#I feel like they could have avoided that word if they didnt want to trigger people

[yanderecrazysie]

what would some of the haikyuu yanderes do if their darling has severe trauma from being verbally abused when she was 13 and she saw the three people who would abuse them (i definitely didnt just go running to hide from them while bawling my eyes out and shaking-)

I hope you’re doing better! I unfortunately can relate ): Seeing abusers again is so stressful and it feels like it’s happening all over again. I hope you can avoid them for the rest of your life, my precious anon.

I wasn’t sure which characters to use so I did a ton of them. The more the merrier, and I hope at least one is comforting for you!

Pairings: Lots of Haikyuu characters x Reader

WARNINGS: Yandere themes, referenced past abuse, violence (fighting), murder, threats, panic attacks, abusers should go to jail for life imho

Summary: When you come face-to-face with your abusers from years prior, how will your yanderes react when they see you fall apart?

KARASUNO

Daichi

Daichi’s level-headed but angry. His voice is booming when he tells them to back off. He puts an arm around your waist possessively and doesn’t let go until your abusers are out of sight.

Sugawara

Sugawara focuses a lot on trying to make you feel safe. He’s whispering comforting words as he leads you away from those awful people and he only touches you if you are okay with it, since he knows that can be triggering to some people. He’ll defend you if necessary, but he’s more worried than threatened.

Asahi

Asahi may be a little bit of a coward, but he’s aware that he’s “scary-looking” and uses that to his advantage. Your abusers wouldn’t dare go after you when a guy like Asahi stands between you and them. He’s happy to see them leave without having to fight, but a part of him wishes he could punch them in their evil faces.

Tanaka

Tanaka is not afraid to fight at all. He’ll pull off his shirt and whirl it around his head like a lasso while he yells things like “Want a piece of me?” and “That’s right, you better run!” While a fight might not break out, it’s possible. And Tanaka will leave them bloody and bruised if needed.

Nishinoya

Nishinoya would instigate a fight, furious that they would dare hurt someone as precious as you. The moment they say something scathing, he’s on them like a small hurricane. He’s not the best fighter, so he might come out on the losing side, but he’s not going to give up.

Tsukishima

He’s taunting them the moment you show fear. He does his best to draw their attention away from you and onto the mocking, button-pushing jerk who seems to know just what to say to piss them off. When they’re finally slunk away, he’s gentler and buys you ice cream or your favorite treat, even though he doesn’t know what to say to make you feel better.

Yamaguchi

Yamaguchi is trembling like a leaf when he tells them to “g-go away!” He’s better at comforting you later on, fretting over you and helping you take deep breaths if you’ve gone into a panic attack. He’ll squeeze your hand tightly and tell you that he’ll never let anyone hurt you ever again.

Hinata

Hinata might feel a little afraid, but he’s still claiming to know karate and giving your abusers a death glare. He doesn’t care if he gets beat up, as long as it gives you time to run away and hide yourself from them. He’s glad when they back off because it means he can now focus on making you feel better.

Kageyama

Kageyama is intimidating even when he’s not angry. And right now? He’s angry. It takes him a little while to catch on that you’re afraid (he’s a little dense), but when he does, he’s frightening the abusers away with threats of serious violence.

FUKURODANI

Akaashi

Akaashi’s quiet in his rage and decides to pull you away so you don’t have to be around them anymore. If they follow, he’ll be sure to call the police, but most likely, he’ll just focus on trying to keep you calm and keep you away from those monsters.

Bokuto

Bokuto’s normally such a happy guy, so seeing him upset is a little scary. When he’s done scaring your abusers away, he’s all over you like an excited puppy, doing everything he can to cheer you up. He’ll find your abusers again later, if he can, and make sure they never come anywhere near you ever again.

AOBA JOHSAI

Oikawa

His threats come out sounding almost charming, even if his words are anything but. He can be intimidating when he wants to be and it sends shivers down everyone’s spine. Once they’ve left, he’s spoiling you like nobody’s business to get your mind off of it.

Iwaizumi

He throws the first punch, no doubt about it. He already knows what they look like because you’d shown him pictures when he demanded to see who hurt you, but this is the first time he’s seen them in person. He may go so far as to “accidentally” kill them if he beats them up too much.

Kyoutani

Kyoutani, on the other hand, will kill them outright. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, not when it’s for you. He’s not good at comforting you, so he’ll just get rid of the threat once and for all.

NEKOMA

Kuroo

Kuroo knows what’s happened to you, so when you begin to have a panic attack, he immediately knows what’s going on. He’s quick to stand between you and them, speed walking you away or even scooping you up into his arms and carrying you away. A part of him wishes they’d start a fight, but he doesn’t want to upset you more than they have.

Kenma

Kenma is not a fighter and he wants to avoid it as much as possible. But he still cannot forgive your abusers and is sure to give them a nasty stare. He’ll try to distract you from your fear by leading you away and having you play his handheld video games until you’ve nearly forgotten about the incident.

Lev

Lev is an oblivious guy, so he doesn’t see that they have upset you for a little while. When he does, he’s confused and whispers with you to figure out what’s going on. When it finally dawns on him, he picks you up and carries you away, speed walking with those long legs of his until you’re far, far away from those awful people.

Yamamoto

Pretty much the same as Tanaka, he’s raring for a fight and intimidating your abusers away with a borderline laughable attitude. His antics might cheer you up a little, especially when he’s chased them away.

DATEKO

Aone

He’s so big and frightening, I doubt your abusers will come anywhere near you. You can hide behind his back and cling to his shirt while he gives your abusers a pants-peeing-worthy glare.

Koganegawa

Similarly to Lev, it takes him a long time to figure out what’s going on, but he misunderstands the situation. He’ll walk right up to them and demand to know why they’re staring at his girlfriend and tells them that he doesn’t like it. This man is tall so they probably don’t want to have anything to do with him, squeaking out an apology and scurrying away.

SHIRATORIZAWA

Ushijima

He’s also intimidating without trying and will also march right up to your abusers. He asks them in a rumbling voice if they want to leave or get hurt, and they choose the former. He’s not a man of many words, so he kind of strokes your head and gives you all the affection you want afterwards.

Tendou

Similar to Tsukishima, Tendou is calling out mocking things with half-lidded eyes. He makes sure to hammer in the point that you’re his girlfriend and he’s not happy with what they’ve done. He’ll put an arm around you or hug you close out of both possessiveness and care.

Semi

Semi’s a death glare kind of person, putting an arm around your waist to lead you away. Seriously, if looks could kill, your abusers would be 6 feet under. He complains loudly about how stupid they are and how much he wishes he could kill them, hoping that will cheer you up and frighten them away.

Reon

He’s a laid-back guy and looks to solve the situation peacefully, even if he’s furious deep-down. He informs them that he’ll call the police if they harass you, and that’s not an idle threat. He’ll pull out his phone the minute they start anything, and he’ll defend you if it comes down to it. Most likely, he’ll focus on helping you calm down and feel safe.

Goshiki

Goshiki’s eager to prove what a great boyfriend he is, so he’s putting on a tough guy attitude as soon as he realizes what’s going on. He’s a bit dorky while doing it, so it might end up being more humorous to you than scary, but it does its job and he’s cuddling you close in no time.

Shirabu

Scathing remarks towards them, just utterly cruel jeers that hit them right where it hurts. He’s not going to fight them, probably, but he’ll definitely piss them off while leading you away. He’s not great at comforting you, but he’ll probably be extra affectionate when you’re away from them, if you’re okay with that.

INARIZAKI

Osamu

The more rational of the twins, he’s quick to pull you away and work on calming you down. He reminds you that you’re safe with him, that they can’t hurt you anymore, and that he’ll always be there for you. Inside, he’s seething mad at just the sight of them.

Atsumu

The less rational of the twins, he’s a mixture of rude remarks and threats towards them, acting possessively while showing that he’s ready to fight if needed. He’s kind of boastful in his taunting, if that makes sense, and he does a great job at showing off what they can no longer have- you.

Kita

Kita is pretty quiet and tries to pretend like nothing’s happening while he brings you away. He quietly asks if you’re okay and will drive you home to make sure you’re as far away from them as possible. You might not be sure that he really cares until the next day, when he’s brought you a basket of all your favorite things (treats, a plushie of your favorite animal, etc.) to cheer you up. 

Aran

Aran is normally a calm, level-headed, mature person… but when he sees you panicking, backing up and breathing hard at the sight of those that hurt you? Well, he loses it a little.

He’s yelling at them to back away, puffing himself up to look as tough as possible. He’s not a small guy, so whoever’s coming at you is going to be hesitant to go any further. Aran stands between you and the abusers to make sure they don’t try anything and stays that way until they slink away, tails between their legs.

Suna

 Death glares and makes remarks to you that are just loud enough for your abusers to hear and be offended by. He also films them to have evidence of their harassment, in case they try anything stupid. He makes fun of them to help cheer you up and makes sure you know that they can’t hurt you ever again.

[lovesickheize]

in front of the river ⊹ ࣪. ｡༻

lee juyeon (the boyz) x gn!reader angst

they met in front of the river.

he stayed there forever.

⊱ ─────────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ───────── ⊰

wc: 1110

tw: uhhhh all my fics are kind of triggering, but i dont think this is as bad as the other two,, the only thing that could be considered triggering is the mention of a suicide, but there aren't any details about it.

he was sitting on your bench.

your. bench.

it wasn't yours, but it was yours. the place you visited whenever life didnt treat you well. the past few months had been really hard for you, every day you sank deeper into the anxiety that had been torturing you. so your visits to the bench in front of the river were getting more and more frequent. noone really sat there, which is pretty normal considering it was a single bench in the middle of nowhere in front of old houses and apartments.

so why was he there?

that's what you thought to yourself, staring at the man that was sitting on your bench.

"take a picture, it will last longer." his deep and raspy voice echoed between the not so well-maintained buildings.

"you're sitting on my bench." you replied, refusing to reply with sarcasm. you were too invested in your misery to have energy for that.

he didn't reply. he didn't even turn to look at who had been staring at him. you weighted your options and decided against letting him have his way. he was the intruder after all, that bench was your home in a way.

so you sat next to him, your eyes admiring the reflection of the moon and the stars on the water. "why are you here?" he asked you.

you turned your head to his direction, a confused look on your face. "i come here often." you answered, not wanting to start a conversation, just trying to take in as much of the landscape in front of you as possible. "i know. i've seen you. why do you come here so often?"

it was getting serious. you turned your whole body towards him, hugging your knees that were between you and the boy. "it feels safe. silent and isolated, a great place for bad days." you told him. "why are you here, though?"

"i'm always here." he replied, lifting his arm and pointing at a rooftop with his finger. "i go there on bad days. and i can see you coming here and sitting for hours on this bench with your headphones on and a coke zero next to you. it felt kind of comforting to have someone around that seems like they are on the same page as me. so i decided to come here and wait for you. ask you what's wrong."

your painted with confusion face softened up, after hearing the boy talk. he had a really beautiful voice. "i'm juyeon." he murmured.

"y/n." you whispered back.

"can you take me there?" you continued, your eyes on his. he stood up, taking your hand in his and intertwining his fingers with yours. it didn't feel weird. it made you feel,, safe?

you followed him, your jacket and coke on your other hand. you noticed there were no stairs to actually get on the rooftop and paused. "wait, how do we get there?". "just trust me." the boy you now knew was named juyeon told you.

he unlocked the door of the building and showed you the stairs, chuckling at your weirded out face. "hey don't judge me, i'm not the person who decided to hide the key under the doormat!". he said, while placing the key where he found it.

you laughed at his words. his hand made its way to your mouth in seconds, "shhhh, what if they hear us?". you nodded and he removed his hand from your face. he ran to the stairs, dragging you with him and suddenly you found yourself on the rooftop.

the black haired boy walked to the other side of the rooftop, jumping above the short walls that separated the buildings. he helped you get over them and the two of you found the perfect spot on the next building's rooftop. he took of his jacket and put it on the concrete, patting it for you to sit on.

"put yours on, it's going to get cold soon." he whispered and looked at the river, avoiding eye contact with you. you smiled at how thoughtful he seemed, even though he was practically a stranger. you did as told, sitting on the jacket that was carefully placed on the floor with your back resting on a concrete cube that was probably someone's attic.

juyeon turned around and sat next to you, his eyes never meeting yours. "it's beautiful." you said, your voice so low that it almost seemed broken. a couple of tears ran down your cheek, your tiny whine audible in the complete silence for the the boy next to you to hear it.

juyeon looked at the tears escaping your eyes, his hands going on your face to dry them before he realised it. you looked at him completely taken aback, melting into the boy's touch, as you felt his hands cupping your face and his attention being fully on your tears. now it was your turn to look into his eyes, trying to read his soul. unconsciously you leaned in, until your lips were on his. he didn't pull back, giving in the subtle movement of your lips.

the kiss was slow and passionate. something about kissing the black haired boy on a rooftop under the stars made you feel less dead inside.

the kiss was followed by subtle touches, both of you exploring each other's bodies under the dim light of the moon.

you don't remember how you fell asleep, but you woke up just when the sun was noticeable but not enough to indicate it's the next day. juyeon wasn't there, but his jacket was. you got up and looked around, not seeing any trace of him around.

a sudden feeling of sadness took over your body. you removed your own jacket and put on his black one, leaving yours on that spot. maybe him finding it would give him a reason to come meet you again and take his back.

you never saw juyeon again. it was like he stole your firsts and left you, but it didn't really feel like he left you. even though you knew him for a day -or like,, a night- it felt like you knew him for years.

you still visited your bench quite often, since life hadn't gotten any better. sometimes you even went on his rooftop, always getting a very deep feeling in your whole body that you couldn't explain.

as you were walking down the one-way street to reach your bench a couple days later, you caught a sentence of the radio show playing in a car that was waiting for the traffic light to turn green.

"the black haired boy that was found dead in the river remains unident–"

[v3nusxsky]

Hihi I have a really funky request for a platonic Lady Lesso x Never!student-

A never student sleeps in class a lot and ignores Lady Lesso's warnings multiple times so one day Lesso gets pissed and takes the reader to the doom room-

Lesso demands a reason why the reader sleeps all the time and the student says because she can dream to escape reality-

Thennn Lady Lesso asks her what she dreams about and the student says she dreams about her-

Lady Lesso isnt sure if she wants to know the details but decided to tease the student and asks her about it-

Andddd the reader says she dreams of Lady Lesso killing her parents who are neglective and abusive. [sorry if it's too much haha its my experience u dont have to go into details if u dont want to]-

The answer catches the dean totally off guard and she didnt expect that kind of answer, she thought the student was just another hormonal silly teen ifykyk. And then it's just hurt/comfort and fluff-

My dream world

*Authors note< in such a good mood to write this for you so here you go*

Trigger warning~ swearing abusive parents

Prompt~ see ask*^^

You'd lost count how many times you had napped in Curses and Deathtraps, and how many times Lady Lesso had warned you that this ignorance would not be tolerated. Hell you'd even had a doom room trip, although nothing like what you had heard the stories about. You'd been left all night bound to a chair in darkness, her words roaming your brain "if you can't sleep in your dorm maybe you'll sleep here so you can actually pay attention in my class" yet for you it didn't work.

You continued to sleep where you felt safest, the classroom. And nothing would stop that not even the great Dean of Evil herself. This one particular day you had a double of the lesson which resulted in multiple naps that were disturbed by the crack of her cane on your desk and hissed words of warning. You saw when she snapped, the doom room is where you would be hearing and truthfully you couldn't care less. You needed sleep and if this is how you get it then so be it.

As soon as the lesson ended you were dragged by the arm to the doom room and strapped into that chair once more. Assuming you were alone you let your mind relax. Truthfully you were exhausted and frustrated, why can't she just leave you be! A yawn escaped you, and that's when you heard the tale tale signs of Lady Lesso's cane. Once more you were met with her pissed off look, clearly showing you that you had really bothered her. "Why do you have to be such an insolent child and refuse to pay attention to my very clear and direct warnings." She spat stalling up to you as if you were prey.

She paused for a little wondering if she cared enough to stand here and find out just what was going on or if she should just leave you to sit here. Deciding this needed to stop once and for all she asked the dreaded question. "Why do you sleep in my class?" Her tone was direct and leaving no room for any arguments. "Because I want to escape this" you murmured avoiding her gaze, "my dreams at the only time I feel peace, I can't sleep where I don't feel safe." The information seemed to give her a pause for a few moments. Emotion's flickered through her eyes and you couldn't help but try to understand. "What is it that you dream of?" Her curiosity soaked her words. Perhaps this would give her leverage.

With a sinister smirk you decided to play this game, "you truly want to know, well I dream of all the ways you could murder my parents. Some are intricate and detailed, others are quick and painful maybe even messy. Each way is unique and different and I enjoy seeing just what that twisted evil soul of yours could come up with. After all we are learning from the best here isn't that right Leonora?" You purred her name watching the anger flash over her features. You knew just what buttons to push and you throughly enjoyed pushing them.

