure makes you shrink, it seems to make him bigger, bolder. He sees it as a blessing that he’d gotten so close and still made it out alive.

Yet, all you can focus on is that you’d gotten so close.

/

“Do you know how stupid that was?” Kinich hisses through his teeth, breath hot against your cheeks. His grip on your arms reminds you of his love—bruising, barely controlled. “Don’t ever do something like that again!”

It makes you want to kiss him, weirdly enough; his face is so handsome, even when smeared with grime and blood, and you just want to bite his bottom lip and tug. You want to tell him he’s being unfair, that he does stuff like this all the time, especially nowadays. That he’s been through six rolls of bandages this week and you’re wondering why you need to buy more already.

But you think that might make him angrier, so you merely shrug.

“Sorry, Kin,” you sigh, “I won’t do it again.”

/

When it’s dark, you lose Kinich in the sky.

His hair is an inky color, the kind that swirls and disappears behind the stars when you’re not looking hard enough. He’s quiet, too, even as he tends to the remains of the blown campfire. 

He’s searching for something in the stars, you think. Maybe his mother, or maybe his father. Love, or vengeance. 

“Kin,” you call, voice echoing delicately through the clearing. He doesn’t turn to you, doesn’t reply, but you know he’s listening. “What are you looking for?”

He frowns. You smile bitterly.

Even he doesn’t know.

/

You and Kinich aren’t in love.

Before you died, maybe you could’ve been a good lover. Maybe a good person, because the two are not the same thing. But now, you’re neither, and you’re not sure what Kinich is either. You’re not in love with Kinich, because you’re not in anything, haven’t been since you died.

Instead, all you are is clawing, running, escaping. It would be good for you to do that much, if you could.

But you don’t. And neither does he.

When you retire for the night, he sleeps facing away from you for the first time. As if to console you, he shoves his share of the blanket in your direction—he always seems to be too warm for his taste.

You don’t want to think too hard about what that means, so you sleep.

/

When the Night Warden Wars come back around, you don’t go.

Kinich finds you sitting upon a cliff overlooking the Stadium of the Sacred Flame. He approaches you wordlessly, and the grass parts politely as he takes a seat. You already know what he’s going to say.

“You’re still going,” you say, always beating him to the punch.

You take his silence as an answer, no matter how rotten it tastes.

The flame is visible, even from here, and you think the rumors must be true—that the flame draws its power from Natlan, that it takes and takes to fuel the future of your people.

There’s no other explanation for the way the oxygen is sucked straight from your lungs.

/

Kinich fails to return from the Wars, and no one can seem to find you for three weeks.

Twenty-one whole days that your friends spend, unsure if you’re still breathing. Mualani will later say it was the worst period of life—unyielding, roaring waves of grief that refused to dissipate, an enduring assault on her heart and soul.

You wonder if you’ll ever manage to weather the same storm.

You’re eventually found, if only purely by coincidence.

Citlali takes a stroll one night, at a time when the sun is long buried. She can’t say why or how, only that she does. And she sees you.

And then, she can’t seem to force the image of you sleeping on Kinich’s grave from her mind.

/

“I’m going.”

With your tears glistening in the moonlight, Kinich feels like the Sacred Flame is burning him from the inside out. Sweat beads on his nape; it’s hot, too hot. He wishes the night was colder.

“But why?” you ask. Your hand inches toward his, and it hurts more than he thought it would. “Why can’t you just stay with me?”

Staying or going—he’s always been caught between the two. Or maybe he’s always lived by going, and it’s the worst kind of habit that he can’t seem to break. So he merely shakes his head and tries to ignore the pang in his heart when you start to sob.

A breeze passes. He shivers.

And yet, he still can’t manage to say he’s sorry.

[zaceouiswriting]

The Football Stud: Fever

Character: Gabe x male reader, (mentioned) Nolan Halloway

Universe: Somewhere in Teen wolf

Warnings: Smut: hardcore, degradation, humiliation, feminization, mentioned non-con

Author's Note: Sorry for the late upload. I was going to post something for Christmas, but that's coming much later. I actually wanted to do something wholesome, but it turned into smut faster than I could see, and I lost interest in it, so I wrote a smutty half request instead. (Please don't ask about the logic; there is none) I hope you guys enjoy this one.

You felt uncomfortable even though it fit perfectly, and unfortunately, you had to admit that it didn't look bad on you as you admired yourself in the bathroom mirror.

“Are you coming or not?” Gabe’s deep voice bellowed authoritatively through the locker room, easily reaching your ear.

You swallowed nervously, not wanting to answer, as you knew he would be mad if you were honest. But you took a deep breath because you were even more afraid of his reaction if you didn't answer.

"I don't really feel comfortable showing-"

"Shut up and come out," he shouted, audibly annoyed, "so you can do literally the only thing a stupid fag like you is good for!"

It felt like he had just punched you right in the chest. You felt humiliated on so many levels, and yet you opened the bathroom door, which led straight into the changing room near the showers.

You would be in the locker room if you just walked around the corner. It had been nearly an hour since the football game ended, and the coach handed Gabe the keys to lock the room behind him. The only visible light was the static glow of the lamps in the room, as the sun had long since given way to the moon.

Head down, you rounded the corner with tiny steps. You didn't see Gabe right away, but you became very aware of him when you heard him whistle after you. The first time it happened, you felt exhilarated, even ecstatic.

There, Gabe sat comfortably on one of the benches against the wall. His body was now much more muscular, as he trained twice as much as he used to, but on his lips was the same superior, condescending smirk, still the same, yet so different.

"You look so fucking hot," he commented, beckoning you to come closer to him, which you did.

When you were in front of him, he ordered you to twirl. You saw his eyes darken with lust as he took another swig of his beer bottle. Technically, he wasn't old enough to drink yet, but the football team had some leeway, at least on university grounds.

He emptied his bottle, placed it safely under the bench, and then simply grabbed you by the waist and sat you on one of his legs.

“Look at this skirt,” he said, fascinated by the sight.

You had no idea where he got it, but right before the game, he gave you a backpack with a cheerleading uniform and something else you wouldn't even think about out of embarrassment. Still, you put on everything he gave you.

“Are you satisfied?” you asked, stuttering and uncertain.

“You can be fucking sure of that!” he boasted loudly. "And even more so if a certain slut had listened to me the first time and not made me wait so long!"

There was a danger gleaming in his eyes that you knew all too well. He'll punish you, force you to shout more than just his name, and treat you so roughly that you'll miss class again. Before starting, you knew you'd have to lie to the others again about all the bruises you'd come home with. Last time, your fraternity almost started a manhunt because they thought someone was forcing them on you, but you somehow managed to calm them down, even though you had to admit to some pretty dirty secrets of yours.

You felt his rough hand on your lower back, moving further down to your ass. Suddenly, you let out a yelp as the same big hand gave your behind a hearty squeeze.

“What a perky ass,” he mutters in a slightly slurred voice, “fuck!”

"Don't you want to sit on my lap, baby girl?" His lips were so close to your ear that you almost moaned reflexively. "I know a dirty slut like you would love to know how fucking hard you make me."

Before you knew it, he had pulled you onto his lap. Both his hands were on your waist as he vigorously ground your ass on his lap. You could feel his big cock getting hard and poking you through his tight football pants.

When you heard him moan softly, you felt the heat rise to your face; you had never heard him moan desperately like that before. Usually, he moans like a rutting bull as he relentlessly thrusts his cock into you, but this somehow felt much more intimate.

"Do I have to remind you what I am to you?" His voice, which had previously been filled with lust, was suddenly stern, even cold. You swallowed hard and couldn't answer. "Pretend you can't hear me?" His laugh was dry; you already knew he was done.

Without a word, he pushed you off his lap but held you up, standing in front of him. Just a second later, his large body overshadowed you, with his hands tightened around your waist once more.

"What a cute little girl," he murmurs into your hair, "So small and yet so disobedient."

Your blood ran cold. He seemed angry, even furious, but you didn't do anything that bad, right? But even if you argue with him, it won't help and will only worsen things.

He doesn't say another word. Instead, he wraps one arm around your waist and lifts you effortlessly. He carried you to some lockers in the middle of the room, sat you back down on the floor, and bent you forward slightly with his other hand while he told you in a barely whispered voice to hold on to the lockers for dear life.

You were already halfway gone from worry and desire—if you were a girl, you knew you would be soaked—now only pre-cum covered the surprise under your short skirt. You truly felt like a slut in that moment, just like Gabe had always told you. Even though you weren't entirely sure what would happen next, you knew you had to hide how much you were already enjoying it.

He traced his rough fingertips over your figure, dancing on your skin like a drunken wisp. By the time they landed on your skirt and took it in his hands, you felt him shudder. Fearing that something had happened, you turned your head only to see Gabe's sinister grin. When he caught your gaze, his intentions were more than clear.

“Aren’t you a pretty girl?”

There it was again. At first, you thought he was just maddened from drunkenness, but now it was clear. He was actually feminizing you. You should have known when he made you dress in a girl's cheerleading outfit.

As you were in thought, Gabe covered you completely with his body, pressing his head firmly into your nape, gently kissing your neck, and eliciting soft moans from your stunned body. His hands continued to explore the entire time, finding their way under your skirt and gently caressing your legs, but you were sure that this would be the only time he would be tender with you that night.

And as if you had summoned it, he ripped up your skirt and slapped your right butt cheek with so much force that it almost threw you flat against the locker, only for him to whistle as if nothing had happened.

"Bitch, you look good in lace!" Gabe slurred like the drunken stud he is, so needy and horny that it was hard to believe.

You didn't even know where he got it because the price tag was still on when you got it, and you almost fainted; it was so expensive that you knew he wanted to do this more often, or so you thought.

“I really can’t wait,” Gabe suddenly murmured as he leaned back in his standing position.

With a quick movement, he shifted the tiny piece of fabric that hid your hole to the side, circling it with his finger before attempting to enter it, only to be stopped as it had contracted too much. You could hear him swearing quietly, cursing you and your uselessness.

Before you knew it, Gabe had raised two fingers to your mouth and ordered you to wet them, as that was the only lube you would get.

Without hesitation, you took them between your lips, let your tongue dance on his long, salty, calloused fingers, and finally took them completely into your mouth, feeling them touch the back of your throat.

The second his fingers reached the back of your throat, all you heard was him cursing once again, angry that he didn't use your throat, even though he had trained it for so long not to gag, even when he shoved his huge cock all the way into your mouth with one sharp thrust.

You knew from the beginning that it would make him mad because you knew full well that deepthroating him was his favorite sensation, especially in a crowded university lecture hall.

Gabe only gave you about a minute before he pulled his finger out of your mouth and immediately, with a precision that a drunk man like him shouldn't have, slid his fingers inside your ass. You gritted your teeth, holding back the pain, knowing that Gabe hated it when you showed any emotion other than lust and desire for him.

Without even trying, this guy hit the spot that made your mind go blank for a second, and when you came back, you felt a pain in your forehead. You found yourself in direct contact with the metal side of the locker.

As his fingers aggressively penetrated your hole, a pain shot through your ass. But you didn't complain because that was all you would get before he took you at a pace so brutal that you'd thank God he'd even prepared you in any way, which was already something great of him, as it was something he didn't do all the time.

“That should be enough,” Gabe mumbled, something he probably didn’t even want to say out loud.

Suddenly, you feel him swaying from side to side, the alcohol clearly taking its effect. But he doesn't let that distract him and instead guides his cock, albeit with difficulty, to your hole.

Although you feared the brutal treatment you would receive, you could barely contain your anticipation of feeling him again. It had been a while, and your hole felt empty for quite a long time. As he circled your hole, you quickly became impatient. While you subtly tried to get his cock into you, all you got was a hard smack on your ass, which was glowing a bright red color at this point.

Gabe muttered under his breath, cursing you for being an impatient cockslut, a bitch that needed to be filled. Although it seemed odd to you that he was trying to feminize you, it did something deep inside you.

"You want this cock?" he asked smugly, his words becoming more slurred by the second. "I'll fill you up like the good little slut you are until your belly is full of my child!"

Without even waiting for an answer, he pushed his cock in and didn't stop, even when you felt it was getting too tight, but you knew it would fit, even if it hurt a little. So you bit your tongue and waited for the pain to subside instead of saying anything or even making a sound.

In one forceful motion, his hands wrapped painfully tightly around your hips, just under your skirt, so tight that it hurt, but you still didn't make a sound; he penetrated you.

Only when you finally felt his thick glans pressing against your prostate did you open your mouth, which was usually so large when he hadn't had anything to drink. This drew a long, intense moan from you, which, in turn, elicited a deep, sadistic chuckle from Gabe.

“That's the shit,” grunted Gabe, “Moan louder for me, bitch!”

As you felt another slap and his cock throbbing violently inside you, you were forced to give him exactly what he wanted. You gave him more, moaning sluttily and even going an octave higher than you thought possible, sounding almost like a real girl.

"God... fuck," he muttered quietly as his hands became a little more bearable. "That's my little girl, my good little slut!"

He even went so far as to pet your head, almost making you feel like he really cared about you. But the relentless pace of his thrusts told you otherwise. Although you wished things were different, you knew there would be nothing between you, nothing other than mind-blowing sex, that is.

Gabe's thrusts got even harder, his warm manhood burning so well in your hole, but the worst part for you was how precisely he hit your prostate each time. With every thrust deep into your bowels, barely visible on your stomach, he ripped your senses from their sockets again and again. It was almost torture, but you loved every second of it, feeling like you could fly, breathe underwater, and face the next day as if you had conquered it many times before.

At the limit of your senses, you felt one of his hands moving up your stomach to your pectoral muscles. He squeezes your slightly trained muscle, which elicits a satisfied grunt from him.

For a long moment, it was completely silent; nothing was said, and the only sounds echoing through the room were the rapid, rhythmic slapping of your skins and the animalistic noises Gabe made like the brute he was.

“I’m about to bust,” Gabe suddenly announced, although his breathing and voice were even.

You were speechless; he had never come so quickly and calmly, always out of breath, sweating like crazy. Now, he was none of that.

As announced, it took almost no time before a few thick jets of cum filled your insides with much-needed warmth.

Gabe didn't pull out as he usually would. Instead, you saw his hand on the locker wall next to your head as you returned to the plane of the living, his muscular body hard against your back, and his warm breath that smelled of beer and something fruity, maybe strawberries or something similar. Turning your head slightly, you saw him grinning smugly at you; your heart dropped into your skirt.

Suddenly, you felt something soft on your lips. You couldn't process the sight before you; Gabe was so close, his eyes closed and his sinful lips capturing yours in a gentle, warm embrace. It lasted only a fleeting moment, warm and completely unexpected.

“Such a good, pretty girl for daddy.”

Your cheeks turned a deep shade of red. You wanted to mock and belittle him for calling himself that, but you didn't. You felt warm and wanted for once. So you let it pass and looked away in embarrassment, but Gabe, with a gentleness you'd never experienced from him before, placed a finger around your chin and forced your head back without much effort.

"Don't look away, baby," he murmured against your lips before capturing them again.

This time, he didn't close his eyes, instead holding eye contact with a knowing glint in his eyes. But you couldn't hold the eye contact for long. You closed your eyes and melted in his embrace. Your tongues quickly entangled with his, clearly more dominant. He pulled you closer to him, both of his hands exploring the front of your body as if it belonged to him.

It wasn't until he separated the two of you that you realized you were no longer standing but sitting safely on Gabe's lap. He was now leaning comfortably against the wall, hands clasped behind his head, flexing his biceps the entire time, clearly visible even through his football uniform. You'd be lying if you didn't feel things you weren't too proud of.

"Now be a good little slut and ride me," he told you arrogantly. "I've made you cum three times already, and I only came once, so keep going, baby."

He massaged your upper body as if calming you down as he spoke. It worked somewhat, but as you tried to follow his orders, you realized something: your legs hurt too much to move. Panic rose in you, afraid of what would happen if he knew. So you tried your best and even put your hands on his thighs, using them as leverage to move yourself up. But your whole body felt heavy.

Before you knew it, your arms gave way, and you fell against Gabe's chest. You heard his angry breathing and felt his hot breath on your neck.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” you admitted sheepishly.

Suddenly, you felt a violent jolt and quickly found yourself on the cold floor. The skirt you had been given and the tight top were already worn out, even slightly torn, not to mention the lace underwear that was already crumpled and almost destroyed.

Gabe towered over you with his fists clenched. "You worthless bitch," he mutters, seemingly ready to dish out the worst punishment. But to your surprise, he just crouches down next to you. "I told you what will happen if you turn out to be worthless and unable to complete your one fucking job, you stupid whore!"

His voice was steady; none of the slurring you heard before was left as if he had never been drunk. Without hesitation, he spat in your face, stood back up, went to his backpack, and pulled out his phone.

Unable to move, you could only stare at him with wide eyes, horror coursing through your veins as you heard the disgusting words he used.

Just as you started to feel your legs again, the locker room door busted open. Loud laughter and energetic, indistinct conversations followed. The entire football team soon filled the room, but no one was looking at you as they greeted their quarterback. Gabe made pleasant conversation before folding his arms across his chest, not glancing in your direction once, just a small nod in your direction and more demeaning words.

When the team first looked at you, they were smug, calling you a needy slut who would even play a girl just to get some cock. Even though you felt bad, they had a point. But you still thought Gabe would say something in your defense, but he didn't.

Instead, even more horrible words came from him: He told his team that they could do whatever they wanted with you since you were useless to him now, but he wanted the cheerleading uniform and underwear back, even if they were in tatters.

You were too stunned, but when you saw Gabe, already changed and leaving, you stretched out your arm and begged him to take you with him. Instead, you only heard a scoff before he left the room and closed the door behind him.

As you were about to lower your hand, one of the boys took it with a wickedly grim grin. He gently stroked your hand, only to tell you to be a good slut to them because they weren't as generous as Gabe and would take drastic measures to make sure you did right by them.

Although you were disgusted and scared, you still nodded. You cried silently as you felt dozens of hands on you and someone supporting you. But when he was about to enter you, you screamed.

***

You woke up weakened, your body covered in a thick layer of sweat. Groaning in pain, you tried to find out where you were, only to find yourself in your fraternity bedroom.

“Thank God you’re awake,” you heard a gentle voice say.

You turned your head and smiled gently. "Nolan, what happened?"

Concerned, he touched your forehead, only to quickly pull away.

"You're not any better," he whispers lightly. "You fainted in one of your lectures, and our university doctor sent you back with Mark because you weren't so bad that you had to stay there. He did give him some medication for you, though."

You wanted to take the pills, but you couldn't move your body, just like in the locker room. Nolan quickly noticed this, put them in your mouth, and helped you drink some water.

You grimaced as the cold liquid ran down your throat, but then a sigh of relief escaped your lips.

“Did something happen to Gabe or the football team?” you asked in a hoarse voice.

It was immediately obvious that Nolan was uncomfortable. You feared the worst and believed that your dream was actually reality. 

"Gabe came over but left when he heard you were sick," Nolan told you. "I still can't believe you tolerate him taking advantage of you like that."

Smiling and relieved that what you had experienced, even though it felt real, was only a dream, you gently stroked Nolan's hand.

"I wish he loved me as much as I love him, but I'm content with how things are right now," you said slowly, even though your throat hurt. "As long as I'm in this fraternity, I get the best of both worlds: mind-numbing sex with the person I love while also being able to cuddle with you guys and do all the cute couple things without anyone being pressured to feel anything."

Nolan sat there stunned, never having thought about it like you did, but he realized they actually treated you like their partner. All the time outside of class and when you weren't getting fucked by Gabe, they spent with you and your fraternity, cuddling, watching movies, playing games, and going out. None of them even had partners; they were completely focused on you.

You smiled as you slowly fell back asleep but asked Nolan to take care of you. Unconsciously, you laid your head on his hand, causing Nolan to get stuck.

A few hours later, someone else opened your bedroom door.

"Is everything okay?" The new person asked but got no answer. When he walked in, he saw Nolan holding you in his arms. "Damn, I must be late," he commented quietly, chuckling as she walked back out and closed the door behind her. Cursing himself for letting Nolan out of his sight.

[Masterlist]

[lavandulawrites]

He Watched

Yandere!Loser (Adrian) x reader

I had really fun writing this<3

Adrian’s (yandere loser) character profile

Masterlist Original Characters Masterlist

Warnings: implied masterbating, yandere, stalking, obsession, possessiveness, overprotectiveness, Adrian is totally unhinged, some religious imagery

He watched. He watched you through your windows as you went about your day. You never noticed him. Even when you looked in his direction, you never saw him. He was invisible. A ghost wandering among the living, latching onto you like if you were the sun and him the moon.

He watched you get dressed, eat, sleep. He watched you watching your favourite stupid TV-series, he had also started watching it and it felt like the two of you had your own little series-marathon. He watched you get late for work, stumbling down the driveway with your hair a total mess (though it only made him live you more). He watched you laugh. He watched you when you have your friend come over. He watched as your friend tried to make a move on you, but you firmly showed him away. He watched as you cried over your friend. He watched your mother hug you, your father holding your hand, your little sister holding onto you and your big brother petting your back. He watched you mourn. He felt even closer to you now that he has seen all your emotions.

Snow filled trees turned into blooming cherry trees, the brown dirt turned into lush green grass, that withered away and return to dirt. One thing remained the same: you.

A normal human being would feel remorse for causing you so much pain, but he didn’t. Because why would he? Why would he feel bad about protecting you? Adrian had done you a great favour. Don’t you know that there are plenty of creeps wanting to drive their claws into your soft flesh at any given opportunity? You were so naive, that it made his heart go all soft and gross.

You were the oxygen he breathed and the blood that ran through his veins and kept him alive.

You wouldn’t take that away from him. Right? If you did, he would wither away like the grass outside of your house and die.

Adrian needed you and you needed him. For how many times hadn’t he saved your life? How many times hadn’t he pulled the strings like a guardian angel? His white wings had long blackened and the fall from grace was high, but it was a price he was willing to pay. Black horns had sprung out in the wild black chaos that was his hair. When the moon was high and the shadows looming, he swore he could almost see a black spaded tail swishing behind him.

Adrian remembered when his mother used to take him out to church when he was younger. He had never really been that religious, but the worshipping had always fascinated him. Now he knew how his mother felt. You were the new deity in his life and he was your most devoted follower. At night he was on his knees in his room in front of your alter. He worshipped you with all his might and prayers of your names fell from his tongue in moments of ecstasy.

When his bedtime came, he kissed the pictures of you that hung over his bed like a cross. His dreams were all filled with you and your beautiful eyes.

He watched as his pale hand knocked firmly on your door (he had removed your doorbell to keep your interaction with others minimal). He watched as his fingers wrapped around the bouquet of red roses, in a way to ground himself. He watched as your door creaked open and the scent of you flooded his senses.

He watched as your eyes gazed into his accompanied with a soft smile. He watched as your smile widened as he introduced himself. He watched as you took his flowers and let their smell hit your nose.

He watched as you offered him your hand as you invited him inside.

[auren-zagarra]

Mercurii Sepultus

Chapter one: Manes Dominae Meae

Author’s Note: Hello! This is my first long fanfiction for the Twisted Wonderland fandom. I’d like to thank my beta reader, Tammie (@house-of-tales), for all their help. They were incredible - correcting and improving the text, sharing amazing ideas, and just being an absolute blessing to work with. While this chapter doesn’t contain any smut, I do plan to include it later on - so, kindly: minors, do not interact!

Trigger Warnings: Death, angst, grief, mentally unstable Malleus, and implications of depression.

Characters Count: 13667

Your body was buried on a Wednesday evening.

The air bit with cruel indifference, wind lashing the folds of Malleus Draconia’s cloak as he stood like a monument of grief before the stone that bore your name. A marble too soft for the horror it concealed. Beneath that soil, you lay - silent, cold - and the world around him seemed hushed, as though nature itself dared not disturb the stillness of death. The warmth that once clung to your skin had long since fled, leaving behind only a hollow echo of what you were. You, who once danced through the castle halls like firelight on dark stone, who laughed like chimes shaken by spring winds - now stilled, muted, devoured by the earth. He could not weep. The grief had calcified, a crown of thorns buried into his skull, throbbed by the soundless memory of your voice. You had held him once, arms wrapped like sanctuary, breath soft against his horns as you whispered promises meant to outlive the stars.

"I will never leave you."

You had said it, so softly, with eyes full of love and hope. A promise spun of warmth and eternity - and yet, you had left. Why? Why had you woven lies from love and sewn them into his heart? Were you deceived yourself, or had the cruelty of time simply stolen your breath before your promise could be kept? Now you were no longer warmth, nor voice, nor laughter. You were only a memory rotting beautifully beneath the earth, perfumed in petals, decaying with elegance as all mortal things must.

They had all foreseen this. The courtiers whispered it from the halls: This human is a fleeting flame; they will perish long before the dragon’s fire fades. And yet, Malleus had refused to believe them. But death is a tyrant with no regard for kings or vows. And so, he stood alone, as dusk closed its dark wings over the land, mourning not only your departure, but the cruel truth that even love, in all its grandeur, is powerless before the grave.

Now it is Thursday morning, and the sun stretches golden fingers across the graveyard, casting warmth upon the pale face of the grieving king. Its rays, soft as breath, dared to caress him, as if urging him to rise, to return to his castle and forget the one who once crowned his heart with joy. But how does one forget a cathedral once filled with light? How does one abandon a body that was once a sanctuary, now reduced to sanctified rot beneath indifferent earth? How could he walk away? How could Malleus Draconia leave you there - to decay, to fade like a half-remembered verse of a love poem? In your absence, the centuries pressed down upon him with a child’s weight, and he was no longer king, no longer fable - merely a boy again. A boy stumbling through the lonely corridors of Night Raven College, searching for something - anything - that would make the silence stop echoing.

Malleus had stood vigil beneath the moon’s gaze, all through the hours when ghosts grew brave. He had waited, mad with hope, as if you would rise laughing from the grave and tell him this was simply a stupid jest. But the dawn brought no miracle, only the cruel morning light. And so he fell - at last - his knees sinking into the grave-soiled ground. The regal weight of his mourning cloaks pooled around him like black blood. Silent tears carved down his cheeks and kissed the earth where you slept. His fingers clawed into the damp soil, trembling as they curled around the mud - his last, desperate tether to your vanished warmth. If he clutched it tightly enough, would you come back? If his grief soaked the ground deeply enough, would you feel it beneath the veil? The mud dirtied his hands, but he did not care. A king no longer. A husband no longer. Only a widow - drenched in daylight that mocked the night he carried inside his chest.

A year was not enough to mend the fractures death carved into him. Nor was the second, which passed like a ghost brushing its fingers across an unhealed wound. Some say that the third year brings mercy - “third time’s the charm,” they claim, with smiles stitched from ignorance. But such words are lullabies for the damned, sung by those who have never known true loss. Lies we inherit as children - wide-eyed and foolish - and repeat as adults who’ve forgotten how to live without illusion.

Malleus Draconia had no illusions left. He was an abandoned man, a soul with no future, condemned to linger in the shadow of a love turned to dust. For five long years, he returned - like a mourner possessed - to the place where your body slept beneath the withered earth. Every month without fail, he knelt before your grave and wept the same tears, salt-slicked and soundless, each one a memory he could not bear into forgetting.

He brought flowers, always the same kind - those soft-petaled things you once adored. He would cradle them gently in his hands, brush them against his lips, as if kissing you again through their bloom. And then he’d lay them down, right where your ears once wore them like a crown of spring. “Not even they could rival you” he used to whisper, when your laughter still lit the hollows of his heart.

On the fifth anniversary of your death, Malleus commissioned a portrait. Not a simple likeness, no - but a relic, wrought by the steadiest hands in all the Valley of Thorns. The canvas was stitched with threads of gold and silver, each one trembling with the weight of devotion. And your face… oh, your face. It was captured in cruel perfection: flushed cheeks, lips softened by the illusion of breath, skin painted with a warmth that no longer touched your bones. Yet it was the eyes - those eyes - unsettled even the fae. There was something in that gaze, something unholy and piercing, as though your soul had found its way back through pigment and brushstroke just to accuse him. You stared out from the frame not like a memory, but like a judge. Not lovingly, but as though whispering, "Why did you let me rot in the dark? Why did you bury me and call it love?"

Yes, those were your eyes… and yet, the painter - no matter how skilled - could not resurrect the light they once carried. That particular fire had died with you, and it would never burn again. His fingers brushed the dried oil gently, and for a moment he swore the paint seared his skin - a heatless flame, born not of fire, but of guilt. Still, he did not pull away. He placed the portrait where the king’s should have hung, high above the throne room - breaking the rules settled by bloodlines and titles. Let the courtiers murmur. Let tradition fade. What was royalty, after all, if not the power to choose who you worship - and how deeply you mourn them? This was his shrine in your memory.

The ink bled like blood across the parchment - a dark, oozing wound upon the letter your majesty had so carefully begun, meant to serve as a reply to a distant king’s plea: the offering of his daughter’s hand in marriage. The error was born of a simple gesture - Malleus, rising to shut the window against the sighing dusk, his sleeve brushing the inkwell’s lip. A soft clink, a tip of glass, and then ruin. The black ichor spread like rot, devouring his words before they had even been born - as though fate itself had risen from the grave to strike the quill from his grasp. He stared at the marred page for a long while, not with frustration, but with a hollow stillness that haunts. Then he cast it aside - not in defeat, but as one acquainted with the impermanence of all things.

A fresh page lay before him - blank, pale, expectant - yet it remained untouched. Malleus sat once as outside, the world turned on: stars wheeled in indifferent constellations, winds danced through trees. But the seconds grew heavy. Minutes blurred into hours, losing their shape. He did not chase them. He only thought. The ink at his quill’s tip trembled, then fell - a single drop blooming on the virgin parchment like a bruise. And with it came the sigh, deep and slow, dragged from the hollows of his chest like a final breath. He could not write. Not because he lacked words - but because no word, no sentence, no treaty scrawled in gold that he thought would fit as an answer. He knew he should remarry, bond his soul with someone of high class with noble blood - but it sounded so… wrong.

Rising, he reached for the ornate chandelier resting upon the nightstand - that little altar beside the bed you once shared, now cold, untouched by breath or dreams. The moment his fingers brushed the metal, the flames within flickered - and then bloomed into green. Not the harsh green of envy, nor the sickly hue of poison - but a soft, phosphorescent glow that shimmered like emerald dew upon midnight leaves. It pulsed gently, alive with fae magic, casting halos that swayed like spirits against the cold stone walls. He stepped into the corridor, the dark swallowing him like a tide. The castle slept - no servants stirred, no nobility whispered. Only his steps remained - slow, echoing.

It was as if his feet moved of their own accord, drawn not by destination but by sorrow - silent pilgrims. They carried his pallid form through the vast, hollow corridors of a castle far too grand for a soul so burdened. He, the lonely monarch, wearied not by rule but by remembrance, drifted as a wraith might, until he stood once more before the altar of memory - the throne room. There, your visage awaited him and it was enough to unravel him. Would you call him weak, he wondered, for refusing to let your death settle into silence? For summoning your spirit with every breath, tethering himself to a memory too tender, too cruel to release? He gazed into those eyes - eyes that once knew the shape of his joy - and imagined their judgment: that he was not a king. Tears, always waiting, rose once more. His lips cracked about to speak - a whisper, perhaps, your name, or some plea the stars might understand… when suddenly, a voice pierced the hush.

A voice echoed in that mausoleum, so soft and familiar: “Tsunotarou! You’re back!”

And there you were. A phantom, watching him from the other side of the room. The garments that once adorned you in life - and later in death - now hung from your form like a thin veil. You smiled… just as he remembered, just as he had longed for in countless fevered dreams - and opened your arms, as if the grave had never claimed you. There was no reason for your presence, no law of nature that could explain such an apparition… But Draconia no longer cared for the laws of life or death. 

He felt like retching, like tearing his own chest apart just to see if his heart still dared to beat within it. What vile trick was this? What cruelty did fate now stage before his weary eyes? Was it destiny that mocked him… or the last desperate fracture of a mind undone by grief? The king stood motionless, trembling - not from fear, but from the overwhelming ache of longing. Had he yearned so bitterly, so violently for your return, that even his soul had grown defiant? Had his mind, broken by mourning, chosen to rebel against reality itself - conjuring you in the hollow silence just to spare him from madness? 

His hands rose toward you as if by instinct - trembling limbs guided by love and delusion alike. Fingers stretched toward something far too divine, too sacred, too lost for one such as him. He reached not for flesh, but for memory… for stealing one last kiss from your lips, for a warmth he missed so dearly. And oh, how he longed to feel it again - to feel alive. It was blasphemous, to crave so greedily what the heavens had claimed, to reach for a soul meant to rest in peace. And yet, what man would not dare the wrath of angels… just to hold his beloved one more time? The love of his life. His human.  He stepped forward, haltingly - like a man afraid to frighten a specter of deer-bone fragility, one that might flee into the shadows of eternity if startled. 

But before he could close the distance, before their fingers could meet and tangle like they once had in moonlit gardens, his body betrayed him. His knees buckled. The weight of grief and guilt crashed into him like a tidal wave, and he crumpled to the stone floor with a thud that echoed through the silence. He could not look at you. He could not meet those eyes. Because they were the same eyes that had looked into his during your final moments - when life had fled her body like smoke from a dying flame. Eyes that had once held warmth, light, laughter... now stared down at him with a chilling stillness. There was no anger in them, no cruelty. And yet they judged him more harshly than any sword or sentence ever could.

A sob tore through his chest - guttural, full of all the pain he'd tried to bury in the ruins of his castle, in the ashes of memory. It wasn’t a cry. It was a groan, a sound dragged from the very marrow of his soul. He wanted to say something - to tell that figure right in front of him that they were still everything, that they haunted him in sleep and in waking, that his love hadn’t died with them. He wanted to beg for a kiss, even just the remnants of one. To feel their breathless melody on his lips, even if it was a lie.

But all that came out was the truth: "I'm so sorry." he whispered, barely able to breathe through the trembling of his voice.

The only response was the way your hair shifted slightly, as though stirred by wind that did not exist - as though some god had sighed in pity… or in disapproval. You gazed down at him - eyes as lifeless and cold as the soil that once held you. And yet, with the tenderness of a haunting, you brushed a single strand of dark hair like coal from his face and began to sing. A lullaby for the damned. You were there. But were you mercy… or malediction?

You appeared at dawn on Wednesday.

[jksian]

When the end comes

You loved him with all your heart, held onto the person you knew will never be yours; but, the only regret you had was, you weren't able to tell him about those feelings.

Pairing: best friends brother JK x reader

Genre: ANGSTY, unrequited love

W/c: mid length?

warnings: depressing thoughts and implied suicidal thoughts, character dea*h, workplace harrasment, illness, family drama and step-parent, one sided love from oc' s side, tattoo artist Jk, age gape

A/N- This story is incomplete and I don't intend to continue it, but I'm still posting it because I wanted to share it with you guys and since many of you expressed your desire to read it :⁠-⁠)

It was during the autumn season when he first met you.

Not in a literal sense; but that was the day he thought he finally come to knew you. A side of you, he never thought he would be able to witness.

Just like the sight in front of him right now.

He did not even fathom the idea of seeing you like this. Beautiful eyes which once shined so brightly under the sun; are now closed. Not even a hint of flickering of your eyelashes which you usually do while being extremely nervous.

Now, autumn has returned again; but, despite the comforting warmth of the cozy weather being replaced by the harsh wind blowing away the leaves from the trees, creating the atmosphere unbearably gloomy and dull.

Because the warmth is gone, along with you.

…

15 years ago…

“Why is he coming, now!? Fuck, I have to meet Sam!” Jia was beyond frustrated after knowing that her brother was coming to picked her up from the school.

Both you and Jia had been friends since your childhood. From being scolded by teachers to helping each other in anything and everything and being the ‘crime in partners’ duo, everyone in your school knew you two were inseparable.

She was always been a free-spirited girl. Generous and helpful, she was kind of a friend who stick by your side in bad times. Other than that, there were many good things about her and one of those were, her brother.

Jeon Jungkook.

The first time when you laid your eyes on him, you couldn’t able to remove the image of his glowing face ever since then. He was gorgeous as well as kind. You were smitten by his beauty. He was popular among girls. With a face like that, it was a very common fact, girls often got trapped by his good-looks which wielded them to the world of imagination.

And, you were one of those girls.

You often found yourself daydreaming about him, made silly scenarios in your little head. Your weekly visits to his sister’s house and getting to watch him closely more than any of those girls could, doesn’t help with your increasing amount of fake scenarios growing inside of your mind.

It was a stupid little crush, but you still held onto the possibilities of those cringe worthy romantic stories in your head to manifest it into reality.

Whenever he was around, every time you got a little bit shy but you tried your best to hide it from others.

“Someone clearly isn’t happy to see me.” Your best friend’s brother sing song those words towards his sister, pointing out her scowl which was very much evident on her face upon seeing him. The fact that she was planning on meeting her so-called-date in the name of fake extra classes would be caught red-handed, made her panicked and mad.

“H-hello.” You asked him even though your heart was racing at the speed of 100 mph and your hand was sweating like the Niagara waterfall, you still conjured up some courage to start the conversation.

“Moon? How are you?” He immediately replied with a sweet smile on his face. People often compared his face with the bunny and you can say why. There are some significant similarities.

You got a little bit flustered whenever he used that name. He gave that name to you because you loved the moon. So much so that you escaped from your school with your Jia to watch the night sky.

It was the first time you witnessed the true beauty of the moon. Sitting on the edge of the river near her house, you both admired the shinning moon light spreading on the water as it sparkled.

You both got scolded for your little escaped not just from your parents but your teachers also. From that moment, he gave you the name ‘moon.’

He was in his sophomore year of college, got an scholarship to study in abroad. It was winter at that time when he got back in his own country during holidays. Even though the atmosphere was cold, Jungkook radiated warmth wherever he goes. He was always been the one who shined brightly in whatever he did.

Jia’s endless pleading didn’t helped much in convincing her brother, so she didn’t had any choice but to went back home. Through out the way to her home, she kept on cussing him.

“You go on dates too! Even, you have a girlfriend!” That was the first time you experienced your first heart break. It felt like someone had put a knife into your heart.

