#I AM NOT NORMAL FOR HER HELP SHE IS ALL I DRAW... | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

haztory · 2 months ago

Text

bias.

masterlist | part two

— jack abbot x fellow f!reader; attending/fellow dynamic, age-gap (unspecified but assumption is reader is late 20s and up while jack is mid-40s), heavy plot, slow-burn, angst, character harassment (from an original male character), mentions of grief, mentions of jack's late wife, mentions of racism against staff, sexual content (mild), mentions of death, protective jack abbot, medical inaccuracies, mentions of needles, these two taking care of each other without realizing, ohio slander (srry!)

— word count: 11k

— summary: A week on the floor with Dr. Jack Abbot. Or: The multiple shifts in which Dr. Abbot's bias towards you shows.

SHIFT ONE, Sun-Mon, 4:15 AM:

“Did you tell Reno you were going to shove your foot up his ass?”

You pause your charting at the rolling cart outside of North 12 and look over your shoulder.

Jack stands behind you, arms crossed, with a raised brow and his lips pulled thin. Not sternly— you're familiar with what that looks like, have been on the receiving end of that a few times. This is a tempered concern, one he pushes down lest he get too involved.

“Yep.” You answer, simply. You return to your charting, fingers clacking loudly on the keyboard as the truth buoys in the air.

He huffs a breath, heavy. An attempt to roll out the strife that comes with the burden of being an attending. “You trying to make my Monday shitty?”

“Trying to keep you on your toes, old man.” You return.

He steps in beside you, leaning his good shoulder against the wall as he faces you. He keeps his gaze beyond you, scanning the movements of the ER.

“You wanna tell me why?”

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“I don’t.” He agrees.

“So, why are you asking?”

“Morbid curiosity.” He admits, dryly. Hazel eyes fall to you, swimming with a suppressed amusement that only a poet could accurately describe. “And he wants me to write you up.”

A sigh escaped your mouth, heavy and inconvenienced. You turn to him. “He told Anna Maria to spend less time speaking ‘her language’ and more time speaking ‘ours’ so she could fulfill his orders.”

His lips flick downward, heat infusing with the twitch. “You see it?”

“No. Caught her in the stairwell crying and she told me. Apparently, he’s been picking at her all night. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t the first one he said this to. So, I told him if I ever see him speaking like that to one of my nurses I’d take him to the parking lot and shove my foot up his ass.”

Jack nods. It’s weighty and slow as he digests your words, but there is otherwise no conflict on his face. The heat from before extinguishing. No shade change, no visible opinion. Resolute, resound, completely normal, when he says, without much effect, “Okay.”

The typical smart quip dry remark remains nowhere to be found.

He steps away from you and walks the short distance to the front desk and settles behind it. You watch him quietly, clueless as he grabs a post-it note from behind the desk and a pen from the cupholder and begins writing something. Completely unable to read the man.

“Okay?” You probe, drawing closer to him.

“I believe you.” He says.

A beat passes, filled with the low hum of the moving ER and the faint sound of his pen scratching on the paper. He puts the pen back into the cup holder then folds the paper up, tucking it into the breast pocket of his scrubs. It’s a simple thing yet the charged silence makes it feel like a great epic.

The fated paper written on account of your words. His face makes no betrayal of its contents. Even in your own obvious glance down to the paper then to his eyes, he makes no movement to provide clarity.

“I’m not apologizing.” You say after a minute.

“I didn’t ask you to.” Jack tilts his head to the side. “Would’ve done the same damn thing.”

Silence stretches, long and heavy as your eyes hold on his.

“I don’t like him.” You explain, as if that could help anything. Jack nods and this time you understand it to be one of agreement.

There’s no doubt of the new transfer’s value as a knowledgeable doctor, just as there is no doubt that PTMC needs another night shift doctor on the rotations. But within those resounding truths comes another of equal importance.

Dr. Maxwell Reno, the new fellow on the floor transferred from Cleveland three months ago, is a dick.

“Neither do I. But I don’t like anybody.” A flicker of understanding sparks in his eyes. “I’d pay good money to see you take him in the parking lot, though.”

A smile finally breaks onto your face. “Give me Friday off and I’ll do it right here.”

“Yeah, and get stuck with paperwork? Try again, city girl.”

“Worth a shot.” You shrug and he shakes his head. Only a slight downturned smile gracing his face..

A steadied quiet fills the space. The ER only slightly awake tonight with the small troubles. A young boy who had fallen off his bunk bed, a teenager on fluids from a stress induced migraine, and some other small plights that have trickled onto the floor. It’s hardly ever like this, the forbidden “quiet”. Usually a storm falls in shortly after but tonight, the quiet has been just that. Quiet.

There’s a slight wariness in everyone, the other shoe dangling from the ceiling that everyone keeps glancing to. Waiting for it to teeter, maybe even thud violently against the floor. And yet, nothing. For once, it’s a nice thing to wade into, because it leads to moments like this. Pleasant exchanges and generous smiles from the man usually averse to those.

“I can tell Anna Maria to come talk to you.” You supply, only to make his life easier.

He shrugs, considering it. “Sure, only if she wants to. But you handled it. Should be fine.”

“You gonna do it?”

“Write you up?” He asks. You nod.

He walks around the front desk, his slow gait bringing him before you. “Do I look like a school principal?”

“Grey hair had me convinced.”

He glares. The edge of your grin cracks wider. “I can’t professionally condone fellow-on-fellow crime—”

“—You have got to stop hanging with Shen—”

“—but you’re my only brawler on the floor and we’re running low on those. So no.”

“Brawler? It was one time!”

“You tackling that 37-year-old meth addict is a fan favorite.”

“Is that why you’re keeping me around?”

“It’s not because of your suturing, I can tell you that.” He leans comfortably against the desk, and for all the quiet murmurs that have gone around about Jack and his hard sarcasm and no-bullshit attitude, he is wildly comfortable in this moment. Eased, despite the constant glancing at the other shoe. Joking, at your expense. As he settles into an easy tease and his body relaxes, you find that you don’t mind him poking at you all that much. Not if it gets him like this.

You raise a brow at the mention. “Didn’t realize you all were thinking about it that much.”

“Every night before bed. Your screams help me sleep.”

You hit his arm playfully. “You’re so morbid.”

“Wait ‘til you see what I use to meditate.”

You feel, then, the tingling sensation of an audience on you. Glancing up, you see the quick scurrying of some nurses pretending to be occupied. The whites of their eyes seen at the very last second, just as they pull their stares away from the quiet moment.

“You should get out of here before the peanut gallery starts accusing you of bias.” There’s a thrum of dismay that pulses through you at the suggestion. The feeling of a good moment ending that you unknowingly try to cling on to. You stampen it out before the possibility of it shows on your face.

“Bias? Of what? I don’t like you that much.” The tone is dry, wholly Jack, and yet his eyes make home to a low burning whim of trouble like it always belonged there. “If anyone says anything, I’ll just take it from the expert and shove my foot up their ass.”

He taps his hand on your desk, a finalizing drum before he departs.

“Hopefully the metal one.” You call after his retreating figure.

“You know it.” He says without looking back.

The sound of your laugh resounds through the halls.

SHIFT TWO, Mon-Tues, 9:17 PM:

Meredith Sakman, a 67-year old woman who fell off her kitchen chair as she was trying to clean her kitchen light, sits before you in the examination room as you suture the superficial laceration sustained to the right side of her head.

Her hands, wrinkled with age and wisdom, fiddle with each other incessantly. Passing from twiddling with her wedding ring to drumming on her thighs as you weave thread through skin.

Sensing her discomfort, you fill the space. “So, Mrs. Sakman—how long have you been married?”

She seems startled out of the fog of her head, ”Oh, uh, 42 years.”

“Wow. Congratulations.” You hum, sincerely. “What’s the secret?”

“I don’t know. All these years and he’s still the person I look for when I walk into a room.”

“Must be an outstanding man.”

“When he wants to be. He’s a little bit of a grouch, but he makes me laugh.” She laughs, and the wistfulness of her voice grounds the room. You smile inadvertently at the details of her love.

“Are you dating anyone?” She asks curiously, just as your forceps tie one end of the suture.

“Uh, no. I am not.” Saying it isn’t a confession of fault. It’s fact.

The priority has always been your career. School first to get you to the good job that can get you to the rest of your life. You weren’t made for much of the troublesome youth, a fortunate detail your parents never took for granted. Smart head on your shoulders that got you the New York residency for three years, that led you to pursue the Pittsburgh EM fellowship—year one of two already knocked off your belt.

Dating—as desirous as it could be on the lonely nights—didn’t fit much into that picture. The type of men that were interested in dating you didn’t fit into that picture.

“Well that’s odd.” Mrs. Sakman heaves, truly stunned by your admission. “You’re a beautiful young woman. And a doctor. They should be rushing to snatch you up.”

“Well, you know. Guys my age tend to find that intimidating and often can’t measure up.” You explain simply and the older woman scoffs.

“You need an older man.” She smiles knowingly. “One who knows a couple of things and can be your match. I’ve had my fair share of them and they were quite the memories.”

You don’t settle too long on her words, no matter how much you agree with them. Have always been told that you needed someone mature, like you.

You move on. “I bet you were a hot gun back in the day.”

“Still am, sweetheart.” She giggles. “You know, my son is single.”

You give her a deadpan stare from above, halting the thread of your needle to meet her gaze.

“Mrs. Sakman—“ You scold and she holds her hands up in defense.

“He’s a very smart man! Has his own accounting firm, very sweet and I’m not saying that because he’s my son. He’s 40 and you’d make a good match. And with that face of yours, you’d give me beautiful grand babies.”

You laugh, tying up the final knot in the suture and setting the forceps on the cart beside you. The excess thread is cut off with your scissors. “Unfortunately, I’m not in the habit of dating anyone related to my patients.”

“Then I’d like to see another doctor, please. So that way I’m not your patient.”

You shake your head with a smile. “You are a trip, Mrs. Sakman.”

The exam room settles into a comfortable silence, filled with the overheard sounds of the life of the ER around you. The small chatter in the curtained room beside you, the hum of machines, the occasional shout or laugh from the nurses desk.

Just as you finish up your dutiful matters to her laceration, slipping the gloves off and directing your attention to her to explain proper suture care—

—she’s calling out to someone over your shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir! Can you be my doctor?”

Turning around, you see Jack is caught mid-stride walking past your room. His face scrunches in concern.

“Everything alright?”

“Mrs. Sakman—“ You begin hastily, mortification burning through you as he steps into the enclosed space.

Mrs. Sakman, in her rosy glory, plows on. Meeting the man with an effervescent grin that gives no cause for caution. “Oh yes, your doctor here is lovely and has taken such good care of me, but I’d like you to be my doctor.”

A brow raises, his eyes flicking to yours for explanation.

You flounder for a moment, your mouth opening and closing repeatedly. The chagrin you feel is red hot and there is little hope that it doesn’t reflect obviously in your face.

“Dr. Abbot—” You sigh, begrudgingly, fingers at your forehead as you try to rub the embarrassment away, “Mrs. Sakman is trying to set me up with her son but as I said, I do not date relatives of my patients.”

“Ah.” He takes the information in stride, nodding his head with latent interest. Cool, calm, and collected while you fluster over the discussion of your dating life.“You trying to take one of my doctors from me, Mrs. Sakman?”

“If you’ll let me.” She smiles

“You don’t have to put your son through that torture. Order me a pastrami deli sandwich and I’ll give her to you for free.” Jack tilts his head to the side, grabbing a pair of gloves from the wall. He pointedly ignores the loud offended gasp you emit.

“Let’s take a look at you.” Sliding the gloves on and stepping up beside the older woman, he begins a gentle survey of the laceration. Fingers slightly touching the wound, turning his head this way and that in review.

“Sutures look good. CT clean?”

“Not even a hairline fracture.” You present, “She’ll be tired, maybe a bit dizzy, but otherwise she’s good. Anticoagulants have been prescribed along with tylenol for the next couple of days. Gonna keep her for another hour for observation before discharge with a wonderful guide on how to clean her sutures.”

“Good.” Jack nods. “Well, unfortunately, Mrs. Sakman, there’s not much more for me to do that your current doctor hasn’t. So you will have to stay in her care.”

“You can’t make an exception for a poor woman?” She sweetens.

“Your flirtations won’t work on me, young lady.” He issues, low and exceptionally playful.

Mrs. Sakman giggles akin to a teenage girl, her face turning rosy as she waves Jack away.

“Besides—” Hie head gestures to you as he speaks to Mrs. Sakman, “—we call this one Rambo behind her back. We give her up, we gotta spend more money on security and that’ll come out of my paycheck.”

Jack takes off his gloves and tosses them into the bin, giving you a long, knowing look. Mirthful and wry, it holds against your dry, scolding one. Waiting for you to make a rebuttal, calculating the moves and ways it would come out of your mouth for him to counter. You anticipate it, depriving him of the reaction that he’s looking for despite the way his eyes dig into yours, searching for it. Looking like he couldn’t stop looking for it, like it would make his whole night if you just caved.

You stick your tongue in your cheek and he watches, fixated—the ghost of amusement casting over his face as he sidesteps you by the curtain’s opening.

Your eyes trail after him, doing so well in withholding until he tilts his head at you. Beckoning. Your lips quirk upward then, and it’s all he needs.

He breaks the prolonged charge with a sweet goodbye to your patient. “Have a good night, Mrs. Sakman.” Then, to you, he innocently says. “Holler if you need me.”

And then he’s gone, leaving from whence he came. The crater of his weighty presence settles in the room.

You turn to Mrs. Sakman, with a shake of your head and an exasperated smile on your face. “And that is why you don’t want Dr. Abbot as your doctor.”

“Is he seeing anyone?” She laughs.

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a daughter you want to set up, too.” You admonish.

“No. But you should pursue that one. That look, I’ve seen that before.”

It’s a splash of cold water over the heat that was simmering within you. At the embarrassment, at his teasing. A voiced thought that has no place for existence in this room—in this department, in this moment, in your life.

(A voiced thought that has infiltrated your own a time or two. That has wiggled its titillating fingers into the wayward dream, made a mountain out of a molehill, leaving your chest heaving, your thighs clenching, and the thought of Jack Abbot vivid on your mind.)

You push on, clearing your throat and detouring before your embarrassment escalates to humiliation. “Alright, Mrs. Sakman. I’m going to print out a guide for you that tells you how to take care of your sutures.”

“I’m serious. Rules be damned, life’s too short. And he’s too handsome.” She insists just as you mean to step out of the exam room. You see only sincerity and genuity in her features. “I can see you with someone like him.”

Your mouth opens to find a response only to be met with the drying of your tongue. Words suddenly hard to connect, meaning difficult to find.

Finally, with little resolve and even less polish, you mutter, “Be back soon.”

SHIFT THREE, Tues-Wed, 12:05 AM

“Hey! You think you can take my shift, sunshine?”

Ellis’ voice stops you from your walk from the bathroom and into the break room where she and Hilly gaze curiously back at you. The resident and the nurse are two of your favorites on the night shift, stopping for them is akin to stopping for air.

“Rambo, brawler, sunshine. I’m getting all the nicknames this week.” You lean against the doorframe, peering at the two women who smile easily at you. “When?”

“Next Tuesday.”

“Can’t. I’ll be on vacation.” You tell her with pity.

“Oh shit.” Her voice is light despite the disappointment. A welcome refresh on the night shift. “Where you going?”

“Florida.” The excitement is barely contained in your words. The prospect of a long vacation—away from the noise, away from the stress, away from disinfectant and in the sun—is a long overdue one. That excitement is shattered upon Hilly and Parker’s audible groan of disgust. Your mouth drops in shock as you defend. “I’m visiting my sister!”

“Don’t get eaten by a gator.” Hilly mumbles.

“Or a disney adult.” Parker pokes and you roll your eyes.

“I will be at the beach, thank you very much. A whole week with a piña colada in my hand and a tiny bikini on.”

Parker stands from her seat at the break table and fills up her thermos from a water bottle in the fridge. “If you come back with sun poisoning, I’m gonna laugh.”

“I’m a pro at tanning.” You insist.

She raises a brow. “Even with a tiny bikini on?”

“Especially with a tiny bikini on.” You assert.

She shrugs with a smile. “We’ll see.”

“Talk to Abbot.” You tell her, returning back to the topic, “He might cover it.”

It’s almost comical the way Parker and Hilly’s faces scrunch in unanimous uncertainty.

“Not today.” Ellis says.

“It’s one of those days.” Hilly supplements. You nod in understanding, not entirely faulting the reasoning. Warnings were issued throughout the crew the minute the shift started. Steer clear. Dr. Abbot woke up on the wrong side of the bed today.

Or maybe he didn’t sleep at all.

“Unless you wanna ask him for me?” Ellis counters, curiously.

Your brows furrow. “Why me?”

“Because you would get a much different answer than I would get.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” You insist, off put by the implication that you have any kind of weight to you in respect to Jack. Jack doesn’t lean on anything, for anyone. He doesn’t waver, he doesn’t reconsider. He’s a straight shooter, calling things like he sees it, having answers before the situation even arises.

If anything, your familiarity and comfortability with him makes you more prone to being at the short end of his sticks. Voluntold for things less than appealing—like picking up more shifts, by his steadfast hand.

“He’d say the same thing to me that he would to you.”

Hilly and Parker, in another feat of supernatural alignment, look at one another. A silent discussion translated in the look before they return to you.

“Sure.” Hilly nods.

“Whatever you say.” Ellis supports. Your guffaw is met with Hilly’s boisterous giggles.

That is, until her laughter is unceremoniously shot dead. An arrow to the heart, a quick and frigid silence encompassing the room. A glance at her reveals widened eyes fixated on something over your shoulder.

The man in question stands behind you, lips in a thin line as his gaze bounces between the three of you.

“Are we a hospital or a talk show, now?”

The two women quickly make their excuses, shuffling out of the room in a speed remarkably unlike either of them.

“Nope, on the way out now—”

“—I just remembered I’m so busy—”

Leaving only the two of you to occupy the break room. You half expect him to throw a comment out to you, expelling you back to the trenches of the ER but he doesn’t. He steps into the room with a low mutter. Unintelligible and gruff, resounding of the ire that has become him since the night started.

The smell of his aftershave wafts past you. A cool mist twined with a musk. Inexplicably, him. Resonant of the stoic confidence that emanates off of him. Resounding man.

He’s tense as he approaches the counter, pulling a mug out of the cupboard and flicking on the coffee machine. It’s visible in the way he carries himself. The stance of a soldier back on war grounds, eyes skirting, glancing over his shoulder, listening for something. Not the sound of an incoming ambulance, not the sound of an intern struggling during a procedure. Something almost quiet, imperceptible. Known only to him, familiar to the memories that live in the lines of his face. A call with no name.

A call that will bring back all that he’s lost.

“Ellis needs her shift covered next Tuesday.” You toss the test balloon out, wondering if it’s enough of that kind of day for him to shoot it down with a precise blow dart or if there’s enough gentility in him to at least let it float by.

“Sounds like an Ellis problem.” He mumbles.

“Just throwing it out there. In case you happen to have a solution.”

He looks over his shoulder, his eyes clearly bounce between yours, digging for a moment, before he turns his attention back to the coffee machine.

“I’ll see.”

Floating by, it is.

“Everything good?” You ask his turned figure. Stepping further into the minefield, seeing what lands, which foot you place will step on the mine. “You’ve been working all week.”

He snorts, but there’s no humor to be found. “So have you.”

“Yeah, but I’m off for a week starting Saturday. When are you off?”

”Saturday.”

A quiet hangs in the air, filled with your expectancy. ”…that’s it?”

“And Monday.”

“You need more than that.”

One shoulder raises in a shrug. The smell of ground coffee fills the air as the pot bubbles to toil with the brew. Nothing particularly interesting and yet his attention is fixated. “Not dead yet.”

You hum, suspicious enough. “Rough night?”

“What makes you say that?”

The edge to his tone, that’s identical to the edge in his posture, that’s exactly like the edge in his attitude. Any and all of the above.

“You’re wired, today.”

The observation isn’t groundbreaking. It doesn’t shatter windows, or break the sound barrier. It is a recognized truth that sits in the air with little disruption. He says nothing. Only pours the pot of black coffee into his mug.

He’s not wearing his ring.

The black one that has stayed permanently fixed on his left hand, third finger.

There’s only been a handful of shifts in your year at PTMC that you’ve seen him without it—and they all felt like this. Rough. Tense. Like someone is one misstep away from receiving the glare that maims the career.

It’s not a secret that Dr. Abbot lost his wife to cancer a few years after he was medically discharged from the Army. Just the mythology that lingers in the air like antiseptic. It’s easy to piece together that the days of his rigidity happen to coincide with whether or not his ring is on.

And maybe that’s why you’ve been able to gravitate towards him. Not out of pity, but understanding. Respect. Admiration. Anyone with two eyes can tell that Jack carries himself with a significant weight—a testament to the life he’s lived, all that he has learned and lost. It’s a quiet confidence, an assumed burden that shows in his gait. A shining light that draws the helpless to him.

It’s hard to not be drawn to someone like him.

So, you try. Out of some loose notion of affinity, respect, out of some desire to give back, you push where you know you probably shouldn’t.

“You know…if you ever want to talk— about life, your day, what you ate this morning, something stupid you saw—” Your voice falters, hesitant for a moment before you find your steel commitment and push. “—grief. You can always talk to me. I’m here. At work. Out of work.”

His body goes still. Rigid. And stupidly, you wonder if this was the call he was listening for.

“I won’t pretend to know. But, I can listen. If you want me to. Just ask.”

You don’t think he’ll ever take you up on it. In fact, it’s laughable to think that your attending—the man leagues above you in experience, and knowledge, and wisdom, would willingly stoop down to his fellow’s standing and talk about his feelings. Men like him compartmentalize. It’s what makes him an excellent doctor. The immovable rock under the beating current of the river. The beacon in a rushing trauma room.

But a foolish part of you tries because… well, because you want to.

Because it’s Jack, at the end of the day. Battlin’ Jack with the edge in his eyes and the razor on his tongue. The first one you look for in a busy operating room, the last one you spot as you're packing up for the night.

Hazel eyes turn over his shoulder and find their spot on you with immediate precision. Boring a hole into you. Analyzing, configuring, understanding. He stares at you, in a charged stillness, almost like he were doing all three things at once and coming up empty on whatever he was trying to find.

“…Sure.”

You understand in the hesitancy that there is something hidden that he’s not wanting to share. You try to reason that his answer, as vague as vague comes, is a good thing, if only to save yourself from the disappointment of realizing that your attempt for connection has met a stoned wall. His words ring of finality, his signal to end the conversation.

It’s here where the berth between you two feels so enormous, the difference in your stages of life. Not in the quips of the shifts, not in the jests of your being his junior and your teases of his age. Not when you’re beside him manning a procedure and working in tandem with the makings of a well-oiled machine as though you were always meant to work with him. But here, where you catch Jack in the hush and see glimpses of the man under the doctor is where the reminder is so pointed.

Signed, sealed, and delivered with red tape in your line of sight. Caution, written in his crow’s feet. Tread lightly, in the wrinkle of his smile lines. Warnings you should heed.

And yet, keep pushing, echoes in the beat of your heart.

You nod, a small, resigned smile crossing your face. Leaving well enough alone.

“Okay.” Tapping a hand against the doorway, you begin to take your leave from the room.

“Oh!” You stop yourself, turning back to him only to find that his eyes are still trained on you. “Uh, your patient in fourteen said he was experiencing a burning sensation in his penis when I walked by.”

“He’s in for heartburn from eating a shit ton of takis.” He says, diffident.

“Guess he didn’t lick all the dust off his fingers.” You shrug.

“Sounds like it.”

You take your leave and in the wake of your absence, Jack takes a harrowing breath.

His therapist’s voice lingers in his head.

Doesn’t have to be the whole fleet. Doesn’t have to be announced. Just one is enough. Just a status update is all they need. All you need.

And maybe it's because he knows the sincerity behind your words, the invitation doesn’t feel like a hanging noose like it usually does. The prospect of talking about it—giving the status update—is akin to a standing death sentence for a man like him. Giving the unnamed a name, voicing it into existence, giving it the power to consume.

He’s getting better at it. Giving the small doses in the official setting, where it's him, four beige walls, and a man with a PhD. Taking it outside of there, though, is still the battling challenge.

But—when you say it, when you offer—

He pushes past it, doesn’t try to think too hard about it. Stocks it up on a shelf out of reach. Something to handle later, to forget about when he remembers to toss it out. Or, if the mood catches him just right in the safety of Dr. Mott’s office, he’ll bring it up. Discuss what it means, what he should do about it.

He doesn’t know. Only knows that a door has been left ajar, breadcrumbs of care and comfort leading a trail through and to you. Cracked open by your gentle hand.

Only knows that in the dormant hold of a wounded man and the slow becoming of a new one that he’s pushing himself to, Jack finds himself feeling the faint pang of hunger for something other than self-inflicted guilt and shame.

He eyes the breadcrumbs you left behind. Wondering, deep in the recesses of his conflicted mind, how they would taste.

He chugs his coffee, burns the taste buds on the tip of his tongue. Hopes that it erodes the want right where it began, cripples the potential to even try.

(It doesn’t.)

Thurs-Fri, 11:35 PM:

Jack is two forearms deep in the cracked thoracic cavity of an intubated 46-year old woman performing an EDT when the doors to Trauma One open.

“Dr. Abbot, can I speak to you?” Dr. Reno, communal night shift’s bane of existence and general nuisance, shouts into the operating room.

Jack has no more of an issue with the man than he does with anyone from Ohio—a general sense of pity coupled with a scrutinized squint of the eyes at some unsavory opinions that tend to come from the Buckeyes, particularly when the Steelers are playing—but the general opinion of the team’s feelings are not lost on him.

He’s heard the whispers, seen the way the crowd parts like the Red Sea when the man is around. Jack keeps his head down, for the most part. He’s not Robby. Aside from the general check-in and check-out, he doesn’t want to manage people. Personalities exist, but they don’t matter in the heat of the moment. He leaves them be, pointedly making quirks and general tendencies a side effect of the job. Pointedly makes it not his business.

Until it is.

“Don’t know if you have eyes, Reno, but I’m kind of busy.” Jack responds, quick and cool, before turning his attention to Ellis’s intubation, “Drop the left lung and pump another three CC’s. Pericardium is getting cut.”

“Find me after.” Reno says briskly, the doors shutting loudly.

Something vile and uncouth springs to his mind, annoyance cutting through Jack like a stabbing knife at the summoning. Something inappropriate, unprofessional, mildly threatening on a good day. Its sentiment is met in equal parts with Ellis’ mumble of “dick” which only makes Jack feel slightly better.

Scissors cut through the thin wall of the heart’s membrane and quickly spot the torn ventricle that’s spouting blood profusely.

“Found our geyser.” Plugging the hole shut with his finger into the rupture, he looks over to Walsh. “Ready to stop twiddling your thumbs, Dr. Walsh?”

“About time.” She rebuts, moving in beside him and beginning the suturing of the heart.

Then a moment later, as her forceps pull thread through delicate tissue, she says, “You should handle that.”

He doesn’t need clarification to know what she means. “And you should handle this.”

“I’m doing my job.” She pushes. “Do yours.”

12:05 AM

“I’m concerned about your other fellow.”

If time could be rewound, he’d go back to this morning and let the phone ring into oblivion. Ignore the call asking him to come in tonight and spend the rest of his day watching the Pirates play the Yankees. Would rather watch his team get their asses handed to them than have this conversation—knowing where it’s going, knowing who it's about. The regret of his decisions only grates him further.

Dr. Abbot doesn’t find Dr. Reno. Dr. Reno finds Dr. Abbot—contrary to the directive that interrupted the procedure in South-13.

Just as he’s stepping out of the OR and chucking his bloodied gloves into the trash bin, Maxwell is on him without preamble. That stabbing feeling—the unabated annoyance— creeps up his neck like a fucking burn. So much so that Jack has to roll it out before even looking at the new fellow.

His eyes flick to the man, deeply unimpressed at how dogged the man appears to be. He continues his path towards the workstation. Dr. Reno follows after him, quick on his heels.

“Her charts and prescriptions are suspect.”

“What, is there not enough work, man? You’re reading other doctors’ charting notes?”

“She and I have disagreed too often about standards of care.”

“Then leave it as a disagreement and move on.”

“Just—” Dr. Reno grabs onto Jack’s arm, halting him in place. It earns the man a putrid glare, Jack’s eyes boring into the hand that lingers on his bicep until Dr. Reno takes the hint and quickly removes it. “—look at it, Dr. Abbot. I’m concerned.”

Reno holds out a folder, one that Jack fights the urge to grab and chuck across the ER. There are no niceties when Jack takes it, his ire blatant as he yanks the folder from the man’s hand.

Your name is the first thing he sees on the document. A usual tender, easing thing within him that Jack refuses to draw attention to—the sight of your name below his on the schedule set for the same shift, the pop-up notification of your name in the work group chat whenever you send a text. Something he would continue to dutifully ignore were it not for the fact that the notes labeled as “suspect” are notes you’ve made on a patient dated a week and a half ago.

He scans the timeline, red quickly filling his vision. Steel becomes him the minute his gaze flicks up to Reno, finding the man looking back at him expectantly.

“This is your smoking gun? Really?” Reno nods, emphatically. Jack grits his teeth. “Get back to work, Maxwell.”

“The patient was coughing up blood and complained of chest pain. CT confirmed it was a pulmonary embolism which should’ve resulted in a cardiac catheterization.” Reno insists, bulldozing past the point of professional restraint.

“Not if it wasn’t severe enough.”

“It was enough for the patient to be transferred for admission and OR to take care of it. This is a clear case of delay in proper care.”

“You’re upset that one of our doctors isn’t trigger happy with a knife? That she—” Jack looks to the chart record again, spotting a note that makes him more irritated, “That she correctly prescribed and provided anticoagulants that reduced patient discomfort and clearly instructed the patient to follow up with their PCP the next day.”

“And him being on the schedule for the upstairs OR today?”

“A week and a half after the patient’s visit to the ER. Clearly not admitted through us and yet treated in our hospital. Wonder what that could mean.” Jack bites sarcastically. “Oh yeah, that the patient followed up with their PCP and it was decided to remove the clot.”

“Dr. Abbot—“

“Stop following up on other doctors' charts. Focus on your patients. And don’t bother me with this shit again unless it's serious.” The folder is shoved unceremoniously into Reno’s chest. “Whatever beef you got against her, don’t bring it to my floor.”

It’s when Jack is halfway down the hall that another remark is called out.

“I didn’t realize you were so biased.”

His leg aches in the socket of his prosthetic, a sign of his lowering threshold. The pulse of blood felt worse in the stub more than anywhere else. Turning, his eyes narrow.

“Excuse me?”

”You should’ve written her up. You know you should’ve.” Reno explains as Jack steps—stalks—closer. “It was a threat against another doctor. Management won’t be happy that you’ve overlooked it.”

Abbot stands before him, his chin tilting up just as his jaw clenches. “I didn’t overlook anything. I’m well aware of what happened and I’m choosing to handle it differently.”

“You handled it wrong.”

Jack's eyes narrow. A long steadied exhale is released, like a bull catching sight of the red. “You caught me on a good day. Take a walk, Dr. Reno. If you can’t be a team player and get your shit on straight, then consider this permission to get out of the ER for the night. Your choice.”

“You can’t—“

“Make. Your choice. Before I make it for you.”

12:17 AM

You’re on the back of a motorcycle with the wind in your hair when a phone call interrupts. Opening your eyes is like pulling yourself out of tar, but the caller ID does the hard work of taking you out of the depths of your REM cycle.

“Hello?” You ask, voice groggy and tired.

“Sorry to be calling you so late. I know it’s your day off.” Hilly’s voice sounds on the other end of the phone. “Any chance you can come in and work an 8-hour?”

“Why? What’s going on?” You’re already sitting up in your bed, the decision to head into work practically made.

“Reno had to head out for an emergency. We’re short one.”

“Oh shit.” You mutter. You raise the heel of your palm to rub into your eye. “I didn’t realize I was next on the rotation.”

“You aren’t. Dr. Abbot asked for you.”

If the decision wasn’t made before, it was made now. “I’ll be there in thirty.”

“You’re the best.” Over the line, you hear from a familiar but faint voice in the background, “She coming in?”

“Yes!” Hilly calls, before turning her attention to you. “Dr. Abbot gave a thumbs up, but it was a grateful one. I can tell.”

12:52 PM

“What took you so long?” Jack calls over his shoulder, seemingly already knowing you’ve entered the ER without even glancing backward.

You watch as the back of his head tilts up to the status board, then back down to his notes. You saddle up beside him, placing your bag onto the nurses desk for shoving into a locker later and lean against the workstation.