"Why in the hell would I kill your parents?" She pondered out loud triggering an outburst from yourself. "Maybe because they are abusive and neglectful assholes who deserve so much more than death by your hands. Maybe you thought I was a mindless puppy drooling over you? But no. I dream of how your twisted mind would torture the bastards that had tortured me for years before I came here." The venom in your words was undeniable and it caused the older women to step back from you. Perhaps you had hit the nail on the head, maybe she wanted to be right and now she knew she was wrong it was hurting her pride?

You would be lying if you said you didn't believe Lady Lesso was attractive. Anyone who stated that would have to be blind. It was a fact you knew she knew. So why feed into it? Yet this side of her, was one you hadn't seen and didn't quite know what to do. She freed you from the chair and stepped forward opening her arms. Why in the hell was she offering to hold you? Yet, affection was something that was usual withheld from you so you took it slowly. When her arms wrapped around you, sobs took over your body as you let out years of pain. She hushed each and every stuttered sentence, her hand stroking your back in a calming and motherly manner. This was definitely not what you thought your doom room trip would be. Yet telling someone allowed you to feel a kind of relief you believed to be impossible. You were safe and warm, and now you didn't feel so alone, your secret was out and maybe one day she would act on your thoughts. Maybe.

Word count ~ 1025

[lets-talk-spirituality]

https://at.tumblr.com/lets-talk-spirituality/703755184537567232/rfw9at8itdad /// I agree with everything, you're right and it's okay for you to act this way!

curiously I see a lot of myself on you, i'm a teenager, i grew up in an abusive household, and I have a poor communication with my parents (they’re divorced) it's a loooong story but summing up i developed many issues and attracted toxic friendships, i'm trying my best to heal and i know how you feel when people twist your words and put pressure on you, i know because I go through this since childhood (reason why i have only two friends lol. I don't consider friend friendship without depth. To protect my energy and mental health). I'm too caring toward others and I dont want to disappoint anyone. My life is boring but at least my heart is in peace. I have emotional blockage and use this as a way to avoid becoming codependent with an abusive person, i fear i would love unconditionally anyone who gives me the love i didnt received and wished so badly my entire life. I don't like having to be strong all the time, sometimes I feel exhausted i wish i could rely on someone.

Is easy to gaslight and manipulate me (i'm not even tell a story that happened to me with a narcisist during 2021😂 now i'm laughing but at that time i wanted to yell) after i realized this, i started to develop some defense and i never open up about me to others and only share what i don't mind people knowing. I don't trust my own self and need validation but finally i'm working on it and developing confidence. Consequently these wounds - plus many issues and anxiety - made me highly empathetic and intuitive (unfortunately not on a psychic level), I would never do to other people what was done to me. We don't have to become the monster that destroyed us.

I appreciate that you haven't given up on this blog even with all the trigger and annoying people, I wouldn't handle it, honestly, i'm glad you share knowledge and don't let negativity get in your way, the process of healing from trauma is very complicated. Wishing you the best! 🌱💕

sorry for bad english

Omg. Hi! Welcome to the tribe. So glad you found the blog and me because yes. We have very similar experiences and probably relate and can understand each other very deeply. If anything I hope it makes you feel less alone and gives you hope that things can always grow and strengthen. Reading your ask made me tear up a bit, because thank you for validating me and my experience and my reactions and for truly understanding what I said. I also feel like maybe we are connecting for the reason of feeling community and that’s so nice. Thank you for sharing so much of yourself with me.

I’m adding you to the psychic bestie circle, because I was literally on the phone with my mom (also a long story, because who likes ‘em short?) about how I view loyalty and how seriously I take that and why it makes it hard for me to make friends and feel like I belong. I think trauma does this thing where you can’t take relationships lightly because so many of core your relationships are fractured and it doesn’t feel safe to have friends or other people around you can’t fully trust. It can be hard to engage with people who are more light and casual at times because it’s like they don’t really understand what it’s like. I struggle to connect a lot because I feel people don’t understand the depth of what experiences like this mean and how they shape us.

And you nailed it. I did that with my exes. I’m a lot more healed now because I rarely feel things (blessing and a curse, amiright?) for people, but part of me is so terrified to meet a healthy partner because I know so much of this will come up. Being love starved makes you primed for codependency. There’s this thing I wrote once:

“You’re going to hurt me.”

“No. I’m going to love you, and sometimes they feel the same.”

If you’ve only ever known love that hurts, healthy love hurts too, because it almost exacerbates how badly you were treated by offering a comparison. I can’t find a way to expand this feeling through words, so I hope you get what I’m saying.

And yes again! I literally wrote after talking to my mom not an hour ago “why do I always have to be the adult” I’m always the glue holding shit together, the one no one ever worries about because I always handle it. My sister is dealing finally with her trauma from all this and my mom is all I wanna be there for her and wanted to talk to me about what happened growing up honestly. And it’s like why couldn’t you offer me that when I was suicidal for the past two years (2020/2021) but you can give that to my sister (who deserves that obvi, but like I do too).

That’s the shit that kills me sometimes and I know it’s playing victim but sometimes it’s really like just because I’m smart and strong and wise and capable of holding it all together, doesn’t mean you can just neglect me. Doesn’t mean I should have to hold it all together all the time. That’s kinda what I mean about people negating my hard work. Like people I’ve encountered, generally speaking, seem to not understand my struggle because in a way I make it look bearable or something. I’m only like that because I had to bear it. There was no option. Whether I make it look easy or not, doesn’t mean it is. I could only ever rely on myself— ultimately things I’m grateful for, I’m sure you get this push and pull too between appreciating what you went through and how it grew you and also resenting it deeply because you’d rather be well adjusted.

Idk why today all my trauma is stirring around. Maybe because of therapy yesterday but it’s like all day I’ve had this energy going around. Anyway, sweet nonnie. I can tell you have an amazing and loving soul and I feel so much power from you, it’s quiet but formidable. If you ever want to chat in the DMs. I’m here for you! And your English was fucking perfect and I’m impressed AF because I can only speak English and un poquito de Espanol. Sending so much love and healing and just general joy to you! 💫⭐️☀️ Never let the dirt dim your shine. You’re golden baby and you only grow more rare with time. Mwah 💋

[whispers-ln-shadows]

addressing what went down on nye…im really sorry for how things went, and i want to own up to my actions.

i was genuinely excited to spend nye with you, and everything was going great until midnight. i want to emphasize that im truly not hung up on my ex in any way. it's just that it triggered some deep-seated emotions, particularly about my dad, and it completely consumed my thoughts and overwhelmed me.

what happened next was a mess. i not only got upset but also ended up lying about what was said, and i know that it only made things worse. i can't imagine how frustrating it must have been for you to go around and around in circles with me for three hours, and i'm truly sorry for putting you through that.

without avoiding responsibility, because this is still completely on me, i realized that alcohol played a significant role in what happened, and i'm determined to be more responsible in the future. i want you to know that i have no intention of letting an ex, or anything else, affect our relationship like it has.

i regret telling you we were done...its not what i want or feel, i didnt mean it. i was just overwhelmed by the situation.

ive taken a deep dive into self-reflection, trying to pinpoint my triggers and confront my tendencies to lie or avoid the truth. it's led me to some conclusions.

above all, trust is of utmost importance. i realize the need for you to trust me completely, to believe in the honesty of my words. equally, i must trust you, especially when it comes to being honest without fearing rejection. we need to foster open, constructive conversations, which you excel at with your clear boundaries and support.

on the flip side, i often find myself anticipating conflicts and worst-case scenarios, causing me to shy away from honesty out of fear. i create these mental scenarios and apply them to situations that haven't even happened yet, and i really regret how it has affected our relationship.

for our relationship to work, trust is an absolute must. i recognize that i haven't provided many good examples of being honest in the past, and i'm genuinely sorry for that.

thinking about why ive sometimes resorted to lying... it's been a self-preservation mechanism for me, a way to shield myself from facing difficult truths that i might find uncomfortable or challenging to talk about. i've been afraid of potential conflicts and the emotional toll that honesty could bring. but I understand that this approach has only caused more harm than good, and i need to break this pattern and confront the truth, no matter how hard it may be, because you deserve that honesty and openness.

ive unintentionally taken my frustrations out on you, which is unfair and hurtful. i've leaned on you to fix things for me when it's my responsibility to address my own issues. i know that this isn't healthy for either of us, and i really need to work on managing my emotions better and not burdening you with problems that aren't yours to solve. it's essential that we both have the space to be ourselves and support each other without the added pressure of fixing everything.

i appreciate the valuable advice you've given me in the past, and i want to acknowledge that sometimes i haven't followed it as i should. i understand that, to some extent, offering guidance and support is all you can do, and im grateful for it.

i know i let you down, and i'm committed to making amends and ensuring this doesn't happen again. i value our relationship so much, and i'm ready to work on myself to handle triggers better and be completely honest with you.

i value what we have with all my heart. we share so many great moments, and i genuinely enjoy our time together. you make me incredibly happy, and i cherish what we have. the thought of losing you terrifies me, and i miss you while you're taking time to think about everything.

i want to end this apology by pleading with you not to give up on me. im truly sorry for the mistakes ive made and the hurt i've caused. im willing to do anything it takes to make things right and to be better for you and myself. our relationship means the world to me, and i hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me and give us another chance...

i hope we can put this behind us and keep building a stronger, trusting bond together...

[nahalism]

Why I ghost. Probably a mixture of my childhood, a chaotic mind and the feeling I wasn’t ready/should be better. In my head I need to reach a level of solidness and self love before I allow myself to be around her. Unconsciously back then, consciously now. Which led to me talking bs, and not knowing what I felt or why I acted the way I did, wanting to meet her, but not ready and it led to not talking often. Not realising that everything would have been better if just tried communicating w her, cuz in the end that’s probably all she wanted and did not realise back then that I hurt her w this. It’s very difficult for me to put my thoughts into words, so I often stay quiet. Maybe also the fear of being misunderstood. Maybe also me assuming that people will just understand and I just want them telepathic understand me. Which after a while I think happened w her, cuz I felt like I could feel her and she could feel me. Anyway I always had this problem and even though I am aware of it, and wanting to improve it, it seems to get a bigger problem. That’s one reason why I love the things you post, you always seem to put your thoughts so well in words and sometimes they fit very well w my own feelings and thinking. So thank you for that. Also I recently found your YouTube and it’s even better to see/hear you talk and think.

mm i hear you. if its any consolation i dont think your alone. there are many people who struggle in a similar way, and as i was saying to the person who first asked the question about ghosting, its that inability to reconcile the situation in the moment that makes a lot of people prone to 'cutting people off'. its not the only reason but its a big one. maybe in the moment it feels like recoiling into a form of solipsism/individuality in order to deal with and process your own reality is the only way to self preserve, and as such move forward. but it only pulls you further away from the people you love and that love you (if you didnt care deeply the situation wouldnt be triggering enough to make you leave) which is dangerous for you— the reason i bring that up again is because you pointed out, you want and try to improve but the problem keeps getting bigger. oftentimes the only way to be free of something is to work through it, and so whilst avoidance provides an immediate solution, it just defers the problem allowing it to persist and actually get bigger. its why i was saying its always best to address things and deal honestly and directly. apart from that being kinder and more considerate than muting or ghosting someone, its less destructive for the 'ghost'. & its also, why a person shouldn't take it personally when someone ghosts them. sometimes its not about their own inadequacy (which it feels like in the moment) its the ghosting persons inability to appropriately confront and handle the situation

anyway, i want you to know waiting till your perfect before you allow yourself to love, or be loved, is an enormous faux pas. you are lovable and ready to give and receive love as you are, it might just take work to fine tune it so it matches the ideal or potential you see for yourself. and they were probably trying to show you that, that being the causal factor in the misunderstanding between you both, because as they try to give or receive love you push them away out of fear/thinking your not ready. — however you will always encounter the same difficulties in giving and receiving love until you work through them and so whilst youve avoided it in that relationship it will continue to re-emerge wherever you go next. humans need love. so dont make a messy trail of relationships or deny yourself love until you can show up perfectly. we are human and imperfect. if you wait till you are 'solid' before you try to make amends, you may be waiting forever. instead go back to your fault and dedicate yourself, despite the inevitable errors you will make, to correcting yourself. its not pleasant and you may continue to hurt people but put trust in their love for you and their ability to see your intentions are pure despite how mangled your actions may turn out to be. unsolicited advice, i know but ohwell. :) you got this, i promise

(also re: youtube, thank you!<3)

[bishiglomper]

It's not even 9 and I'm riled up

I woke up to a loud, confident "FUCKIN'-!"

It sounds like the nephew hurt himself. Which didn't actually trigger my anger because of the F word

Its because he said it so adamantly.

Which i then realized started last night.

Before then it would be a scream whisper, going "FAH" or "F'kin". Which irritated the shit out of me, but no, now that i think about it, he blatantly said FUCK several times last night with no shame.

And half the problem isnt even the goddamn F word! He always straight up verbally attacks and abuses us! And when we tell him to go away, he'll come back seemingly calmer and be like

"Hey mom? ...why are so annoying?"

And she'll say something like "I'm trying my best to make you happy."

"You didn't answer my question. I said- why are you so goddamn annoying?

And why is (bishi) so annoying? I just want to play my game, but you, you cant mind your goddamn business! Why can't you just ignore me! I cant believe i have to share the living room with you people!!"

I want to bitchslap him so bad

It's such a shame. He's a very sweet, sensitive boy. He can be so thoughtful. If you're hurting, he asks if he can rub it for you. He asks for cuddles all the time. He likes playing games like I Spy and the alphabet game. He likes doing character voices. He can sing great. He's very good at math and when he realizes he does good in reading he gets so shyly proud of himself. He likes history and all sorts of interesting facts. You do NOT ever make a bet with him over facts he knows. And he's real good with toddlers.

But oh my god. He absolutely cannot deal with any negative emotion. The slightest irritation and he becomes the biggest fucking asshole.

He is not going to make it in the world. At all. Everyone is going to hate him. He's not going to learn to make friends.

Fuck, we're not going to make it. My sister has expressed concern that, when he actually gets bigger than her? He's already like 150. He's a big boy. He could hurt us if he wants to.

When he hits puberty and shit escalates, i dont know what the fuck we're gonna do. He does not listen. He has never had an ounce of respect. We absolutely cant control him.

But the worse he gets, the weaker my sister's guidance gets.

I just. I understand to some extent "i can take it because he feels safe enough to lash out at me without consequences" but that is not turning the flag the color you think it is. And it is giving him the confidence to start treating US that way.

And i don't care if he's autistic. He's not unaware of the world or what's coming out of his mouth, this is not a verbal tic. He can learn some goddamn basic respect and patience for the people around him.

He's not going to learn to brace himself against bad feelings if we don't even bother to teach him how to navigate and deal with those feelings.

He turns 10 in 2 weeks.

Double digits already. And jesus, dont even get me started on the self reliance aspect of his upbringing. I just need him to control his mouth.

You know none of us taught him this. We do not speak to or treat eachother like that at all. He learned it all on youtube and the gaming culture he's exposed to on the oculus.

Ive been warning my sister to limit and control that exposure since he was like 4 and could navigate YouTube on his own. You can see how that turned out.

My sisters childrearing frustrates me so much. Ive shared thoughts, concerns and found all sorts of articles and videos to help provide insight and ideas.

Id been telling her for WEEKS about rejection sensitive dyaphoria. She avoided looking it up because she didnt want to acknowledge another thing wrong with him.

Since then, she read something like. When he feels criticism, he feels like the world is trying to kill him. Not consciously, that's just how his brain chemistry responds. And she doesnt want her squishy widdle baby to suffer. Its just so heartbreaking! That his brain thinks the world is trying to kill him! We must protect his feelings!

Like bitch, no. You need to help him reshape his thinking and reassure him that no, we're not attacking him personally every time he hears anything negative or opositional.

[bespectacledbun]

⚠️ [EN SPOILERS] ⚠️ 

some thoughts regarding a certain part of luke’s main route. kind of a vent about the localization, but not really that deep. under the cut for spoilers. tw/cw for mentions of sexual assault.

so I was reading luke’s route during election to use tickets for lucky time and I got to chapters 13 and 14 of his route— the part where he explains his origins and how his parents met to a horrified mc. and it has a flashback to Sariel explaining Luke’s origins to him in a flashback:

and..... I kind of feel like it was. downplayed in a sense? I understand ikepri is an otome first and foremost, but it’s already delved into a whole host of admittedly very dark topics, including abuse, depression, suicide, PTSD, war, and slavery. so it’s not as if this is the first time they’ve covered something that would need a trigger warning. this is the exact same dialogue line in the JP version:

Sariel: “That night... the king assaulted and raped your mother like a beast”

the information is the same but the wording is much more explicit in comparison. in the en version.... it feels like they tried to sanitize it (not the right word) so that the game wouldn’t be too dark. which, like, given all the other awful shit that already happens in game and with the other suitors, is a weird move imo. I feel like the localizers shouldn't have shied away from translating the line directly.