“So? Are you the same age as me?” Jungkook reasoned with her but the thing you noticed that, he didn’t denied it. Your friend wasn’t lying.

The brother-sister duo busy their selves in an argument about “Jia should go on a date or not” where you went silent, had a emotional turmoil within you. It was so random, your little heart weren’t prepare for that news.

The thought of your crush loving someone else who was never gonna be you, shattered your heart. That day, you cried your heart out into your pillow at night when no one was around to heard your broken sobs.

…

Thanksgiving came and it was time for celebration. It was the time for eating delicious food, show our gratitude to the universe and spending time with our loved ones.

But, you weren’t particularly enjoying.

Every year, the Jeon’s and your family celebrated most of the occasions together, due to your father and Mr. Jeon being friends apart from your friendship with their daughter. But , this year, one more family joined in. You didn’t mind if it was just another random someone, but it wasn’t someone random.

The food was excellent as always. Mrs. Jeon had always been a great cook. All the food was mouth-watering but still, you found your self concentrating more on the scene unfolding in front of you rather than your food.

Jungkook invited his girlfriend to his house on Thanksgiving. That was the first time you saw the girl, your crush was in love with.

She was beautiful would be an understatement. Long, silky hair which was dyed brown, tall with a sweet personality. Anyone could have said on the first glance at them that, they were made for each other. There were many similarities between them too, like both were studying at the same college, Jungkook being art major and she was in the literature department, both belonged to the same city but never met each other before and the most importantly, both were at the same age.

Where you were four years younger than him, basically same age as his sister.

He probably think of you as his sister. No. Definitely he did.

You were burning with rage when you saw them holding hands. Even though everyone was around them, they didn’t seem to care much. It also seemed like Jungkook’s family liked her so much. They were happy that their son have met someone who made him happy. Both their families were happy about their relationship.

When it was evening, everyone was chattering and laughing inside the house but you were on the balcony, standing alone. You couldn’t help but cry. It was too much for you. You’d been crying for days now, but now that you’ve seen his girlfriend, there was no denying that it was real. Their relationship was real and you didn’t had a chance anymore.

“Moon is watching the moon?” You didn’t noticed when Jungkook came here. You abruptly wiped your tears away from your cheeks. He came closer to you and stand beside you, you took a step away, tried harder to hide your face from him.

When he noticed you hadn’t answered his question, he continued “I picked the right name for you, didn’t I?” he asked again, tried to humor you but you were nowhere near to laugh or even smile at his jokes.

You were standing there silently, not staring at the sky anymore. You lowered your gaze and your head fall downwards, shoulders slumped. He must had sensed that something was wrong with you, that’s why he asked “Hey, are you okay–,”

Before he can finish his sentence, an ugly sob slipped past your mouth, unable to held it back anymore. This time he didn’t held back, he placed his hand on your shoulder and made you look at him. You were insistent on not to face him so he settled with just holding you by your shoulder.

Tears were streaming down your cheeks without any resistance but his hands felt comforting even though he was the one hurting you at that time.

“What happened? Does someone hurt you?” you could sense the concern in his voice, his voice was so soft like he was afraid of hurting you. That made you cry even harder.

“____, please tell me what happened?” This time he was rubbing your arms up and down, a gesture of comfort. He patiently stand there until you calmed down and was ready to talk.

When he saw you finally wiping your tears away, he took a loose strand of your hair and tuck it behind your ear. That little affection felt like someone poked a needle into your heart.

“I like someone.”

You whisper to him , tried your hardest to not burst out crying again. You saw his expression turned into confusion, so you continued “But, He doesn’t like me.”

Again, your eyes were filling with tears. The image of them together encrusted into your mind will always hunt your down for sure.

Jungkook seemed to contemplate on how to respond to you. Then, he asked “How could you know that he doesn’t likes you?”

“Because, he has a girlfriend.”

Jungkook was taken aback by your statement. He looked at you with sympathy in his eyes, like he was sad about the situation you were in.

“I- are you sure? Also, do I know them by any chance?”

You avoided his gaze but nodded to his question. You were afraid that he might know about your secret crush on him. What if, he hates you after knowing that he was the person you likes?

No no, you couldn’t let that happen.

“how old is he?”

“Same age as yours. And, I’m sure that he has a girlfriend. I’ve seen them together the other day. You- you might know him but I don’t know…” You shifted on your feet, fidgeted under his curious gaze. He was staring at you, you felt that even though you were looking at the other direction.

“May I know his nam– ,”

“No.” Before he could ask the question, you dismissed immediately. There’s no way in hell you were gonna tell him that.

After seeing your defensive state, he didn’t push that question onto you anymore.

“Okay. You know, you’re a beautiful girl, right? You’ll find someone better than him in the future who will love you.” His smile was surreal, he was looking at you like you were the only one existed in the world, Eyes so gentle.

He was such a kind person, always helping who was in need, from offering jacket to a random person at a cold night to rescuing you from getting embarrassed in front of thousands of people on your first day of period. Even if you tried to assume that he was being caring only to you, that you’re special to him, you knew it wasn’t true.

You were just a random girl who was happened to be his sister’s friend.

He took out a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to you. Your tears were as stubborn as you were, “If he is my age then, that means he is older than you –,” the realization hit him.

“–___, he didn’t do anything to you right?” his worrisome expression made you think that why does that matter? His brows were pinched as he searched for your eyes.

“N-no, why are you asking that?”

“You should be careful from people, especially older guys. I’m not saying all the older guys are bad, but you haven’t see much of the world yet, so it might be difficult for you to identify who is good. You also haven’t matured enough–,”

“What do you mean by that!?” you got offended by the those words. Matureness doesn’t comes from age, also why was he acting like a seventy years old grandpa?

He got off guard from the sudden change in your tone. Shifted on his feet, he tried to make you understand his prospective, “I mean, many guys in our college targets younger girls like you to take advantage of, and… I don’t want that to happen to you.”

“W-why?” you wiped your nose with his handkerchief as you asked.

“Who wants something bad happens to the people they care about?” his smile was so genuine, the way he looked at you back then, made you feel things you’d never felt for anyone else.

That night you realized that, maybe, your silly little crush on him wasn’t just a crush. It was more than that. Something that might ruin you in the end but, still you let that thing to engulfed you completely.

That night, you found comfort in the person who was the reason behind your heart break.

…

That year, your father got transferred to a different country, so without a doubt, it was the time when you part your ways with your best friend.

It was painful, parting ways with the friend you’ve spend your almost entire life, but what’s more painful, was not able to see your childhood love ever again.

That was the last time you saw Jungkook on your way to the airport, walking hand in hand with his girlfriend.

You didn’t knew back then when someone’s in love, how they looked like. That radiant smile on his face and the glitter in his eyes when he looked at her shined so brightly made you think that, maybe it was the face of a man in love.

But, the sad thing was, you were not the reason behind that smile on his face.

…

8 years ago

Life wouldn’t be anymore shittier.

After you left your country, you tried your hardest to overcome and forget about Jungkook.

You left everything behind and those memories you’d made with some of the closest people there, weren’t leaving your mind even for some moments. Every little thing you did back then, reminded you of them, especially Jungkook.

Still, you managed.

You did graduated from a college and got a job. Everything was going fine until you found out that you had pancreatic cancer.

Doctors said that it wasn’t in it’s last stage yet but after thousands of medications and appointments for half an year, before that day, they declared that you only had 10 months to live only.

Not even an year.

It was so unfair. You had dreams and goals which you still had to achieve but life had other plans for you.

Your health wasn’t well enough to maintain a 9-5 job, but, you still did it because you didn’t wanted to be a burden on your family.

You were twenty-four when you realized your life was going to end soon.

“What is this!? Are you gonna present this in front of the client?” Your boss shouted at you, that bald-faced nuisance who doesn’t even know how to pronounce ‘future’. Yeah, his future was as clear as his empty bald-head.

You’ve submitted the same project for the third time, because he wasn’t ‘satisfied’ with your work, but the truth was, he doesn’t even turned the first page of it to check. Clearly, he was just messing around with you or to be honest, harassing you.

The reason behind it – rejection. You rejected his offer of ‘get a promotion just by spending a night with him’. He was adamant on sleeping with you. His flirty remarks wasn’t very subtle, you knew this pervert would come to this point at sometime.

“Make this again!” he threw the file across the table towards you. It hits you and you cursed under your breath.

“What was that?” he asked, his chimpanzee like face contort with anger once again.

He got a pretty punchable face.

“Have you checked my project, sir?” there was mockery in your voice which his one brain cell wasn’t able to comprehend.

“What nonsense are you talking about?” his brows were pinched together, flared his nose like a fucking dragon.

“I submitted the same project for the third time yet, you didn’t noticed that. Is your ego got hurt so much so that after my rejection, you’re doing this pity things to me now?”

His face goes through seven stages of grief, fear flashed through his eyes but, soon turned into rage. He abruptly stood up from his chair, banging his fist on the table, “What the hell are you talking about!? Have you forgotten your place? Don’t cross the limit, ____. You’re nothing, a good for nothing! You should know that, I’m your senior here, talk to me with respect! Or –,”

“Or what? Are you gonna complain? You know, I’m also going to complain about something…” You said, your tone as calm as ever but eyes hard as a rock.

He knew, what filthy texts he had sent you and obviously, you didn’t deleted them even though he had told you to. You thought, he might explode right at that moment out of anger, “Are you threatening me? Huh? What? Are you gonna complain about me now?”

“Yes, you asshole.”

“Bitch–,” He was going to hit you with a file but before he could do that, your colleagues interrupted and he stopped midway, pretending like nothing happened.

You stormed out of his office, never minding him calling your name continuously. Everyone in your office looked at you like you’d grown two horns on your head. You didn’t gave them any attention and straight up went to the CEO’s office.

He had threatened you countless times about how you were gonna lose your job if you don’t work how he wants you to, accordingly.

But, you had nothing to lose anymore.

After you filed a complain and submitted the resignation letter, you left that company. For good.

On the way to your home, you called your parents and told the you left your job. Your step-mom was more furious than your own dad.

Of course, you knew that would happen but what was the benefit of continuing the job when you won’t be alive anymore.

You hang up the call as soon as you heard her shouting from the other side.

You felt lost. What were you doing all these years?

Barely surviving.

You didn’t even know how it felt to live life. Not surviving, living.

All you did was, earning money with your fragile health to make it stronger but instead, it worsen even more at the end.

Now, you were on the brink of death.

Is it okay to leave everything behind? You thought. It wasn’t like you had much left in your life anyway. Your parents were stressed all the time because of you. Your sister were depressed after knowing about your condition.

Is it too soon to die in this moment? You asked yourself while standing at the edge of the bridge which connected two cities together. Staring at the river below, almost 136 meters high. You kept on staring blankly at the way water flows by, wondering where it might took you if you jump at this instance.

Before, your intrusive thoughts controlled you, your eyes landed on a bird, it’s wing crippled. It kept on chirping and tried to fly, but every time it does, landed on the surface of the barrier.

You slowly shifted closer to it, not wanted to scared it away and held it in your palms gently, “Hey, let me bandage you, okay? You will be able to fly again then!”

Fortunately, you had a small box of fast aid kit with you. Being a full-time patient and a regular visitor to the hospital, you got accustomed with the medical kits and medicines.

You swiftly bandaged the wounded wing carefully while rubbing its back.

“Do you have a name?”

The bird wiggled into your hold a little. You realized how dumb that question was, but you’d always liked talking to animals even though they couldn’t reply back to you or even understood you. All they did was, stare at your face dumbfoundedly, probably judging the crazy women in front of them.

After you were done, you released it from your hold and you saw the bird flying again.

The happiness you felt at that moment was indescribable. It felt like, you were cured from your deathly disease and your death sentence has been halt for a long period of time.

You felt like, you could live your life, just like that bird.

You felt…alive for a moment.

You didn’t knew when you started crying, tears ran down on your cheeks, on their own. You saw the bird fly happily. It wasn’t fully recovered yet, but still, the determination and courage ignited something inside of you.

At that moment, you regain the courage to live your life.

Not surviving anymore but, living your life to its fullest. At least for once.

…

Convincing your family wasn’t easy, especially your step-mother.

You had decided that, you want to spend your last days of your life in your hometown, which meant, you all had to move back to your old country where, once you left everything behind.

“I want to live my life before I die, dad. I want to live and do all those things while I’m still alive… because I don’t want regret it on my last days. Please, let me fulfil all those dreams before I left this earth?”

You father rarely saw you crying since you’d grown up. Not that you often cried in front of people, you always preferred crying silently in the dark of your room, hiding from everyone.

It was surprising to him.

But, the most surprising thing was, when you saw tears in his eyes. Your father was someone who believed that, crying was a sign of weakness.

But, he didn’t showed that to you, hiding his face from you, he said, “Then go, start packing your bags.”

You didn’t believe your own ears, did you heard it right?

You couldn’t contained your excitement as you hugged your father from behind and said, “Thank you.”

Tears breamed from your eyes after realizing that, finally you were going back to your country.

…

The streets still looked almost the same where you had spent your entire childhood, just not as much calm and warm as it used to be.

So many residents were built there now, it was more hectic and crowded. Thankfully, your old house was on sale at that time. The owner whom your father had sold that house to, wanted to sell it and your father bought it.

The walls of that house held so many memories, many untold truths and evidence of your cruel sleepless nights. The whispers of heart break buried in a corner of your room. All those memories came back to your mind and you found yourself day-dreaming about your old crush again.

“Where Jungkook might be right now?”

“What are you thinking about?” your sister came up behind you, noticing your eyes fixed on the direction of his house.

Your sister had graduated at the same year when you guys moved here. You were more than happy that she decided to start her career here and stayed with you, at least for that reason, you were able to spent your last days with her.

She knew about every single thing happened in your life and Jungkook wasn’t exceptional.

“Nothing…”

“Don’t lie. You were thinking about Jungkook, right?”

Oh god. Hearing that name after so many years, felt surreal. It only intensified the longing you were feeling all those years. Your eyes slightly widened but you dismissed immediately.

“No, you idiot. Go and do your work.”

“You don’t? Okay then, if you say so… but you should probably call Jia, she will be so happy to see you again!”

“I’ll call her later but now, my head is aching! Can you please make me some tea?” you pouted at her, gave her those innocent doe eyes. She glared at you in return, with bombastic side eyes, she left the room.

You giggled and heard her cursing back at you. You laughed a little more at that. Your bond with your sister was special. Something very close to your heart. She was the only family you had, according to you.

Your parents got divorced when you were only twelve years old, so figuring out what was going on and adjusting to the situation was difficult for you. Separating from your mother was especially harder, you thought of her as your best friend but…

No one’s gonna stay with you for forever and you learned it the hard way.

Ever since then, so many things changed in your life. Your father married again in the hope that, you and your sister might be able to experience the motherly love from her, but instead you got more pain and suffering.

She was at your throat for every single second, peace was something you used to crave, if not love. You never felt at home. When you found out about your disease, it was a disaster; but still, all she cared about was money.

How thoughtful!

You decided to take your sister’s advice and called your best friend. After eight years, you were again in your hometown. It was so nostalgic that you got emotional.

All the furniture were yet to be settled, your bed wasn’t ready to be used so you took a seat on your window, staring outside.

As you saw the canvas of the evening sky transforms into a masterpiece of hues, a tapestry of twilight unfolds, painted in soft pastels — a symphony of peach, lavender, and whispers of indigo. That moment felt celestial as your heart filled with an unknown warmth and you found yourself embracing your own body into your arms.

You had called her few times in all those years and she did too; but, with time, the busy schedules and hectic day to day life forced both of you to grew apart. The calls kept on reducing in number and, then it stopped altogether.

The call rang for four times before she picked up. For some moments, you were just staring at each other’s faces, network wasn’t working on your favor so it took time to get a clear picture of her face.

“You’re still alive?” was the first thing she asked you, very typical ‘Jia’ like behavior.

“Yeah, I’m still alive. Thank you very much! How are you?” you humored her and you saw her scoffed.

“You tell me, where were you? Huh? NO calls! NO massages!… were you gone underground or something? Oh no, wait! You forgot about me, right?”

She kept on blabbering her nonsense, falsely accusing you, dramatically thrown tantrums at you. You saw her brows pinched together as she glared at you which was supposed to be intimidating.

“Well, I’m in our hometown.”

“…What?!”

She couldn’t believe your words so you turned the camera around and gave her the view of the street where you guys used to run and play.

You saw her eyes widened and mouth gaped at the view, she scrutinized the area a little bit longer and made sure it was indeed her hometown.

“Fuck, bro! why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because I wanted to surprise you, but well, looks like you’re not here.”

Her face turned into a sad expression from irritation, mirroring your own face.

You knew you would’ve told her, but you genuinely wanted to gave her a surprise with your arrival, in which failed miserably!

“It’s fine, I’m coming home in a few days.” That comforted you to some extent, knowing that you would be able to meet your best friend after all those years finally, before you die. It certainly gave you some comfort.

No one knew about your condition except your family, not even your best friend. The reason being, you wanted a normal life.

You didn’t wanted those sympathetic looks from others or them doing things for your just because you are gonna die soon.

No, you wanted them to act normal, just like they always did.

You didn’t wanted them to felt some urgency or pressure.

You didn’t wanted them to feel bad or guilty for you.

No, you wanted them to treat you normally, just like they had been with you ever since they met you.

Just a normal life before you die, where you can enjoy every second of your life and live it with others. Was that too much to ask for?

“Come back soon then,” Your smile held a sense of nostalgia and melancholy in it and for a brief second, you thought you saw tears in her eyes.

“By the way, have you informed others?” She changed the subject, probably didn’t wanted to cry at that moment of happiness.

“Yeah, we are going to meet at a club in this evening.”

“That’s great! Have fun then and also… is Jay coming?” she smirked at the camera and arched a brow at you.

Having a crush was different but this guy was on another level. He was head over heels for you. You never understood his obsession or love (what he used to say) for you. He was the same age as Jungkook. It wasn’t like he wasn’t good looking, on the contrary, he was charming. A guy for any girl would fall for. Topper of his class with that cute face of his, he got the whole package.

But, you never felt anything for him. So the first time he confessed to you, you straight up said ‘no’. Maybe it was a bit rude, not that you were denying but You never grasped the concept of leaving someone in ambiguity without providing a clear response, especially when it involved feelings.

“Do you want me to bonk you in the head? Why would he come to our reunion party? Come on…he isn’t even belong to our friend circle!” You said in disbelief and she rolled her eyes a little more.

“Dude, he was obsessing over you for such a long time! I’m sure he might be into you after all these year– ,”

“Jia–, you know how I feel about this–,” Yeah, she does. She knew everything, “Can we please drop it?”

She dropped the topic after your pleading. You always got irritated whenever she acted this way, teasing you by someone’s name who had a crush on you, constantly encouraged you to start dating one of them. You being you, never listened to her.

You both talked about things in general after that and then hang up.

Yeah, it was good. If not telling anyone about your sickness helped you live the way you wanted to, then, it’s okay.

As soon as you hang up the call, you felt a sharp pain in your stomach. You breathed in and out as you tried to endure it. Probably because you hadn’t took your medications yet. That’s why it was happening. You’d accustomed with all this by that time, so it wasn’t any thing new to you.

You were fine.

…

The city you lived in looked different but still, there was a familiarity in it.

Sidewalks hum with activity as people strolled, laughter echoed from cafes, and the distant sounds of traffic created a vibrant urban symphony. The evening air carried a blend of aromas from food vendors, filled your noses trills and made your stomach grumbled.

You met with your school friends at the club 15 minutes away from your house as planned. Coming to a club doesn’t made sense to you, because you weren’t able to drink alcohol, but.. well… you were there because of your… friends.

You sat on a stool which were lined the polished counter, where patrons sipped drinks and shared laughter. You watched your friends danced across the crowded dance floor, lost in their own world.

You saw Kai from your friends group, approaching you, came straight at the direction where you were seated. You quickly reverted your eyes to somewhere, acted like you hadn’t even noticed him just now, like any other introvert, focusing on your drink in your hand.

“Hey, ____! Long time no see.” Yeah, it would be longer if he weren’t just interrupted your peaceful time there.

He was grinning ear to ear like he just found some treasure. You adjusted yourself to looked at him, “Yeah, Hey! How are you?”

“Oh fine, just living the busy life of a busy man. You say, what you’re been up to these days?” oh, nothing special, just waiting to be embraced by death and, oh! Also trying to have a peaceful time which now has been disrupted. You hoped you’d be able to say that on his face but… oh, well… manners!

“Nothing special –,” He pulled a stool beside you and hopped on it, “You say?”

You watched him settling beside you comfortably. You internally rolled your eyes when you realized he probably wasn’t going anywhere soon.

He started talking about his life which you didn’t mind any attention to, you were busy finding loopholes to escaped the man in front of you. You eyes darted frantically everywhere around the club to found any of your friends, anyone, but the crowd made it harder to spot any of them.

He offered you a tequila which you politely refused. Then, he continued insisting on buying you a drink, his words laced with determination, the alcohol in his system clearly kicked out at that moment. The background buzz of the bar heightened as he tried to charm you into accepting, created a moment of tension which wasn’t a good kind.

Despite your clear signal of disinterest, he remained persistent. It ultimately left you annoyed than ever. The last time, your refusal was harsh, words came out of your mouth was rude but the situation particularly made it harder for you to be calm, “How many times do I have to tell you that I don’t want a drink? It would be great if leave me alone.”

He took that to his heart, it seemed, because the look he gave you was similar to Chihuahua dogs when angry. You never got what this boy’s problem was, even any other boy who tried to pursued you before.

Why boys don’t know when to stop and have no shame? Universal question. The whole world wanted to know the answer, included yourself.

“Why the attitude? I’m just trying to be friendly! Damn, seems like you don’t deserve that–,” He scoffed, “you’ve become more hot, not gonna lie; but, that hard-to-get bitchy attitude is still there.”

The audacity he had!

You raised an eyebrow but maintained your composure. “Friendly doesn’t usually come with comments like that. It’s about mutual respect,” You retorted.

He leaned against the counter, undeterred. “Come on, no need to be so serious. I’m just being honest here. You were always good looking and now, you looks irresistible, but the attitude…”

You sighed, contemplated on if you walked out of there or slap him across his face, “Honesty is appreciated when it’s respectful. Your comments are crossing the line.”

Unfazed, he chuckled, “I just call it like I see it. No harm meant.”

“Well, it’s causing harm. I value my personal space and expect to be treated with respect,” You stated firmly.

He scoffed again, “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to loosen up a bit. Not every compliment is an attack.”

As his audacity reached new heights with an attempt to grab your arm, frustration surged within you. You were on the verge of snapping back, but just in the nick of time, a familiar voice called your name, halting your impending outburst.

“Hey, there you are! I’ve been looking for you.”

You turned your face to your left and saw Jungkook standing there, a n knowing smile on his face which he usually made when he got annoyed or angry.

Relieved and equally surprised to hear his familiar voice, you redirected your attention, grateful for the interruption regardless.

You stared at him with wide eyes, still thinking that if he was real or not. He glanced at the guy who had attempted to grab your arm, his smile faded into a more serious expression. “Is everything okay here?" Jungkook asked, his tone carried a subtle warning.

The guy got tensed, visibly uncomfortable under Jungkook’s scrutiny, stammered, “Just a misunderstanding, man.”

Jungkook’s demeanor remained stern as he replied, “Best not to misunderstand personal boundaries. She’s not interested.”

His hand was on your shoulder in a comforting manner. With that, Jungkook subtly positioned himself between you and the guy, creating a clear physical barrier. The unwelcome intruder, perhaps sensed the shift in dynamics, made a hasty exit. His protective side kicked out.…

…Like any other big brother might had.

Being the protective big brother he was, Jungkook had a younger sister, so dealing with guys hitting on her became a familiar scenario for him. He had accumulated experience in handling such situations.

Yeah, he still saw you like his little sister.

“Jungkook…” Words came out breathy form your mouth like you still hadn’t believe him standing there. The feeling you had buried in a corner of your heart years ago resurfaced once again, the bittersweet warmth you used to feel whenever you saw him bloomed inside of your heart.

Jungkook’s gaze held a mix of familiarity and affection, and you found myself lost in the moment, the years melting away.

“Hey –,” He said softly as he stand in front of you, “Are you okay?”

When he smiled at you, you realized his smile was still the same, radiated warmth and playfulness. That boyish innocence was still there but with a mix of mature allure that time. That doe-like, expressive eyes that held a certain depth, his gaze was both inviting and enigmatic, in which you found yourself drowned.

There were significant changes in his appearance though, like the tattoos on his arm and those piercings on his eyebrows, ears and even his lips. You stared at him absentmindedly before he spoke, “Moon? I asked if you’re okay?” That name again!

“Yeah, right… I’m okay. Thank you, Jungkook.”

He smiled at your response as he said, “I didn’t knew you were in the town.”

“Yeah, no one does actually. I wanted to surprise Jia, but she is out of the country so…’

“Right, she is.” Then silence settled between you two. Before it could got more awkward, Jungkook said, “So…how is life going?” as he took the seat on which Kai was settled before.

How were you gonna answer that? Your life… you felt like it was never yours. You moved out of the country because of your father, you got a college degree so you could help your family financially, then you diagnosed with a disease which eventually going to kill you so you didn’t had much time left.

But, in all of these, what you did for yourselves? When was the time you actually lived your life?

You didn’t had an answer to that tbh.

“Nothing special. My dad got retired so we thought about coming back to our country.” You answered, swirling the glass of virgin mojito in your hand. “and, what about you?”

“Me?” He asked, his doe eyes staring wide at you, chucking a little, he replied, “Came back to my home after realizing, I’m not gonna get a job there any time soon, not bad though–,” He glanced over your shoulder as you saw something flickered in his eyes, “ –Then thought about starting my own business, now I got my own tattoo shop.”

You saw him frequently glancing over your shoulder, as if someone was behind you whome was trying to see.

“Oh! That’s awesome!”

He didn’t replied and kept staring at a particular direction behind you. When you attempted to look behind, he stopped you by grabbing your arm. “Yeah, it is.”

He let out a laugh which clearly indicated his nervousness. “Is everything okay?” you asked.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Is someone behind me?”

“Yeah… it’s just my ex.”

He said that casually as if he wasn’t just trying to desperately snatch a glance at her. You didn’t understand, his ex?

You remember his girlfriend. What was her name again?

Nina? Nanny? Ah, no. Yes!

Nancy. She was his girlfriend whom he invited to the thanksgiving party. As far as you knew, they were still dating according to Jia even though she confessed that to you a long time ago.

“Umm– Jungkook? I need more context to understand what you’re talking about. So, fill me in what I’m missing out?” You squinted at him dramatically and he laughed a little at your ministration.

That same smile which was enough to make your heart flutter and skip a beat.

“It’s nothing, just that…” He paused midway and glanced over your head again before continuing, “We broke things up a few months ago. Decided to go separate ways because we didn’t work out eventually?”

There was a question mark at the end, you wondered why was that for. Was he not know why they broke up? That’s sounds silly. Maybe, he was confused after they broke things up and thought that he made a mistake there? He might still wanted to be with her?

Before your train of thought escalate even further, He tapped you on your shoulder and brought you back to the reality, “Earth to ___,” You saw him smiling at you, “What are you thinking?”

You were wearing off shoulders, so, the naked touch of his fingers upon your skin kindled a transient flame, imprinting an indelible mark of his presence that will linger unwelcomed for the next few days.

“N-nothing, what were you saying again?” shaking the dizziness from witnessing the stars in his eyes, you asked. It’s normal for a human being like you, feeling dizzy after touched by someone made of stars. Gotta be grounded, you aren’t allowed to touch the stars, you reminded yourself.

“I asked, if you want to dance with me. Would you?��� He asked as he extended his hand for you. You knew, you shouldn’t touch the stars but the shining flow of it made you blinded to the upcoming consequences of your actions.

You should knew well, why he was asking for a dance. His ex was still behind you so the only reason would be to – made her jealous, still you reciprocated.

You warned him about your lack of knowledge in dancing, nonetheless, he pulled you to the dance floor.

Placed your hands on his shoulder and his on your waist, he instructed you to move. As soon as, you two stepped on the dance floor, the song changed to a melodic one from a upbeat song.

Apocalypse by cigarettes after sex started playing in the background and you found yourself staring at the men in front of you for a second before you broke the eye contact.

Even thought you turned you face to the other side you could feel his eyes on you, making your mind go blank.

He pulled you closer, bodies Pressed together as both of you started to move in sync with the music. His breath hit the side of your face, making your breath hitched after knowing the close proximity between you two.

“____,” He called, your name sounded pretty from his lips, “Look at me.”

It sounded like a demand but his tone suggested other wise. Tender and delicate, as his soft lips brushed against your hairline, made you gulped the lump forming in your throat.

You did look him in the eyes. His gaze, held galaxies within, each flicker echoing the poetry of an undiscovered universe, in which you found yourself lost.

“You’re doing good. Just don’t think too much and let your body move according to the rhythm –,” He said, his gaze focused on your face, closer than before. The ambient lighting casted a soft glow, accentuating his delicate features, his words gave you courage, an unfamiliar sense of comfort and his face made you thought that you had someone you could rely on.

In that shared gaze, time momentarily freezes and you found yourself falling for him, again.

“Aish…I sounded like some know-it-all, I think? don’t mind it, please.” There was nervousness in his voice, fleeting glances searched for reassurance to make sure you didn’t found that offensive.

You didn’t help but realized how thoughtful and considerate a person could be that he was worrying about something so small. It wasn’t even sounded offensive to you, it was just a suggestion, guidance to someone who doesn’t know the ‘D’ of dancing.

Like a delicate melody played on uncertain notes—a sincere expression that made his words all the more genuine and endearing and you found that oddly charming.

You couldn’t help but smiled at him, “Don’t worry, I didn’t mind at all, but… I might get offended if you don’t tell me the truth right now.” You teased, slightly grinding at him.

He pinched his brows in confusion, “What are you talking about?”

“Are you. . . Somehow trying to make your ex jealous? Because if you are, I think it’s working.”

His eyes widened a bit, clearly wasn’t expecting something like that. He, again, glanced over to the girl who was still standing at the same spot for ten minutes, observing every move you two made.

“I– No–, I mean not exactly,” He looked at you with a hint of guilt in his eyes, giving you an apologetic smile, “Well, not gonna lie. I did tried to make her kinda jealous – but it wasn’t the entire reason why I asked you for a dance.” You found a hint of panic in his eyes, again looking like he didn’t wanted to offend by any means, which you found enduring. Why does he cared so much? You thought.

You couldn’t help but saw this little things in people, especially the people you held close to your heart.

“Then, why did you asked?”

“Because, I wanted to.” He said casually, as if he didn’t just made you skipped your heart beat a little faster. You shifted your gaze to the other side, feeling weird emotions about the person you wouldn’t felt. Nonetheless, you chuckled a little bit.

“You would have told me earlier, then I might have put more effort.”

“So, you aren’t putting effort yet?” He giggled, eyes gleamed under the light.

“No – I didn’t mean that, but, now we have a mission in our hands, so we better win it!”

He made a look of knowing, realized what you were implying. He let out a chuckle, shook his head at you adorably and gripped your hand a bit firmly, pulling you a little bit closer as if there were any gap in between.

Your chest flashed against his, the burning heat of your cheeks might be visible by then, you felt his thumb rubbing slowly at your waist where he was holding you. That small gesture was supposed to be comforting but it only made your cheeks grew a shade brighter.

You thanked the dimly lights of the club.

The evening went by just the two of you holding each other close as you swung your bodies to the unfamiliar melodies. This time, there was no barrier in between you two, like, ‘he see me as his sister’ or ‘he has a girlfriend.’

…

Sometimes, It was hard for you to understand Jia.

That one time when she asked if she could borrow your white gown on her birthday. Of course you gave that to her. It was her birthday party in the evening, so you didn’t grasp the fact why she wanted to wore something …old, when she had a new dress waiting for her in her wardrobe.

But, then switched her dress to that very new black dress in the middle of that party. When you asked her, she refused to gave you an explanation, which baffled you and left you confused.

Even though you didn’t liked her odd behavior that night, you let that slipped.

“Taehyung is looking at your direction –,” one of the girls from your class whispered in your ears as she giggled like a typical teen girl next to you.

All of your friends were sitting at the cafeteria, munching on your food. It was a typical boring day at school until your eyes landed on Jungkook. He was in the senior year and also the captain of school soccer team.

When you were busy drooling over him, your friends started making their own theories.

“Yeah, I’ve seen him staring at ___ quite often.” Other girl from your same table passed a comment.

Kim Taehyung was in the soccer team as well but a year older than Jungkook, but they were like brothers, the ‘IT’ best friend duo. It was quite usual for you to saw Taehyung whenever Jungkook was around. He was with him almost all the time.

But, you never noticed him staring at you. You thought they were making silly scenarios in their little head in hope of some Juicy gossip until you noticed, Kim Taehyung staring at your direction.

“Stop, guys! He is probably looking at somewhere else or looking for someone? Who knows!” You shrugged them off, not wanted to participate in their nonsense.

The men, they were talking about was the ‘sweetheart’ of your high school, every other girl was smitten by him, so it was a bit difficult for you to accept that he might had a crush on you.

“___, you are dangerously oblivious.” Then they laughed as if they just discovered the funniest joke of the century, their laughter echoed through out the cafeteria except from you and Jia.

It was easy to assume someone’s weight just by looking at the structure of their body until you had to carry them.

“Fuck! He is heavy dude!” Jia cursed under her breath, unable to hide the suffering of carrying Jimin all the way up to the 5th floor to Jungkook’s apartment.

“He doesn’t seem like–,” You were about to trip and fall, but adjusted yourself quickly. “yeah, he is heavy.”

The knock on his door wasn’t too loud as you made sure not to woke any neighbors up 2 in the morning.

You heard a groan along with some footsteps before the door swung open in front of you and you wished that you wouldn’t saw what you’d saw.

There was Jungkook, naked and standing in his full glory. Thank God, he had a sweat pant on.

You immediately looked down out of respect and…well, shyness? Because the way your cheeks heat up was embarrassing. You were flustered and you hoped, no one noticed.

Jungkook made a surprised gasped and scrunched his brows out of confusion, “What are you guys doing here at this hour? I- wait, is that jimin?”

“Yes!! Now help us, dummy.” Jungkook grabbed Jimin’s arm but not before shooting a glare at his sister’s direction, gave her a look of ‘you better shut the fuck up.’

He took jimin from you two and carried him like his weight was nothing, held him like a feather. Before the three of you could reach out to the sofa, you saw Taehyung came out of another room.

“What’s going on in the middle of the night?” His deep voice was an octave lower, clearly he was in his dreamland. With a scowl, he rubbed his eyes and looked at his very drunk friend, “Wait – Is that jimi– Is he dead?” He dramatically gasped.

“No. But, tell me, are you two…gay?” She asked them quietly, made it more dramatic by her expressions. Her mischievous eyes shifted to Taehyung from Jungkook, then again on Jungkook.

Taehyung gave a glare at her direction, no words left from his mouth. The poor guy just woke up at the middle of the night and accused of fucking Jungkook. You held your laughter back, didn’t wanted to make it more chaotic than it already was.

“No– I mean you look like you just had a rough night and–,”

“Jia, will you shut up?” Jungkook’s voice was stern, as if he was holding himself back. His sister knew how to get on his nerves, for sure.

Ignoring the fact that she was about to bring scolded by her elder brother, she took the responsibility and filled him up with the information.

“We were at this bar and we saw Jimin there…lying on a couch. The owner was searching for his friends but, since they weren’t there, we took him here.” She chirped, feigning innocence as if she didn’t just called her brother gay.

Jia decided to met you at this famous bar, again you went along with the idea even though you knew the fact that, you won’t be able to drink anything.

At least you liked the ambience of the bar, until you found a very drunk blonde haired guy laying on a couch, almost knocked out. The owner was literally about to kick him out if it weren’t for you and Jia arrived at the right time.

“He was supposed to join us.” Taehyung shook his head in disappointment, letting out a huff, he walked over to Jimin who was finally knocked out on Jungkook’s couch. Following Taehyung’s lead, you sit beside Jimin, scrutinizing his face for any discomfort he might had.

Your gaze briefly flickered towards Jungkook, caught him staring at you, before he quickly averted his eyes towards Taehyung. You knew, it wasn’t anything you might had thought of, but the way your stomach flipped over wasn’t something normal.

“What you guys were even doing?” Jia asked exaggeratedly, squinted her eyes at both men in front of her suspiciously.

Yes, Jungkook and Taehyung was like brothers since they were in high school, probably saw shits of each other which might had never been seen by anyone, their bromance was top-notch but that doesn’t allow people to question about their sexuality. You knew, Jia was just joking and probably pulling her brother’s leg off and besides, Jungkook has a girlfriend. Or so, had.

They might broke up, but the possibility of him having feelings for her was strong, because of the dance you two had that night at the club. No person who doesn’t had any feelings for their ex would did such thing to just made them jealous. He doesn’t said that, he doesn’t had to, it was all clear in his eyes or so you noticed.

[glambots]

since requests are open..👉👈 how would sun, moon, and monty react to their s/o previously being an actor in movies? (Bonus if their s/o had to scream/cry during a scene and how they feel about seeing that kinda thing even if it’s just a character their s/o is portraying)

☀️Sunnydrop + Actor!Reader:☀️

You KNOW that man is Eating Up everything you've ever been in--because he has to. He's a LOVER of the arts, and also your Lover, so it just makes sense. Just know, he will also be your biggest critic. (In a loving, sometimes equally dramatic way.) There are times when he'll hear you scream or see you cry in a certain scene, rub his chin thoughtfully, then simply respond with a shrug and a: "Eh. I've seen better." But don't worry! He's mostly joking!

🌙Moondrop + Actor!Reader:🌙

Moon's favorite thing is to quote your own lines back to you. Especially the funny ones. He doesn't really like watching you get too emotional on-screen, it makes him uncomfortable. But also more than a little curious--if you were really scared, would you really scream like that? Fazbear help you if you were ever in a horror film, because he will copy the horror tactics in an attempt to get a "real" reaction out of you.