“Yankees beat Pirates ten to four. I should be out on the town. You’re lucky I’m here at all.” You push back and he tuts, annoyed. Whether at you or the game, you’re unsure, but it brings a smile to your face.

You peer into his notes. If he minds, he makes no visible sign of it.

“I’m delighted, truly. Nothing screams lucky more than watching the unit crash and burn while we wait for you to grace us with your presence.” He retorts, but there’s no venom to his bite.

“You’re smart, Dr. Abbot. You can handle it.”

”Yeah? Then what do we pay you for?”

“PTMC needed the city flair.” You smile widely at him.

“The shitty one?”

“The New York state of mind. The wins and all. You’ll understand when the Pirates finally fix their offense in the outfield.”

“Don’t forget the stellar humility.” He hums, noncommittal. “And leave the Buccos out of this.”

You tilt your head at him. “You don’t like me because I’m humble.”

“Like implies affection.” He replies, easily. “Tolerate is more accurate, city girl.”

“Whatever you say, old man.” You sigh. “I get to leave early tomorrow though, right?”

“Extortion.”

“Tit for tat.”

An announcement rings over the intercom. An inbound GSW, four minutes out. The room turns then, those settling in the front half of the floor preparing in an orchestrated chaos for the arrival. Jack grabs a pair of gloves from the box affixed to the wall, tossing them over to you before grabbing and slipping on his own. Jack finally looks over to you, his eyes doing a quick once over of you before he settles back on your face—readied, but easy.

Seamless and still anticipation constructing your features, determination filtering in through the artful weave of your calmness. You stand sliding gloves onto your hands welcoming the impending disaster like it were an old friend.

If there were nerves to be had on you, he couldn’t find them.

It only compounds the ridiculousness of Reno from earlier. Only furthers Jack’s unwavering lack of doubt when it comes to you. You stand awaiting the incoming trauma like you hadn’t just woken up half an hour ago, like you’ve been standing beside Jack the entire night when it should be Reno, and relief hits him like a truck.

A semi that’s caught him like a deer in the headlights, loosens the strain that’s fixed permanently in the column of his neck, makes the ache in his shoulder pointedly less. One held breath away from feeling.

“Thanks for coming in.” He says, suddenly serious.

Thanks for coming when I asked, he means.

It startles you, the turn. The unexpected stoop into sincerity. Eyes bounce between his, unaware of where it comes from. He stares back, unabashed with the earnest yet otherwise unreadable.

Nonetheless, you take what he gives you.

“Yeah. Of course.” There is equal genuinity in your voice. You nod your head, softly. “Anything you need.”

He nods, once. Then turns to watch the loading bay doors. “Make me proud tonight and I’ll think about Friday.”

“Getting soft on me, Dr. Abbot.” You tease, but it holds no real feet to fire. It’s not ribbing, nor is it a condemnation. Just an observation that sits between you two like a shared secret.

“Yeah, well.” Jack shakes his head, but there’s no concealing the way his lips twitch upward. You both decide to leave well enough alone.

Turning in time with him, you pull on his surgical gown and tie it at the back. He ties your own, his hand lingering on your back when he finishes.

SHIFT FOUR, Friday-Sat, 8:47 AM:

You don’t get to leave early.

You take a sip from the porcelain mug of lukewarm coffee you’ve taken from the breakroom and continue your endless stare into the slow revival of the world.

The dark of the sky begins to dilute with the morning rise, the cold breeze of the spring air a welcomed remedy to your flustered skin. The benches at the park beside the hospital are uncomfortable, pointedly so. The longer you sit, the further the aches in your back that made their wonderful appearance halfway through your shift demand your attention—but this is what you need.

A tether to reality, a removal from the endless spirals of a hurried mind. A way for your feet to finally settle on the firm, stable ground. No running, no long stretches of standing, no burning in the flex of your calves. Just dirty sneakers on the gravel, feeling some semblance of stillness even as life begins to slowly wake up around you. Hands feeling the fading warmth of the drink you hold tightly.

Birds chirp melodically as streaks of orange break up the sky. Your chest starts to feel like it isn’t on the brink of collapse from the erratic beat of your heart. You can finally breathe.

The new day, in. The old one, out.

“It’s not the worst of vices to have, but a sixth cup of coffee is pretty drastic. Even for my standards.”

It’s rather difficult to align your inner chakras when Jack’s voice grows closer to you.

The heavy sigh you exhale conveys exactly how you feel about it. “I’m not in the mood, Jack.”

“First name, huh?” The sound of his voice is another stabbed knife into the pantheon of wounds that decorate you today.

“Off the clock. Formalities be damned.” You return, annoyed.

He steps in beside you, his steadied gait and imposing figure filling your periphery. A vision cladded in black scrubs that you refuse to look at. He makes no further movement, surveying you with a neutral look on his face. Not a new thing from him, and certainly not for the first time it’s happened tonight.

Jack has a staring problem. Always watching, hawk eyes knowing things before they reach his ears. A dutiful sentinel on the floor and the subject of the running joke you have with a few of the nurses about the amount of eyes he has on the back of his head. Lisa and Hilly think there’s at least four, one for each cardinal direction. You’ve got money on the table that there’s eight pairs, minimum.

It’s his job as attending to be tuned in to everything that happens on his shift but it’s uncanny the way he notices everything.

(“Military.” Ellis had said simply, eyes focused on charting.

“X-ray vision.” Shen chirped with a shrug and a sip of his iced coffee. You nodded in agreement.)

It’s not a hunch, or a theory, or a girlish fantasy to say that all eight pairs of Jack’s eyes were on you tonight. He appeared out of thin air when things went sideways on your cases. Seemingly easy patients turning chaotic within the blink of an eye and each time, he was there. Beating Ellis and Shen to the punch, pulling gloves over his hands and giving his assessment in steady confidence and simple authority as he fell into step beside you.

Assisting you with perfect timing the first two times your patients coded, leading the procedures for the next one, and taking over completely on the final one.

With his backpack slung over his shoulder and his hand shoved in the pants of his scrubs, Jack does as he’s done all night long and stares at you. Deeply, intently, unnervingly. His face betraying no tangible thought as he keeps you within his line of sight.

And just as you’ve done all night, you keep your gaze in front of you. Fixated on the park before you.

There’s no telling if he watches out of concern for your wellbeing or others. Determining if you were a complex puzzle needing to be solved or maybe a potential bomb needing to be diffused.

He’s got a morbid connection to the latter. All the more reason for him to stay away.

In standard Jack fashion, he doesn’t.

“That bad, then.” His words are light, almost blasé. It fuels a fire that you were unsuccessfully trying to stampen out.

You scoff. “Yeah. Pretty fucking bad.”

He moves, then. Shrugging his backpack off, he places it beside the bench and sits next to you. Close, too close. Out in the open and away from the confines of sterile white walls and yet you still feel like you’re cornered. Drowning in the nearness of him, in the substantial feel of his presence.

He takes a breath before finally saying, quietly, like a man trying to tame an angered animal, “It wasn’t personal—”

“Felt personal.” You bite back, bitterly.

“You were clouded.”

Finally, your head snaps to him. Disbelief furrows in your brows. “That’s bullshit.”

Your heated and sharpened fury meets his stoic and anchored one, looking at him for the first time since you were pushed aside in trauma three. No betrayal of guilt resides in the lines of his face, only true honesty and sincerity.

It only makes you angrier.

“You undermined me in the middle of a procedure. In front of interns, in front of residents. This isn’t my first time around the block, Jack. It was a resection. I can do those in my sleep and you know that. This was no different.” Your head shakes incredulously, the frustration surging forward with little reservation. And while the anger is there, simmering deep in every crevice of your words, pinching your lips and narrowing your eyes, the hurt bleeds through, try as you might to hold it back.

“You might as well have just told the whole team you think I don’t know what I’m doing. That would’ve been infinitely better than telling me to step aside.”

The corner of Jack’s lips flick downward, a sign you’ve come to understand as his clear disagreement. They purse forward as he thinks for a second. Registering the extent of your words.

He leans his elbows on his knees. Thinking for another moment, until he says, “This isn’t New York.”

Your head pulls back in offense. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you’re not alone in a department doing drastic shit by yourself because you have to, anymore. You’re here, we’re a team and in case you forgot, you’re my senior fellow. My responsibility. And I’m not going to let you drown.”

“I-I wasn’t drowning. I had cases, they got resolved and I moved onto the next one—”

“You had four codes today.” He interrupts. “You don’t just move on from that.”

Your breath hitches. It’s the actualization of the heavy weight, the one that’s been sitting on your chest all night. Constricting your breath, keeping your feet moving, and hands fidgeting. Somewhere in between keeping your head down and switching from one patient to the next, it hadn’t registered that he would have tucked the information away as something other than a performance metric.

A stupid notion, one clearly without any semblance of thought, because it’s Jack.

(The Jack you’ve had all week, the one who teases as a means to compliment, who has quietly deferred to you when questions arose during procedures, who has given approving looks from the doorway over the course of the week. Jack that has brought you coffee on random occasions when the lulls have kicked in, in the mug he knows belongs to you, the one you sip at now. Jack who knows you’ve entered a room before a word comes out of your mouth.

Jack, who is both a breath of fresh air and the halting cause of your own when the hazel of his eyes fall on yours from across a hectic room. Concern etched in the irises, a quiet check-in, a quick review of your status, before moving on to the next thing.

Jack, Jack, Jack—whose name fits too well in your mouth, that you’re too keen to speak out loud just because you want to.)

He says the truth simply. Without blame, unlike the raging guilt that courses through you. Without lecture. Words uttered incredibly soft for a man forged from fire and brimstone.

“None of them were easy and none of them were your fault. Just really bad fuckin’ luck that they landed on you. It’s enough to weigh on anyone.”

“My day had nothing to do with that procedure. I’ve been through worse, I can handle it.” You lie, stubbornly.

“It had everything to do with it.” He continues, holding your gaze dutifully. As though he could stare his truth into you—make you physically see his meaning. “I saw that look in your eye. You were gonna hack at that man’s body if it meant a single chance of survival.”

“Because there was a chance, Jack. If you had just let me—“

“Sepsis from secondary peritonitis. The bowel was necrotic. There wasn’t.”

“Then let me find that out! You push Shen, you push Ellis, I’ve seen you push Mohan. I get one bad day and I’m treated with baby gloves? I get kicked off a procedure? I’m a fellow, Jack. I should’ve been allowed to do my job.”

“I push when there is something to learn. He was gone the minute he rolled in through those doors. There was nothing to learn in that.”

“So I get punished for wanting to try?”

“I stepped in because you weren’t doing it for the betterment of the patient, you were doing it for yourself.”

He renders you speechless. Your face falls from tense anger to a shattered hurt. You fall against the backing of the bench with defeat. The throat tightens in that familiar way that it’s been doing all shift. Your eyes start to sting with the swell of tears that you try to swallow down, force away before they threaten to spill.

Still, Jack watches. Assessing, preparing, readying himself for the fall that he’d seen coming from the beginning.

“This isn’t a question about what you can do.” He says quietly, a whisper in the wind. A reassurance uttered in the safe space between you, broken only by your shuddering breaths. “You’ve been off kilter on me since you got that little girl. I get it. No one blames you for that. You went into this one hoping you could get a save after the ones you lost. And if you want to pretend there was a chance, fine. You can sleep knowing that I made the call on this one. That this falls on me. Not you.”

And you’re smart enough to read between those lines.

It was never about competence. It was a staged intervention. Jack’s way to release some of the pressure off of the cooking chamber that has been you all day. To place part of your burden on his shoulders.

Making sure that the four codes you were responsible for tonight didn’t turn to five.

The heat of your bruised ego simmers low, water poured onto the embers and leaving a smoking ash of your tender and fragile heart. Heavy with the stress of today, fraying from the guilt that eats at you. You turn to him, your eyes red-rimmed and burning with unshed tears that only inch forward the minute you meet his gaze.

His focus on you isn’t intimidating. It’s a familiar shroud of comfort, a soft place to land. He listens, watches, waits. Beckoning you into him, wanting you to let go.

“It was just like New York again, Jack. It felt like everyone I touched died.” Your voice breaks at the admission. “I can handle it, you know, when it’s bad. It sucks, but I can put it away and keep going. But today it was—these were simple ones.”

Your breath catches when you feel him move closer to you, his thigh intentionally pressing into yours. Another tether to the ground.

You rub your hands against your face roughly. “Like what— what do you mean I lost an eight-year old to pneumonia? That’s routine, we go through that all the time. I did a year in peds for fuck’s sake. I had her— for a second I had her.”

An incredulous laugh tumbles out of your mouth. Absurdity is hardly a humorous thing and yet, it escapes with the fall of a tear that you quickly wipe away. “Then it was the dad with the DVT who just dropped on me. He was ready to be discharged. I was on him for two hours and nothing.”

“Then the car accident came in and I—I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t shake them from me. It was just one after another. And I tried but…just wasn’t good enough.”

He interrupts quickly, leaning in close to you. His voice fusing with a well-meaning reprimand, “Don’t do that. That doesn’t do anyone any good.”

You sigh, tearfully and look to him. He’s close, close enough in your space where his shoulder is touching yours and you see how the lines on his face deepen with his intentful stare into you. It only capitulates the need to fall.

“I know Reno’s been looking at my charts. And I know he brought it up to you.” You tell him. The careful composition of the man made of stone fractures, then. Surprised, aggrieved, almost furious. “And I guess—I don’t know. When you told me to step aside, it felt like you were believing him a little bit.”

The speed in which he dissuades the thought is comforting. “That wasn’t what that was. That’s not why I took you out.”

“I know.” And you do. But it still felt like it.

Jack shakes his head, drilling truth into you with an emphasis that could hardly be missed. Needing you to understand exactly what he meant. “Whatever Reno thinks about you, fuckin’ forget about it. It doesn’t matter—”

“I don’t care what he thinks. He’s an idiot. And he’s from Ohio.” You scoff. “I care what you think.”

It’s his turn to be rendered silent. Not out of shock or stupor—but at the need to hold back everything that creeps up in that moment. Tiny gospels that bang against the caverns of a hollowed heart, carved empty from the brutal grip of a world that has taken too much. Truths that beg to be let out. The unnamed that claws up the soft tissue of his throat that begs to be given a name, to be heard.

The truth is that you had been thorough all night, fast on your feet, a helping hand where needed. A forceful hurricane blazing through the trauma bay with a proficiency that justified your standing as a fellow. And Jack had an eye on you all night not because you were cracking but because he had to make sure you were still standing. Still breathing. Not as part of his job but because—

He needed to.

And the minute he saw the slight waver, saw the way it was beginning to seep into you, he became a man of two minds. No longer able to compartmentalize. His eyes focused on the patients in front of him, his ears attuned to the sound of your voice on the other side of the room. Listening to the rises and falls like a hymn, reverent in his pious focus.

How his only way to fix all that was wrong for you was to be involved himself—handle it himself. Wedge into the web of you that’s been stretched thin and mend the cracks, bring you back to steady and safe ground.

Bring you back to him.

He doesn’t say any of that. Restrains the flooding thoughts with a wrangled rope and ties it hard enough to cut circulation. Ties the yearning before it makes an ample fool out of everything.

Instead, he goes for the standard. The known truth, the easy one that lives beneath the dry teases and offhand remarks.

“If it matters that much, you knocked it out of the fuckin’ park today. You touched more patients today than anyone else on the floor, gave excellent care in the chaos. You did damn good, today.”

Your nod is empty, tired. Dry of any attempt at human dignity. And it humors you that just a few days ago you were the one offering him comfort.

“How’d you know how many I was on?” You ask after a moment.

“…I was keeping count.”

“Really?”

”You drink more when you’re stressed. Like caffeine will make you focus harder.” He huffs at the surprised look on your face. “Told you. You’re my responsibility.”

“MD, therapist, dietician, and babysitter.” The laugh that comes out of you is wet. You sniffle. “Sucks to be you.”

“Most days, but not today.” You huff out a laugh and his smile slants. He flicks his head to the side. “C’mon. You need to sleep. Florida’s calling your name, God knows why.”

He stands with a grunt, working out a knot in his neck before turning and holding a hand out to you. You take it, allowing him to lift you from the bench with your own pained sigh.

You rub at the ache on your back. “I’ll try but I’m five coffees deep—“

“—six.” He corrects.

“Six.” You repeat, feeling gently warmed at his record keeping. “Don’t think my buzz is going to let me sleep. Try to get some shut eye for me, though.”

“Don’t waste your wish on me. I don’t sleep much.”

“Do—do you wanna get some breakfast, then? I just—” The words come out before you have much cognizance to reel them in. Exhaustion and guilt and all of its disarming siblings pushing the request out. “I’m not ready to go home yet.”

Just as they hit the air, you realize how silly it is. You don’t expect him to take you up on it—too aware of the gap, the existing berth that lives loudly in between you two.

“Yeah. Of course.” He interrupts. Says it as sure as the air he breathes. Says it without hesitation and even less reservation. As if you couldn’t have asked anything more obvious.

“Anything you need.”

And in your colored shock, in the repeat of the words that were once aimed at him, here—that’s when you see it. Or rather, feel it. The charge, the shift, the inkling of something else.

Something beyond your attending. Beyond the stature of the leader who knows everything, who can impart wisdom just as much as he could take it away. Beyond the monolith who pushes you to be better, that draws the lines firmly in the sand of duty and obligation, of giving it your all and knowing when to let it go.

There, in the softness of his hazel eyes settling on yours and the small tilt of the corner of his lips pulling upward, is a man. A gentle one, with something soft wedged in the center of his steel chest that he’s torn down a wall and unlocked just to show you.

Only you.

Something on the precipice of becoming sweet, almost ripe for picking.

Something you don’t know the name to, yet, but can feel deep in parts previously unknown to you that you desperately want to learn more of as the sun rises on the two of you.

SHIFT ONE, Tues-Wed, 6:48 PM

“Look at what the cat dragged in.” Dana’s smile bleeds into her voice as you step onto the floor. “Smelling of coconut and looking sunkissed.”

The familiar smell of sterile sanitizer and disinfectant is a welcome one. The pat of your sneakers on the tile floor is a familiar anthem as you enter the ER.

You hold your hands out and bow to your awaiting crowd, “In the very flesh.”

“Surprised you don’t have a flower in your hair.” She teases, her smile growing warmer as you draw in closer.

"Thought about it but I figured that’d be bragging.”

“Indeed it would.” Dana busies herself with the final details in preparation of handoff. You come up to the desk, leaning your elbows against the surface. A quiet moment before your shift starts. “You get to stay at the beach?”

You hum, pleased. “All week. In the tiniest bikini known to man.”

“Atta girl.” She smiles.

“There’s sunshine.” Ellis calls from down the hall, and you see her approach the workstation looking like she’s already gotten a head start on her rounds. “Welcome back. How’re the nieces?”

“Too stinking cute. I got some photos you’re gonna die for.” You sigh, wistfully. “I missed them.”

“Not gonna leave us for Florida now, are you?”

“Ask me at the end of my shift.”

“Nah, she won’t.” Dana coos, wrapping her arms around your shoulders and giving your arm a loving rub. “Pittsburgh won’t force our sunshine out just yet.”

“Abbot would put a stop to that before it even started.” Ellis jests, and you raise a brow.

“What?” You ask.

Dana ignores you, directing her stare to Ellis. “Maybe even get some people written up.”

“Maybe even put some people in a disciplinary hearing.” Ellis returns.

Your eyes bounce between the two. “Okay, what the hell don’t I know?”

“Nothin’.” Ellis smiles, turning on her heel.

Dana pats your arm, lovingly. “Happy to have you back, sweetie.”

7:47 PM

“Hilly, I’m going to put in an order for an EKG for Mr. Breyer. You mind making sure that he’s bumped up on that one?” You tell the nurse as you both exit the exam room.

“Can do!” She chirps.

“Oh! And—“ She turns on her heel at your call, looking at you curiously. “Did something happen while I was gone?”

Her brows furrow. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something with Abbot.” Understanding floods her face.

“What have you heard?” She asks, voice dipping low.

”Just a comment. Something about a disciplinary hearing.”

”Oh my god, I can’t believe no one’s told you.” She crowds near you, excitement radiating off of her. “Not confirmed, but heavily suspected because Anna Maria heard it from Jesse who heard it from Perlah who saw Dr. Robby and Dr. Abbot talking about it. But— Dr. Abbot got Reno suspended.”

“What?” Shock raises your volume, which Hilly quickly shushes you. You lower your voice in apology, “For what?”

“Harassment. Unprofessional conduct.”

“Against who?” You ask, already suspecting the answer.

“Four people. Three nurses—”

“Three!” You gasp. You had only known about the one incident, heard some things about from the others. But the extent remained only in what you saw in the stairwell with Anna Maria.

“All Latino. They all went to Dr. Abbot. Apparently he was keeping notes on certain racist comments made.” Your mind flickers to the image of the note he tucked into his breast pocket, and its unsurprising then that he would’ve known about it all along.

Eight pairs of eyes always watching.

“And the fourth?” You ask, curiously.

Hilly’s eyes seem to gleam brighter when she says, “You.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Dr. Abbot raised it up to Dr. Robby who raised it up to Gloria and so on.”

“Harassment against me?” You ask again, unbelieving.

“Yeah. Something about sabotaging your performance. Depending on the source, some say he talked about some of the comments he’s heard Reno say to you or the arguments he would start in the operating rooms. But everyone agrees—”

Hilly pauses for a moment—whether for dramatic effect or to convey the extent of the magnitude of her next. Either way, you remain fixated on her. Waiting, watching for her.

“—they’ve never seen Dr. Abbot angry like that.”

9:51 PM

You don’t get the chance to talk to him—officially.

Only make him out in the background of the hectic shift, see him at the bedside of an incoming trauma before rushing into an OR, stepping in beside him and slipping the gown on to assist.

There’s the sly comment about your absence—Hope you didn’t forget how to do your job, city girl.

One you meet in equal time—Watch and learn, old man.

Sly smiles exchanged, the meeting of tender glances, the return of the familiar. Into the feeling.

He catches you at the rolling cart outside of North 12 again. A moment finally spared in the frenzy of the night that he willingly decides to lean into. He puts his good shoulder against the wall, surveying you with a steadied eye.

“How you feeling?” He asks, but you can make in the tone that something belies the words. A veiled test, the subtle making of your person upon return to work. A gauge of what you’ve heard.

You meet his test balloon with an easy smile. Happy, content.

“Good.” You say to him, true and meaningful, “How are you?”

He watches for a moment before nodding, satisfied. “Good.”

There’s not much to say about what may or may not have happened while you were gone. At least nothing you trust to not lay waste to the goodness of the moment. There’s nothing to explain or be explained.

You know why he did it. He knows you know why he did it. You both decide to leave well enough alone. Trusting each other like second nature.

A beat passes. “D’you relax? Take photos?”

You nod, emphatically. “Yeah. I gotta show you the ones I got from this alligator farm we took my nieces to. You’d get a kick out of it.”

“So long as you skip over the bikini ones.” A smile etches on his face. Loose and light, the same familiar song and dance.

“C’mon. You don’t even want to take a peek?”

“Not unless you want to keep me up at night.” He raises a brow. “You can keep your Florida sunburns to yourself.”

“Well, just picture my screams, then. That always puts you to bed, right?”

“Not this time, it won’t.”

You take it to mean that the image of your body will scar your attending, which forces a scoff out of your mouth. Rolling your head to him, you intend to make faux hurt known. But, in meeting his gaze, you see something else entirely.

A toiling knowing that runs the quip on your tongue dry. It’s that something from before, tainted with a depth that you haven’t seen from him.

The air heats slowly, flint to stone igniting the mutuality of piqued interest.

For a second you realize that maybe, the heavy gap that you’ve always figured lies between you two wasn’t so hefty from the extent of the said differences in life and experiences—but heavy for another reason altogether. For all the things left unsaid.

It brings an image to your mind—one that has entered into the realm of consciousness on nights where alcohol has made you too loose and latent desires infiltrate the privacy of sleep.

An image of you and him.

Rough, calloused hands running over flustered skin. Tugging shirts off, stripping pants down, pulling panties to the side to take a peek. The heat of his breath fanning over the side of your neck, the pads of his fingers swiping through the wet. Circling, playing, a tease whispered in a husky tone just before he—

Your breath shudders.

“Welcome back.” Jack says lowly, turning on his heel and trekking down the hall.

a/n: of course it would be a a traumatized forty-nine year old man that would break my eight month hiatus. my first dip into this man, and i want more

let me know your thoughts!

#jack abbot x reader #jack abbott x reader #the pitt x reader #jack abbot fanfic #jack abbot x you #dr jack abbot x reader #jack abbot #jack abbot x female reader #the pitt fanfic #idk man he just means so much to me #also we are widower!jack stans in this house #nothing but respect for his grief and trauma #and you bet reader has respect for it to #also srry about the ohio slander

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ponyisle · 30 days ago

Note

That Twilight evolution drawing of yours fills me with the GOOD ANGST.

Am I detecting some lingering feelings of regret and resentment over the whole Alicorn change?

Twilight holds a grudge against Daybreak for a while after she was turned. I draw Twi comforting Honey a lot so here's a bit of the inverse. Honey becomes a rock for Twi in her more difficult months. Their relationship is one of the first times Twilight felt she had any say in her own choices.

Also answering this one....... Twilight NEVER wanted to be a Patron or in any position of power/authority. She's a naturally gifted unicorn, of course, that's why Daybreak chose her as her student, but this path wasn't something that she wanted for herself. Her parents wanted her to succeed and all she ever knew before moving to Ponyville was doing what she was told. And even then, moving wasn't even her own decision.

She likes to read, likes to learn, but she also likes to eat snacks and lounge around gosh darn it!!! She wanted to be a normal pony, live a normal life, but it felt like she was pushed into situation after situation without much of a choice.

Her body initially rejected the spell Daybreak cast causing her horn and wings to deform. She was devastated, feeling even more alienated from her body than before. She had to deal with migraines and could never fully use her wings until looooong in the future.

Her friends(much like Honey) helped her through this scary transition too. They're all very close-knit by the time Twi gets turned.

She eventually takes up a position of leadership but only because she CHOSE to.

#cantergale #mlp #my art #mlp au #mlp art #mlp twilight sparkle #mlp pinkie pie #twipie

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lighting-and-shadow · 10 days ago

Text

Ikigai, Part 9

Summary: You’re desperately in love with a man who already belongs to another.

Ikigai (n.) (Japanese): "A reason for being," the thing that gets you up in the morning.

Trigger Warnings: brief mentions of suicide, romanticization of suicide, mentions of cannibalism, mentions of murder

Part 8

“Have fun.”

His voice is light, teasing like it usually is. But you can tell there's something more underneath that facade. Even as Sylus hands you his black card, you know there's more there.

He’s unsatisfied with something. He wants something.

It's the way he looks at you. Like he's craving. Hungry. You don't see this side of him often, but it usually comes out during when you need to dress fancy for some party or gathering.

Don't dwell on it. You have work to do.

You snatch his card from him, careful to not even graze his skin. His touch has a way of distracting you. And those kinds of distractions are the last thing you need.

“We shall.”

Sylus gives you a strange look. You just stare on forward, beckoning him to give you the card. Then he chuckles and his eyes soften to that special gaze that makes your heart melt before he hands it over. God are you glad things are at least semi-normal between the two of you.

You lean into Miss Hunter, loop your arms through hers, and begin to walk away.

“Me and Miss Hunter are off. Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on her and make sure she isn’t too good of bait.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Miss Hunter mutters.

“And I am hardly a babysitter,” you smile at her. “I’m merely looking out for my new friend because she’s clearly a trouble magnet.”

Miss Hunter scoffs at you. Sylus just watches the two of you with a smile that speaks to something deeper in you.

“And you? Who will keep an eye on you, sweetie?”

“Everyone,” you reply with a smirk. “Because that’s my job.”

That’s why he called you Gamayun, after all. Because you bewitch and charm people with the words from your mouth. Sometimes you told truths, hidden prophecies and tales of the past. Sometimes you told lies, dark exaggerated whispers and catatraphizing things from the smallest details.

Gamayun wasn’t just an empty promise of Sylus’ love. It's more than that. It’s your story. It’s you. And that’s why you love the nickname so much despite the pain it causes.

You exchange a look with Sylus before he leaves to deal with the traitor. His carmine eyes and heartfelt expression draw you in. For a moment, he’s the siren between the two of you.

But than the god of death that he is, and the origin of your own nickname for him, claws its way to overlap that beautiful face of his. That part of him is struggling to come out right now. He doesn’t want to become that fearsome person, and just remain in his other state.

He stays loyal to his duty, though. Much like you do. You wish you both didn't have to.

You focus on Miss Hunter in order to drown out those thoughts. Watching her go wild with Sylus’ card, after you encouraged her multiple times to do so, brings a smile to your face.

But, at the same time, you can’t help but mentally check out. Your mind drifts to simpler times. Times before you were in love with a taken man and the two of you were just boss and employee.

The hostess of the gala stands out in her intricate blue dress. Crushed seashells along her trim dazzle like diamonds. Her deep blue makeup perfectly complements her pale skin.

Just her getup alone reminds you of the mermaids you've seen in books as a kid. Her flickers make the semblance all the more obvious.

Flashes of tattoos on her face and a scaly tail where her legs should be. They bring with them a hum in the air, and the scent of salt. But they vanish just as quickly as they come.

She's beautiful in both states. Beautiful and deceptively fragile.

Because if someone was just looking at her for the first time with no context, they couldn't imagine the sheer amount of blood on her hands.

Kai is a delicate woman, small and unassuming. But you know better from the stories you’ve dug up and the ones your boss has told you.

”A woman with an ice-cold heart,” all the rumors said. Sylus just said she’s a ruthless cockroach unwilling to die, which he could respect.

She seems so untouchable. You and Sylus make your entrance to her gala, you in his colors and arms locked, yet she doesn’t even spare a glance. She just talks. Talks and ignores all gazes that turn to the new people in the room.

She may ignore your presence, but you can’t ignore hers. Not with that color that bleeds into her thread. Not with the stain of death that hangs upon it.

A dead soulmate, her thread reads. One that took his own life.

It’s the rarest of threads for you to see. Because most tended to follow their soulmates. A soulmate’s love is the most treasured love, after all. And to live without that love isn’t a life worth living in the eyes of most.

Maybe that’s why she has such a vicious repetition? Maybe that’s why she’s known for having such a dead heart? Because people sensed there was something fundamentally wrong with her, much like they do with you.

You chase those cursed thoughts away as soon as they come. They only bring misfortune, and tonight, you need anything but that. You need Kai’s fortune.

”This place is rather stuffy,” you comment loudly enough for the hostess to hear once you’re close.

Kai’s expression doesn’t change, but the look in her eyes do. They shift to one of curiosity and inquiry.

Most people wouldn’t dare to insult a party to straight to the hostess’ face. Especially when said party is being thrown by her. So as you've hopedd, she's drawn to you, even if she's unaware of that.

From what you've researched about her, she is a woman who values honesty. So while it may pain you to be so blunt, being forthcoming is the best way to sway her. That, and if you can find her single weak point.

Because someone like Kai doesn’t do all this without reason. You need to find that reason.

Of course, there were rumors. Secret children. Dying parents. But, seeing her in person confirms only one: a spouse.

Kai doesn’t wear a ring on her finger. She doesn’t even have a tan-line to indicate that she wears one outside of work. It’s her thread that tells you of another. You don't get the details. But this person, this mystery spouse, is kind. With a heart so warm it thawed even Kai's.

That’s who you need to find.

”Apologies, Mrs. Kerr,” you plaster on a genuine smile. “Didn’t know you were so close. I may look like a dragon at the moment, but I assure you, I do not possess the eyes of one.”

You fiddle with the fake, but realistic, horns on your head as you say this.

”Seems you got my gift,” Kai’s voice is smooth, but absent of any emotion.

”Gift, you say? That’s what you’d call this?” Sylus gestures to you and him.

For whatever reason, Kai decided to make her gala themed. Non-humans, to be exact. And you and Sylus are dragons, fiends, according to what she sent you alongside the two invites. Said invite had clear instructions on how you wouldn’t be let in if you weren’t wearing your designated outfit.

You knew from the second you saw the outfits (after getting over you initial shock that she had your measurements for some reason, and knew of your employment under Sylus so quickly) that Sylus wouldn’t be in a good mood during this gathering.

He’s already glaring daggers at anyone who dares to gaze at him for too long. And he’s touched his horns so many times, you’re surprised they don’t have handprints in them.

However, he still manages to keep that same arrogant smirk and carefree attitude. Or, at least, he manages to fake it enough to make it seem that way. You know better due to your power.

Kai seems to know better as well. She keeps her eyes locked onto Sylus as she briefly greets and waves off other guests. Her face remains blank, but her eyes and thread tell of amusement. She notices your boss’ discomfort just like you do.

”Of course it’s a gift, Sylus,” she casually says his first name when others would say it in fear or would just use his last name. “What else would you call this?”