I can kind of guess WHY the line was changed, because ikepri jp and ikepri en were marketed as two different games. ikepri jp from the get-go was supposed to be a mature romance meant for adults, with dark topics included. ikepri en, on the other hand, was a cute fairytale-esque love story with no mention of how dark the game could really be. but the downside of that is a lot of players were underprepared for all the triggering stuff that the game actually has (ive seen many, many, many comments and tags on my posts about how ikepri was much darker than people expected). 

so with the atmosphere that ikepri en set up for itself, I guess that could be one reason why they chose to use different wording for that specific dialogue. but to me what ends up happening is the en version (unintentionally) downplays the severity of what happened with the previous king and Luke’s mother. 

“he forced himself onto your mother” doesn’t carry the same weight and severity that “he raped your mother” holds, from my view. it doesn’t really convey the level of trauma that Luke’s mother endured for the rest of her life because of what happened to her. what happened to her was rape, and I feel it should have been called as such in the game, not by a euphemism

[fivefeetfear]

Chp 11

………………

“I didn’t know it happen to me until you showed me the photo.” Fizz spoke again, he is looking out into the horizon avoiding eye contact with me. I didn’t say a word, I was completely speechless. Me confronting him with the photo had started to play behind my eyes.

“What happen last night?” I heard my quivering voice ring in my head.

“Nothing happen! I told you I totally blacked out!”

That was the truth. He didn’t remember what had happen to him.

“Stop fucking lying! I have a photo of you in bed with someone else!” I could see my younger self whipping out the phone showing him proof that he had cheated.

Fizzarolli looked completely mortified. I thought it was because I called him out on his bullshit. I finally had proof and he was scared he was caught! I remember the Tears in his eyes as he just stared at the photo, frozen.

That was a genuine reaction. He honestly did not remember the tragedy that had taken place and I reminded him. And then I sang a fucking song about it! That must have trigger the fuck out of him! Oh Satan what did I do?

“All I could remember was killing it at the show, there was a party, I got drunk and I wanted to call you. But everything went dark. The gaps in my memory started to pop up when I saw the picture.” He continues as he rubs his face in frustration.

“I know who she was too.” Fizz smirks darkly as he cast his cold eyes up to the sky.

“Was?” I ask softly. He nods, his pink hues shifts to me from the corner of his eyes.

“Ya think I was gonna let that bitch get away with it? She sent it to you, she was planning to fuck up our relationship or some shit. But I got me to thank for that.” He says bitterly as he leans forward propping his metal elbows on his metal knees. Fizz groans loudly as he shook his head.

“The reason I lied about me cheating on you because…because it seemed easier at the time. To say I DID it, t-that I’ve made that choice. I couldn’t accept that someone had-…” I could see Fizzarolli tremble as he tired to speak. I instantly slip my arms around his slender waist holding him close. I press my forehead against his back hoping to bring him some ease.

“Anyways I let that night fester in me and lashed all of my anger and grief upon you even Blitzo. It wasn’t fucking right, I know it wasn’t. I was falling apart and then those people wanted you. I was just so fucking much! I knew couldn’t let any harm come to you. But I was a coward, I couldn’t…let you go. I wanted to set you free, I wanted you to be happy! I knew without me you would be better off but I kept belittling you every fucking time because I was scare! I couldn’t handle you being out my life and I kne-

I turn Ollies head around to me as I place a kiss on his lips shutting him up. He was speaking too fast, he was slurring and tripping over his words. And in all honestly I needed him to shut up. It was becoming overwhelming for the both of us to relive our trauma. My Mind was racing, it kept flashing every to old memory of Fizzarolli berating me, I could still feel the desperate love kept me trapped in that toxic situation.

I didnt want to know what was going through his mind. The equally horrific things he must have experience all alone. I wouldn’t be able to handle it all.

I broke the kiss and place my forehead against Fizz’s as we both cried. Fat streaks of tears pour down our faces as we held one another. Fizzarolli was muttering sorry over and over again. It was killing me seeing him like this.

“Shhh, hey, hey calm down ok. We both need to calm down Ollie.” I coo softly to him as i stroked his wet cheeks with my thumbs. Though i was taking my own deep breaths to settle down I couldn’t stop my mind. How could I not have seen he was in pain? How did I not see the drastic change in him? If I were to notice what was going sooner would that had change our fates?

“I am so so sorry I hadn’t notice you were in pain Ollie. I’ve should have seen th-

“N/N, doll. I love ya but shut the fuck up. Don’t you dare try to cover for me again. I fucked up. Instead of getting help and being honest with you I tormented you. So please stop defending what I did, got it?” Fizzarolli asks in his rough voice. I felt my cheeks grow warm, oh I hadn’t realize i was doing again. I bit my lower lip as I shift my (e/c) eyes down.

“Sorry.” I whisper not knowing what else to say. Fizz huffs out a soft laugh while he shakes his head. The jester leans down and plants another kiss on my lips.

“Come on, let’s go inside before you catch a cold. Can’t have ya getting sick when you work tomorrow night.” The imp teases, he easily scoops me before standing up. I nod in agreement as he stretches back to the bed with Momo still snoozing. The two of us settle on his chest fluff cuddling each other with a new sense of trust around us. The talk definitely brought us closer and it definitely answered some questions. I full heartedly believe that this time things will work out.

We bid the other goodnight, but before I feel asleep I had one more thought.

I need to see Blitz.

………

When the morning came I got up from my slumber. I had one thing on my mind. I wanted to see Blitz so we could talk. I don’t know if he’s going through his own shit or he wanted to protect me. It could honestly be a mix of both when it comes down to him. But I didn’t want him believing those horrible things I had said to him. I had no right.

I had already gotten off the bed and was in the closet. Asmodeus gave me a mini closet of my own! I threw on a fitted dress paired with a black jacket. I internally groan when I saw I only had heels here, I really need to bring some other clothes. Grabbing a pair of stilettos I slip them on and quietly made my way out the room. Once out the room I round about the corner only to collide with Fizzarolli. He was till in his boxers.

“Where ya heading off to so early?” He asks through his yawn. I barley understood him.

“First of all its 11 in the morning and I’m going to see Blitz. I need to apologize.” I inform walking around him continuing to walk down the large hallway. I could feel Fizzarolli following me.

“How are you going down?”

“Train.” I answer.

“Ya gonna walk to the train? It’s miles from here! And Do you have a plan?”

“Yes and Nope.”

“Does he know you are going to see him?”

“No.”

Fizzarolli groans as he stops in his track.

“Ok let me get dressed, I’ll drive ya.” He says as he began to make his way back to his room.

“Are you sure?” I ask his retreating figure. He gave me a lazily yes as he kept walking. I softly smile as I change directions from the front door to the kitchen. We both could use a cup of coffee.

…………

Fizzarolli threw on an all black outfit, with sun glasses and a mask so he did not draw attention to himself. He grabs his coffee we were on our way. It was a quick drive to the train station, then me and Fizzarolli hop on the train. He said he wants to go to, he didn’t explain why but it was nice to have company. I laced our fingers together as I lean my head on his shoulders as we waited for our stop.

We made it to the wrath ring easily enough. We walk through the terminal to get out but then I saw some kids selling cookies. I paid for two boxes of Samoa‘s and then we got a taxi. Next thing I know I am standing in front of B apartment door with Fizz down the hall waiting. I saw Blitz’s van so I knew he was here.

Ok I can do this. Just knock on the door and talk to him. simple enough. Or not. What if he never wants to see me again? Should I just go? Uhhhh I hated second guessing myself! Just knock!

“Hello?” I heard Luna ask. I look up to see the teen hell hound standing before me. How did she know I was here?

“Hey is Blitzo home or not?” Fizzarolli rough voice ask as he stood beside me. When did he get here? Did he knock for me?

“THE O IS SILENT!” Blitz yells from inside the apartment. Luna raise her brows, her eyes still bored and uncaring.

“That answer your question?” I nod as I mutter a thank you.

“B it’s me, I wanna talk.” I call out to him. The red imp walks to the door and gently pushes Luna aside as he glares at me.

“I don’t wanna talk to you! You can kiss my ass! And so can that creepy fucking guy you brought. What? Things didn’t work out with that cheap ass jester like I said it wouldn’t!” Fizz growls as he lowers his sun glasses giving Blitz a menacing stare.

“Watch it Blitzo or I’ll knock your motherfucking teeth out.” Blitz seem taken back seeing the grand jester himself looking like this. He must have not seen Fizz red skin in while too.

“Look B, can we please talk?” I ask. The short imp just huffs as he crosses his arm over his chest. I’m glad I prepare this. I reach back to my bag and pull out the Girl Scout cookies giving it a shake. Blitz eyes darts to the box of treats and quickly snatches it from my hold. He immediately tears into the box and began to eat the cookies.

“You got ten minutes.” Success. We went inside his apartment and sat on his couch. B was munching away as we sat on the couch and Fizz stood by the front door. I can easily see how uncomfortable he is. Taking in a deep breath I cast my gazes to my friend.

“I want to say im sorry B. I know I should have told you. But it was so confusing…everything happened so fast. I barely understood the situation. I thought us hooking up would be a one time thing, but it wasn’t.” I began to explain trying my best to explain what had happen.

“I know I gave you shit about being honest and then I wasn’t. I did wanted to tell you when I was ready and I could explain things better. I never wanted you to find out the way you did. I am so so so fucking sorry.” I grab hold of his hand giving it a squeeze. It was quiet for a while but Blitz sighs as he looks up at me.

“And I am so fucking sorry for saying all that shit to you. It was uncalled for, i shouldt have said that knowing all the shit you’ve been through. You are changing in the best ways. I want to be there for you when you need me and Satan knows I need you. Can you ever forgive me?” I ask softly, nearly pleading. I didn’t want to lose him again. Especially not over Fizzarolli again.

“Look I’m not your fucking dad to be telling you what and what not to do. I was angry but I shouldn’t have come in there ready to shoot your dirty ass sex doll. And I shouldn’t have said those things to you either. We both fucked up, and I’m sure it’s gonna happen again. So yeah, I forgive you, you lil slut.” I smile happily as I lean over and hug the hell out of him. Satan things turned our better than I thought. I figured he would start screaming at me again. Wow Doing this adult shit and talking things out seems to be legit.

“I love ya B.”

“Yea yeah I love you too (F/N).” With one final squeeze we pull away. We both turn our attention to Fizz who had clear his throat.

“Sorry to break up the love-fest but I want to talk to Blitzo-Uh I mean Blitz.” He says lowly giving me a knowing look. I guess he wanted to tell him what he told me. B looks at me with curious eyes, I just nodded at his unasked question. He groans as he hops over his couch.

“Fine let’s chat it up Fizzarolli? That sounds fucking weird coming out of my mouth. Let’s take a lap around my van.” I raised my brows and eye Blitz suspiciously.

“B?” I call out.

“What In not gonna kill your boyfriend. Just gonna have a lovely chat. Come on fuck face.” Blitz says as he grabs his keys and yanks Fizzarolli out his apartment. Oh Satan.

Wait Did he call him my boyfriend? Was he my boyfriend, well they. They haven’t asked me. Do I ask them? Are we ready for that?

…….

The boys were gone for a while and I was getting a lil worried. Luna kept me company as we talk about her, she mentioned making new hell hound friends. And how they were all jealous that she got to see me perform. I offered her free tickets for her and her friends for my next show.

“Thanks (F/N) that’s really cool of you.” I waved it off as I lean back on the couch.

“It’s no biggie, just think of me of your cool aunt!” Luna hums quietly with a smile on her face as she nods.

“Ok I’ll keep that in mind.” Then Luna ears perks up when she heard Blitz loud voice approaching.

“They‘re back.” The door swings open and there stood B talking Ollie ears off. Seeing them standing there together made my heart melt. I couldn’t help imagining them being their younger selves. I hope we can be that close again.

“And that’s how I accidentally waffle iron my tail.” Ollie had his shades off so I could see his beautiful pink orbs roll seemly annoyed. The corner of his lips was giving him away though as it slightly quirks up.

“You’re still a raging idiot as ever. I really wish that would have change with age but here we are.” Ollie cracks as he crosses his arm.

“I may be an idiot but at least this idiot got this!” B says lifting up a sheet of paper.

“What is that?” Ask With the tilt of my head.

“It’s a contract for I.M.P! Fizzarolli signed it!”

“Who did you put a hit on?” I ask wondering if there was a person in the human world he wanted dead.

“Me.” Fizz mutters dully scowling Blitz. But B looks happy as ever as he wear his shit eating grin.

“What!? WHY?” I scream completely confused on why he wanted to get himself kill. B jumps on the couch besides me with the contract as he show me.

“Well after our chat, which honestly I was not expecting to be very fucking dark. I decided to give him a slap on the wrist! To prove to me he is serious and shit, he agree to these terms of never causing you any physical, emotional, mental and spiritual harm, unless you ask for it. No kink shaming here! And If he does hurt you in a non-kinky way than I have the right to shot him fuckin dead!” No fucking way. I grab the contract from Blitz hands to read over the fine print and at the bottom was Fizz’s name written out in chicken scratch. Holy shit. He signed this! I direct my attention back to Fizzarolli looking embarrassed, I don’t think I was meant to see this.

“Ollie, you didn’t have to sign this.” I say to him as I walking to the jester. He sighs as he lowers his mask.

“You weren’t suppose to see that but yeah. I knew this was the best way to show that jack ass I was serious. I know how much he means to you so I signed, hopefully he would stop hassling you about us.” Fizzarolli’s says looking directly at B. The short imp hums as he waves his tail mischievously.

“Mhm probably not.” my eyes started watering up as I look up at Ollie with a small smile.

“Oh Ollie, the thought is appreciate it.” I then tear the contract to bits and toss them in the air like confetti.

“But not necessary. The fact that you are here with me, willing to talk to B. Is proof enough. I love you Fizzarolli.” I yank the collar of his head as I brought him down for a kiss. I felt Fizz mechanical arms wrap around my hips bringing our bodies closer together. He slips his fork tongue in my mouth and I welcome him in happily.

As we were distracted with the kiss, we missed the small exchange between Luna and Blitz.

“Did you get him to sign it digitally?” She asks her father. B was currently snapping photos of us like a creepy as he nods his head.

“You bet your ass I did.”

………….

Hello ! I hope you all had a wonderful break! Mines was a mess! Thank you for reading! And sorry for the mistakes!

Thank you for 100 followers!

[vrronica-sawyer]

i've seen you post about jd and heather duke's mental health a lot but what do you think is going on with veronica? clearly something is but i dont know what.

Firstly the way you worded that is hilarious,

Anyway I think it's clear she's depressed and that was the intention canonically, but looking back at her as an adult whole emotional attachment to Heathers as a whole stemmed from Veronica being the most accurately I've ever felt represented as a mentally ill teenager when I first saw it, I view her as having BPD. You could say it's self projection obviously but almost all the symptoms and behavior she displays that made me feel so seen by the character are the symptoms I learned later in life are BPD.

The depressive episodes turned constant emptiness, the impulsivity usually revolving around self destruction, and her entire relationship with the Heathers and the problems she has with them at the start of the story all just scream borderline to me. Going from being someone's best friend for years and (according to chandler) being okay with their bad behavior and finding it funny to all of a sudden hating them and thinking they're a bad person when their behavior hasnt changed and Veronica's worldview and personality really hadnt either sounds a lot like splitting to me. Most people's idea of splitting is the opposite, when people talk about it they always talk about the scary concept of you being a good kind friend and then your scary borderline friend has an episode and makes you out to be the devil on a whim, but a lot of what I've experienced is that because of the black and white perception of people the disorder causes I will meet someone who is really really not great, treats me very poorly and has a million red flags, but because they were nice or entertaining in our first couple interactions all bad behavior of theirs is completely excusable if not invisible to me until either they do something big enough to trigger my splitting on them or I just have an episode and in this case it ends up being a good thing (for that relationship at least). So like when I was younger and unaware I had bpd i would look at Veronica's relationship with the Heathers and didn't question it at all, I was like yeah sometimes youre very close with terrible people for a very long time until you realize the things they've been doing are bad even though you... wouldve morally thought those things were bad from the start. I never understood why people questioned Veronica's logic in the situation or didnt realize from context clues they were supposed to have been close friends at the start of the movie.

Same with her handling of the JD situation, she goes from encouraging and going along with things to very against it and angry that he would even think shes okay with it all without vocalizing any of this to him once because the jumps happening in her head make sense to her and it doesnt occur to her to communicate these things to him.

And again just the overall emptiness, anger, self harm and recklessness, all that very much reads as BPD to me. Most of it overlaps with depression but most symptoms of depression are also symptoms of the disorder, plus its very rare that bpd and a form of clinical depression aren't comorbid.

Though I do want to note that there is a reason BPD is avoided as a diagnoses for teenagers around Veronica's age, a lot of the symptoms stem from emotional dysregulation that you can also experience just from being a teenager with a developing brain and unstable adolescent hormones and it's debated on how long it takes for the disorder to develop, some people believe it grows from having something like depression untreated as a child/teen and doesnt fully form until adulthood. That is to say,,, teenagers reading this if you also relate to these things I listed I'm not telling you that you have borderline personality disorder, nor am I saying Veronica has it canonically. This is just my opinion as someone who related to the portrayal of depression and mental illness that is Veronica Sawyer as a teen who later learned what my specific disorder was, giving me a certain bias context for hers.