����Montgomery Gator + Actor!Reader:🐊

The only thing Monty doesn't like is watching you do anything that has to do with on-screen romances. Especially kissing or..."other," kinds of intimate scenes. It's just weird. The screaming and crying he can deal with, cause he knows you're not actually in any danger. Especially when he's there to protect you. But the kissing and all that...it leaves him with a weird, deep pit in his stomach. He doesn't like seeing it, and it usually leaves him more than a little prickly for a while afterwards (which is stupid, and he knows it's stupid, which just makes it even worse).

[chimcess]

⮞ Chapter Seven: Fuck Bureaucracy Pairing: Jungkook x Reader Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon, Boss!Yoongi, Commander!Jimin, Astronaut!Jimin, Doctor!Hoseok, Astronaut!Hoseok Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only Word Count: 19.7k+ Summary: When a deep space transporter crash-lands on a barren planet illuminated by three relentless suns, survival becomes the only priority for the stranded passengers, including resourceful pilot Y/N Y/L/N, mystic Namjoon Kim, lawman Taemin Lee, and enigmatic convict Jungkook Jeon. As they scour the hostile terrain for supplies and a way to escape, Y/N uncovers a terrifying truth: every 22 years, the planet is plunged into total darkness during an eclipse, awakening swarms of ravenous, flesh-eating creatures. Forced into a fragile alliance, the survivors must face not only the deadly predators but also their own mistrust and secrets. For Y/N, the growing tension with Jungkook—both a threat and a reluctant ally—raises the stakes even higher, as the battle to escape becomes one for survival against the darkness both around them and within themselves. Warnings: Strong Language, Blood, Trauma, Smart Character Choices, This is all angst and action and that's pretty much it, Reader is a bad ass, Survivor Woman is back baby, terraforming, some mental health issues, survivor's guilt, lots of talking to herself, and recording it, because she'll lose her mind otherwise, fixing things, intergalatical politics, new characters, body image issues, scars, strong female characters are everywhere, cynical humor, bad science language, honestly all of this has probably had the worst science and basis ever, I researched a lot I promise, let me know if I missed anything... A/N: I love a good rescue mission...

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The reds of M6-117 bled across the sky like a bruise stretching over the horizon. It was technically morning—though nothing about this place felt like morning. There were no birds, no blue sky, no dew on the ground. Just heat rising in slow, merciless waves under the low twin suns. No relief, only exposure.

Y/N stood outside the Hab, boots sunk halfway into the grit. The wind had died down for now, but the silence was heavier than any storm. Her suit was streaked with dirt, pockmarked with patches—each one a story she hadn’t had the time or energy to write down. The visor on her helmet caught the early light at an angle, throwing a warped reflection of the landscape behind her. She didn’t look back at it.

She tilted her head slightly, as if trying to decide whether she was ready to say it out loud. Then she pressed the comm.

“Jim.”

Her voice came through the static-soft channel, low and almost hesitant, like she was still practicing the sentence inside her own skull. The word hung there a moment, delicate and unfinished.

“I need you to do something for me.”

She paused, pressing a gloved hand against the seam of her thigh like grounding herself might make it easier.

“If I don’t make it—and I’m not saying I won’t, just… if—I need you to talk to them. Please.”

She looked down, eyes tracking the trail of her own footprints half-blown smooth by last night’s wind.

“They shouldn’t hear about me from a news brief. Or a stranger reading a script. That’s not how this ends.”

Her voice cracked slightly, but she didn’t stop. If anything, it made her steadier. There was no emotion she hadn’t already felt out here—fear, grief, anger, numbness—and now they all just circled each other like orbiting moons.

“Helion Prime was the beginning of everything. I was seventeen. Terrified. Stupid in the ways you’re only allowed to be when you’re too new to know better. And they were so proud. I used to think they were just being polite, but they meant it. Every article—they printed them all. Even the blurry ones where I was just in the background fixing a panel.”

She exhaled slowly, eyes drifting to the nearby speculor—its chassis sand-swept and sunburnt. Her reflection blinked back at her in distorted glass.

“Flight school at twenty. I met you there. I remember the day I brought you home,” She smiled faintly, remembering. “They adored you. God, I think Aunt Rose made you cookies the second day she met you. They never had to pretend with you. You were family before we ever said the word out loud.”

A beat.

“They didn’t even hesitate to move across the galaxy to be near us. Packed up their entire lives and settled on a rainy colony world, even though Aunt Rose hates humidity and mold and missing her morning paper. You remember how mad she was when she realized Aguerra didn’t even have paper delivery?”

Her voice grew quieter then, the smile fading as her posture straightened slightly.

“If something happens, I need you to go to them. Sit down. Look them in the eye. Don’t tell them about this place. Don’t describe the suits and the patch kits and the way the sun burns through the walls at midday. They don’t need to know that. Talk about Starfire. Tell them how much I loved that ship. How much I loved what we did. That was the happiest I’ve ever been, Jim. Not just in space. Anywhere.”

She shifted her weight slightly, boots crunching against dry ground.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “There’s no good way to tell people their niece died millions of miles from home. But if it has to happen, they need to hear it from someone who knew me beyond the title. Who saw me here, with the work and the grime and the joy of it all.”

Her voice caught on the next breath. She didn’t try to hide it—there was no one out here to impress. Just the comm channel, the open stretch of dead horizon, and a sky that never blinked.

She steadied herself.

“And tell Uma…” Her voice cracked, unraveling mid-sentence. She blinked hard, trying to keep her eyes clear, but it was already too late. They were glassy now, fogging over with grief she hadn’t allowed herself to feel until this exact second.

“Tell her I love her. Tell her I’m sorry.”

The words came out rough. Honest. And too small for everything they meant.

“I wanted to be there,” she continued, slower now, like each syllable cost her something. “I wanted to help pick paint colors, argue over names no one would use. Hold her hand when she panicked over something tiny and hormonal and beautiful.”

She let out a shaky laugh—just one—but it didn’t stay.

“I wanted to sit in the nursery with her. Feel the baby kick. Help build furniture we’d curse at and pretend we knew how to fix. Babysit. Fall asleep on the couch watching movies we’d already seen. Spoil the kid. Sneak them candy behind your backs.”

She looked up, eyes squinting against the sharp white glare of the twin suns climbing higher above the dunes. Her voice dropped to a whisper, quieter than the wind curling at her feet.

“If I made it home… that baby would already be walking.”

She didn’t need to explain it. The heartbreak sat there on its own, fully formed.

Silence followed, but it wasn’t empty. It was full of everything she couldn’t bring herself to name. All the stolen time. All the pieces of a life she was still trying to carry, even as the weight of this planet pulled harder at her every day.

When she spoke again, it was softer. But there was no wobble left.

“I’m not giving up. Don’t think for a second that I am.”

Her eyes locked on the far line of the horizon. The sky shimmered, heat warping the edge of everything.

“I’ve made it through things that should’ve killed me,” she said. “But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that hoping for the best only works when you’re also planning for the worst. I’m not making a goodbye message. I’m covering my bases. That’s all.”

She reached up, adjusted the mic on her collar, and took a steadying breath.

“If it comes to that—if I don’t make it back—tell them I didn’t die out here just trying to hang on. Tell them I chose this. That I wanted to be out here. That I believed in what we were building. That I gave it everything I had.”

She paused, her fingers brushing the spot near her hip where the suit had been patched again and again. The fabric there felt thinner, no matter how many times she reinforced it.

“Not because I was brave. Not because I was reckless. But because I believed in it. All of it. And because I was exactly where I was supposed to be.”

Her voice dipped to almost nothing.

“Tell them I’m okay with that.”

A pause.

“Even if they’re not.”

The wind picked up again, pulling at the hem of the thermal shielding she’d bolted down earlier that morning. It flapped once, soft and tired, like the Hab itself was exhaling beside her.

Y/N stood there a little while longer, watching the light stretch across the red landscape. The suns climbed, and the shadows pulled behind her like anchors.

She didn’t speak again.

Eventually, she turned. The gravel shifted beneath her boots, crunching softly with each step. The Hab loomed ahead, patched and battered and still standing—like her.

She walked back toward the airlock.

The Taurus Interplanetary Commission headquarters stood like a blade of glass and steel against the deep blue atmosphere of Taurus I. It was the kind of place built to make a statement—an architectural flex that said humanity didn’t just belong in space; it was starting to understand how to make it beautiful.

Inside, the halls buzzed with quiet, measured urgency. Footsteps on polished floors. Low voices in corners. The occasional murmur of comms traffic spilling from open doors. On a wide display screen in the atrium, NOSA’s press conference played in real time. Yoongi and Mateo sat at the table, looking like they hadn’t slept in days. Probably because they hadn’t.

“We substituted the standard ration bricks with high-density protein cubes,” Mateo was explaining, his voice steady but dry with exhaustion. “What we didn’t account for was the behavior of those cubes under heavy thrust. Combined with lateral vibration during ascent, the protein packs liquefied and shifted the weight distribution. That’s what destabilized the payload.”

The reporters pounced.

“Why wasn’t this caught during final inspection?”

Yoongi leaned forward, face unreadable. “We didn’t have time.”

The room stirred with low, anxious chatter.

“You skipped the inspections?” one reporter asked, voice sharp.

“Yes,” Yoongi said. Flat. Unapologetic. “We had a fourteen-minute window. If we’d missed it, we wouldn’t have another chance for months. And she doesn’t have that kind of time.”

The broadcast continued, but in a quiet corner office ten floors above, the volume had already been muted.

André Batista stood near the window, his hands tucked into the pockets of his tailored jacket. His gaze drifted from the screen to the man seated behind the desk.

“She’s not going to make it,” André said finally, his voice low but certain. Not cruel. Just honest.

Gunther Apinya didn’t look up right away. He was scanning a data packet, fingers idly flipping through the pages until André stepped forward and placed a second folder in front of him.

“Maybe not,” André allowed. “But maybe she does. Take a look.”

Gunther opened it.

Charts. Numbers. A schematic of the Argo booster system, overlaid with a proposed injection path—M-344/G orbit. Deep burn. Minimal gravity assist. Fast and dirty.

“You ran this through engineering?” Gunther asked, already knowing the answer.

“They ran it twice. If we launch in forty-eight hours, it’ll reach her in time.” André crossed his arms. “With margin.”

Gunther frowned. “Why hasn’t NOSA reached out to us?”

“They don’t know we can help,” André said simply. “That booster tech is still classified under Coalition R&D. There are maybe twelve people outside this building who even know it exists.”

Gunther leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled under his chin. “So what you’re saying is... if we do nothing, no one would ever know we had the capability.”

André nodded once. “That’s right.”

They sat in silence, the air between them thick with implication. Out the window, the twin suns of Taurus I were setting low, turning the glass gold.

Gunther finally spoke, his voice quiet but firm. “And if we help?”

“We burn a booster we can’t replace. Argo gets delayed. Possibly scrapped.”

Silence again. This time, longer.

Gunther stared at the file. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink.

Then he closed the folder slowly, the soft click of the binder echoing in the quiet office.

“This doesn’t go through governments,” he said. “No public release. No diplomatic channels.”

André raised an eyebrow. “You want backchannel?”

“I want scientists,” Gunther replied. “Just us. Just them. No politics. No medals. If this works, the world never needs to know.”

André didn’t smile, but something in his shoulders eased. “I’ll make the call.”

As he stepped out of the room, Gunther turned back to the muted broadcast. Mateo was still speaking, trying to explain the loss without flinching. Yoongi sat beside him, unmoving, his eyes shadowed but clear.

The lights in Yoongi’s office were dim, the windows tinted against the rising glare of Aguerra’s twin suns. A half-empty mug of cold coffee sat forgotten on the edge of his desk, the ring it left behind now drying into the paper below. Across from him, the comms unit glowed faintly, casting a soft blue hue over the scattered reports and schematics that hadn’t been touched in hours.

He didn’t speak. Not yet.

The voice on the other end was calm, precise—measured in that way only career scientists and seasoned negotiators knew how to be. It laid out the terms cleanly: launch access, limited telemetry sharing, classified propulsion specs kept under lock. No governments. No press. Just a backdoor lifeline.

Yoongi sat motionless in his chair, head tilted back against the cushion, eyes closed. Not from sleep—he hadn’t slept in over thirty hours—but to block everything else out. The ache in his shoulders. The sting behind his eyes. The pressure that had been building in his chest since the probe failed.

But now, there it was.

Help.

Unexpected. Improbable. Quietly offered from a corner of the galaxy where he hadn’t dared hope.

He almost didn’t trust it at first. Then the voice repeated the final clause, politely, waiting for acknowledgment.

Yoongi blinked. Straightened.

He didn’t reach for a pen. Didn’t take a breath to buy himself time. He already knew the answer.

His voice, when it came, was low—rough from disuse—but steady.

“Yes,” he said. “We accept.”

And as he leaned forward, elbows braced on the desk, the hum of the line settled into silence. A silence that, for the first time in days, didn’t feel like failure pressing in from all sides. It felt like motion. Like the beginning of something.

He let the weight of it settle.

Then he picked up the stylus and got back to work.

At Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s primary assembly bay, the air was thick with fatigue, sweat, and the faint chemical tang of solder and composite dust. Half-finished components were stacked on worktables. Coffee cups littered the corners of schematics. No one had slept enough. No one was planning to, either.

Marco stood at the whiteboard, sleeves rolled to the elbows, marker already in hand. His hair stuck up in uneven tufts like he’d run his fingers through it too many times, and the stubble on his jaw was well into Day Three territory. Behind him, the whir of ventilation fans and toolkits hummed over the low murmur of keyboards and data feeds.

“Okay,” he said, voice sharper than usual—not angry, just wired. Focused. Running on pure adrenaline. “Thanks to some unexpected friends on Taurus 1, we’ve got one more shot at this.”

He turned and started writing fast, the marker squeaking against the board as he sketched out the basic launch trajectory and burn profile. The numbers came from muscle memory now.

“We built Iris in sixty-three days,” he went on, turning back to face the room. “And for the record? That should’ve been impossible. But we did it. You did it. Every subsystem, every weld, every last calibration. You made it happen.”

He held up the marker like a baton. “Now we do it again.”

The engineers and analysts around him exchanged tired looks. There were bags under everyone’s eyes, a few still wearing the same clothes from the day before. But no one objected. No one moved to say no.

Marco raised an eyebrow, as if daring someone to tell him it couldn’t be done.

“We don’t get sixty-three days this time,” he said. “We get twenty-eight. Twenty-eight days to design, fabricate, test, and launch a completely reconfigured payload. Lighter. Faster. Hotter burn. Different booster.”

He tapped the board with the marker, underlining a series of projected dates.

“And we’re going to do it. Because the alternative is watching someone die knowing we could’ve helped. I’m not interested in being a footnote in that story.”

The room had gone quiet—no arguments, no complaints. Just the subtle shift of people straightening in their seats, tightening ponytails, finishing cold coffee. The kind of stillness that came just before a storm.

Marco exhaled, stepped back, and dropped the marker into the tray.

“We don’t get to fail this time,” he said, softer now. “We get to try. That’s the gift. So let’s move.”

Someone from the propulsion team stood up and headed toward the assembly corridor. A software lead muttered something about patching a new thermal profile and started typing. A tech from avionics walked out without a word, already pulling up wiring schematics on a tablet.

Marco watched them go, then turned back to the board.

The numbers weren’t beautiful. But they were possible.

The hum of NOSA’s supercomputer lab was the kind of ambient noise that most people didn’t notice anymore. But Dean Marblemaw had always liked it—the low whirr of a machine thinking faster than he ever could, the air conditioners clicking rhythmically to keep it from melting down under its own brilliance.

He sat alone at the far terminal, sleeves pushed up, fingers moving fast over the keys. The numbers flowed like music—data sets, burn windows, orbital maps all converging into something strange. And then, suddenly, something true.

He stopped. Blinked.

Ran it again.

Same result.

Dean leaned back slowly, a grin spreading across his face like he couldn’t stop it if he tried. The kind of grin that had nothing to do with ego and everything to do with the pure, breathless thrill of seeing the impossible become real.

"Holy shit," he whispered, half-laughing.

He snatched the pages from the printer—charts, calculations, a half-scribbled orbital solution that shouldn't work but absolutely did—and bolted for the door.

The halls of NOSA blurred past him. He wasn’t built for running—skinny and long-legged in a way that always looked vaguely winded—but he didn’t stop. Security glanced up as he passed. A junior engineer did a double take. He didn’t care.

By the time he reached Mateo’s office, his heart was pounding and his shirt clung to his back. He didn’t knock.

He flung the door open hard enough that it bounced off the stopper, startling Mateo, who was in the middle of a call, headset pressed to one ear, tablet in the other hand.

Dean didn’t waste time.

“You should hang up the phone.”

Mateo blinked at him, thrown completely off balance. “I’m sorry, who the hell are you?”

“Dean Marblemaw. Astrodynamics. Floor six.” He stepped forward, still out of breath. “And seriously—you need to hang up the phone right now.”

Mateo held up a finger, eyes narrowing. “I’ll call you back,” he said into the headset, voice sharp with suspicion. He ended the call and set the tablet aside. “This better be worth it.”

Dean didn’t respond. He dropped a folder onto the desk and shoved it across the surface, sending a half-full coffee mug wobbling to the edge.

“Read this.”

Mateo didn’t move. Not at first. He studied Dean’s face—sweaty, flushed, buzzing with something like adrenaline—and then picked up the packet.

As he read, the frown that had settled into Mateo’s forehead deepened. Then stilled. His eyes jumped back up to Dean’s.

“This trajectory’s not viable.”

“It wasn’t,” Dean said, chest still heaving. “Until I ran the residual vectors on the second flyby sequence and—look, I can’t explain it fast. But it works. The window’s narrow, but it’s there. We can reach her.”

Mateo glanced back at the numbers, flipping to the second page. He did the math in his head. Then again.

His chair creaked as he leaned forward, elbows on the desk.

“You're absolutely sure?”

“As sure as I’ve ever been of anything that wasn’t caffeine dependency or gravitational constants.” Dean grinned, breath finally evening out. “Dr.Gomez, we can get a new payload there faster than we thought. If we burn on this vector, we shave thirty-one days off the injection arc. Thirty-one. That’s the difference between watching her die and watching her walk away.”

Mateo didn’t waste time. He was already punching the intercom.

“April,” he said, calm but urgent. “I need mission planning in my office. Now. Tell them it’s about Project Elrond.”

Across the room, Dean dropped into a chair, still riding the high of the math he’d just scrawled across four pages and a whiteboard. He grinned, breathless.

“I told you to hang up the phone,” he said.

Mateo didn’t respond. He was staring at the file in front of him, not reading it, just letting the numbers sink in like they were burning through the paper and into his chest.

They had something they hadn’t had in days.

Hope.

Alice stepped into the conference room mid-scroll, still reading from her phone. “Okay, seriously—what the hell is ‘Project Elrond’?”

Mateo didn’t look up from his tablet. “Had to give it a name.”

She stopped just inside the door. “Elrond?”

From the far corner, Creed looked up, brow arched. “Council of Elrond. Lord of the Rings.”

Alice blinked. “Why do Earth people always name critical operations after fantasy books? Is it a cultural compulsion? Or just a lack of imagination?”

Marco, legs stretched out, gave a quiet laugh. “It’s the meeting where they decide to destroy the One Ring. World-saving stuff.”

“That doesn’t make it better,” she muttered, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Am I even supposed to know what that means? How old is that book?”

The door opened again, and Yoongi walked in with a coffee in one hand and his usual unreadable calm. “If this is a Project Elrond, I want my codename to be Glorfindel.”

Alice didn’t miss a beat. “This is why I hate working with Earthlings.”

Creed grinned at Yoongi. “You don’t even know what this meeting’s about, do you?”

Yoongi took a seat and set his coffee down with care. “I assumed it had to be important if Matt called us all in here so urgently.”

Mateo looked up at last and slid a tablet across the table toward Dean. “Show them.”

Dean nodded, suddenly serious. His energy had been buzzing all morning, barely contained, but now it focused. He stood, pulled a few random objects from the table—a stapler, a mug, a stylus—and laid them out with quiet purpose.

“I can get Starfire back to M6-117,” he said. “By Sol 320.”

The air shifted. Heads turned. Every unspoken thought hit the same wall: That’s impossible.

Creed narrowed his eyes. “Say that again.”

“Five-six-one,” Dean repeated. “It’s tight. But I’ve run the numbers three times. The trajectory holds.”

Yoongi leaned forward, fingers steepled. “How?”

Dean didn’t sit. He held up the stapler. “This is Starfire, inbound toward Earth. They’re supposed to decelerate soon, prep for orbit. But what if they don’t? What if we tell them to skip the braking burn and use M6’s gravity instead?”

He swung the stapler in a wide arc toward Yoongi’s mug. “They slingshot. Pick up velocity, not lose it. We intercept the Argo probe on the way through. Resupply mid-sling.”

“With what?” Alice asked.

“Food. Fuel. Life support modules,” Mateo said. “Whatever we can get packed into the probe before it meets them.”

Dean pointed with the stylus. “After resupply, they make the burn straight back to M6-117. But there’s no time to decelerate. It’s a flyby.”

Alice frowned. “That’s useless unless—”

“Unless Y/N meets them in orbit,” Dean said. “MAV launch. She matches trajectory and speed, intercepts them mid-pass, and they haul ass home.”

The table was silent. Not confused—calculating. Each mind tracking the feasibility, the mechanics, the margin of error.

Dean took a breath. “It’s all there. The math checks out.”

Yoongi sat back slowly. “Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“Leave the room.”

Dean’s face fell. “Wait, what?”

“You’re done for now,” Yoongi said quietly. “We need to talk.”

Dean hesitated, looked around the room, then gathered his notes and walked out. The door clicked behind him.

Yoongi turned to Mateo. “Is he right?”

Mateo gave a slow nod. “His math’s clean. No gaps in the logic. If the Argo resupply works—and if Y/N can get the MAV off the ground—it’s viable.”

Alice’s brow furrowed. “So what’s the tradeoff?”

Mateo didn’t pause. “We only have one Argo. We use it to resupply Starfire, or we send it to Y/N directly with enough food to keep her alive until Helion Nexus arrives.”

Alice leaned back, thinking. “No backup?”

“No second probe. No margin,” Creed said. “We built one. We launched one. That’s it.”

“And what about the crew?” she asked. “What does this add to their mission?”

Mateo looked her in the eye. “Three hundred twenty days.”

Creed didn’t hesitate. “They’ll do it. All of them. You don’t even have to ask.”

“That’s the point,” Mateo said. “We don’t want to ask. Jimin shouldn’t have to carry this decision.”

Alice blinked. “Commander Park.”

Creed nodded. “Her family. Her former commander. If we put it in front of him, it’s over. He’ll say yes, and we all know it.”

Yoongi exhaled, his gaze shifting to the ceiling for a moment. “Can the ship make it?”

Mateo nodded. “It was built for extended missions. All five Nexus launches. It can handle the time.”

“And if anything fails out there?”

Mateo didn’t blink. “Then we lose all of them.”

Marco’s voice was soft but clear. “So it’s a question of one life… or six.”

The words hung in the room like smoke.

No one spoke.

Then slowly, every head turned to Yoongi.

He didn’t rush. Just sat there, staring at the table, eyes distant. The room was quiet except for the quiet hum of the vent overhead and the faint ticking of the wall clock.

After a long pause, he said, “We still have a safe way to bring five people home. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

Creed’s hands curled into fists on the table. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“Let them make that decision.”

Yoongi didn’t answer.

“We’re going with option one,” he said.

Creed stood. Slowly. The chair scraped sharply against the floor as he pushed it back.

He held Yoongi’s gaze, jaw tight.

“You goddamn coward,” And he walked out.

The airlock sealed behind her with a low hiss—routine, automated, impersonal. Y/N didn’t look back.

She stepped onto the dusty ground with the same slow, measured movements that had come to define her. Not fatigue exactly—she was long past the point of real exhaustion. This was inertia. Survival-mode autopilot. Her boots dragged slightly with each step, her gait uneven from the ache in her hip that hadn’t gone away since the last hard fall.

The brush in her hand was stiff, its bristles worn down to the point of uselessness. She’d meant to replace it weeks ago, but every time she thought about digging through the storage crates, she ran out of momentum. So the brush stayed. Dull, frayed, familiar.

Ahead, the solar panels stretched in a broken line across the plateau—dust-caked, half-buried in places, their surfaces dull under the constant pale light. Cleaning them had become a ritual. Not for efficiency anymore. Not for system optimization. Just something to do. A reason to put on the suit. A reason to move.

She reached the edge of the first panel and lifted the brush.

Then stopped.

Her hand hovered midair, fingers locked around the handle. For a moment she just stared, unmoving, her helmet visor reflecting a warped image of herself against the glassy surface of the panel.

She let the brush fall.

It landed with a soft thunk against the dust and lay still. The sound barely registered. Even the wind felt half-asleep, carrying only the faintest rasp of fine sand.

She stood there, breathing slow, not entirely sure what she was waiting for.

Then, without making a conscious decision, she turned and walked. Not toward the Hab. Not toward the rover. Toward the low ridge that curved beyond the eastern edge of the old settlement site—the one she visited sometimes when the air inside got too heavy.

Her spot.

The only place that felt slightly other on a planet that never changed.

The slope was gentle, but it took effort. Her suit was already too warm, the sun already high. She climbed anyway, boots crunching against loose rock, the incline chewing at her thighs. At the top, she sank down, legs folding beneath her with a graceless drop, and sat.

Not to rest.

Not to think.

Just to stop.

Below her, the empty valley stretched endlessly in all directions. The remnants of Colony 212’s initial outpost lay half-swallowed by dust—crumpled scaffolding, shattered survey drones, the twisted frame of a greenhouse torn apart by a windstorm before she’d even landed here.

The suns were low now. Three pale coins bleeding sideways light across the ridgeline, elongating shadows until the rocks themselves looked like reaching hands. She closed her eyes.

And stayed that way.

Minutes passed. Maybe longer. She lost track.

By the time she opened them again, the sky had changed. The suns were climbing again—merciless, blinding—and the world had gone from dim orange to stark, clinical white. Her suit’s internal alarm chirped, then escalated to a shrill beep.

TEMP WARNING: EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT UNSAFE.

She silenced it with a few taps.

Her throat felt dry. She didn’t feel like moving.

She didn’t want to go back to the Hab. Not yet.

And that was when something caught her eye—just a flicker of light in the dust. A glint. Not bright. Just out of place enough to make her turn her head.

Near her boot, half-buried in grit, was something metallic.

She crouched automatically, fingers brushing the sand aside. The object revealed itself slowly—a long, slender drill shaft, pitted with corrosion but unmistakably familiar. A specimen drill, the kind issued during the early survey missions.

She stared at it, frowning.

It hadn’t been there the last time she climbed this hill. At least, not visibly. The storms must’ve uncovered it, shaken it loose from whatever shallow grave had hidden it all these years.

She turned it over in her hands. The serial tag was mostly scrubbed, but she recognized the build—an older model, standard during the early M6 surface ops. Pre-colonization. The drill tip was blunted. A few of the threads were stripped. But it still had weight.

Her eyes followed a faint line in the sand—tracks, barely visible. The kind only time and wind could etch. They led toward a jagged rock formation nearby, one she’d passed a dozen times without looking twice.

She stood and followed the line.

Near the base of the rock, holes had been drilled—precise, methodical, in a pattern meant for core sampling. But they were shallow. Incomplete. As if the mission that had started here had been cut off mid-execution.

Y/N crouched again and ran her gloved fingers across the markings. The ridges were still sharp. It hadn’t eroded completely. She paused, hand resting against the surface.

It didn’t feel like just another piece of equipment forgotten by some long-dead operation. It felt… interrupted.

She sat back on her heels, the drill resting across her lap.

The low hum of NOSA Mission Control ticked along at its usual pace—monitors blinking, quiet conversations traded in clipped tones, the soft churn of machines doing what they were built to do. Underneath it all, that familiar background drone: the sound of systems keeping time in space.

But at April Borne’s console, none of it registered.

She sat forward in her chair, posture tight, eyes fixed on the center screen like it might flinch. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, ready to react, but frozen for the moment. Around her, the world moved in quiet circuits. At her station, the world had narrowed to one: M6-117.

Three displays surrounded her, each showing a different slice of telemetry—orbital drift, atmospheric density, biosuit vitals. She moved between them with ease, toggling overlays, tracking sensor shifts in real time. She wasn’t new anymore. She’d learned what mattered.

But one feed didn’t change.

Front and center: the live camera stream from an orbital relay, trained on a wide plateau. The camera wasn’t automated. April had locked it manually an hour ago. She didn’t want the feed to lose her.

On-screen, a single figure moved slowly across the dust-blasted landscape. An EVA suit, patched and sand-worn, its silhouette tiny in the frame. Step. Pause. Step. Pause.

April didn’t say anything for a while. Just watched.

Then, softly, without looking up, she spoke.

“She’s been out almost all day.”

Behind her, Mateo Gomez stood with his arms crossed, his weight shifting like he couldn’t quite settle. His jaw was tight, eyes glued to the same image. He looked tired in a way that didn’t come from lack of sleep—like his body had forgotten how to let go of tension.

“How many EVAs is that now?” he asked.

April flicked through a tab on the side screen. “Four, officially. Five if you count the solar sweep she did this morning.”

On the feed, Y/N’s figure came to a stop. She bent slightly, adjusted something in her hand, then continued walking—three hundred meters, give or take—before stopping again.

Then again. And again. Same rhythm. Same intervals.

“There’s a pattern,” April said, frowning slightly. “Three hundred-meter increments. Always the same distance between stops.”

“Survey work?” Mateo leaned in. “Did JPL send her updated collection coordinates?”

April shook her head, already checking. “No new packets. I ran a log scan—no inbound data. No flagged instructions. She hasn’t even acknowledged our system pings in four days.”

“So it’s all her,” Mateo murmured.

April nodded once. “She’s marking positions. Deliberate spacing, consistent timing. She’s not scavenging. She’s building something.”

The screen to her left pinged. A soft alert. April’s eyes snapped to it.

“Hold on,” she said. “We just got a packet through the Speculor relay.”

She brought it up quickly, hands moving across the keyboard with purpose. The data decrypted smoothly. It wasn’t a distress call. Not even a voice memo.

It was raw science.

April’s brow creased. “Chemical breakdown—batch 1A-7C. Surface composites. Silica ratios, microstructure modeling, thermal tests...”

Mateo stepped forward fast. “Wait—what batch?”

“1A-7C. Why?”

He stared at the screen for a second. “That’s Oslo’s grid.”

April looked up. “You mean—Colony 212? The geo-mineral mapping project?”

Mateo nodded slowly, as if the pieces were clicking together in real time. “Yeah. Oslo’s team was testing local substrate cohesion. Seeing if the regolith could be mixed and cured into load-bearing material. That data was supposed to drive long-term construction models for outposts. But the Eclipse hit before they finished.”

He leaned closer, eyes narrowing at the screen. “And that number… she’s not guessing. That’s the actual designation. Oslo ran a radial grid—six hundred meters across, three hundred between sample paths.”

April quickly overlaid the coordinates from Y/N’s EVAs onto a legacy terrain map. The grid snapped into place, translucent lines lacing across the dusty plateau.

It was nearly identical.

“Oh my god,” April whispered. “She’s not just collecting. She’s replicating the test grid. Exactly.”

Mateo stood still, like he was watching something sacred.

“She’s not just surviving,” he said quietly. “She’s continuing the mission.”

Y/N’s figure had stopped again, kneeling in the red dust. Her hands moved with slow precision, sealing something into a container—probably a drill sample, maybe a substrate core. There was no rush. No panic.

Just focus.

Purpose.

April sat back slowly, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “She picked up where they left off.”

“She must’ve found Oslo’s notes,” Mateo said. “Maybe from the wreck. Maybe from one of the old surface drives. It doesn’t matter. She’s finishing the work.”

“No,” April said softly. “She’s continuing it.”

The room shifted around them. Not louder—just heavier. The kind of silence that settles when something meaningful happens and no one wants to interrupt it.

On the feed, Y/N stood again. Adjusted her grip on a sampling tube. Walked three hundred more meters. Stopped. Crouched.

She was following a dead man’s path.

She was finishing what history had abandoned.

Mateo exhaled. His voice came out hoarse.

“She’s doing the science.”

April didn’t respond at first. She just kept watching.

Then she leaned forward, eyes bright behind tired lashes.

“That’s not what we expected her to do,” she said. “After the crash. After everything. I thought—honestly? I thought she’d hunker down. Try to stay warm. Make peace with the end.”

“She was never built for that,” Mateo said. “She’s a problem-solver. If she couldn’t be rescued, she’d figure out how to be useful.”

He watched her take another knee, dig gently into the ground.

“That girl is a fucking superstar,” he murmured. “Even when no one’s watching.”

And for the first time in days, the tension in Mission Control eased—not with certainty, but with clarity.

April’s screen updated again—new readings, a fresh transmission of spectrographic data. She sat up straighter, readying the next pass.

Across the room, techs leaned in a little closer. Conversations quieted. Chairs scooted forward.

Because for all the things they didn’t know yet—how to bring her home, how to explain what she was doing, how to protect her legacy—they understood one thing now:

She hadn’t stopped.

She had found a reason to keep going.

The Hab was silent, save for the steady, rhythmic scrape of stone on ceramic.

Y/N sat at the experiment table, hunched over, sleeves rolled back to the elbows of her pressure-rated thermal undersuit. Her fingers moved with practiced efficiency, knuckles red and chapped, nails bitten down to the quick. She brought the pestle down again—firm but controlled—grinding the coarse sediment sample into something closer to a usable grain. Not powder. Not paste. Just enough to test. Just enough to keep going.

The makeshift chem kit in front of her was stained with dust and old reactions, once-white trays now tinged with rust-colored residue. Glassware clinked softly as she shifted her weight. The solvent vial sloshed—half-full, if she was generous.

This part of the job wasn’t hard. Not physically. But it demanded a kind of patience that only survival had taught her. The precision of it gave her something to anchor to. A routine. A reason to move from one hour into the next.

She didn’t look up when she started talking. She didn’t need to. The camera, mounted across the room, was already rolling. It had been for hours. Most days, it was easier to pretend someone was watching. Even if she knew better.

“They evac’d eighteen sols into a thirty-one-sol mission,” she said quietly, the words emerging through a clenched jaw. “Eighteen. That’s how long Colony 212 lasted before everything went sideways. Which means they only got thirteen sols of science logged. Thirteen days.”

Her hand moved without pause—sample bag to mortar, pressure, grind, transfer to the tray. Repeat.

“For each of them,” she added, her voice lower now. “That’s what they left behind.”

She reached for a second tray—one marked with Oslo’s original numbering system, the labels half-scratched out, rewritten in her own handwriting. Neat. Slanted. A little messy in the corners, but legible. Human.

“Commander Oslo,” she said, almost conversationally. “You get the easy one. Mineral bonding profiles, structural cohesion. Hard science. Repeatable tests. The kind of thing even someone half-awake with a hangover can finish.”

She paused, adding a few drops of reactive solution. It fizzed faintly, curling steam against the inside of the tray cover.

“I hope your afterlife’s better than your last moments on this rock,” she muttered. “I really do.”

She glanced up, just briefly, toward the camera. Her mouth curved into something like a smile—thin, ironic, but not cruel.

“Jung, listen. I’m gonna be honest with you. I don’t understand chemolithotrophic detection. Not really. I read your notes three times and still couldn’t tell if you were looking for life or just bored. But I’m trying, okay? I’m running the tests.”

Her gaze flicked to the far side of the workbench, where a row of empty sample tubes waited to be filled.

“And Cruz,” she said, her voice lifting a notch with mock solemnity, “I know you didn’t like it when I touched the ChemCam. You made that very clear. Well. Guess what?”

She reached for the unit, brushing it with the back of her hand like a cat knocking something off a shelf.

“I’m touching the ChemCam. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Zero consequences. Viva la anarchy.”

The joke landed quietly, with a faint shake of her head.

She kept working, transferring notes from a test strip to her master log—an old ration box she’d flattened and drawn a grid on in marker. Real paper. Real pen. The graphite snapped halfway through a sentence, and she calmly flipped to a pencil stub with a taped-on eraser.

“Zimmermann,” she said, a little more gently now, “I made a cataloging system. It's rough, but it works. I’m calling it ‘Das Core Samples,’ because I figured you’d like the pun. You know. For the Fatherland.”

She didn’t laugh at her own joke, but the corner of her mouth twitched.

“Nguyen…” She paused. “I still don’t know what you did. Seriously. I looked it up. Your title said ‘systems integration and adaptive redundancy.’ Which—I think means... backup stuff? No clue. I hope someone back home got your job title translated before your plaque was engraved.”

The words hung in the air, but there was no venom in them. Just tired affection. The kind you had for coworkers you never really knew but still missed when they were gone.

She turned back to the test rack, sorting the samples into clean, labeled sleeves. Every move was methodical, deliberate. She wasn’t rushing. She wasn’t wasting time either.

“I’m trying to keep everything organized,” she said after a while. Her voice was softer now. “Documented. Archived. I know it’s not exactly my strength.”

She wiped the corner of her eye with the back of one hand, smudging a line of dust across her cheek.

“But I want it to make sense,” she added. “In case... someone comes later.”

She reached across the table for a clean data tag and etched the next code into it with the edge of her multitool. Her hands didn’t tremble.

“Maybe someone will teach it in class one day. ‘The Frenchie Syllabus.’” She let the words linger, then smiled—a real one, this time. “Intro to Improvised Civil Engineering: How to Build a Bathtub Using NOSA Tubing and an Old RTG.”

Her smile faded just slightly, but her voice remained steady.

“Intermediate Cuisine: How to Cook a Potato Six Thousand Ways. Advanced Chemistry: How to Make Water Out of Rocket Fuel. Maybe don’t blow yourselves up like I did.”

She looked back at the camera.

Then, wordlessly, turned back to her samples and kept working.

The Starfire was quiet, save for the soft whir of filtered air and the constant, almost imperceptible hum of the ship’s primary drive coils in idle mode. The kind of silence that didn’t just surround you—it settled in. Wore into your bones over time.