”You don’t want to know what I would call this, Kai,” he spits out her name like it’s an insult.

”You’re right, I don’t. Maybe your new employee can tell me what she thinks of her outfit? Everyone else has just given me the best of compliments, so I’d like to hear something honest for a change.”

The two most dangerous people in the room give you their full attention. You take it in stride, relying on years and years of practice not to shrink under their judging gazes.

Starting to feel like we’re not on the same side, you think as Sylus’ eyes in particular bare into you.

”I find them quite telling, Mrs. Kerr.”

”Telling of what?”

”Telling of your relationship to my boss, and why he decided to drag me here of all place for our first outing,” you give your full attention to Sylus before you continue. “Speaking of which, said boss needs to make himself scarce if he wants this to work properly.”

Sylus tilts his head at you, leaning to whisper in your ear, “What do you think you’re doing?”

”Setting you up for success. Now shoo,” you whisper back into his ear.

”How demanding you are, Miss Negotiator. And here I thought I was your boss.”

Sylus’ tone is the same as ever, but the glint in his eyes tells a different story. One of how he doesn’t appreciate you ordering him around and disrupting your dynamic. One of danger and cautioning you not to cross a line.

You soldier on, “You brought me here to work. So mind your ego, and let me, because she and you clearly have bad blood and I’d rather not have to navigate that all night.”

Rather than taking offense by your blunt words like a normal person, Sylus just gets more amused.

”What makes you think we have bad blood? This could just be our way communicating.”

You scoff, glancing quickly to see if Kai noticed, but she's already back to greeting guests.

”Don’t insult me, boss. Even a blind and deaf person could notice how much you two want to rip into each other.”

A thought suddenly pops up in your head after you say this.

”Why in the world do you want to do business with a woman you clearly despise, and who hates you in return?”

”Ever heard of keeping your friends close, but keeping your enemies closer, sweetie?”

You jab him in the arm for the stupid nickname, one you’ve told him repeatedly not use on you because that sort of nonsense should only be used with his soulmate. He’s ignored you every time, too entertained by your flustered reactions.

”Business requires mutual trust, does it not?”

He laughs. “Not here, sweetie. Here, business can come about merely because two people want to spite someone else.”

He looks you dead in the eye with a sinister smirk, “Or because the desperation to live is just that powerful.”

Sylus finally walks away once he says that. Shivers run down your spine. His words are a reminder of why you’re really here, on why Sylus decided you persuading one of his enemies to work with him was your first task.

He’s measuring your worth. He’s seeing if he should keep you around.

For all that you two joke and banter, there’s always a voice in the back of your head that wonders if he’ll change his mind about sparing you. You may not have known what your old auction house was doing precisely, but there may have been others that died there that were the same.

You’re here to prove that you were different than those buried in the rubble. And prove it you would.

Kai turns back to you, “Finished?”

”Of course, Mrs. Kerr. Apologies for my boss’ behavior. Listening to reason isn’t his strong suit.”

You feel a bit guilty about insulting Sylus, but than you remember his numerous threats during your first week at his base and immediately brush that off.

”I get the feeling you and I know that better than anyone.”

”Tell me about it,” you roll your eyes before schooling your expression to a more serious one. “And now that he’s gone, how about we talk business?”

”Bold one, aren’t we?”

”I was under the impression you valued honesty, Mrs. Kerr. I’d rather not insult your intelligence, and instead would like to negotiate in good faith than deceit.”

”Good faith? From Sylus?” She sneers, the most emotion she’s shown thus far.

”Not Sylus. Me.”

”You work for him. Isn’t that the same thing?”

”If we were remotely the same, I highly doubt you’d give me the time of day.”

”Maybe I’m giving you the time of day because you’re similar,” Kai takes a sip of a drink someone had offered her, frowns, and than says, “Because at least Sylus is never boring. Two of him equals twice the fun, right?”

You laugh, “Two of that man would drive me insane. And I'd imagine that would be the same for you, no?”

Kai shakes her head in humor, face still as blank as ever.

”No, you’re right. Just the image in my head of that is nightmare fuel enough. Two of him means twice the explosions every time we meet, and I don’t think my people would want to deal with that anymore than I do.”

Her words give you pause for concern.

”Explosions? That’s a theme with him?”

Kai gives you a questioning look for you to continue.

”The first time we met he blew up my old workplace. Granted, my old boss deserved it, but still… didn’t think that was an every day occurrence for him.”

”I don’t know about every day, but he tends to explode something every time I meet him. Usually me. Granted, this is usually after we’ve had another… disagreement.”

She sounds proud of herself. That pride is wiped away in a second, and she levels you with a harsh gaze.

”He knows we aren’t friends. Or allies in any capacity. And that we’ll turn a gun on one another for the right price. So why has he sent you to me?”

That ice cold gaze of her beautiful eyes would freeze anyone else. Years of customer service and dealing with others far more trigger happy than her allows you not to waver.

”Because he’s testing me,” you decide not to beat around the bush. “Getting you of all people to work with him will prove my worth.”

Kai isn’t fazed by your words.

”And you think you can do that?”

You shrug. “Why not? You’re a woman of extreme intelligence, and you’ve worked with him in the past for the right price. I just need to find out what price will make you stay and what it entails.”

Silence falls between the two of you. And you almost believe you see the ghost of a small fall on her lips. But her face is back to its usual blank expression before you can even blink.

”Ya know,” there’s a drawl in her tone, an accent leaking out that wasn’t there before. “Most people are never this upfront. Even when being honest or acting in "good faith" like you claim."

”I worked at an auction house before Sylus hired me. Trust me, I’m well aware. But I find such conversation to be desperately dull. Much like most parties.”

”I hope you’re not including mine.”

”We shall see,” you glance around, looking for a certain something for a moment, but you spot your destination easily. “Aw! There’s something to spice things up.”

You gesture to her open bar.

”I wonder who suggested that? It stands out from the usual things at these gatherings.”

”My spouse,” you’re a bit surprised at Kai’s admittance; it isn’t public knowledge that she’s married, after all. “Sylus knows I’m married. And even he didn’t, you’d of all people would’ve figured it out.”

”You flatter me.”

The two of walk to the bar. Many eyes follow you, but no one dares to approach Kai.

You see Sylus in your peripheral vision, sipping on some expensive drink you’ve seen your old boss drink occasionally, and surrounded by people who talk at him. Sylus just looks at them bored out of his mind. His signature smirk is plastered on for appearance's sake.

There’s desperation in those people. For his attention. For his cooperation. For his money. And he just stands there with that familiar, arrogant, expression.

His eyes flicker over to you. You put on an award-winning smile, and that smirk of his deepens to a real one. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand upright.

Because he’s judging you, studying you in ways you didn’t think possible. This is the first job where you had any danger from your own boss; the others hired you under different circumstances.

You brush him off as soon as you get to the bar. You had a plan to enact, after all.

When the woman behind the counter turns to you and Kai, you give her a sweet smile.

”Why not take a break, honey?”

The woman gives you a look. Kai doesn’t react.

”I’ll take over. I was a mixologist not long ago, and I believe your employer wants a drink more to her tastes. You seem tired, and I’d hate to put any pressure on you when I’m the one being so nosy.”

Kai tilts her head at you before she addresses the woman, “Do as she says.”

The woman thanks you profusely, and practically sprints out of the ballroom. You walk yourself to behind the counter, scanning the spread of high quality ingredients with a keen eye.

My old place was never this decked out, you think to yourself as you search for just the right things.

You get to work pretty quickly, Kai watching as you fly around from shelf to shelf. But you avoid any alcohol like the plague. From what you dug up on Kai, and your observations of her thread, she hates alcohol.

Her father drank so much to the point where she had to raise herself and her brother alone. On his rare days of coherance, he'd throw bottles at the siblings, screaming how Kai's brother murdered their mother.

Her soulmate used to use it on their bad days before their death. Alcohol is symbol of dread to Kai, a painful wound that will probably never properly heal.

You can relate to that somewhat, with you aversion to romance. Not on the same level, but that’s what empathy’s for; you don’t need to have the same experience to have an idea of what she’s been through. That, and you can read her soul.

There’s turmoil as she watches you work, curiosity and a bit of fear mixing together to make a cocktail of emotions in her heart. Outwardly, she doesn’t show any of this. Her inner world is locked away.

Another thing you two have in common. You’ve been burned by the world far too many times to trust it with your fragile heart.

And it’s why you’ve been so truthful with her so far. Kai and you’ve been lied to and lying your entire lives. Shedding that skin and becoming someone that isn’t like that for her, someone she can trust… that will do far more good than any savvy business proposal or story.

So you work to give her a flavorful drink she’ll love, reading her thread and working in your experience to create the perfect blend. The second she takes a sip of it once you slide it towards her makes all the effort worth it.

”Not bad, Miss Negotiator,” it’s as much of a compliment you’ll ever get from the woman, and you'll take it gladly.

”Why thank you for the kind words, Mrs. Kerr.”

You give a little bow as begin your next drink. No one’s ordered yet, but some of Kai’s guests are curious and look at you.

The waiters obey your orders, delivering each personalized drink to correct person. An arms dealer here, and a jewel thief there. Each have varying reactions from mirth to shock to almost a little bit of fear over the strange woman who entered with Sylus knowing them so well.

Speaking of your boss, you save his drink for last. Both for the drama and because than that puts him into the spotlight once more. The mysterious bartender and her boss… eyes will turn to the both of you.

But, eyes are apparently already on your boss. And not for anything good. You watch the last waiter go with his drink and spot the towering man in a scuffle. He stands with his arms crossed, clearly having the time of his life. You can barely see him, but that much is obvious.

Now the woman that stands in front of him is anything but that. Her face is scrunched up in ways you didn’t think possible. And judging by how she looks, she’s screaming at him. Her getup suggests a rich heiress, and there’s only one of that here from what you remember of the guest list.

Miss Andrea Crimson, the only child and heir of one of the many gangs in the N109 zone. But the Crimsons were different; they’ve been here the longest, have one of the farthest reaches, and are infamously ruthless to the point where even Sylus and you cringe.

People have died by that girl’s command for the smallest infractions. Her father gives into her every whim. And there were rumors of there being a second child that was pushed out of the family because of her jealousy.

She also has a history with your boss. Once in love him, now full of a hatred you can almost admire for how deep it runs. To Sylus, she’s a nuisance he can’t get rid of; to you, she’s yet another obstacle for you to conquer.

You politely excuse yourself to Kai, who waves you off while sipping her drink. She watches you go, though. From interest in what you’re doing, or the commotion you’re going to, you don’t know. Either way, that little bit of attention she’s paying to you will work out in your favor.

Once you arrive at Sylus’ side, you’re not given much of an opportunity to speak.

”What?” Andrea spits at you. “You his new toy, now?”

That pisses you off. Originally, you were going approach this woman with kindness, respect. A little firmness, but nothing too crazy.

That goes out the expensive, decorated window to moment she addresses you as a toy. Maybe because of that phase you had as a late teen, throwing yourself at anyone as some poor way of getting the love you crave? Maybe because you’ve worked in several places that saw you as a mere decoration?

Or maybe it’s because of what she said says about Sylus? Your new boss is harsh, but fair. Terrifying, yet reliable. And hearing her say that, imply that he treats lives and people so cheap, chips at your very soul.

Moments like these make you wonder if your lack of soulmate makes you care so much, or you were stripped of one because you’d care for others more than them.

”Oh, get a hold of yourself, Andrea. I and many others do not have the time for to interrupting important business because this man would not fuck you.”

That shuts her up quickly. But you’re not finished.

”I get that you’ve gotten everything you’ve ever wanted in life until he said no to you. The drugs. The money that keeps coming despite all your failed businesses. The multiple affairs, some of which whose spouses are here. Even the murder of your own sibling was covered up for you."

You speak these words with certainty and authority as you get closer to Andrea. Her expression drops, and the blood drains from her face. Her dark skin doesn’t blush, but you can practically feel the warmth from her body.

”How did you…”

”I know more, Andrea,” you speak quieter, in her ear. “I know that you’ve stolen every little accomplishment from them. I know you framed them as the problem child while you were the perfect daughter. I know you stole their voice from them. And I know why you’ve really come here.”

”Why…”

”Do you really want me to spell it out for you? Surely there’s enough of a brain in that head of yours to not want to hear it?"

She trembles, and you relish in it.

”What do you want?”

”Leave my boss and me alone, and I’ll consider keeping my mouth shut. Because you have a treasure trove of secrets that I’ll be happy to spill if you don’t.”

Andrea shuffles away, head still hung up high despite her embarrassment. You can respect her for that much.

A slow clap from behind you causes you to drag your eyes away from her.

”Nicely done, Miss Diplomat,” Sylus’ ever present grin both amuses and frustrates you.

”I wouldn’t have had to do that if you’d have learned to keep that mouth of yours shut.”

”What would be the fun in that, sweetie?”

You internally roll your eyes at the foolish man before you. But, you plaster on your best customer service smile on the outside.

“Anyone ever told you that you’re far too aggressive?” Your tone is sickly sweet.

“Any suggestions I don’t consider are filed under “never heard of it”. Besides, you handled yourself quite well.”

“Only because I must in order to keep your organization from collapsing and from you being constantly on everyone’s most wanted list. And if anything I tell you to do is in that “never heard of it” file, I will being killing you myself.”

Maybe your conversations with Kai have made you stupidly bold. You mentally scold yourself for being so… insolent. But Sylus just seems to find the whole thing hilarious, so you relax.

At least you can have fun with your new boss. Even if he does tend to like threatening you. A lot.

“After all that effort you went through not only to get me to let you work with me, but also today?”

“It’s all a part of my elaborate scheme.”

“What scheme?”

“One filed under “Sylus is not privy to this.” Deal with it.”

He chuckles at you. Then, his tone takes on a more serious one.

”How do things with Kai fare?”

”Swimmingly, all things considered.”

”And what things are you considering?”

”You,” you say before leaving. You can hear Sylus laughing again as you do.

The journey back to Kai is a quick one, with people already back to their normal business as if nothing had happened. Perhaps because most of them see drama like this every other day.

”Apologies,” you say to Kai as soon as you get behind the bar again. “But I simply could not let such a woman make a scene at your gala. And my boss certainly wasn’t doing anything to stop her.”

”It’s fine. I invited Sylus because he attracts drama and entertainment like that. For some reason, people are too afraid to say things like that to my face."

Because you’re far more dangerous than even Sylus, you think.

Kai’s reputation is even more brutal than Sylus’. Drowning entire companies in deserts. Creating jewelry from the bones of those she’s killed. Driving people to suicide with her voice alone. Even rumors of cannabalism.

The woman is deadly, terrifying. But, for good reason.

”Well… no matter how entertaining he is, there’s a limit to how much I’m willing to stand being thrown at him. He may not be swayed by anyone’s opinion of him, but I sure am.”

Your words are flowery, targeting what you know of what Kai feels towards her spouse. There’s tinges of worry in her thread. There’s brief flashes of her mystery spouse being a doormat, and the fear that incites. Time after time, the person she loves lets their family walk over them.

Your words strike that cold heart of hers. Strike at the very core of who she is, and honestly, who you are: a protector. Because those flowery words weren’t just that. They were the honest truth.

You’re grateful to Sylus. You’ll never say that to his face, but you are. For this new job. For the freedom he allows you. For the bits of kindness he shows like ordering things you like to eat to the base or giving you the latest tools for jewelry making or giving you a rare gem or entertaining your drink mixing hobby.

Because despite how he threatens you, he still manages to treat you well. Which is far more than any of your previous bosses did.

”You care an awful lot for a man you haven’t worked with for long.”

You don’t ask how she knows this. Kai probably has an extensive information network, and she’s not stupid. With her history with Sylus, if you weren’t new, she would’ve met you sooner.

So you don’t ask that. No need to insult a woman who would, without hesitation, smash the glass in her hand to slit your throat and stain her pale skin a deep red. She’s killed over less.

”Do I need a reason to care for another? It’d be a lonely existence without it.”

”Yes it would,” she mumbles with the most emotion you’ve heard from her all night.

Once again, you tap into Kai’s deeper feelings. There’s a sense of loneliness that permeates her thread. An aching, festering, loneliness not unlike your own.

There’s a weight to that loneliness. One of responsibility. One of duty. And one of longing. Again, so similar to you, yet so different.

Part of you thinks that this why your boss and her don’t get along. Because they feel like they’re staring into a mirror.

You, on the other hand, take that similarity in stride. It’s another way for you to connect to your target.

”Why’re ya taking such an indirect approach to getting what you want from me? After all, ya clearly know ye way around getting to know people and their secrets. Why not use mine against me?"

Kai’s voice is back to her usual flat tone. Her body language is lax, but blank. She gives nothing away to normal people.

But you aren’t normal people. You see her thread, a piece of her soul leaking into your field of vision. And it tells you the real story.

It tells of wariness, of woman scorned and burned by kindness in the past. It tells of broke promises and what that did to her family.

It tells of hopefulness, of her praying that maybe you’ll be different from the rest. It tells of how the logical side of her wants to squash that hope and snuff it out before it can see the light of day.

You appeal to that part of her, “Such methods aren’t needed here.”

”Why?”

”Because a deal made with you that’s not in good faith isn’t a deal at all. And as I said before, I'd rather our deal come out of one of good faith than deceit. That, and because both parties already have bad blood, and you deserve more than some silly scare tactics.”

”Besides,” you laugh a bit. “I doubt such a thing would work on someone like you. Andrea has nothing real in her life, nothing for her to hold on to, hence why I scared her. You do, Mrs. Kerr. And that makes you all the more fierce and all the more respectable.”

”Still on with te flattery, ya?"

She hides it well, but you can tell she has a storm of emotions at how well you read her. Fear for her spouse. A bit of awe at you and your continued boldness. Skepticism.

”It’s my greatest weapon,” you smile. “And it’ll work on you, I’m sure.”

Kai swirls the rim of her drink with her fingertip.

”And why do you believe that?”

”Because you and Sylus ultimately want the same thing: change to the N109 zone.”

Kai finally finishes her drink and turns her full attention to you.

”Why do you think that of someone like me? Surely you’ve heard the rumors?”

You almost laugh at her words. Because despite her coldness, her endless cruelty, and the way Kai carries herself... you know what she really wants.

You know her type well. You know how scarred her heart is. You know how much the child in her cries with every person she protects.

Because why was there no one like her when she was a child? Why did no one protect the little girl who grew up too fast?

”Simple. Because you’re capable of love.”

Kai has nothing to say after that. Her face is still cold. Her body is still relaxed and not giving anything away. But you know you’ve struck a chord with her.

She keeps her eyes away from yours. Perhaps because they’re so expressive despite the icy chill she tries to keep in them?

You follow her eyes. You follow her eyes as they follow someone in the gala, one that walks not too far from where the two of you sit..

They flicker. They flicker like Kai did earlier that night, and the night you first met Sylus. But they don’t show draconic traits like your boss did, nor the scales or tattoos the woman before you did.

No. This person flickers with machines. Armor and mechanical wiring crawling across their skin. Black, deep black, twined with silver. A destructive weapon in their hand.

A voice calls out from them.

”Run X-02,” it calls. “Run.”

You blink, and it’s all gone. Vanishing in a flash, but still so disturbing that it makes you feel nauseous. Because while Kai and Sylus flickers were shocking, they weren’t so… empty.

Devoid of any feeling. A machine. A weapon. A being whose parts were carved out time and time again until nothing remained but the single order to obey.

You could feel your heart pound despite your effort to calm down. You focus on the current details of the person: dark skin, black hair with streaks of silver that remind you of the stars.

No calm comes from looking at them. Because Kai has decided to make them a cyborg for their themed outfit. That, coupled with you and Sylus’ own get up, made you wonder if she knew. If she knew of the shapes certain people's souls once held. If she knew that person was an android once, just like Sylus was once a fiend.

”You seem awfully distracted.”

”Apologies.”

”No, it’s fine,” Kai waves you off, tilting her head before the whisper of a smile appears on her lips. “You’ve had to deal with a lot for your first outing with Sylus. Why not visit the gardens? My spouse takes great care of maintaining it.”

You want to take her up on the offer. To escape into nature and just settle down your thoughts and racing heart. But you can’t. You have a job to do.

”As much as I appreciate your offer, I—“

”I insist. You wouldn’t want to disobey an order from your host, now would you."

”No. No I would not, Mrs. Kerr.”

”Good.”

She gives you the directions to the gardens. And you memorize them easily.

As you leave your station to go where she commands, you notice her glide her way to Sylus and other guests. And judging how their threads behave, you figure Kai’s in a good mood.

You think about her as you meander around her mansion. Priceless artworks are casually on display in the hallway, all of the same artist. Rafayel. You recognize his style from your auction days.

The second you see the garden, you let out a huge sigh. It’s gorgeous. Sprawling rows upon rows of flowers that you were sure were extinct.

Towering trees that reach to the sky, their branches home to many birds. You swear you see Mephisto among them.

Whinding pathways that are easy to follow, but you can get lost because of the sheer beauty that surrounds it.

You’re in awe that such a place can exist in the N109 Zone. There’s no sunlight for these plants to gain nutrients from. So how are they growing?

Placing a hand on one of the trees, you dig into them. Plants don’t have souls, or at least, not in the way that humans and Wanderers do. They have no threads of fate. They have no real desires, fears, or secrets.

But you can speak to them on occasion. If they’re old enough.

You’re drawn to one tree, and it’s the one you place a hand on. All you get is the flashing image of the person you saw earlier, the one Kai was staring at and the one whose past emanated such emptiness.

You see them and another tending to this garden. The only thing you can make out from the other is they’re a man and he feels like sunshine. He and the person from the party are what made the plants grows.

You wander further into the garden. Birds chirp. Foxes scatter about. Gentle winds sway. And, eventually, you run into another person. It’s the one from the tree’s memory, and from the party. It’s the former android. They’re crouched on the ground, grass and dirt crawling up their fancy clothes.

The moment you see them up close, you feel bad about your early assumptions and how you let their past life cloud your judgement. Because this person has one of the most beautiful souls you’ve ever seen.

They feel like nature itself. Like all the plants, animals, and maybe even planets themselves have been meshed together to create one person. They’re thread glows with a kind of compassion and gentleness you’ve never seen from another.

Their thread is weaved together by sorrow, love, and hope. And in that love lies someone familiar: Kai. This is her spouse. This is the person she’s willing to do anything for.

Every plan you had for this meeting goes out the window. They stare at you with their tender blue eyes for a moment before they reach into their pocket for something.

A pen and notepad comes out. You’re left there, just watching this person write something down before they rip off the slip and hand it to you.

”I’m sorry if I frightened you,” it reads. “I’m Alex, and this is my garden.”

Alex stays on the ground. You introduce yourself with your own name, and they nod.

”Can I help you? You seem in need of some assistance.”

Alex blinks at you. You offer a shaky smile. They think for a moment before standing, and you’re able to see into the bushes they were previously sheilding.

A wolf cub, hardly old enough to be away from its mother, trembles in the bushes. Clearly injured—one of its ribs is poking out of its side—,malnourished, and dripping wet. In short, its condition is horrible.

Alex is writing again. You let your palm out from them to give it to you once you see they’ve finished this time.

”I found her a few hours ago on a trip outside the zone. Poor thing was on her own and stuck under the corpuses of her slaughtered family, probably for days. She was unconscious, and her rib ripped through her skin when she woke up in a strange place. I’ve tried calming her down, but nothing seems to work.”

The sorrow in Alex’s words is evident, even if they aren’t using their voice. Their expression falls, eyes downcast and fists clenched in frustration. They’re so open with their emotions. It’s a sharp contrast to their wife’s way of doing things.

”How about I try? You’d have to relay my intentions, but I’d like to think of myself as quite good at persuading others.”

Treating a wolf cub like any other customer or dealer wasn’t something you thought you’d ever do in your life. But, the poor baby needs help. And it’ll make Alex happy.

Already attached to them within 30 seconds of meeting them.

Another paper is put into your hands, "Why?"

”Because I’d hate to see her suffer more. She deserves some kindness after what she’s been through.”

Part of you wonders if you’re still speaking about the wolf cub. And judging by their reaction, Alex thinks the same.

Deep down, you believe the same about Kai. A girl forced to step up at a young age and raise her little brother.

A woman who became a monster to protect those she loves and what remains of her people.

A woman who time and time again has forced herself to carry insurmountable burdens.

And maybe, you too, can relate to this. Maybe you also deserve some kindness after all you’ve been through. And maybe, just maybe… that’s the real reason you got this job.

To distract yourself, you do what you do best: you talk. You talk and Alex relays and repeat. Until, finally, the little cub walks out and into Alex’s arms.

They get to work immediately. You use the little one’s soul to soothe her, guiding the pup to sleep while Alex mends her fur and resets her bones.

They also summon a large falcon to perch on one of their arms. In its beak it carries a milk bottle that Alex lets the little one drink from when you coax her out of a deep sleep.

You two stand in silence for a bit. The falcon occasionally squawks.

It takes the notepad into its beak, and Alex writes, “Would you like to stay longer? I’m sorry, but I really should be heading back.”

”As should I. My foolish boss might be making a mess again.”

Alex smiles, and you both begin your walk back. They still cradle the wold cub in their arms. The falcon flies just slightly overhead. The trees and plants seem to lean and reach out to Alex as the two of you walk by.

More animals begin to join. A white tiger follows closely on their heels. A polar bear walks beside you (and it takes everything in you to remain calm). Both a crocodile and an alligator walk in front of you.

As a result of this, your re-entrance to the party turns many heads. Some afraid. Some in shock. And one enraged: Andrea. She says nothing. She just glares at Alex while they look down in embarrassment.

You reach your boss and Kai quickly. The falcon swoops down again with the notepad, Alex writes, and hands it to Kai. She reads it quickly.

She taps a fork on her glass, "Alright. I'm calling an end to tonight’s gathering. Get the fuck out before I feed you to one of these fine creatures."

Kai pets the head of the tiger and polar bear as she speaks. People hurry out. But the gaze that Kai and Alex give you and Sylus roots the two of you in place.

Kai turns to Sylus, “I’ll work with you.”

He immediately turns to you and whispers. “Seems your first job went well.”

”I told you my method would work,” you grin.

”Aww, but mine’s more effective and time-saving, sweetie. We’ve been here for far too long.”

”It hasn’t even been an hour, you big baby.”

His eyes widen at the insult, "You've become quite bold."

”I just talked to a supposed cannibal who also happens to be someone with a body count many times higher than yours and who’s been killing since she was mostly likely around the age of 5. I’m allowed to have a little bit of attitude.”

”Whatever you say.”

”And about your “method”… mine’s clearly superior to it. And better in the long run. Evidenced by how a woman who hates you is now working with you.”

”And how exactly did you do that?”

”Through her spouse. A spouse you didn’t tell me about,” you lightly gesture to Alex. Kai and them are too busy chatting to notice you do so.

”Forgot to mention them."

"No you didn't," your whisper becomes harsher with annoyance at his obvious lie. "And you did that on purpose."

Sylus' grin widens, "And why do you think that?"

Your own smile mirrors his, “It’s written all over your face.”

Sylus just laughs.

”You finished?” Kai calls out, eyebrow raised.

You two turn your full attention to her again.

”Good,” she continues. “Now, we have one condition for our business deal to go forward.”

Sylus crosses his arms. “And that would be?"

”She will be our communication. Our liaison, so to speak,” and she points at you. You snap back to the present when a hand touches your forearm. It’s Miss Hunter, and her haul of protocores.

“For someone who was so hesitant not so long ago, you’ve spent quite a lot.”

Miss Hunter ignores your words, worry lining her expression. “You okay? You were spacing out…”

Her eyes look you up and down.

“I’m not going to collapse again, sweetie. I’m quite alright.”

You give her a smile to sell the whole thing, your little act. Because what else could you tell her? That you were drowning in memories of a simpler time?

I’m fine, Miss Hunter. Just thinking about the past, before I fell in love with your soulmate and I was just an employee under him.

You couldn’t say that. For so many reasons.

Due to those reasons, you try to focus on the world around you, and anchor yourself in the present. People dancing around you, minding their own business and lost in their own worlds.

You have half the mind to join them. That is until some men start badgering Miss Hunter. And, strangely, you’re thankful for it. They’re a welcome distraction.

You quickly place yourself between the men and Miss Hunter, shielding her from their eyes and their grabby hands. However, you don’t get even a word out of your mouth before a familiar voice interrupts.

“Her schedule’s full.”

Sylus comes up behind the men. They scatter upon his arrival. Their departure allows you to get a good look at your boss. He looks pissed.

Arms crossed tightly against his chest and scowl evident on his face, he watches the men leave you all in disgust. He looks like an animal ready to pounce. The dragon in him is bubbling to the surface, appalled and enraged someone dared to get so close to his treasure.

Will he be that way with me in future? Or is he already that way, raging at the mere idea of me being near his soulmate?

You speak because any more thoughts like that, and you might begin to cry.

“That was quick."

Sylus' expression relaxes upon hearing your voice, “You know how I detest wasting my time on boring things. The meeting was predictably that, so I wanted to speed things up.”

“You sure that’s not because you were worried?”

You say the words in jest, but part of you truly hopes he was worried. Not for you, but for her. For his soulmate. For his destined love. For his sorceress and the only woman worthy of him. Because if that’s the case, well… you have all the more reason to leave.

You can justify that voice in your head that screams at you to run if he cares for her. If he cares for her more than you, that is.

“Worried about what, sweetie? You can handle yourself just fine. And I know a little extra baggage won’t hinder you.”

Miss Hunter, for some odd reason, doesn’t comment on his obvious dig. You give her a look. She looks away, almost like she’s embarrassed.

There’s something going on between them again.

You brush it off. Last time you got involved in their drama, it didn’t end well for you. No use in you sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.

Because of how lost in your thoughts you are, you almost don’t hear Sylus’ next words, “Care to dance?”

You don’t look at him because you expect his hand to be stretched out to Miss Hunter. You do look at her again because she’d need someone to hold her bunch of protocores. But she just gestures her head at Sylus, and you turn to him in confusion.

Sylus hand extends to you . Not his soulmate that carries a mound of protocores.

You hesitate. But something in his eyes compels you to take his hand, so you do so in the next moment. Sylus gives you a precious look as he whisks you away. Miss Hunter gives you a small thumbs up, and you don’t know how you feel about that.

Sylus and you easily fall into a rhythm with one another. Years and years of familiarity shadows all your earlier turmoil. You can just embrace his touch, his scent, and his care with no reservations. Each step to the music, choreographed but comforting.

Sylus leans in to whisper in your ear, “Sherman has been taken care of, Gamayun.”

That brings a smile to your face. A sick, twisted, and evil smile that you tend not to show. But Sherman had it coming.

He betrayed you. He hurt Miss Hunter and took her family from her. He got himself into this mess. And you only wished you’ve could’ve been there to rip out his soulmate thread, one attached to a woman who was long gone.

“Good. You better not have been quick about his punishment. Otherwise, I’m going to have to drag him out of his grave.”

Sylus spins you, and pulls you close for a moment.

“So aggressive.”

“I’m taking your advice: anything I don’t consider is filed under “never heard of it”, and I definitely don’t consider myself aggressive.”

He releases you and you step back.

“Then what do you consider this?”

“My bleeding heart acting up again.”

The two of you step into the back and forth dance again, box steps and making circles around the dance floor.

“Your bleeding heart gets you into far too much trouble.”

“Better than the trouble your loose lips gets us both in.”

“And what trouble are you referring to, exactly?”

“Kai,” you begin to list off. “That old records dealer in Siberia. That one arms dealer in Canada. James.”

Sylus’ face makes a strange expression at James’ name.

“Still hung up on that man?”

“That man,” you tease, speaking directly into Sylus’ ear when you get closer. “Would’ve been quite a help to our business.”

“You sure your interest in him isn’t personal?”

If you didn’t know any better, you’d say he sounded jealous. But a quick glance behind him at Miss Hunter, protocores taken away by some of Onychinus men, gets you to give up that idea.

Why would he be jealous when he has her?

“Guess we’ll never know,” is all you can get out.

You and Sylus dance in silence for a bit longer, a beautiful display of your synergy. You keep looking for Miss Hunter at any given opportunity. Her presence reminds you of your place. She reminds you that despite the inherent intimacy of this dance, you will never get more.

You’ll never get what you truly want.

“You see, this is why I worry whenever your bleeding heart acts up,” Sylus suddenly says.

“Why?”

Your voice sounds airy. You cringe at the sound, hoping Sylus doesn't notice how it wavers.

What is wrong with me?

“Because despite me being right in front of you, your eyes are focused on her.”

You feel so hot. Your head is in such a fog.

“And you care about that because…”

Sylus pulls you in close, closer than any other previous time. You two no longer dance, and his arm is tightly wound around your waist.