[turtle-go-brrrr]

4 times Leonardo was a dork and the time he wasn’t

Heya! I adore the "strong stoic character does something embarrassing or dumb" trope, and Leo has been left behing from that one. Also, my fervent Leo Simp Friend said these were all good ideas and I trust his judgment completely, so it's also for him. Enjoy, you Dork-ass Looser (affectionate) @weird-flex-but-ok

I have one of these "4 times ______ and 1 time ______" stories for each of them, I just got really inspired by him all of a sudden. But they're coming!

There might be a few typos here and there, but I really don't wanna wait any longer to post it :3

Requested: No

Pairing: None, platonic

Word count: 2500 +

Triggers: cursing, injuries, blood, intrusion

Summary: You were always sort of intimidated by the leader in blue, but a series of events shows you he might not be as serious as he wants you to think.

__________________________________________

First time

It took you a while to get along with all of them.

Not because you didn't trust them, or because they made it difficult, and certainly not because they're mutants. You're just not that good with new people, and you tend to shy away. Especially when you have New York's heroes in front of you.

So yeah. It took a while. But soon enough, you warmed up to your new friends, and you had a great time. Mikey was the first who made you feel welcomed, always asking questions about you and insisting you came to the lair in the first place. Donnie followed soon, after you started asking about what he was working on. It took a bit more work to get closer to Raph, but it turns out sarcasm was the way to go.

If only their leader was as approachable.

He never made you feel unsafe or unwelcomed, don’t get me wrong, he just kept a professional distance with you, which started to become quite painful as time went on. You tried not to take it personally, thinking he maybe was as shy as you were.

You had time anyway.

It was early in the evening when you made your way to the lair. For the first time since you met the turtles, you went there alone. You were a little nervous, thinking you might get lost in the maze of tunnels under the city, but figured you could just call someone if anything happened. Lucky for you, you found your way to your friend’s place, but not without hustle.

As you entered, you realized it was uncharacteristically quiet. The only sounds you could here were the faint music and the not so faint curses from Donatello’s lab. The smart decision seemed to be leave him alone, which is exactly what you did.

You haven’t been here long enough to know where to find the others, and as you didn’t exactly felt like staying alone in the living space, you tried finding your way to the dojo, as it was one of the other places you knew well.

Of course, now you got lost. Venturing into the sewers was fine, but walking into your friend's home wasn't, apparently.

You found something else, however. This particular tunnel led to a room you could identify as someone's room. You could see the large bed in the middle of the room, a small table with a bottle of water, a book, and a makeshift alarm. A set of twin swords were hanging on the right wall, just above a small bookshelf.

On your left was another table with a (healthy, you noted) bonsai tree, and next to that was Leonardo, facing a mirror. He had his right arm lifted up to his head, and was looking right to you through the mirror.

He looked absolutely horrified.

What the fuck.

He slowly rubbed his face in his hands, let out a long sigh, and turned to you, more tense than you've ever seen him. He cleared his throat as you pince your lips in a thin line to hold back a smile.

"Hello, Y/N. I... didnt think you'd come in so early."

Despite the badly lit room, you can see him bite the inside of his cheek.

"Yeah, uh, I didnt mean to... interrupt you," you say. Your voice is slightly shaking as it takes all of your willpower not to burst out laughing. And he definitely notices.

"You didn't! I uh, wasn't doing anything anyway. So, tell me- what brings you to the lair?" He asks, avoiding your eyes.

"Oh, Mikey invited me, he said I wasnt allowed to skip on movie night. You know how strong willed he is," you smirks, unable to handle it much longer.

Stiff as a board, you see the corner of his mouth twitching and hear him whisper, "... I wasn't flexing."

Silence.

You snort laugh hard enough to choke on it as you quickly turn around to hold yourself against the wall, the insanity of the situation crashing on you. Leo sat at the foot of his bed, head in his hands, and you could see him shake in repressed laughter once you wiped your tears away.

You sit next to him after finally calming down from the hysteria. He sighs, straightens his back and gives you a side glance.

"I'm not judging."

"You're still laughing, though."

"Yeah, but like, I guess I just wasn't expecting that. Still not judging."

He nods, still smiling. His voice is at least 3 octaves higher when he asks, "Please, don't tell the others."

"And what, give them the privilege of knowing about your little... ritual? Nah, don't worry about it."

_______________________

Second time

The second time your assumptions about the leader were subverted happended only two weeks after the... incident.

You had invited the whole crew to your place for the very first time, and they were all excited to come. You made a copious dinner: a few veggie cakes, chicken wings and a bowl of roasted potatoes. They were supposed to bring the drinks and movies, and April and Casey were in charge of the desert.

A perfect night, it seemed.

And it would have been if they could decide what to watch first without jumping at each other's throats.

"You guys need to grow up."

"Leave me out of thi-"

"Donnie's suggesting Velocipastor of all things and you think we need to grow up? Come on, Y/N, I thought you were better than that."

"Okay, first of all, how dare you. And second, this movie's a masterpie-"

"Yeah, because everyone knows that his supremior intellect means he's the only one who gets to choose a dumb movie. Why won't you guys watch Sharknado?"

"Supremior isn't a word. And it's because unlike you, peasants, I have taste." A devilish smile creeps up Donnie's face. The bastard is doing it on purpose.

"Peasants?!"

"You ugly-ass son of a-"

"Hey! Leave Dad out of this!"

"We could watch Shrek instead?"

You decided to go get some glasses in the kitchen, leaving the children to their stupid fight. Searching through your cupboard, you hear a crashing sound, quickly followed by utter and complete silence.

Oh no.

In insight, leaving them alone was maybe not the best idea. You were reconsidering bringing glasses into the mess as you made your way to the origin of the sound. And what a mess it was.

Your friends were all expressing shock in some way, Casey (surprisingly) being the most dramatic of them all with his hands right in front of his face and his jaw hanging open. They were all looking back and forth between you and another direction near the table.

The really cool bowl that held the delicious potatoes you made was broken on the floor. There was glass and potatoes everywhere, but the biggest shards were in a neat pile, right behind Leonardo, who looked like a deer in headlights.

"... nothing happended."

"I'm... starting to think it's a habit of yours," you say as you watch him not so discretely try to hide the broken pieces behind his foot.

"Look, if you keep putting your foot in there you're gonna hurt yourself. Just, step away a bit, will you?"

"I'm sorry I broke it. Let me help you clean up, I don't want you to cut yourself."

"It's okay! Don't touch it, I'll get a bag," you say as he starts to gather the biggest shards.

Won't even listen for one second, will he?

Raph was already picking up the untouched potatoes to put them in the plates on the table, and April went to the kitchen with you to retrieve the bag and cleaning supplies.

"Ew, Mikey don't eat that."

"Thirty seconds rule, baby."

"It's five seconds, you moron. And it's way over thirty anyway. Spit it out."

The rest of the night went on without further issues, but Leo still looked apologetic during the movie. Which is probably why he was standing before you as his brothers were leaving.

"Thank you for the evening. And I'm... sorry again for the bowl."

"Hey it's okay, man. Don't worry about it. As long as no one gets hurt it's not that big of a deal."

"I'll get you a new one." He doesn't wait for your answer and ruffles your hair before taking off.

"Text me when you guys get home!" You scream into the night, hoping one of them heard you.

______________________

Third time

It's surprisingly easy to mess with Fearless.

You were in the living room, getting your ass beat on Mario Kart by Mikey, when you decided to take a break for your stomach (and ego)’s sake. You made your way to the kitchen, where Leo and Raph were in a heated discussion. Raph looked

“I’m telling you, 4 inches is too small. What do you get from 4 inches ? Nothing. But 10 inches ? It really makes you feel something.”

…

What?

You looked down on the table and saw multiple ingredients lined up on the table, with a long piece of bread on the side.

Oh, sandwiches. Got it.

Leo’s back was facing you, but Raph gave you a knowing glance, one that said ‘do it’. So, you did. Not without a smirk, first.

“Oh, wow, Leo ! I didn’t think you’d be so open about that kind of conversations.” You open the fridge, hoping you can hide your smile behind the door.

“What ? What do you m-” His face falls. Raph starts chuckling next to you and it looks like Leo’s brain is rebooting. 

“I mean, I’m not judging. You do you, buddy, I’m happy for you. Just surprised you choose lunch time to talk about it.” And in other circumstances, you’d mean every word. But right now, messing with your friend is too good to pass on.

“No, hold on- I didnt mean- It’s not what you think ! I’m talking about sandwiches !” He tries to show you the ingredients currently on the table, but Raph decides it’s time to join the fun.

“Lying isn’t vey Bushido of you, Honor Boy,” he winks at you and you can’t repress a giggle.

He puts his face in his hands, knowing very well that the both of you ganged up on him but unable to save face. He just smiles, goes back on his chair and hides his head in his arms, hoping you won’t see how embarassed you made him.

“Hey, you like what you like. Have fun with your sandwiches.” You give him an innocent smile, pat him twice on the shoulder, and join Mikey back on the couch with a plate of grapes.

You could hear Raph’s light chuckle from the kitchen.

______________________

Fourth time

Mornings are hard.

And they’re even worse when you spent the whole night sewing an arm back together after a sword gave it a nasty cut. And getting glass shards off of your friend’s shell. And putting a bone back in it’s rightful place after a particularly bad fall.

Yeah. Long night. And a tense one, too.

Because with the physical pain came the chock and residual fears, the anger and blaming. Everyone was stil on guard, and all that tension was exhausting. You barely slept, too worried that one of your friend’s state would degrade if you didn’t keep an eye on them at all times. Which didn’t really help you get the rest you needed.

If you were hoping the morning would be kinder on all of you, you quickly realized that it was a mistake. While, luckily for the turles, the mutagen was already healing their physical wounds, the emotional exhaustion of the previous night was still heavy. Of all of your conscious friends, not one dared break the eerie silence.

It was weird, seeing them like this. But you couldn’t force yourself to say anything, strangely scared of what could happen. You resumed to making breakfast for everyone and bringing clean towels to the still sleeping feverish turtle in the medbay. Splinter and Mikey were at the kitchen table, quietly accepting your offering, when Leo came into the room from the medbay.

He was still half asleep, and in his drowsiness didn’t see the wall he accidentally ran into.

“Oh, sorry. Didn’t see you there.”

Everyone turned to Leo, who it took a solid minute of staring blindly at the wall to realize what just happened.

Donnie was the first to laugh. It didn’t take long for april and Mikey to join, soon followed by Splinter affectionately patting his son’s arm. Leo smiled and shook his head, as their lighthearted laugh was contagious.

The leader in blue was more of a goofball than what you first expected, and you were grateful for it in the fading tensions of the morning.

______________________

One time he wasn't

When someone intrudes your home, especially at 4 am when you were sleeping in the next room, a lot of things go through your head.

Did they take anything?

Yes. Your bag with your wallet, some cash, your credit card, your ID, and a few fidelity cards from various stores. Your laptop. A set of keys. That one blanket Raph made you (probably to carry everything without making too much noise).

Why you?

Why not? Your apartment isn't isolated, but it's not exactly on a main street either. It was probably practical for them.

Were they armed?

Who knows. Maybe. Maybe not. Probably. Statistically, most likely.

What could have happened if you had tried to confront them?

A lot of things. Maybe, if you let them know you were awake and knew what was going on, without necessarily confronting them, it would have been enough to make them run away. Or maybe there were multiple armed people, and they wouldn't hesitate to use force if necessary.

Who knows.

Can the police find this person?

Statistically? No. At least, that's what Casey told you when you asked him. Unless they got really lucky, they won't find anything.

Or at least the stuff they stole?

Again, unlikely. Unless they can trace your laptop back to the guy, or someone can give a physical description and a direction, there's not a lot they can do.

What can you do now?

Call your bank. And your insurance. And your landlord. Let them know what happened and follow their directive, they'll guide you through their procedure and help you soften the blow.

Casey was the first person you called when you woke up this night, and he was at your place within minutes with two other colleagues (the closest he could find). He spent the rest of the night reassuring you, helping you with the phone calls, asking around for witnesses, but nothing.

It's weird, feeling unsafe for the first time in a place you had called Home for years. It's disturbing. You can feel the nausea your anxiety is giving you, and a headache starts to grow at the back of your skull.

You don't really like this feeling.

So when your turtle friends dropped by the next evening without telling you and you welcomed them with a swing of your favorite pan, let's just say reactions were split.

"I can hack into your computer to find its location if you want. Wouldn't be the first time."

"What?"

"What? I mean, I didn't do it for your location last time. I know all about your search history, though."

"We're gonna have a talk about boundaries and privacy once we're done dealing with that," you sigh. You crash down on the couch next to your friend and mindlessly watch him work.

Leo comes up to you and gently nudges your shoulder. "Hey, do you have a toolbox somewhere? We brought locks to put on your door and windows. You know, just in case."

You nod, quiet, and lead him to your room where you keep most of the most useful stuff you own, including but not limited to a toolbox and a first aid kit.

Your movements were almost mechanical as you retrieved the box and handed it to him, and you decided to help him put up the locks to keep your mind occupied.

He was concerned. You looked like you were still in choc, which he could completely understand. Getting robbed is awful in itself, but getting robbed while you're sleeping in the next room? Horrific, in his mind.

He was also furious. He couldn't be there for you. This person had the nerves to go after his friend, and what if you got hurt? He wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

He noticed he was staring when your eyes met his.

"Hey. We're gonna do whatever we can to find them. We're also gonna focus our patrols in your neighborhood for at least a few weeks, until you feel better," he puts a hand on your shoulder. "It's gonna be okay Y/N. Trust me."

You look up to him, and when you look into his eyes, you know he means it. You let your head fall against his plastron as he holds you against him, a silent promise for safety.

"Hey shorty," Raph pulls his head into the crack of the door to address you. "Wanna learn how to fight? I can turn you into a death machine."

You heard the faint "Raph, what the fuck" coming from Mikey who was still in the living room.

You gave a small laugh as you got up, Leo following you closely to the living room.

"Hey! Fighting isn't for everyone. But I could make you a really cool taser, if you want."

"What's with you and tasers?"

"They're efficient."

The bell ringed and April came in holding 4 boxes of pizza, that Mikey assisted her with as soon as she set a foot inside.

You looked around at your friends as April brandished the pizzas like a trophy while Raph and Donnie went back and forth trying to decide who, between man power and electricity, would win in a fight.

And you realized that yes, Leo was right.

It's gonna be okay.

[tangledstarlight]

Written for Day Two of Jukebox Appreciation Week: Alternative Universe –– @jukebox-week​

here is my, somewhat anticipated, firefighter!luke au. this got. so long guys. i’m so sorry. it became a 5+1 and i lost control. this all started because i wanted to see luke do a pole slide and i didnt even fit it in smh. also check out this amazing art by mamirugbee if you get the chance too!! anyway, much love!! enjoy!! 

also on ao3!

lil disclaimer: i’ve never been to la and i’m not a firefighter, i tried to do as much research as i could but firefighter forums aren’t helpful as you’d expect for somethings, who knew! so take everything with big dose of suspension of belief please! 

trigger warnings! mentions of blood & injuries (nothing graphic), lots of swearing, fire.

RATED T –– there’s no graphic scenes but there’s a lot of kissing and fading to black, so rating might change if anyone needs me to 😬

Word count: 21,184

ONE

When he was a kid Luke had had a lot of dream jobs.

There was a week when he’d wanted to be a landscape gardener after watching too many renovation shows during a week off school sick. When he was eleven he’d seriously considered being a doctor for approximately two days after watching too many reruns of ER with his mom, but it was quickly pointed out to him that he would need to go school for years. And he’d given serious consideration into being a professional bungee jumper, which he still maintains is a real career path and he’d have been excellent at it.

But then he’d discovered music when he was thirteen when his parents had given him a guitar for his birthday, and that had been it.

That was his dream.

To stand on a stage and play for an audience and create a connection with the world. And he’s pretty sure he could have done it. It would have been the dream he reached.

But then the garage they rented to rehearse caught fire while he was asleep on the ratty old sofa they’d found on the street. And maybe the fire itself wouldn’t have been enough to make him change his dreams, but everything that happened afterwards?

Well, there’s nothing like almost dying to reorder your life, right?

(It’s the story he tells everyone if they ask, it’s the one he almost believes too.)

The owners of the house had left a candle burning or forgot to unplug a toaster or something mundane and silly like that. Something that people always warn about but never think will happen to them. He doesn’t know. He can’t remember.

All he knows is he’d been sleeping on the sofa and the garage had gotten warm and he’d woken up to a room full of smoke. There had been a moment of panic, as he sat frozen, chest having and eyes stinging, before he’d jumped up, grabbed his guitar, his notebook, his phone and ran outside.