Armin Zimmermann sat alone at the aft systems console, strapped into the harness more out of habit than necessity. His diagnostics had finished a full ten minutes ago, but he hadn’t moved. The screen in front of him still blinked its green confirmation lights in time with his pulse.

He scrolled absently through his inbox, expecting the usual: systems logs from JPL, status updates from mission ops, the occasional joke from Jung or Cruz buried in the metadata of a routine check.

But then his eyes landed on a message that didn’t fit.

Subject: Unsere Kinder.

He stared at it.

Our children.

Armin frowned. It wasn’t a phrase Kelly would normally use. They didn’t speak German with each other much—not anymore. His wife preferred English, and emails were usually short, efficient. News from Earth. Photos of their daughter. No riddles.

He hesitated, then clicked.

The body of the email was empty. No text. No signature. Just a single attachment: a .txt file, small and unassuming.

He tapped it open.

The screen populated instantly—lines of symbols, not quite random but not immediately readable either. Mathematical notations, directional headings, numbers too specific to be coincidence and too disorganized to be deliberate.

A sharp edge settled in his chest.

He stared at the file, heart rate rising. The longer he looked, the more his instincts screamed that this wasn’t a mistake or spam or a misdirected file.

This was a message.

Armin unstrapped, pushed off the console wall, and glided through the corridor with practiced, weightless ease. The ship was familiar under his palms—every panel, every joint, every slight bump in the composite wall plating. The kind of familiarity that only came with months in orbit, where even silence had a pattern.

He found Valencia Cruz in the ship’s rotating gym module, her strides steady on the curved track. The artificial gravity was low—just enough to make cardio unpleasant, just low enough to make injuries dangerous. She was in the zone, sweat on her brow, earbuds in.

Armin tapped the console by the entrance. The door hissed open.

Val looked up, spotted him, and slowed. “You okay?” she asked, voice breathless.

“I have a problem,” Armin said.

She stopped the treadmill, wiped her face with a towel, and stepped out of the rotation ring. “You don’t usually say that unless something’s on fire.”

He handed her the tablet. “My wife sent this. At least, it says it’s from her.”

Val took it, leaning against the bulkhead. She swiped through the file. Her brow furrowed. “It’s not an image,” she muttered. “Not corrupted either. It’s a clean text file. Plain ASCII.”

She tapped to expand the lines. The screen filled with patterns. Coordinates. Variables. Formulas layered between what looked like navigation flags and arcane mission notations.

“This isn’t random,” she said, more to herself now. “These look like… course headings. Vectors. And this—this might be delta-v tables?”

Armin nodded slowly. “I thought so too.”

Val looked up. “Any idea what it’s for?”

He didn’t answer right away. His eyes scanned the data again, fingers brushing over the screen like he was trying to feel the meaning in the numbers.

Then his voice caught—quiet, clipped. “Here. This is a reference to the Marblemaw Maneuver. It’s a theoretical slingshot burn. Dean published a paper on it two years ago, but I think I’m the only person who actually read it.”

“You’re saying this is from Dean?”

He shook his head. “No. But someone used his math. Dean wouldn’t be able to get clearance to send this. Has to be a big guy at NOSA, but that still doesn’t explain why it was sent to you from Kelly’s inbox.” 

Val’s eyebrows drew together as she focused on one line that stood out, bolded in a sea of plain text.

SOL 320.

They both stared at it.

The number hit Armin like a punch to the gut. He reached for the wall to steady himself, the zero-g making him sway.

“Oh mein Gott,” he whispered.

Val stared at the screen, then at him.

“You think it’s about her.”

He nodded once.

Val didn’t look up from the screen. Her fingers were already moving, copying the data into her private log and running checksum validations. Not to confirm the file’s source—she already knew it wasn’t junk—but to stabilize it. There was a chance it could disappear as quickly as it came.

Armin hovered for a second, his jaw tight. Then he pushed off the bulkhead and turned toward the main corridor. “I’m getting the others.”

Val nodded without taking her eyes off the text. “I’ll see what else I can pull from it.”

Val was still at the terminal, but now her fingers hovered just above the screen, not typing—just staring. She’d parsed most of the file. Enough to know what it was. Enough to feel her chest go tight with the implications.

She heard the others enter before she turned—Armin, Jung, Nguyen, each one quieter than the last. No one cracked a joke. No one asked for coffee.

Jimin Park wasn’t with them yet.

Val looked up, then at Armin. “You told him?”

“He was on the call deck talking to Uma,” Armin said. “He’s coming.”

She nodded once, then sat back in her chair, folding her arms over her chest. The data still glowed on the screen—numbers, coordinates, trajectory math, and the name SOL 320, burned in bold near the top like it was written in blood.

Nguyen broke the silence first. “It’s real?”

Val glanced at him. “Yes. It’s real.”

“And it was sent to Zimmermann,” Hoseok said, quietly. “Not to JPL. Not to Command.”

“To his wife,” Armin said. “Piggybacked on a family message. They slipped it into the attachment buffer.”

Hoseok gave a low whistle. “That’s a hell of a risk.”

Val didn’t smile. “Which means it’s got to be important. So, it’s a Park call.”

The hatch behind them opened with a pneumatic hiss.

Commander Jimin Park stepped into the room, still in his flight jacket, headset looped around his neck. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes scanned the crew immediately, clocking the tension, the way no one made room for small talk.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Val stood. “You need to see this, sir.”

She didn’t say more. Didn’t try to explain. Just stepped aside and offered him her seat at the console. Her tone wasn’t dismissive—it was deliberate. This wasn’t hers to carry.

Jimin sat slowly, glanced at her, then down at the data on-screen.

He started reading.

The others didn’t interrupt.

For a long moment, the only sound was the soft hum of ship systems, the occasional shift of a boot against the deck. Jimin scrolled slowly, eyes narrowing as the math unfurled in layers—positioning burns, delta-v margins, fuel requirements, time dilation calculations.

Then came the header again:

SOL 320.

He froze there, staring.

Val leaned on the back of the chair, her voice low. “It’s a maneuver. Based on Dean Marblemaw’s original slingshot paper, but adapted for our current trajectory. It uses the neighboring planet’s gravity to redirect us back to M6-117. No braking. No orbit insertion. Just one burn, a flyby intercept… and Y/N has to meet us mid-course using the MAV.”

Jimin sat back slowly, his hands resting on the armrests, gaze distant now.

The others watched him. No one pushed. No one dared.

Val broke the silence, her voice softer than before. “I didn’t want to be the one to say it, Commander. This... it’s not a decision for any of us to make. Not really.”

He looked up at her.

“I trust you,” she said.

The room held still as he looked at each of them in turn. Jung. Nguyen. Armin. Val.

They all waited for him to speak—not out of deference to rank, but because they knew what this meant. Y/N wasn’t just a crewmate. She wasn’t just a scientist on another rock.

She was his family.

And now she was a question hanging in space.

After a moment, he leaned forward, shoulders stiff with the gravity of it all.

“Get me everything,” he said. “Engine specs, margin of error, fuel thresholds. We don’t move unless we know it can be done.”

Val nodded once. “Yes, sir.”

He stood slowly, gaze still on the screen.

“And we keep this off Command until I say otherwise.”

“Of course, sir,” She grinned.

The crew of the Starfire sat around the narrow rec table, their knees brushing beneath it, shoulders hunched closer than comfort allowed. The lights overhead were dimmed, low power mode humming softly through the ship’s systems like a second heartbeat. Empty ration wrappers floated lazily in the corner, caught in the stagnant air.

The ship’s artificial gravity drum wasn’t active tonight. No one felt like turning it on. No one felt like pretending.

Jimin leaned forward, elbows resting on the scratched tabletop, fingers loosely laced. His voice was steady, if a little hoarse from speaking too long in the too-thin air.

“And assuming the burn goes clean, the maneuver takes us into a solar flyby, past Earth. The intercept brings us home in... 211 days after rendezvous,” he said. “Give or take.”

Silence followed. The crew looked at one another, the numbers hanging there like frost on the walls. No one moved. The weight of what he’d said hadn’t settled. It was still drifting, still searching for a place to land.

Koah broke the stillness first, his voice hesitant. “That would actually work?”

Jimin nodded. “The math’s sound. I ran it with Armin. Val checked the burn window against the latest telemetry. The fuel reserves are tight, but within margins.”

Koah rubbed a hand over his face, then let it drop to the table. “That’s wild,” he muttered. “It’s brilliant.”

Armin, who hadn’t spoken since they sat down, leaned forward. “It is brilliant. And it wasn’t mine.”

He looked up. “Whoever sent that file knew our vector. They built a burn profile around our exact rotation, our real-time acceleration data. It’s too specific to be theoretical.”

Hoseok Jung exhaled hard, his arms folded across his chest. “Okay. But why the encrypted file? Why send it to you and not Command?”

Jimin looked at him. “Because NOSA already said no.”

He let the silence hold a second longer before continuing. “They weighed the risks and made their choice. Rescue her later, not now. Safer for us, statistically. But someone disagreed. Someone back home—someone with access—wanted us to have another option.”

“So we’d be overriding the chain of command,” Koah said, brows knitting. “Making a decision they explicitly rejected.”

“Yes,” Jimin said. “If we do this,” he continued, “we’ll force their hand. They’d have no choice but to send the supply probe to intercept us on the return arc. If they don’t, we starve. But they will. Because the alternative is letting six astronauts die on a public feed, live and slow.”

Koah leaned back, eyes locked on the ceiling. The metal above him was marked with signatures—names from Nexus I and II, left like chalk on a wall before graduation. Most of them were still alive.

This would make sure of it.

“Are we doing it?” Valencia asked finally. Her voice was calm, but there was something brittle at the edge of it. She looked tired. They all did.

Jimin shook his head. “It’s not my call.”

Koah blinked. “You’re the commander.”

“I am,” Jimin said. “Which means I know when something is beyond the scope of command. This isn’t a mission deviation. This is a mutiny.”

The word hung in the room like static.

He let it sit before continuing, his voice low. “You need to understand what this is. If we commit and the maneuver fails, we’ll burn too much fuel to get back. If we miss the MAV intercept, we lose the rendezvous and she dies. If we miss the unnamed planet’s gravity corridor by half a degree, we spiral off-course for good. And even if we pull it off... it adds 213 days to our mission clock.”

He paused. Let the numbers soak in.

“213 more days in space. No resupply planned. No re-entry window guaranteed. Something breaks—something simple, something stupid, like a heat exchanger or a water recycler—and we die out here.”

No one moved.

“And even if we don’t die,” he added, “some of us are military. Koah and I would face court-martial. The rest of you? You’d never fly again.”

A long beat passed.

Then Koah gave a crooked smile. “Yeah, I figured.” He looked at Jimin. “You really think I care about flight status after this? Frenchie’s out there alone.”

“She’d die,” Armin said quietly.

Koah nodded. “Then yeah. I’m in.”

“Don’t rush it,” Jimin warned. “This is the kind of decision that doesn’t come off your record. Ever.”

Koah met his gaze. “Then I’ll make it count.”

Hoseok tapped a finger against the table, then looked up. “We can’t ignore it. If there’s a shot—hell, if there’s even a chance she’s alive—we take it. We’re not leaving her out there.”

Jimin turned to Val. She hadn’t spoken. She’d just been watching him.

Of all of them, she looked the most conflicted—not reluctant, just... aware. Her eyes were sharp, calculating. And scared, in a way only someone with full knowledge of the risk could be.

“Val,” Jimin said.

She exhaled slowly. Ran a thumb along the edge of the table. Then finally, she nodded.

“One condition,” she said. “We finish the math. Every inch of it. No gaps. No ‘close enough.’ We run this thing until it bleeds numbers.”

Jimin gave a slow, sure nod. “Agreed.”

Val looked around the room—at the faces of the people she’d flown with, laughed with, broken with—and when her gaze came back to Jimin’s, her voice was clear.

“Let’s go get her.”

Brendan Hatch sat slouched at the front console in Mission Control, elbows on the desk, one hand wrapped loosely around a paper cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. The graveyard shift was always the same—quiet, steady, unremarkable. Background hum from systems, low chatter from telemetry and comms, a few tired engineers trading stories in hushed tones. It was routine, predictable.

That’s why he liked it.

He took a slow sip and winced. The coffee tasted like rust and burnt toast.

The voice in his headset broke the calm.

“Flight, CAPCOM.”

Brendan straightened a bit, instinct overriding fatigue. “Go ahead, CAPCOM.”

“We’ve got a... strange ping from Starfire. Unscheduled update, came in just now. One-line transmission.”

Brendan set the cup down. “One line? What kind of line?”

There was a pause on the other end, and when the CAPCOM spoke again, their voice held a note Brendan didn’t like. Hesitation.

“No system flags, no distress codes. Just this: ‘Houston, be advised. Dean Marblemaw is a steely-eyed missile man.’ That’s the whole message.”

Brendan blinked.

He turned slowly toward Guidance, who was already swiveling in his seat with a raised brow.

“Dean who?”

“Not a clue,” CAPCOM replied. “Checked personnel. Checked payload specialists. No one onboard Starfire by that name.”

Brendan opened his mouth to respond, but didn’t get the chance.

Alarms screamed to life.

First one console, then another—flashing red across telemetry, guidance, propulsion. The hum of the room shattered. Chairs scraped, voices rose. The quiet rhythm of Mission Control was gone in an instant, replaced by controlled chaos.

Brendan shot to his feet. “Guidance, report!”

“Flight, Starfire’s orbital vector just shifted,” came the answer, fast and clipped. “They’ve made a burn. Large. Coordinated.”

Brendan’s gut tightened. “Drift?”

“Negative. No drift. This wasn’t passive. They changed trajectory. On purpose.”

“What’s the delta?”

“Twenty-seven point eight one two degrees. Relative to prior flight path.”

Brendan swore softly under his breath, jaw clenched. “CAPCOM, get them on comms. Ask what the hell they’re doing.”

“They’re not responding, Flight. Not acknowledging the transmission request.”

“Jesus Christ,” Brendan muttered. “Guidance, time to irreversible course commit?”

“Working on it.”

“Telemetry,” he snapped, turning toward the woman two rows back. “Any chance this is instrumentation error? False reading?”

“No, Flight,” she replied, already typing. “Confirmed from both uplink satellites. This is real-time. The burn profile is clean. Intentional.”

Brendan ran a hand over his face, pushing back the throb that had started behind his eyes.

“Flight,” CAPCOM again. “Still no response from Starfire. No autopilot anomaly. Manual controls engaged. This is them.”

For a moment, no one said anything.

Then the propulsion tech let out a breath. “It’s a slingshot.”

Brendan turned to him. “What?”

“The numbers. It’s not a decel. It’s a gravity-assist prep burn.”

He turned back to his console, pulling up the star map. The trajectory arced not toward Earth, but around it—shaving close, building speed.

“They’re not coming home,” the tech said. “They’re slingshotting Earth. Back out. Somewhere else.”

A long silence stretched.

Brendan leaned over the comm desk, both palms flat against the surface, heart pounding.

“CAPCOM,” he said quietly. “Ping orbital intelligence. I want a full trajectory model. And tell me when that slingshot window locks.”

“Aye, Flight.”

“Guidance,” he said, turning again, “when exactly did this maneuver begin?”

“Timestamped at 03:46:18 GMT. Four minutes ago.”

Brendan stared at the screen. The arc was unmistakable now. Clean. Purposeful. A new course already emerging.

He knew what that meant.

He didn’t know how, or why—but this wasn’t a malfunction.

This was intent.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered. “They’ve gone rogue.”

He took a deep breath and leaned into his mic.

“Somebody,” he said, “find out who Dean Marblemaw is—and why the hell he’s hijacked my spaceship.”

The early light bled through the windows of NOSA’s executive floor in thin, fractured lines—cold and silver, like the morning hadn’t quite committed to warmth. The city beyond the glass was still quiet, tucked beneath fog and the hush of anticipation.

Yoongi stood at the far end of his office, unmoving, hands clasped behind his back. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular—just the smear of light creeping across the skyline. His reflection hovered faintly in the glass, superimposed over the world below like a ghost watching from orbit.

Behind him, the door opened. Footsteps, then a pause.

He didn’t turn.

Creed Summers stood just inside, shoulders squared, silent.

For a moment, neither man spoke. The only sound was the low hum of systems on standby, the distant rattle of a cleaning cart down the hall. That, and the heavy, aching silence of two people carrying the weight of a decision too big for either of them alone.

Finally, Yoongi’s voice broke the stillness.

“Alice goes before the press at nine,” he said, still watching the horizon. “We’ll confirm that we’re supporting Starfire’s new trajectory. Official line is that it was planned. Contingency strategy.”

Creed nodded once. “It’s the right move. Optics, morale. Damage control.”

Yoongi turned, slowly.

He looked tired—not just physically. There was something deeper in the lines around his mouth, the set of his shoulders. Not a man who lacked conviction, but one who had been forced to weigh too many impossible things for too long.

“You may have killed them,” he said.

Creed didn’t flinch, but his face didn’t harden either. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, still and steady. “They made the call.”

Yoongi stepped closer, stopping just behind his desk, fingers brushing against the edge as if grounding himself. “You fed them the math. You knew what they’d do.”

“I gave them information,” Creed said evenly. “That’s all. The choice was theirs.”

Yoongi’s jaw tightened. “Don’t split hairs. We both know what a team does when you give them a mission and a reason.”

A beat of silence.

Then Yoongi’s voice dropped—quieter, rawer. “You know how fragile this whole damn thing is?”

He looked at Creed now—not as an adversary. As a man trying to hold up a building while the ground cracked beneath it.

“The public, the funding, the next three missions that haven’t even left the floor. I’ve got three senators on the line every day, asking why we haven’t pulled the plug. Why we didn’t bring them home sooner. Why we let her stay behind. Every time someone dies up there—even when it’s the right call—people turn their backs on us. And every time we get lucky, they forget the odds. They stop listening to the numbers. The margin disappears.”

Creed didn’t speak. He didn’t have to.

Yoongi exhaled, slow and steady, like it physically hurt to say what came next.

“I’m not here to play politics,” he said. “I’m here to keep the program alive. So the people who come next still have something to reach for. I’ve fought tooth and nail to hold this place together—not for power, not for legacy. For continuity. Because once it breaks—once people stop believing we’re worth the risk—it’s gone. And it doesn’t come back.”

Creed’s voice was soft. “She’s not a statistic.”

“I know,” Yoongi said, almost too quickly.

It surprised them both—how fast the words came.

He looked away, swallowing once, then slowly sat at the edge of the desk.

“She’s not a number, Creed. I know who she is. I remember her interview. She had this… fierce optimism. Asked me if she’d be allowed to ‘fix things’ if they broke, or if we’d just tell her to wait for a maintenance bot. She was so sure she could outsmart anything.”

Creed’s posture eased, just slightly. “She kind of has.”

Yoongi let out a low breath that might’ve been a laugh, or something close. “Yeah. I know. I read every log. Every data stream. Every piece of cobbled-together engineering magic she’s pulled off in the dirt. She shouldn’t have lasted two weeks.”

“And yet she’s finishing the colony’s science logs,” Creed said. “Using a frying pan, duct tape, a shitty old drill, and radioactive decay.”

“She’s alive,” Yoongi said, like it was a secret.

“She’s alive,” Creed echoed.

The silence that followed was different now. Heavier, but not hostile. Just honest.

Yoongi stood again, walking back toward the window. The city below was waking. Headlines would be firing up soon. Half the world already knew. By the time Alice hit the podium, the story would be out of their hands.

He stared out at the light for a long moment.

Then, without turning, he said, quietly, “God, I hope you’re right.”

Creed said nothing.

After a few more seconds, Yoongi added, “When this is over, you’ll submit your resignation.”

There was no venom in it. Just gravity. Consequence. A toll paid in silence.

Creed nodded. “I figured.”

Yoongi turned back to him.

“Bring them home,” he said.

Creed gave a small nod—tight, respectful—and left the room without another word.

Yoongi stayed where he was, one hand resting lightly against the windowpane. The sun had climbed a little higher, casting long, sharp shadows across his office.

The sun crawled over the horizon like it was dragging its feet, casting deep red light across the wind-carved ridges of Sundermere Basin. As it climbed, the basin seemed to ignite—rust, gold, and copper spilling across the plain. Heat shimmered early in the day on M6-117. It didn’t build; it simply arrived.

The stillness of the planet, as always, was total. Except for the faint, rhythmic sound of drilling.

Inside the Hab, Y/N sat hunched over her cluttered experiment table, still in her half-unzipped EVA suit. Her hair stuck to the sweat along her temples, her undershirt damp across her spine. A dozen open containers surrounded her—rock samples, rusted tool bits, a half-smashed solar converter she was trying to rewire with salvaged cabling. Her shoulders ached. Everything ached.

The camera blinked red, and she gave it a weary smile.

“Here’s your daily crash course in logistics,” she said, voice hoarse but steady. “Every Nexus mission requires a minimum of three years of presupplies. Fuel, food, oxygen, parts. You don’t pack that kind of bulk on launch day—you land it ahead of time.”

She gestured vaguely to the map that blinked on her tablet. “Which is why the MAV for Nexus-4 is already parked in Sundermere Basin. It got here almost a year before I did. Or... was supposed to.” Her smile faded for just a second. “Anyway. There it is. Waiting.”

Her eyes flicked down to the numbers on the screen—distance, resource counts, route projections. She swallowed, then looked back up.

“The plan is simple,” she said, not even pretending to believe it. “I drive 3,200 kilometers across a planet that actively wants me dead. I bring my oxygenator, my water reclaimer, my atmospheric regulator, my food, my tools, my radiation gear—everything that lets me keep breathing. I install it all into a vehicle I’ve never tested, in conditions it was never prepped for. Then, right as the Starfire passes overhead at orbital velocity, I launch and pray I don’t miss the window.”

She paused, letting that settle. Then gave a dry, lopsided grin.

“Okay, yeah. It sounds insane. But also kind of awesome, right?”

She sat back in her chair, stretching out her sore arms. Her elbow knocked over a tin of screws, which rattled across the table and clattered to the floor. She didn’t bother picking them up.

“Of course,” she added, “that’s future Y/N’s problem.”

Her tone darkened, not bitter, but quieter.

“Right now I’ve got two hundred sols and change to figure out how to convert this glorified golf cart into a spacecraft support vehicle. NOSA’s running the numbers, trying to make miracles happen, but so far the best advice I’ve gotten from Earth has been... and I quote... ‘Drill holes in the roof of your rover and hit it with a rock.’”

She smiled again, brighter this time, then glanced down at the metal plates stacked beside her. “So. Guess that’s what I’m doing today.”

She didn’t log off. She just stood, rolled her shoulders, and got to work.

Later, outside, the three suns were already high in the sky. The light was sharp, clinical. There was no softness here—not from the light, not from the wind, not from the planet. The surface heat rippled like liquid, and the rover baked under it.

Y/N stood on the roof of Speculor-2, bracing her boots against the support bars, a modified drill in her hands. The metal screamed beneath each puncture. The holes didn’t need to be pretty—just precise. Dozens of them, arranged in a ring, traced with chalk from a broken filter cap. Her gloves were stiff with dust. Sweat ran down her back inside the suit, soaking the inner lining.

When she finished the last hole, she set the drill aside and pulled a flathead screwdriver from the pouch at her hip. Then, the rock. She’d chosen it carefully. It had a good weight to it.

The first strike dented the panel. The second left a visible imprint. She kept going.

Each blow echoed through the stillness like a challenge. It was absurd and it was necessary. And it was all she had.

Inside the Hab, the cooler hummed. The lights flickered briefly as she walked in, peeling the top half of the suit from her body. She drank a pouch of electrolyte gel, gagged, then sat down at the small kitchen table, slowly chewing on a cold potato.

One by one, she laid out ration pouches in a line and began marking them in thick black Sharpie.

Departure.

Birthday.

Last Meal.

She hesitated over the final pouch, then wrote something smaller.

If I Don’t Make It.

She capped the marker and sat back, staring at the row.

There was no drama in her expression. Just focus. Acceptance. She’d been past fear for a while now.

Far above the surface, the Starfire had completed its burn. Its course now locked. A ship the size of a small city turned with impossible grace, cutting through the darkness in complete silence. Its panels flared softly in the starlight as it adjusted position, beginning its long arc toward rendezvous.

The engines cooled. The crew settled. Somewhere, someone was running simulations.

But down below, on a world that had tried to kill her a dozen different ways, Y/N was still moving. Still patching. Still planning.

She pulled her notepad back toward her and began sketching the adapter plate that would bridge the MAV’s cockpit to the supply lines from the rover. The drawing was shaky—her fingers cramped—but she kept going.

It was still absurd.

But not impossible.

The video booth on the Starfire wasn’t much more than a glorified storage locker. No insulation, no privacy to speak of—just a narrow alcove welded into the comms deck, with walls so thin you could hear the ship groan during its thermal cycles. A single chair, bolted to the floor. A screen about the size of a dinner tray. That was it.

But to Commander Jimin Park, it had become a kind of chapel.

He came here when he couldn’t sleep. When the silence of the corridors felt too big. When the ship's humming nerves and quiet voices became too much and too little all at once.

Now, he sat forward in the dim light, hands folded tightly between his knees, staring at the flickering terminal as it made contact.

The screen blinked once, twice—and then steadied.

Uma appeared.

Backlit by the warm kitchen glow of their apartment on Aguerra Prime. She stood in front of the counter, arms folded across her chest, her silhouette unmistakable. Behind her, the sky beyond the window was still black. Early morning. That fragile hour before the city started breathing again.

Her golden hair was pulled into a messy knot—loose, a little unkempt, wisps of it curling around her face. No makeup. Her eyes were puffy, like she hadn’t slept much. Like she’d maybe cried in the bathroom and then come back out without pretending it hadn’t happened.

Jimin stared at her a moment longer than he meant to. He drank her in like she might vanish if he blinked too hard.

But when she spoke, there was no softness in her voice.

“Five hundred and thirty-three days.”

It wasn’t a greeting. It wasn’t even anger, not really. It was the kind of flat, sharp-edged fact that cut deeper than yelling ever could.

“You added five hundred and thirty-three days to your mission,” she said. “And you didn’t even call first.”

He didn’t flinch. He’d had this conversation a hundred times in his head. None of them made it easier.

“I know,” he said, quiet. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head—not in disbelief. That stage had passed. This was something colder. A sadness so layered it had started calcifying into sarcasm.

“Did you even think about us? Me? Hana?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Do you even remember how old she’ll be when you get back?”

He didn’t look away. “Almost five.”

“She’ll barely remember you,” Uma said. Her voice cracked slightly on the word remember, but she pushed through it.

“I know.”

Her arms tightened across her stomach. He could see it—how hard she was trying not to let herself break, not here, not on a grainy video call with a six-second delay.

“You’re signing up for seven more months of silence,” she said. “When I went through IVF. When I was pregnant. While I give birth. While I recover. While our daughter goes to her first day of school and asks why the other kids’ dads come to pick them up. And all she’s got is a photograph and a voice memo from orbit.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, just to breathe. The silence stretched, broken only by the faint hum of the Starfire behind him.

“I know,” he said again, voice low. “You’re right.”

“You think I care about being right?” she snapped, and then immediately softened, as if the sharpness had drained what little strength she had left.

Her hand came up slowly to her face, like she hadn’t even noticed it moving. She rubbed at her temple with the heel of her palm, as if trying to smooth out the ache that had settled behind her eyes. Then her hand dropped to her belly.

“I had contractions yesterday,” she said.

Jimin’s breath caught, barely audible over the low hum of the booth’s systems. His whole body stilled. Only his eyes moved—searching hers across the grainy feed like he might read something more, something urgent.

Uma didn’t give him time to respond.

“I was alone,” she said. “Scared.”

Her voice didn’t tremble. She said it with the kind of flat honesty that came after a long night of holding yourself together.

“I called my parents,” she added, more quietly now. “They won’t make it in time. Customs delays—they’re stuck off-world until next week. Rose and Sean are staying with me through the delivery, which is… fine. Really. They’ve been amazing.”

She paused, and for a moment, her eyes softened—but not toward comfort. Toward grief.

“But they’re not you, Chim.”

She looked down, hand still resting on her belly. Her other arm wrapped around her midsection like she was trying to hold something in, or maybe keep something out. When she looked back up at him, the bravado had cracked wide open. What remained was raw and quiet and impossibly human.

“I didn’t want to meet our son without you.”

Jimin leaned in slowly, like he could close the light-years between them with body language alone. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Swallowed hard. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough-edged and barely steady.

“You’re not alone,” he said. “You’re meeting him in a world where I already love him more than I ever thought I could love anyone. That has to count for something. I know it’s not the same. God, Uma, I know it’s not. But it’s true.”

His voice caught, and he pushed past it. “Rose and Sean—listen, they’ll take care of you like you’re theirs. I made sure of that before I left. I should’ve told you sooner. I should’ve done a lot of things sooner.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“I’m so sorry I’m not there with you.”

Uma turned away, just slightly, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her sweater. Not hiding the tears—just trying to stay upright through them.

“I called him Riker,” she said after a pause. “I know we were still deciding. I know we said we’d wait. But it felt right. Last night I was reading those baby books Quinn gave me, and I whispered it to him. And he kicked.”

Jimin’s throat clenched. He didn’t trust himself to say anything at first.

“Riker,” he repeated finally, like he was testing the word in his mouth for the first time. “Yeah. That’s his name.”

She smiled—small, real. Her chin trembled.

“He looks like you,” she said. “From the scans. Same nose. It’s hard to get clear pictures because he keeps tossing and turning, but I just know just like I knew Hana would.”

“I wanted to be the first one to hold him,” Jimin said, voice low.

Uma nodded. “Then get your ass home.”

He chuckled, breathless. “Working on it.”

He leaned in even closer, his hand hovering near the edge of the console like he might reach through it. “I’ll come home to you, Uma. I swear to you. I’ll crawl back if I have to.”

“I believe you,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

Her hand came up again, touching the screen gently. Jimin mirrored the gesture. Their fingertips aligned through the glass—no warmth, no pressure. Just the image. Just the intention.

A silence settled between them. Not empty. Just full of the things that didn’t need to be said aloud. Years of late nights. Early mornings. Fights. Laughter. Hana’s first steps. The quiet promise of a life they were still trying to build.

Then Jimin spoke again, more carefully now.

“She’s like my sister,” he said. “I know that’s not in the job description. I know it wasn’t supposed to matter. But I made the call. I stayed. I would do it again.”

Uma pulled back slightly, sitting straighter. Her arms folded across her chest. The tears were drying, but her eyes stayed hard, focused.

“You think I don’t understand why you did it?”

He didn’t answer. He knew better than to try.

“I do,” she said. “But you didn’t tell me. You didn’t even give me a choice. I had to find out from a system ping that you were extending your mission—seven more months, just dropped into my inbox like a goddamn package delivery.”

She shook her head. “You’re going to miss your son being born, Jimin.”

Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to.

He leaned in again, pressing his palm to the console like it might carry the weight of what he wanted to say.

“You would’ve told me to go,” he said, quiet. “If I’d asked.”

“Of course I would’ve. But you didn’t ask. That’s the part that hurts.”

He nodded once, slowly. “Then be furious. Be as mad as you want. I’ll take it all. I just…” He swallowed again. “Please don’t stop talking to me.”

Uma stared at him for a long time.

Her face didn’t shift. Not right away. Her arms were still crossed, her jaw still tight, and for a moment, Jimin wondered if she was even going to say anything. Then she exhaled—long, controlled—and the line of her shoulders softened. Just slightly. Not in surrender, but in recognition.

That quiet, painful kind of understanding that only happens between people who know each other too well to lie.

“Goddamn it, Chim,” she muttered, voice low. “You’d better bring her back.”

It wasn’t forgiveness. Not entirely. But it wasn’t anger either. It was something deeper. Something closer to faith. The kind that could only survive if you’d been through fire together and still chose to look each other in the eye.

Jimin’s shoulders sagged, just a little. Not enough to be obvious. Just enough to let some of the weight slip off his chest for the first time in days.

“That’s the plan,” he said.

Uma didn’t respond right away. She just reached forward again, her hand finding the edge of the screen. This time, her fingers trembled.

Jimin mirrored her instinctively, pressing his palm to the glass. Their hands aligned—pixels and pressure, no warmth, no real contact—but it was the closest thing they had to touch.

They stayed like that, neither speaking. The silence between them wasn’t empty. It was full—of late-night talks and shared routines, of old fights and quiet reconciliations, of watching their daughter sleep between them on the couch and arguing about whose turn it was to clean out the recycling chute.

It was the silence of people who knew how to sit in each other’s pain.

Finally, Uma spoke. Her voice was quieter now, but not small. It was steady. Honest.

“Bring my favorite sister-in-law home.”

Jimin’s lip twitched. He gave a tired smile that almost—almost—reached his eyes.

“She’s your only sister-in-law.”

Uma rolled her eyes, that familiar flicker of fire slipping back in. “Whatever, Orphan Annie. That just makes the title easier to maintain. Don’t get cocky.”

He laughed. Really laughed. It came from somewhere deep in his chest, cracking through the weariness like sunlight through storm clouds. The kind of laugh that reminded him what it felt like to be more than just a uniform and a mission file.

Uma smiled too, but it faded quickly, replaced by something gentler. Something sad.

“I should go,” she said, glancing off-screen. “Hana’s about to wake up, and I don’t think our connection is going to last long enough for her to talk to you. It’d break her heart if she only got a few seconds.”

Jimin’s smile faltered. He nodded, slow. “She still asking?”

“Every morning,” Uma said. “She stands at the window and asks when the stars are going to give you back.”

His chest tightened. “What do you tell her?”

Uma’s voice was soft, but firm. “I tell her the stars are just slow. Like her dad.”

Jimin chuckled under his breath. “Exactly like her dad.”

Uma glanced down, brushing something off her lap, then looked back at the screen. “She still sleeps with that stupid plush helmet you gave her.”

“She named it Captain Helmet, right?”

“Lieutenant Helmet,” Uma corrected. “She demoted it last week for insubordination.”

Jimin barked another laugh, “That tracks.”

In the corner of the screen, a red light started to blink—connection timer winding down.

Neither of them said anything right away. They both knew what that light meant. They both knew how these calls ended.

“I love you,” Uma said.

“I love you,” Jimin said, the words catching at the edges of his throat.

The screen flickered.

Then it went dark.

The booth filled with the soft hum of life support again. A steady pulse of recycled air, a low mechanical whisper—just enough to remind Jimin he was back on the ship. Back in the silence.

He didn’t move.

Not for a while.

He just sat there, one hand still resting against the blank screen, the echo of Uma’s voice lingering in his chest. He had hoped Hana would be there today. She would’ve made him feel better about this whole thing.

Eventually, he stood. Adjusted his collar. Wiped his face with the back of his hand.

Then he turned and stepped out into the corridor, the weight of two promises—one to his wife, one to Y/N—pulling him forward.

Because there was work to be done.

The lab at JPL was immaculate—sterile white walls, overhead lights humming in quiet synchrony, and the kind of chill in the air that came from both temperature control and high stakes. But beneath that pristine order, the room buzzed with pressure. Not the loud, chaotic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that built slowly and wrapped around your ribs.

Marco Navarro stood near the central bay, arms folded tightly across his chest, posture stiff. He looked like a man trying very hard not to look tired. The sleeves of his button-down were rolled up just past his elbows, exposing forearms marked by the fine lines of someone who hadn’t left the building in days. His dark eyes were locked on the Iris 2 Probe as it hovered, cradled by a suspension rig, waiting to be sealed for launch logistics.

All around him, his team moved with quiet precision. Engineers in cleanroom suits adjusted clamps and rechecked fittings. Two techs hovered over a tablet, reviewing structural readings. A third was halfway through a final checklist on the containment shell. Every movement was practiced, deliberate. No one raised their voice. No one had to.

But the tension in the room was palpable.

Across the lab, three representatives from TIC—the Terran Interplanetary Commission—stood just beyond the boundary line in sealed protective suits, their presence as subtle as a shadow, but twice as heavy. No one spoke to them. They didn’t speak either. They just watched. Silently, intently. The government’s eyes on borrowed ground.

Marco didn’t acknowledge them directly. Not yet. He leaned in toward one of his senior engineers, muttering a question under his breath.

“Telemetry package confirmed?”

The engineer, a red-haired woman with tired eyes and half a protein bar tucked behind her monitor, nodded once. “Final sync cleared at 0637. No transmission lag. We’re clean.”

Marco gave a curt nod, but his eyes stayed on the probe.

Iris 2 wasn’t just a machine. Not anymore. It was memory and responsibility and proof of intent—of everything NOSA, JPL, and TIC had promised and failed to deliver the first time. This probe wasn’t just about reaching M6-117. It was about reaching her.

He could feel the weight of it—of the quiet desperation stitched into the calculations, of the late-night redesigns, of the emergency approvals rushed through by Parliament in the wake of the satellite feed leaks. Every bolt on that chassis felt like a plea.

Just hold together.

Just get there.

Just give us a chance to make this right.

He exhaled through his nose and finally let himself glance at the TIC observers. One of them—a younger woman, likely an analyst based on the blue badge—caught his gaze. She gave a small nod. Not approval. Not encouragement. Just acknowledgment. That subtle gesture that said, We’re all in the same trench now.

Marco returned the nod, just as restrained. No words exchanged, but the message passed cleanly between them.

They both knew what was riding on Iris 2.

This wasn't a test flight. It wasn’t a publicity mission. It was a lifeline.

Every update they’d received from NOSA over the past three days—Y/N’s position tracking, the sample uploads, the EVA logs—had shifted the gravity of the operation. Iris 2 wasn’t going to M6-117 just to drop instruments and wave a flag. It was going to confirm the unthinkable. That someone had survived. That someone was still fighting.

Marco turned back toward the rig. The final clamps had been set. The outer seal was being lowered into place with a slow mechanical hiss, locking the probe inside its carbon-frame shipping cradle. Once it left this room, it would be transferred to a high-altitude payload facility for thermal calibration. After that, it was Helion’s problem.

But right now, in this room, it was still his.