When he begins to lean in, your heart pounds and your stomach flutters. It's a thumping bass that drowns out all other conversations and music around you. All you can hear is your heart. All you can smell is his cologne.

All you can see is him.

Warmth flutters and circulates through your body. A warm that whispers comfort and safety. A warmth that draws you into Sylus just as he draws into you.

This warmth calls to you. Beckons you. It smuthers all the guilt, denial, and determination to stay the course.

It says, kiss him, kis him.

“Don’t you know by now that I adore you?” He mutters into your ear.

The two of you just stare at one another. The world stops dead in its tracks. Because did he really just say that? With his sultry voice that glides over your ears and sends shivers down your spine and makes your legs tremble and causes you to be so very weak? With a softness in his eyes you’ve never before in your life?

No. I’ve seen it somewhere.

It’s how Kai looked at Alex and vice versa. It’s how James would look when he talked about his lost love. It’s how so many soulmates would look at their other half.

But, that couldn’t be true, could it?

Your eyes are deceiving you. Because Sylus is leaning in closer to you. His scent becomes stronger and your body become warmer. You don’t care about anything else around you. All that matters is him and you and your pounding heart.

It’s like you’re waiting for something, studying him to be prepared for what it is. You’re still, as if any movement will scare him off or make him change his mind about whatever he's about to do.

And, for a moment, you swear you see him glance at your lips. You stop yourself from breathing. You, stupidly, lean into him.

Your brain screams at you to stop. Your heart sings for you to move faster, to get what you've wanted for so long. You listen to your heart.

You cup Sylus' cheeks. You tilt your head to the side. And that heart of yours—that foolish, foolish muscle—is so very loud that it consumes all your senses.

All you feel is your heart. All you see is your heart. All you taste is your heart.

What would Sylus taste like?

The thought is indecent. It's a fantasy. It's a trap. It's something you should never want, never think about, never wonder about.

But it's the siren song that pulls you in. It's what makes you tenderly glide your tongue against your lips as Sylus draws you closer.

That seems to break Sylus out of whatever trance he’s in, and his hand leaves your waist. You drop your hands from his cheeks when he does.

And just like that, the warmth in you is sucked away, as if his hands were the supplier of it. Your heart still envelopes you, consumes you. But no longer do you think about the taste of Sylus.

You perse your lips together, your mind conjuring the image of something else pressing against them. You blink several times, still in awe at all that did—and didn't—happen.

Am I… disappointed?

That’s ridiculous. You knew from the moment you fell for Sylus nothing would ever happen between the two you. You knew that, and you told yourself that everyday when your urge to kiss him or cuddle him especially close or flirt with him became too much.

To distract yourself, you ask, “How long until the bombs go off?”

Sylus doesn't seem affected by the strange atmosphere that was between you two. He gives you that familiar arrogant and confident smile.

But there's a glimmer in his eye. A glimmer that tells you so much and so little. You don't dare look at his thread in case there's more confusion there.

“Why do you assume I’m doing that, Gamayun?”

Because, unfortunately, I know you all too well.

“Because it’s you, Sylus. Now, when do they go off? I need to warn Miss Hunter.”

A sudden explosion is the last thing she needs. You couldn't bare to see her buckle under the weight of such panic, of such grief and pain.

Miss Hunter hides her grief well. But, it peaks out occasionally. Sometimes when she laughs just a bit too much. Other times when she looks at Sylus, for some reason.

Her suffering is palpable to everyone at the base. You've all collectively decided to pretend you don't see it and let her shield her fragile heart.

Because, otherwise... she'll shatter. She'll shatter and break and fall apart into so many pieces that not even expert crafters like you and Sylus could put her back together.

And no matter how her existence breaks your heart, you could never—will never—wish such a thing on her. No for any reason. Not even if she begins to hate you. Not even if she turns you in to the Hunter's Association.

And certainly not even when she ineviably takes away the man you love for good.

Sylus' response brings you out of your spiral, “I’ll come tell you when it’s time.”

He brings you close one last time, pressing a kiss on your forehead and murmuring, “I do love that heart of yours.”

You speed walk away. Body and mind in turmoil. Frustration. Embarrasment. Hope.

You can't control yourself. It feels odd, considering how composed you normally are. Control is everything to you. Control is literally your job and your life.

Right now, you're anything but that. You're flustered from head to toe, still feeling the ghost of Sylus' lips on your ear and forehead. You have to actively stop yourself from touching those places.

His lips were so soft. Softer than you ever imagined on those rare days you let yourself indulge in the fantasy of a future with him. How much softer would they have been against your own? Would he kiss you gently with those lips?

Or would he be rough, possessive? Like he's trying to claim your lips as your own?

You feel hot all over again just imagining it: his arm on your waist becoming tighter, his other hand gripping the back of your head, his hot breath against your lips when he dives in for more...

You want to scream at your own vivid fantacies. Thoughts and images so vivid, you can almost feel them.

His arm around you, muscles tensing on your hips as he tries to pull you impossibly closer to him.

His hand on your back, fingers spread wide and holding you in place, but featherlight as to not hurt you.

His other hand on the back of your head, making sure he's getting the perfect angle to kiss you.

His lips on yours, trying to mold them to his. Tongue in your mouth, eyes with blown pupils on you when he backs up for air, and whispered sweet nothings that only you can hear that spill out for a moment before he dives in for more.

For more of you.

What the devil is wrong with me?

Your walk to Miss Hunter feels like an eternity with the company of your delusions.

The moment you’re by Miss Hunter’s side, your embarrassment multiples. You were just fantisizing about her soulmate, her other half, and the man she will one day marry.

She wears a shit-eating grin.

“Sooo, what was that about?”

“What was what about?” You attempt to deflect.

“Don’t give me that,” she rolls her eyes at you. “I may not be as smart as you, but I do have eyes.”

“Don’t insult yourself like that,” your defense of her comes out before you can really think about it.

“You’re dodging the issue.”

She turns to face the dance floor. Or, rather, where Sylus stands near it. Just the sight of him makes you feel all warm and fuzzy again.

”Don’t you know by now that I adore you?”

”I do love that heart of yours.”

And just like that, you’re flustered again.

“Dance with me,” you blurt out, escaping from Sylus’ line of sight and dragging Miss Hunter behind you.

Miss Hunter giggles, grin still on her face. You can practically hear the teasing questions and words that beg to fall off her lips.

Is this what it’s like to have friends?

Your social life took a dive years ago, far before you met Sylus. After your best friends in high school ditched you for each and their new love, reaching out for companionship was… hard, to say the least.

Kai and Alex filled that void for some time. The three of you stopped talking about a year ago for some reason. Kai’s been very quiet in the “business” world since then. And Alex has always preferred to stay out of the spotlight, so you didn’t worry much when they dropped off the grid.

They were, and still are, probably two of your closest friends. People who get not only the lighter side of you—the one with a bleeding heart—but the dark side, the lonely one with a cynical out look on love.

But, as much as you love them, they are anything except normal. Kai’s killed more people than anyone you’ve ever met. Alex prefers the call of nature to the voices of humans. They both carry pains you couldn’t even begin to understand.

You love them. You love Sylus. You love the twins. But, you need some reprieve from your bloodstained world.

Miss Hunter appears to be the key to that. Someone who reminds you of the good in the world, rather than the bad parts you’re determined to destroy. Someone who reminds you of that innocent little girl you once were before you got your powers (ironic, given that she’s more or less a symbol of everything your powers have taken from you).

She’s a kind and gentle soul, one who hasn’t been stained by the world and still believes in good. She reminds you of Alex.

But unlike Alex, Miss Hunter is fierce. Unwavering. And because of that, you couldn’t ask for a better soulmate for the love of your life.

Imagining her and Sylus together still hurts. It still claws into your heart and shreds it without mercy. But, in a little corner of your heart, there’s joy. There’s happiness for your new friend and the man you love.

Because no one else could make each other as happy as the other will. You’ve seen it time and time again.

As for her other soulmates… well, they aren’t your problem. You’ll deal with that problem too once you come to it.

“Still thinking about your boss?” Miss Hunter pipes up, her tone teasing and lighter than you’ve ever heard it.

Yes.

You still feel his touch, phantom imprints. You still want more of his touch, the ghost of his taste still on your tongue. You want more and more and more.

But you will never have it. You need to remember that. All you'll ever have is the dreams and nightmares of that with Sylus.

And your dreams are meant to be crushed. They're meant to be broken beyond repair. Why should someone deemed by the universe unfit for love be able to dream?

Why should they be able to wish, to wonder?

Why am I allowed to live?

“What ever are you talking about?”

Stepping into your usual role is all you can do to make the thoughts stop.

“Seriously? You’re pretending not to know again?”

No. I just don't want to know. I don't want to remember my mistakes and my errors and my stupidity, and my—

“Why don’t just spit it out?” You quip back with a smile.

“Fine,” she huffs as you twirl her. “You and Sylus—well, mostly Sylus—it’s obvious you're in love.”

“You’re still on about that?”

You thought you cleared this up earlier. Your stomach twists at the thought. Having Sylus’ soulmate believe the two of you are in love, and not just extremely close is a problem. A huge problem.

“And you’re still in denial about that? I mean, come on! He looked like he was going to kiss you. I had my imaginary popcorn out and everything!”

“You’re ridiculous,” she giggles as you pull her close. “Preposterous. Delusional.”

“I know what you are, but what am I?” You roll your eyes at her.

“His friend and employee. Not his soulmate.”

The word “soulmate” causes a shadow to fall over her eyes.

“How… are you so sure?”

You want to laugh.

Because I can see it. I see how your souls are tied together. I see how he’ll love you and only you through every lifetime. I see how I’m merely a footnote in your love story.

You, of course say none of that, and can only say, “I just do.”

The cheery and playful atmosphere dissipates between the two of you. You stop dancing and you guide her away from the dance floor to somewhere more hidden. You don’t know what to say.

The airy and warm feeling you had early is gone, sapped away by your own stupid words and your own stupid love. Why, oh why, did you have to do this to yourself?

Maybe part of you loves the pain of a broke heart?

The tap on your shoulder comes as a welcomed distraction.

“60 seconds,” is all his whispers in your ear before he goes off to talk to other people.

For once, you’re grateful for Sylus’ tendency to do big shows of power. The ensuing chaos and combat will keep your mind occupied.

“What was that?” Miss Hunter inquires, tilting her head at you.

“A heads up I requested,” her expression pushes you to answer further. “Sylus has a flare for dramatics. And those dramatics tend to involve explosions.”

You continue in a much gentler tone, “I know an explosion took your family. Springing one on you isn’t very polite, so I asked Sylus to give me a heads up.”

Miss Hunter trembles. You hold her close.

“Thank you,” she whispers, trying to sound brave.

“No need,” you check your phone for the time. “We have about 30 seconds. Ready?”

“Does it matter if I’m not?”

You sigh. “I suppose not.”

The seconds tick down. Miss Hunter’s breath is shaky. You feel her heart pound in her chest. You squeeze her even closer to you. You count each breath, and remind her to stay calm.

Then, it comes. Multiple explosions rock the building. People scream. Some are crushed, while others die in a blaze. Others still are picked off by the twins or Sylus himself.

You don’t focus on them. You focus on keeping Miss Hunter shielded and calm. Her heartbeat is out of control, so you mess with her threads a bit. Just small nudges to keep her tranquil, to remind of her of better times.

The whole thing is done in an instant. Sylus casually walks over to check on her.

“You alright, sweetie?”

“She will be. Give her time,” you snap.

Sylus laughs, sticking his thumbs into his pockets, “I meant you, silly.”

He takes a hand out to flick your forehead when he says the stupid nickname.

“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

You brush him off because today has been just a bit too much. Your hear has always been weak to Sylus, but you've never had such real... material in your mind.

You've never thought of how he would kiss you. You've never thought about how he would touch you in throes of such intimacy. You've never let your thoughts get so far.

But that look in his eyes when you two danced. That look he gave you before you went to Miss Hunter... it gives you ideas. Foolish, unrealistic, and dangerous ideas.

“Because I seem to recall you prioritizing helping our guest over your own safety.”

He leans over Miss Hunter who was still buried in your arms, and tilts your head so that he could get a better look.

“Look, your face is bleeding.”

His touch makes you feel hot all over again. It gets worse when you remember how it made your imagination run wild.

You can almost pretend you're somewhere else. Somewhere private. Somewhere where this simple touch on the chin to look at your cuts and bruises could become something else.

Your knees almost buckle. But you hold it together.

“Minor cuts, you fool. I’ve had worse.”

“And that makes that better because…?”

“…Shut your mouth.”

“Or else what? You’ll shut it for me?”

You flush at the implications. Sylus’ smirk tells you that he meant it in the way you’re thinking of. Your heart rate picks up again. You’re warm all over. And there’s this sense of… anticipation and hunger as you stare at one another.

That warmth is back. It begs to take a chance, a leap of faith. It screams at you to just grab his neck and finally have what you've craved for so long.

“Could you please not flirt so close to me?” Miss Hunter mumbles.

You almost scream. But the crushing guilt keeps you silent. Her words remind you of your place, of the line you've been treading far too close to.

You step back from Sylus. Miss Hunter is no longer buried in you, so she doesn't follow.

You ignore her question because you have no way of really responding, “How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” she grumbles. “Let’s finish this.”

You guide her to the rooftop, glancing at Sylus to be sure he follows. He shakes his head.

“I’ll clean up here. You go.”

“I seem to recall that she’s your guest.”

He shrugs, “she likes you more.”

You splutter. Then, you let yourself hug him and whisper in his ear, "Be safe, Morana."

You follow Miss Hunter up to the rooftop as quick as you can. The sharp winds in your face make the burn of emotions dampen down. That, and the giant Wanderer that roars above.

“Stay back!” She yells over the racket, shooting at the foe. “You don’t have an Evol, right?! It’s dangerous!”

“Ever the diligent Hunter, protecting civilian, eh?”

“Now’s not the time for jokes!”

“The only joke here is that you think me,, of all people, need protection!”

The fight against the Wanderer is short. After all, Wanderers were once people. They had souls and threads for you to mess with. So you help her, weaving threads and shooting after she handed you one of her guns.

You hand it back as you walk to the pedestal that held the Aether Core, beckoning her to that the power that belongs to her. And you watch her threads react.

You never really paid attention to Miss Hunter’s Aether Core, not when they were more pressing issues at hand. None of this issues exist now in this moment.

Now, you can. Her glitching threads that emerge from it. The strange energy that flows from it, an energy that seems to call to you. It tries to drag you in, to swallow you.

You don’t know why.

And when the energy from the new core begins to leak out into her, the very universe shifts around you.

You hear her heartbeats, and your own heart seems to sync with it. Thump. Thump. Thump. A resonate of sounds that are so familiar yet so foreign.

And underneath those thumps, there’s a hum. A song. A whisper of melody you’ve never heard before and can’t describe despite how it echoes in your brain.

It’s beautiful.

The sound is like home. Like a gentle kiss from your mother or the safe embrace of your father. Like the boisterous laugh of the twins or the comfortable touch of Sylus.

It brings a tear to your eye. With that tear comes visuals. Planets. Stars. Galaxies. They all lay over your eyes and block the vision of Miss Hunter taking the power of the new Aether Core.

So, so beautiful.

You think you can stay here forever, basking in that wonderful melody and the sights that it brings. But the moment the energy flow into Miss Hunter stops, it ends. A blip in time. A small moment of absolute peace.

Quickly wiping your face before she turns around, you snap out your trance. There’s things to be done, after all.

You do all the things needed to be done: help Sylus and the twins clean up, settle Miss Hunter, and escort her out of the N109 Zone.

“You should come visit me,” she says, bright smile on her face.

“Maybe I will…”

After all, what better fresh start is there than the city of the woman who drove me out? You take my place at Sylus’ side… maybe I’ll take yours in the Hunter Association.

It’ll be a sick, twisted, heartbroken exchange. One not equivalent in the slightest. For how can you compare a woman loved by many to one loved by none?

Author's Note: Also, please go to the original blurb to ask to be added to the taglist (it's impossible for me to keep checking every part every time I update).

2nd Author's Note: How long is too long for a chapter?

Taglist: @eolivy, @rafayelridesfisheatsfish, @animegamerfox, @jasperjokester, @schrodingerskimdokja, @just--crys, @snowdynasty, @shi-thats-kiera, @mansonofmadness, @dwuclvr, @ameilli, @katiedoesstuff101, @everythingistaken00, @napa-the-yappa, @hanaluxx, @lovesick-sylus, @tenaciouszombiewombat, @ladyparamount, @applepi405, @midnight-reverie, @69-gojos-wife-69, @bellagrayson-wayne, @phisen, @idkmanimjusthorny, @munchychuusy, @autumn2534, @poptrim, @sillyfreakfanparty, @zaynesfirefly, @flamedancer13, @thissmartdumbass, @mrsllawliet, @jeondyy, @ssetsuka, @dels-page, @that-lost-one, @johnnysactualgf, @mariquitas-en-verano, @toelady, @sinnamon-bunn, @yesbiaswrecked, @doggyteam2028, @little-rays-of-darkness, @albatrossblue, @vyntheria, @silverianni, @browneyedgirl22, @tiklestar, @beaconsxd, @pepperushia

#ikigai #lads x reader #sylus x non mc reader #sylus x non!mc reader #love and deepspace caleb #sylus qin x reader #sylus x reader #love and deepspace x reader #sylus x mc #sylus angst #sylus fluff

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kenzdolls · 30 days ago

Text

STORMY HEARTS . 5.7k

⌗ synopsis: after blowing up on your boyfriends, they decide to “ignore” you out of hurt.

⌗ pairing: katsuki bakugo + eijiro kirishima x fem!reader

⌗ sent in by: anonymous

⌗ trigger warnings: arguments/conflict, emotional distress, mild anxiety, mentions of crying, brief reference to nightmares, use of (y/n).

the alarm blared for the fifth time that morning, and you finally managed to drag yourself out of bed with a groan. nothing was going right today. you'd stayed up until 4 am finishing a report for midnight's class after spending hours helping uraraka with her quirk training. your muscles ached, your eyes burned from lack of sleep, and the dull throb of an oncoming headache pulsed at your temples.

"just get through today," you muttered to yourself, stumbling toward the bathroom.

in your exhausted haste, you knocked over your coffee mug, sending the hot liquid cascading across your freshly ironed uniform. you stared at the brown stain spreading across the white fabric, and for a moment, you thought you might actually cry.

"you've got to be kidding me," you hissed, frantically dabbing at the uniform with a towel. all you managed to do was make the stain larger.

by the time you'd changed into your backup uniform (which was slightly too small after the last growth spurt), you were running terribly late. you sprinted across the ua campus, your bag slapping against your back with each step. the spring morning that would normally lift your spirits only seemed to mock your misery with its cheerful birdsong and golden sunshine.

you slid open the classroom door with seconds to spare before aizawa's arrival, drawing curious glances from your classmates.

"hey, babe! we missed you at breakfast!" kirishima's bright voice called out as you slumped into your seat. he bounded over with that sunshine smile that usually melted your heart. today, it just made your headache worse. his red hair was perfectly styled as always, those sharp teeth gleaming in a grin that screamed energy you simply didn't have.

"yeah, we waited for fifteen minutes," bakugo followed behind him, his usual scowl softening slightly when his eyes met yours. he was wearing the special earrings you'd given him for his birthday – small explosive shapes that complemented his quirk. any other day, the sight would have made you smile. "tch. you look like shit. rough night?"

any other day, you'd have laughed at his blunt concern. but today, everything felt like an attack.

"obviously," you muttered, rummaging through your bag for your textbook only to realize you'd left it in your dorm. "great. just great."

"you can share mine," kirishima offered, already pulling his chair closer. his warm thigh pressed against yours as he scooted over. "i even wrote notes in the margins for once! bakugo's been helping me with that whole 'being a good student' thing."

"i don't need your help," you snapped, immediately regretting your tone but too frustrated to apologize. you shifted away from his touch, creating a small but noticeable gap between you. "i'm not a child who needs to be coddled."

kirishima's smile faltered, hurt flashing across his face like a lightning strike. his hand, which had been reaching for yours under the desk, retreated to his lap.

"the hell is your problem?" bakugo growled, protective over kirishima as always. his crimson eyes narrowed dangerously, and a few small pops emanated from his palms – a sure sign he was getting agitated. "he's just trying to help. no need to bite his head off."

"my problem is everyone acting like i can't handle myself for five minutes!" your voice was louder than intended, causing nearby classmates to turn and stare. midoriya and todoroki exchanged concerned glances from their seats. "i'm having a bad day, okay? is that allowed, or do i have to be perfectly fine all the time?"

"fine! handle it yourself then!" bakugo shot back, grabbing kirishima's arm with more force than necessary. "let's go, shitty hair. she wants space, she can have it. all the fucking space in the world."

"guys, maybe we should—" kirishima started, his voice uncharacteristically small.

"no," bakugo cut him off. "if she doesn't want us around, we're not gonna beg."

you watched them retreat to their seats as aizawa entered the classroom, yellow sleeping bag in tow. the pit in your stomach grew heavier with guilt, but pride kept you from running after them. besides, aizawa was already starting attendance, his bloodshot eyes promising detention to anyone who disrupted class.

throughout the morning lessons, you could feel kirishima's concerned glances boring into the back of your head. unlike bakugo, who resolutely stared ahead with his jaw clenched tight, kirishima had never been good at holding grudges. once, during english with present mic, you caught him writing something on a scrap of paper – probably a note to pass to you. but when bakugo noticed, he whispered something that made kirishima's shoulders slump, and the note disappeared into his pocket.

by lunch, the tension was unbearable. you gathered your courage and approached their usual table, tray in hand.

"can i sit—" you began, but bakugo cut you off before you could finish.

"tables full," he said coldly, despite the two empty seats beside him.

"come on, bakugo," kirishima said softly. "that's not manly—"

"it's fine," you interrupted, pride once again getting the better of you. "i'll sit with mina and the others."

as you walked away, you heard bakugo mutter, "see? she doesn't care anyway."

if only he knew how much you did care. how the lump in your throat felt like it might choke you as you forced yourself to smile at mina's table.

"lover's quarrel?" mina asked, her black and gold eyes filled with genuine concern as you sat down.

"something like that," you mumbled, pushing food around your plate without appetite.

"they'll come around," tsuyu said matter-of-factly. "kero. boys just need time to cool off."

but as you glanced over at your boyfriends, seeing kirishima's forced laughter and bakugo's stormy expression, you weren't so sure.

the next three days were excruciating.

your boyfriends weren't outright ignoring you, but they had clearly taken your outburst to heart. whenever you entered a room, conversations became strained. lunch found them sitting with kaminari and sero rather than saving you a spot. kirishima's daily good morning texts stopped, and bakugo didn't wait for you after combat training like he usually did.

the distance between you grew with each passing hour until it felt like a chasm.

on wednesday, you paired with ochako for combat exercises while kirishima and bakugo immediately gravitatedtoward each other. the sight of them working together seamlessly, complementing each other's quirks with practiced precision, sent a pang of loneliness through your chest.

"you're distracted," ochako noted gently after you failed to dodge a simple attack. "is everything okay with you and the boys?"

"i'm fine," you insisted, wiping sweat from your brow. "just tired."

but you weren't fine. that night, you lay awake staring at your phone, thumb hovering over your group chat with kirishima and bakugo. the last message was from three days ago – a silly meme kirishima had sent about hero costumes. you started typing several messages, only to delete them all.

i'm sorry i was such a jerk.

delete.

can we talk?

delete.

i miss you both so much it hurts.

delete.

pride and fear kept you from sending anything. what if they'd decided they were better off without you? what if your one bad day had shown them that dating two people at once was more trouble than it was worth?

thursday morning brought no relief. in homeroom, you noticed bakugo had switched seats to sit farther away from you. kirishima still occupied his usual spot, but he seemed deflated, his normally spiky hair slightly less enthusiastic, as if reflecting his mood.

"trouble in paradise?" mina whispered during modern hero art history, nodding toward where kirishima and bakugo sat together, pointedly not looking your way.

"it's fine," you lied.

"well, you better fix it soon," kaminari leaned over to add. "bakugo's been twice as explosive in training. he nearly singed my eyebrows off yesterday."

"and kirishima keeps breaking things because he's hardening unconsciously when he gets upset," mina added. "he crushed three pencils in math alone."

it wasn't fine. the classroom had become a minefield of awkward silences and avoided glances. even your classmates had begun to notice, exchanging worried looks whenever the three of you were in proximity. at one point, you heard iida lecturing mineta about "respecting the delicate dynamics of polyamorous relationships" – a sure sign that your love life had become a topic of class discussion.

that afternoon, you spotted kirishima alone in the common area, a rare sight these days. gathering your courage, you approached him.

"hey," you said softly.

he looked up, surprise and something like hope flashing across his face. "hey."

an awkward silence stretched between you.

"how have you been?" you finally asked.

"good! fine, totally fine," he responded too quickly, his forced smile not reaching his eyes. "just, you know, busy with training and stuff."

"right," you nodded, heart sinking. "me too."

before you could say more, bakugo appeared in the doorway. his eyes narrowed as he took in the scene.

"kirishima. we're supposed to be studying," he called sharply.

kirishima glanced between you and bakugo, conflict written across his expressive face.

"coming," he finally said to bakugo, then turned back to you with an apologetic look. "i gotta go. but, um, it was good talking to you."

as they walked away, you heard bakugo mutter, "what were you thinking? she made it clear she doesn't need us."

kirishima's response was too quiet to hear, but the slump of his shoulders told you enough.

by friday afternoon, you couldn't take it anymore. sitting alone in your dorm room, you hugged your knees to your chest and finally let the tears fall. you'd messed up. one bad day had potentially ruined the best relationship you'd ever had. the charm bracelet they'd given you on your two-month anniversary felt heavy on your wrist, each small charm – an explosion for bakugo, a hardened fist for kirishima, and a symbol representing your quirk – a reminder of what you stood to lose.

you fingered the charms, remembering how bakugo had pretended to be annoyed about shopping for "sentimental crap" but had been the one to spot the perfect bracelet in the store window. how kirishima had insisted on charms that represented all three of you "because we're a team!"

the memory only made you cry harder.

a soft knock at your door startled you.

"go away," you called, hastily wiping at your tears. you didn't want anyone to see you like this, especially not mina or tsuyu with their well-intentioned advice.

"(y/n)." it was kirishima's voice, uncharacteristically serious. "please open the door."

your heart leaped to your throat. had he heard you crying from the hallway?

when you didn't respond, another voice cut in.

"open the damn door or i'll blow it off the hinges." bakugo, as subtle as ever.

"dude, we talked about this," you heard kirishima whisper harshly. "that's not the approach we agreed on!"

"well, she's not answering, is she?" bakugo shot back. "we've been standing out here for five minutes!"

with a heavy sigh, you pulled yourself up and unlocked the door, quickly wiping away any remaining tears. you weren't prepared for what greeted you on the other side.

kirishima stood there clutching an enormous bouquet of your favorite flowers, his crimson eyes wide with concern. the blossoms were slightly crushed on one side, as if they'd been held too tightly by nervous hands. beside him, bakugo held a bag from your favorite bakery in one hand and what appeared to be a small wrapped gift in the other. his usual scowl was present, but there was uncertainty in his eyes that you rarely saw.

"can we come in?" kirishima asked softly.

you stepped aside wordlessly, and they entered. bakugo immediately began pacing the small confines of your dorm room, while kirishima stood awkwardly by the door. the silence stretched between you for a long moment before all three of you spoke at once:

"i'm sorry—"

"we shouldn't have—"

"i was being a jerk—"

the tension broke as kirishima let out a relieved laugh.

"we've been complete idiots," he said, setting down the flowers to take your hands in his. his palms were warm and slightly calloused from training, the familiar texture making your heart ache with longing. "we should've known you were just having a rough day."

"i saw you spill coffee on your uniform that morning," bakugo admitted gruffly, still pacing. "should've realized you were already having a shitty day instead of making it worse."

"yeah, and we know you were up late helping uraraka," kirishima added. "deku told us."

"you guys were asking about me?" you questioned, a tiny spark of hope igniting in your chest.

"of course we were," bakugo stopped pacing to look at you directly. "just because we were pissed doesn't mean we stopped caring."

"i should've handled it better," you admitted, looking down at your and kirishima's joined hands. "i had no right to snap at you like that. you were just trying to help, and i was… i was just so tired and frustrated and taking it out on you wasn't fair."

"and we had no right to ice you out for days," kirishima replied, squeezing your hands. his eyes were suspiciously bright, as if he too might cry. "that wasn't manly at all."

"it was my idea," bakugo confessed, the admission clearly costing him. "i told kirishima you needed space. but i was just being stubborn and hurt."

"i should've stood up to him," kirishima added. "i knew it was wrong."

bakugo stepped forward, awkwardly thrusting the bakery bag toward you. "here. your favorite. the old lady at the bakery says hi, by the way. asked where you've been."

you peeked inside to find an assortment of pastries that made your mouth water – custard-filled taiyaki, melon pan, and the red bean mochi you loved so much.

"you went all the way to mrs. sato's bakery?" you asked, touched. it was at least a thirty-minute train ride from ua. "in the middle of the school day?"

"we may have skipped last period," kirishima admitted with a sheepish grin. "but all might is pretty understanding! we told him it was a relationship emergency."

the mental image of your boyfriends explaining to the former symbol of peace that they needed to skip class to buy you pastries almost made you laugh despite the tears threatening to spill again.

"we've been following you around all day trying to find the right moment to apologize," kirishima confessed, rubbing the back of his neck. "but you always looked so sad, and we weren't sure if you even wanted to talk to us anymore."

"plus hair-for-brains here kept chickening out," bakugo added, earning a protest from kirishima.

"me? you're the one who kept saying 'the timing isn't right' every time we saw her!"

"because it wasn't!"

"of course i want to talk to you," you whispered, cutting off their bickering and feeling fresh tears spring to your eyes. "i've been miserable without you guys. i tried to text so many times, but i was afraid you'd moved on. that maybe you realized having a girlfriend was more trouble than it's worth."

bakugo's expression softened, and he reached out to brush a tear from your cheek with surprising gentleness. "don't be stupid," he said, but his voice held no bite. "as if we'd give up that easily."

"we were miserable too," kirishima admitted. "bakugo blew up the microwave when kaminari mentioned your name yesterday."

"i did not!"

"you totally did. and i crushed my phone when i saw your name pop up in my memories app."

"is that why you have a new phone?" you asked, noticing the unfamiliar device poking out of his pocket.

"yeah," he smiled sheepishly. "hardening quirk and emotional distress don't mix well with electronics."

bakugo handed you the small wrapped package he'd been holding. "here. this is… from both of us."

you carefully unwrapped it to find a small velvet box. inside was a delicate silver necklace with a pendant that matched the charms on your bracelet – the three symbols intertwined into one design.

"kiri picked it out," bakugo mumbled, a faint blush dusting his cheeks.

"we both did," kirishima corrected, beaming now. "we wanted something to remind you that even when we fight, we're still connected. the three of us, together."

"plus," bakugo added, avoiding eye contact in that way he did when being sincere embarrassed him, "you're always touching that bracelet we gave you. even this week when you were ignoring us. so we thought…"

your heart felt like it might burst as kirishima took the necklace and moved behind you to fasten it. his warm breath tickled your neck, sending a pleasant shiver down your spine. when he finished, his lips brushed against your shoulder in a featherlight kiss before he moved back to face you.

"i'm really sorry," you said again, looking between them and touching the new pendant resting against your collarbone. "for everything. i promise i'll try to communicate better next time i'm having a bad day instead of bottling it up and exploding."

"that's my job," bakugo said with a smirk, referring to his quirk. the familiar joke made warmth bloom in your chest.

"we are too," kirishima replied, pulling you into a warm hug. you sank into his embrace, breathing in the comforting scent of his cologne and the faint smell of cinnamon that always seemed to cling to him. "we should have checked on you instead of assuming the worst."

after a moment's hesitation, bakugo joined the embrace, his strong arms encircling both of you. it was rare for him to initiate this kind of physical affection, making the gesture all the more meaningful.

"if you ever feel like that again," he murmured against your hair, "just tell us to back off instead of bottling it up, got it? say 'bakugo, kirishima, i need space today,' and we'll give it to you. no questions asked."

"and if you need help," kirishima added, "just say that too. we're not mind readers."

you nodded against his chest, feeling the weight of the past few days finally lifting. "i promise."

the three of you stayed like that for a long moment, simply holding each other and reconnecting without words. finally, kirishima pulled back slightly, his trademark sharp-toothed grin back in full force.

"so," he said, his voice bright with hope, "movie night in the common room? i think we all could use some cuddle time."

"as long as we don't have to watch another one of those action movies where the heroes do everything wrong," you teased, feeling yourself smile for the first time in days.

"only if i get to pick the movie," you teased, feeling yourself smile for the first time in days.