Luke remembers watching the flames grow higher and higher in the garage, smoke following after him from the door he’d just run from. He remembers watching them seem to jump from the roof of the house to the garage. He remembers seeing Mrs Anderson running up to him, the oldest daughter trailing behind with wide eyes, and asking for his phone. He remembers fishing it from his pocket and dialing 911. He remembers the moment he heard the line click, a voice asking him a question as his eyes locked on the house and he saw two hands hitting at the upstairs window.

After that he doesn’t really remember much of anything, he tells everyone.

Except that he does.

He can still remember the heat on his skin, how he’d been grateful for once that he’d fallen asleep in his coat. He remembers his lungs aching as he sucked in smoke and coughed it back out. He remembers a split second decision. Guitar and notebook falling to the ground and running into the house as Mrs Anderson screamed something behind him.

He remembers, as he tried to cover his mouth, his nose, with the sleeve of his coat, thinking that this would be an awful way to die. He remembers not wanting to. He remembers, as he kicks down the jammed door of the youngest kids bedroom, how he really wanted to hug his mom again. He remembers someone screaming and his name being called and throwing a blanket over his head, a weight in his arms he doesn’t remember picking up. He remembers flames and heat and wet tears on his neck and gasping for breaths and then he really doesn’t remember anything at all.

Until he wakes up in a hospital bed and his mom is in the chair next to him and it hurts a little to breathe and there’s bandages on his arms but he’s alive and Luke’s pretty sure that’s the important part to remember.

It’s the part he remembers when the doctors say he can’t play his guitar for a couple of weeks while the skin on his hands and arms heals, that he should avoid straining his voice for a while. It’s the part he remembers when they pick through the rubble and burnt out remains of the garage he’d called home for the last few weeks. It’s the part he remembers when Alex and Reggie tell him it’s okay that they take a break from ‘breaking into the music scene’ while he heals and they find a new place to rehearse and replace their equipment.

It’s the part he remembers when the Anderson’s show up at his parents house with flowers and a basket of snacks and thank him.

He’s alive and they’re alive and part of that is down to him.

And it’s that bit that keeps tripping him up. No one has ever called him a hero before, but that kid does. The youngest Anderson that he’s shared maybe five words with before running into a burning building to carry out. He’d called him a hero and hugged him and Luke had spent the next hour trying to figure out what that meant to him.

Music was his dream. He was pretty sure it was his heart and his soul and everything in between. But it hurts to talk for the first few days after and it hurts to sing for a few weeks after that and, without really noticing it, he ends up back at school. And then he’s graduating and Alex is going to UCLA and Reggie decides he wants to be a teacher and the band is at a stand still.

And Luke— doesn’t mind as much as he thought he would. Doesn’t mind putting this dream on hold while he maybe explores something new. Something he’d never even thought about before.

(And if telling people about the fire kept them from asking why he no longer sang, well, that was a bonus. He nearly died, that was a good enough reason to reorder anyone's life. Right? They didn’t need to know about his performance issues.)

The point was, Luke had once dreamt of playing music to the world and leaving a mark, something to be remembered by.

And then he’d nearly died and music had to wait and he...found a new sort of dream. It wasn’t exactly making a connection with everyone but for the couple of minutes he was carrying someone out of a burning building? It was a connection that would leave a mark, at least for a little while. And it really didn’t hurt that people seemed to love a man in a firefighter uniform.

But just because his dream of playing music didn’t come true didn’t mean he didn’t still love it. Which was why standing outside the burning record store was really hurting his heart.

“Do we know if there’s anyone inside?” He calls over to his captain who’s already directing people around, but Luke’s eyes are on the windows of the second floor and the smoke he can already see against the glass.

“Not that we—” the words have barely left Harrison’s mouth when they both see a face through the smoke and hands banging on the glass. Whoever it is looks like they try opening the window but nothing happens and their knocking on the glass gets more frantic.

“Roof, window or stairs?” He asks, already flipping his visor down and checking the straps across his waist holding everything important.

“Stairs, they’ve cleared the side entrance. Try to come out the same way you go in this time, Patterson. And take Danforth,” she waves one hand in the air but Luke is already heading towards the side of the building, his mind already ten steps ahead.

Get to the door. Check his oxygen. Check Danforth isn’t about to fuck things up. Count to five in his head and walk inside a burning building..

“Going in now,” he says into his radio, as he nods his head at Danforth and pushes on ahead.

Lukes has been into a lot of fires since that first one when he was seventeen and running on nothing but adrenaline and impulse. But there’s still always a moment after he first steps inside a burning building that feels the same as the first time. A rush of heat, heart pounding, thoughts running wild about how this would be an awful way to die.

Then he sucks in a breath, lets the weight of all his equipment resettle on his body, in his mind, and he gets on with his job.

And sure okay, he still runs mostly on the adrenaline coursing through his veins, but he’s pretty proud to say he thinks things through a little more now.

Mostly.

They make it up the stairs and through the flat's front door with little issue, which is, of course, when the issues decide to show up. He can see why the girl in the window was looking frantic, and swears at the fact no one downstairs had noticed the huge fucking hole in the ceiling.

It stretches from just in front of the door to what he assumes used to be a living room, but half the sofa is hanging down and there’s flames already licking their way up a kitchen bar stool. His eyes scan the room on the other side of the hole, trying to spot the best place to cross and the stranded resident.

“Hello? Fire and rescue, we’re here to get you out!” He doesn’t hear anything for a moment, and then a hand shoots up from behind a table followed slowly by a head of curls.

“Over here,” at least he thinks that’s what she says. It gets cut off by a cough and her head ducking back down.

“I’m coming to you,” he calls, but she either doesn’t hear or can’t ankowldge it, but that’s fine. Luke just needs to know where she is. He backs up a step, looks back at the hole in the floor and backs up another, and then he runs, jumps, lands with a thud that echoes up his legs.

There’s a cracking sound behind him, and Luke turns in time to see part of the floor where he’d just been standing start to give away as flames leap up and smoke clouds the area, while Danforth hops backwards to avoid taking a fall. He can see wide eyes through the screen of his visor and Luke reaches up to tap the button on the talkie, inclining his head towards the door as he speaks.

“Better tell Harrison I’m coming out the window.” He shoots the other man a grin before turning back to his job at hand. Find the stuck girl, go out a window, hopefully make it home before Reggie eats all of Alex’s leftover lasagna. Oh he hopes there’s still some garlic bread left over too. Or maybe he can convince Alex to whip some up for them, that man knows how to make a good garlic bread. Little cheese on top. Some of the fancy salad he steals from work. Maybe Willie will be over and he’ll have bought dessert.

Luke’s planned out his ideal menu for the evening, and breakfast the next day, by the time he makes his way carefully across the crumbling floor and is kneeling down across from a girl whose face is mostly obscured by wild curls and a damp towel. Someone paid attention during a fire talk, he thinks.

“Hey, are you hurt?”

It’s only four years worth of training and feeling the heat of flames slowly getting closer that stop Luke from completely blanking on his job as wide brown eyes meet his through his visor. There’s a streak of soot on one of her cheeks and he catches sight of unshed tears pooling in her eyes. She’s looking up at him with a mix of fear and worry and what he really hopes is gratitude and a large part of his mind knows this isn’t the right time, but holy crap, Luke’s pretty sure she might be the prettiest girl he has ever seen.

“No,” she coughs out, shaking her head and Luke blinks. Pulling his thoughts back to the issue at hand. The fire, the falling floor, the window, the— was she wearing monster slippers? He bites back a smile even as his eyebrows tick up, just a little.

“Let's get you out of here, yeah?” He ducks his head to catch her eyes and make sure she’s heard him. “You ever jumped out a window before?”

The girl's eyes widen a fraction as they dart towards the window she hadn’t been able to open and when they dart back to him there’s a determined glint mixed with the fear.

“Wait here, I’m gonna make sure we’ve got a soft place to land,” he pushes himself back up and over to the window, gives it an experimental tug and frowns. Someone has painted the window shut, which is bad for fire safety, but great for him being able to show off a little and smash a window. Luke unhooks the axe from his belt just as his radio crackles to life.

“Which window are you coming out of Patterson?” Harrison’s voice comes through and Luke can picture the way she’d probably sighed in resignation when Danforth had turned up outside with his news. He was always being told off about coming out through a window when it wasn’t a part of the plan. Turning slightly so he’s standing side on, Luke raises his arm and swings the axe at the glass. Someone shouts from below and he hears the girl let out a gasp over the sound of shattering glass.

“This one,” he says, holding down the button on his radio and reattaching his axe in one movement before leaning out the window to see them pulling the large inflatable cushion to below the window he’s standing at. He wishes the bigger ladder truck hadn’t been redirected across town, it was much more badass to help a pretty girl down a ladder then it was to push them out a window and say ‘jump’. He waits until someone shoots him a thumbs up and turns back into the apartment.

“Alright, let's get out of here shall we?” Luke says, holding out a hand to help her up, there’s a second of hesitation before she drops the towel she’s holding and reaches up to grab it. He notices the bag she’s clutching to her chest and idly wonders what she’s deemed important enough to save from a fire. He’s been doing this job long enough now to know that everyone has different priorities. Some are more questionable than others.

“Wait,” she pulls her hand out of his grasp as they reach the window and she leans out, “You’re serious about jumping out? I thought you had like ladders or something! I can’t— I—”

“Woah hey, hey,” he puts a hand on her back as she tries to back up into the room and Luke is conscious of the fire still raging, eating away at the floor, and he knows there’s no time, but sometimes people just need a little reassurance, “It’s okay. What’s your name?”

She looks up at him and there’s tears streaking through the soot on her skin as she breathes in shallowly, “Julie.”

“Alright Julie. Normally we do have a ladder, and I know it looks scary but this is perfectly safe. I promise. It’s like jumping onto a giant cushion. Kinda fun if you forget about the fire.”

She still looks unsure, head shaking slowly as her grip on the bag tightens and Luke ducks his head, and even though he knows he shouldn’t, he flips up his visor so she can see him better.

“I know we’ve just met and you have no reason to trust me, but I’m going to ask you to trust me anyway. It’ll just be a shortfall and a bounce. Over before you even remember to be scared,” he can feel his lips tugging into what he hopes is a reassuring smile. Julie’s eyes track over his face quickly before she shuts them tightly and nods once.

“Okay. Okay. I’m jumping out a window. Sure. This is fine,” she mutters and Luke grins, flipping his visor back down and slowly helps Julie up onto the window sill before she can change her mind.

“I’m gonna keep hold of this alright?” he gently extracts the bag from her fingers and secures it over his shoulder before helping Julie sit on the sill and jumps up to join her, legs dangling in the open air. “Short fall and a bounce. You got this,” he squeezes her hand that’s gripping the window frame as she flinches at the sound of something falling behind them. “Ready?”

She whispers something that he doesn’t quite catch but nods her head, squeezes his hand back and jumps. There’s a rush of air, Julie sucking in a breath somewhere next to him, and then he’s hitting something, body being absorbed by something cold and bouncing once, twice, and then settling.

Despite the fact he’d just told Julie that there was nothing scary about jumping out of the window, Luke always felt a spike of fear in the first second he’s airborne. There’s a moment, just a single moment, where he worries that this time he won’t hit the ground again. That he’ll float away. It’s illogical and crazy, and Luke knows that. But he still worries. The same way he always worries that this burning building will be the one he doesn’t walk back out of.

For a moment, Luke just lies there. He lost Julie’s hand somewhere in the fall but he can hear her breathing somewhere nearby and slowly the sounds of his crew start coming back to him and he blows out a breath and gets back to work.

//

One of the bonuses to being the person to jump out of a burning building is that Luke doesn’t have to help deflate and put away the cushion. The downside is that he has to spend twenty minutes with one of the paramedics as they check him over.

No matter how many times he tells them he’s fine. You lie about bruising a rib one time and no one lets you forget it.

“Are we done here?” He asks as the paramedic finally doesn’t swat his hand away as he takes his oxygen mask off and Luke tries really hard to not let his leg bounce too obviously.

“Any sign of issues—” they start but Luke is already pushing up from the back of the ambulance, shooting the paramedic a two fingered salute and picking up the bag he’d dropped by the back tire when he’d been told to sit. It’s only a short journey to the gurney on the other side of the vehicle and the girl lying on it with her eyes tight shut and holding a phone to her ear, though he thinks it’s more for comfort then actually talking given she’s still got an oxygen mask over her mouth.

He approaches slowly, trying for a gentle smile as her eyes snap open and lock directly with his. He holds her bag up, and fully intends to just leave it by her side and get back to work — no matter how much he so desperately wants to talk to her again, even though he’s not sure why, but he’ll think about that later — but she pulls the mask away from her face and smiles back at him.

“Flynn just hold on,” she rasps and there’s a slight wince on her face as she realises how saw her throat is, Luke slowly approaches the side of the gurney and gives her what he hopes is a sympathetic smile. He remembers how shitty a smoke hurt throat can be.

“I gotta get back to my crew but I just wanted to check in,” he says, resting an elbow on the metal railing and pretending the way his eyes rack over her face and body is simply to check for injuries — though he’s glad to see the monster slippers survived the fire and the fall —, before he licks his lips once, and holds her bag up for her see, “and to make sure you got this back.”

Julie takes her bag with a relieved sigh that Luke might think more about if their fingers didn’t brush slightly in the transfer and leave him wishing he hadn’t been wearing gloves when he’d held her hand as they jumped out of a burning building.

Which right. Burning building. Almost dying. Being scared. Priorities Luke!

He clears his throat and smiles again, a little softer as his eyes linger on her face. Someone has wiped away the worst of the soot from her cheeks and forehead, but there’s still streaks of it across her skin. And she’s looking at him with the same sort of grateful look that he’s seen countless times before, and he swears there’s something else. But she had nearly died, and he’d helped save her. His job here was done. A connection with someone that would last long after she forgot his face or his name.

“I should uh—” he points over his shoulder with his free hand, taps along the side of the gurney once, twice before breathing out, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

He only manages to take a step back and turn around before Julie is coughing out, “Wait!”

Luke doesn’t hesitate to spin around and back to her, eyes quick to scan her face to see what might be wrong, “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“No I just—” she coughs again, and Luke reaches across to slide the oxygen mask back on her face, keeping a careful eye on how many breaths she takes before she slides it off again, about to say something when she beats him to it, “Sorry. I just. I wanted to thank you. For y’know. Saving me. And…” she trails off, biting her lip and for a moment Luke thinks she’s about to start coughing again but with the way she starts avoiding his eyes she realises she’s just putting it off.

“And…?” he prompts, ducking his head slightly to catch her eyes.

“And I realised I didn’t get your name. Which sounds silly now I’ve said it out loud,” she mutters the last part, head hitting the flimsy pillow with a soft thud that makes him grin. Because she wanted to know his name! And it’s not the first time a person he’s saved has wanted to know his name, but it’s the first time a super pretty girl has asked and he’s wanted to tell her.

“It’s Luke,” he says with a grin, taps against the gurney one last time, “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime Julie.”

TWO

Luke had taken up running when he was 19, between jobs and starting to worry all his potential had been burnt up in the same garage fire that had destroyed his favourite couch and stolen his voice at 17.

It had been his dad's suggestion. A way to get him out of the house and doing something that wasn’t moping or waiting for his friends to be finished with classes, he’s sure. But, even after he’d signed up to be a firefighter and had a whole new fitness schedule, running was still his favourite thing to do. He and his dad might have had their issues but he’d been right about needing a way to clear his head when he could no longer write.

And while he no longer really needed to run to clear his head about what he wanted to do with his life, he did need to breathe in fresh air and forget about the damage a fire can cause.

Some days he had more images to forget about then others.

Some days he just wanted to run.

And some days, he needed to get out of the house before Alex force fed him some weird experimental fish dish. Apparently they were testing out a new menu at the restaurant which just meant Alex was testing the food out on him and Reggie and occasionally Willie when the skater couldn’t come up with an excuse quick enough.

So maybe he was running in the park and avoiding one of his roommates. It was still a valid reason. He’d seen grapes being mashed up with paprika and had not been interested in trying it. Reggie and Hotdog could take one for the team.

The route he runs takes him past a duck pond and a bunch of teenagers throwing a frisbee and other people walking their dogs and —

“Fire! Dad! It’s on fire!” A voice from his left screams and Luke’s instincts kick in as he changes the direction he’s running without faltering a step.

It’s one of those stand alone bbq things that parks have dotted around and Alex hates. Something about not being able to properly grill the meat. Luke had given up listening the third time he’d started talking about them, much more concerned about how no one ever checked them over or made sure they were safe to use.

He can see the problem straight away, something has fallen between the grates and caught on the coals, and where it should just be glowing embers and small flames there’s smoke billowing and flames jumping out at the teenage boy frozen in place.

“Hey can I borrow these?” Luke asks as he comes to a stop next to him, carefully extracting the tongs from his grasp before he can respond. It’s not exactly standard protocol or even the safest plan but Luke clicks the tongs together once before darting them into the flames and pulling out whatever was causing the fire and dropping it on the square of concrete that the bbq is planted on. He stops on it a few times until there’s no longer any flames jumping up at him and all that’s left is smoke and what looks like a half burnt cloth.