“Double-check the seal redundancies,” he said to no one in particular. “Don’t assume the checklist is enough. I want a visual on every damn latch.”

Someone murmured an acknowledgment and peeled off toward the capsule with a scanner.

Behind him, the lead TIC official stepped forward slightly, crossing the line for the first time. She was older than the others, with silver streaks in her hair and a face that looked carved from patience. She didn’t interrupt. Just waited.

Marco finally turned to her.

“We’ll have full system redundancy locked before the truck arrives,” he said. “We’ve tripled the diagnostics on this model.”

She nodded, arms at her sides. “Good. Because we don’t get another shot at this.”

He didn’t argue. They both knew it was true.

“You’ve seen the EVA logs?” he asked.

“All of them.”

“And?”

The woman hesitated—just for a beat. “I’ve seen a lot of missions,” she said. “A lot of accidents. A lot of breakdowns. But I’ve never seen anyone doing what she’s doing. Not after that long. Not with no support.”

Marco’s jaw tightened, but his voice was calm when he answered.

“She was always that kind of astronaut. Doesn’t do things halfway.”

The woman looked at him, gaze sharp. “Let’s hope the rest of us can keep up.”

Then she stepped back behind the line again, her presence receding without a sound.

Marco stayed where he was, hands on his hips, eyes back on the crate now that the final lock had engaged. The engineers were already moving to sign off the handover forms, but he lingered.

Because once this box was gone, once the probe left his care, everything became chance.

The video booth on the Starfire was barely bigger than a walk-in closet, but Armin Zimmermann didn’t mind. In zero-G, everything felt a little more spacious anyway. He floated cross-legged, tucked into the narrow padded frame like he’d been born for it, the soft blue glow of the console casting gentle light over his face.

The screen flickered, adjusted—and then settled. Kelly appeared, clear as ever.

Her hair was pulled back in a low, effortless bun, and she wore a navy wool sweater he recognized from their last trip to Bremen. Even over the feed, she looked sharp. Steady. So completely herself. She sat at her parents’ kitchen table—he recognized the striped ceramic sugar jar by her elbow—and behind her, soft daylight filtered in through a tall, arched window. Earthlight.

Home.

“I found it at the flea market,” she said, lifting something into view with a sly grin. “Original pressing.”

Armin squinted, then let out a short, delighted gasp.

“No!”

Kelly held it closer to the camera, and there it was—Abba’s Greatest Hits, 1973. The white cover with the floating heads, perfectly preserved, the plastic sleeve only slightly scuffed.

“You’re joking!” Armin’s voice leapt, thick with his Aguerra-tinged German accent. “Kelly—that’s impossible to get! People have been trying to fake that cover since the ‘90s!”

“I triple-checked it,” she said, clearly proud. “Even the spine’s intact. The guy selling it said he bought it new in Malmö and barely played it. I think he was a bit heartbroken to let it go.”

Armin laughed, clapping his hands once in midair, the motion sending him spinning slightly in the seat harness. “Of course he was! If I had that, I wouldn’t let it leave my sight.”

Kelly smiled, and for a second, her posture relaxed. She looked at him like she had in the early years—before deployment cycles, before kids, before so many late nights spent on opposite sides of space.

“I got it for you,” she said simply. “I figured it’d help you hang on, for a few more months.”

He pressed a hand to his chest, mock-theatrical. “My heart,” he said dramatically. “You’ve stolen it again.”

“You never had a chance,” she replied, grinning.

Then a voice cut in from offscreen.

“Papa! Papa, look!”

A blur of motion darted behind Kelly’s chair. Max—age five and wild as ever—climbed up into her lap, shoving something toward the camera. A small toy spaceship made of interlocking blocks.

“I made this for you!” he shouted.

“Ohhh!” Armin’s face lit up. “Is that the Starfire? Wait—Max, did you get the airlock module right?”

“I did!” Max said proudly, twisting the top off to show him. “And this part detaches for landings!”

Kelly made a quiet oof as he squirmed in her lap. “Max, careful—you’re knocking the camera.”

“Sorry!”

Another voice called out from behind them—more composed.

“Felix, come say hi to Papa,” Kelly said over her shoulder.

A moment later, Felix stepped into view, his gangly arms wrapped around Marta’s middle with the kind of awkward, determined grip that came from practice and not quite enough upper body strength. He was seven now—taller, thinner, all knees and elbows. His hair was sticking up in the back like he’d just rolled off the couch.

“She’s getting heavy,” he announced, not complaining so much as stating a fact.

Marta let out a soft babble in response, followed immediately by a hiccup. Her round cheeks flushed with effort as she spotted the screen—and then her entire face lit up. She reached out toward Armin with both hands, fingers splayed, drool trailing from her chin to the sleeve of Felix’s shirt.

“Ach Gott,” Armin murmured, smiling so wide it wrinkled the corners of his eyes. “Look at her. She’s so big now.”

Kelly adjusted the angle slightly to center them all, then tilted the camera down to keep Marta in frame as Felix shifted her to his hip with a grunt. “She’s cutting teeth,” she said. “We’re up at least twice a night now. Last night she bit my finger and started laughing like a little villain.”

“I wish I could be there for it,” Armin said, the humor still in his voice but something heavier behind it now. “Even the screaming. I’d take the 3 a.m. crying and diaper explosions if it meant I could hold her.”

Kelly looked down at Marta, brushing a bit of hair from her forehead. “She misses you. They all do. But… I’m really glad you were here when she was born. I keep thinking about that. It mattered. Even if it was just one week, it mattered.”

Armin nodded, slowly. “Min didn’t have to approve the delay. I know that.”

“He did,” she said softly. “And I think it meant a lot. To all of us. Uma’s been struggling more than she says—Jimin missing Riker’s birth really hit her. I told her it would be okay. That it doesn’t change how much they love each other, how close he’ll be to that baby. I mean, you missed Felix’s birth.”

“And look at him,” Armin said, watching as Felix leaned against the kitchen doorframe now, absentmindedly rocking Marta as she gnawed on the edge of his hoodie string. “Still thinks I’m the coolest person alive.”

“He wrote an essay about you for school,” Kelly said, with a faint smile. “Said his papa works in space and is braver than a lion, but also better at cooking noodles.”

Armin laughed, chest tight. “Better than a lion at cooking noodles. High praise.”

“Max added that you once stopped an alien invasion. With a rock.”

“An Aguerra rock, no less. Very powerful stuff.”

“Apparently.”

A blur darted across the screen again. Max had returned, spaceship model still clutched in one hand, his curls bouncing with each step. “Papa! Did you see the antenna? Look, it turns—” He twisted it aggressively, and one piece popped off, bouncing out of frame.

“Oh no—wait—where’d it go?” he muttered, diving under the table.

Armin grinned, shaking his head. “Are you still fighting space pirates?”

“Every day!” Max’s voice called from under the table. “But they’re scared of me now.”

“Good,” Armin said. “Because they should be. With that ship, they don’t stand a chance.”

Kelly checked the screen corner. “We’ve got three minutes.”

Armin sat up straighter, trying to squeeze every second out of it. “How’s Earth?”

“Busy. Loud. But it’s good to see everyone. My mom’s still convinced Aguerra air has too little oxygen, despite never setting foot there.”

“I miss her house,” he said. “And her strudel.”

“She’s still mad that you like it more than mine.”

“She’s not wrong. Yours is… dense.”

Kelly gasped, mock-offended. “Rude.”

“I say it with love.”

“You’re lucky you’re in space.”

Marta began to fuss again, a tired cry cutting through the moment. Felix bounced her gently, but she was already twisting, trying to wriggle free.

“I’ll get her down,” he said, disappearing down the hallway.

Max had reappeared, one hand clutching a bent antenna triumphantly.

And then it was just the two of them again.

“You holding up?” Kelly asked, her voice quieter now.

Armin hesitated, but then nodded. “I’m okay. Mission’s a lot, but the team’s solid. Yoongi’s keeping the pressure focused. Mateo’s... well, he’s still Mateo. And Jimin’s trying to keep it together.”

Kelly’s expression shifted slightly. Concern.

“Any word on Fry?”

Armin’s smile faded, but it didn’t vanish. He was good at carrying the hard things lightly.

“No updates yet,” he said. “But she’s out there. Been fixing things, and managed to finish an old colony’s mission. Sick off of eating potatoes, perhaps. I know I would be and I get paste in a tube for breakfast.”

Kelly nodded slowly, eyes drifting toward the edge of the screen like she was picturing Y/N on that silent, brutal planet. “She’s always been stubborn.”

“She’s not stubborn,” Armin said. “She’s relentless. There’s a difference.”

The countdown blinked red now—less than a minute.

Kelly reached toward the screen, her fingers brushing the camera frame like she could close the distance through intention alone. “I’ll play the record for the kids when we’re home. Felix already sings Waterloo in the bath.”

Armin laughed, low and fond. “He’ll be a star.”

“Like his papa.”

He looked at her—really looked. The creases near her eyes, the calm strength in her voice, the soft exhaustion of someone doing too much but never complaining.

“I love you,” he said, quiet but clear.

Kelly smiled, eyes glistening, but she didn’t blink. “I love you more.”

The feed stuttered—just for a heartbeat—then steadied.

“Tell Max he’s getting an upgrade module,” Armin added, right as the screen blinked to black. “I’ll build it with him. When I’m back.”

And then the connection dropped.

Armin didn’t move.

He floated in the quiet for a moment, hands loose at his sides, the echo of laughter and baby babble still ringing in his ears. The hum of the ship crept back in—soft, familiar, indifferent.

He pressed one palm gently against the screen.

“I’ll get there,” he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. “I’ll come home.”

Then he pushed off the booth wall, slow and weightless, and drifted back toward the corridor. Toward duty. Toward something unfinished.

A father. A husband. A chemist. Still tethered to three children, a kitchen on Earth, and a vinyl record waiting to be played.

The launch pad shimmered under the relentless Aguerra Prime sun, the air rippling above the scorched concrete like a mirage. From a distance, it looked almost peaceful—the tall form of the Iris 2 Probe standing poised against the deep blue sky, its titanium shell gleaming with clean, sharp edges. But the closer you got, the more you felt it: the pressure humming through every cable, every socketed bolt, every word passed between engineers like it might snap if spoken too loud.

The booster tower rose behind it like a steel spine, support arms still locked around the probe’s flanks. Sunlight glared off the reflective plating, flashing across visors and toolboxes as teams moved in tight formation around the base. They moved with the synchronicity of people who didn’t have time to second-guess themselves—every motion honed by thousands of hours of prep. Check. Recheck. Confirm. Sign off.

It wasn’t chaos. But it wasn’t calm either. It was the electric stillness before the sprint.

Off to the side of the pad, in the limited shade beneath a modular control tent, Taurus Flight Director Isla Reinhardt stood with her arms tucked behind her back, her body language composed but taut. The sharp lines of her white jumpsuit caught the sun, unwrinkled despite the heat. In front of her, Creed was gesturing—tight, controlled movements, but unmistakably frustrated.

“This entire sequence is backwards,” Creed said, low enough to keep it out of the general comms traffic, but not hiding the edge in his voice. “You’re running a TIC stack from twenty years ago. We’ve updated every protocol since Nexus One, and we haven’t done command layer locking that way since Apollo 27.”

The translator, standing just to the side of them, repeated the statement in clipped, neutral tones—softening the delivery but preserving the structure. Creed didn’t look at the translator. He didn’t need to. His eyes were locked on Isla, waiting.

Her jaw flexed once, just barely.

“We’re following a mandate from oversight,” she replied. “The redundancy needs to clear from the top line of remote interface down. You want to override that, you take it up with Parliament.”

“I’ve tried,” Creed said. “They sent me you.”

That earned him a sharp look, but she didn’t flinch.

A few meters behind them, André Batista leaned against one of the static barriers, arms folded, expression unreadable behind his reflective shades. He was a fixture here—part liaison, part architect, part political shield. He didn’t often speak unless something needed settling. So far, he hadn’t moved.

Beside him, Yoongi Min stood with one hand tucked into his flight jacket pocket, the other holding a data slate he wasn’t reading. His stance was relaxed, but his eyes tracked everything. The two men locked eyes for a moment.

André tilted his head slightly.

Yoongi gave the barest shrug. Not my circus.

The translator cleared her throat gently as Creed fired off another quiet barrage of concerns, this time about sensor lag and latency curve risk over a long-range transmission relay. Isla didn’t interrupt—she simply let him speak, waiting for the break. When it came, she replied in a tone so calm it almost felt detached.

“We’re under a transparency clause,” she said. “TIC’s name is on this. I don’t care how things were done at NOSA. If something goes wrong on this flight, it’s ours to explain, not yours. That’s the trade-off for funding.”

Creed’s nostrils flared. “This isn’t about funding. It’s about surviving the mission long enough to justify the launch.”

There was silence. Not long. Just long enough for the weight of it to land. The translator didn’t repeat that one.

André stepped forward finally, pushing off the barrier. “We need to stop playing jurisdictional chess. The probe is loaded. The window is locked. We’re hours out, and every one of you has skin in the game.” He looked between them, then directly at Isla. “Let’s not waste the time we’re running out of.”

He turned to Yoongi next. “Where are we on the confirmation pings?”

“Telemetry’s stable. We’ve got three handshake confirms from Iris and two from the booster package. Final burn path data’s syncing now.” He glanced at Creed. “She’s gonna fly, Summers.”

Creed didn’t argue. He just exhaled, rubbed the back of his neck once, and stepped away from the argument like someone carefully placing a grenade down before walking away.

Yoongi looked after him for a beat longer than necessary. Then he turned to Isla. “He’s not wrong about the sequence logic. But you’re not wrong about politics.”

“Funny how those things rarely line up,” she muttered.

In the background, the launch pad hissed as cooling vapor rolled down from the upper stacks. A ground tech called out a ten-minute marker in clipped Standard. The wind shifted slightly, bringing with it the tang of scorched ozone and oil.

They all turned toward the pad, eyes tracking the silhouette of the Iris 2.

Y/N stood crouched atop the curved hull of Speculor 2, bracing herself against the relentless wind. The gusts came in rhythmic pulses, sharp and slicing, carrying fine, metallic-red grit that embedded itself in every seam, every fold of her suit. It was the kind of wind that didn’t scream—but pressed. Pushed. Like the planet itself wanted her gone.

Her boots, magnetized to the surface, clicked softly as she adjusted her stance. Above her, the sky was the same hazy slate it had been for weeks—never quite light, never quite dark, the perpetual dusk of Hexundecia’s upper atmosphere. Out here, there was no sound but the filtered rasp of her breath inside the helmet and the occasional groan of the rover shifting in the wind.

She worked quickly, but carefully—gloved hands moving with practiced intent as she secured the last edge of the pop tent onto the roof. It didn’t look like much: an awkward dome of salvaged thermal mylar, structural flex-canvas, and about three rolls of industrial adhesive. The seams were patchy, the shape slightly asymmetrical, and the fabric still bore the faint burn marks from its previous life as an emergency airlock tarp.

But it was what she had. What she’d built.

She ran a final bead of sealant along the base, then tugged at the corners, checking for give. None. Good. The fabric trembled under her fingers, sensitive to even the subtlest shifts in pressure.

"Okay," she muttered, her voice low and clipped, more to herself than the recorder feed. "Let’s see if you can hold your breath.”

She flipped the switch on the manual pressurization system—an old NOSA rig she’d retooled for small-space inflation. It hummed, then clicked. A second later, the tent shuddered and began to rise, inflating with slow, uneven breaths. The canvas bulged awkwardly at first, then snapped into shape, the internal frame locking into place with a faint metallic pop.

Y/N held perfectly still, watching. Waiting. Her pulse ticked in her ears, louder than she liked.

The tent swelled outward slightly under pressure, flexed, then settled.

No tearing. No hissing. No collapse.

She exhaled, breath fogging briefly on the inside of her faceplate.

"Okay," she whispered, this time with something closer to relief. “Okay.”

She stepped back, letting the winds howl around her as she took in the strange structure she’d created. Ugly as hell. But airtight—for now. It would hold a pocket of warmth. Let her eat. Sleep. Think. Survive a little longer.

The pop tent wasn’t a permanent solution, and she knew it. It was a stopgap. One she’d have to check every few hours for signs of structural fatigue, thermal drift, or microtears. But compared to sleeping half-curled in the rover’s cargo hold, it was a goddamn luxury suite.

She climbed back down, boots thunking lightly as they disengaged from the magnetized hull, and dropped into the main chamber of the rover. Inside, it was dim and cramped—stale air, the scent of worn insulation, and the ever-present tang of iron dust.

She peeled off her gloves with slow care, flexing her fingers. They were stiff and pale, the skin rubbed raw in places where the liner seams never quite sat right. Her breath slowed. The adrenaline was ebbing now, the rush of getting something done giving way to the quieter dread of everything else still ahead.

This had taken four sols to rig.

She had, maybe, twelve more before the storm cycle shifted and buried the area in sand thick enough to compromise everything. And if her estimates were right—and she prayed they were—there was a chance, however slim, that a satellite would be sweeping near this quadrant by then.

She had to make the tent visible. Reflective. Irrationally bright.

She’d started sewing strips of spare mylar to the outer shell two nights ago, in the dark, with a thermal needle and frozen fingers. She had four more to add. Maybe five.

Outside, the wind surged again—louder this time. Something heavy thudded against the side of the rover. Probably a loose panel from the old dig site. She didn’t jump. She was past jumping.

Instead, she reached for her patch kit and a folded sheet of mylar she’d scavenged from the side panel of an old solar collector. Then she stood.

One seam at a time.

That’s how she lived now.

Not by the week. Not by the day. Not even by the hour.

Seam by seam. Breath by breath.

At the NOSA headquarters, Mateo and his team of engineers were deep in the throes of their own technical challenges. They surrounded a mirrored setup of Y/N’s speculor, trying to replicate her conditions as closely as possible. The engineers were methodical in their work, carefully testing and retesting, but their efforts were proving difficult. One of the engineers scratched his head as he tried to fit the bulky Oxygenator into the cramped confines of the pop tent, muttering under his breath as he juggled the components.

“Maybe if we angle it this way…” Mateo began, but before he could finish his thought, the unit tipped over, causing a flurry of activity as the engineers scrambled to adjust the pieces. Mateo sighed, his patience wearing thin, but his tone remained steady. “Okay. Again.”

Koah floated just above the rail of the comms bay, one hand anchored to a support bar, the other tapping a short sequence into the feed control. The connection took a few seconds longer than usual—just long enough to make his pulse tick a little faster.

Then the screen lit up, and there they were.

Quynh, all sharp cheekbones and soft eyes, with her long hair twisted into a lazy bun at the top of her head. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch in their apartment back on Aguerra Prime, barefoot, a wrench in one hand and their two-year-old son Bao sprawled sideways across her lap, talking a mile a minute.

“There he is!” Quynh grinned, tossing the wrench into a tray beside her. “Koah, your son is trying to dismantle the toaster because he thinks it’s a spaceship.”

“It is a spaceship,” Bao declared, his little face popping up toward the camera with unfiltered joy. “Papa! Look! Toaster engine!”

Koah laughed, the sound echoing softly in the confined booth. “That’s classified technology, buddy. You can’t just reverse-engineer domestic appliances for launch.”

Bao let out a squeal of delight, bouncing in Quynh’s lap.

“You’re supposed to say hi, not initiate tech theft,” Quynh muttered playfully, nudging him with her chin.

“Watch this,” Koah said with a grin, pushing off the far wall in one smooth motion.

He floated through the zero-G space like a swimmer in slow motion, tucking into a controlled spin. His body twisted mid-air, knees drawn in, one hand flaring out for style points. He rotated once, then shifted momentum and drifted cleanly into the partial-grav buffer near the edge of the booth, landing with a soft thud on the deck.

Bao shrieked with laughter, clutching his belly. “AGAIN!”

Koah beamed. “You’re lucky your dad’s a certified space ninja.”

“You’re lucky you married a woman who finds space ninjas hot,” Quynh said dryly.

Koah barked a laugh. “No lies detected.”

He dropped back into a crouch and leaned closer to the screen, chin propped on his hands as he took them both in—his son’s wild curls and jam-streaked shirt, the familiar line of Quynh’s collarbone just visible under a worn tank top she’d probably stolen from him in college.

“You look good,” he said softly, his smile still tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Exhausted. But good.”

“So do you,” Quynh said. “Very heroic. Very floaty.”

“Bao,” Koah said in a mock-whisper, “how’s Mama holding up without Papa’s superior wrench skills?”

Bao squinted at him. “Mama says you make mess. Mama say she fix.”

Koah clutched his chest like he’d been shot. “Traitor!”

Quynh smirked. “He’s observant.”

They all laughed—an easy, looping rhythm that Koah could’ve stayed inside forever.

Then Quynh tilted her head, the light from the screen catching in the curve of her cheekbone. The warmth in her face didn’t disappear, but it shifted—something sharpened beneath it.

“I’ve been asking around,” she said, her voice quieter now. “About her. About what’s happening. No one’s talking.”

Koah’s smile dimmed at the edges. Not gone, just more cautious now. “You mean Fry?”

She nodded, brushing a hand through Bao’s curls as he leaned heavily against her shoulder. “I know Creed Summers went behind Yoongi’s back. That much I pulled out of one of the payload guys during a lunch break. But past that?” She shrugged. “Even Ives won’t say anything. And you know she usually cracks if you wave a coffee pod in her direction.”

Koah let out a slow breath and rubbed the back of his neck, like he was trying to knead the tension out of it. “Yeah,” he said finally. “It’s… complicated.”

“Complicated like top-level-clearance complicated?”

He hesitated, eyes flicking away for just a second. “Complicated like… you’d be obsessed with the engineering, and then terrified once you realized what it actually meant.”

Quynh’s expression didn’t change, but her posture shifted. She leaned forward a little, Bao still clinging to her like a sleepy barnacle.

“I don’t need you to break protocol,” she said, not accusing, just honest. “I know how it works. But I don’t want you sleepwalking into something you can’t walk out of.”

Koah looked at her, really looked, and felt that familiar pull in his chest—the one that reminded him exactly why he chose to stay. Why he said yes, when every other instinct told him no.

Even now, with everything spinning tighter by the day, she wasn’t asking him to come home. She was telling him to be smart. And that was love too.

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” he said, voice steady. “I promise.”

Quynh’s mouth curved into a half-smile. “Good. Because I may be the only one in the support chat who thinks you staying up there is the coolest thing ever.”

Koah chuckled. “The other wives still mad?”

“They’re... coping. Uma’s pissed. Understandably. Kelly pretends she’s fine, but the boys are taking it harder. Max asked if he could build a space elevator to bring Armin home.”

Koah smiled at that, the kind of smile that knew exactly what being missed felt like. “And you?”

Quynh rolled her eyes. “I’m over here bragging to anyone who’ll listen that my husband is doing deep-space diagnostics with a toothbrush and a busted coolant valve. Like some kind of orbital MacGyver.”

“Technically,” Koah said with mock formality, “it was a toothbrush and a strip of thermal tape. I have standards.”

Bao perked up. “Papa is best!”

Koah grinned, eyes sparkling. “Damn right he is. And you, Bao Bean, are the best little sidekick in the galaxy.”

“Are you bringing robot?” Bao asked suddenly, sitting upright in his mother’s lap. “You promised robot!”

“I remember,” Koah said, nodding solemnly. “And not just one—two robots. One for you, and one for Mama.”

Quynh raised a brow. “Oh yeah? What does mine run on? Flattery and caffeine?”

“Logic circuits, emotional resilience, and a coffee reservoir with built-in sarcasm,” Koah replied. “Basically… you in droid form.”

She laughed, the sound bright and short and familiar. “Flawless design.”

The screen flashed—two-minute warning, pulsing red in the corner.

Koah’s chest tightened the way it always did near the end of a call. He hated this part. Not just the goodbye, but the slow slide into silence.

“I wish I could stay longer,” he said, quieter now.

Quynh reached toward the camera, her fingers brushing close to the lens. “We’re good,” she said. “We’re here. And we’re proud of you.”

His throat tightened, but he didn’t let it show. “Give Bao a kiss for me?”

Before she could answer, Bao leaned forward, pressing his entire face against the screen. “MUAH!”

Koah mimed catching it, then tucked it into his pocket. “Straight to the cryo logs. Archived forever.”

Another blink—sixty seconds.

“I love you,” Quynh said, voice steady, full of everything she didn’t have time to say.

“I love you more,” Koah answered. Then added, “When I get back—”

“You’ll finish fixing the toaster?” she cut in, smirking.

“I’ll launch the toaster,” he said. “With a fusion drive and retractable wings.”

Quynh laughed, even as the feed flickered one last time.

The screen went dark.

Koah stayed there, suspended in the weightless booth, his hands still hovering near the edge of the console like he could will her image back. Then, slowly, he let go, pushing off the wall with practiced ease.

Back at the launch site, the first rumble came low—almost imperceptible at first, like a distant storm building beneath the concrete.

Then the pad lit up.

A towering column of fire and sound erupted beneath the Argo as its engines roared to life, white-hot exhaust curling around the flame trenches in thick plumes of smoke. The shockwave hit a split second later—rolling through the observation stands, rattling steel fixtures, and thudding deep into every chest on the platform like a second heartbeat.

It was a controlled violence—raw, precise, beautiful.

The Argo began to rise.

Slowly at first, as if testing the air, then faster—cutting through the sky in a clean, perfect arc. The hull gleamed gold in the afternoon light, the sun catching along its flank as it punched upward past the clouds, trailing a pillar of heat and vapor that tore the sky in two.

A wave of cheers broke across the launch complex. Technicians and engineers who’d been stiff with focus a moment earlier now stood shouting, hugging, clapping each other on the back. Some laughed. Some just stared, mouths parted in disbelief, as if they couldn’t quite believe it was finally happening. Others wiped at their eyes with sleeves and tried to pretend it was the sunlight.

Yoongi Min stood just off-center from the crowd, shoulders square, arms crossed, but there was a softness to his expression that hadn’t been there minutes before—like a coil had finally loosened in his chest. Next to him, Creed Summers was grinning, not wide, but sharp—relief mixed with the residue of pressure. His tie was still half-loose from the argument earlier, but now he extended a hand to Yoongi.

Yoongi hesitated, then took it.

Not warmly. Not with forgiveness. But with acknowledgment.

“Well,” Creed said, low enough for only Yoongi to hear, “we didn’t blow up the planet. That’s a win.”

Yoongi didn’t smile. But he didn’t pull away either.

“Telemetry looks clean,” someone called from a nearby terminal. “Guidance holding steady. No drift on the main stack.”

Across the pad, André Batista stood a few paces back from the crowd, hands in his pockets, sunglasses reflecting the disappearing silhouette of the rocket. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The quiet, satisfied nod he gave said enough. He had seen a hundred launches in his lifetime. This one mattered.

Marco stood a few steps off the platform edge, jaw clenched but eyes tracking the ascent with laser focus. The Iris-2 probe was up there now—every circuit, every algorithm, every delicate sensor array tucked into the Argo’s belly like a secret whispered across the stars. It wasn’t just equipment to him. It was purpose.

As the rocket disappeared past the clouds, only the vapor trail remained—fading into the blue, curling in on itself like a final signature on a hard-fought page.

Yoongi finally exhaled and turned to face the rest of the team. His voice was steady when he spoke, but his words carried the weight of months.

“Mission clock starts now,” he said.

Creed nodded once, then turned toward the ops tent, already scanning his tablet.

The cheering had begun to taper off. Reality was returning in steps. There were check-ins to process. Booster separations to confirm. A thousand things that could still go wrong.

But in that brief window—between fire and silence—everyone stood a little taller.

Taglist: @fancypeacepersona @ssbb-22 @mar-lo-pap @sathom013 @kimyishin @ttanniett @sweetvoidstuff @keiarajm @sathom013 @miniesjams32

[s0ulsice]

     V I R A G O

CHAPTER 6:

She was a bird, I was an arrow

✮⋆»»———➤⋆.˚꩜ ˙⋆ ☀︎  ✮⋆»»———➤⋆.˚꩜ ˙⋆ ☀︎  

Neteyam x fem na’vi!omaticaya!reader

Characters:

Ka’lik- (like you would pronounce “Malik”) Y/n’s father/deceased

Zensira-deceased, Y/n’s mother, spider's adoptive mother

Kailo-(Y/n’s ikran. Your ikran is a male)

WARNINGS: panic attack, blood, heights, sexual assault???(Kyuna being touchy) attempts of undressing someone? (Again, Kyuna.)

☾✮⋆»»———➤⋆.˚꩜ ˙⋆ ☀︎  ☾✮⋆»»———➤

Neteyam POV:

When I was 15 I fell in love.

I fell in love with a girl made of moonlight and stars stitched together by sirenic hymns of pulsed passion. 

She left loose curls in her braids and had bruised knees from climbing. She has auriferous, harvest moon eyes that glow viridescent when the night untangles itself from its resting place, aligned imperfectly with her stellified sunset-tinted soul. 

I started by bringing her little things.

Flowers. Crystals. Herbs for various uses to share with her family. She danced at clan ceremonies, immune to the curse of incoordination. Her dark hair swung behind her, braids woven out of pieces of the night. She was a wild child. Running through rivers and daring to drive herself through the dullness of the dirt.

I knew that she never met her grandmother, but she wore the river pearl necklace that once belonged to her.

I knew that she loved swimming, and never really talked about how good she was at it.

I knew that she kept the dried petals from the little dolls her mother would make her out of flowers as a child and hung them above her hammock in her family's tent.

I knew that she made her first kill with a bow and arrow when she was 4. And that the tip of that very arrowhead was tied on her song chord to mark the occasion.

I knew that she was worried. Worried about me, about the human boy she called her brother, about her home, and her people, her parents who were still healing from the first war.

But I loved what I didn’t understand. That was my first mistake.

Because my whole life has been about being the older brother. When she gave me the gift of feeling like a child again, I suppose I thought I could leave her like one. 

And I know that sounds stupid. I know I sound stupid. 

It wasn’t immaturity I craved. It was that lightness. The kind that the sun could never provide.

That stupid, stupid boy. If I could grab him and shake him by his shoulders until his brain repositioned itself into the right place, I would.

There was an addicting absurdity to it all. 

Running through the forest with her after dark, whispering her name in the night while my hands traced her spine, leaving lazy, open kisses on her ribcage and spinning her around with her legs caught around my waist. Dragging my fingers along her pulse point. Feeling her breath flicker in the firelight of the stars. I never dared to do anything beyond kissing her and holding her. So perhaps that boy isn’t as stupid as I thought.

I slept with her. Not like that, though. Actually sleeping. The kind where your clothes remained on. The first time it happened was when I stumbled to find her by the creek, where she was weaving a basket for her mother. I was so exhausted from training i collapsed my head into her lap while she stroked my back. 

Sometimes I kissed her neck, the expanse of her throat where I swore I saw heaven hollowed within. I ran my hands over the sweet homage of her thighs. 

There was a freedom with her I felt with no one else. Then the world felt too big, my heart created corners that only fit her shape. When the air became knotted and my breath spilled from my lungs in sporadic bouts of blemished air, she blessed me with a barrier of bliss. I thought I was so deserving of that decompression. I was an idiot to think it wasn’t a privilege. 

Some nights we’d sit on the thickened tree branches of the pandora oak outside the old village.

She’d lean her head on my shoulder and i’d tell her the English names of the constellations my father taught me.

“What’s that one?”

She whispered, pointing with the tip of her finger and tracing the shape of the asterism, eywa knows I couldn’t look away from the stars in her eyes, an opalescence embedded like a sea mirroring the night’s contents, and suddenly I saw two skies. 

“Its called the archer.” I hummed, gently guiding her wrist to place her hand atop the shaft of the bow caught in the cosmos.

“See? There’s her bow, and her arrow, and her body.”

She tilted her head, attempting to see the shape. Her eyes light up when she finds it.

I smile, a warmth spreads within my chest as my enamourment echoes through the dusk.

“My father says some people on earth started calling it a ‘virago’.”

She nods in acknowledgment, glancing between me and the stars.

Those were the nights I hope she can remember. Those are the nights I pray i never forget.

But sometimes the shadows loom instead of live. The world around me started breaking down into fragments that figmented themselves drunk on delirium. Because having my mother’s eyes doesn’t mean i’m free of my father’s gaze. 

I was afraid of control. My second mistake was becoming accustomed to it.

But my chance with that fiery girl is gone. I’ll bury it. So I don’t have to look at it. So no one has to look at it. Because she deserves so much better than to chase fireflies for the rest of her life. 

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the night the sky turned red. 

My father and mother had left for date night. I was home with Lo’ak, Kiri, and Y/n who as babysitting Tuk while her parents went to gather herbs.

We didn’t speak to one another. It was too awkward. I clung to silence like it was a sustenance for my survival. 

Our parents had been gone for a few hours when we saw it. 

A new star surfaced in the sky, tearing through the dark viciously. Sparing nothing in its path of annihilation. 

An unfamiliar sort of fear fell upon Norm and Max’s face as they exited their shack at the sound of commotion. Their smiles faded so fast they might as well have never been there in the first place.

Kiri shrunk away slowly to an unknown place of hiding. As if trying to shield herself from the threatening presence of this bolide.

lo’ak dropped the bracelet he was making, the beads landing on the ground with scattered sounds of clanking and chaos.

Tuk ran to y/n, a panicked descry leaving her as she took refuge in her arms. Y/n held Tuk protectively. Her expression was notated by one of horror.

Me? I froze. The world stopped spinning. The moon refused to shine. The earth had withered away under my feet.

I was dazed as I followed my siblings into our families tent, I remember Norm’s words as he ushered us inside, trying to mask his panic.

“Kids, get inside- c’mon quickly.

Tuk, let’s play a game. Okay? Tuck your knees to your chest and don’t move until I come back.”

The world was falling apart.

And I couldn’t even see my last glimpse of it beyond the cloth quarters of the home I grew up in. That’s how you trap yourself.  You convince yourself your cage is just an illusion. 

When my parents returned home later, Y/n sprinted to them, asking frantically if they had seen her parents return.

“They haven’t yet returned?”

When my mother spoke those words, the air tensed.

I watched helplessly as she ran to her ikran, mounting it with no time to waste.

I reached for her arm, stammering out pleas for her to stay. Stay close to the stars that sent the shadows of the endless dusk desolating any shred of hope. Without them i’d surely loose her in the darkness. Stay in the light, please. Stay where I can see you. Where I know you are safe. Where I know they can’t take another.  Stay where every moment was inscribed to instinct. Where every moment of my life is a piece of a plan. A plot. Every word is scripted. And even if you were never a part of it I can still keep your eyes in my life.

Stay with me. Please. I don’t know what’s out there and I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.

She hissed at me with tears in her eyes, shaky hands pushing me away as she mounted Kailo with irascible mannerisms. 

Behind it all was a little girl who just wanted to find her mom and dad.

I envy her. I envy her ability to not cower from the darkness. 

To stand where others couldn't see. 

My father chased after Y/n. Determined to bring her and her parents back in one piece. Promising my mother she wouldn’t loose anyone else she was close too.

But sometimes we can’t keep our promises. 

I waited with my mother and my siblings. 

I watched my mother pray. Clutching my grandmother’s hand close to her chest. Murmuring invocations to the wind.  My mother couldn’t stall away the anxious inquisitiveness of Tuk, complying with her to shut herself away from the sharp helix-scarred sky, victim to fire and ruin. 

“Wait inside, Tuk.”

That’s all anyone would tell her. 

Lo’ak sat coiled in the corner. Staring infront of him as if the air was dissolving into fragments filmed in glass, shattering into pieces.

He was silent. Still. But he was like my father in that way. A master of disassociation. When you stayed so rooted in solitude the world around you ceased its spinning. 

Kiri prayed in my grandmother’s tent. Isolating herself.

What more can you do when what you thought were stories of the past resurrect from devastation?

History was cruel. Our biggest mistake was thinking the future would forget.

Would it forgive? Would it tread this demolition generously? Would it spare my mother from losing a sister for teh second time?  Would it let my father laugh just a bit longer? Let him remain unpunished. Maybe in a world where the heart on his sleeve isn’t in the shape of a shackle. Where the shadows of his past sins remain silent. When ‘sir’ wasn’t a synonym for ‘dad’.

Please.  Let my littlest sister play in the forest after dark again. Chasing winged insects and dancing to heartbeats. Let her feel the solace of safety and the freedom of frolicking in the flower fields without fear of the sky demons. Don’t make her grow up knowing war. Give her a world where I don't have to explain that Dad still loves Lo’ak and me even after yelling at us. 

Don’t take my little brother's light away. Don’t shy him away from me. let me see the spark flicker in his eyes when he would look up at me. Bring back the days of chasing him around and having our heights measured next to each other. Childhood memories of keeping him occupied with stories while he squirmed on my mother's lap, getting his hair rebraided. Back when I was his sibling. Not his shadow. Now I can’t find it when my existence is the pinnacle of excellence that’s dangled over his head. To fall as the burning star while he damns me in the daylight of the sun. Days when my father's words to Lo’ak were filled with tender devotion, and not deadlines and demands and disappointment. Look at him. Please. Don’t turn your attention into a privilege. 

And Kiri. Oh kiri. Please. Don’t twist her story. Don’t write my sister’s mother into the enemy. Don’t make the sleeping body she yearns to touch beyond her hand pressed to cold glass awake in darkness only to say goodbye. The only place solace is found for Kiri, the only place she can hear her voice within the deep forest. Don’t resurrect Grace’s memory and taint it.

Please don’t hurt the girl I’m in love with. Please don’t banish the stars in her sky to the depths of the hollowed and hardened corridors of her heart.  What must I do to protect her? Tell me, and tell me now. I’m running out of time. Do i look her in her eyes and tell her that every breath i take is for her? Every half-note of my heartbeat is a syllable in her name. I know I failed her. I know. And im sorry. I’m so, so sorry. 

I paced around the tent, watching Tuk play with her toys in the corner, waiting for any sign of return. 

When the shadow and the screech of my father’s ikran, the rising sun rushing currents of a blinding white light leaking through the overlay of the trees, crashed into the sounds shaping themselves into shards, slicing through the air.