"as if," bakugo scoffed, but the arm around your waist tightened affectionately. "it's my turn."

"we'll negotiate," kirishima laughed, pressing a kiss to your temple.

the common room was already bustling with activity when the three of you arrived, your hands interlinked with kirishima on one side and bakugo on the other. conversation died down momentarily as your classmates took in the sight of the three of you together again, expressions ranging from relief (midoriya) to knowing smirks (mina).

"thank fucking god," kaminari whispered loudly to jirou, who elbowed him in the ribs. "what? i'm just saying what everyone's thinking! i couldn't handle another day of bakugo being even more explosive than usual."

"shut it, pikachu!" bakugo growled, but there was no real heat behind it. his thumb traced small circles on the back of your hand, a subtle gesture of affection he probably thought no one noticed.

"movie night?" todoroki asked from his spot on one of the couches, his mismatched eyes taking in your joined hands with quiet approval.

"yeah, if that's cool with everyone," kirishima replied with his usual enthusiasm. "we were thinking something chill."

"as long as it's not another documentary about mountain climbing," sero groaned. "i still have nightmares about that last one iida made us watch."

"the educational value of understanding extreme environments is not to be underestimated!" iida protested, chopping his hands through the air emphatically.

the familiar banter washed over you like a soothing balm. mina gave you a thumbs up from across the room, mouthing "told you so!" with a wink.

"i guess we were pretty obvious, huh?" you whispered to kirishima as the three of you claimed the loveseat, which was just barely big enough for all of you if you didn't mind being squished together (which you certainly didn't).

"extremely," tsuyu confirmed from nearby. "the whole class was walking on eggshells. kero. aizawa-sensei even asked if there was something wrong with the three of you."

"he did not!" you gasped, mortified at the thought of your homeroom teacher discussing your love life.

"he totally did," uraraka confirmed, floating a bowl of popcorn over to your group. "he said, and i quote, 'fix whatever's going on because your performance in joint exercises is suffering.'"

kirishima laughed, the sound warming your heart. "sorry about that, guys! everything's manly and awesome now!"

"yeah, yeah, just keep the makeup pda to a minimum," kaminari teased. "some of us are single and bitter about it."

"you're just jealous because you can't get a date," bakugo shot back, but there was almost a hint of playfulness in his tone.

as the lights dimmed for the movie (a compromise selection that had something for everyone), you found yourself sandwiched between your boyfriends on the small loveseat. kirishima's arm draped around your shoulders, his fingers idly playing with your hair. bakugo's thigh pressed against yours, warm and solid, his hand finding yours in the darkness.

"this okay?" he asked quietly, his voice uncharacteristically gentle.

"perfect," you whispered back, giving his hand a squeeze.

as the movie played, you felt bakugo's foot nudge yours under the coffee table. when you looked his way, he was staring straight ahead at the screen, but the corner of his mouth was quirked up in a small, private smile meant only for you.

with kirishima's radiant warmth on one side and bakugo's protective presence on the other, you knew that no matter what bad days might come, the three of you would weather them together.

later that night, after most of your classmates had drifted off to their dorms, the three of you remained cuddled together on the loveseat. kirishima had fallen asleep, his head resting on your shoulder, soft snores escaping his slightly parted lips. bakugo was still awake, his thumb tracing lazy patterns on your palm.

"hey," you whispered, careful not to wake kirishima. "thanks for not giving up on us."

bakugo looked at you, those fierce crimson eyes softening in a way they only did when he was with you and kirishima. "as if that was ever an option," he murmured. "just don't scare us like that again, got it?"

"got it," you promised, leaning over to press a soft kiss to his cheek. "next time i need space or help, i'll just say so."

"good," he nodded, then added quietly, "i missed you."

coming from bakugo, those three simple words meant everything.

"i missed you too," you whispered back. "both of you."

"we know," he replied with that rare, genuine smile that made your heart skip a beat. "now get some sleep. shitty hair here has already drooled on your shirt."

sure enough, there was a small damp spot on your shoulder where kirishima's head rested. somehow, even that was endearing.

with a contented sigh, you closed your eyes, surrounded by the warmth of your boyfriends. the last thought that crossed your mind before sleep claimed you was that maybe, just maybe, bad days weren't so terrible when you had people who loved you enough to chase after you with flowers and pastries, even when you pushed them away.

and maybe next time, you'd just ask for that hug you needed right from the start.

the next monday, the change in atmosphere was palpable. as you walked into class flanked by your boyfriends, kirishima's arm draped casually over your shoulder and bakugo's hand intertwined with yours, a collective sigh of relief swept through the room.

"thank god," kaminari whispered loudly to jirou. "i couldn't handle another day of bakugo being even more explosive than usual."

"shut it, pikachu!" bakugo growled, but there was no real heat behind it.

mina gave you a thumbs up from across the room, and even todoroki seemed quietly pleased by the restored harmony.

"i guess we were pretty obvious, huh?" you whispered to kirishima as you took your seats.

"extremely," tsuyu confirmed from the desk behind you. "the whole class was walking on eggshells. kero."

kirishima laughed, the sound warming your heart. "sorry about that, guys! everything's manly and awesome now!"

as aizawa shuffled in to start homeroom, you felt bakugo's foot nudge yours under the desk. when you looked his way, he was staring straight ahead, but the corner of his mouth was quirked up in a small, private smile meant only for you.

with kirishima's radiant grin on one side and bakugo's quiet affection on the other, you knew that no matter what bad days might come, the three of you would weather them together.

and maybe next time, you'd just ask for that hug you needed right from the start.

taglist: [open]

mutuals

@https-bakugo @haikyuubby @va-3 @lotusstarr @tulippanes @gh0st-g1rll @luvseraphh

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always-just-red · 1 month ago

Note

hii! i have a request!

the mc/reader has a pet cat and adores cats so rafayel will have to accept that his beloved bride has a furry little companion bc them and the cat are a 2 for 1 deal and the cat is basically their baby and there’ll alway probably be a cat in the home forever

ty!! adore ur writing!

Aww thank you anon!! As a devoted cat-person, I'm THRILLED to finally be sharing my vision of cat-dad Raf. 🙂‍↕️ This fic felt so personal in the end, I swear I can't write Raf without it accidentally becoming this window into all the intimacy I want but don't have 😭 Anyway!!! Dedicating this to my babies, Floof and Velcro!

Cat-Sitting

Rafayel x Reader 🎨

Summary: Was it really a good idea to leave Rafayel and your cat unsupervised?

Genre: Fluff + humour

Warnings/Additional tags: gn!reader, established relationship

| Word count: 2.5k | Masterlist | Opt-in to my taglist here!

Disclaimer: Characters belong to Love and Deepspace. All work is my own, so please don't repost or plagiarise!

Captain Jenna indicates the large, glass monitor behind her— a finger dragging across it, zooming in on a smaller section of the virtual map. “There’s been an insurgence of Wanderer activity here, and—” another swipe of her finger— “here, so we’ll be increasing patrols in these districts. While public safety remains the priority, we should be investigating any unusual fluctuations of…”

You’re so, so tired. Your chin is resting on your hand and your leader’s briefing is starting to sound like a bedtime story. Sat beside you, Xavier is looking similarly uninspired. The blue of his eyes is glazing over. His eyelids are drooping. When he blinks, it’s slow and unfocused.

Your phone buzzes and it feels like you’ve been doused in cold water; your heart jumps. Glancing around, thankfully no-one but Xavier noticed. His gaze flits over to you with lazy interest as you reach into your pocket, checking your phone under the table. It’s a text from Rafayel: your cat is broken??

You frown, ever so slightly. Before your mind has any time to run away with that ominous message, another notification comes through:

[Silly fish <3 has sent an image]

With one more furtive check that no-one’s watching, you tap at the screen, opening up your messages. You squint down at the photo. It’s your cat, perched on the arm of your sofa. She looks perfectly content, and decidedly unbroken.

Rafayel texts: it had legs before, right?

Again: where

And again: where are they???

You have to consciously hold back your smile. Your cat’s legs are tucked away underneath her; you can’t see them in the photo. ‘Loaf’, you surreptitiously text back.

Rafayel responds: ???????????

You close your phone as more messages come through. You don’t have to read them to know it’s the same emoji, over and over: artsy birb, lying in a puddle of tears. You’ve silenced your phone so it no longer buzzes. Jenna is drawing patrol routes on her map. Xavier leans over to you, whispering: “How’s the first-time cat-sitter?”

Without saying a word, you move your phone under the table so he can sneak a peek at it. There are now twenty-three unread messages. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.

Xavier chuckles under his breath, and this time, you can’t help but smile. Jenna turns, locking both of you in a steely-grey stare. Xavier gives her a grin, and you give her a double thumbs-up. With a sigh, she goes back to her presentation.

…

“So I said, ‘what am I supposed to do? Not kill the Wanderer? Y’know, the Wanderer tearing its way through a street full of people— just because it’s a tiiiiny bit different than normal?’ And get this! He says, ‘yes.’ He says, ‘you should have taken some time to study it, brought me data and samples.’ Can you believe that?”

You laugh quietly as you finish up typing your latest report. You can believe that, actually. If a Wanderer broke in through the window of this building right here, right now, you’re pretty sure Nero would be sat with a clipboard, taking notes. “C’mon, what did you expect?”

“Uh… some empathy, maybe?” your colleague frowns.

“Yeah, that’ll be the day.” Your phone rings in your pocket, and you whip it out with business-like efficiency. You’re on autopilot. “Hello?” you ask, opening up the next set of gloriously exciting blank text boxes on your screen.

“Cutie!”

It’s basically a yell. You narrow your eyes at your monitor, inputting your name, your badge number. “Raf,” you return apathetically. “What’s up?”

“Code red. Code red!”

“Mmhmm?” You don’t know what that means.

“You have to come home. Right now. It’s an emergency!”

“Is it, though?” Your keyboard clacks, only stopping when you have to check today’s date before filling it out on your form.

“Are you even listening? I said code red. Does that mean nothing to you?”

“Yup! Gold star for Rafayel.”

“Seriously?! I’m trying to tell you that your precious little angel’s in trouble.”

Was that supposed to be your voice? You don’t sound like that. “I’m sorry you’re in trouble, Raf.”

“No!” he squeaks. “Not me! The— oh for the love of the ocean, the lobsters, the sharks and the crabs— can you just get here? Please?!”

For the love of all of those things, hmm? You chuckle. “Okay, okay. I’m on my way. Hang in there. Okay, angel? Little angel fishie. Ooh! Angelfish!”

There’s silence from the other end. “…You done?”

You hit enter on your keyboard. “Please, we both know you’re blushing right now.”

…

You stand at the door of your apartment— home early from work, courtesy of the old ‘family emergency!’ card. It’s sort of nice, honestly; you can’t remember the last time you got to play it. Family emergency… You think of you and Rafayel, your little cat, and Reddie. There’s a warm feeling in your heart as you open the door.

That feeling is gone when Rafayel snatches you by your arm.

“Quick,” he says, dragging you towards the lounge, “quick, quick, quick!”

No ‘welcome home’ kiss means something’s wrong. Actually wrong. Your bag tumbles from your shoulder; you have to skirt around the coffee table to keep from crashing into it. “Whoa,” you mumble, “Raf, slow down. What happened? Tell me what happened.”

“Look!”

At last, your arm is released. Your heart is in your throat as you do look, and—

You’ve got to be kidding.

Your cat has moved from the arm of the couch, but she didn’t make it far. She’s snuggled up like an adorable croissant— one paw over her face. You realise, fairly quickly, that the ‘emergency’ lies in what she’s found a nest in: a crumpled heap with a criss-cross pattern. Cream, navy, and red wool, all squished up beneath her. It’s Rafayel’s cardigan.

“Aww!” you coo.

“Aww?” Rafayel echoes. “That’s all you have to say— aww?”

You’re not listening. You crouch down beside the couch, leaning in close. “Hi baby,” you coo again, tickling at your cat’s paw gently. She lifts it, one eye half-opening. You smile, and the eye widens more— filling with your reflection. “Has the big, bad fishie been bullying you today?”

She makes a tiny chirp as she stretches her front legs.

“That’s a lie!” Rafayel snaps.

“Oh no!” you sympathise— pointedly not with the man behind you. “What did he do, huh? This is a safe space. You can tell me.”

Both of your cat’s eyes are open now, still heavy with sleep. She speaks back to you: matching your tone with a soft-spoken meow.

“I see,” you tut, nodding. “And then what?”

She meows again. You gasp.

Suddenly, Rafayel is on his knees beside you, jabbing a finger towards her face. “You traitor! We had a deal.”

Your cat stares at the finger. Yawns— briefly an eldritch horror: all sharp, shining teeth— before curling a paw over it. Rafayel goes still. His eyes shine with the quiet panic you see when you brush a hair away from his forehead, or sweep a tear from his cheek with your thumb. It’s so soft; he doesn’t know what to do with it. You smile knowingly. He sees you and clears his throat, his hand slinking back.

“Okay,” he mutters to himself, “I have an idea. Lemme just…”

He pinches an edge of the cardigan. “What’re you doing?” you ask.

“You ever seen that magic trick? With the tablecloth? I’ve just gotta…”

“No!”

He’s biting back a grin as he adds: “But if I’m fast enough—”

“No, Raf!” you giggle as you intercept him. He laughs in a small, genuine way too, his hands shooting back to the cardigan every time you manage to wrestle them off of it. You have to pry at his fingers. Catch them before he sends your cat on an unscheduled flight across your apartment.

Inches away, she watches your scrabbling hands, completely unperturbed. When Rafayel gives up— his fingers relaxing in their tangle with yours, his laughter dwindling— she blinks drowsily.

Time feels slower, and somehow forgiving. You lay your head down on the sofa. “Do you really want your cardigan back?” you murmur, because your cat is asleep again.

Rafayel slumps, mirroring you as he pulls your hand close to his lips. “Nah.” His voice is like warm, orange light, and he kisses the tip of your forefinger. “It’s okay. What’s mine is yours, cutie. And what’s yours is—” he falters, looking towards the bundle of fur beside you.

You hum appreciatively, letting him plant one, two more kisses before you pull your hand away. “Wait here,” you breathe, pushing yourself back up onto your feet.

One expedition to the kitchen later, you return with a small bag of treats. You find your previous seat on the floor, then reach into the bag— pulling out a small, fish-shaped biscuit. “Look,” you chuckle, wiggling it through the air like it’s swimming, “it’s you.”

“Ha, ha.” Rafayel rolls his eyes, cheek still squished against the couch.

He needs more convincing, so you make the fish swim in his direction, stopping just short of his nose. It floats patiently before him, persisting even when his face wrinkles. You wiggle it one way. Then the other. This earns you another eyeroll, but he does at least smile.

You flick the fish over to your cat. She’s awake in an instant, mouth snatching it up: teeth splintering it with a crack. You swear you see the colour leave Rafayel’s face. You hand him the bag of treats, and with a pout, he starts to set up a trail of them: leading across the sofa. There’s a mournful sigh for each he lays down. Even the odd, whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“Give it a rest, will you?” you huff. “I watched you eat an entire seafood platter last night.”

He narrows his eyes at you, holding your gaze as he puts the next treat down deliberately slowly. Behind him, your cat has stood, stretched, and is now pottering along, crunching away without a care in the world. Rafayel reaches for his cardigan, giving it a shake before threading his arms through the sleeves.

When the crunching stops, he turns— another treat caught between two of his fingers. Your cat takes it carefully, delicately, and she chirps as those same fingers tickle the top of her head. A contented purr underscores the moment. Rafayel smiles as he plays with her ears.

Then he catches you watching him, your eyebrow raised. “What?” he asks self-consciously.

You scoff. “Code red my ass.”

…

Rafayel doesn’t really know when you fell asleep.

Your head is on his shoulder, and his pencil moves mindfully slowly: a quiet scratch, scratch as it waltzes over his sketchbook. The room has gone dark. Tangerine light has stopped spilling from the windows, and he can’t reach any light switch, so he settles for the bleedings of the TV. Cool blues. Pale greens. The space around him flickers, and there are voices, too: broadcasters, droning on.

He hears it, even though he’s trying not to. “Another Wanderer attack”, they report. “Indicative of a recent, worrying insurgence of incidents.” Updated statistics. Civilian casualties. Hunter casualties.

Rafayel’s pencil has stopped. After a moment, he sighs— pressing a kiss to the top of your head you don’t feel, and will never know the weight of. He forces himself to look back down. Draw the shapes and the lines of the things that distract him from that feeling in his chest.

Someone is watching him.

His gaze wanders up, finding eyes across the room. Your cat is studying him from afar, sat with her tail curled neatly around her paws. He pokes his tongue out at her. She chirps back. He returns to his sketches, and half a minute later, she lands on the arm of the couch beside him, having pounced gracefully up. She doesn’t deserve any more of his attention. His pencil moves up and down, up and down, and she’s transfixed by the end of it. She lifts a paw, and—

“Nuh uh,” Rafayel warns, his eyes still on the page.

The paw waits. Rafayel chuckles. He raises the pencil, waggling it in the air between them, and her pupils go wide as she bats at it. With one sweep, she brings it closer to her mouth— bites down. Crunch.

Rafayel tuts: “Monster.”

Thankfully, she’s soon bored by the game. She sits, watching him expectantly, like he must have another one lined up for her. He doesn’t, so he turns his sketchbook towards her instead.

“What d’you think, little co-conspirator?”

The page is full of sketches, mostly of you. There’s one of you sat at your kitchen island, sipping some tea and looking like you wished you were back in bed; your hair was a mess. There’s also Reddie: soft, flowy lines and shimmering, monochrome scales. In one corner, your cat is sleeping with her legs tucked underneath her. ‘Loaf’ he’s written next to it, with a crude, tiny sketch of some bread.

Your cat isn’t looking; she’s staring past the page, at the real you. With a half-formed meow, she leaps onto his legs, making a beeline for yours. “Nope!” he says, blocking her path with the sketchbook. “Sorry, kitty, but our brave hunter needs to rest.”

She tries to get past him, but for her every movement, his sketchbook moves too: always one step ahead. With another, more indignant meow, she starts to tread circles on his lap. Then she kneads at his leg, claws sinking in. “Monster,” he whispers again, drawing air through his teeth. “Relax, will you? Jeez.”

His thighs are still being treated like pincushions, so he lifts her gently, his other hand reaching behind him. He knows what she wants. His cardigan is draped over the back of the sofa, and he drags it onto his lap—straightening it out as he grumbles, “this is extortion, you know.”

The cat is lowered back down, and she curls up in the wool of his cardigan, like that had always been the plan. A purr begins to rumble, deepening as Rafayel pets at her head, running fingers— aching from sketching— through the warmth of her fur. Her eyes are sleepy. Rafayel yawns, his head drooping to rest against yours.

His fingers move mindlessly, enjoying the softness while the television talks of tragedy, and he doesn’t notice.

#🖋rach is actually writing #rafayel x reader #rafayel #love and deepspace #lads rafayel #lnds rafayel #l&ds rafayel #qi yu #rafayel x mc #rafayel x you #lads x reader #lads #lnds #l&ds

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toast-on-dandelioms · 1 year ago

Text

🕷️Just Another Neglected Story🕷️

[previous] - Part 4.1 - [next]

Any names that you find familiar, in this part, were taken (with permission) from the fanart made by @the-broken-truth, while some changes like description of what's happening were made by me then modified by my beta reader, my bbg, Jamie.

tw: Joker, angst/no comfort, small description of injuries, small description/mention of a panic attack (I am unsure if it was that, please tell me if I am wrong).

Weeks passed with you still being Spider and a 'normal' teenager at the same time. But some changes and new things happened in these weeks.

You got visited by Superman almost daily, or nightly since he always visited when you were patrolling at night. You never questioned how he knew where to find you, you didn't want to think about it and just let him follow you during your nightly patrols.

He also helped you train while using all of your strength because you usually held back in fear of hurting people, so his tips helped a lot considering that he also had the same problem before.

Furthermore, now that you started to help with small problems around Gotham, like small thefts and gang problems, those problems started to slowly stop, giving you more time to train with Superman and help around the community.

You still didn't join the Bats or even the Justice League whenever Superman tried to propose it, you just didn't want to fight big shots like Joker or other super villains.

You liked doing small things and loved seeing the change it brought from you helping.

Just defeating super villains won't reward you with a pie from the nice old lady after helping her move her things in the apartment and give her groceries if she can't go to the supermarket, or getting drawings of little kids after you help them go home safely.

You also scored candies whenever the moms had them, which made you incredibly happy because they always had the candies you loved.

So you were happy, especially since Alfred never mentioned your breakdown after that night and kept on the usual routine of leaving your food on the desk in your room so you wouldn't have to come down to the kitchen.

You did notice him acting a bit weird but you pushed those thoughts aside since you didn't really notice anything weird happening around the Manor so you thought he was just nervous for something Bruce did.

You gave him too much trust and sooner than later you will regret doing that.

But something did change around the Manor, you just didn't notice because you started to walk on the ceiling, without shoes or Alfred would kill you, to avoid annoying encounters with anyone in the house, even if listening to music while on the ceiling was a bit difficult but you’re managing.

Well, Alfred knew that if he walked to Bruce and told him about you and what you felt he would've been ignored, especially since Bruce barely remembers that you even exist in the Manor and that you're a member of the family.

And even if Bruce did remember that you exist he would be annoyed, especially since he clearly hated your mother and was only paying the child support because he had to, especially since your mother threatened to take him to court if he wouldn't pay when he first got the news.

Talking to any of the batkids would've also been useless, because he also knew that no one in the Manor remembers you, especially now that you could walk on walls no one could even see you.

He couldn't count how many times he almost got a heart attack whenever he could see you on the ceiling, just hanging out or doing your homework, even though he still didn't understand how you could work without gravity making everything fall.

So he decided to do it in small steps, starting with leaving photos of you around the house in places where everyone sees them.

He put almost every picture that he owns of you, like you at a dance recital as the lead dancer or you at a science fair to which you won first place with an invention of yours.

One thing Alfred knew by putting your photos was that every person would notice how in all your photos you were alone and how your face never showed any emotion.

He knew it was small but he couldn't wait anymore, he needed to take action now or before you decided to leave for the Kent family, he couldn't let you go after he heard you talk about Clark and Conner while he made food in the kitchen.

He just hoped it wasn't too late for you, especially with your break down. He hoped you could still let someone in after all these years of being alone.

He did try his best but he was only a butler and he couldn't change someone's view of another person if that view was filled with hatred.

And you never noticed thanks to your walking on the ceiling or walls, moreover, you couldn't care less if they actually noticed you now. You were finally moving on and having a new start thanks to Spider.

But now it's not the time to think of Alfred's attempt of getting you acknowledged by the family, you were getting busier thanks to all the work as Spider, school and also dance classes.

You also kept on using yourself as a test subject, just to check the process of the spider DNA that's now in your DNA and seeing if anything changed or you had some mysterious new powers, taking videos to record the process of your evolution with the now Spider DNA in your body.

One thing you acquired after a while was invisibility, or camouflage as you called it since invisibility sounded magical and you didn't want it to sound like you were a kid.

How you found out you could use it was not a good experience.

You were in the kitchen with Alfred, just hanging out with him while he cooked when Damian suddenly entered the room to ask Alfred for some food for a new pet that he adopted.

In your panic at the sheer thought of Damian seeing you and hurting you like he did in the past made you freeze up, squeezing your eyes shut in hopes that he would just disappear from existence. Praying to every god you could recall that Damian wouldn't find you, you tried to not breathe too loudly so he wouldn’t hear you.

After a few minutes of paranoia passed and you didn't hear anything around you, you slowly opened your eyes and saw Damian still waiting for Alfred to give him the food for a cat he adopted and completely ignoring you.

You were still scared he would see you so you stayed silent and waited patiently, albeit apprehensively, for him to go away before actually making a sound, which was a loud sigh of restrained relief as air poured back into your lungs. Somehow you hadn't noticed that you'd been holding your breath the whole time. Strange.

You slowly got down from the counter you were sitting on and walked up to Alfred, confused as to why the old man wasn't looking at you and instead was looking at the ceiling before softly calling out his name.

You got even more confused and slightly worried when he got scared since you were standing right in front of him but he, for some reason, couldn't see you.

After a bit of Alfred trying to explain that he couldn't actually see you and you not understanding why, you finally managed to make yourself visible.

You quickly went to work at the corporation to take a few tests to see what happened and didn't see anything with those tests but after a few days of trying to understand what happened and how you could make it happen again, you managed to go invisible on command.

It took a bit but you managed to do it, which got extremely useful to sneak into the kitchen when you need to get some snacks in the middle of the night so that Alfred doesn't catch you on the wall eating chips at 3 am.

Plus thanks to that time you found out that your eyes glow in the dark, which was a bit weird since the spider that bit you wasn't a bioluminescent one but you figured it was your own DNA that changed some things.

In the time following that discovery and training with Clark, you slowly started to join him in solo missions for the Justice League, but made sure to tell him that you didn't want to partner up with another person except him.

And you made sure that he knew you weren't an official member of the Justice League or of the Young Justice League, you just joined him so you wouldn't get rusty since Gotham is still filled with crime but fighting with teens or men who just swing a crowbar or knife is not really challenging.

You didn't want anyone except Clark to join those solo missions, not because you were scared of hurting another person since you learned to control your strength thanks to him and got pretty good with your spider senses.

You just hated being around people you didn't know or trust, especially if they were a member of the Wayne family, you absolutely detested them.

You refused to look at them and especially talk to them even though you had the voice modulator.

One of the many reasons you used the voice modulator was to not get recognised but also because you hated your own voice and the voice modulator helped when talking to lost kids or just kids in general.

You never told anyone why you hate your voice, you just refused to talk one day and learned asl to communicate with people and also used notes if people didn't know asl.

The mask was like a hearing aid, it changed your voice and helped you use it more so you could talk sometimes.

As time passed, the birdies (basically all of Bruce's kids, you just called them all bird to show how much you didn't care about them) kept on trying to talk to you and showing up where you were when you were patrolling.

You had a list of most annoying to less annoying since you couldn't really do much about them, especially since Clark forbade you to throw another one of them off a roof if they got too close to your liking or just breathed wrong.

They never sustained grave injuries since you always threw them to another building or a dumpster, or to Superman if he was around.

Most of the time in a dumpster to make yourself smile since you would take a photo then swing away before they could do anything, but they started to pose whenever you would take a photo, making you annoyed and ruining your fun.

The most annoying was Dick, with how persistent he was even if he was stuck on a wall thanks to your webs when he got too close or made you uncomfortable by continuing to call you nicknames that he would use with Damian and Tim.

You hated how he would just laugh and call you his little sibling, especially since he would never call you that if you didn't have a mask on and you felt that it was unfair that he suddenly cared about you just because of the mask.

It made you feel like you were getting ignored and forgotten once again but this time to a version of you that he likes while the one behind the mask is always getting ignored.

Just like at the Manor, the real you will never be appreciated and accepted with love.

The second most annoying in the list is Tim, it was gonna be Damian but Tim took second place with how creepy he is around you and how he knows too much of what you do.

Like, you knew he's the one who knows everything about every hero and villain since you saw him work on the bat-computer while you were stealing a few grappling hooks for your web shooters since they broke. (You were invisible and you got lucky that Cassandra wasn't there or she would've found you immediately.)

But seeing him open a folder and watching how many videos and photos he has of you in the bat-computer, like when you were fighting some gang members or when you were helping some nice old lady crossing the street.

If anyone else showed you their collection of you doing badass or just normal stuff while you were a vigilante then you would've felt impressed and very honored because you never thought someone would actually go out their way to be a fan of you.

But seeing Tim, someone you still had some respect for, having so many files, especially from when you first started and hit so many walls while swinging around made you weirded out and somehow violated, especially with how concentrated he was while staring at the videos.

Seeing that folder and all the information he had on you made you lose all the respect you still had for the boy.

Another thing he did was that, whenever you met him while patrolling or eating a few hot dogs with your favorite guy, he would always talk of things you did like he was there and creeped you out so much that you had to restrain yourself from throwing him off a roof or wherever you two were.

Most of the time you just tased him and went your way, paying the hotdog guy a little extra so he wouldn't stop selling you hot dogs.

You're also starting to think that hot dog guy is using you for the tips since you always tip him 50$ or more to stay silent and let you grab more hot dogs from him.

Third annoying but still so annoying that you want to punch his face is Damian. Mostly because he treats you like you're his older sibling.

Like he respects you and looks up to you. But you knew it was because of the mask since you also knew that if you ever took off the mask in front of him he would try to kill you.

You have to be supervised by Clark and even Jon since your only solution to get rid of Damian when he’s around you is throwing him off a roof without worrying about not using your super strength.

You hated the kid and didn't really hide it but he never said anything about it since he thought you two were bonding and you acting like you hate him is normal.

You wanted to tase him when he dared to call you his older sibling in Arabic, hating the look on his face that had so much adoration and admiration for you since it actually made him look like a normal teen.

(You learned some Arabic to get close to Damian when you found out where he was from when you were young)

Like he didn't create so many scars on your arms and legs with his sword and those batarangs. Like he didn’t make you so afraid of the Manor that Alfred had to assure you that he wouldn’t hurt you or you would get a panic attack by getting near the Manor.

Least annoying but still annoying is Jason Todd. You hate that mask he wears because you can't see his face and know what he’s really thinking about, and especially how he acts like you two are two old friends who meet up everyday.

You hate how he pats you on the head when you're distracted, since the spider sense doesn't really deem him a threat for you, and manages to evade your attempts to kick him away or throw him off a roof, laughing whenever you try to do so.

Like you two were just playing and you weren't angry at him and wanting to throw something at him but couldn't.

So your one solution was ignoring him and walking to the side of the building so he wouldn't reach you since he couldn't walk on walls like you.

Which did make you smug whenever he complained about it on the roof of the same building, finding it funny when he acted all offended when he understood you were smug by how you were acting even if your mask didn’t show your face.

Yea you and Jason did get along sometimes, most of the time if you were having a nice day and if he was the first one you would meet of the birds.

You had a decent relationship with Jason, yes you did have fun sometimes but you wouldn't call him a friend or even your brother.

Plus you never forgot about the years he would ignore you and especially when he punched you in the eye and didn't even apologize decently.

Or how he would complain about how terrible of a father Bruce is, or how annoying Dick is to anyone else while you would just stand there, completely ignored since he was probably talking to someone else or to himself.

And acted like he was the only one who's life was 'ruined' when Bruce got in his life when he's still loved even after everything he's done.

Even though he's still remembered every Christmas and given big gifts that means that the person who bought them thought of him, and birthday while no one even remembered you had a birthday and you always celebrated it with a cupcake or some friends.

So you preferred to ignore him or you would punch his skull if he tried to complain one more time about Batman and his death.

Not like Cassandra, Duke and Stephanie were any better.

Cassandra was annoying because of how silent she was. You always managed to see her but you knew she wanted you to see her.

Plus, 'hanging out' with her was just you doing your usual stuff while she followed since you couldn't push her away like the others.

And fighting wasn't in the option since she could kick your ass with just a hand and without moving, so you just ignored her, even though your spider sense was always going crazy when she was around since she was a walking threat.

Even five minutes with her would give you the worst headaches that you had to ask her to stand very far or you wouldn't be able to even walk around without wanting to puke.

You hated her because she was taken in by Bruce like you but instead of being hated because of her upbringing, she got accepted with open arms and he always loved her.

What did she have that you didn't?! Why does she get all the attention and love you always wished for while you're getting forgotten and hated?!

You saw her getting accepted, getting all the love you always wished for, seeing your father going to her dance recitals while he didn't even bother to even acknowledge that you do the same sport as her but in a different and smaller dance studio since you couldn't afford to go to the one Cassandra goes because of how expensive even one lesson was.

Stephanie was another person you hated. You knew of her past, you used the bat-computer whenever no one was in the batcave when you managed to control the invisibility.

You knew about what her dad did. You understood her reasoning to become a vigilante. You didn't hate her for her past, god you didn't even care who her father was.

You just hated her because of how loved she was by everyone. She was like Cassandra but once again, all the love was going towards the two and it never even touched you.

You did try to bond with her when you arrived at the Manor but she did look like she wanted to be everywhere but not with you.

Even when you only talked about things you knew she loved, it still wasn't enough for her. She still avoided you and preferred to spend time with either Barbara, Dick or Tim.

And after a bit you gave up and let her live her life without you in her way since she clearly didn't care about you.

The worst part was that everyone prefers Spider than you, since she also keeps trying to hang out with you when you're patrolling or spending time with kids and teens.

Or getting beat during a game of basketball since you sucked at that game and the teens you played with would tease you which made you laugh since you liked spending time with people the same age as you.

But it would be ruined when she would show up, wanting to play too even though she would just play with you and make it obvious she wanted to make you win.

Which ruined the game entirely for you and always made you leave after a bit with the excuse of being busy as a vigilante, which made the teens and also Stephanie confused.