“Carlos! Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

Luke turns around just as an older gentleman rushes over, eyes darting from the fire Luke has put out, to the still cooking burgers, to the teenager who’s grinning.

“I’m fine,” he reassures his dad and Luke takes the opportunity to shake some ash off the tongs before offering them back to him, “Dude that was so cool! You just stomped out a literal fire!”

Shrugging, Luke rubs at the back of his neck as he shoots the dad a quick smile, “Just doing my job, it was no big deal. Honestly.”

“Your job?” The man asks, head tilted curiously as he accepts the tongs.

“Yeah I’m a fi—”

“Luke?” A voice he hadn’t expected to hear again cuts him off as a girl with a mass of loose curls in a pretty pale yellow sundress skids to a halt in front of them, eyes looking quickly between him and the other two with increasing concern as she seems to notice the burnt ground. “What happened?”

“Julie! I— Hi,” Luke starts and suddenly wishes he was wearing something more flattering than shorts and an old band t-shirt he’d cut the sleeves off of on a whim. He at least wishes he’d had time to shower before she starts to think he just always stinks like smoke and sweat.

“This young man just saved your brother from a flaming napkin,” the man says and there’s a teasing note in his voice as he looks at his son before raising an eyebrow, “You two know each other?”

“Yes. I— well sort of?” Julie says and there’s a slight furrow between her brows, “Luke’s the firefighter who got me out of the apartment.”

“You’re the one who got my Julie out of the fire? And you just saved Carlos too?,” he says, taking a step closer to him and Luke only has time to nod before he’s speaking again, “You must let me thank you! Do you like burgers? You should stay, eat with us.”

“Oh that’s— that’s really kind of you sir but you don’t have to do that. I was literally just doing my job. Both times,” Luke’s quick to say with a shake of his head, but there’s a gleam in the man's eyes that makes Luke pretty sure he’s about to be eating a burger. Which is better than the option waiting for him at home.

“I won’t hear anything of it. You saved my children, the least I can do is offer you some food. And you can call me Ray,” the man — Ray — waits until Luke gives a smile that feels only a little forced before turning back to the bbq and Luke catches him muttering something, “We really should have attended that fire safety course Victoria mentioned.”

Coughing to hide a laugh Luke looks back in time to catch the tail end of a look that Julie shoots at her brother and the way he rolls his eyes before he grins and walks over to his dad. And then it’s just him and Julie. Who apparently told her family about him. Luke bites his bottom lip to try and not smile because of course she’d told her family, she’d nearly died and hadn’t. It was a big deal. It was something you told people. It doesn’t make him special.

Julie’s looking up at him, her head tilted slightly like she’s considering something and he desperately wants to know what’s going on inside her head. But then his eyes glance down and he can’t stop the grin that spreads across his face at the sight of the doodle covered sneakers she’s wearing and how different they are to the monster slippers he’d seen her in last time.

“No slippers today?” the words slip out of his mouth before he can stop them, brows rising as he looks pointedly at the sneakers on her feet and back up at her.

“Didn’t want to make anyone jealous,” she laughs, but Luke can see a slight flush in her cheeks as she brushes some hair behind her ear and he’s suddenly struck by the urge to do it for her. He’s saved from making an embarrassing move by her next words, “I see you’re not in a uniform today either.”

And, if Luke didn’t know any better he’d say she was upset about that fact if the way her eyes tracked down his body and back up to his face, and if the deepening colour in her cheeks was anything to go by. But why would she be upset about him not wearing his uniform? That thing was heavy and warm. He did not get the fascination.

“They let us wear other clothes sometimes. The uniform can get a little hot,” he grumbles only for his lips to pull up into a slight smirk as he watches the way she bites her lip and avoids his eyes, “Why, disappointed?”

“What? No! I—,” she sucks in a breath and blows it out and Luke watches as she tosses curls over her shoulders and straighten her spine before looking him straight in the eye, and there’s a fierce sense of determination mingling with something like excitement, “I was just thinking how I never got to thank you properly. For helping me out of the building. And how I’d like to do it in a way that doesn’t involve my dad burning burgers in the park.”

Luke blinks and just stares at her because it sounds a little like she’s just asked him out but he doesn’t want to be one of those guys who just assume they’re being asked on a date because of a little life saving. She could just mean a totally harmless thank you coffee and he’s just overthinking it and oh fuck she’s still talking and he’s just gaping at her.

“And I mean it doesn’t have to be a date if you don’t want it to be! I could just buy you a– a doughnut or something. Wait, that’s police isn’t it? Shit what do you buy firefighters? Do you have a stereotypical food? That’s not the point. I—” she sucks in a breath like she’s about to ramble on some more when Luke’s mind finally catches up and he grins at her, reaching out to catch one of her hands that had started waving through the air mid spiel.

“Julie. I would really fucking love to go to dinner with you.”

Her eyes light up as she looks from where he’s still holding her hand, their fingers somehow becoming interlocked and Luke doesn’t know if he did it or if she did but she doesn’t seem to mind and neither does he. It kinda feels right.

“So dinner. So I can thank you, and we can… get to know each other,” she sounds a little shy as she says it and Luke squeezes her hand.

“It’s a date.”

//

He gets to the restaurant ten minutes early and Luke’s pretty sure it’s the first time he’s been early for something since they had the chance at playing at an under 21s club when he was 16. He hadn’t even been early for his first day at the station.

But for a date with Julie Molina? On time wasn’t even an option.

There was just something about her that made him want to show up early, to wear his fanciest shirt, to comb his hair. She made him feel alive in a way he hadn’t in a long time — which he’s pretty sure says something about a guy who runs into fires for a living and maybe he’ll think more on that later — and so far he’d only really met her twice.

And one of those times probably shouldn't count, given all the fire.

But his point still stood. There was something special about Julie that meant she deserved him dressing up and bearing Alex’s teasing and having to gently push Hotdog away before she left hairs all over his pants.

For half a second, as he stands in the doorway of the restaurant, eyes glancing around before landing solidly on Julie in a booth against the wall, Luke wonders if she thinks he’s special enough to not be on time for too. And then he blinks, and she’s waving a hand at him and he remembers he’s pretty ordinary in the scheme of things and Julie is probably just a very punctual person.

“Hi,” he breathes as he slides into the booth on the opposite side of the table from her, noticing her bag and jacket filling the empty space between them and then the way her fingers are fidgeting with one of the cloth napkins on the table, “Sorry I’m late. You look really nice.”

Because she’s wearing a dark blue dress with little stars stitched into it in silver thread that glints under the lights of the restaurant, and her curls look bouncier, if that was even possible, with some pulled back at her temple with clips. And she looks more than nice, but Luke’s already said nice now so he can’t take it back, can he? Oh no, he’s spiralling.

“Oh. I’m just…early,” she trails off, giving a small shrug and shooting him a smile that he doesn’t hesitate to return and he doesn’t know if it’s him smiling or just the fact he’s shown up or — what, but Julie’s fingers still on the napkin as she seems to settle more in herself, and she blows out a breath before smiling at him, “You look nice too. You’ve got...sleeves today.”

Luke can’t help it, he blushes, a laugh working it’s way past his lips as he rubs at the back of his neck, trying to play it off cool only to promptly give up when he catches sight of the way Julie is trying to bite back a smile at his reaction; because making her smile is quickly becoming one of his favourite things. And hopefully, if tonight goes well, he can spend a long time making her smile, and more.

“You’ve seen me with sleeves more than without,” he points out and this time it’s Julie’s turn to blush a little, ducking her eyes.

“Well your arms certainly make an impression,” she mutters with a roll of her eyes at him. But it’s hampered by the blush still on her cheeks and Luke grins, nudging her ankle with his foot under the table.

“Have you been here before? I looked up the menu but couldn’t decide what looked good,” Luke says, letting the topic of his arms drop for now. Though if all goes well he’ll make sure to bring it up at another time.

“My tia says they do a really nice tagliatelle,” she replies, picking up her own menu and letting her eyes glance at it before back up at him with a smile.

“This is the tia who makes the really good um,” Luke bites his lip as he tries to recall the conversation from yesterday, snapping his fingers when the word comes back to him, “Tostones! That your dad was talking about?”

The smile that graces her face lights up her eyes, like she hadn’t thought he’d been paying attention to what was said yesterday, or that he wouldn’t remember even if he had been.

“Yeah, that one,” Julie looks back at her menu and Luke follows suit, eyes skimming past all the options but not really taking any of them in. His mind is still stuck on the way she’d smiled at him and how pretty her eyes were when she did.

Their waiter comes and Luke takes her tia’s suggestion and goes with the pasta dish, pretending not to notice the way Julie smiles at him when he does.

“So,” she starts when the guy has gone and they’re alone in their booth again, her hands folded over each other on the table as she looks at him, “Firefighting huh? That must be...I don’t want to say fun but...interesting?” She wrinkles her nose a little, like it’s still not the word she wants to use, and he gets it.

“Interesting is a pretty good word for it. And it can be fun,” he nods, biting his bottom lip as he thinks about it, “When we get to rescue cats or someone's trapped on their roof or something. But it’s intense too. Some days are harder than others to go home from.”

“Is it something you always wanted to do?” There’s honest curiosity in her voice and Luke almost feels bad for laughing after the way it makes her blink in shock.

“No,” he shakes his head, still laughing a little, “I uh I was gonna be a rockstar. Not like kids say they’re going to be,” he’s quick to add as her smile returns, “Me and my best friends, Alex and Reggie, we had a band and we were fucking good. Played our own instruments, wrote our own songs. I think we could have been legends,” his voice trails off as he thinks about it. About that abandoned dream and the scars from it he still holds.

Julie tilts her head at him and he blinks to pull himself back to the present as she speaks, “Can I ask what happened? If it’s too painful or anything you don’t need to tell me I’m just...curious. Don’t hear many people who sound so passionate about lost dreams.”

“Ironically, there was a fire at our rehearsal space and uh, no one was seriously hurt or anything. Everyone got out. But um, I was in hospital for a few days for minor burns and smoke inhalation,” Luke frowns and tries to keep to the facts, no need to wander down that memory lane right now, “I couldn’t play for a few weeks afterwards, and then the first time I tried to sing was about a month later and it...hurt. So I haven’t tried since.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I was 17 so uh seven, nearly eight years ago now,” he hadn’t realised it had been so long. Huh.

Julie blinks at him, her mouth opens only to close again a few times before she seems to find the words she’s looking for, “That’s...wow Luke, that’s a long time. But I— I kind of understand. The being hurt and...scared to sing again.”

Ignoring the way she seems to have caught on to his unspoken truth in being scared about singing, Luke focuses on her own apparent issues. And the fact that she’s apparently a singer. He might have pushed down all his own music related dreams but he’s always had a type.

“Can I ask what happened?”

“My mom died when I was 17,” she gives him a sad smile and Luke’s eyes immediately widen, lips tugging down as he starts to get an idea of the story that’s about to follow.

“I am so sorry Julie. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” and it’s instinct to reach across the table and touch the back of her hand that’s strayed back to the napkin, and it seems to be instinct for her to turn her hand over and link their fingers.

“No, no it’s fine,” she sucks in a deep breath, and lets it out again, keeping her eyes on their interlock fingers, “It was um cancer. And we knew it was coming, so we got the chance to say goodbye. But my mom she was— God she was the best person I knew. She was amazing and my best friend and just this amazingly talented musician who used to be in some badass bands. She taught me to play piano, and a little guitar and we used to sit out in the garage that her and my dad turned into a studio and just — write and play and sing together for hours.”

There’s a pause where she looks lost in a memory of a different life, and Luke lets her have it. Lets her play with his fingers and figure out how much of her past she’s willing to divulge on a first date. Alex is always reminding him that not everyone subscribes to his brand of honesty from the get go. And then she sighs, licking her lips before looking up at him with a small smile that he thinks means thanks.

“After she died I uh I couldn’t play or sing for a long time. Music was just— it was our thing and I didn’t know how to do it without her. So I avoided it at all costs and didn’t sing for nearly three years,” she blows out a breath, shaking her a little at him, “And then I was in the car one day, I don’t know where I was going, but the radio was on and one of my mom's songs came on. I didn’t even think about it, I just… started singing along,” she shrugs one shoulder at him before blowing out a breath and laughing.

“God, sorry. I really brought the mood down huh.”

“Best to get the traumatic backstories out of the way now,” he grins, squeezing her fingers quickly, “But hey, you can’t just mention your mum being in a band and having songs on the radio that casually! Gotta tell me more now. If you want to.”

So she does. She tells him all about Rose and the Petal Pushers and how her tia was the original bassist before life got in the way, how they’d played the club scene in the 90’s and landed a gig at the Orpheum, about the few songs they’d had that landed on the charts and the ones that some classic rock stations would still play. She tells him about the vinyl she’d had of their first album that she hadn’t been able to save from the fire and how her dad had been the one to shoot the cover art. She tells him about teaching music part time to kids while she works on making connections and plans for an album and how much she hates looking at apartments.

In turn Luke tells her all about his parents, and Alex and Reggie and how he saved Hotdog the cat from under a hotdog vendor's cart and had been hiding her in their apartment ever since. They spend too long talking about how she knows of Reggie’s music classes and how she’s been to the restaurant where Alex works too many times to count, and how it’s so weird they’ve never met before an apartment fire. He tells her how Alex and Reggie are his family, how they’d been with him through the loss of music and finding firefighting and how he’d already beat Reg at rock, paper scissors five times to be Alex’s best man when either he or Willie popped the question. He tells her how he can’t play his guitar unless he’s drunk and the place that used to be full of lyrics is silent.

At the end of the night, when their waiter finally gets tired of them hogging a table and asks them to leave, Luke knows enough about Julie to know that if they hadn’t met the way they did then they would have met some other way.

So he kisses her slowly, gently, against the side of her car and knows that she feels whatever it is between them too when she asks if he has plans tomorrow.

He doesn’t. And even if he did, he would cancel them for her.

THREE

“Ugh I love my dad but I have got to find somewhere to live before him and Tia drive me mad,” Julie grumbles through the phone and Luke smiles as he pictures her gripping her steering wheel a little tighter as she struggles with her love for her family and her need for space.

“Still no luck with the apartment hunting, huh?” He asks, hoping the sympathy is evident in his voice even as it’s partly muffled by the way he’s trying to pull a t-shirt over his head at the same time.

“Everything’s either too expensive or too far away from work or just has bad vibes,” she sighs and Luke can faintly hear the ticking sound of an indicator in the background.

“How can a place have bad vibes?” he laughs as he pulls the hem of his shirt down with one hand, closing his locker with his elbow of his other, nodding at Harrison as she raises an eyebrow at him as she walks past and Luke already knows he’s going to be teased today. Much like everyday since he and Julie had officially started dating.

But look, it wasn’t his fault he’d somehow met literally the best person on earth and she’d decided he was worth spending half her time with. Even Alex, Reggie and Willie had agreed that Julie was pretty fucking awesome and way out of his leage and had made him promise not to fuck it up. Which personally, Luke had found a little rude because he had no intentions of fucking things up and full intentions of spending the rest of his life with her.

Which yeah, okay, he knows is a little much after only a few months.

It was why he hadn’t asked her to move in with him. A voice that sounded suspiciously like Alex was in the back of his head reminding him that they’d only been dating for two months, or sixty seven days if you wanted to be exact. Not that he’d been counting or anything. Because that would be weird. It was just— Luke didn’t do casual when it came to relationships. He was either all in or not at all. And he was all in for Julie, and he was like, 75% sure she was all in for him too. But even still, it was too early to ask her to move in. Right? Fuck, he was going to have to go back to his pros and cons list later.

“Trust me, if you’d been in this place you’d know what I mean by bad vibes. Carlos would say it gave him ‘bad ghost tingles’, which I really didn’t understand before today,” she laughs a little before muttering something he doesn’t quite catch and then something he’s pretty sure translates to shoving something somewhere unpleasant and Luke grins to himself. Julie with a little road rage is kind of hot.

“Anyway,” she returns to the conversation and he really wishes he was in the car with her and not across town leaning in a doorway, it’s almost enough to make him start pouting before her next words are crackling through the phone, “Are we still on for dinner tonight after your shift?”

“Yeah!” Luke clears his throat, hand rubbing at the back of his neck at just how quickly and loudly he had agreed to that, but he can hear Julie laughing gently through the phone so he’s not really all that embarrassed, “I mean, yeah as long as you’re still up for it?”

“You said Alex was going through a fusion phase and I really want to see how he’s going to combine Italian and Thai food.”

“Oh I see, so you’re only using me to get close to my chef roommate, huh?” Not that he could blame her. Alex made some pretty great food.

“Don’t be silly, I’m clearly playing the long game and intend to use you to get to play with the sirens on a fire engines,” she giggles and it’s nearly enough to make Luke quit his job to spend the rest of his life trying to make her repeat the sound over and over.