My father had his arm thrown over y/n’s shoulder, locking her in place against his chest, she crouched on the front of his ikran, shaking and thrashing.

His other hand gripped his ikran saddle like a vice, struggling to keep both him and Y/n upright in flight.

The moment the touch down to the village y/n all but collapses to the ground, slipping out of my fathers grasp.

He curses, jumping off and scrambling to hold her. A low wail leaves y/n as she claws and scratches at her own skin, clutching what looks like the remnants of a songchord in her hand.

No sign of her parents. That only meant the worst.

It hits me like a blow to my chest, creeping up my spine like vines of plants from hell and tying me down to the earth, roots caging me in, the world around me clawing to come inside.

Everything around me blurs. The ground under me shifts with the wind. The patterns reverse and the sound waves reshape themselves behind shadows.

Light is refracted, captured in a dome of reflections. My mother is the first to sprint towards the pair. Her steps slowly traipsed down as she registered the absence of Zensira and Kai’lik.

The sight of Y/n clutching a bloodied song chord shattered any ounce of hope she had.

My mother sobbed into her palm, rushing towards Y/n to grasp at her shoulders, desperately trying to keep her close, as if the sky demons would rip her straight out of her arms.

My grandmother jogs over, trying to cage her daughter in her arms and gradually pull her away, giving Y/n the much-needed space. 

My father has tears in his eyes.

He doesn’t dare let them fall. Not in front of his clan. His children.

My father is a master of disassociation. Confrontation was never a confidant of my fathers. Lock him in a room with him and his own grief and watch him fall apart.

He's angry. Angry at the world. Angry at himself. Angry at this piece of his past he prayed he’d never see again.

Lo’ak drops frantically, taking a place behind y/n and my father, trying to speak to her in hushed tones that are washed out by her cries. Lo’ak isn’t good with these kinds of things. But he cares for her. He struggles with the placement of his hands momentarily, settling to rub her back soothingly.

Tuk pushes past the crowd forming in the distance, and scampering behind me,  gently placing her palm on my leg and tugging on my fingertips.

“What's wrong? Whys’ everyone crying?”

I don’t answer. I can’t answer. I can’t even look at her. I’m still. I’m frozen. I’m useless.

She winces at the sound of more wailing, pushing herself to stand in front of my father.

I know I should speak. Tell Tuk to go back inside. Away from the screaming and the crying. That’s what older siblings do. I feel her small fingers slip away from mine and suddenly my skin feels as if it's unraveling.

I don’t think yesterday existed.

Because just yesterday I saw Y/n and her parents, with Spider and with the clan. Just yesterday the sky was blue. Today it dawns a sickening shade of orange.  The sky dissevered and swallowed it whole before it could even breathe. 

How can it change so fast? Did it slip away from me? Maybe I didn’t hold on to it tight enough. Please, my love. I’m sorry. Can’t you see I’m sorry? Please hold onto me again and I swear I'll never let you go again. 

I look at Y/n again, still trying to pry herself out of my father’s grasp. One hand clutches her forearm and digs and scratches her fingers into the flesh so manically it draws blood. Her other hand clawing at the dirt. She starts to hyperventilate as my father panics.

“Breathe Y/n.  You have to breathe. Please.” My father’s voice is hoarse and desperate. The world is spinning to fast for him meanwhile mine ceases to spin at all. 

Or maybe that’s incorrect. My world was right infront of me. Crying and breathing as if her lungs denied her existence.

Tuk’s whimpering catches his attention, his ears pin down as he grapples with the idea of his youngest baring witness to such tragedy. 

Then those frantic golden eyes that mirror my own focus on me.

“Neteyam! Take your sister inside. Now! go! “

I can’t. I’m stuck. Why am i stuck? Iv’e always been the first to act. The first to speak, to advocate, to defend.

What will happen to my clan? To my family? Can we win again? Will we win again? Are we as strong as we were during the first war?

“Neteyam! Get Tuk and move!”

My fathers voice is drowned by the swirling thoughts in my head.

My father places Y’n beside Lo’ak, who immediately wraps an arm around her to keep her upright.

“Dad!”

Loa’k calls after him as he files towards me. His voice cracks. 

He scoops tuk up with one arm, using his other to grab my arm, dragging us both into the tent, pushing us inside with all the gentleness he could manage.

“Stay with your sisters and your mother. Please.”

He breathes before leaving, returning to Y/n.

My mother is sobbing in the corner, Kiri at her side with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Grandmother tries to calm them both.

“Eywa why? Why has the past come back to us?”

She curls herself into a fetal position as she cries out as if she's in physical pain.

Tuk starts to cry.

The earth is weeping and my family is shattered. The love of my life is left in a starless night sky.

Can the sun shine in the dusk?

✮⋆»»———➤⋆.˚꩜ ˙⋆ ☀︎  ☾✮⋆»»———➤⋆.˚꩜ ˙⋆ ☀︎  ☾✮⋆»»———➤

“If you can’t smell the fletching you aren’t doing it right.”

Y/n smacks my chest for the 8th time that hour. My lessons with her had finally begun, per my father’s orders.

And after thinking about it, i’m grateful my father chose me for this position. so what if I enjoy spending time with her? And I can’t say I despise hearing her make demands and orders and instructions.

Is that weird? Am I weird for that?

She sighed in frustration, staring at me like the hopeless case i was.

“Really? you have these freakishly big arms and no posture.” 

I frown, patting my bicep pitifully.

“They’re called muscles.”

“Then use them. Straighten up.”

She elbows me in the ribs. 

I take a breath, tracing her slightly faded form with my peripheral vision as I prepare to be denied of her essence in my line of sight, even for just a moment as she steps behind me. 

I correct my stance, shooting the arrow as it flies through the woven targets shes created and tied to the tree.

She examines my shot, running her fingers over the painted circle and where my arrow has skewered itself embed. It was perfect. Right at the center.

“Better.”

She affirms, yanking it out of the target and tossing it to my feet.

“We have to practice angles. Its clear you can shoot a bow, quite well at that. But it’s different when you’re transitioning into targets that are at sky-level with you.”

Today, she trains me to become an archer like her and my mother, to learn the skills to eventually shoot down sky demon ships.

I reach behind me to let my bow hang on my back, the string brushing my torso.

“Will the transition take long?”

She shurgs.

“It depends. It’s different from using a bow on foot or on a direhorse, even on ikran from low distances. It’s not like sturmbeast hunting. The rush, the wind, the air, it all screams at you while you shoot from the sky. The last thing you want is to be fumbling around for an arrow while a gunned ship chases you.”

She speaks absentmindedly as she gathers the targets from the tree, untying the  ropeshes used to secure them.

I smile to myself, watching the way her hands work around the intricate knots she’s created.

“I’m a fast learner. I’m sure I’ll catch on.”

She scoffs, looking over her shoulder.

“Don’t shower me with proclamations, I’m confident in your archery skills. It's the change of pace that’ll become an impediment.”

I think sometimes Y/n assumes I harbor this overabundance of cockiness. I don’t. I never have. But i guess that’s what happens when you’re is away from someone for a long time. You forget.

Her gaze explores the thickened grass woven into a makeshift target as she starts to pile them into the big pouch she brought them in. The air around us spreads and forms an exterior of foreign feelings. I don’t reject the atmosphere it provides.

Treading lightly, I slowly take a step towards her.

“You are a good teacher.”

I say matter-of-factly. I’m stalling. I don’t want my time with her to end.

She scoffs, refusing to spare me a glance.

“I’m a terrible teacher, I’m a good shot and I order other warriors around when your father wants me to. People see that and assume my teaching skills are just as good.”

I shrug, leaning against a tree, reaching out to take the sack off her hands for a moment. She gave me it reluctantly. She takes a seat on the tree stump, tossing her head back before looking back at me, waving her hand in a downward motion.

“Sit for a moment. It’s important to rest your muscles after training. There’s nothing worse than straining your shooting arm.”

I huff out a quiet laugh. I sink against the tree across from her. “Well if you insist.”

She shakes her head.

“I don’t. But the cramps you’ll avoid in your biceps arms definitely do.”

I watch as her fingers trace the curvature of the arrowhead, the sun sliced over the ridges in the small objects surface, rounding over the curves and patterns in the stone.

“How would you feel about heading back without me?”

She asks; not even glancing at me as she opens her water flask, taking a few sips out of it and cursing quietky when she tilts the pouch too far back and some water spills down her chin to her neck, the unwelcomed sudden sensation making her shudder.

She hands me the flask, offering some water but all i can do is gawk at her words.

“To high camp? No. We should stay together.”

I shake my head, gently declining her offer of water and muttering a thank you.

It’s her turn to gawk now. Staring at me as if i have three tails.

“I have my bow.”

She gestures to the weapon next to her, the curved wood carved with patterns and bright beads and feathers adorining it.

“I’ll be fine on my own.”

I know she hates beinhg chaperoned or supervised. So i allow the sounds of the forest to symphonize while i devise something to respond with. The sewn sky is torn at the seams as clouds creep by. Something with feathers moves in the distant canopy. 

“Why? Don’t you want to return with me?”

It’s not you. I just don’t want to go home yet.”

“Than who is it?”

She’s quiet for a moment, fidgeting with her songchord to busy her hands.

“Spider.”

That was honestly the last thing I expceted to hear.

By the time Spider could walk-

Well, really, i doubt the guy ever went through a ‘first steps’ phase. He probably just started running. 

By the time he could preform some kind of motion with his legs that incorporated standing up and getting him from one place to another, Y/n’s parents had pretty much accepted him as their child.

That was his ticket to having the full na’vi child experience. He had a songchord, a bow, was taught the history of the clan through stories and songs. He loved them, and mourned them when their time came. Y/n and him have always been close, and since the past tragedy, it’s not hard to say that they’ve fought to keep eachother in their lives. Especially when my parents ushered y/n to live with our family, and leaving spider with norm and max. Because whether others believe spider belongs with our people or not, she’s never known a world where he’s not there. It’s a scale that shouldn’t be tipped. One will surely loose balance without the other.

I blink, sitting up as my head cocks to the side.

“Spider? Why? What did he do?”

IS it wrong for me to assume spider is the one at fault for whatever quarrel is proceeding?

No. At least i don’t think so. I actually think it’s pretty fair.

She groans, running her palms down her face, the skin under her eyes being dragged downwards under her fingertips.

“He’s just so- and then he- and he just- and he-”

She shakes her fists furiously as if shes strangling something invisible.

I wince.

“I don’t think that will improve his current situation with the air on this planet.”

“I’m ready to take the mask and shove it where it won’t see air again.”

“Woah there.”

She sighs roughly, absently throwing a small rock into a bush.

“Why doesn’t he ever think before doing stupid shit?”

“Well the shit wouldn’t be stupid if it was properly considred.”

She mumbles to herself, waving me off.

I place my hand on the stump next to me to shift myself to lean back against the tree further.

“Y/n, I know things can be rough with siblings. Trust me, i know. But-”

“Can i tell you something that will sound horrible?”

My sentence is stifled as she hinders it with her quiet, rueful words.

I fumble for my next words.

“Uh yeah. Yes. yes of course.”

I wave my palm towards her in a stupidly clumsy ‘the floor is yours’ motion.

When someone wants to vent, count on me to turn the atmosphere into one of an addiction confrontation. 

But my eywa, she wants to talk to me about her problems. ME! Not lo’ak, but me!  Does that mean she trusts me?

She looks down, the light spills down through the overbush of the trees, casting a hazy halo upon her figure, golden-crested shadows flirt with her azure skin. The sunlight feels shallow today. Melancholic and hollow. The sun is silenced as it slips behind a cloud. Buried beneath a grey eclipse.

“He’s not one of us. He’s my family but he’s not the same as me, not even the same species. but he wasn’t-” 

She hesitates.

“His people were never suppose to come here. To this planet. He can’t run as fast as us, fall from heights where we can and just come out unscathed, he’s not as big, as strong, as durable and adaptable as us! He’s not a na’vi! And as much as i wish I could make that his reality, I can use all the blue paint in the world and It won’t make him as tall as me. I can’t-.”

Her voice cracks at the endnotes, it’s only noticeable if you listened closely.  it makes my ears pin back, itching to aid this burden.

“I can’t keep drawing circles around him and begging him to stay inside of them.”

Sometimes soulmates aren’t lovers. They’re siblings. Tied at the roots.  Whether they were related by blood or not, they carried a piece of eachother. Even when the world tears them apart, that piece binds that root back to common ground. Energy is only borrowed. And one day, you’re gonna have to give it back.

If i were to loose Tuk, Lo’ak, or Kiri, the energy we’ve shared would circle back to where it started. And that root would retreat back to it’s spiral shape. That’s what life entails at the center of your circle. You would die for your siblings at the end of the day, and if they take the shapes of stars you search for them in the lengths of the sky.

Her tail coils around her ankle, poking at the bracelet that circled around the skin.

“Y/n, we can’t protect them forever.”

She curls herself into a ball, letting her weight drag her to the ground so that she lays bundled, her arms locked around her knees. Groaning and hissing loudly.

“I don’t want to protect him forever i just want him to stop trying to kill himself.”

“I don’t think that’s his intention, Y/n..”

I poke at her back, attempting to push her upwards with my palm so that she doesn’t faceplant in the dirt.

She mumbles, And if I was anything but a foot farther away I probably couldn’t hear her.

“When we were children he was so small… small-brained…And now he's still small, but bigger..but still fucking smaller than me..but he’s older…”

“..and?”

“His brain hasn’t gotten any fucking bigger. I’m going to take up alcoholism.”

“Please don’t.” I sigh, 

“You can’t stop me. I’m going to drink until I forget.”

Oh how beautifully eloquent she is when shes loosing all sense of sanity...

“Y/n, he lives in the same camp as us. You’re going to wake up and remember.”

I rock my knuckles against her spine, still trying to have her body avoid the fresh dirt.

She stares into the cup of her palm. My eyes catches glimpses of the shadows kept sacred in the corridors of the covers that cover her body, the dip of her hips, the drag of her nape, the cinch of her waist, the plush of her thighs and stomach. She’s soft right now. Her muscles aren’t tensed and her stomach isn’t lined.

I’m quiet as i stare at my shins, my fingertips brushing against her other hand.

“Do you remember the other night, when we all talked about scars?”

Her tail flicks, signaling that even if she wasn’t looking at me, i knew she was listening.

“Scars are symbols. They stay with us wherever we go, reminding us of where we’v e been, how we’ve gotten there..how we survived.”

I stare up at the trees, my eyes catching the shapes casting shadows over the leaves.

“Well, I’ve been thinking that some scars don’t appear over time, sometimes we’re born with them.

Her muscles tense and she pensively clutches at her song chord. I almost take it as a sign for me to just shut up. But i can’t. The words just seem to find me.

“You..”

I stare at her. My gaze tracing lines over the patterns imprinted into her back. Somedays i think pieces of her essence are torn from the scars, blemishes, bruises, and slight discolorations that stretch across her skin. Bruises that overlap ultraviolet hues darkened into navy nights, blemishes that I swear are just painstrokes from outer space, shapes imitate cosmic rays and lunar surfaces, opulent nebulae and collisions of stars that would surely cower before her.

She is made out of pieces of the universe.

Salvageable stretches of sunlight. Crystal blue, sun-kissed acquiescence of July. Cherished adventures stained in ink delight

Refusing to wither away even when seasons change and when snow i’ve never seen turns to falling stars. 

Violent sunsets, whispers, and the oceans start to sink. I consider myself equally submerged.

“You are just..so strong. You’ve always been responsible for him. You both have grown up under the same roof, you can find that common ground. You both share that circle. Those scars from your experiences..you both can’t escape that.”

Silence settles between us, my arm drapes over my propped up leg.

“It’s not wrong of you to say he doesn’t belong here. Because there’s truth to that. Our home was never meant for his kind, and maybe it never will be.

But if i know one thing, I know that he belongs with you. You’ve stood on that common ground with him through what might as well have been an earthquake, but you’re still here. He owes you that.”

She shakes her head, sitting up quickly, her words catch in her throat.

“But that’s exactly where i seem trapped. He doesn’t owe me. It’s my job, it’s my own commitment! When my parents were still around i swore to stay by his side.”

“You were no older than 6 when you probably grasped the idea that he was there in your home to take the place of a sibling. Y/n, you didn’t swear anything. I wish you wouldn’t bind yourself to this idea-”

“I’m not binded to anything. I am proud to protect my people.”

“Someone once asked me if i’m so busy protecting everyone else, who protects me.”

She stills. Surprised that i’m quoting her.

When the world becomes a sword, she became a shield.

She purses her lips, tugging on a braid that rests over her shoulder.

“That’s different.”

I laugh. Not because its funny. Because its ironic.

“How? You, me, and two dumb, reckless siblings to look after. Lo’ak and spider aren’t that different. Suppose that means neither are we.”

She leans back, her head roughly resting on the bark.

I take a breath, leaning back with her.

“Letting go of that bind doesn’t mean giving up.” I whispered. Staring up at the sky, watching as it creeped and treaded towards a crepuscular cape.

“I know”

She whispered, leaning her head opposite of my direction to rests on her shoulder.

“But he’s all i have left.”

She rasps, looking downwards once again.

My fingers brush hers. I try to focus my eyes on anything but her. The burnished bronze bark shades of the forest around me grapples with my gaze.

I know she hates pity.

A fleeting fracture, half exposed, and bare. Bones shaking under scared skin stretched over a blanket of shame. I think weakness is her greatest enemy. Vulnerability is nothing but a pallid guise of weakness’ tide. In obdurate grace, She stands elate. I’m nothing more than a shadow in the corner of her storms.

She’s an ocean I fear is too vast to cross. I've let myself drown before. 

“Y/n. I’m so sorry.”

I whisper. But as apologetic as I am, I can’t decide what I’m apologizing for.

Her parents being dead?

Her crippling fear of losing what fragile pieces of her family she had left?

The specters of her lost, an elegy of ceaseless pain. It forces me to remember I'm presumably forgotten, along with the stars and the sky I once promised i’d give her. 

As the sky grew a bit darker. We sat in a silence that danced with serenity.

the clouds like shredded silk, tinged with the delicate hues of a bruise that would never fade.

It was me she trusted in this moment. Not Lo’ak coming in clutch with bad jokes or my father with years of experience I can only pray I’d amount to earn. 

Me. Who’s soul took the shape of a shadow that loomed in the darker corners of her heart.

What did I do to deserve this?

As I look at her now-, Y/n.

The y/n.

the woman who had walked through infernos that would have incinerated lesser souls, whose spirit had been forged in the crucible of war, who bore scars both visible and unseen. Her eyes, shadowed by a thousand skies and golden eclipses, had softened now, their fierce gleam dimmed for a brief moment of vulnerability, her very presence carrying the weight of bereavment.

The sky and I share a flicker of breath, as though it too understood the gravity of the moment.

I want to capture her words with my hands, catch them. 

These words of hers, the ones I can only beg to hear once again, alike the essence of something rare and blackened, with sorrow yet magnificent in its pain. She spoke of battles fought not just against the sky demons, but against creatures that lurked in the recesses of her mind, devouring fragments of her peace. The blood she had spilled is not foreign but it rots all the same.

At the cost of being blunt, it fucking pisses me off. Beyond that if I can ever find the words.

How could they-

No. How could anyone hurt her? 

How could anyone take what they’ve taken from her and continue to reach for what precious circle of family she had left?

How could anyone—any hand—have so defiled such sanctity? faceless figures, cowards. Fighting from far away in the sky ships that stir the wind and attempt poorly to glide upon air that was never even theirs to breathe.  

I want to be the shield that keeps her safe, and at from the storms that sweep her away and leave her with scars.

I don’t want to watch her fight for the rest of my life-

Please. I don’t want her to fight for the rest of hers.

Is this where I have to stay? Is this where I have to wait? 

I am consumed by an ardor so profound it defies the very essence of language.

No. No, I'm done waiting.

I’ve dispensed myself in my mistakes for 3 years. I may never entirely forgive myself for what I’ve done to her, but I refuse to keep drowning myself in it. 

I want to live. Not survive off her faint glances and light touches.

No I want her. I want her back and I want her to be mine.

How could I ever think I could move on? That I could outgrow her? The thought of any other woman in the clan-

No, any other female known to this ground, to want any of them the way I want her, it’s wrong. It’s unnatural. A parallel that threads like a citadel, a monument of sinew and steel, fissures spider webbing beneath My skin, cracks through which light might enter or shatter me under her touch.

And eywa, I’m tired of it. I’m so fucking tired of it. How much longer will I be consumed by this need that cannot be satiated by any other presence other than hers?

I want to hear her laugh again. I want to hold her again. I want to kiss her neck and trace my palms down the curve of her waist and her thighs. I want to hear her call my name breathless into the darkness while I capture her moans with my lips and watch her hair spill through my fingers. 

I want to hold her hand. I want to kiss her until I can’t breathe. I want to feel the weight of her on top of me and under me and her legs wrapped around my waist. 

If she allowed me I would beg her on my knees. I would kiss her ankles up to her hairline and whisper apologies that sound more like worship.  

I want her to pull me away. I want to drown in her.

Can she possibly know? Her absence is not a void but a presence—vast, unbearable, and omnipotent—filling every crevice of thought, every trembling nerve that dares to remember. Her voice lingers in the silence, a phantom melody that unspools endlessly. she might as well be a rope to my wrists, tightening like a noose.

I don’t s resist her.  Even torment is preferable to the sterility of forgetting, to the annihilation of what remains of her in me.

How could she possibly not understand? The things I would do for her?

I would crawl through dirt and dust and call it scared ground if she so much as stepped there. What is love if not worship and what is yearning if not devotion?

Because she’s so beautiful. She’s pretty. She’s gorgeous. She’s perfect. She’s every word I can think of and all the words I’ve yet to learn.

So much so it’s almost otherworldly. i stand before like a penitent before an altar that will never grant me absolution. if this longing is a sickness in my soul, i'm going to cherish it because it's hers. 

Watch as she unmakes me.  Slowly, exquisitely—dismantling my pride, my reason, my very humanity, until nothing remains but the hollow echo of her name. And I  would call that emptiness sacred. 

If anger is what she needs so be it. betray me, despise me, reduce me to carrion before her feet.

Must I weep for gratitude? for even in degradation?  Done.

I will wait.

“I don’t like just waiting here.” The silence that had once reigned was shattered. Unveiling the world anew, pulling the soul from its slumber. I’m shaken awake from my momet of zoning away. It doesn’t take me long too realize it was Y/n’s voice. Well obviously- who else could it have been? the tree?

“Huh? I’m sorry- did you speak?”

She squints at me. Her eyes flicker before she stands to her feet.

“I said I don’t like this waiting. I should have never suggested it. I’m sorry.” 

She brushes herself off before grabbing her bow and the woven bag of targets, slinging her bow to tuck under her arm and the sack over her shoulder. I scramble to my feet, grabbing my own bow and water skin. 

“It was stupid of me to try to avoid this- i’m just gonna talk to spider when i get back.”

She mumbles.

“Oh- wait. Eywa you’re fast.”

I chuckle awkwardly. All she can do is toss me a blank glance over her shoulder. She moved swiftly, not making much if any sound.

I stop infornt of her, reaching out to offer her my free arms to carry the bag.

“Do you need-”

“No. lets get moving. I want to get you back before dark or else your father will have a heart attack scare.”

She cuts me off, swaying past me and onto the path where ouyr ikrans perched somehwre ahead.

“You know-”

I jog behind her, casually steadying myself to match her pace.

“You know my father doesn’t need to know where i am every second of the day.”

She shrugs.

“And yet, he does.”

Touche. 

Brush it off Neteyam.  I mean, how bad would it really be if the woman you were in love with saw you as nothing but a marionette tethered pathetically to his father?

Oh. That sounds worse than i thought.

Easy fix? Right? …Right?

“He’s just looking out for you.”

She enlightens, with a quiet precision, each word a steady beat, unadorned by excess or hesitation.

My whole life i've wanted people to see past the shadow of my father. But now i’m begging her to. 

 Why can’t she see the me that has shaped with my own hands, not inherited or molded by the past. 

I riven between the maddening urge to captivate and the harrowing awareness of my own profound inadequacy. She, an indomitable presence, even though i've known her since she was learning to walk, is still so fascinatingly intimidating. 

“I don’t-”

I stumble over a branch. Was it a branch? It could have been a root or a rock. Whatever it was. I lurch forward before unevenly shifting, then I awkwardly brushed it off, pretending it hadn’t happened.

She stops and stares at me. Painfully unimpressed with my lack of attention to the ground.

I clear my throat, trying not to wince.

“I don’t need him to look after me.”

She shrugs, walking ahead of me without much thought. “Well of course not. Look at how gracefully you coordinated that fall.”

“I didn’t fall.”

“Are you calling me blind.”

“No part of my body other then my feet touched the ground. That’s not a fall. It’s a…stammer.”

I cross my arms, suddenly my gaze finds interest in the bright colors that crowd a herb patch near by.

“Oh and what a beautiful stammer it was.”

She rolls her eyes, effortlessly shifting everything in her arms to only one side as she raises two fingers to her lips and create a whistle sound.

I see a shape of something winged and large in the distance. A cacophony of  colors and  jagged lines, and abstract forms are layered atop one another, intermingling and overlapping in a way that feels both disorienting and captivating

The sounds of flapping wings resonate from afar, an unseen presence demands attention by echoing the sound of it’s arrival. Kailo lands first, followed by rey’sa. 

Kailo was larger than the average ikran. That’s what Norm told us the night after Y/n’s ikinimya.

I still remember that day. Watching her dodge and duck away from the literal jaws of death on the ikran rookery. I saw her, and in that fleeting moment, my soul seemed to abandon me, leaving flesh frozen as I watched her plummet off the cliff side. My heart might as well have been ripped from my chest. It felt as though stricken with some fatal malady, ceased to beat. A dire, unshakable certainty gripped me—that she was gone. as good as dead. That she had slipped from the grasp of light.  

Kailo’s colors seem to pulsate with a tumultuous vibrancy. Bold and garish in their audacity, writhe and clash which burn with an almost sacrilegious intensity, to the shrieking blues and grotesque purple, the hues seem to scream at the beholder, drowning the senses in a discordance of visual tumult. 

 a gnawing sense of impotence. They spill, uncontained, stretching and sprawling, as though in the midst of some violent outpouring of emotion or thought. Jagged, fractured red lines pierce the air, juxtaposed by sweeping curves, both jagged and fluid in their simultaneous grace and aggression.

The spread of red, blue, and purple creates a  furor of colors, intermingling and overlapping in a way that feels both disorienting and captivating.

My eyes, without any conscious volition, as if led by some hidden magnetism, gravitated toward Rey’sa. Her brown, green, and yellow skin clash in a manic strife. The splashes of brown are deep and earthbound. It pushes it’s weight against the lighter, more volatile green, incessant, and vibrant, it twists and coils in unruly shapes, as though struggling to break free from the heavy grasp of the brown. Meanwhile, the yellow flashes like a burst of lightning, crackling with energy.

She shakes her head back in forth in a quick wild nutation before tiltidng her head towards me, a high noted-shrill leaving her as if informing me of her arrival.

I give her neck a few pats, tightening my saddle with one hand while I throw myself to straddle atop, hiking up my leg and shifting in a slight jump.

Y/n doesn’t mount until she secures the targets and her bow in her side saddle, handling it with the utmost care. As if parting with it was akin to severing a vital thread that tied her soul to her body.

There was a quiet dominion everywhere she went. Trailing her steps. In her orbit, the air became sanctified. Her back straight as if someone held a board to it to ensure it never faletered from it’s position.

I mount rey’sa after ensuring everything was fastened. I reach back for my kuru. The movements to connect my kuru to my ikran are so unmistakably ingrained. Practiced and performed to a point of cognitive habituation. 

The moment I see the cords connect, I feel it.

The traverse vast expanse between us thinning into a network that flows effortlessly, a seamless exchange of synapses that make the sound of sensitive reverberations.  It’s an undercurrent of synergistic sensations.

I shake my head to clear up the swift headrush that swept through when making the bond, my vision clearing almost instantly.

I turn to my side, seeing y/n already staring at the sky with a quiet resolve.

“I’m going to talk to him when we get back.”

She looks at her hands, they almost bruise with how tightly she grips the reigns. Her gaze is suffused in a promise that I feel proud to say she only shares with me.

“Good.you two should work things out.”

She nods, shifting, adjusting her legs.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

She shrugs.

“Talking sense into me.”

I laugh. But I don’t mean to. It’s accidental. It echoes between us

“Nothing makes sense when you have stupid reckless people like Lo’ak or spider in your life.”

If only she knew things only ever made sense when I was with her.

₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺☀︎₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺☀︎₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊

NETEYAM POV; back at high camp..

When we arrived back at high camp, I watched y/n run off to wherever spider was, leaving me alone to return the targets to the supply tent.

I should have told her right there and then. Why didn’t I? 

I linger in my self-pity for only a moment, then steady myself, refocusing on the task at hand. I start putting the targets back and their respective places. Behind me, the faint sound of a new presence disrupts the silence.

 The steps are quiet, as if treading.

“Finally, Lo’ak. Come help me put these away.”

I wave him over without turning my head

“Guess again..”

I jump. In all the year’s iv’e lived with Lo’ak, Iv’e never known him to have a voice so feminine sounding.

I turn, and I feel my breath leave my body in a flicker.

Kyuna stands in front of the tent flap, with one methodical move she uses her finger to tie the drawstring of the flap closed, the sudden lack of light making this whole endeavor even more horrifying.

 her presence lingers, a silken thread weaving through the space between us.

“My eywa, you’re so jumpy, Teyam.”

Here’s a fun fact. No one in the entire clan I’ve been born and raised in, calls me ‘teyam’ other than my siblings and occasionally my mother. The sobriquet came about when Lo’ak was about 3, and had trouble pronouncing “Neteyam”. Net or Teyam was his go-to. Honestly I never understood how hard it was to just push the two together but anyways,

When Kyuna uses its imbued with a sense of familiarity and ease, felt unmerited. A familiarity that hasn’t been earned. Much less deserved.

Is it fair? To say something as simple as a shortened version of my own name to be so intimate?  

My subconscious drive takes the shape of a marionette. Instinctively moving me backwards the split second she steps forward, her chest invading what I’m positive marks the starting point of “personal space.”

It’s almost like my body repulses the idea of touching her in any way that could even immediately be seen as intimate.

“I finally caught you alone. You’re always so busy..”

She makes her fingers mimic a walking motion as they trail up my chest, neck, before tapping my nose.

I clear my throat, grabbing her wrist and gently placing it back at her side.

“Kyuna this doesn’t seem very-“

“Oh shut up! You’re always so worried about everything. Can you ever let loose?”

She laughs, almost manically, trying despairingly to make her constant interruption seem cute or innocent.

”speaking of loose.”

My eyes flicker down to where she hooks a finger under the waistband of my knife, pulling me closer to her. almost trying to pry her way between where the woven strip of fabric keeps my loincloth resting on my hips.

My eyes widen.

“Nope! Okay! That’s just- nope. No. We are not. I’m going to remain clothed. Thank you..”

I push her away by her shoulders this time.

She Rolls her eyes.

“You’re so stiff sometimes”.

Stiff. Interesting choice of words.

As she bats her eyelashes at me and pouts, I can’t decide whether I feel sad or sorry for her. Or both. Is my attention worth all this? Does she think this is attractive?

Unfortunately, I don't think I have the patience to indulge her.

“Kyuna this is not-“

I sigh, running a hand down my face. Frustrated at what part of that incredibly, small brain in her head thinks that this is okay??

“Kyuna you can’t be doing this. I don’t want to be seen as someone who sneaks around with anyone like this.”

“No one has to know.”

“Right! Because nothing is happening here.”

I speak slowly, as if trying to explain to a small child, holding her hands as I place them down at her sides once again.

“I. Don’t. Want. This.”

I reiterate.

She throws her hands up in frustration, groaning loudly.

“Then what do you want, Neteyam? You never tell or do anything that shows it!”

I raise my eyebrow, quietly standing and watching her tantrum.

A part of me does finally feel coerced into pity. Why did she obsess over this? Over me?

“Women throw themselves at you! They practically drool over you and you don’t even blink! It’s like you don’t care.”

She continues.

“Do you think the whole playing “hard to get” and the “I don’t care” facade will last forever? Because I see right through it.” 

She pokes my chest, making me step back once again, my hand behind me resting on the wooden pillar that held the tent up. My fingers anxiously and absently tracing the grooves in the smooth wood.

“There’s something or someone  you want. “

“Kyuna, if you are so fixated on there being someone, do you honestly believe, in your heart, that it’s you?”

“Why cant it be?”

“I’m not saying it can’t be, I'm telling you it’s not!”

“Look at you! You won’t even touch me. You’re probably just shy?”

“I’m ‘shy’ because I wont have sex with you inside this tent? Sure. let's put it that way.”

I turn my back to her, starting to pile up the targets and untie the hanging cord around each one. Maybe if I act like she’s not there, she’ll disappear. 

There's a pulse of silence before i feel a hand on my shoulder, sending a shrilling shudder down my spine.

“Let’s not dance around this Neteyam.”

She snakes to duck underneath me, placing herself to occupy the very small space between me and the wall, her nose nearly touching mine, I feel her breath for only a shred of a second before I flinch the other way.

“You can’t keep running from this.”

“Yes, I can. The question is, will you stop chasing me.”

 "I won't stop chasing what I know belongs to me."

It’s unnerving. How her tone treads that unmistakable subtle possessiveness. That’s how Kyuna works. In her mind, you belong to her whether she realizes it or not. This is how she plays the game. Shifts the board, moves the pieces while you're not looking, and when you turn around, she tries to convince you that it was you who can’t remember what you did with your pieces.

I know where my pieces are. They’re my fucking pieces. Not hers.

“I want you”

She declares.

“No, you want something no one else has.”

I reason.

“No You don’t understand-”

“Something no one else has, but I can’t satisfy that for you-”

Our voices overlap.

“I love you.”

“You love the idea of me.”

Maybe I really do feel sorry for her.

“Can you really think of anyone else in this clan that would be a better wife for you other than me?? They wouldn’t last.”

Nevermind. I’m annoyed again.

“Is it fun? Thinking you’re better than everyone else?”

I query.

“No. Thinking isn’t fun. Knowing is my forte.”

Ah, so she doesn't enjoy thinking. What a shocker.

“Ever since the return of the sky people we’ve been weakened.”

I raise my brow, my face furrowing into something new.

“I don’t follow.”

“Don’t you see it? They only dwell in the past, we’re too afraid to fight the way we used to. We’ve all heard the stories. Our clan used to be ruthless. Feared by others. Now we’re just an afterthought. We’re afraid. But you, once you’re olo’eyktan you could change that, And i could help.”

She speaks, and the sound—that sound—is as if some unfortunate hand struck an untuned instrument, a mere echo of what it could have been. A cruel, discordant note that rends the stillness of the soul.

She is like a child playing a game whose rules she cannot understand, and whose consequences she cannot foresee. But the pain, the pain is real. It is deep, it is sharp, it is unspoken. And yet, she speaks again, and again, with the same ignorance. 

Maybe I'm offended because it was all real to me.

Watching my mother wake up crying in the middle of the night plagued with memories of hometree was real.

Watching the love of my life lose her family because of the sky people’s destruction, that was real.

Standing here right now while they dangle our survival over our heads is real.

“I suggest you quit while you’re stepping ahead, Kyuna, You don’t know what you speak of.”

My former tone vanished, replaced by a gravity that demanded attention.

She looks embarrassed. And why wouldn’t she be?

She stammers, fidgeting with one of her braids.

“I was only- you don’t understand.”

“You’re right. I don’t. Do you think I’m impressed by this?

I don’t know what comes over me. Anger? Frustration? Annoyance.

I take a step closer, than another, until she’s pedaling backwards to remain ahead of me.

“Do you think this is attractive? Impressive? Do you think this is the kind of thing I yearn for at night? Stupidity? Ignorance? Do you think I get off on this? On you? Because I can promise you I don't.”

She gulps.

My father once told me that fear controls people.

I vowed to never fall victim to that again. Controlling others. I did it once and I lost the love of my life.

But maybe, control was potential. So was power. And if I have to shape my shadow into something scary and unapologetic to cast away such intrusive presences like hers? I’d justify it.

“Neteyam, I didn’t mean-“

She reaches for my arm, and I’m beyond tired of her touching me.

“Get out, Kyuna. I’m dismissing you.”

“But-“

“Out. Now.”

She stands in silence before turning to leave.

I feel my chest tighten its knot of air I didn’t even know was there until she’s out of my sight.

I don’t like pulling rank on people. But am I so terrible if I say that felt good??

I take a breath, steadying myself. Whatever just happened I could unpack later.

Right now, I allowed myself to be busy with the task at hand.

My sense of peace vanished once again when I saw a figure enter the tent out of the corner of my eye.

Can’t she take a hint?

“For the love of eywa!”

I groan.

“I’m not going to have sex with you! What do you want from me!? Just keep it  in your fucking loincloth and-“

I turn around to see my father staring at me in horror.

“Dad?“

₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺☀︎₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺☀︎₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺

Y/ns Pov:

you shouldn’t be nervous to talk to someone you’ve  known my whole entire life and yet a more insidious, gnawing sensation sears at the back of your mind.

Maybe it’s guilt you feel. because the last time you spoke you brought up the past we both wish we could forget.

It was an unspoken rule between us. Not to bring up your mother. 

It was never a spoken pact.  Youboth knew all too well what happened with grief was left untouched. It hardens into something immutable.

 you care about each other too much to put yourselves through that pain again.

You think the sky is sinking. The darker it became the more it seemed to cave downward. Maybe if you climbed a tree you could brush your fingertips against the stars and hear them whisper words of comfort.

You were a warrior. A “lieutenant” as Jake would call you.  You had an invitingly strange familiarity to challenges. 

Why did the feeling you had right now akin itself to the one you have before a raid?

Every step you take feels closer to the fire. 

You grabbed the metal railing and hoisted yourself up to the wooden platform, ignoring the stairs made for human sized feet. 

Ducking under the small door you felt the back of your neck brush the  cool metal.