Duke was the only one of them that you knew tried to hang out with you when you weren't Spider. That's why he was one of the ones you hang out with most if he came to see you while you were patrolling.

He came when you were almost 15, you didn't remember how old you were but you knew he was one of the ones who actually paid attention to you.

But after a while, all his duties as Signal, as a high schooler and as one of Bruce's kids made him too busy for him to spend time with you, to which he explained whenever he was late for something you two planned to do.

And you understood, you cheered for him from the back and always smiled at him whenever he was with you as Signal, even if he couldn't see it. And he did tell you the best places to get food during patrols so you liked him for that, but you remained loyal to the hot dog guy.

But then there was Bruce, acting like he was the savior from his kids that kept annoying you even though he wasn't any better than any of his kids, he was one of the worst in terms of how annoying he was.

He was starting to compete with Dick for the first spot on your list, which you didn't like since you just wanted to be alone, or with Duke and Jason.

Like he would keep on calling you kid and other nicknames you heard him give to his sons over the years, which made you sick because it reminded you of when you were little and that your biggest wish was to also get a nickname like your brothers and sisters and spend time with him as your father even if he never paid any actual attention to you.

But what you hated most was how he always smiled softly at you, even when you tried to kick him away and he would just grab your ankle like it was nothing, like you were his favorite child. Like he didn't tell you that he would never be a father to you when you gave him a father's day card when you were 12 and trying to bond with him.

Looking at you with so much love and adoration, making you disgusted since he was the same man who once looked at you with disgust and hatred just for entering his office because you needed his signature for something.

The same man who clearly told you to not expect him to treat you like his child since you weren't. You were just an annoying kid who had to come to his house since no one else wanted to take you in.

You wanted to puke whenever he looked with love, refusing to forget about everything he did just because you were a child of someone he hated.

You understood why Bruce hated your mother, you couldn't force everyone to like what you like, but you still didn't understand why he had to ruin your life by keeping you with him.

He could have sent you to a foster home, he could have sent you to boarding school all your life so he could never see the face of the one he hates. But he didn't.

No, he decided to accept you in his home and ruined your life, making you miserable by keeping you there and then basically neglecting you and forgetting you even exist.

You wanted to puke whenever he looked at you with love when you were Spider, you had to take so many showers and had to scrub your skin so hard it turned red by how hard you tried to wash away his touch whenever he managed to actually touch you on either the shoulders or head.

You found comfort in Clark since he never forced you to interact with the Robins and Batman and understood why you hated them since you explained to him who you were but didn't tell him everything.

He did annoy you whenever he tried to suggest you to come with him to Metropolis even after you explained that you couldn't just move to another city right in the middle of the school year.

Moreover you were still a minor and you would need Bruce's consent, which you refused to ask since you refused to acknowledge that he was supposed to be your legal guardian.

Plus you always had fun with his kids when they were around since they would throw you in the air and catch you, making you laugh like crazy since their throw was like making you fly for like 2 minutes before catching you.

Conner was more fun to be around because he understood what you were going through since he also had problems with Superman when the kryptonian refused to accept the clone as his son.

Plus he always made the best jokes and made you laugh whenever you would have a bad day after seeing your legal guardian and his kids having a fun outing together while you were at the Manor since they didn't even remember you existed.

Or when you had a bad dance practice and almost destroyed your pointe shoes with your strength because you thought you weren't good enough to be a ballet dancer which spiraled to thinking that because of you not being good at dancing then you weren't good enough to be recognised by your legal guardian and his family.

He was more like an older brother than Dick, Jason and Tim ever were for you. And you didn't even care, you loved him as a brother and loved hanging out with him.

Jon was nice but he was also friends with Damian and you didn't really spend that much time with him because of that. You were scared Damian would be with him and you didn't want to see the evil spawn.

But the times you did hang out with him were nice, he always brought cake that his grandparents made and shared it with you while you listened to him talk about whatever he wanted.

He was fun and very nice but you weren't used to hanging around a small teen who actually wanted to be with you and actively seeked you out for your attention.

You were more used to a small teen who would glare at you and attack you if you dared do anything, even just breathing in his direction, the scars on your arms and back proved that.

But you never said anything to Jon about what his best friend did to you, you didn't want Jon to feel like he had to choose between two sides.

And you knew he would choose Damian's side, no one ever chose your side. You knew no one would even dare to be by your side.

Well after a while of going to missions with Clark and him letting you do most of the work as training with his close by to make sure you wouldn't get hurt, you were finally going on a relatively simple mission with Conner and unfortunately with Jason.

You knew Conner didn't want him there but he probably got Batman to convince Clark and him, so you didn't say anything to him about Jason being there and just stayed by his side while you were in the small ship.

The whole ride was spent in silence, only stopped whenever Conner would check the coordinates or by the sound of you fixing the web shooters to make sure they wouldn't go haywire when you were fighting.

You finally landed in the spot where you were supposed to start your mission, near the villain's lair, if you could call it that since it was an unused bunker a group of cultists found and are now living there, which made you get down eagerly since you wanted to finally do a mission without Clark's supervision.

But your excitement immediately died when you saw Stephanie waiting for you there, making you let out a loud string of curses.

And yes, you did ignore the message on your phone from Clark that said 'language' and just walked past Stephanie and Jason, just wanting to get the mission done and go home with Conner.

Plus he did promise you his grandmother's best pie if you finished the mission and you could not pass up the opportunity of getting another slice of that delicious pie.

As you walked up to the lair with Conner, you patted him on the back before standing in front of the door as Stephanie tried to open it by picking the lock. You waited exactly 10 seconds for Stephanie to unlock the door before pushing her away, kicking the door down with your strength since she was taking too long for your liking.

You didn't even care if they were watching, you just glared at them all in silence for a few seconds before they were able to hear you say.

"Stay here and you two don't follow me, Conner don't try anything or I will tell Clark"

Then, right in front of them you became invisible before walking off, the only sound they could hear were of your sneakers walking down the metallic stairs.

(Switch Pov to Stephanie)

Stephanie knew she wasn't the best person. She knew of her father's evil doings and she knew she wasn't the best Robin or the best vigilante.

But when she saw Spider, she thought that they were perfect. They were always helping people and never too busy for everyone.

She, at first, didn't even know who Spider is because of how busy she was with her life and her vigilante job. But when she saw Tim researching them, she was amazed.

She knew there were other vigilantes in the city, it was a big city but she didn't know about a vigilante who didn't fight big villains like the others.

She saw Spider helping old ladies, stopping small gangs from forming by helping the teens and just being an image for the people to rely on.

She knew Bruce stopped high grade villains like Joker or others but Spider, Spider was different.

They didn't fight Joker, no they just fought the criminals who would bother people that couldn't do anything to stop them.

She admired the vigilante and wanted to be friends with them, maybe one day she could convince them to join her and her family at the Manor.

But what she didn't understand even though she craved to know was why they hated her. Why they hated her and the rest of her family.

She tried so much, she craved their validation so much that she trained so hard and tried so many times to interact with them.

But she would keep on getting ignored or she wouldn't be able to follow them by the speed of them swinging or when they walk on walls to avoid her.

She cried so many nights at the thought of her idol, the one person she wanted, no craved validation would hate her so much when she can't even remember or know why they hate her so much.

But when she heard of Jason joining Spider for their first mission, she was so jealous that she used the bat-computer to check where Spider's mission was supposed to be and followed them in another ship.

She wanted to show to her idol how brave she was, so maybe they will praise her and laugh like when they're with Conner, Clark and Jon.

Plus she wanted to wipe Jason's smirk off his face since he kept on bragging about going to a mission with Spider for days and how he was the favorite since compared to the rest of them, he was the one who Spider stayed the longest before leaving or throwing him off the roof.

But all her excitement and hope died the minute she heard Spider curse when they saw her, her head slowly lowering as she tried not to cry.

And when Spider told them to stay there, god she wanted to protest but strangely Jason held her back and just told her to hack in the security system to watch Spider with the cameras.

She didn't understand why she couldn't follow Spider to help them but did as Jason told her to, watching all the cameras with him and seeing henchmen getting knocked out or tased by Spider even though they weren't visible.

Plus she found it hilarious when a goon got knocked out by a flying metal tray and the others just stood there confused before also getting knocked out by a taser or a punch then getting tied up on a wall or floor.

As she watched the security feed, she noticed that Spider entered the boss's sanctuary, filled with small and useless artifacts that the Justice League used to trace the villain so they could capture him and stop him before he tried to grow his cult or summon some demon.

She kept watching and trying to find a camera inside the sanctuary, starting to get annoyed and also panicking a little because if she couldn't see anything in the sanctuary then she couldn't call for backup if something went wrong, especially by how far Spider was, and even if they were going to help them, it would take too long.

She kept on switching cameras and trying to hack into anything that was electronic, getting more frustrated as time passed since she could see the villain approaching the sanctuary with someone next to him, making her confused since he wasn't supposed to have partners that helped him.

She managed to switch a camera in time to see Joker next to the villain, the blood in her face draining as she stared at the clown on her screen in silence, her eyes wide like bugs and no sound could be heard from all three of the teens.

She went back to where Spider was and noticed a camera was on, to which Stephanie immediately tried to warn them by moving the camera a bit but it was too late and both villains entered the sanctuary and closed the door so Spider wouldn't be able to leave without getting noticed by the cultist and the clown.

She watched the feed without moving any part of her body in terror that if she even moved then the two villains would notice Spider and do something horrible to them.

She gasped when she saw Joker suddenly pulling out a gun and pointing it at where Spider was supposed to be, not managing to hear what he was saying since the cameras were old and didn't register any sounds, plus his psycho-smile made it difficult for her to read his lips so she couldn't even use that to her advantage.

As Stephanie kept watching, not noticing that she was holding her breath by how focused she was on Joker then cursed loudly when she saw the screen turn black, throwing the tablet in anger as she got up, making signs for Jason and Conner to follow as she ran into the lair.

She quickly jumped over any henchmen on the ground, needing to get to Spider immediately and save them.

She had to help. She had to stop that psychopath from hurting them. She needed to protect them.

As she ran, her vision was starting to get blurry by the tears threatening to fall as she ran. As she ran, she suddenly got blocked by the metal door that was blocking her from saving Spider.

She immediately called Conner, wanting to use his strength to open the door but unfortunately he couldn't even throw a decent punch that could leave a dent on it.

Even after a few tries Conner didn't do anything so she started to try to open it by using the panel next to the door, her frustration already growing by how useless he was.

So Stephanie sent Conner outside to call Superman and Batman while she and Jason tried to open the door as they waited for the two heroes to arrive.

As the three of them waited for Batman and Superman to come, Jason and Stephanie saw something coming out the door that made their blood cold.

Some form of gas kept on coming out the door and the only thing they were able to hear were some noises of something or someone getting hit and coughing.

Stephanie did smell the gas, trying to pinpoint what the gas was but she couldn't recognise it since the only thing she could detect was that it had a sweet smell, which was nothing like all the gasses she ever smelled before.

The only thing she knew is that the gas wasn't the usual gas Joker uses on his victims since she wasn't laughing or having a maniacal smile but she still couldn't pinpoint what the gas was.

Stephanie stayed silent, trying not to show how terrified she was while Jason was trying to kick down the door while yelling curses directed at Joker.

Conner was outside the lair to use the ship and communicate with Batman and Superman, knowing they were both on different missions and he couldn't fly to both of them to ask for help, especially since he found out that he couldn't even fly, making him even more desperate for them to come.

As they waited Stephanie tried to make Jason stop punching the door when she saw his knuckles bleed, not wanting another one of her siblings get hurt because of her incompetence before looking at the door.

The blood drained from her face, her knees giving up on her and making her fall to the ground as she heard a scream, the cold metal floor the only thing she could feel at the moment.

She knew the scream couldn't be of Joker. He heard him yell before and this scream wasn't his. She hoped for every god as she tried to hack the panel of the door, even though she already tried before, with a bit of difficulty, her vision starting to blur as tears started to fall and her hands trembling as she was trying to ignore the multiple screams she kept hearing.

She couldn't let Spider get hurt, she should've been there to help them. They didn't deserve the pain and hurt she and almost all of the Robins went through because of Joker.

She stopped when she felt a familiar hand on her shoulder, the realization that she was just messing up the wires and making it even more difficult for the door to be opened when she looked at her hands tangled in between the wires.

She looked up at the man and visibly relaxed, completely giving out on the floor as Jason helped her by cutting the wires tangled in her hands while Batman examined what was happening as Conner explained what he knew, Superman next to him and waiting for Batman to give orders since he knew that if he acted irrationally then Spider would be in danger.

(Switch to Bruce's POV)

Bruce knew he wasn't a good person and a hero like Clark and Diana, that's why he called himself a vigilante since heroes save people and stop criminals but he couldn't save everyone.

Sometimes he was too late and he couldn't save someone innocent that unfortunately crossed ways with a villain or a gang.

Another thing Bruce knew was that he wasn't the best father because he let his kids get hurt by going on patrols with him as a vigilante, not thinking about what could happen to them if they fought someone too strong or if he suddenly decided to make them stop being a vigilante by saying that it was to protect them, which made everyone sneak out to be a vigilante.

He had to bury his children too early because of vigilantism and couldn't help his son when he was being trained by the League of Assassins.

But when he saw Spider for the first time, seeing a child that looked no older than 14, maybe 15, made him think that maybe, maybe he could help this one become the best version of themselves.

And if he was good enough, he could be a father again and get another child saved from the darkness and evil that surrounds Gotham.

Even if the only evil Spider saw was him and his family.

One thing he hated was that he couldn't understand why Spider absolutely loathed him and everyone of the vigilantes who live or have lived under his roof.

He couldn't understand why and even after checking every mission he ever did that included helping kids/teens in Gotham, nothing gave him a lead as to why Spider hated him.

And the worst thing was that Spider decided, out of all the heroes and vigilantes in the world, and especially in the Justice League, to trust and get close to Clark.

To Clark! His enemy! He was supposed to be the one teaching Spider to control their strength! He was supposed to be the one laughing with them while eating hot dogs and sharing funny stories of stupid people they say during patrol.

(He knows about it thanks to a small camera he put on Clark’s costume after he found out that he and Spider got close)

He didn't trust letting them go on a mission even if Clark told him that they could and that they were ready.

He thought it was too early and that they weren't trained to fight villains like he and the others fight everyday, especially with Conner since he wasn't perfectly trained so he managed to convince Clark, with much manipulation and guilt tripping, to let Jason come with them if there was trouble.

He didn't know Stephanie would also be there, especially since he didn't talk about it in the batcave about the mission but he already guessed that Jason bragged about going so she also went to also see her idol, knowing about her obsession with Spider to which he didn't say anything but encourage it with his own obsession towards the arachnid vigilante.

Not that he minded, two of his kids were better than none and Spider needed all the protection necessary even if the mission was one of the easiest possible. Especially since he chose it as a way to make sure Spider wouldn't be in actual danger.

But the moment he got a message from Conner explaining that Spider was in danger because of Joker, someone who wasn't supposed to be there in the first place, made his world crumble as he ran to where his jet was, needing to get there as soon as possible.

He couldn't let another person, no he couldn't let Spider get hurt or worse, killed, by the clown bastard.

He needed to save them, he needed to stop that fucking clown and he couldn't let Clark beat him to it. He knew that if he was the first one to save them, to help them then they would trust him more.

He couldn't lose that huge advantage to Clark or it would be impossible to even be able to get Spider to trust him or any of his kids. Which was already difficult but he saw them being more comfortable with Duke and Jason.

He arrived almost 3 seconds before Clark did, even though the kryptonian made his presence known since he made a crater at his landing and looked extremely infuriated as he walked towards Conner.

Bruce was already next to the boy and listening to his explanation on what happened, his usual frown that always made him seem annoyed with everything since he didn't want to show that he was scared.

He listened to superboy as he explained what happened in detail as they walked in the lair, a small smile appearing on his face whenever he saw henchmen and cultists knocked out and all tied up in Spider's web.

As they walked he noticed Conner and Clark weren't flying even if the space was big enough for them to even float, so he approached the boy, knowing it couldn't be Clark since the kryptonian was flying just two seconds ago, to see if he had anything on him and saw a familiar glowing green stuck to the boy's shirt.

He quickly grabbed it and put it in a container to block its effect since he knew it was kryptonite, the result showing on both kryptonians because they now could fly again.

He showed the container containing the kryptonite when both Supers looked at him "it was on Superboy's shirt, not sure who put it on him" he explained, now confused but especially enraged to who dared to interfere with the mission and put Spider in danger.

When they arrived at the door he saw something that made him frown more but also worried. He saw Stephanie continuing to tangle her hands in the wires of the panel next to the door, probably trying to open it but he saw her shaking and sobbing, making him understand that the girl was too focused on trying to save the vigilante inside the room that she couldn't focus on the task she was doing.

He then turned to Jason and saw him kicking the door and punching it, small dents on it to show how much strength he was putting in it and his bloody knuckles showing for how long he was doing that.

Bruce quickly checked on Stephanie and Jason before telling Superman to get rid of the door, the silence around them being too suspicious and dangerous since almost 2 minutes before they arrived both Stephanie, Conner and Jason could hear screaming from inside the room.

Dividers were made by @cafekitsune so please check them out because they do amazing stuff.

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nichuuu · 6 months ago

Text

Paper Houses

Cho Miyeon x M reader

(1st instalment of The View Between Villages)

Word Count: 18k+ Special thanks to @defmaybe for helping to draw out the best version of this fic.

(All the details? Really? Oh wow. Okay…)

(I’m gonna dissociate myself from this so… “you” is gonna appear a lot. Don’t sweat it cupcake—you’re not actually the one in this mess.

It’s just a bad habit of mine, that’s all.)

(You’re lucky. You get the sweet start to it all. For what it’s worth: sweetness is a fucking deceiving concept when you have rose-tinted lenses.)

“You know: out of all the men I’ve dated, you cook the best.”

You raise an eyebrow as you flip the grilled cheese in your skillet. Frankly, there’s nothing to be impressed about over grilled cheese and tomato soup. Cheese sandwiched between two evenly buttered slices of bread, grilled till golden brown and served with a side of hot tomato juice in a bowl. Literally everything has been prepared for you and packed neatly into some package in a grocery store. All you did was heat it up and add a few of your own ingredients.

“Is that a compliment or a flex?” you ask, turning your gaze away from your skillet momentarily to look at Miyeon as she replies. Her face isn’t gonna add value to her answer, but you just like looking at her. She is hot after all.

She scoffs and takes a sip of her coffee. “Jeez… Can’t a woman compliment her boyfriend in peace?”

You’ve had this conversation before, but you like to entertain her.

“This woman can’t,” you tell her, making sure she can see the smirk on your face as you turn back to the sandwich. You wave your spatula in the air as you speak, almost like you’re referring to PowerPoint slides. “She’s too weird about everything. Never take her seriously.”

“Oh, so we’re just gonna call me weird and neglect the fact you keep your butter in that?” she exclaims, pointing at the butter bell on top of your fridge. It was a Christmas gift from your mom last year, and even though you did think it was weird at first, you have not gone back to keeping your butter in blocks.

“You keep my fucking butter bell out of this,” you warn, and it’s half joking and half serious.

(No one fucks with your butter bell.)

Miyeon chortles. You don’t need to look at her to know that she’s raising her hands in the air when she says, “jeez man. Didn’t know you guys were tight like that…”

And it’s stupid exchanges like this that make you appreciate her company by bounds. It’s lonely in the apartment when she’s out being famous; really nice to have her around for the holidays, albeit for a short time. It’s been a while since she’s been back. There’s much to catch up on over an 11 am brunch. You don’t know why she’s up so damn early today, cause normally you guys sleep till the late afternoon, then go figure out what to eat for dinner before lazing around in the apartment.

So with cheese falling from the corner of her lip, she gives you the latest developments in her life. Then it’s your turn, and you're glad to say that nothing’s really of interest in either of your updates. That’s usually for the better: sometimes the news you give each other can be a little heart-attack-inducing, so it’s better that your lives are pretty bland.

“You know,” she says as she wipes her mouth. “I might just keep dating you for your food,” she tosses her tissue onto the dining table and lets out a sigh. “Fucking delicious.”

You scoff and sip on your coffee. “Bet you told that to all the guys,” you reply wryly. “Probably gets them real excited, huh?”

She grins. It’s cheeky, mischievous, maybe even a little naughty. “Not telling.”

“You don’t tell me a lot of things,” you chuckle, and you’re low-key unsurprised to hear a little bit of unintended bitterness in your voice. “Not that it matters or anything… I just value communication.”

Oh, you’re petty. So fucking petty that it makes your skin crawl a little.

Miyeon’s unfazed.

“Don’t get your tits in a tussle, pretty boy,” she muses. She folds her arms and leans into the table. “You’ll know more when I trust you more. For now: I’ll give you information as I please.”

And you kick yourself because you forget she can be a bit of a handful herself.

“Ugh, what will I ever do with this mysterious woman?” you smirk, resting your elbow against the table as you lean in as well. To be perfectly clear: you’re not mad at her. Her secrecy just bugs you out a little, and she knows it. “Such little knowledge on such a hardened beauty… must be tough to really crack her open and figure her out.”

You love her eyes, and you love to make them roll (in multiple contexts). They kinda gleam as she tilts her head. “Fine… I’ll give you something since you’re so damn desperate,” she drums her fingers against her cheek while her chin nestles itself into her palm. “What I’m about to give you is gonna change your life in so many ways. It’ll probably redefine your whole damn existence.”

You express your interest by leaning in a little more. Miyeon checks her six—like she isn’t in the comfort of her own home—before leaning in. She’s all clandestine. You have no idea what for.

“You ready?” she checks. And you know she isn’t expecting an answer, but you nod nonetheless. She checks her left and right for good measure. You never know: maybe your lamp is listening.

“I’m aching for cock right now.”

And you guys don’t even make it to the couch.

It’s on the floor next to your table where she has your face in her hands, and she’s kissing you aggressively. She’s properly kissing you, and it makes you knock the back of your head against the floor a little, but it’s really not too big of a deal.

She lifts her lips off yours and smirks. “For the record: it’s your fault that we aren’t fucking on the couch.”

“Yeah, and I actually paid rent early for once,” you shoot back sarcastically. “And would you mind helping me clean the yacht I most definitely own on my luxurious salary? Thanks a bunch, honey.”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes. She knows you’re full of shit, but she’s full of the same shit as you. Form a shit pile or something, maybe even a shit mountain if you feel like it. You could really go on for a while about how you two can talk for hours, but that’s not the main event.

The real deal comes when she has her hand beneath the waistband of your pants, slithering down to the very thing she aches for. She has that smile on her face, the one that kinda says “Oh I’m gonna love this” or “you’re gonna love this” or maybe even both. There are ways to distinguish the messages by looking at her eyes, but you’re a little too lazy to go figure it out right now. And before someone calls you a bum, you can’t help it: she has her hand on your cock and a piercing gaze trained on you. How about you try and focus on discerning implicit messages when there's a hot woman touching you in the right places?

“How are you hard already?” she asks, a hint of a giggle in her tone as she presses your shaft against your body. There’s barely any space down there, yet she makes it work so easily. “I didn’t even, like, do anything yet.”

“Well,” you hum, just as she starts to squeeze your member, appling that toe-curling pressure to your tip and smiling as you strain a little. “I can kinda see your tits through your shirt.”

Miyeon raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t even look at her shirt. “Oh?” and she starts to pump. “I didn’t notice that…”

“Totally,” you grunt. “Like how you don’t notice that your shorts are barely shorts?” you continue, but there’s something more bugging you. “And at least pull my pants down if you’re gonna jack me off, would you?”

Miyeon snorts, but compiles nonetheless. She gets your pants and boxers off with ease. It’s one swift motion (it’s practiced grace really), and she gets back to the task at hand before she was so rudely interrupted.

“What does seeing my tits have anything to do with you?” Her motions are languid and fluid, steady and flowing like a stream. She doesn’t need to look. She doesn't need to guess. She knows you like the back of her hand. “Does it turn you on? Excite you?”

You have it in you to roll your eyes before they shut. “Stop asking these fucking ridiculous questions.”

“It's a basic inquiry.” She laughs in this aloof tone that you know is paired with the most devious of smiles. “So you won’t let me compliment you and you won’t let me ask questions? Tsk. Chivalry is dead.”

Miyeon goes a little faster, adds a twist of her wrist. This is just her hand, mind you, and it’s already ruining you in a way that only she is capable of. The tender touch of Cho Miyeon is something no woman you’ve met could ever replicate, and it takes you to places that you can only visit with her. Those fingers are magic, that mouth is magic—hell, everything about her is magic.

“Please,” you manage to quip past the jolts of magic being sent through your system. “We both know that you have the answers to all the questions you just asked.”

She giggles—playfully, you might add. This is all a part of the game you play with her; this is the way Miyeon’s cookie crumbles. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Who cares?”

You care: not a lot, but enough to make this as humorous as you want it to be. You kinda only give two shits because it lets you be kinda petty with her, but not that you externalise it or anything. You just have it pent up in you for the fun of it.

“Anyway,” she muses, halting the strokes of her hand to your cock. “Have I told you about how much I wanted you to fill me while I was filming?”

You take a moment to breathe. “No… But do tell.”

And gets to that, but not before ridding herself of her shirt first. By technicality, it’s your shirt, but it shrunk in the dryer at some point, so it just became hers. She gets into the details, the nitty gritty; tells you exactly what she’s imagining during the filming of her Music Video all while you kind just sit there and ogle at her chest. She takes her time, covers the stuff that you don’t really need to know but it’s kinda hot to know — things like “ugh, I needed you to bend me over the hood of that car and just fuck me at that point…” — because you admittedly get off knowing that she ever thinks about you that way and… God, you’re rambling aren’t you? Still pretty fitting though: it’s the way Miyeon talks when she’s thinking nonsense.

“Ugh. Now I’m wet,” she mutters. She speaks as if it’s your fault that she went on rambling about her fantasies with you. “You know you make me like, really horny right?”

“Oh no… Whatever will I do?” you’re really just rolling with it. Not because you want to, but because you want to get this bit where you tease each other over and done with. It’s kinda like marinating meat in the way it makes the sex a little hotter. Truthfully: you’re aching for her. Really: you want nothing more than to just get her pinned beneath you and writhing on your wooden floor.

And frankly? You could do all of that right now.

So it’s with a bit of grace (and some dexterity) that you flip the positions: now you’re kneeling over her while she is the one that lies on the floor, if that makes any sense. Miyeon isn’t shocked by your sudden movements, more so delighted by the fact that you finally gave in to your carnal urges and just went for it. She smiles, knowing full well that she’s done something that's gonna give her that fuel she needs for the week. You know: sex that’s the opposite of soft; some shit that fulfills some wild thoughts.

“Gotta say, you’re quicker than usual,” she has that cocky smirk on her face. You wanna wipe it right off her face, and you know just how. “Normally you’re all talk, no– Oh…”

You like that it really only takes a finger pressed against her panties to shut her up. It’s not much, but it’s enough to make her shut her eyes and shut up for a moment. The spot you press on is damp, soaked in that sweet slick. Gently, you trace the outline of those swollen folds. “You were saying?”

She has it in her to laugh—a breathy chortle. “Fuck you.”

“I’m working on that,” you fire back. Your cock twitches a little when you see her jolt in response to your touch. Your finger pressed down on that one spot that makes her weak, and it really works wonders: an airy gasp slips past those thin, luscious lips. The number of times you’ve kissed those lips swollen is not a number countable with 10 fingers.

Miyeon sighs, and it’s a mix of pleasure and frustration in her breath that humors you. She relaxes into the floorboards, her hips rock, her cunt rubs against your fingers. She's searching for some friction — sweet release in lewd movements. You let her move for a bit, watch her shake like the bough of a willow tree as she pleases herself against your fingers.

“Enjoying yourself?” you quip.

“Yeah..” she hums. “Passing time while you’re still not taking these shorts off me.”

Of course… How could you be so forgetful?

You stop for a moment to help her wriggle out of her clothing. It isn’t one of her most graceful moments, but it quickly passes. The shorts join your pants on the floor. Her panties are pink — not that subtle shade of pink or even like a darker version of pink. It’s Barbie fucking Pink.

“So we’re feeling loud today, huh?” you ask, letting your finger trail the lacy parts of the fabric. Miyeon smiles.

“Sana gave them to me,” she explains, not the least bit sheepish that her damp spot is visibly darker than the rest of her underwear. “Hope this doesn’t affect you in your work or anything…”

You feel the corner of your lip turn up. “No, no… Of course not,” you assure her, all while you let your hand slip between the fabric and her skin. You can feel her shudder, then you feel the heat of her cunt at the tip of your fingers. “You caught me on the right day actually… Pink’s in my rotation of favourite colours this fine morning.”

“Right,” her voice has a lilt. It’s shuddering a little too. “I knew that… Definitely had that in mind.”

You laugh. Your index fingers slip between her folds. She moans.

You lower yourself, capture a swollen, taut nipple in your mouth. The sweet suction you deliver makes her gasp. Her hand finds itself in your head.

It’s all quite rhythmical, almost like a routine for the two of you. The way your bodies react to each other feels so natural that you think it might just be second nature at this point. You know her body: you’ve memorised the dips and curves and tender spots; the hot spots, the warm parts and the best parts. She knows you—the way you think, the way you talk; the way you play with her and the things you want to do with her. It would be safe to say that you guys practically have PhDs in the subject of each other, but that’s not a fair statement because you’re both a little more complicated than you let on. That keeps the sex exciting; it makes you crave each other a little more than last time.

“One or two?” you whisper, letting your finger dip in and out of her lips and getting it all wet in her slickness. She takes a moment to think, or maybe she’s taking a moment to really soak in the teasing. Either way: she takes some time to reply.

“Two,” she shifts herself a little lower, her clit pressing into the base of your middle finger. It makes her sigh — a low, kinda sonorous escape of air through her lips. “I hope you trimmed your nails this time.”

“That last time was a minor mishap,” you admit. You kinda want to pull your hands out to double-check, but you’re too mired in the moment to assuage your worries. “Don’t worry. I’ve got it all under control.”

She beams like the damn sun. “Good. I like it when you’ve got the reins.”

And that makes you suck in some air through your teeth.

(God, does she know how to try you on.)

Your digits push themselves inside of her. They’re wrapped in her tight warmth, snug as a bug in a rug or whatever. You love the way her abs kinda flex as your fingers introduce themselves to her insides. It makes the best parts of her pop. Her chest rises a little more than the last time, her breaths becoming a little longer and more drawn out as your fingers explore her like always. The way she jolts when you get to that one spot at the roof of her pussy tells you that she has been primed and ready for this moment, loaded up like a shotgun and the trigger is really just any part of you that makes her cum. It could be your fingers, your tongue, your dick, your thigh—any part of you that can get her to that sweet high. Of course: you’re more than happy to assist. And so your mouth latches itself back onto her breast, tongue licking and swishing and flicking the swollen nipple atop her small yet generously sized breast. You relish the way it feels in your hand as you cup it—not too firmly and not too gently—and give it a squeeze, enjoying how the flesh spills out a little between your fingers but still fits in the palm of your hand.

“How do you only get better at this?” she hisses through her teeth. “I mean, I just saw you last week but… Oh god…”

You remove her nipple from your mouth. “Art is honed. This is art.”

She laughs, then throws her head back to let out a moan. “Well I’ll be damned,” her eyes close as she speaks, resting themselves for a bit so that she can enjoy the feel of your fingers in the best part of her slick. “Paint me like one of your French girls then.”

And you kinda have to kiss her after that. It’s a good line… and she’s, like, smoking hot right now.

You can’t track the exact moments where she starts to blue screen on you, but you can guess it's somewhere between you pinching her nipple and when you slide a third finger into her. The pressure, the stretching—it’s, like, everything she wants as of right now. She lets out this choked-up cry that you like to hear, the supple curve of her back growing more defined as she arches just a little more. She doesn't hold back, she never does. When you’re making her feel good, you can bet some good money that she’ll let you know. She’ll find her own way to express herself, be it through sound or action or words—sometimes a combination of all three.

The way she feels around your fingers—delicate squeezing and sweet pressure around your digits as they stretch her to new lengths—is nothing short of enthralling. You can feel her pulse around you, the dull throb of her heartbeat as it beats for the sole purpose of getting all that blood rushing into the right areas. Your hand is kinda messy, fingers coated down to your knuckles in the sweet substance from her heat. Miyeon starts to writhe, squirm. A whine leaves her mouth. It’s followed by another, and another, and another—keeps going till the whiny stream ends with a guttural moan.

Her legs close around your wrist. Her throat bobs.

“Mmph… baby…” her hand flails a bit as she tries to search for you. She catches your shoulder and her nails dig in. “Your mouth… I want your mouth on me.”

You always loved how forthcoming she is.