Which is of course when the alarm sounds and people start rushing around him. He hears Julie blow out a breath on her end of the line and for a moment Luke can picture her so clearly. Sitting in her car, hands gripping the wheel and fingers tapping along to whatever melody is stuck in her head, hair tied up because she was going to wash it tomorrow, a little crease between her brows as she concentrated on the road that would deepen every time someone pissed her off. God he— huh. Luke blinks and blows out a breath of his own. If it’s too early to ask her to move in, he knows it’s probably too early to say the thought that just stuck him.

“I gotta,” he rasps, swallows and tries again, “I gotta go. Duty calls. I’ll see you tonight?”

“Eight o’clock. I’ll meet you at yours,” he imagines she’s nodding her head at him, “Be careful out there okay?”

“Always am,” Luke wants to say something else, but Danfroth hurries past him and he’ll be damned if he's not ready first, “Bye Jules.”

He holds on for a few more seconds, to see if she’s going to say anything more but it’s just static and their breathing and a click as they hang up.

//

His first year at the station there had been a massive ten car pile up on I-5 where the Hollywood freeway decided to join the party. It had been a lot of broken glass and people calling for help and a car hanging over the edge as others started burning. Luke doesn’t remember many of the details of the night. Except that he kind of remembers all of it.

Because his brain hates him and insists on keeping hold of all the traumatic moments in his life no matter how hard he tries to forget them.

He remembers being frozen at first. Gripping the strap of the bag he’d been told to hold as people bumped into him as they’d got straight to work. He’d been 21 and a probie and suddenly thinking he’d made the wrong career choice. He’d been seconds away from bolting when he’d heard a small voice calling for help. And Luke had blinked. Sucked in a breath of cold air and got to work.

It had been a series of reassuring smiles and telling people to cover their eyes and trying to ignore the way some people were covered in more blood than what was left in their bodies. He hadn’t had to deal with the worst of it, not really, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still sometimes wake up having dreamt of blood on roads and pulling people from cars before they blew up.

Now, as he closes the door of the engine and snaps the strap on his helmet closed, Luke thinks he’ll be dreaming of this call for a long time to come. On the plus side, at least this one was taking place in daylight.

“The hell happened?” he mutters.

“Truck lost a wheel and took out three cars in front of them and then another four behind. I think the rest are just collateral damage,” Danforth shrugs as he passes by Luke to open one of the side hatches on the engine.

Something about the way he says it rubs Luke the wrong way but he doesn’t have time to figure it out because Harrison comes up to give them assignments and he’s grabbing the jaws of life and heading into the chaos and the mess.

There’s a moment of calm between him helping get a young man out of a car and arguing with someone from a different station about not scaring already scared people by saying they’re going to cut trapped limbs off, where Luke manages to take a moment to breathe. There’s sweat coating the back of his neck and he knows if he looks close enough he’ll spot blood on his gloves but that's a problem for future him. Right now all he wants is a cold breeze to blow across the freeway and to not see an other person stuck in their car.

“Can we get some help over here please!” Someone shouts and Luke rolls his neck, pushes away from the wrecked car he’d been leaning against and heads towards the voice.

The first thing he sees is a car on its side with something leaking from somewhere it shouldn’t and knows they don’t have long before it makes a bigger problem. The second thing he sees is someone with strangely familiar curls kneeling over a body surrounded by an awful lot of glass.

“We’re gonna need a medic over here!” He calls over his shoulder before closing the distance with a jog and dropping into a crouch next to the young woman with her hands pressed into the side of an older man. Luke’s eyes track from his body to the car and the trail of blood and back to the woman's hands, coated in blood and arms that are shaking.

“Okay, we got him. Did you pull him ou— Julie!?” Luke’s hands falter for a moment as he reaches to replace the woman's hands with a wad of gauze as he finally has a chance to glance up at her face and realises the familiar curls were familiar for a reason. There’s blood on her sweatshirt and a streak across her cheek that’s disturbed by tear tracks and Luke remembers the first time he’d met her, crouching behind her sofa with tears on her cheeks, holding a bag full of song books and photos to her chest, and looking terrified.

She looks scared right now, but not like she had then, a different kind of scared that comes from not knowing if you’re doing enough to save someone.

“I— I pulled him out because the car is leaking gas and I didn’t—” she pauses to suck in a breath, hands balling into fits as she tries to steady them and Luke takes the pause to run his eyes over her and check for any injuries. But she seems fine, which is the important part right now. Well that and doing his job.

“Hey, we got him,” he ducks his head to catch her eyes and waits until she lets out a shallow breath and nods, “You need to go get checked out by a paramedic.”

“I’m fine, it's— it’s not my blood. I wasn’t in the crash, I just got out to help,” she trails off as her eyes follow the path of a pair of paramedics hands that come into view, taking over his job of putting pressure on the wound and Luke rocks back on his heels to let someone else take his place.

“Come on Jules,” he puts one hand on her elbow and slowly pulls her up as he stands too, moving them both out of the way so the paramedics can do their jobs. He waits until they’re lying down a backboard and Julie can see that he’s breathing. That he’s alive they’ve done all that they can and Luke practically feels the breath she lets out, shoulders dropping and her hands finally uncurling as she lets him pull her further away from the scene.

“You’re okay?” Julie asks as they come to a stop near his station's engine, hands reaching out for him only to seem to notice the blood and stop half in the air, and Luke can’t stop the half scoffed laugh that comes out of his throat as he unclips his helmet to pull it off his head to see her better.

“I should be asking you that,” he mutters, raising a hand up only to remember he’s still wearing his gloves and starts to pull one off before trying again, letting his palm cup her cheek, thumb brushing gently over her cheek and taking some of the blood with him. “What were you doing out there? You could have been hurt.”

“That guy was hurt and he needed help,” Julie shrugs a little as she looks up at him with a small twitch of her lips, leaning her cheek in his hand as her lips brushing slightly against the skin of his wrist as she speaks, “You’re out here every day risking your life, Luke. All I did was drag a guy from a car and try to stop him bleeding out.”

“Probably saved his life is what you did,” he blows out a breath and tries to send all his worries and concerns with it. He wonders if this is how his family and friends feel everyday he goes off to work, because it kinda sucks, maybe he should apologise to his mom later. Luke opens his mouth to say something before being cut off.

“Patterson! We got another call, come on,” Harrison interrupts, shooting a quick smile at Julie before looking at him and nodding towards the engine.

“Are you okay to drive? I can get someone to drop you off at mine?” He’s pretty sure someone around here owes him a favour, or he can see if Willie’s free or—

“I’m fine to drive but you’re not going to be finished for four hours. I don’t want to be intruding or anything,” there’s a small frown between her brows that makes Luke grin and want to kiss it away. So he does. He presses his lips to her forehead, and rests like that for a second, two, three.

“They won't get this all cleared for a while but they’ll let you turn around and my place is back the way you came,” he points out as he pulls back a little to be able to see her eyes better, “So, you go back to mine, feel free to use one of Reg’s bath bombs if you want, raid the cupboard next to the fridge for some of Willie’s cookies. Relax. Plus you know where the spare key is, and Reg should be back at about five so if you can’t find anything he’ll be there to help.”

“You sure it’s okay?”

“Go. I’ll be back by eight. Promise. I love you.

They stand like that for a few more seconds, his hand on her cheek and staring into each other's eyes in a way that he’s sure is going to get him teased later on. And then Harrison calls his name again and he rolls his eyes to make Julie laugh and press a quick kiss to his lips. Before he leaves her, he catches someone from the 97 and asks them to make sure she gets out fine. And Julie rolls her eyes at him, but he simply shrugs as he starts to walk backwards with a grin.

It’s not until he’s sat in his seat, headset on and clutching his helmet that he realises he’s just said he loves her. Oh fuck.

//

As the door clicks shut behind him the first thing Luke notices is Hotdog waiting by the pile of shoes for him like she does every Tuesday when he gets home. 

The second is the smell of onions and garlic, which means Alex is home and cooking dinner and he hadn’t realised how hungry he was.

The third thing is the sound of Julie’s laughter mixing with Reggie’s and Willies and Alex’s voice trying to sound offended. And Luke smiles to himself as he kicks off his shoes, drops his bag and bends down to pick up Hotdog, fingers scratching under her chin as he thinks about how all of this is something he could get very used to.

Plus, if Julie’s here it means he hadn’t scared her off with his spontaneous declaration earlier. Which is good.

“...found her behind the bookcase in Reggie’s room like, 3 hours later!” Alex finishes saying as Luke strolls into the kitchen with said hide and seek champion in his arms.

“Are we talking about the first or the second time Reg couldn’t find her?” He asks leaning his elbow on the back of the chair Julie is sitting in and drops a quick kiss to her lips as she turns her head to smile up at him. She’s retied her hair up and all traces of smoke and sweat and blood are gone from her skin, leaving her smelling like peaches, so Luke’s going to guess she took him up on the bath bomb offer.

“Hey,” he whispers as he pulls away to run his eyes over her face, pretty sure she’s doing the exact same thing to him.

“I’m still fine. Better even. You have a really great bath,” she says, quite enough that only he hears, and he definitely doesn’t miss the suggestive tone that makes him bite his lip before he says something not appropriate for present company. Instead he settles for poking her lightly between the shoulder blades and letting his fingers trail up from her shoulders to her neck to idly play with a loose curl at the nape of her neck. Biting down on the smirk that’s threatening to take over his face, Luke turns his attention back to his boys and the times Reggie has lost their cat.

“Wait, you lost her more than once?” Willie stares pointedly at Reggie who pauses in his cutting up of vegetables to smile a little sheepishly at them all.

“Hey, Alex is the one who freaked out thinking she was blind when she just didn’t give a fuck about the laser pointer!”

“That’s not even—” Alex starts, turning around and pointing his spoon at Reggie only to sigh and shake his head before turning to look at Luke with a raised brow and a look in his eyes that he doesn’t understand in relation to his next words, “Okay, moving on. Put out many fires today?”

Luke rolls his eyes at him because ever since he’d started his firefighter training six years ago Alex had been asking him the same question every night he came home. It was tradition at this point. So he adjusts his position so Hotdog can jump from his arms to the ground and make her way over to Willie before he answers so he has full range of movement for his dramatic retelling of his day. He only gets as far as lifting one arm to point at his friends before he’s cringing and lowering it again, instead holding up his index finger and nodding towards the bathroom.

“Actually, let me shower first. There was a whole incident with vinegar at a store earlier,” he waves away confused looks and drops one eye in a wink as he starts to back out of the room, “All will be answered soon.”

He tries to shower quickly, but gets caught up in scrubbing his hands through his hair and letting the hot water pound on the tight muscles on his back for longer than he’d like to admit. Someone he’d carried down five flights of stairs had once told him that he carried too much tension in his shoulders, like he was carrying a bunch of burdens and shit that he needed to let go. At the time he’d just said it was because his equipment was heavy. Now he’s starting to think that they might have been on to something.

Only problem is that he doesn’t really know what his burdens are or how to let them go so he just keeps ignoring them in hope they’ll sort themselves out.

Turning the water off and wrapping a towel around his waist Luke wipes condensation off the mirror as he grabs another towel to rub over his hair quickly, pushing still damp strands out of his eyes. He can still hear the boys talking faintly in the kitchen and doesn’t have a chance to wonder where Julie might be when he picks up a voice singing from his room. It’s something from a musical he thinks, something that she’s been working on with the kids she teaches for the last few weeks and Luke feels bad for them because how could they possibly compare to her voice?

Luke leans his shoulder against the doorframe, arms crossed on his bare chest as he watches Julie move around the other side of his room, picking through the books and cd’s he has stacked haphazardly on a bookshelf. She has her head tilted a little to the side as she reads the spine of something, shoulders moving up and down as she skips through a verse to hit the chorus again, hips swaying in a pair of his dark jogging bottoms that she’s had to turn up several times at the bottom. He hadn’t realised before that she was wearing his clothes, that she must have relaxed in the bath and then rooted through his drawers to find his softest pants and comfiest looking t-shirt. It must be a newish one, he thinks, because it’s still got sleeves attached and he can’t recognise it from the back. God he kind of loves to see her in his clothes.

The frame of the door starts to dig a little uncomfortably into his shoulder and he hisses a little as he pushes away, grabbing Julie’s attention who looks over her shoulder at him her mouth turning up into an almost coy smile as her eyes track down his body. His eyes brows raise a little as he grins back at her, pushing further away from the door to walk towards her only too falter as she fully turns around and —

Luke sucks in a sharp breath as he finally gets to see the t-shirt she’s wearing. He had forgotten he still had it. Cheap white material that was soft until you washed it once and it turned like paper, but when they’d been sixteen with their only money coming from allowances and busking, it was the best they could afford. He can still remember Reggie spending painstaking hours designing their logo, testing out different versions of the curve and font styles before settling on that one. And then the three of them spent even more hours carefully transferring the logo onto cheap t-shirts.

He hadn’t really thought about those t-shirts for a long time. He didn’t know if the others even still had any left. He didn’t know why he even still had one. The thing hadn’t fit him in years, like the second he’d given up on singing and music the t-shirt had grown too small for him. Or he’d just grown too big for it.

“Are you okay?” Julie asks, and he doesn’t know when she has moved, but suddenly she’s in front of him and Luke is getting a clear, up close view of his old band's shirt on her. 17 year old Luke would be losing his mind at the sight. Actually, 24 year old Luke is kind of losing his mind at the sight.

“Yeah just—” his voice cracks a little and he swallows, trying not to notice the way she’s biting her lip to stop a smile, “Not seen that t-shirt in a long time.”

“Oh?” she hums looking down at her chest, pulling slightly at the hem so she can see the logo a bit better before looking back up at him from beneath her lashes, “Reggie did say you might be a little surprised by it. I can take it off if you want?”

Fuck. He kind of wants to kill his friends for not warning him. Kind of wants to not be thinking about anyone but Julie for the next half an hour at least.

“It looks much better on you then it did on any of us,” he mutters, one hand coming up to lightly trace the lettering across the fabric.

“So you want me to keep it on?”

“Did they say how long dinner would be?” He asks as his fingers move from tracing the letters to up following the curve of her collarbone gently, lips ticking up on one side as she shivers.

“Twenty minutes,” she breathes, arching her neck to give his fingers more skin to explore and letting her breath fan across his lips as her fingers drop to the edge of his towel, using a fingernail to trace his hip bone. He’d want to talk about what he said earlier, to see if she felt the same but there’d be time for talking later.

“Keep the shirt on.”

FOUR

Luke really fucking hates working nights.

It’s a fact Alex is always laughing at him for, because of them all he’s always had the worst sleeping habits, had always been known to be up in the middle of the night doing something else. But that was by choice. This is because he needs money to pay rent and buy food and take Julie on nice dates.

Which is his newest reason for hating working nights.

He misses spending time with Julie. Being on opposite schedules really fucking sucks.

At this point he’d even take just getting to hug her, to watch something crappy on tv and fall asleep together in the same bed.

Logically, Luke knows that Harrison hadn’t been aware of what stage his relationship with Julie was at, but a part of him truly believes she had scheduled his turn of nights just as they’d gotten past that awkward stage of not knowing if they could stay over at each others place and where hitting the stage of leaving a toothbrush and saying ‘I love you’ when they said goodbye. And hello. And just anytime one of them felt like it.

Harrison couldn’t have known, but he’s going to blame her for not getting to see his girlfriend in daylight for the last week anyway. And when he starts to feel bad for blaming Harrison he’ll find a way to blame Danforth instead.

“You’re extra grumpy today,” Alex comments as he stirs something in a pot on the stove, watching the way Luke dumps cream into this coffee and grunting at the way his favourite bowl is still dirty in the sink from yesterday.

“I hate the night shift,” he mutters, giving up on his hunt for cereal and pulling a box of leftover pasta from the fridge instead.

“If you wait five minutes you can have some of this.” Luke doesn’t even have a chance to say anything before Alex is pulling the container away from him and is left with no other choice but to wait.

“Something is smelling good!” Reggie breezes into the kitchen with the air of someone who has been up for hours and is preparing to wind down for the evening. Luke kind of wants to throw something at him for it, and might have tried if he didn’t spot a ball of fur purring away on his shoulder, “What’s going on with Mr McPouty?”

“He’s not seen Julie in a week. I think he’s having withdrawals,” Alex whispers loudly as he spoon what Luke thinks is risotto into a bowl and slides it across to him.

“Can’t say I blame him, we went for coffee yesterday between classes? Man Julie’s so cool! And did you know her dad's this, like, semi famous photographer?” Reggie gushes and it takes everything in Luke not to pout even more at the fact Reggie got to hang out with Julie and he didn’t, “She says hi by the way.”

“Fuck off,” he mutters, flipping Reggie off as he starts laughing and pulling a fork out of the drawer closest to him, it does nothing to dissuade his boys from their laughter and Luke can’t find it in himself to care.

He’s tried and he misses Julie. He’s allowed to be grumpy about it.

“Anyway, you can’t talk to me about being grumpy. Remember when Willie went to that competition thing in San Diego and you didn’t see him for two days?” Luke points his fork at Alex and is rewarded with him having the decency to flush a little at the memory.