No matter how many times you’ve been in the shack, entering it always felt like a fever dream. The white and gray that washed the walls were such a huge contrast to the natural shades that hued pandora’s grounds. It had a way of making you feel empty. Like the crowded space could seep into a pit dwelling portal.

You treaded carefully, minding your anxiously swishing tail and praying that it wouldn’t be the cause of a beaker or something irreplaceable shattering.

Max and norm come into view.  They sit at a table hunched over a flat board that sits between them. The board has little white and black boxes and pieces that all differ in size and shape. They scatter across the board, stilling in their place, waiting to be moved.

Norm’s eyes light up as he laughs manically, grabbing a black piece by the curved top and shifting it to one of the white pieces, knocking it over with a swift flick and taking the spot the white piece once inhabited.

“Have fun doing my dishes for a week.”

“You’ve been spending too much time in your avatar, you've finally lost it. You know I'm winning, right?

“Don’t even think for one second you haven’t been shoving pieces in your pocket every time I get up for coffee.”

Max scoffs.

“You’re a caffeine addict.”

“And you’re a cheater!”

“Those are fighting words, I’d watch myself.”

“Then empty your pockets! Come on! If you have nothing to hide.”

“What’s in a man’s lab coat is his own damn business!”

You stand awkwardly, exaggerating a cough to emphasize your presence.

Their heads snap towards you and every trace of frustration and theatrical betrayal vanish.

“Oh hey Kiddo.”

Norm waves, standing up and stretching his arms over his head. Max follows behind him, cracking his back with a groan before smiling at you with a warm familiarity.

You stand awkwardly greeting the two with respectful nods.

“I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“Oh no, never, You caught us at a good time.”

Max waves away the notion of apology from the air, 

“To what do we owe the pleasure?”

Norm leans against the wall, grabbing a spare mask made for avatars and reaching out his hand to offer it to you.

You shake your hand, gently pushing the mask away.

“I’m not staying long.Is spider around?”

“He's outside.”

The three of you jump a bit at the sounds of footsteps above you, thick metallic thuds echo from the outside.

“Oh. well, now he’s up..side?” Norm gestures to the roof where spider’s evident movement was heard.

“Oh son of a- he’s gonna tear his stitches. That’s like the 5th time in the last 4 days.”

Max groaned, running to grab a med kit that sat on a table in the corner.

“I_..I can go let him know you guys don’t want him climbing?”

Your tail thwacks your shoulder blades. An exemplary allude of nervousness.

Norm nods, folding up the black and white squared board that laid flat on the table.

“That’d be great, he listens to you.”

You exited the shack without words, looking up at the slightly slanted roof and metal poles that curved embed with the shape. You jumped, hoisting yourself up over the awkward overhang before sitting atop it. You paused when two dangling pale legs came into view, you crawled over the next curve and were met with Spider’s back.

You froze for a moment. 

Because it’s just now you realize that you thought the anticipation was what intimidated you. Just the walk from your ikran to the shack itself like like an unendruable trek towards something unmapped. Uncharted.

Your clan glorified you because they cannot see the contrast within recklessness and bravery.

To everyone around you, you were never afraid of the unknown. Dancing where others struggled to stand on uneven ground. Danger was an adventure. Not an intimidation. In a sky devoid of light you never feared the dark. 

The wait was never what you should have feared. The uncertainty, in the silent torment of your thoughts was a comfort you’ve taken forgranted.

Because now you have to face him. 

You can’t pretend to be made of stone forever. Eventually you’ll break like glass. 

You reach your hand out, tapping his shoulders.

“Spider.”

His name comes out hoarse. The two syllables sound as if they had to pry thesmelves from the depths of your throat.

He turns around, and you can’t get yourself to meet his eyes. They settle in his lap, and you see his knife and a sharpening tool resting there.

“Hey.”

He whispered, turning around to face you. He places the knife and sharpening tool in a pouch resting on his hip.

There's an awkward silence as you both turn to face the edge of the mountain where only a few marui’s scattered and stopped where the natural stone barrier of highcamp enclosed you all inside. 

Your breath hitches as your eyes follow two na’vi children running around playing a game, tackling each other and screeching.

And for a moment, for a fragment of a second, you swear you see you and spider.

“Norm and Max don’t want you up here.”

You say it unintentionally. But you needed something to fill the space between you. The silence demanded too much of your attention.

Spider glances over at you, swinging his feet absentmindedly.

“Yeah..I know. I just-”

He tugs at his locs lightly.

“I don’t know. I can’t think with my feet on the ground.”

Really? You never would have guessed.

“I think we should talk.”

“About what?”

You look at him, wondering if he’s forgotten your argument.

He squints at you before his gaze settles on the ground.

“Oh. That.”

“Did you forget.”

He shook his head.

“No. I tried though.”

Silence strikes again. Suffocating the expanse of what pressed between you two. It’s an oppressive hum of the unendurable truth that is heavy and refuses to remain unacknowledged. 

“I’m sorry, I was an asshole. I know you were just worried and-”

He paused.

“No. Let’s start with this. 

Y/n you’re the strongest person I know.

You’re intelligent and badass and a warrior. And I love that about you. But I remember a time where you’re life didn’t revolve around this war. And sometimes I feel like- part of why you put yourself into that position to protect me…I don’t want you going out and risking you’re life because I’m weak and small and-“

“You’re not weak.”

You cut him off. The edge of your voice makd his hands stop their fidgeting.

“You’re not weak. You’re just not like us.”

You expect hi to flinch or scowl when you say that but he does nothing of the sort. There’s a sadness behind his eyes shadowed by the long ignored truth.

You sigh, staring back up at the dark sky.

“We can paint as many layers and shades of blue as we can and it still can’t hide what’s underneath.”

“Yeah. A sky demon.”

He mumbles quietly.

“A product of mistakes that someone else made.”

You correct.

He's silent, he stares ahead.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

You nod, swaying your feet in a rhythm that matches his own.

“If we both were to climb a tree and throw ourselves off the highest branches, who would have a better chance of lesser injury. You, or me?”

Spider is quiet in his response. Almost embarrassed.

“You.”

“Which one of us can run faster?”

He rolls his eyes subtly, shoving you softly with his palm.

“You.”

“Who has more knowledge about the sky demons and their weaknesses.”

“Me?”

You both pause . You smile and nudge him back.

“That doesn’t make either of us stronger or weaker from the other. We’re different. But there is no difference that can divide what has grown between us, spider.”

He finally looks at you.

“I never should have brought up sa’nok. It was wrong.”

You whispered

For a moment you both slip to the center of your spiral. The center that was slowly unraveling to reveal a pain you both could wish never existed.

“But that is our common ground. We were raised under the same roof, in the same family.”

He leans his head on your shoulder, and the motion makes your still, your spine stiffening.

It’s not unwelcomed. Just unexpected. 

“When they died I thought that they would separate us.”

Pain and fear is heard in his voice. And Jake says you and Lo’ak are a trouble making duo? You’ve clearly never met pain and fear. Two wretched companions that gnaw at the marrow of every shred of hope. It's the shadow that stalks even in the most mundane of moments. 

“They vouched for me. Even when the rest of the clan said I didn't belong with a family.”

“I don't care what the rest of the clan thinks.”

You affirm.

Spider blinks at you. Seemingly shocked.

“But they’re your people.”

“So are you!”

You toss your head back and groan, taking your frustrations out on the sky.

“Why does everyone else get to tell me who I love? Who do I choose to protect and value as my own?”

Spider is quiet. He goes to answer, but nothing comes out.

“I don’t know.” he whispers. 

“I don’t know either. Listen, no one gets to tell us that we aren’t family. Family isn’t always who you share blood with. 

I may not have lived with you continuously throughout my life, but I would die for you at the end of the day. You’re my family because I remember playing with you in the river and chasing you down the stream. You’re my brother because I remember staying beside you even when other children said you being in my home meant that we shared your ‘human germs’.”

He stares at you. You can’t  decipher what he’s thinking.

“Why should anyone else decide what you are to me?”

“Neytiri can.”

Spider interjects. Her name isn’t resentful in his voice, it’s rather longing for something distant. Something he’s never had.

You look down. Regretful.

“I can’t change the way she thinks about humans. She’s just afraid, and shes protective of her family-”

“I know that. But she’s also protective of you. And I don’t hate you for it. But-”

He stops. Staring down at his hands as if they are stained with something you can’t see.

“But what?”

You inquire gently, like trying to coax a shy child to speak.

“I’m gonna sound like such an asshole if I say it.”

You snort. 

“It’s okay. I felt the same way earlier.”

He takes a breath.

“It’s not fair. They were parents to both of us. But you're the one taken in after they die. They would never do that to me. Because I'm not a na’vi.”

“Spider, I know it feels like that but they aren’t abandoning you for some sort of vengeance-

My- our mother and neytiri were like sisters. Jake and our parents were close. They promised that if anything happened to either of them they would step up for me.”

“No. They promised to step up to take any children she had under their wing.”

“Spider…”

“I’m not mad at you. It’s just frustrating. You get off at the easy lane while I'm going 90 miles to nothin’ off a cliff.”

And there it was again. That sting.

“Easy lane? Did you think this, any of this was easy for me? Having neytiri and mo’at braid my hair the way our mother would? Having jake accidentally call me “Zensira” for the first few months by accident? That day we had to leave the old village and come to high camp, the day I walked past the home we grew up in for a final time? Saying a last goodbye to the place where every moment of laughter, every memory, every fragment of joy I've known in my life feel so empty? So dark and cold?”

Spider shakes his head frantically.

“No! No of course not, we both lost something that day. I remember it too..It’s just..They’re there for you. You know?”

“I'm here for you.”

You reiterate. Almost desperate. At this moment you felt like a spider and you were onlookers into a mirror where he refused to acknowledge that you could both see your reflection upon the same surface.

“Iv’e been here. I’m staying here. So is Lo’ak, and kiri, tuk, norm, and max-”

You stop mid sentence as you remember what was scractching at the back of your brain.

“Oh by the way, max told me to tell you to stop tearing your stitches.”

You both are quiet. And then you laugh. You both laugh hard. And you nor him really know why.

As the laughter dies down he rests his head on your shoulder, whispering into the air.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.”

What were you both sorry for? Everything. Nothing. Somethings. Because this is where you both surrender. Even while you both remain tainted with the bitter aftertaste of unresolved tension, you withdrew, but not in peace—no, it was more like the calm that precedes a storm, an uneasy lull where the heart strains against its own quietude.

You both were stronger than what or whoever came between you. That was a fact.

₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺☀︎₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺☀︎₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺☀︎₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊

*emerges from my cave*

Hehe..hi…long time no see, huh?

Now before you throw the pitchforks at me, I can explain my delay of this chapter. For those of you who have read my bio, you already know I’m a film student. In the next few weeks me and a group of my classmates are going to start shooting a film entirely directed, produced, and written by us. I’m the art director and getting ready to travel (we’re filming in another location) has made me so busy…on another note I had to rewrite this chapter almost 5 times because it never came out right until now.

But, allow us to move on a happier note…

 Happy Valentine’s Day and Black history month guys! I hope everyone enjoyed this chapter as much as I did. 

Neteyam and Y/n have finally started they’re training sessions, so buckle up for more tension to come. And FINALLY! Spider and y/n are back on speaking terms. Phew. (This will not be the last argument they have in this story 😚)  

Writing for Kyuna is so funny. Like, take a hint please shawty. He don’t want you. Ugh. It's desperation for me. And we left off on a cliffhanger with Jake and Neteyam? That will be an interesting conversation for next chapter..hm..ANYWAYSSS I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter!

btw for my arcane watchers, do neteyam and y/n give you guys ekko and jinx vibes??

₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊⋆☾⁺☀︎₊₊⋆⁺☀︎₊☾⁺☀︎₊𖦹✮⋆⁺₊

TAGLIST!

@fluorynn (THIS ONE’S FOR YOU FYNE SHYTE)

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I love you all! Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

[narcjsistx]

𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐋 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄! | itoshi rin x fem reader

part seventeen: podium || BAND AU, A BIT AGED UP

plot: after your band's last concert, a few days after Rin's, an online competition arises about who is the best bassist. A whole new challenge is created by the new fandom who loves you, but people don't know that you and the bassist of Blue Lock haven't spoken in about 3 years since you broke up, when you were sixteen

02: PAST, YESTERDAY

characters presentation here ; all the parts here

"It's embarrassing" the boy says, but you shake your head "It's not true. Aren't you embarrassed to play in front of so many people but spending time like this with your girlfriend?" you tease him, but he snorts, tightening his grip "Shut up"

You giggle, staring straight ahead. Afternoons like this, just you, him and the sea, are becoming rare lately. Since that night, now a year ago, the band has achieved a lot of goals, playing in other cities, even further away and some closer. This means a lot of time spent in the rehearsal room, and above all even less time spent together as a couple. You are so happy that Blue Lock, your creation, is experiencing now. But you also miss the times when it was just you and Rin playing together

In a few weeks, he'll be on a small first tour of the entire prefecture that will take him away for a few weeks. You'll follow them as a manager for a few dates, but only for those in the cities closest to home. You're happy, but at the same time, there's something wrong, something you can't understand but which causes you so much pain

"Are you sleepy? You're quiet. I mean, more than usual" he says, and you force a smile "I'm just a little tired. Tough days with school and... stuff" you say almost in a sigh, but Rin before being your boyfriend was a good friend of yours for a long time, so he knows when something is bothering you "Stuff? Something happened at school? Or with me?" he asks, his hand loosening a little. You shake your head "Don’t worry. I just have a lot on my mind" you say, placing your hand on his, but even though you're not seeing his face directly since you're leaning against his chest, you know Rin isn't convinced "You should tell me what's on your mind" he says, and you look down, focusing on the sand beneath you "This is stupid"

Today was another tough day, especially because for the umpteenth time you were in danger of not seeing each other because of band practice. It's not something that happens rarely anymore, you're used to it, but Rin insisted that he wouldn't mind coming to the beach with you anyway, just to spend time with his girlfriend. The beach is deserted at this hour, as the sun sets to make room for the moon: his hands are holding your waist, as he sits behind you, his legs lazily holding you close to him. It's stupid how you're making a fuss over your boyfriend's success

"I don't care if it's stupid or not. I want to know, it's not normal for me to see you like this" he says in a cold tone, which however hides a hint of concern. You tilt your head, noticing how the sun has almost disappeared by now "I don't even know how to explain it to you. It's just... lately I think I'm always the one who's left behind" you say in a tense tone, but your heart hurts "What?" he asks, and you sigh again "Every time I do something for someone, I end up falling behind, while the other one rises to the top. I was the one who made Sae play the first time, and now he's in another country to improve his talent. The band I created is fine, but I'm not in the band's future plans. It hurts me to think that for all that I try I never get a result that is completely about me, because then I also feel like a bitch for suffering from the success of the people I love. It's just that for once I would like to be the one who gets to the top, and not the one who makes others get there"

It's the first time you've really thought about this, and consequently also the first time you've said it out loud. For a few minutes the only noise you can hear is that of the waves of the sea, and you think you've ruined everything. Maybe you seriously need to learn to be quiet, Sae often told you when you asked your music teacher about the wrong notes. Maybe your best friend was right all along, who for the umpteenth time, you brought to the maximum and left you with the minimum

Rin shouldn't even be here, but at her house after a day of rehearsals. You ruined the only moment he gave you. Maybe you're a bad girlfriend

"I never thought about this point of view of yours" says the boy after the silence, maintaining the calm tone that distinguishes him "But I always thought I could never thank you enough. I don't have the material things to express my gratitude" he says softly, lowering his head just to whisper in your ear. Your eyes widen in surprise, but you barely have the courage to turn around “You look so amazing. You are amazing. I still wonder how I got the chance to meet you all those years ago, maybe it was like a gift from Sae. Something like that" he says, and you chuckle softly at his comment, feeling the air around you thin out “I mean, I’ve never actually thanked you for this. Maybe i did after our… first kiss” he says, and you laugh “You did. Twice” you laugh, but he shrugs “Shut up. I know. I don’t regret it” he says seriously, but you recognize his rare emotion

"It's just that I often think that maybe I'm wrong, in being a bitch for not being completely happy. Or in thinking that maybe I deserve it too" you say honestly, and he nods "I understand" he says, and you nod "I don't know... like..."

"I love you. Thank you for everything you've done and are doing now. I can't tell you how proud I am to be your boyfriend" he says, taking your hands and playing with your fingers "Because you're perfect. You really are, from the way you play the bass to the way you ask me for my sweatshirts. You're simply the only person I know for sure I truly love, above my family" he says it all in one breath. You are almost shocked by his words, turning to meet your boyfriend's downcast gaze, which is however betrayed by his red ears and cheeks "Do you have a fever?" you ask worriedly

Rin speaks very little, and above all he always keeps his emotions bottled up inside himself. It's something he's done since he was a child and by now you're used to it, but every time he lets himself go it always gives you a sense of surprise

"I don't have a fever. It's just... you do so much for me, for the band, and if I can't even make an effort to show you how much you mean to me, maybe I'm a bad boyfriend. But I don't want to be" he says looking up, hoping you don't pay too much attention to his physical reactions visible on his face. You purse your lips, letting out a sigh and then smiling sweetly at him "Thank you for telling me. It's nice sometimes... to be told you're loved" you say honestly, reaching out to caress his face. Rin leans against your palm, leaving little kisses on it and on your fingers "Remind me to tell you, sometimes. I think about it every day but subconsciously forget to say it" he admits patiently, and you nod "I'll try" you say, relaxing your muscles. Rin leans down to kiss your head, but as your neck bends, his lips meet yours in a tender kiss: neither of you moves, as you enjoy each other's warmth mixed with that of the sand, still warm even though it's dark now

Maybe you're not a bad girlfriend, but you just need to feel loved. When that happens, you feel like you're the one at the top and the others at the bottom, they're at the bottom of the podium while you're at the top. Rin wants you to always feel that way, at the top

TAGLIST: @x3nafix ; @kittenish0 ; @littlejapanesesightseeingtrip ; @pan-kojiwa ; @pookalicious-hq ; @kaz-0e ; @sof888a ; @chugging-bleach ; @matchablossomsss ; @lovelymeguru ; @thebestsetter ; @yamsverse ; @princesssae ; @yuukigyatgyat ; @azharyy ; @rwbie ; @bubybubsters ; @swagkittybear ; @syarc0re ; @rink1sser ; @frogsrules ; @hwaassaa ; @chuuyalvover ; @poemzcheng ; @poisonedst4r ; @s4-mmy ; @gojosfiance ; @justtkari ; @xl-pr ; @yumiixiu ; @hyomadarlings

[midnight-mourning]

Santa's Helper

❄️❄️Midnight's DCA December Day 25❄️❄️

Another silly one for y'all, I'll be honest this was 2 am Midnight who finished this and it's give or take on whether she cooks or not, but I'm gonna say yes for now :D

Prompt: Santa comes to the Daycare to see the kids, and reader dresses up as an elf to help out. A certain attendant thinks they look pretty cute~

Word Count: 1915

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

When you initially saw the costume that had been picked out for you, you laughed outright. When you found out that you actually had to wear it, your laughter died in your throat.

"You can't be serious." You gestured to the outfit. "You actually want me to wear that."

Your manager had shrugged. "Santa needs a helper. You already work in the Daycare. Saves me some trouble."

You just look at the outfit with horror, no words for your distress. 

It's an elf costume. Green, with red trim and a hat to match. It came with a belt, ears, and the same shade of green shorts. There were also red and white stripes tights, to your dismay.  It was godawful and you hated it.

But, you didn't have a choice unless you wanted to be fired. And considering you had a job where you got to work with your crush(es) all day every day, you'd rather suck it up and put it on. 

You understand why you had to be the one to do it. It had been your idea for Santa to come to the Daycare in the first place. You'd been pushing for it, honestly. Upper management hadn't seen the point until your argued how good an experience it would be for the kids. 

Therefore, this whole thing was your responsibility, meaning that if you wanted things to go smoothly you had to cooperate so that this went off without a hitch. Besides, it wasn't just the kids you were trying to please. 

When you'd told the attendants your idea, they were over the moon excited about it, while they knew better in terms of Santa being real, having someone come and surprise the kids like that was exciting to them. And to have your crush so thrilled about something you came up with? That feeling was too good to ruin it all over a stupid costume. 

This is the mantra you tell yourself as you stand in the bathroom, having just put the majority of the costume on, save for the hat. 

You look ridiculous, you feel ridiculous. But it's for the boys—the kids, it's for the kids. 

You sigh and shove the hat on, staring at yourself even harder in the mirror. 

There had to be some way you could make this work. You dig in your bag for your makeup, deciding add a bit of Christmas flair with some eyeshadow, and taking a pencil, draw little stars of various styles and sizes under your eyes and across your cheeks. You fix your hair so the hat looks cute, ish. 

You look back to your reflection, it's not the best, but it's better than before. You take a deep breath, and finally leave the bathroom, trudging back to the Daycare. When you arrive, it's empty, save for Sun. 

It's early, the kids weren't going to be here for another hour, and 'Santa' would be here around mid-morning, so your main goal for now was to get set up and prepared essentially. 

Sun hears the door open and shut and turns from setting up the crafts station. 

"Good morning, Sunbeam! How are—" He hesitates when he sees you, your ears start to burn. "—you... today?"

You sigh and drop your bag off in its usual spot. "Good morning, Sunny. I'm fine."

He walks over to you, staring down as his rays spin every so often. 

"You look..." He mumbles something you don't catch. 

You're sure it's probably nothing good. He probably thinks you look silly. "Yeah. I know. Let's just, ignore it, yeah?"

"Oh... Oh! Sorry friend I was um, distracted for a moment. What I meant to say is that you look wonderful! Perfectly in character for today."

You scoff half-hearted. "Thanks, Sun, but you don't have to lie for my sake. It's alright. I'm gonna go get started on Santa prepping, okay?"

You walk off then, completely embarrassed. Had you stuck around you might have heard Sun quietly utter. "But I wasn't lying."

Set up involves creating a holiday scene for where your Santa will sit. You're provided a big chair by management, and using some outdoor holiday decorations, and some spare sheets, create a snowy landscape. The long red carpet you'd found in storage ties up the scene nicely. Now all that's left to do is wait for the kids and 'Santa' to get here. 

You sit down in the chair, flipping through your phone since you have nothing better to do. You can't recall who's playing the big man this year. You think it's that one guy your age from Bonnie Bowl, but you're not too sure. He was nice, you don't know why they picked him for Santa given his age and non-Santa look, but whatever works. You just hope he plays the part like he's supposed to. 

As you're sitting there, you get the acute feeling of being watched. Sure enough, glancing up slightly you see Sun is staring at you, rays fluttering every few moments. You make eye contact and both flinch, going back to what you were doing. Several more times before the kids show up the same thing happens, and you wonder how bad this costume must really be for him to be so fixated on you. 

The kids at least are excited you're dressed up. They say as much as they go about the day, all anxious for when Santa finally shows up. 

And show up he does. You'll admit, the guy underneath that costume does a great job. He bursts into the Daycare, laugh loud and hearty and a sack over his shoulders. He carries with him an air of charisma that few can achieve when playing Santa Claus, and he's great with each of the kids. 

Sun helps to get them organized while you get your coworker situated. While doing so you decide to try for some small talk. 

"Thank you so much for doing this. It's really appreciated." You say, as you stack wrapped boxes that had come from the sack. 

He keeps his voice low so to not blow his cover. "Yeah, of course. This is fun for me compared to fixing bowling lanes all day."

"How do you nail the character so well?" You shake your head. "You're like what, 20 something? No offense."

He laughs. "None taken. This is kind of embarrassing, but I'm part of an improv group. We've been doing a lot of holiday themed practice lately and they always make me be Santa because I can do the voice."

You two continue to chat back and forth for a few more minutes before the sound of someone clearing their throat interrupts you. Startled, you turn around and see Sun standing there, hands clasped in front of him. He seems, tense? To be fair you are too, wanting this to go well. 

"If you're ready, Mr. Claus. The children are ready to begin."

Your coworker gets into character again, laughing. "Of course! Thank you Sun, let's get started, shall we?"

Sun nods, walking back to manage the kids in line and you frown. But, shake it off as the first kid runs up, starting to rattle of his Christmas list the second he's sat down. 

The event proceeds exactly as planned. No upset kids, no arguing over gifts, no crying either. Everything is perfect. 

Well, near perfect. 

You're slightly distracted by helping out your coworker, but you notice how Sun looks over to the two of you every so often. You're not entirely sure why. Yes, your coworker is being incredibly friendly with you, talking directly to you and throwing compliments your way. But it's all in character of course, it's not like he's not keeping up the act as he does it. 

It does click to you however as he leaves that there was more to it than just that. 

You're by the door, saying goodbye and thanking him again, when he pops a question you weren't expecting. 

"This was a lot of fun today. Besides cheering up the kids, I really liked talking to you." He ducks his head a moment, then looks back to you. "I know this is like, not the optimal time for it but would you um, want to go out sometime? Maybe get a coffee and chat?'

Oh. Oh no. 

You hadn't been expecting that at all, you can't even begin to think up a response. 

Fortunately, you don't have to. As a certain someone interjects. 

"So sorry to interrupt! But I'm afraid you're out of luck, Santa." Sun steps forward, putting a hand on your shoulder. "They're taken. Better luck next time, but thank you for stopping by! Buh-bye now."

Sun all but shuts the door in his face, leaning over you to do so. Then he looks down to you, as you're still gaping like a fish. 

He stands upright and turns back around, you hear him clap his hands behind you. "Alright everyone! It's time to enjoy your presents! Remember to play good and play fair, alright? We're going to go have playtime of our own, but if you need anything we'll be there to help!"

Sun takes your hand, and starts leading you through the Daycare, you stumbling behind him as you register what he said finally. 

"T-taken?" You squeak as he marches you to an abandoned section of the playset. He ducks inside, pulling you in with him and then sitting down. 

He points to the spot on the ground across from him and you get the hint, taking a seat. 

Once you do, he speaks. "Yes. Taken. If you'll allow, that is."

"N-no, no complaints here. I just, um. Really?"

Sun nods. "Mmmhmm."

Something clicks then. 

"Wait a minute. Sun, are you jealous?" You reach a hand out to set on his leg. "I hardly know that guy, I wasn't expecting him to ask me out! I um, I've had a crush on someone else, well, someones else, for a long time."

"Who?"

You laugh, not being able to take it. "You, silly! You and Moon both. Trust me, some guy from Bonnie bowl wouldn't be able to change that—"

You're interrupted by Sun's smile meeting your lips. Followed by him doing it again several times over, hands coming up to hold your face. Once he's satisfied he pulls away, sighing. 

"Sorry, Starlight. I, um, got a little excited hearing you say that. I didn't mean to interrupt you, what were you saying?" There's a dreamy lithe to how he speaks, it makes you giggle. 

Your hands come up to hold his, leaning into his touch a tad more. "Honestly, don't think it really matters at this point. I'd rather be doing more of that than talking right now, to be honest. Just wish I wasn't in this silly costume for all this."

Sun kisses your forehead, then presses his against yours. 

"I think you look very cute. That's... part of why I acted so rudely. I was upset he got to see you up close like this."

You chuckle. "Well, you get to see me now, don't you?"

Sun hums in agreement. 

"Then, let's make the most of it."

As you share another chaste kiss, you have to come to the undeniable understanding that you may very well have to thank your manager for making you wear this costume. 

Another kiss distracts you from thinking further. 

On second thought, maybe you'll keep this one to yourself.

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

Thank you for the fun little request @twomanypockets!! I thought that jealous Sun would go perfectly with it, hope you liked it ^-^

Thanks for reading!

Masterpost link

Tag list (if you would like added, see this post for more info):

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[shinene]

hi sorry, i dont post my art or OCs as much as i should :splinky:

THESE ARE MY MAFIA AU SIBLINGS, they like in some sort of cyberpunk world. (OH YEAH, THEYRE ALSO MEXICAN 🇲🇽‼) and yes,,, they are for self-insert if you wanna 😊💕

Lunático the moon, Desperado the eclipse, Solitario the sun, theyre all dogs of one of the prominent familia in this massive city. The boss is an intimidating evil android lady

i put them on artfight where you can also read a little about them-!!

i havent written anything coherent for them yet but the story i have planned atm is reader meets Desperado while searching for the missing brother (who was getting involved with bad peeps) and Desperado um. forces them to help find HIS missing siblings, but he also helps and protects them

the title i have right now is Mala Suerte

i have yet to decide if the twins live 🤔

also,,,, kinda want to make a version where the reader is a mafioso from a rival familia? of some kind,, but this version would be a female reader insert bc i have so many specifics for this stupid character, she's a goddamn menace !!

[yurinaa-world]

Hihihi!!! If its okay with you, could I please request an x reader with Dan Heng, Jing Yuan and Blade (platonically!) thats like the Collector from The Owl House? The readers a star child and has this kind of like sun and moon appearance and have a very childish personality !

Heres a link to the Collectors character if you haven't seen the show!

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://theowlhouse.fandom.com/wiki/The_Collector&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwj_mK_wk_uEAxXVzDQHHWLKAwcQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0h5oA7-5fony5qDSTZ04Jn

Please take your time when writing this, and if you feel unmotivated or don't want to, please ignore this 🫶 tysm!!!!

𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓇𝒶𝒸𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓈: Dan Heng, Jing Yuan & Blade !platonic x Gender-neutral Reader

𝒮𝓎𝓃𝑜𝓅𝓈𝒾𝓈: with a reader that's like the collector

𝒲𝒶𝓇𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔𝓈: fluff, spelling mistakes

𝒟𝒶𝓃 𝐻𝑒𝓃𝑔

You follow him around wherever you go, waiting for him to finish doing his work. When he’s done you drag him away to play with you.

You’ve played every game together and now you're kind of bored. Until Dan Heng comes back from his mission to this new planet with a game! Now you two can more fun

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

Ugh, you're so bored. You don't know what to do anymore. Hanging upside down is the only thing you’re doing. Just feeling the dizziness slowly creeping in, giving you a slight headache. Just waiting for something to happen.

“I got you a gift.”

You see Dan Heng walk in front of you, seeing him holding a bag in one hand, making you immediately jump down to see what he got! “What is it!”

You smile brightly while he gives you the bag. Pulling out a…board game! A new one. 

“Woah! I've never seen this one before! You’ve gotta teach me how to play.”

𝒥𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒴𝓊𝒶𝓃

He's the type to only let you win sometimes…if he’s feeling generous about even letting you get past half the board before striking all your pieces down. 

Oh don’t pout, it's just that he’s lucky today. Maybe you might have a chance in the next round.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

“Checkmate.”

Your eyes go wide when you see Jing Yuan get rid of your chess piece, leaving you the loser of this short round. “Ugh, I thought I was going to win!” You begin to sulk a little at this outcome.

“You must think more outside the box.”

He pokes your forehead, making you gently caress it and comfort it with your hands. “Outside the box?” You sigh

 “I’m always thinking outside, how much more?” 

𝐵𝓁𝒶𝒹𝑒

I just know this man secretly loves kids (Ignore Yanqing). He has a soft spot in his ice-cold heart. Beside that soft spot is pettiness. You ain't winning that game Monopoly, he doesn't care if you want to win so badly, you’re going to have to accept the cruel world.

When you complain to him in that high-pitched voice, it just makes him cover his mouth to not laugh at your face. He might ruffle your hair and mess it up just to see you get red-faced.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

“Go to jail.”

You just stare at that stupid card as Blade is watching and waiting for you to move your piece into the jail zone. “No way.” You huff putting your piece into the jail space monopoly board while grinding your teeth before handing the dice.

But now you’re tired! Glaring and seething at dice as you get no doubles while Blade’s made it four times around the board, bought out most places, and maxed them all out.

You start to get restless watching him roll and land his piece, yet nothing happens to him. You snatch the dice and roll…only to get no double!! “I give up.” You whisper and pout, gripping at your hair, only to see him grinning at you.

“What? I can hear you.”

You feel embarrassed, before reluctantly saying it again yet even more quietly “I give up”

“What I can’t hear-“

“I give up, okay!

if you liked this, consider tipping me on ko-fi! it'd mean a lot!

[silkscream]

CHAPTER 8: TERMINAL PARADISE

ੈ✩ gojo satoru x reader, geto suguru x reader

He likes to braid your hair while you braid Suguru’s. He thinks of bringing the bed from his room into yours, pushing the two twins together to fit the three of you. Looks at you both with puppy eyes.

ੈ✩ chapter cw/tags: explicit content (18+ mdni) , unprotected sex, high/drunk sex, dubcon, somnophilia, oral sex, threesome, the boys being........ evil?

ੈ✩ wc: 7.7k

ੈ✩ a/n: what's upppPP i'm a little tipsy rn but. here is chapter eight. title from the adrianne lenker song. anyways this chapter is very self-indulgent but as i read it back it makes me like. sad. i shan't elaborate. it's very stupid olympic sex i'll tell u that. belligerent fucking if u will

playlist ✸ read on ao3 ✸ series masterlist

June, 2009

Heat sticks onto you like a leech. You’ve started to think you’ve become one, what with the dark side of your technique. You walked the halls feeling like a white deer that failed to blend into a thicket.

You latch onto your boys like a leech, too. Fighting for space in the same sky in between the sun and the moon. Suguru likes to tell you you’re the stars in small ways, always a gleam in your eye despite mostly feeling dim. There isn’t much time for moping anymore, Satoru tells you. It’s the summer, after all. 

It’s quiet on Onjuku Beach. Well, quiet enough, save for the occasional splashing and the sound of Satoru’s cackles as he swims underwater and pulls Utahime’s ankle. You hold back laughter, watching her lash out like she usually does, Satoru running away like a little kid.

You take a bite of watermelon, the juice dripping out of the corner of your mouth. When you feel Suguru’s weight on the blanket next to you, you give him a slice. He wipes your mouth with the pad of his finger and tastes it on his tongue. He’d gotten accustomed to grooming you like that. Braiding your hair and sticking petals in it in the spring. Rubbing your shoulders with suntan lotion.

You glance at him afterward, when he’s not looking, grappling with the urge to bite him on the shoulder. You think that maybe Satoru would. You aren’t sure if you have the same privilege.

The afternoon drags on, barely changing the summer sky as the tide stays consistent between you and the moon. Shoko and Utahime had headed back an hour before, leaving Satoru’s head in your lap and Suguru seemingly napping underneath a Murakami novel. 

You’d scrunched your nose up at the sight of it—Norwegian Wood. You’d teased Suguru about it, accusing him of being pretentious with a secret love for hollow female characters. He’d rolled his eyes, tipping back a beer, teasing you for bringing No Longer Human.

“Talk about dysfunctional and sad,” he sneered. 

Satoru’s damp hair isn’t helping the shiver of your thighs, the sheen of your smooth skin now riddled with goosebumps. He’d teased you for taking the time to shave every part of your body before the mission, something you never did. Keeping up your appearance when you didn’t need to for him. Suguru likes a bush, too, you know. 

You flushed when he said that, like your face was on fire.

Being day drunk is fun, you decide. Haziness suits the three of you.

You’re sweltering, to say the least, considering the late afternoon sun is setting in a place that hits you directly. Suguru stirs. You feel his warm breath on the side of your thigh as he rises, rubbing his eyes. 

“You think I tanned unevenly?” he asks, squinting at you.

You shake your head, smiling. He smiles back, yawning just before he snaps the side of your bikini bottom without warning. You wince in surprise, blushing.

“Wanna wake up the prince?”

“But he looks so sweet when he’s asleep,” you sigh. “And so quiet.”

“Real fuckin’ quiet,” Suguru laughs. He pauses as he looks at Satoru, as if skimming his face for something. He flicks his nose with his finger, making Satoru flinch and whine.

“C’mon, Satoru. Up.”

He mumbles something in between a whimper and a slurred mutter, nuzzling his nose into your lap until you feel his hot breath fanning your cunt. He whines even more when you shift, attempting to get to your feet and put on your cover-up when he latches onto your wrists with his hands. 

“We gotta go,” you coo softly. 

He obliges with a pout. Satoru had rented a house with an ocean view for the three of you to stay in, much too luxurious for a mission that would only last a few days. But he had the expendable funds, and he refused to stay in a hostel like you had suggested. 

He continues his petulant attitude, his stride like that of a child on vacation. It did feel like a vacation, if you had to be honest. The curses you’d exorcised the day before were hardly exhausting.

It’s only been three days in Onjuku, but you think that the boys are plotting against you.

It’d started the first day, Thursday, after a few exorcisms and one Special Grade made of tongues that they were able to kill in record time. Satoru had insisted on showing as much skin as possible, citing the heat. He was wearing your favorite shirt of his, unbuttoned to show off his alabaster skin, unblemished by anything at all, not even the hot sun. 

He’d also insisted on dessert for breakfast, pointing out the novelty shops along the coast of the local town with the titillation of a real tourist, as if he hadn’t spent weekends there as a child. That’s how the three of you ended up eating popsicles for breakfast.

He was being annoyingly sly, pinching and prodding at you all morning like a little boy. He’d insisted on mimosas before noon, Suguru oddly going along with his antics at your expense. You’d had popsicles at the beach after. Satoru wouldn’t stop staring at you, blinking through the brain freeze as his mouth went to work on something strawberry-flavored. He was obscene with it, his tongue moving in languid movements, disgusting you but burning your skin at the same time.

His lips were stained bright red for the rest of the afternoon, but it looked so beguiling that it had you distracted for the rest of the day. You knew you could have him — he had never played hard to get — but something would gnaw at you telling you the opposite. Made him like forbidden fruit, deluding you.

For one, he was either missing your signals or feigning oblivion, a game that you willingly became a pawn to. He had always taken up too much space, but now he was tugging at your hair like you were twelve again despite your protests. 

And then, when you were brave enough to sneak a hand on his thigh underneath the dinner table or cuddled a bit closer to him in bed, he did nothing. 

Suguru was less obvious about teasing, which made you feel like you were crazy. 

It started with small grocery runs. Suguru accompanied you after Satoru refused to go on the principle of having enough money to dine out for every meal. It felt domestic to pick vegetables with him. Both times, he’d thrown in a treat or a drink that he knew you would like without asking. He’d praise you after the day’s work in ways that set your guts on fire.