“Miyeon…” you drawl, and this next bit is really just for the fun of it. “What’s the magic word?”

She laughs softly through the pleasure, lets a smile grace your eyes. She doesn’t fight it; she wants it—wants you. She just wants you in any shape or form. Any version of you will do; she’ll take all the different sides of you in a heartbeat. All she needs is you. “Please.”

You’ve never found so much delight in hearing that word. Kinda makes you want to hear it again.

“I can’t hear you,” your thumb presses down onto her clit. Her thighs start to twitch.

“Please!” she yells that magic word in the form of a shout this time. Your cheeks hurt from how widely you’re beaming.

You retract your fingers. They come up to your mouth so you can taste her off of them. She’s nothing short of delicious, and you can kinda tell that she knows it because she’s smirking as she watches you clean off yourself.

“How are we feeling about the samples?” she has that proud gleam in her eye. “Pineapple’s been in my diet as of late… Just wondering if anything’s different.”

You smack your lips. “Picking up on a little tang here… Can’t be sure though.”

Her hands slide down to her hips, thumbs hooking into the band of her panties and pulling them down her thighs. “No worries. There’s more where it came from.”

The gall of this girl is insane, you’re thinking, smirking as you assist the journey of her underwear down her slim, milky legs. Like all your other clothing, it’s tossed aside.

Miyeon spreads thighs, bends her knees so that her feet are flat on the floor. You get in position, let your palms slide down her body with careful consideration: run your hands over the sensitive parts of the stomach, skim that one portion of her inner thigh that makes her shiver. She watches—waiting and anticipating while failing to keep her excitement off her face.

She is glistening, swollen and plump to your eyes, kinda far ahead considering that you just used your fingers. She’s eager, unashamed and more proud than embarrassed about her arousal. Her legs shift a bit. She looks at you, a fingernail between her teeth as she exhales sharply when your thumb traces the outline of her pussy, careful in its endeavor as you feel the muscles around her slick tense up in response. Oh she’s so damn impatient right now, but she lets you get away with all of this because it gets her off a little harder; the teasing is just part of the show and the climax will probably follow pretty soon, fast and hard

“You’ve been looking forward to this, huh?” you remark, watching as her eyelids flutter when you put a little pressure with the pad of your thumb.

“Mhm…” she replies. It’s a low hum, one that resonates in her throat rather pleasantly. “You have no idea…”

You laugh. Your eyes roll towards the ceiling then set themselves back on her. “Please… We both know I have some idea,” you stop your thumb on her clit, and you begin to draw small circles around it. “You did tell me” —and you have to pause for a bit to use your other hand to press down on her pelvic area, stopping her from jolting her hips up to get that sweet sensation of your thumb rubbing her swollen nub. She whines a little, a soft plea following suit— “about all the things you wanted to do with me.”

She desperately tries to shift herself, press herself a little more against you. The smooth wooden floor hinders her, the lack of friction failing to aid her. Her brows furrow. She’s frustrated. “Yeah, well, if you know what I want so much, why aren’t you fucking getting to it?”

You wink. “Relax. I’m just letting the meat tenderise.”

“Oh shut it you fucking— Mmmph!”

And the way you part her with your tongue, it’s like she’s butter and you’re a hot knife slicing her open. You're slow with it, and you don’t stop when Miyeon’s thigh stiffens against your palm, or when she squirms a little and almost got your tongue derailed from its track. You know what makes her tick, what makes her hit the octave and gets her nice and messy for you. If anything gets Miyeon going more than actually fucking—it’s definitely gotta be when you get your tongue on her folds.

“You’re never gonna let me finish my sentences, are you?” she laughs breathily. You watch her abdomen as it rises and falls together with the quick breaths she takes.

“Dunno…” you nuzzle your face in her folds for a little, giving her time to say whatever she wants for a bit. “You did say that chivalry is dead.”

From your bottom up view of her, you can tell that she just rolled her eyes. “No comment. You won’t let my finish it any— oh my fucking god.”

Now it’s the flat of your tongue against her clit that stops her dead in her tracks. Her juices have begun to lather your tongue in their addictive taste, drawing you into her just a little more with each lap of your tongue. You suck on one of her folds, then your tongue is inside her, and she moans, her hand finding a spot on the back of your head that she can grip on to. She calls you crazy, calls you baby, runs her fingers through your hair. Your tongue dips in, circles, laps; your nose brushes against all the right spots of her skin and it draws out these almost sob-like, quiet sounds from her chest and she’s… Fuck, she’s amazing.

“I might take a while,” she whispers to you. You call malarkey, but play along nonetheless.

“Fuck yes,” your tongue swipes the entirety of her in a long, broad stroke. “Please, by all means princess. Take your time,” you don’t think you could ever sound as enthusiastic as you did right now. She pushes you down a little harder onto her slit, and you delight in how she squirms when you push your tongue a little deeper between her folds.

Her nails start to dig into your scalp a bit, and she starts pushing you down onto her cunt a little more.

“You know,” she speaks with this half-whisper-half-gasp, the type of tone that tells you that she’s fighting to stay in control of her own body. “I— mmph… Sometimes I lock myself in the changing room and just get off to the thought of you eating me.”

You suck on the other fold that you neglected earlier. “Oh yeah?” and you get a finger inside of her. She cries out, abdomen flexing deliciously as she turns pliant under the pressure of your finger getting a hold of that sweet spot. You can feel the heat—it feels like your skin is gonna melt. “Bet you get off real hard to it, maybe even harder than you will in like, two minutes.”

“Two?” she tries to sound a little defiant, but her voice is cracking and it’s really not working out in her favour. Your finger is barely pushing up by the way, yet it seems like she’s got thousands of pascals of pleasure weighing down on every part of her being. “Don’t put yourself on a fucking pedestal… I am nowhere close.”

You hum in reply, saving your energy to suck on her clit. And it’s almost like she’s spring-loaded in the way her thighs clamp around your ears immediately after. Her fingers eat into your scalp, a light, searing pain growing across your head as you kiss her right fold, then her left. You can tell that there’s liquid burning heat running through her body, spilling all over her. Miyeon tries to hold on, tries to prolong this for a little more by getting her nails deep in your scalp. But she’s falling apart, coming undone with each second.

“Baby.”

“One minute left,” you put your lips back around her clit. Her head thumps against the floorboards.

“I—can’t.”

“Ugh. Hate it when you lie.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Just fucking cum.”

And she ruins herself. She loses sense of the world for a bit—convulsing and twitching on the floor while you continue to lick her. No cry leaves her mouth; a strained, choked up phonic gets caught in her throat and refuses to dislodge. Her back arches, her thighs flex. Her world fades for a bit.

Give or take: she takes a minute or so. When she gasps for air, you know she’s come back down to earth. You welcome her with a kiss to her abdomen as you rise up. Her cheeks are rubicund—flushed and making her glow as she smiles at you. She softly captures your cheeks in her hands.

“Okay,” she huffs, taking deep breaths as she strokes your face with her thumb. “Out of all the men I’ve dated: you can cook and eat the best.”

“Twenty dollars says that you’ve said that to at least four guys,” you muse. “Maybe five if I’m generous.”

She closes her eyes for a moment. Inhales. Exhales.

“Hand on my heart,” she uses one hand to push some hair out of her face. “I’ve only said this to you.”

Ignorance is bliss. Believing her is a sort of ignorance.

You willfully let yourself be blissful because you can.

(Then fast forward a little. Maybe like, three hours? Or however long it takes for you to have a nap and a shower to get ready to go out.)

“Are you seriously going out in that?”

And you have to stop at the door. You know that tone all too well.

“What is it this time?” you grumble, turning around to face the bed so that she can get a full biopsy of your outfit. It isn’t a bad outfit in your honest opinion, and you’re no stranger to horrible (unintentional) attempts at making fashion statements. Colour-blindness is a hereditary curse; it’s not your fault that you can’t tell that this shade of blue doesn’t work with that shade of grey and whatnot. “I swear I wore this a week ago and you said nothing.”

Miyeon slips out from under the covers. In your T-shirt, she saunters with purpose and urgency as she makes her way over. She stops in front of you and takes your tie into her hands. “It’s either you lose this tie or do something else to this already god-forsaken outfit.”

You consider the options for a hot minute. You’re kinda proud of this outfit—it took a lot of time and vetting through Miyeon to get it planned out and everything. The tie was kind of a staple piece—as important as the shirt or trousers. To hear that (in essence) you looked like shit admittedly dealt a blow to your ego, but why be petty when you can be cavalier?

“Whatever,” you reply, making no effort to stop her from trailing a nail up your shirt. “I couldn’t really care less about how this woman perceives me tonight. Not even into her anyway.”

Miyeon chuckles. The finger on your chest wraps itself around the top of your tie. “That’s an option as well,” she adjusts the knot, though it doesn’t look like she’s doing it to make you look better. “But can I give you one more alternative?”

“By all means, princess.”

She tugs on your tie, pulls you close. Your lips are just centimetres away from hers. You get a whiff of her scent. She’s using the shampoo you bought her.

“Stay home,” she makes sure that her voice is kinda breathy, tickles your face as she lets the phonics dissipate into warm air. “Skip the date. You have a smoking hot girlfriend to fuck anyway.”

Oh and it takes you just about everything to stop you from grabbing her by the face and just kissing her. It's so easy: reach forward, get her face (or waist) in your hands and just smash her lips against yours. You know she’s thinking the same thing; but she’s waiting on you, anticipating what you’re going to do next. It’s a sick little game the two of you play, but it’s fun as hell and really doesn’t get boring in the near future.

“You know what my mom would say…” you begin, and you know she’s gonna stop you.

“Say you're sick”—bingo motherfuckers. She owes you five bucks—“tell her that you got the cold and so you can’t show up.”

“Expended on that one… And the work emergency one too,” you regretfully inform her. “And no: I will not be telling them that we’re actually a thing—“

“Cause you want to protect me and blah blah…” she interjects yet again, her fingers moving up and down, closing against her thumb in mimicry of a mouth moving. It’s petty, kinda frustrating—but it’s Miyeon. She’s a handful to deal with at times, but at least she’s your handful to deal with. “Been running the same jig for a little too long, tiger. I know your game.”

“I know,” you admit. “I’m a one-trick Pony and my carrot is you. What’s new?”

She chortles at that, and you take that moment to really get a good look at her because by god is she beautiful. Head-turner, eye-widener, heart-racer — not to be a bore, but again: it’s Miyeon. There’s a lot more about her that you could synthesize into words, but you won’t (not because you don’t want to or anything; but it’s more about the fact that you probably don’t have enough time to get someone to understand her.)

Cause here’s the thing (about her, you and both of you): she’s just as human as anyone, and that means she’s just about as complicated as anyone. You’ve got a story, she’s got her’s, and the two cross somewhere to form a midpoint before they start running parallel to each other before meeting again and running together and… You get it, don’t you?

No? Fuck.

Okay. She may or may not be able to hold down a relationship; and you may or may not have been able to secure a relationship. You kinda get drunk with her over this revelation one night and you may or may not have joked over the fact that maybe you should get together. And then you may or may not have had the hottest sex you’ve had in years before you may or may not have realised that she’s the best thing to happen to you. It’s all kinda hypothetical to you cause you’re still processing the fact that this is all real. Still wondering if it’s a fling cause it’s only been about 3 months since this started.

(Calm down cupcake, no one likes a party pooper who prods on details in the midst of a story. It’s just… Ugh. The story behind how the two of you know each other is so boring and complicated—full of unnecessary exposition like this whole bit really. It hurts to retell it, so here’s a summary: she used to date your roommate, roommate moved out after they broke up, she stayed and hanged around you, here you are now. Fuck the details, there’s no room for it really. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.)

“Save the charisma,” she tells you, really putting on some breath behind her words. “I prefer it when you use it in bed.”

And you kinda have to kiss her after that. It’s a good line… and she’s, like, smoking hot right now.

The kiss kinda blurs the line between passionate and sweet (if there even was a line to begin with). It’s quite aggressive, a little tender but also a wee bit emotional. It makes you a little bitter, but don’t get it twisted: you love this girl with all your heart and you’d do anything to stay with her. It’s just that you’d love—more than anything—to lose the shirt and pants you’re wearing to make out with her, and then let things flow as they do. Unfortunately, your parents really want you to meet this girl, and you have to get going or you’ll probably get cut from the will or something.

She tries again. “Stay…”

“Miyeon—”

“I fucking need you… Please.”

It’s just so fucking tempting…. But there are only so many lines you can cross before you find yourself in trouble with border patrol. And if there's anything you hate more than lectures, it’s lectures from your mother.

Her lips graze yours, hovering just millimeters away. She wants to kiss you—bite your lower lip and pull you into an undoubtedly sloppy lip lock. That will end with your hand somewhere on her body that gets the ball rolling (and we all know where that ball goes). She has it in her to do it; she has the right, the means and the fucking autonomy (and audacity). She’s just waiting on you, seeing what happens when she plants the seed of an idea in your head and waters it a little.

Unfortunately for her, you’re too damn terrified of your parents to let that seed grow.

“I‘ll see you later,” you whisper, albeit a little reluctantly. “Call me if anything comes up.”

She understands that she’s lost. Doesn’t stop her from giving you that kiss though. “Don’t keep me waiting tonight… I love you.”

Ugh. She’s one hell of a woman, isn’t she?

So get this: this woman that your mother found for you is possibly the most boring person you’ll ever meet. She’s beautiful and all, but she has the personality that has just about the same amount of flavour as food in the west before spices.

She spends the meal talking about her job, and you kinda just fix her with a hundred yard stare and tune out. You couldn’t give a shit about computer security really—never was and never will be into that shit. It doesn’t help that your phone is kinda blowing up at the moment. It’s buzzing all over your thigh in your pocket. Pretty trippy, kinda makes you wonder if Miyeon had just slipped one of her vibrators into your pocket.

You excuse yourself to the bathroom at some point. You’re not sure how long she’s been yapping your ear off for, but it kinda doesn’t matter. All you’ve gotten from this meal is really just a handful of nonsense and a migraine.

Anyway: it’s in the confines of the bathroom store that you check on the ruckus in your pocket. The screen lights up and you find that the spasming of your phone was caused by a combination of posts from a news outlet and from Miyeon. She takes precedence over the news.

Miyeon//8:01 pm: I swear to you I have no idea what’s going on

Miyeon//8:01 pm: I’m getting this at the same time as you

Miyeon//8:02 pm: I don’t know what’s happening. Please come home.

And the way you open your news app almost instantly makes you feel like you’re all too familiar with this. It’s not a headline, but it might as well be from the way it makes your eyes widen and your breath stop for a second.

You blink. You blink again.

The words don’t change.

Suddenly, you have a valid reason to get out of this dinner.

(How you get home is a little fuzzy, but that’s not really the important part.

What? The headline? Oh you know it, don’t you cupcake? It was literally the only thing on people’s minds for some reason, as if an idol dating an actor is something unheard of.)

“What the fuck?” you ask when you step through your apartment door.

She sighs as you remove your coat and hang it behind your door. “Look… I’m just as confused as you are—”

“An actor?” you interject. You’ll admit that it’s a little rude, but you’re really just trying to make sense of this as fast as possible. “How long have you known this guy?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t,” she huffs. “I swear to you, hand on my heart and the other on the bible, I am not in love with that man.” She says. “I barely even know the fucker, never talked to him in my life.”

It’s a little hard to look at her right now. You have lots of things to say; lots of feelings and lots of thoughts. If you’re really gonna be honest with yourself: you’re scared, hurt and a little confused. Miyeon’s good at lying—a little too good for your liking. Pair that knowledge with your insecurities, and congrats: you’ve just given birth to multiple insecurities. They’re like little demons running amok in your chest. It’s suddenly hard to breathe.

You can’t do this with her now. Not when all this is all so fresh and new.

But she catches your arm as you try to walk past her. Her grip is firm, pleading.

“Please,” she utters, letting her hand slide down your arm to let her fingers wrap around your hand. “Trust me on this.”

You want to. You really want to. And so it hurts you to ask, “Am I just another fling?”

You can see it in her eyes when she realises the motivation behind the question. She doesn’t take long to come to the epiphany—just a little less than a second before her eyes soften and her lips part a little. Her expression scares you. You want to run from this all together and leave it to another day, but God knows that you won’t be getting any sleep with this weight in your head. It’s comical, almost hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that it’s your relationship with her on the line.

You like to think that she can’t express her answer into words, so she kisses you instead. You’ll never know why she chose to kiss you, but it's sweet and so powerful that you can kinda live with that gap in your knowledge. You may or may not have teared a little, and you may or may not have melted into her lips a little too quickly. What you can say for certain: when you find yourself back in those eyes, panting with your face between her hands—the words ‘I love you’ escape your mouth faster than you can think. You don’t say it for the sake of it; you say it cause you mean it. You want her to know that you’ll fight for this relationship, that you’ll fight for her.

And it makes her smile.

“I’m like, in love with your goofy ass,” she mutters, thumb tracing a path along your cheek. “So don’t you ever think that I’d drop you for some slick-back fuck face.”

That’s more than enough for you. Her smile is contagious as you hold her waist. “Crude. I love you, Miyeon.”

“Yeah. I heard you the first tim—”

Of course: you don’t wait for a finished reply to kiss her. It’s a practice, almost a common tongue at this point.

Miyeon lets her hands fall, gets her arms around your neck while you reacquaint your lips with hers. She’s lovely, fucking divine and maybe even a little addictive—straight up dangerous if you’re to sum it up. You wonder, for a second, if you’re being manipulated, and it’s really only for a second because she’s got her teeth in your bottom lip and she’s dragging them towards her. She wants more—more of you and less of this need to prove her love. She touches your chest, palm flat against your flesh as she deepens the kiss. Ignorance is bliss. Believing her is a sort of ignorance. Kissing her deepens that ignorance, makes you all the more blissful.

“I need you,” you breathe, unashamed by your blatant desire to have her right now. Really: you can’t get enough of her smell right now. “Please Miyeon… Let me be the only one.”

She smiles softly. She runs her fingers through your hair. “Baby, you already are.”

You press your forehead against hers. “I know. But can we just…”

You can’t really verbalise what you want out of this. You want Miyeon, but you don’t just want the idea and concept of her. You long for that connection with her, that union and that closure, not just some fleeting, superficial feelings. This woman is quite literally one of your dreams. It’s selfish to say this, but you want that security—something tangible to know that you’re really hers and she’s really yours, a piece of her that you can hold on to that helps rid your heart of those little demons. You hope she can understand this through your closed eyes.

And something about the way she fixes your hair tells you that she does.

“It’s okay,” she assures you, her other hand finding that one spot on your chest. It feels like it’s touching your heart directly, calming it. “I get it,” her fingers wrap around the knot of your tie, loosening it till it unravels completely. “You’re hurt and scared. Frankly, so am I.”

Miyeon wraps the tie up neatly in her fist. Her hands cross over each other as she reaches down to grab the hems of her shirt. It slips off her, a layer peeled away. Then the tie rolls down from her hand.

“I want you to know”—she drapes the tie around her shoulders, the thin portion ever so slightly shorter than the broader portion as they hang on either side of those perky mounds—“I will do everything I can to protect you and us.”

She tosses the smaller end across her body, cloth flying over her left shoulder and dangling behind her arm. The broader end is wrapped around her neck—once, twice.

Miyeon steps closer and takes your hand. The broad end of the tie gets slotted into your palm.

“And even though I might have to be seen with him,” she coos, and she’s a little clumsy as she reaches for the thin end behind her, but she gets it on her second or third try. “Even though I might have to hold his hand in public,” she slips it between her skin and the loop she’s made, ties it off. “You should know: I am yours.”

She shocks you into silence as always. You know what she’s insinuating. You know that she knows what she’s insinuating. Your eyes search her for consent, and you find that it’s the only thing you can make out behind the veneer of a tender gaze. She checks the makeshift leash she’s made. It’s not coming off anytime soon.

You wrap some of the tie around your hand. Your fingers close around the silky fabric.

(Just so we’re clear: the tie may look horrible on you, but she looks amazing in it.)

You pull.

And it’s just that.

Clothes come off, lips meet, sighs fly through the room. Her hands explore you, grab you, pump you; your kisses find the best parts of her, the parts you love the most and the parts she loves attention at. The tie never leaves your hand, and you give it a tug or two when you get your digits in her on the couch. You’ll never forget the way she looks when her head is forced up just after it whips back, the glassy look in her eye as she begs for you, keens for you. Never in your life has anything this debauched been so intimate. You’ve never heard sighs out of you and her so luscious.

“Princess,” you quite literally growl as you address her. It’s not necessary, but the squelching of your fingers in her slick brings out something in you—a part of you that’s wild and somewhat untamed. “I fucking love the way you moan.”

Miyeon bites down on her lower lip, hard enough to draw blood. “Yeah? She husks, her eyes going half-lidded in pleasure when you get your fingers in the same, soft, tender spot on the roof of her pussy. “It’s all for you. Ngh— A-All yours…”

And you don’t know how you can not believe her at this point.

You pull at the tie. She almost straightens completely. You kiss her. Her moans send pleasant vibrations down your windpipe.

It’s all so perfect. And it somehow gets even more perfect when she cums—waves of heat burning through her system; eyes shut and mouth agape; hands around your neck and your name spilling from her lips in a mix of curses (that mostly contain the word ‘fuck’); body convulsing and twitching in ways that make a low grunt emerge from the depths of your chest as you watch her. She’s beautiful—your beautiful princess.

When it’s over, you let the tie go slack. She crashes against the couch, forcing air back into her lungs with deep breaths. There’s sweat on her face, her body. Your hand finds its place on her tummy as you place small kisses on the corner of her lip, her jaw. Her skin is moist and sticky.

“Have me,” and it’s more so of a demand than a request. “Take me. However you want, wherever you want,” she runs her hands through your hair, “You’re the only one I want.”

You let out a low hum. It lightly vibrates at the base of your throat as you catch her earlobe between your lips.

“Has anyone told you how fucking beautiful you are?” you can’t help but ask. She searches your face or a minute, then she chortles.

“About half the world,” she replies. “But it means the most coming from you.”

(Oh… That line really means the fucking world to you.)

You kiss her, hard. It’s messy, sloppy, and at some point you guys are scrambling to get on top of each other. She wins at one point, and so she rides you—dropping and rising hard and fast on your cock like a lewd merry-go-round carriage. She’s relentless, letting your cock fill her while she blanks out and just lets herself cry and moan like you don’t have thin walls in your apartment. You let her please herself, throw herself down onto your cock again and again till you decide that it’s your turn to have some fun. The tie is your friend, and you use it to pull her real close to not too kindly hiss your instructions into her ear.

You’d kill to see the look in her eyes again.

And so you have her against the nearest wall in less than a minute, her back flushed against it and one of her legs bent in the crook of your arm. She reaches between your bodies, grabs your throbbing shaft and rubs your tip against her slit. You feel the heat of her pussy—the desire and depravity that burn in her core. You can’t believe she’s yours.

“I’m gonna put this in me,” she narrates her course of action, all breathy and silky. “It’s gonna fill me, fuck me… Maybe even cum in me.”

“I wouldn’t get ahead of ourselves here,” you whisper, your hand wrapping itself back in the fabric of the tie. “That last part? I dunno… Seems a little optimistic, don’t you think?”

She pushes your head in between her folds—not all the way, but enough to part them. “And why is that?”

You pop your hips, push yourself in a little more. She inhales sharply.

“I only cum inside good girls.”

The smile that creeps its way onto her face is wicked.

“Trust me,” her hand finds purchase on your shoulder, pads of her fingers digging into the muscle. “I’ll be the best you ever get.”

She puts her weight onto the leg in your arm. You slide into her.

And you both take a moment to enjoy the unity—the feeling of the two of you being joined as one; your out of sync heartbeats that feel like pattering raindrops around your shaft. You want to say something witty, a quip that will get a nice chuckle out of her.

All you can really manage is, “Fuck.”

And in response: “Talk less. Fuck more.”

You draw back, push in. There’s the sopping sound of your shaft going in and out of her, wet pushing into warm flesh. You groan. She sighs.

Tight, hot, wet, divine.

And it goes without saying: when you pick up the pace, she lets you know that she loves the feeling—the stretching, the filling, the push and pull. It comes to you in the form of pure filth: words that have very little consideration for propriety and no room for decency, something along the lines of “I can’t believe you feel this good. I can’t believe this cock is mine” or “That’s it. Keep filling me. Keep fucking— Oh” or maybe even a mix of both. You can’t be certain, because between you and her, you both know that the undulating of your cock into her tight, creamy heat and the almost torturous pressure around your dick is taking you under by the second. It’s not hard to lose yourself in her when she’s basically a little piece of you.

Like always, she let her pleasure be known through desperate noises and choked up words. “Keep going, please, fuck—don't stop,” and it sounds like it hurts but you know it’s the other way around. Her pleasure coated tongue makes the lust in her words undeniable, her half-lidded eyes ruining the argument that she’s in any pain whatsoever. You yank on her tie, her body curves closer. You need a better look at that face.

(Trust me, it’s a face you don’t want to forget.

For lack of a better word: it’s porny as fuck.)

It's a blissful dance – the rhythmic, almost metronomical give of her thighs as you slide yourself home again and again steadily and firmly. The smacking of sweaty and sticky skins colliding is almost evenly paced, sighs and grunts filling the spaces between slaps. She follows your lead, rocks her hips accordingly, angles herself and adjusts so that she can feel you in the deepest parts of her cunt. You lift her leg a little higher, spear yourself a little deeper. You listen to your body, she listens to hers. You give in to your desires.

You don’t mean to blurt it. You don’t mean to make the sex more complicated than it already is. But it happens—it fucking happens and you can’t stop it.

“I love you,” your voice is nothing more than a rasp. She feels so fucking good around you — squeezing, pulsing and doing every little thing that makes your jaw tighten and you legs tense. “I fucking love you, Miyeon.”

She holds your gaze, then smiles, then nods. She nods vigorously, enthusiastically. “I know… It’s all I’ve ever known.”

Your hand on the tie releases it from your grasp. You catch a bouncing breast in your hand, squeeze the tight and taut nipple with your fingers. The tie shakes violently like a snake writhing, bouncing and swaying with each firm impact against Miyeon’s skin. She mewls, pulls you in, kisses you. She lets herself come undone with her chest flushed against you and your hearts aligned as she lets the cries transfer from your mouth to hers. You pump yourself faster, harder, faster, harder. Your finger digs into the flash near her knee. Your blood is boiling, molten metal spilling over and washing over you—gold rush, acid flux, saturating you in this bliss that numbs you out. You can’t tell where your thrusts start and end. They’re blurred by the heat washing over your eyes. You can’t get enough. The way you fuck her—it feels relentless, merciless, a fire that only burns brighter and can’t be put out, fuelled by the heat of Cho Miyeon flushed against you and the sublime squeeze of her slick heat. Everything about this is hot; everything about her is hot.

“Don’t you ever let me go,” she hisses. “Fuck— don’t ever leave. This cock is mine. You are mine.”

“Princess, I’d never,” you nuzzle yourself into the crook of her neck, pepper her nicely with kisses. “You. Only you.”

“Yeah,” and her breath is hot on the nape of your neck. “Cause I can’t ever fucking imagine anyone else filling me this fucking good. No one has ever filled me this good.”

And her fricatives feel like acid: Aqua Regia—melting straight through solid gold just to get to you. It makes you burn a little hotter, fuck her a little harder. Your heart burns at the thought of her; your brain melts at the sight of her—glassy-eyed and mouth agape while cock pumps her full of pleasure and want. She finds a spot on your shoulder, whispers her proclamation of love— “I love you I love you I love you— Fuck—”—before she buries her face into your shoulder blade. Her love is an animal call, cutting through the darkness and bouncing off the walls, reaching a soft spot in your heart that you hold for her. Nothing in this world is gonna stop you from turning her into a messy little fucktoy.

It’s hard to think. It’s hard to breathe. She’s become your world, the only thing you ever want to think about. Anything that isn’t her tight little pussy is irrelevant; what isn’t her thin lips pressed against your shoulder is invalid; no pair of eyes will ever match the glassy, lust-fogged ones that Cho Miyeon possesses. Your pulse is rushing, your head is reeling, your face is flushing. You want her—all of her. You suck hard on the milky skin you’ve caught between your lips, marking her, claiming her. She has no qualms nor worries; she tilts her neck to give you better access to that lovely patch of skin that becomes your canvas. She mewls, presses her forehead harder into your body, grounding herself in the sensation of her skin on yours.

“I’m gonna fucking fill you, Miyeon,” you drawl. “I’m gonna cum inside this pretty little pussy and make a mess out of you,”

“Yeah, yes,” she’s barely holding it together at this point. “Please. Oh god please.”

Your hips move on their own now, taking liberties without signals from your fried brain as you pump yourself into Miyeon with the sole goal of piping her full of your hot seed. For long, wordless minutes, you're thrusting into her in a mindless, fervent fashion, giving in to your desires and your depravity and fucking her like she’s a doll. You relish the feel of her skin in your palms; the feel of her hands pressed against your chest; the sheer, strained phonetic atrocities that rise from the depths of her throat. Your shaft glistens in the light of the room, slick with her sweet juices as it slips in and out of her hot cunt, spearing into her with depth, making her legs weaker by the second. Miyeon cups your cheek, moans your name. You bury your nose deep in those silky locks of jet black hair. You need every last part of her to be close to you.

She's whimpering, eyes squeezed shut, toes clenching; she’s a coiled up spring, a bundle of nerves waiting to be released. Her bottom lip is between her teeth, her throat bobs. She's coming undone, breaking a little more with each thrust of your cock. You know that she’s cumming before she announces it, and when you fuck her over the point of no return, it’s bliss.

Miyeon melts, head whips back and thumps against the wall, positively combusts on the spot and ceases to hold on to the last bits of herself. She lets herself fall through the pleasure, orgasm almost ripping through her system as she shakes in your grasp. She’s such a precious thing, yet she can look like lust itself when she’s busy cumming all over your cock and whining like her life depends on it. She’s tighter, wetter, even better to fuck.

She really is the best you’ll ever have.

“Miyeon–”

“Just fucking cum.”

Your line; same effect. You fill her, make a creamy mess of her cunt because you can. You fuck her through it, push your load deeper with each thrust. Your cock pulses, spasms, shoots load after load after load into her pussy till you can’t take it anymore and jitter to a halt, and there’s nothing left but a filthy mess flowing out at the base of your cock where her lips are splayed the widest. It’s a sight for sure.

(And there really isn’t a word for the moment that the two of you share in that wrinkle in time, that moment where it’s just all warm and fuzzy and you have your forehead pressed against hers.)

You cradle her in your arms, kiss her chest, her jaw, her lips. It’s tender, it’s gentle.

“We’ll figure this out,” she pants through closed eyes. “I promise you: you and me, we’re gonna figure this all out.”

Somehow, you don’t doubt it.

(Still here? Great. We’re getting to the good part. Get your special sock out or something.)

So the newest rage of the K-pop scene is the photo of Miyeon kissing him in a car.

It's a publicity stunt—the whole damn relationship. They are supposed to appear in love according to Miyeon, and it was his idea to kiss her. She never consented and he just did it. It’s a pretty lewd photo: up close and personal and all. You can see his lips on hers, his hand on her breast and they’re like, clearly getting it on in three. Pretty steamy if you do say so yourself,

(...)

Oh fucking hell. Who are you kidding describing this photo like you’re just viewing an artwork. It makes your blood boil, and speaking to her after seeing this photo feels like dancing to alarm bells when you feign ignorance and just talk with her like it’s a normal Wednesday. You’re gonna hurt yourself at this rate, but she really means too much.

She told you that he forced his lips on hers, you believe her to the best of your ability. You kiss her, tell her it’s okay, that she’s doing what she has to do to protect the two of you. She says she’s sorry, that she feels like she’s failed you. You kiss her again—albeit a little half-hearted—and assure her once more that it’s okay. You want to nurse her pain, but you also have your own problems to deal with.

And as if this fucking actor hasn’t interfered enough with your relationship, he has the audacity to call during the make up sex.

Her phone starts to ring when she’s on her hands and knees on your bed, and you’re fucking her into the mattress like she’s some pliant plaything. There's a rage inside you that hasn’t been quenched, and you don’t realise that it’s bringing out that dark side of you till you spank her ass a little harder than you intended to. It doesn’t help that you kinda twitch when you hear her yelp, and it really doesn’t help when she tightens after the second spank. The phone only continues to vibrate next to her head.

“Baby,” she rasps. “My phone…”

“Pick it up,” you hiss. “Pick it up and let whoever the fuck it is hear how you’re being fucked like a slut.”

Degradation has never really been a kink of yours, but you know she’s kinda into it. Even so, you’re not calling her a slut because you consciously want to. You feel like an asshole for being angry, kinda hate yourself a little for not being able to accept that she’s doing what she needs to do. And then you kinda hate her for making you hate yourself and— Ugh. It just gets more complicated the more you try and rationalise it. You can’t stop the hot blood from coursing through your system, fuelling your firm strokes into her tight heat like you’re trying to inject all the hate in your body into her.