He had also, it seemed, picked up the same habit as Satoru of tugging your hair to get your attention. There had been fleeting touches to your waist, too, when he would simply be passing by you after you were done showering. Absent-mindedly, as light as an apparition. Shifting bodies as casually as two people passing in a crowded bar, yet it felt like a car crash to you.

He’d continue that for the second day. Even yesterday, when you had been using the outdoor shower to rinse off after the beach, Suguru had walked in with a drink to offer. Despite still being in your bathing suit, you had felt scandalized by his gaze alone. 

Now, on Saturday evening, you’re alone with him in the beach house while Satoru attends a meeting in Shinjuku against his will. 

Suguru lays on the couch lazily, his tongue jutting out to lick the side of a joint in between tea-flavored papers. You walk into the living room with a yawn, having just woken up from a short nap after reading on the porch. At twilight, the sky flushes pink and purple above the horizon. 

You think about what to eat for dinner, thinking about the prospect of cooking with Suguru alone, which should come as a wholesome, harmless daydream, but truthfully makes your face warm. There are plenty of restaurants down the street, some that even delivered, you recall from a brochure left on the counter. You were intrigued by a seafood restaurant that Satoru had promised to take you to—

“Want a hit?” Suguru’s voice interrupts your ruminating.

“Oh,” you blink. “Um, sure.”

He chuckles as you join him on the couch as if he can read your mind. “It’s like Shoko’s cigarettes, I promise.”

“I know,” you frown, pouting. “I’ve smoked weed before.”

“Last time we passed a blunt around, you kept talking about how it’s against the law.”

“It is!” you mumble, shrugging.

“Yes,” Suguru grins. “And we’re sorcerers that wield magic and kill monsters.”

You roll your eyes, taking the joint from his fingers. He hands you a Zippo, the very one that you had gifted to Shoko months before. You’d have to remember to pocket it afterward to give back to her. 

Suguru chuckles when you take a hit and inevitably cough. When he takes it back, he huffs and exhales a cloud towards your face, grinning with ivory teeth as his Adam’s apple rolls back. You can’t help but fixate your gaze on it.

He taps your knees in a rhythmic pattern with his fingers when you take the next hit. Already, your vision is vignetted with hazy white, but every movement between the two of you feels incredibly sharp, as if you’re wielding the Six Eyes in a dream. Your mouth feels dry, your lips bitten down by your teeth. 

Suguru had been too lazy to change after the beach, barely in the mood to shower until the dampness of his swim trunks had gotten to him. He’d changed to another pair of shorts, the inseam short enough to allow exposure of his tanned thighs, and not bothering with a shirt because of the humidity. Even this close to him, he still smells like sea salt. His long hair was slightly textured, naturally tousled by the ocean.

You sink into the couch, sighing. You feel as though you're overheating. Despite this, Suguru is next to you, thigh to thigh, the spot in between you burning. 

His lips feel chapped, his tongue dry from cotton mouth. He thinks about sticking it down your throat.

The radio that comes with the house is old as shit, something inexplicably adorable enough to be in a vintage shop but not practical enough to own considering it would buzz every few minutes. The signal is weak, crackling as Tatsuro Yamashita plays at a low volume. 

Suguru throws his legs over your lap as he inhales, passing the joint to you but not releasing it. Instead, he merely holds it to your mouth himself, lighting it with Shoko’s Zippo.

Normally, you’d shake yourself after a session, splash your face with cold water before you would start imagining things. You were addicted to the feeling of his fingertips, the sensation exacerbated by your high. The last time you were like this, you’d pictured Suguru’s mouth on your cunt, the image bombarding your mind throughout the night. You numbed the urge with alcohol, still taking bong rips until you threw up in Shoko’s trash can.

You don’t think you’re hallucinating this time. His fox eyes point at you and descend down your face and jaw. 

“No more,” he says.

“Why not?” you whine.

“Your eyes are glazing over,” Suguru chuckles. “So fucking gone.”

“I'm not,” you sigh, pushing his legs off of you and leaning into his shoulder. 

He welcomes you with open arms, allowing you to lay your head on his chest. He smells like his sunscreen, coconut from his fragrance, salt from his body. His skin is incredibly warm too, but so is your entire body, particularly your chest. You can feel your heart beating. You can feel his palm on your thigh. Scorching.

So touchy with you. You wonder if he’s high on anything else. Maybe that was why he was so affectionate today.

Suguru stretches his legs across the couch, your body like a doll’s in between his thighs. He cracks open the can of beer beside him—when had he gotten up to get one?

It’s more humid at night. Or maybe it was the slick of his skin. Either way, you think your hair must be matted with sweat, a messy braid loosening at the back of your head. Strands spin in between Suguru’s fingers like loose threads of a sweater.

“You’re excited.”

“What?” you squeak out, surprised. His voice interrupts a miasma of inebriated thought loops, dripping desire bombarding the forefront of your mind. 

“Your heart’s beating fast,” he observes. “And you get real horny when you're high.”

"I don't—”

"Don't think Shoko and I don't notice Satoru stealing you away when we smoke," he laughs.

His fingers curl around your jaw, lowering to feel the quickening pulse of the right side of your neck. You’d surely smell like him by the time you shower tonight. Coconut and sea salt and beer.

You shake your head.

Suguru had been at a deficit with you for the past six months. He would dream about your cunt sometimes, the sight of you on New Year’s permanently etched into his brain. He and Satoru still looked at the same magazines they’d collected in adolescence, spilling ropes of white to the same pages that had always gotten him going, but you were still more prominent in his head.

He would think of your mouth parting from the sensation of his fingers pushing through the slick of your pussy. Your tongue exploring the underside of his neck.

Satoru has been overly possessive ever since the school year started. Suguru had started to believe that he would never have you again and that he should accept it. He didn't feel particularly entitled to you. The Six-eyed sorcerer had his claim on you since he was a child, anyway—Suguru would learn to get over it.

But now, here you are, in his lap. Your breath quickens at the feeling of his hand on your thigh. Suguru could bet that you were soaking through your panties, perhaps from the moment you found yourself alone with him.

Lately, Suguru wants you more than he wants Satoru.

He loved Satoru so much, more than he thought he was ever capable of since he’d met him at fifteen, but he constantly dreams of the softness of your skin instead. He liked that you were pliant, desperate. It’d be easy to coax a reaction out of you, letting him in the crux of your thighs with just the tiniest amount of teasing. Suguru knew that you would say yes to him as eagerly as you would to Satoru, your mouth already watering. It made him feel insane.

Your cheeks heat up when you feel his dick hardening beneath you. Prodding at the small of your back, the only thing separating you is a thin piece of nylon. 

“Aw,” he purrs. “You have a freckle right here.”

“Do I?” you breathe, your eyes lowering down to where Suguru’s finger strokes the inside of your thigh, the tip of it caressing a dot of dark brown. So tiny that you hadn’t even noticed it yourself. 

“S’cute,” he whispers. You shiver, then. His hot breath all over your neck is intoxicating. When his fingers skim your collarbone, he notices it’s hot to the touch, your pulse twitching the same as it does when he’d called you princess. 

You swallow thickly, turning to face him in his lap. He says your name with a heaviness that has your heart sinking to your feet.

“Can I kiss you?”

You don’t answer, merely turning your head to melt into him. High out of your mind.

He’s careful with you. His lips are soft despite being a bit chapped, his aftershave prominent in the air with notes of sandalwood. There’s intent to it, something you didn’t often feel with Satoru over the past few weeks. 

Your hands cup his jaw almost immediately, while his own hands cup the flesh of your thighs. They slide up to squeeze your ass, which forces a mewl out of your mouth. 

He didn’t think his cock could get any harder, wanting to burst from his shorts. It hurt.

“You’re so warm. You got a fever or something?”

“No,” you breathe.

“Your skin is burning. Wanna take this off?” he grins. A shark smile. His fingers skim the hem of your dress.

You do it without him begging. He doesn’t even have to convince you — you’re peeling it off, exhaling at the feeling of the thick air around you. Even with the slip of fabric off, you still feel so fucking warm against him.

You yelp when he grabs your breast, squeezing it along with his tongue on your nipple.

“Suguru—”

Your whine falls flat. You don't remember if you were meaning to scold him or to beg for more. He smiles with his forehead pressed to yours, his hands smoothing up and down the skin of your sides.

“Pretty,” he muses. 

“Pretty,” you repeat. He’s beautiful underneath you. 

A beat passes. You don't know who closes the distance first.

It’s a gnash of limbs, of lips, of teeth. Devouring each other. The weed made you so fucking wet, dripping into his lap through your panties. He doesn’t bother with them, pulling them to the side to fuck into you without a warning. You don’t even recall him taking out his dick.

The feeling of him makes you want to cry.

He groans at the bulge of your lower stomach, his cock carving out the gooey parts of you for him to nest in. The flush of your cheeks makes you look like a flower. Your cunt blooming for him, hot and tight.

You feel like you’re being split apart, like the skin of a mandarin orange unfurling beneath his hands.

“You’re so fucking wet,” he sighs, gaining control of his voice. Humming instead of growling, like he’s sinking into a warm bath.

You think it would burn if you weren’t so wet, his girth thicker than Satoru’s. 

He holds you by the hips, thrusting into you at a slow pace, breaking you open. Making a mess of your insides. 

“Does Satoru fuck you this good?” he grins.

You’re too breathless to reply. As if you even could, your face feverish at his taunting. You didn’t think you could survive a grip harder than Satoru’s, but despite Suguru’s gentle demeanor, his hands on you are brutish. 

You kiss him, licking up the taste of beer and weed, slightly herbal from the papers. He moans into your mouth when you grip his hair. It’s soft in between your fingers. Like real silk. 

Suguru had dreamt about this for months.

“You look so pretty,” he grunts, teeth bared. “Fuck. Thought about this for so long.”

You whine at his admission. His cock is impossibly deep inside you, coupled with the sensation of your limbs melting like boiled sugar. You roll your hips, cunt spasming around him already. Your nails make crescent-shaped marks on the meat of his broad shoulders, mirroring the same ones that he had made from gripping your waist.

Suguru’s hand holds the crux of your neck, tipping your face upward to look at him dead in the eye. Everything in your body is cloying heat, making it difficult to keep your eyes wide open, but he forces it from you with deeper thrusts. His fingers coax your mouth open for you to suck on, making you whimper, making you choke on his digits. 

There’s a flash in Suguru’s eyes, the smallest gleam that you had recognized in Satoru. Something predatory.

“Knew you’d be a good girl,” he whispers in your ear. “You think about me like this, don’t you?”

“Yes,” you whimper.

He pulls back, leaning back on the couch to let you have your rut, your pace eager like a starved puppy. Part of him wanted to mark you up just to piss Satoru off, though he knew the bastard would probably like it anyway. 

“How do you think about me?”

“I—Suguru—”

“Tell me,” he teases, his smile serpentine. He pulls out to flip you over, your tits pressed against the arm of the couch. “Like this? Pulling your hair?”

"I think about your mouth. About your cock inside me," you say. Mindless. Under his spell.

The stretch from behind feels somehow deeper than before. He groans at the way your back arches, your hair in his fist. Your knees are already chafing from the leather beneath you, the back of your thighs burning from slapping against his skin.

“Close,” you choke out.

“Yeah,” he sighs, biting your shoulder. “Cum on my cock, princess.”

You could pass out like this, you think. Your vision is already spotty, air stolen out of your lungs from the brevity of his movements. Your mouth hangs, wide open and slack as a pitchy moan rolls out.

Suguru follows soon after you — he can’t help it when you sound like that. He’s addicted. Desperate to live inside you like this, high in every earthly sense. He has half a mind to pull out before he spills, but he can’t pry himself from you.

Still dizzy, you lay on him while he cleans up the mess in between your thighs, his cum nearly leaking onto the couch. You’re surprised when he grabs the back of your neck to kiss you again. Neither of you keep track of how much time passes as you make out like teenagers. You feel almost faint in his arms.

“Fuck, you’re still high as shit, aren’t you?” Suguru says, squishing your face in between his hands. He slides his dick back into his shorts, light soiled from precum. If he hadn’t put them on again, he probably would’ve been too tempted for another round. Even with your hand palming him while you made out, you were clearly in another dimension.

Looking at him makes you feel raw. Like letting him fuck you was the same as volunteering your heart on a pulpit.

“Dinner.” It feels strange to use your voice. Swapping spit with Suguru wasn’t doing much for hydration.

“Yes,” he chuckles. “Want to go to that restaurant?”

“Mm,” you whine, slinging an arm around his neck. “Let’s do takeout.”

Satoru manages to slip back late at night, long past the time you and Suguru had fallen asleep on the couch with the television on. He smirks at the sight, hovering over the two of you like the Grim Reaper. Suguru would surely snap at him if he was awake, but for now, the Six Eyes examine every contour of each of your bodies fit together like clasped palms. 

The room smells like sex. Or maybe Satoru is projecting, his jaw only now relaxing after keeping his teeth so gritted during that stupid fucking meeting with the higher-ups. He kept thinking about you, distracted by the sight of you at the beach, your bare legs splayed out on the sand. 

Suguru probably got to you first. Of course, he would. It makes Satoru bite his cheek, but it also makes the butterflies in his stomach feel like daggers.

He stills when he hears you hum, mumbling something unintelligible as you bury yourself in Suguru’s chest. It’s so soft, so innocent, yet Satoru has to excuse himself to your shared room so he can wrap his hand around his cock.

He thinks about your mouth when he’s close and decides not to finish. He’d rather feel you against him instead, skin to skin.

The sound of you mewling in your sleep is adorable to him — you do so in his arms as he lifts you bridal style, prying your body from Suguru’s grasp. When he puts you down in the bed, you look angelic.

Satoru rubs your thigh, prying your legs apart gently so he can suck kisses into the skin. You twitch, your breath heavy. Indulging in your dreams while Satoru indulges in his. 

You squirm, stirring when you feel his tongue in your cunt. You’re already so wet for him, pliable and ripe for him even in your sleep. He tastes salt, the aftermath of his best friend’s release, and he laughs.

“Satoru,” you mumble, your voice still in a dream-like haze.

“I’m right here, baby,” he murmurs, licking a stripe from your clit to your belly button. “Missed me?”

“Mm.”

The air is thick with tension as he rises to slot his body behind yours. Satoru pumps his cock once before he slides into you without much warning. Despite being wet, your cunt burns.

“Sator—” He covers your mouth. 

“So fucking tight,” he groans. “Thought Sugu would’ve loosened you up, huh?”

“Hurts,” you whimper. 

“Take it,” he sighs. “Take it for me.”

His teeth on your shoulder make you dizzy. You still feel like you’re dreaming, but the stretch he has in between your walls makes it all too real. Satoru knows he doesn’t deserve you like this, but he’d decided the moment he stepped into the house that he would be selfish tonight. 

He fucks you like he’s starved. 

Even in the wine-dark night, he senses his best friend all over you with his Six Eyes. You’re covered in him. 

You pant into his palm until he descends his hand to your throat, pulling you taut against him so that your back arches. He doesn’t bother with making you cum, mostly circling your clit to get you wetter. Inside you, he feels boneless, washed away of his irritation. 

“Fuck,” he grunts. “Oh, fuck. ‘m sorry, baby.”

“Too much,” you whine.

He shoves his fingers into your mouth the same way Suguru had done hours before.

With a mean cant of the hips, you can feel his body slacken after warmth fills up your cunt. Your voice is high and needy on the comedown. You taste blood in your mouth from biting down on your lip too hard, chapped from all the kissing of today. 

“Love you,” he mumbles, his mouth on the nape of your neck.

He falls asleep soon after, leaving you with your thoughts, still half-drunk on him, barely lucid. It makes you sick, the way you want him, the way you let him use you. But you liked it. You liked his violence and possessiveness as if his actions were love letters.

Satoru had you weaned on something so saccharine that you stopped caring about the possibility of it spoiling. You welcomed the rot anyway. You had your own to wield with your bare hands.

August, 2009

You dream about them sometimes. You were shocked that the boys didn’t have any more games to play with you during that weekend, the two of them collectively ignoring the smell of sex in the air and the casual touches. They still touched you in their own ways. Reminding you of yourself. Your role as a toy.

Sometimes, you dream about them together with you as the voyeur. You’d see their broad backs, sweat pooling into a navel. Tongue-kissing. They were both too large to fit on the dorm bed together, you’d imagine. 

Satoru gets clingier. If that was even possible. He sleeps in your room instead of his more often now, leaving his clothes tucked messily in your bottom drawer. It’s almost domestic, the way he starts sweeping the floor like it’s a shared house, the way his toothbrush kisses yours in the chipped mug on the bathroom sink.

Even when he's not physically in your room, his presence always lingers. The amount of belongings left behind that are Satoru's continues to increase. Video games he forces you to play with him. Manga piled up on the corner of your desk.

He likes to braid your hair while you braid Suguru’s. He thinks of bringing the bed from his room into yours, pushing the two twins together to fit the three of you. Looks at you both with puppy eyes.

It’s during this time that you realize how touch-starved Satoru must’ve been as a child. He had clung to you then, too—always playing too rough, always finding a part of you to hold whether it had been your hand or your braids to pull. From an early age, he’d always needed that relief. Something to sink his teeth in fully.

He’s more than willing to wear his heart on his sleeve for you, which you find endlessly amusing. It makes him dopey, almost stupid in his affection for you. You’d consider yourself a girlfriend if either of you would say it out loud. Neither of you do.

Suguru likes to sneak up on you in small ways that evade Satoru’s watchful eyes. Like the times he sleeps in your dorm when Satoru is busy on a mission. Suguru will indulge your interest in movies that are more cerebral—psychological thrillers and slow cinema. Satoru doesn’t have the patience for it, always opting for a slasher horror or an action film. Suguru likes to be quiet with you in these instances. Likes to stroke your hair when you rest your head in his lap. Likes to fall asleep in your tiny bed, his larger body engulfing yours.

You’re being shared between them, though you aren’t sure of the conditions. You don’t have the guts to ask. You don’t even notice a significant change. Being attuned to the boys in physical and emotional ways is almost second nature to you, now.

Between July and August, the three of you are a set. 

A crowded bed. Weed-induced makeouts. Someone’s hand snapping the waistband of your shorts and slinking downwards. Sometimes, you can’t distinguish their touches. You don’t care to.

August is golden light waking you from sweet slumber. August is liquid gold in the sky reflecting on smooth skin. Bare knees hanging from rooftops. 

The summer loosens you up, much to Satoru’s delight. Enough to convince you to be more social, at least.

One night, your dorm is crowded—Shoko supplies the weed and Utahime supplies the alcohol.

Strip poker again. A unanimous decision because the school had poor ventilation and there were too many of you for your single box fan to air out the room. Shoko calls the game off knowingly—Satoru’s making his eyes at you again, drunk and high off his ass while you’re occupied with conversation. Any more clothing items stripped off and the rest of them would be kicked out of the room. 

You all settle on a movie drinking game, then. Something stupid, something American that Yuki picks out. You think it’s funny that she hangs out given her anarchist values on sorcery.

Satoru is, of course, annoyingly clingy and annoyingly cute. Hogging up all your attention the second you lean into Suguru in the slightest bit. You almost want to scold him, maybe spray him with a bottle like he’s a cat.

He doesn’t bother to put his clothes back on—not all of them, at least. He leaves his shorts on, though you think they must be a size too small given the inseam. You’re still clad in shorts and a crop top, giving Satoru any excuse to touch any expanse of skin between your hips and ribcage despite the number of times you complain about being too warm.

The girls get too drunk too fast. Yuki falls asleep in Suguru’s lap while Shoko and Utahime end up making out without caring about who’s looking. 

The minute the three of them are out your door, Satoru’s lips are on yours. Teeth adamant on biting into the flesh of your bottom lip like a predator. He tastes like strawberries this time. You can barely keep up before you register that Suguru is behind you, laughing, cursed energy flickering.

Despite everyone’s departure, the room feels smaller. 

Satoru has never been so eager to show off like this, believe it or not. He usually waits until the two of you are alone, though your reaction time is always too slow and the flippant speed that he takes you the millisecond you get privacy together is always too fast.

Maybe sometimes, Suguru would be asleep nearby while Satoru would tease you to sleep, but he’d never be a part of it. Certainly not in the same room.

So it has you deeply flustered now, just like it had been those many months ago in the late hours of New Year’s Day. Rushed and torrid. Two pairs of snake eyes on you. Getting torn apart by two sets of hands.

It seems that your suspicions on that beach weekend were correct.

Satoru’s been bringing up Suguru when he fucks you lately, asking you if you think his other half is more attractive. If you’re thinking about Suguru while he’s inside of you. 

Of course, you don’t answer—you never do. But Suguru seems to be in on it, given the amount of times he bumps into you, the way he’s started to call you Twigs. He seems to be everywhere, all the time, the exact second Satoru isn’t around. Like a scab that won’t heal. 

He buys you lunch often, likes to treat you after studying the more practical parts of Jujutsu. Plays with your hair absentmindedly just like Satoru does.

He’s doing it now, making your scalp tingle as he presses his mouth gently at the nape of your neck—a stark contrast to Satoru’s tongue in your mouth. 

“You gonna let Suguru watch, baby?” Satoru mumbles against your jaw, his breath hot. “Or d’you want him to join?”

You nod dumbly, barely aware of yourself. It’s how Suguru manages to get your shorts off so swiftly. His hands caress your shoulder blades with palms outstretched underneath your shirt. Your own pair of wings. 

It’s too easy—like picking apart petals off a rose. Rough as the boys are, they don’t need to be. You’d fold over for them without much convincing. You can tell how much they love that about you, how Satoru probably whispers about it to Suguru in between classes when you aren’t watching.

So sensitive every time I touch her. Like it’s her first time all over again.

“Suguru,” you whine. “Kiss me.”

He laughs and looks at you like a shiny new toy. Precious. Suguru is somehow more boyish when he’s high, his cat-like smile as lazy as his slurred movements. He’s always graceful despite the posture problem he shares with Satoru. When he smokes, there’s a lightness within him. Rolls off the shoulders like water falling.

He’s perfect.

Satoru preps your cunt with his mouth. You cry out immediately, feeling the vibration of him beneath you. It was good that they cut you off from the joint considering how many beers you and Utahime were passing back and forth. You’re light enough now to feel every lick and suck so acutely, Satoru’s mouth making a mess of you. 

Suguru works on your neck, then takes your nipple in his mouth. You swallow a moan. Kitten licks from both of them and you’re already convulsing.

“Think you broke a record, princess,” Suguru grins.

“Best girl,” Satoru sighs, biting into the meat of your thigh. 

“C’mere. Let me taste her.”

You expect Satoru to huff in protest or move out of the way, but he doesn’t. He leans over your body and presses his mouth to Suguru’s, licking into it obscenely with a small groan. Your eyes widen with fascination, cheeks blooming.

“How is she?” Satoru smirks.

“Perfect. Just like always.”

You whimper in response. They both smile at you; God and the devil. You swear their faces blur into each other.

“That turn you on, baby?”

“She’s so cute,” Suguru muses. “All fucked out already.”

Something divine awakens in your blood. You want to indulge in them, be their pet. It’s like your brain is melting into a pool of desire, dripping out of you. You blink slowly, feeling a pressure in your stomach that bleeds of desperation.

“Want you both,” you pant. Your lashes flutter when Suguru feels the slippery plushness of your walls with his fingers. “Fuck, want it so bad. Need it.”

“So fucking wet, holy shit,” he groans. “All this for me?”

“You?” Satoru frowns. “I’m the one who made her cum.”

“And I’ll make her cum on my cock.”

“Dude—”

“You need to learn how to share, Satoru,” Suguru chuckles. His fingers are incessantly scissoring into you, yet the two of them bicker as if you aren’t there. “You owe me for getting us in trouble last week.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault that we both forgot to put up a veil—”

“Shut him up, will you, sweetheart?” Suguru interjects. “Shit, he’s hard as a rock.”

You whine when Suguru removes his fingers, but he’s quick to fuck into you. It’s whiplash, the stretch of him. Satoru rolls his eyes and leans in to cup your face with his hand, kissing you while his other hand pumps up and down his cock.

“Oh,” you gasp.”S-Suguru…”

“Does it hurt, pretty?”

“N-no. Feels too good.”

“Feels better than Satoru? Yeah?” he sneers.

Satoru glares at him, exhaling a groan in between annoyance and desperation as he palms himself. 

“You know, I was gonna fuck her face but now I think that’s your job.”

“I’ll fuck you after, relax,” Suguru chides. “I wanna kiss her.”

He leans down. His messy bun has fallen out of its scrunchie — it’s one of yours. Even when he has his usual hairstyle, he keeps it around his wrist sometimes. Now, his hair tickles your face as he kisses you, hand to your throat to hold you in place while your hips quiver at the sheer girth of him. 

“Satoru, c’mere,” you whimper.

He kisses you deeply before kneeling in front of you, his cock hovering over your face. You take him in your mouth, the flushed skin of his dick tight and throbbing underneath your tongue. You like the way he groans and pulls your hair, mirroring the way you were just pulling on Suguru’s hair when his face was buried in your neck. 

“Holy fuck,” Satoru moans. His thighs twitch. Suguru’s right – you look fucked out, eyes rolling backward. Must be the drugs. Then again, Suguru��s hitting every sensitive spot inside of you at a relentless pace.

“Such a good mouth, Twigs.”

If you weren’t getting fucked, you would’ve cringed at that. You hate when Satoru calls you that in bed. 

“Good cunt, too,” Suguru rasps. “Perfect cunt. Fuck, do you feel that, baby? Feel me up to your stomach?”

You moan around Satoru’s cock.

Satoru’s eyes are blown wide, a drop of blue expanding against the stark white of his sclera. He used to dream about this. His two favorite people in the world. It had occurred to him just then how much he wanted you both in the back of his mind. Wanted to consume you both in one bite.

He pulls out of your mouth, stroking his cock slowly as he watches. 

You whine something unintelligible. Begging, mumbling. “Faster.”

“Any faster and I’ll cum, baby,” Suguru groans. 

“Don’t cum inside her,” Satoru warns. “I’m still pissed at you for the last time.”

Suguru merely laughs. “Come over here and open your mouth then, pretty boy.”

His thrusts are getting sloppier but rougher. The impact of him is dizzying, the hand he has wrapped around your throat making you lightheaded. You can only stare with a parted mouth, fascinated by the succulent pink of his lips as he focuses on making you cum. You’re too out of breath to even tell him when it happens. 

It turns you inside out. Liquefying your body like treacle.

“You’re so cute when you cum, baby,” Satoru coos, squeezing your breast.

“Fuck, fuck, Satoru, c’mere,” Suguru slurs. He pulls out of you then, pumping himself over Satoru’s tongue until his cum spills onto it. He swallows and scrunches his nose.

“Battery acid.”

Suguru laughs, then looks back at you. “You’ll have to weigh in on who tastes better, princess.”

“My turn,” Satoru grins, his eyes a bit feral. 

You yelp when he manhandles you and gets you into his lap. He starts marking you up. Bites you a little too hard as if he’s trying to wake you up. When he thrusts into your cunt, you gasp, feeling him all the way into your guts. You spasm around him, still sensitive from Suguru.

He holds your hips and fucks into you at a steady pace while Suguru comes to caress your back, licking over your shoulder blades. 

“Satoru, you’re going to make her look like a domestic violence victim with the marks you’re making.”

“She likes it,” Satoru pouts.

“Fuck, ‘m hard again,” Suguru groans. “Lay her down.”

“No, I want her like this.”

“Too fucking bad, I want you like this.” Suguru pulls at you until your back hits the mattress and Satoru rolls his eyes, gripping your hips with bruising force as he drapes your legs over his shoulders. 

Suguru bites Satoru’s neck, peppering it with kisses. Watching them in front of you is tantalizing, makes you clench around Satoru harder. 

“Shit, you like that, baby? You like looking at us?” Satoru moans.

“Y-yes.”

Suguru spits in his hand as he preps Satoru from behind. It’s minimal, given how impatient he is. He reaches over to your bedside table, fumbling with a bottle of lube. It doesn’t take long until his cock fills Satoru to the brim. 

“Jesus.”

“Shut up and take it.”

Satoru feels too hot, too full. The feeling of Suguru’s cock in his ass inadvertently makes him bury himself even deeper into you, and he’s already on the brink. Suguru reaches over Satoru’s body to press a thumb to your aching clit until you cum with a strangled cry. 

The boys try to time their stuttering hips at a similar rhythm, but Satoru feels like he’s losing his mind. Caught up in between both of you, melting, barely lucid. Eyes squeezed shut with his mouth falling open. 

“Tell me you love me.”

You blink at him, wondering who he’s asking. The flush in his cheeks makes him look exhausted, spent. Drunk over the bacchanalian mess of it all.

“Love you, Satoru,” you whimper anyway. “I love you.”

He moans at that. Gasps when he feels the stretch of his hole split open on Suguru’s cock.

You watch with tears in your eyes, overstimulated from your orgasm. Over Satoru’s shoulder, Suguru locks eyes with you and smirks, not letting up eye contact nor the stimulation of your clit with his fingers. He doesn’t care that you’re convulsing underneath them, doesn’t care that hot tears are streaming down your face. He always thought you looked beautiful when you cried. It’s sick of him, maybe, but he wants to be the one to make you do it, even when it’s not his cock inside of you.

“Shit— Sugu—”

Satoru hits his peak, filling you with his cum when Suguru hits the perfect spot inside him. He’s whimpering. His eyes are glassy.

“Fucking shit, you’re tight,” Suguru mutters. “Gonna cum.”

“Not inside,” Satoru whines.

“You’re a fucking brat,” Suguru chuckles. 

Of course, Suguru disobeys, cumming inside Satoru with a guttural groan. Once he pulls out, Satoru collapses on top of your body, face buried in your hair.

You whine. You’re overheated, smothered. Your body feels as though it’s been rearranged multiple times like malleable clay in each of their hands. It’s a miracle that Satoru pulls his dick out of you at all.

“The hell was that?” he asks Suguru, out of breath. Suguru simply smiles, ignoring him.

“Let’s run her a bath. Poor baby looks like she’s gonna pass out.”

He’s right, admittedly. You aren’t even sure if you could get up if you wanted to, which is why Satoru scoops you in his arms. 

“We can’t all fit in the tub,” you mumble.

Satoru laughs. “Yes, we can. But fine, we’ll just shower after you.”

The two of them handle you like glass. The swapping of washcloths and soap bottles makes the ordeal ritualistic. Suguru runs his fingers through your wet hair while Satoru lifts one of your legs to scrub. 

“Little princess,” Suguru says.

“You guys treat me like a pet.”

The two of them exchange a glance. Unreadable. But there’s something of a knowing smile in Satoru’s expression.

“You’re just precious s’all. Perfect girl.”

You sigh, sinking into the water. Something turns over in your stomach, but you’re soothed by the sound of Suguru lightly humming behind you. They’re gentle with you. It’s ironic.’

Suguru kneads your spine and presses kisses to your wet skin. The smell of sex dissipates and the scent of Suguru’s shampoo wafts under your nose instead—he’d left it in your bathroom one weekend when Satoru was out on a mission. You have a suspicion he did it on purpose to get a rise out of Satoru or to make you smell like him. You didn’t mind either way. 

Every touch feels blistering as much as it feels soothing, somehow. White-hot, too noticeable, yet the feeling of their hands lets you exhale. Maybe it was the sex. You couldn’t even really look Satoru in the eye, not really. Something in the face was constantly changing, as if he was slowly transforming whenever you were joined together in ways that were beyond you.

He’d gotten rougher. Meaner in the hips, even if his kisses were meant to cherish. He’d get too eager. He always was, to be fair, but it’s been ferocious from him. Bruising your hips with the force of his hands, handprints adorning your ass. It would be Suguru to pick up the pieces, to soothe you with sweet nothings despite his cock splitting you open. It was only a few times since the beach trip, but it was as if they planned it together.

You realize this now in your post-sex haze. Steam in the air as heavy as your lids. They wanted to take care of you so badly. They just had to ruin you a little beforehand.

[crusty-chronicles]

🎪Crusty's Masterlist of Madness🎪

A Masterlist of all my current works so things are easier to find. An 🔞 marker for any smut fics. Everything else is just fluff.

RULES FOR REQUESTING- please check this out before requesting. Thank you 😘

Airheaded S/O Headcannons: Just a bunch of head cannons of characters (mostly anime) who I feel would thrive with a very stupid, yet incredibly strong S/O

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*old* The Guide To An Idiot's Heart: A Viktor x airheaded s/o fic.

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🔞Smut Week: Smut oneshots everyday for a full week

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Hunter x Hunter

Multi chapter fics

Moon and Sun:(Platonic) Older reader goes soft after unexpectedly looking out for two boys. Whether it be troubled past or mutant ants, their promise to protect will never waiver.

🔞Forgiveness and Acceptance:

It's been a little over a year since the Chimera Ant Incident. A year since you'd made that fateful decision to run away during the fight with Pitou, leaving Kite behind in the process. A year of trying to cope with the aftermath. Blaming yourself for his death and subsequent resurrection, coming back as the very creature that had ended his life. Trying to navigate through your relationship with guilt weighing heavy on your shoulders. So much so that you'd do just about anything for him. Kite however, doesn't view your relationship through the same negative light you do.(Confirmed sequel to Moon and Sun.)

🔞Sandwiched Between:Getting a little too drunk, you and your friends start getting frisky. Unfortunately for you, you're sandwiched between a man who wants to ruin you and another who treats you like glass. PART 1 2

🔞Love Me Like I'm Your Last: A quickie with Kite leads to more than you expected. PART 1 2 3 4

One shots/Headcannons/Drabbles

🔞Med School Won't Pay for Itself: In which Leorio seeks a different means to make money for med school

Why MaS Reader Doesn't Get Along With Kurapika

🔞Kite with an S/O on Their Period

Kite As A Dad

Kurapika with a Phantom Troupe Hating S/O

HxH Men Throwing Down with their S/O's Plushies

Kurapika With An S/O Who Hunts Down Their Family

Kite and his S/O Get Into an Argument

Self-Doubts: It's a mystery how someone like you could have a partner who was seemingly perfect. It made you wonder just what exactly he saw in you. Though maybe you weren't the only one with these doubts.(Kite x Reader)

Touch: In which cuddling with Ging takes a soft turn

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Yu Yu Hakusho

Multi chapter fics

Not so Bad: The gang find a small, frazzled reader after being sent to stop a demon trafficking ring. Upon arriving to the location, they quickly realized everyone was dead, everyone except you. Reader is taken in and becomes attached to a particular demon with three eyes. PART 1 2

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One shots/Headcannons/Drabbles

Just Friends: In which our favorite fox realizes something while you tend to his wounds

Hiei Courting Headcannons: How our favorite three eyes demon courts Reader

Stubborn: In which our two favorite demons tend to and scold Reader for being careless during a fight.

Hands Off: What happens when someone tries to woo Hiei's very stupid S/O. What happens when they move in to kiss. Absolute madness is what.

Hiei with a Tall S/O

Reactions to Reader Being Hit On and Going to Them for Protection

Yu Yu Hakusho Men Receiving Flowers

Revelations: It's no secret Kurama's soft on you. But when his demon form finally sees the light after hundreds of years, the fact only further cements itself.

Jin With A Human Bookworm S/O

Hiei Bringing His Airheaded S/O To Demon World

Kurama With An S/O Who Loves Plants

Yu Yu Hakusho Men Reacting To Their S/O Singing

Hiei and Kurma Seeing Their S/O at the Dark Tournament

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One Piece

What It Takes To Move Forward: Coming to terms with the fact that Sabo wasn't dead.

Sick and Tired (Of You): In which our reader falls ill at the worst possible time. Unfortunately for Law, it's up to him to take care of you. Or alternatively: Trauma dumping with The Surgeon of Death.

[andysyearn]

Letter to Sicily

Rating: General

Fandom: Agatha All Along

Relationship: Lilia Calderu / Reader

Characters: Lilia Calderu, Reader

you can read it on AO3 as well → ♡

Dear Lilia,

I've never been to Sicily before but it felt like home when I was with you.

The way you described everything in detail felt like I was born there.

Your little glimpse of checking on me if I payed any attention to your words... don't worry, I memorized them all.

but I fear my gaze was focused on your lips for another reason.

Lips cherry colored like one of those lily flowers I bought you the other day. You called me silly after I told you it reminded me of you but did you know it actually reminded me of that part you burried long time ago? Even though you had so many stories about Sicily and Italy, it seemed like you left a big part of yourself there, so I wanted to remind you how much I loved that part of you. You know, love, lily flowers represents that part of you.

But that's not all…

I didn't believe in God but I believed you were my savior, cara mia. I've never felt so warm and fuzzy from someone else's smile but yours. Not even the Sun shines that bright. How can I go outside and look at the sun again? Yet it reminds me of you.

You called me my Moon because my light always shone on you and guarded you during the nights everytime you woken up screaming. It's true, I was there comforting you from your gaps and nightmares but don't forget the Moon can't shine without its Sun.

You being close to me felt more powerful than any spell any witch has ever cast.

Your beautiful hazelnut eyes sparkled with joy and kindness yet I could see the tiredness and fear behind them. Oh my sweet Lilia, I wish I was this selfless in life. I didn't deserve you.

But somehow you found me and I melted under your touch. Do you recall the first night?

It was during the Sunday karaoke night in the center, not that far from your shop. You just finished your song - I believe it was Meadowlark - I felt ironically so alive during your breathtaking performance on the stage. Your powerful voice made my heart jump and my soul was suddenly so lighten up. Trust me, buying you that drink cost me my whole courage I had and here we were.

The way your curls framed your stunning face while you were laughing at my stupid jokes but you genuinely thought they were funny. My best night ever...and not the last.

You've changed my life and I hope you know that. Your name truly signifies everything about you - beauty, purity, love, spirituality and rebirth. I hope I reminded you enough of that as this letter is never meant to be opened because now you're gone forever, my love.

I hope your next life will be less painful and more happy. Less darker and more bright, just like you were.

I miss you.

Only yours,

la to luna ô to suli.

(Your Moon to your Sun)