Her hand that was once clawing at the sheets now reaches for her phone. You keep thrusting as she flips it over, keep thrusting as she shows you the caller ID, keep thrusting as she looks back at you with a gaze that says “are you sure?”. You hope she isn’t met by that dark look you often see when you look at yourself in the mirror after a new headline about them hits your screen. It’s funny how one person can flip the idea of make-up sex on its head—turn it from something so tender and beautiful to a spite-fuelled fuck fest that’s gonna make things more complicated. She hasn’t even picked up the fucking phone, but you can hear his sick voice in your head as you drive yourself deeper into her cunt, fuck her harder and faster than you knew you could. She’s in no state to answer the phone, yet her finger taps on the ‘accept call’ button.

(She would’ve rejected it if she could, but she got into some deep shit the last time that happened. Must’ve been threatened or something for her to pick up the phone while she’s getting fucked.)

“Hello?” she does her best to steady her voice, and she’s doing pretty well considering how loud the smacking of skin against skin is. She presses the phone a little tighter against her left ear. You don’t intend on stopping. Let him hear her being owned by you for all you care. “T-This is a bad… a bad time.”

Damn straight it is.

Your hand caresses the curve of her ass. You spank her again, making sure that it’s loud and it leaves a red patch on her smooth, creamy skin. She contacts around you, gasps a little as you bend down and pin her down with your weight on her back.

“W-What?”—and it feels like she’s talking to both of you. You hiss into her other ear. “I’m going to fuck you like this,” your voice is actually a snarl, a dark one. Your body is energized by the promise of taking and ravaging the helpless, prone woman beneath you, your words dripping with loathing and your thrusts brimming with spite. “I’m going to fuck you hard and rough, and you’re gonna keep him on the fucking line so he can hear it.”—“No I’m… Jogging.”

She’s terrible at lying. You let her know through each thrust—hard and deep, uncaring for her pleasure or her comfort or anything other than your need to bury yourself again and again inside her body. There’s the need to dominate her, the need to make her yours. You hope this guy can act like he doesn’t care that his supposed girlfriend is being prone-boned by another guy, act like he isn’t totally aware of the fact that Cho Miyeon’s body is never gonna belong to him at any point as long as you’re alive.

(Keep this between us: but with the way you're going down on her, it feels like the message is being transferred to her and not him.)

You hear indistinct chatter. Miyeon bites down on her lower lip, undoubtedly holding back the stream of cries and sighs and lyrical monstrosities that threaten to burst forth. With her eyes she begs, challenges you to do more. You could be reading her wrong by like, a hundred percent. Doesn't matter, not when you can take every liberty with her body because you couldn’t give more of a shit. There’s more indistinct chatter on the other end of the phone; Miyeon says something along the lines of “no. Don’t buy the choker for me”. You give her a choker—raise yourself up and reach around her to wrap your fingers around her throat. Her whole body tenses when you apply pressure around her windpipe. In no universe does this guy not know what’s going on right now.

Cause she’s there—right there, all choked up and struggling to breathe while the fucker keeps yap-yap-yapping away like he’s some fucking guard dog. It irritates the hell out of you. At some point, he kinda has to hear a squelch or smack or two, maybe even a moan or a cry as well. But he stays on the phone, and not once does Miyeon ever have to address the question of whether she’s being fucked on the other end of the call or not. You thought you were ignorant, but this guy is a whole new fucking level of blissfully ignorant. It feels like his sole purpose is to drive a wedge between the two of you, to make you hate her because you hate him. Again: it’s kinda complicated to say exactly what it feels like to be in this situation.

And you can imagine the moans she wants to let out. They’ll tumble out of her lips like water down a waterfall, and they’ll mix with the sound of your lips smacking against her skin as you lean back down to kiss her neck, stopping at one spot that you know will be good to mark her and sucking hard. It feels like getting back at her—doing all the things you want to do while she can't speak her mind freely (and you know how tortuous it is for her when she can’t moan while she’s being railed like this). You’re not sure why you would ever need to get back at her when she’s done nothing wrong, but I guess it helps to synthesise and dumb down the emotions you’re feeling at the moment.

“Tonight?” she asks. Then she buries her head into the sheets because she can’t hold back this moan that almost explodes from her chest. You’re not squeezing really hard around her throat, mind you—only enough to make her a little uncomfortable, like a tie has been wrapped around her neck. She's getting off on it though: her walls squeeze you a little tighter; her breaths become more ragged and short. Honestly, she's taking your cock so well, and you communicate this to her with a growl. It makes her shudder a hell lot.

Her other hand clutches the sheets, spasms. She’s pliant, she always is, but it feels like you can wrack her tiny body with so much more pleasure as you keep a hand around her throat and keep your dick pumping in and out of her. You wish you had a mirror to see that pretty face warping under the heat of her lust. You kinda forget that she’s still calling him when she speaks again, cause she follows up with, “I can’t— I can’t believe…”

And if that damn phone call wasn’t happening, she’d be saying something along the lines of “I can’t believe that you’re fucking me this good”.

“Sorry. I got cut off,” she pants. “Yeah… It’s harder to hear me when I’m running.”

Now she's talking to you. The reply is to him, but she’s addressing you. You take her up on it, and the slapping and squelching start to ricochet off the walls and ceiling. What you’re doing should be considered as a whole sin in itself. Technically, it’s adultery, but you’re not too sure if you can even classify this as something that simple. This is jealousy, hate and love mashed into one—a mix of things that kinda shouldn’t go together when you have a woman who’s quite literally like putty beneath you. It doesn’t help that she's this hot, this tight, this wet. She’s straining her moans, and it’s so cute that you want to choke her a little harder. You don’t do it (just clarifying some doubts here), but you almost do.

“R-Really?”—you’re almost certain that what comes next is gonna be addressed to you. You can imagine her signing your name off on it—”wow… That must be so fucking good.”

Bingo. Gotta say: she’s kinda smooth with it.

“I’m fine. Out… Out of breath” you don’t know how she manages to keep her voice steady. “Y-yeah… I’m gonna come… Don’t worry.”

You hope that she can hold on.

You don’t know how long more you fuck her for while she’s on the phone. It’s a blur; you kinda only see red and you’re still choking her out even after she hangs up. It’s only when she goes, “Oh, fuck, daddy—!” with this breathless, perverse, pleading tone and a voice that’s so loud; her body unable to do anything other than gasp and moan and urge you to really give it to her, and when she says “fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!” like you’re not doing just that (and only that) at the moment that she’s hung up on him. Now she has every facility available to focus on the rock hard meat she’s receiving. You feel filthy, like you’re doing something wrong.

But hey: the sex is hot and Miyeon’s kinda into it, so you keep going. You keep fucking her into the bed—the same way you would if you were fucking her against the wall or in the shower or against any flat surface, really. It’s twisted, it’s dark, it’s hot; the angle her body is at lets you drive yourself deeper and faster and harder into her wet, tight and hot pussy like you never have before. You’re experiencing a novelty, a new chapter.

(Caveat: is it kinda messed up that you call her a cocksleeve? Not really? Huh.)

“God Miyeon…” you feel like the voice that comes from your throat is not your own. “You’re such a good fucking cocksleeve for me,” and you may or may not be tightening the grip around her throat as you speak. “So tight and wet for me. You’re such a good fuck.”

“Oh daddy, fuck you’re so big and deep in me,” she gasps. She has lots to say, even though air is like a fucking luxury for her. She rarely calls you Daddy, yet she’s using her precious air to do so now. “Fuck, fuck me as hard as you can, daddy! Do whatever you want with me! Own me! Take me!”

You barely recognise the woman she’s become: depraved, sordid and one hell of a hot mess. You love it. It’s fantastic. Fucking fantastic.

And she falls apart under you not long after, writhing and moaning and twitching as this beautiful mess of a woman you’ve made out of her. You want to cum in her, really own her; but your thoughts are fueled too much by the hate in your heart that they're wilder than anything she can ever imagine.

You pull out of Miyeon, your shaft glistening in the dim light. You get off the bed, pull her away with you. Her mouth opens to say something. You kiss her—shut her up. She moans into your mouth, and you swallow it, bite her lower lip, and it's not rough, but enough to get her attention.

“You’ve gotten enough loads inside your pussy,” you husk. “Get on your knees. I want your mouth.”

She nods, and you relish the disappointment in her eyes. You push down firmly on her shoulders. She goes with the motion, and you're not sure if you can ever get over the image of Miyeon on her knees with her pretty little princess face staring at you with anticipation. You think about fucking her face, letting your cock thrust into the back of her throat over and over and over till you paint her face in a messy spray of cum.

And you know what? You’ll do just that.

Of course, Miyeon perfectly understands what has to be done. You step up to her. She parts her lips and takes your cock right into her mouth, grasping the base of your cock and pumping it with one hand while she gently cups and squeezes your balls with the other. The pace she launches into is hard and fast; blurring her chocolate hair and your vision—taking the top half of your cock in and out of her wet mouth with rapid urgency while her fingers work your shaft in a corkscrew motion. The suction of her mouth is almost lethal, the seal sublime; and the audacity she has to look up at you while she takes your cock in and out of her mouth is so exhilarating that it makes you weak in the knees. She’s gorgeous, even more so when she’s got cock in her mouth.

Your hand finds a clump of her black, sweaty hair, and you close your fingers around it, holding them in your fist. You push her head down onto your cock, pop your hips and start thrusting with firm, slow strokes. She exceeds every expectation you ever had, adapting to you, changing to please you. Your eyes shut involuntarily. Your brain blocks out all sensations that aren’t the wet, hot cavern of Miyeon’s mouth sealed tightly around your shaft. With the first entry into her mouth her wet tongue is pressed tightly against the underside of your shaft, lathering it with her spit. The backstroke is somehow even better, that pretty little mouth endeavoring to suck you right back in when you draw yourself back out. It feels like time stands still, but Miyeon’s still in motion, and she’s the one making you feel like all the natural laws in the world are being defied.

A small part of you knows that you have to see it happening in order to truly believe it’s all real, so you force your eyes open to watch the spectacle unfolding between your legs. Smoky eyes glazed with pure lust staring right up at you, watering, projecting perverse pleasure with a gaze; hollow cheeks and a seemingly unhinged jaw to accommodate your length; spit leaking from the corners of her mouth, dribbling down her chin.

“Fuck I—” is all you manage to say (or maybe ‘grunt’ is a better word) before your orgasm takes the reins to your body. It overwhelms your senses, but you force your eyes open to watch as you pull Miyeon off your dick just in time. Thick, glistening cum erupts from your tip to land on Miyeon’s face, on her cheeks and nose, painting her smoky features with pearlescent, warm ropes. You paint her face with your hot white seed, and it’s far from an elegant piece of art. She doesn’t look anything like one of the French girls she wanted to be painted like, but the look of utter lust on her needy features is still breathtaking—mouth open, tongue out, eyes closed in delight and bliss.

Ugh, she's one hell of a woman, isn’t she?

And when it’s all over, she takes your cock in her hand and licks off the drops that she’d been deprived of.

“If you ever do that again.” you love the raspy touch to her voice. The lilt in it is doing wonders too. “I’m gonna make sure that you’ll be calling your mom the next time I blow you.”

You roll your eyes and sigh. “Whatever you say, princess…”

The hate seems to fade. Your heartbeat slows.

Maybe this relationship is salvageable. Maybe you guys can last.

You talk to her about it afterwards and apologise sincerely. She says that she didn’t think much of it when it was happening. Then you guys are at peace again.

(What do you think? How long does the honeymoon last? A month more?

Two?

Generous.

Try one. Fucking. Week.)

“Okay. Hands down: this is the best Jjamppong I’ve eaten.”

The growing pile of clam shells beside her bowl tells you that you did something right. It’s the first time you've made this dish, and there’s always that lingering worry that you fucked up somewhere along the way when you eat it for the first time. The soup seasoning is a little off in some places (you don’t know where exactly), but it’s nothing a dash of fish sauce and some chilli flakes can’t fix.

“I mean,” Miyeon continues, speaking between small yet generous mouthfuls of noodles. “You only get better and better at cooking. I don't know how you do it.”

You give a half-hearted smile. Your noodles have kinda gone cold by now: you’ve been stirring them around with your chopsticks for the past five minutes or so. Appetite has become a luxury for you these days, and it’s one of those days where a new article about him and her comes out, one of those days where you both agreed to put a pin on it and just enjoy life. “Well… It’s a lot of love and care, I guess.”

“You can say that again,” she smiles. “Thank you for making dinner. No one cooks like you.”

“Thank you for cutting scallions,” you say. “No one cuts them like you do.”

She laughs and waves it off, then takes another slurp of her noodles. “I honestly don’t know if I like your tomato soup over this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. My tomato soups have always been the peak of my cooking prowess.”

“I really don’t know!” she tells you, grabbing another clam from the centre of the table. “This stuff is all smoky and tasty… It just feels like home and I—”

You drop your chopsticks into your bowl. Soup splashes onto the table.

“How do I keep living like this, Miyeon?” you ask. There are only so many pins in your possession and you feel like you’ve used all of them. “I’d love to sit here and talk to you about how I made this meal like everything’s okay, and this is just Thursday and maybe we’ll get ice cream later… But it’s not like that right now.”

Miyeon takes your hand in hers.

“I can’t pretend like things are the same when everything’s… different,” you close your eyes, take a breath. “I love you, Miyeon. You’re like, the best thing that’s ever happened to me and… I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.”

You can hear her take a breath to start speaking. You really want to let her, but there’s too much on your chest.

“I know you’re doing what you have to, for me, for us,” you want—oh so badly––to just bury your face in your hands right now. But once you do that, the tears will inevitably come and your ability to speak your mind will disappear faster than you can regain yourself. “But it hurts. It hurts to see you holding his hand, walking around and… and kissing him.”

Your heart stings when you see the tears welling in her eyes when you find it in you to look at her. The last thing you want is to see her in pain. This next bit hurts you even more to say, but you know that it’s better to tell her how you feel.

“I feel like I’m an open wound… and you're just pouring salt on me,” and you start to choke up a little. “I’m sorry to put it that way but—”

“No,” she interjects. “No. I get it… I-I understand.”

And for a moment, it feels like everything's okay for a bit.

Then she comes around the table to kiss you, and hell’s bells start ringing all over again. It hurts to kiss her, but it feels so right.

Miyeon leans into you. She kisses you. She pulls you close. She lets you run your hands across her body, down her back. You stand. Your tongue pokes into her mouth. One of you says I need you and you don’t know who it is.

And like when things were okay: you guys don’t make it to the couch.

You get naked. She gets naked. The sex isn’t about pleasure or thrill. It’s the aching within the both of you that drives your shaft into her cunt, rocks her hips as you fuck her. You quite literally make love with her, your strokes passionate and fervent; her cries are earnest and wanton, full of longing. For long moments when her chest is against yours, your hearts are aligned. You wish that you could fuse them together, take away the pain by making the two of you one singular person there on the floor. It feels possible when your dick is throbbing inside of her, pumping her slick with rock hard meat again and again and again.

But the thing that sucks the most is that you can’t do that. You’re two separate people with two separate problems that kinda overlap at the same point.

You have her bent over the counter, propped up on the kitchen sink—anywhere you could reach was a surface for you and her. And normally you’d be a bit of a party pooper about fucking on these surfaces, but today you really can’t give more of a shit. You want to feel like everything’s okay again, like you’re not fighting for your life to hold on to this relationship that’s being torn apart day by day, night by night.

And you may have pieces of each other deep within your souls, but they don’t seem to fit anymore.

When it’s all over and you’re panting against the dishwasher, reality hasn’t changed and you’re still torn. You have a wound that only you can heal through acceptance, yet you can’t find it in you to accept that this is the life you have to lead. You want to love her. You want it so bad. But you can’t find the will in you to love her when there’s another man in the picture, albeit that her love for him isn’t even minimally a concept. You can’t nurse her injuries either, and it hurts to know that as her delicate hands cradle your cheeks. Her touch is perfect, her breaths are soft on your skin. The two of you have tried so hard to make it work, yet you’ve only come so far. The solution to this problem is like thousands of hot fire pokers stabbing you simultaneously, and it only hurts because it’s the only way forward for the both of you.

“Miyeon,” you can’t quite believe what you’re about to say. The tears streaming down your cheeks aren’t making anything easier. “Let’s break up.”

(And this isn’t for pity: but you cry yourself to sleep after she leaves that night. Ain’t it fun being heartbroken? You would know how it feels, right cupcake?)

Three months, two weeks and one day (about 105 days if you really want to be fully accurate. Go write that down somewhere) pass uneventfully—and by that you mean, you never picked up any of the 138 calls that came from Miyeon. It would have been 140 calls if you hadn’t picked up two of them when you were drunk. But hey, she was drunk too. So it kinda cancels out… at least you like to think that it does. It does, doesn't it? Two negatives make a positive?

(No?)

Ah well. Anyway,

(Okay, caveat, again: you’re thankful that she hadn’t showed up to the apartment once throughout this period. You’ve been stuck between your anger and a blame that you can’t face because you don’t know if you blame yourself or her or him. Drinking doesn’t help to lighten the ache in your chest, so you tried exercising: running, swimming, even pilates; you tried to pick up music—bought a guitar and everything. Your fingers still hurt when you play chords, and you’re considering giving up at some point; you tried to learn how to make those pain in the ass French desserts, and now you have a fire extinguisher permanently installed in your kitchen because you somehow managed to set fire to macarons; and you tried to write. That didn’t go well. 5 Wattpad users politely asked you to kill yourself. Not fun.

One way or another, your thoughts would end up drifting back to Miyeon, and you’d have to sit in place and kinda stare into the distance for a little. And yes, you did question your choice to end things with her many times if anyone is asking. You kinda hate yourself a little for not trying to make things work, and you also kinda hate her for not insisting on staying to make things work.

It took two of the three months for you to realise that you were both kinda in the wrong. But it’s already too late by then.

You couldn’t get a grip of yourself and fight off your internal demons; she couldn’t stop doing what she thought was right to protect the two of you. Net-net: it’s a loss for the both of you in the business of love. Now you have to look for a way forward through this grey-area mess that you’ve made, learn to live with the fact that maybe you guys just weren't meant to be in the grand scheme of things.

The updates on Miyeon’s relationship with that damned actor kept coming, but it stopped as of late. But for a while, they were all the rage for gossip blogs. Every now and then, a shitty title like “Cho Miyeon stuns with her visuals on her date” would pop up, and you have to swipe away quickly before you accidentally tap on the notification and see her holding hands with him. You’ll admit that you opened some of the articles just to get a look at her face, then smile to yourself for a bit before you fight the urge to punch the spot next to her where Squid Game wannabe is smiling. You’ve succeeded so far.

You kept away from Jjampong and tomato soup with grilled cheese too. It’s hard to take your butter bell down from the fridge without tearing a little, and the fish sauce and chilli flake panacea for food doesn't apply to a broken heart by the way (it’s just really salty and spicy. You don’t know what you were thinking. Probably drunk. 0/10, please, please, please do not try). The two dishes are too homely; their tastes remind you of her.

Okay. Let’s ‘anyway’ for real this time.)

Yeah, so uh, remember how you said that sometimes the news you give each other can be a little heart-attack-inducing, so it’s better that your loves are pretty bland? Yep… Sad to say that the same confirmed hypothesis still stands, even when you guys are on day 106 of your break up.

This time the news comes in another headline—and you mean like front page, breaking news headline—on Tuesday night. Wonderwall isn’t treating you too well. You’re pretty sure that your finger tips might be turning purple. Your phone buzzes next to you like crazy, just like it did that night, and it’s like having an iPhone seizure. You don’t think too much when you put down the guitar and pick up your device.

And you only read the first six words to give yourself a valid reason to reset your miscall streak with Miyeon.

Idol Cho Miyeon Slapped In Public…

(The title was a lot longer than that. You should know it since you’re here in the first place.)

It’s in moments like this when you kinda wish that speed dial was still a thing. (I mean there's siri and all, but do you really have time for that right now?) In a blur of great clumsiness, you open your contacts and experience no difficulty in locating her number again. She’s on the top of your miscall list, so it really takes no wizard to figure this out.

You hate that she’s letting it ring for so long. Every brr brr makes you tremble a little more in your seat. If your mum could see you now, you’d probably get an earful for your bad habit of biting your nails.

She finally picks up the phone. It’s good to hear her voice. “Hey…”

Your mouth opens, closes, opens again. Now you realise that in your hurry to check on her, you’ve yet to rehearse what to say to her. The debate between your head and gut almost tears you in two.

“You okay?” you finally manage to blurt after some struggle. “I saw the news… Just wanted to check if, you know, you’re still up and kicking…”

You hear that familiar scoff from the other side of the phone. “Please. You know that it takes more than that to take me down.”

If your ears don't deceive you, you can hear a bit of a strain in her voice. She hates it when you jump to conclusions though, so you leave it as it is for now. “That’s… That’s great.”

And it’s silent again. If you were in the business of losing her interest, you’d be making crazy profits right now. Okay, better end this fast.

“Well uh,” you begin, stopping for a second to swallow some saliva to soothe your semi parched throat. “I guess—”

“Can I come over?”

Like she always does, she shocks you into silence. Your throat dries up. Your mouth is the Sahara.

“I… I miss you… if my miss-calls weren't clear enough about that,” she chuckles. You swear you hear a sniffle. “I’d like to see you again,” and you can hear your heartbeat in your ears, “for closure of course… and maybe tomato soup?”

Your heart joins the debate between your head and gut. It wins.

Minutes later, your butter bell is open, a knife scraping out the last bits of creamy butter out of it so that it can be used to evenly butter the other side of your bread. You’re moving on instinct, with glee and excitement. You’re not sure why you’re happy. You’re just happy—happy that you’re gonna see her; happy that you can prepare this dish again without the knowledge that you’re not gonna see her when you turn. It isn’t till the doorbell rings that the joy fades, and in its place comes that familiar tension of a two tonne weight wrapped around your chest.

You aren’t sure why she rings the door when you haven’t changed the passcode to the lock. If she’s trying to be polite? You appreciate it. If she just forgot the pin? Well… you wouldn’t put that past her either, really. Your gut, head and heart agree you that it’s most likely the latter, and you kinda have to remind yourself as you open the door that she's just as forgetful as anyone else.

“Hi,” you catch yourself staring at her. You don’t mean to look at her dress first, but it’s the first thing your eyes are drawn to; it's been a while since you’ve seen her in anything other than a t-shirt and shorts. The white dress she’s wearing is bedazzled out, the light that’s reflected off of it catching you and making you a deer in headlights for a bit. Then you snap out of it. Your gaze travels up to her face and… “You look… Fucking terrible.”

You love her eyes and you love to watch them roll. “Thanks. You look not bad yourself. Gained some weight?”

You try not to stare. You fail—horribly you might add.

But in your defence, it’s hard not to look at the purple spot on her milky skin.

Miyeon covers her cheek. She looks down at your feet like there's something really interesting about them. “Are you, you know, letting me in? Or are we just gonna keep standing here?”

You blink. “R-Right.”

And soon she’s settled into her usual seat, nibbling on some grilled cheese while you ladle out her tomato soup into a bowl. It feels like nothing has changed, but you know that’s not true. Both of you know that everything’s different, that you can’t just give her tomato soup and peck her on the cheek.

“So you play guitar now?” she catches you off guard as the bowl makes a small thunk against the table. It’s in the same spot she always places it, and you know because a woodring has formed in that area. You follow her gaze and see that she’s spotted your Fender on the couch.

“Sort of?” you reply, a little uncertain in how to rate your abilities. “Just basic stuff, you know?”

She smirks and picks up her spoon, starts chipping away at her soup “So you’re finally digging up the singer-songwriter in you… Good on you, man.”

Again, you find yourself staring at the bruise. It’s a deep shade of purple, splotchy and a sight for sore eyes. From the looks of it, he hit her hard. There’s a burning in your chest—a mix of grief, pity and anger as you watch her eat her food. You wish that you could’ve been there to stop it. You wished that you could’ve just dated her under different circumstances so that maybe, just maybe, you could’ve gotten that ending you wanted. You don’t know how she’s ever gonna cover that up when—

“If you’re gonna get something for this thing, go do it,” she mutters. “Chivalry hasn’t died completely, right?”

You nod and scuttle off. It’s easy to lose track of how long you’ve been staring when you’re lost in your thoughts. Is it scary how this feels like just another conversation between you two?

The ice pack from when she bought that ice cream cake was still in the freezer, and it’s chilly in your hands as you grab it and return to the table. She has finished her soup—not a single scrap left inside the bowl. She must be starving.

Her grilled cheese is half eaten in her hand; she stares into the distance as she chews.

(And she’s as beautiful as she can ever be, by the way. A lot of people haven’t seen her the way you see her, and you’re kinda glad that you get to witness that tender part of her that she rarely shows to cameras. It’s… It’s hard to describe what it means to know that someone like her finds it this easy to be herself around you, but you know it’s an honour and a blessing.

But when you're looking at her with your rose-tinted lenses stripped away from you, the notions you hold towards vulnerability become contradictory, because on one hand you know that she’ll never hurt you the way she did, but on the other you know that she’s not the same person when she’s not around you. So at the end of the day, you’re just kinda left figuring out which side of her is the real her. Do you believe what the Cho Miyeon you know tells you? Or do you believe what the Cho Miyeon the world knows? It gets confusing, makes you wonder why she ever has to put up two fronts in the first place.

Then again, it’s not exactly her fault: she does what she has to so she can stay afloat. No industry is free from dirt. Some are just filthier than others.

I guess what I’m getting at is that… she’s this contradiction in my mind. I want to believe her, but I can’t, yet I still love her like she’s just a regular human and our lives are just a little messy. I know there's this whole argument about the fact that idols are humans too and all, but I guess it’s kinda… undermined? Yeah—undermined by the fact that they can’t exactly lead ‘normal’ lives once they’re famous. Look at me, using these big words.

So I guess… I guess dating her was like the worst of all blessings and the best of all curses. Does that make sense?

…

Ugh. I’m blabbering.

Sorry cupcake, I’ll get back to it.)

And maybe you forget that she isn’t your girlfriend anymore, or maybe you just kinda blank out in the moment, or maybe you just wanted to do it. For whatever reason: you call her name, and when she turns, the ice pack in your hand is gently applied against her face. You don’t think much of it for like, three or four seconds. But when her wide eyes finally register in your head, there’s a moment where your breath is caught in your throat.

This is important, so you should know: the silence is fucking deafening.

She swallows the bit of sandwich in her mouth. “I refused to sleep with him, and he hit me like a girl. Fucking embarrassing on his part,” and there’s that smile on her face as she speaks, the same one that she loves to flash your way when she told you that she loved you. “Barely felt it. Light work.”

You can’t resist—your other hand cradles her unblemished cheek. “Miyeon…”

She closes her eyes. She knows that tone you’re using, the one that’s like ‘don’t lie to me’ or ‘it’s okay, you can tell me’. “Look: when the man that loved you the way no one else loved you breaks up with you, nothing can be more painful than that,” she whispers. Her throat bobs a little. She furrows her brows as her eyes squeezed themselves shut themselves a little tighter. “And that man is you by the way…” her voice cracks, her eyes open, “don’t know if I was clear enough.”

And you kinda have to kiss her after that. It’s a good line… and she’s, like, smoking hot right now. She always is.

The familiarity of her lips against yours almost makes you melt. The ice pack drops from your hand, your palm taking its place on her face. You kiss her like you used to. You kiss her like you want nothing else but her. You kiss her like you want nothing else but her because you want nothing else but her. She’s home – Jjamppong and Grilled Cheese with Tomato soup — and you don’t ever want her to leave again.

“I’m sorry,” she croaks, and you wipe the tear trailing down her cheek. “I should have never… We should have never—”

You shush her with your lips. She lets herself melt into you, her hands running through your hair the way she would sometimes when she called you crazy or baby. You don’t realise how much you’ve missed her touch till now.

“We were both wrong,” you tell her once you break away (rather reluctantly). “So how about we just call it a truce?”

She nods, and she does it enthusiastically. “If it’s cool with you…”

You scoff. “Why would it not be?” and your thumb gently caresses her bruise gently. You want to kill him, but you’ll save that for another time. “I’m the one who suggested it… Guess Chivalry is not all dead, huh?”

And it’s good to hear her laugh again.

“Come here you big idiot,” she giggles, and she kisses you again.

Then you dive down to her collarbone when you can’t take it anymore. And the rest is history repeating itself.

You know: it feels like you’ve been picked up from the ground. Miyeon has come to get you… she's come to get you.

Maybe everything’s okay after all.

(And uh… The media covers the rest. What was it? Like, two weeks later?

Ah whatever. You know what happens, don’t you? It’s pretty crazy, made headlines and all.

CUBE has some really good lawyers… And liars. Almost the same thing.)

“So that’s the story?”

Nursing your third bottle of cider, you chuckle. You’d thought by fleshing out whole smuts in verbal form would have chased her away by now, yet here she is. Then again: she is an old friend of yours, so you guessed that she’d be rather adjusted to your bullshit. “Are you sure you’re an investigative journalist?” you question her, “I thought you’d ask something more along the lines of ‘what happens after?’.”

From across the booth seat, Chou Tzuyu shoots you a smirk.

“The news covered it. Why should I pour salt into old wounds?” she admits. Her glass of wine swirls, manipulated expertly by her delicate fingers. “Anyway, I think I got… The main gist of it. Unless you have more information regarding the restraining order filed against you by CUBE, I have no further questions.”

You roll your eyes. No, you do not have any new information about why CUBE decided that you were a danger to Cho Miyeon, and you’ll never know if Miyeon knows either. She was out of town when it happened, and all she knows is what the news reported: you’re allegedly a stalker and hence a threat. You only know that she called and texted you frantically after, but…

You know what? Maybe you’ll think about this another time.

“You do know that, like, you're kinda bad at this right?” and you set your cider bottle aside, letting it join the almost empty whiskey bottle you bought yourself. You fold your hands and lean into the table. The world spins a little. “I don’t know why you’re prying, but I’m guessing that you heard something from the grapevine that you were itching to hear more about. Either that or you’re just… Could it be that you’re desperate to get something fresh, Miss Chou?”

She sips on her wine, leaves the question hanging in the air for a little as she swallows.

“Keep this between us: I can’t trust Shuhua sometimes,” she muses. “If I’m gonna write about this, I’m gonna have to make sure that all the information I’ve gotten from her can be corroborated,” she pushes a wisp of hair behind her ear. “And for the record: I am not bad. I do my research as thoroughly as anyone else would—enough to know that you are someone who tells the truth.”

“So you’re saying that you trust me as a source?” you can’t help but scoff. “Me, the very guy that got fucked over by CUBE? I could be bigoted and biased for all you know. Or even worse: I’m lying.”

She smiles knowingly. “Respectfully, you have too much… personal voice in this recount that I might as well write an autobiography on your behalf.”

And she stuns you into silence. It occurs to you that you're a little drunk, and you’re pretty sure that you called this woman ‘cupcake’ multiple times. You’re not too sure; you don’t even have half a mind to know what you’re doing or saying.

Tzuyu gulps down the rest of her wine before she rises from her seat.

“I best be going,” she opens her purse and fishes something out of it. She hands you a card, an address and a phone number handwritten onto it in what looks like a felt pen. “If you want your story to be heard, give me a call… Or a text. Whatever strikes your fancy. I’ll need a version of this that doesn’t include all the fucking and your drunk blabbering,” she shoulders her purse and smiles. “Can’t promise that I’ll buy you a drink to make you talk again, but I can treat you to some really good Chinese dumplings. Maybe we can catch up a little too. It’s been a while.”

You stare at the card, tracing the hooks and curves that form numbers and letters. Your eyes fix back on her. “Why are you doing this?”

She shrugs, and it’s not a “I dunno” type of shrug, but more like a “the proof’s in the pudding, open your fucking eyes” type of shrug.

“I want to report the truth, and I know you well enough to know that you want that too.”

That's right. Another series. I know I'm doing everything but finishing up Beats Me, and you can go cry a river in my asks if you want. Just kidding, I love all of you, but I want to write what I want to write. Let me have my fun, would you? Also, for the record: I did not finish this 5 days after Beats Me 7. Beats Me 7 was finished before I vanished from tumblr for a bit. This has been brewing since December. You can thank long drives and Noah Kahnan for this.

Anyway, another big thank you to @defmaybe for being such a great sport and reading through the 39 page document that showed up in their discord DMs one fine day. This fic would have been full of typos and horrible grammatical errors if it weren't for them.

Stay safe, Nichu

#smut #kpop #fanfic #cho miyeon #miyeon #gidle miyeon #miyeon smut #gidle smut #kpop smut

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