“Oh yeah! You lonely baked like, fifty cupcakes!” Reggie grins, snapping his fingers and leans in to whisper to Hotdog, “Two of your parents are lovesick fools. But it’s okay, because Julie and Willie are super cool. I’m sorry I didn’t properly prepare you though, I thought we’d have more time.”

“If I wasn’t so tired I’d take offence at you insinuating we’d never get partners,” Luke grumbles, shoving a fork full of risotto into his mouth and shooting Reggie a half hearted sort of glare.

“Well I’m not tired so I take full offence to it! And stop lying to Hotdog about us!” Alex steps away from the stove, picking up some cooked chicken to toss towards Hotdog, grinning at the way Reggie sputters in protest as she tries to climb his face to catch them.

He knows Alex and Reggie are still bickering around him but he lets it all fade into the background as he eats and thinks about what Reggie had said. Because he wasn’t strictly wrong. Luke's last serious relationship had been at least four years ago and had lasted a month before things had just...fizzled out. And yeah there’d been the occasional girl since, but nothing serious. Nothing like what he felt for Julie.

She made him want to pick up a pen and write again. She made him want to look at old dreams he’d pushed aside out of fear. Which was a kind of terrifying thought in itself. Because Luke hadn’t thought about that dream of standing on a stage and playing music he wrote and making a connection to everyone in a long time. Not since he’d left the hospital after a house fire and the first time he’d tried to sing a month later his throat had felt like it was bleeding. So he’d pushed that dream down and found a new one and had avoided looking at it ever since.

Until Julie.

With her stunning voice and captivating laugh and blinding smile. Until she’d dragged him to a silly open mic night and handed him a guitar and just asked him to back her up.

Luke hadn’t told the boys about it.

That he’d stood on a stage and played while a crowd cheered. He didn’t know what it meant. Wasn’t even sure if it could be classed as progress if he hadn’t actually sang anything. But playing something for someone that wasn’t him was something, right?

He chews thoughtfully at a piece of chicken and looks between Alex and Reggie who have moved on from bickering to discussing weekend plans. Maybe he should tell them, they’d probably have some helpful insight into his problems.

Or they might just call him dumb and point out it’s been seven years and his throat is fine and he’s not had any problems talking since two weeks after leaving the hospital and he’s just been a coward. Damn he needed to get Alex and his stupid logical voice out of his head.

“Dude,” Reggie cuts through his thoughts, frowning at his phone screen, “You’re gonna be late if you don’t get ready soon.”

Luke squints at the screen as Reggie turns it towards him and nearly chokes on the bite food in his mouth as he pushes out of his chair and picking up his bowl as he goes, “Fuck!”

//

Luke slams the door of the fire alarm panel shut as the beeping and sprinklers in the restaurant finally stop and he’s left with a slight ringing in his ear and water soaking into his back. Which is bad. Because it means he’s torn his coat at some point and is going to need to sort that out before their next call. He’s glad he found out on a false alarm rather than while being in a burning building though, better a slightly damp back to being burnt.

“Alarms off, I’m going to do a sweep through,” he holds down the button on his radio and waits for the crackling to die down and Harrisons voice to filter through a confirmation.

False alarms are his least favourite calls, which he knows is bad, but he likes a little action in his night. If he’s going to be stuck on the night shift he at least wants to be doing something more than opening storage closets to check there’s no one trying to wait out a fire.

He hums the theme tune of some 90’s sitcom he can’t remember the name of as he walks down the short corridor between the kitchen and the main dining area, glancing in the men's room and the ladies and pauses a moment too long as he looks in the disabled toilet.

The last time he’d been out for a meal it had been an awful group event that Alex had made them all go to for one of the waiters at his restaurant. The food had all been weirdly sticky and they kept playing a questionable remix of Bless the Broken Road and the biggest bright spot of the whole evening had been when everyone was wandering around talking, Julie had dragged him down a corridor and into a bathroom.

Letting the door shut, Luke lets out a slight groan as he moves away from the corridor and back towards the main entrance. As if he wasn’t missing Julie enough already. He just had to go and remember that evening.

“Place is clear. It looks like a wire got loose but they’ll need to get someone in to check all the detectors. It didn’t seem like the sprinklers were really doing their job in the kitchen,” Luke reports to Harrison once he’s outside and within earshot of her, taking his helmet off and running a hand through his hair as he comes to a stop beside her, glancing towards the crowd of people waiting behind cones and a man arguing with someone in a police uniform. Luke shakes his head at the sight of the man gesturing towards the building and back at himself as he unfastens his coat and shrugs it off his shoulders, “He doesn’t think he’s actually going to be able to reopen tonight does he?”

“Hm? Not our problem,” Harrison says without even looking up from whatever form she’s filling out, though she does lift her pen up and wave it to something over his shoulder, “There’s someone over there looking for you. You’ve got 15 before we’ll be ready to leave.”

With a frown Luke looks over his shoulder, but can’t see anyone that he knows and it’s as he turns back to tell Harrison that when she taps him on the ear with her pen and Luke gets the hint. He leaves his helmet and coat with her and is halfway to the taped line when he spots a face in the crowd that makes a smile split across his face.

“What are you doing here?” He asks, not even attempting to keep the widening smile off his face as he jogs to a stop beside the tape line where Julie is standing with an arm linked through Flynns.

“Well we were trying to have a nice dinner,” Flynn mutters, and Luke catches the way she wrinkles her nose as he pulls away after leaning over to kiss Julie quickly, but there’s a slight smile on her lips too. Which is always nice to see because winning over Flynn had felt like the biggest test of his life and some days he still wasn’t entirely sure if she liked him or not.

“Just karma for trying to eat anywhere that’s not Alex’s place,” he rocks back on his heels and crosses his arms over his chest, letting the thumb on his right hand hook under the suspenders and dragging it a little across his chest.

“I don’t want him to think that I’m interested in being his friend because he can get me a table at the last minute,” Julie says, a small furrow appearing between her brows and Luke can’t help but shake his head with a laugh.

“Trust me, Alex’s first rule of friendship is don’t eat at crappy places that don’t get their fire alarms checked regularly.”

“That sounds more like your rule,” Flynn points out and she’s raising an eyebrow as she looks at him in a way that sends him back to being fifteen and put on the spot in a maths class.

Before Luke can formulate a reply Julie is shaking her head at her friend with a laugh and Luke’s eyes are drawn back to her, “No. Luke’s first rule of friendship is that you need to be able to name at least one band or artist from the 80’s. Quickly followed by knowing where all your fire exits are.”

“Just like to make sure people know the classic,” he shrugs, lips curving into a smile as realises just how well Julie knows him, and how much she remembers from their first date too.

“Ugh. You two are annoyingly cute,” Flynn mutters which is only when Luke notices that Julie’s been smiling back at him. But he can’t find it in himself to care how annoyingly cute they might look, he’s not seen her in a week and has to go back to work in less than five minutes. He’s gonna stare at her like the lovesick fool his friends accuse him of being.

//

A yawn creeps up his throat as he balls up his t-shirt and throws it into his bag, rolling out his neck as he reaches for the navy hoodie from inside his locker, foregoing another t-shirt in order to speed up the process of getting home and going straight to bed. He has plans to sleep for the next forty-two hours and only answer his phone for Julie, or his mom if she rings more then twice.

Heaving a breath he slips his hands through the arms of his hoodie and has it half lifted up to his head when a shiver runs up his back as someone traces a spiral pattern up his bare back.

“Hi,” a voice whispers behind him and Luke feels a sudden spike of energy at the sound of her voice. Enough to slip his arms the rest of the way into his hoodie and pull it over his head, he can feel Julie tugging at the hem at his neck, pulling it down to the waistband on his jeans and he tries not to be sad at the lack of her touch.

“Hey,” he finally replies as he turns around, eyes sweeping across her face and the casual leggings and too big band shirt that he’s pretty sure is his that she’s wearing, “You’re up early.”

“Mhm,” she smiles up at him, and it’s sweet and simple and lights up Lukes life in more ways than he’ll ever be able to express to her in words. “Thought I’d come pick you up. See if you maybe wanted to grab a little breakfast before you vanish into your bed.”

If it was anyone else asking him, Luke is pretty sure he’d give them a flat out no and grumble about people being too cheery in the morning. But it’s been five months and he loves her and he’s not been able to say no yet. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to say no to her. Luke blinks as that thought settles within him.

Spending his life being unable to say no to Julie. He really likes the sound of that.

Completely unaware of the sudden life epiphany he’s experienced, Julie has zipped up his bag and is holding it, eyebrow raised as she looks at him. Waits for him. And Luke pushes all thoughts so the future aside for now, he’ll deal with them later and focuses on the now. On how easily Julie slips her hand into his when he offers it to her, how simple it feels to tug her a little closer and drop a kiss to her forehead before they leave the locker room.

“So you're gonna buy me pancakes, right?” He asks as he waves at one of the engine drivers already busy readjusting his seat for the day.

“I’ll even treat you to an extra topping,” she teases and Luke wrinkles his nose at her even as a smile pulls at his lips.

FIVE

“Hey so uh, I have to ask you something,” Luke started, eyes following the hands of the paramedic as they checked her over for any injuries. But, much like all the previous times, Julie seemed perfectly fine. Which was part of his problem. Or not problem. But his concerns. Because this was the fifth fire his station had been called out to that Julie had been at the scene for. And yeah okay maybe asking her while she was sitting on the sidewalk after running out a burning building wasn’t his best move but he’d been holding off on asking for a while and it just sorta slipped out.

“Are you—”

“You’re all good here, just keep with that oxygen for a little longer for me and then we’ll clear you to go,” the paramedic says, giving her arm a single pat before nodding to him and walking away.

“Julie, are you an arsonist!?” He blurts the question out before he can stop himself, and he watches with mounting embarrassment as Julie removes the oxygen mask from her face — slight indents in her cheeks that he’d want to smooth away if he hadn’t just accused her of a crime — and eyebrows halfway to her hairline.

“Excuse me?” she rasps and Luke winces from the hurt look in her eyes.

“I just—” he starts, waving his arms around them to try and encompass where they are. The store that’s still on fire, the firefighters still trying to get it under control, the people being treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation. “This is like the fifth time you’ve been at a fire! And I love you, you know I love you but I just gotta know if I should be covering for you or something here!”

For a moment Julie doesn’t say anything, just stares at him with her wide brown eyes and lips slightly parted and a little smudge of dirt across her chin. And then she laughs, throwing her head back against his shoulder and eyes shut tight as her body shakes with the force of it. Which does nothing to calm Luke’s fraying nerves about dating an arsonist, but does a lot to make him want to smile at the sight of her joy. Even if it’s maybe tinged with a little insanity.

“You’d really cover for me if I was an arsonist?” She asks after she calms her laughter and regains her breath.

“I mean...yeah,” he shrugs, rubbing one hand at the back of his neck as he smiles at her, a little sheepishly as he tries his best not to dislodge her head from where it’s resting.

“Luke, you’re very sweet and I love you too,” she reaches out a hand and wiggles her fingers at him and Luke barely even hesitates before he’s putting his hand in hers, fingers interlocking and rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand as he waits for her to carry on, “But I promise, I’m not an arsonist. I just seem to have really bad luck when it comes to places with faulty wiring.”

He’s silent for a moment as he lets her words register in his mind. Not an arsonist. Just bad luck. God, he’s so dumb.

“And!” she continues, sitting up straight again and poking a finger of her free hand into his cheek and snatching it away quickly before he has a chance to bite it, “You’re not even on duty today! I wouldn’t have even been in that store if you hadn’t been running late because you had to help Reggie with something.”

“Ah so it’s Reggie’s fault then,” Luke agrees and is rewarded by Julie huffing a laugh as she drops her head back to his shoulder, her hair tickling his cheek as he rests it against the top of her head. He gently reaches over to reattach the oxygen mask to her face as they sink back into a comfortable silence.

Luke thinks back to an hour ago, when he’d been hovering over Reggie’s shoulder and trying to help him work out the issue with a song he was helping to produce. He thinks about the look of shock and then excitement that had taken over his best friend's face at the sight of him scratching out a rough arrangement on his notes. How it had been the first time outside of drunken nights — and a dark crappy bar’s creaky stage for an open mic night — that he’d played anything on his guitar for someone.

When Luke had sworn off music, out of what he can now recognise as fear, he’d never really stopped to think what it meant for the people around him. At the time, he’d thought his mom was just still trying to keep the peace whenever she’d asked why he didn’t play anymore, had thought Alex and Reggie were happy for an excuse to not follow him on his quest for connections with the world, had thought that maybe music wasn’t for him.

He had never thought maybe they missed him playing as much as he had loved it.

And then he’d met Julie and that part of his brain that he’d shut off had exploded with lyrics and melodies and chords he hadn’t thought about in years. He still hadn’t sung, still wasn’t sure if he could, but Luke was starting to think maybe not being able to sing was okay if he could grab his guitar and finally express his feelings through music again. Some of them at least, he turns his head a little to press a kiss into Julie’s hair before resting his cheek back in the same spot.

“I’m sorry I was late,” he whispers, “And that I accused you of being an arsonist.”

“I’ll forgive you,” she mutters, the sound a little lost by the mask but he doesn’t miss the way her lips are pulled up into a smile, “If you buy me pancakes.”

//

“Okay what about this one?” Luke asks as he holds up a vinyl, The Bangles staring out at them from under their big hair and questionable bangs of the Manic Monday era.

“I’m trying to find some music from this century,” Julie rolls her eyes at him as she pushes his hand down and Luke pouts at her, which only earns him another eye roll.

“But you’re going to need some of the old classics too! You did say you lost most of your music in the fire,” he points out, slipping the vinyl into the small growing collection under his arm with a sweet smile at her. If she’d wanted someone to suggest modern music she had to have known he was the wrong person to bring shopping.

“You know there’s this thing called spotify? It’s amazing, it has like, all the music you could possibly want on it,” she teases as she leans in a little and Luke can’t help but do the same, wrinkling his nose as he pretends to look lost.

“Never heard of it, guess you’ll just have to come home with me later and show me how to use it,” his eyes glance down at her lips before slowly trailing back up to her eyes in time to see her rolling them again, though he also notices the slight flush to her cheeks and grins.

“Only if you help me find the records on my list,” she whispers, and for a moment Luke thinks she’ll close the distance between them and press her lips to his and is so distracted with the thought that he misses the way her hand comes up to push at his chest, sending him rocking back on his heels and Julie sliding past him.

“Tease,” he mumbles and Julie laughs from behind him, already moving through the rows and looking for things on her list. Things she lost in the fire, things she’s just always been on the lookout for. And Luke here’s to try and help her find them. But he’s also here for an ulterior motive and uses Julie’s distraction of looking through the r&b to head towards the other side of the store where he knows they keep the unsorted second hand stuff.

He’d started his hunt a few months ago, stopping by various music stores and second hand places to look around and ask the staff to let him know when they get a new stock of vinyls or tapes. So far he’d not had much luck. But he was feeling confident about today. He’d played music for Reg and Julie wasn’t an arsonist and Willie was ‘stealing’ them some of his uncles cheesecake for tonight. So today was the day he was going to find it. And it would be the best housewarming gift for when Julie moved into her new place next month.

And he really hopes he can find it because his back up plan is a plant of some kind and that just feels too cliche.

He shifts through copies of The Beatles and The 1975 and a shocking number of The Zombies which is something he’ll be thinking about later. He’s down to the last few vinyls in the crate and close to heaving a sigh when he flips back the second to last one and grins. Purple petals falling onto the upturned faces of four women who are smirking up at their band name on a dark blue background. Pulling it out, Luke flips it over and skims the five songs on the back and bites his lip as he examines the small signs of wear and tear on the edges but otherwise seems fine. Almost perfect condition.

He just knew today was a good day!

“Luke!” Julie’s voice startles him out of his thoughts and he only just has enough time to slide the record between two others in his hands before she spots it as she runs up to his, fingers wrapping around his forearm as she tugs at him, “They have a photo booth! Come take some photos with me. Please?”

She looks up at him with wide eyes and everyone always tells him he has the best puppy dog eyes they’ve seen, but Luke thinks that’s just because they’ve never seen Julie’s. Not that she needs them. He’d say yes to anything she wanted. Which she knows.

“Only if we take the most cliche ones possible,” he lets himself be pulled towards the back of the store where an old fashioned photo booth with a red crushed velvet curtain is nestled between stacks of crates and t-shirts on a railing. Putting the records down on the edge of one of the crates Luke digs some change out of his pocket while Julie slides onto the bench, leaving a space for him to join her.

Her hair brushes against his shoulder as she leans forward to read the faded instructions and Luke hands her a couple of dollar bills before she can even reach for her own purse. There’s a whirring sound after she feeds them into the machine and the screen flickers a few times before a countdown starts and Julie lets out a gasp as he wraps an arm around her shoulders to pull her back just in time for the first flash.

“Oh fuck,” she laughs and flings her arms around his neck, smooching their cheeks together and now Luke’s laughing, their reflections showing two people a mess of hair and half closed eyes. By the third flash Luke has his face buried in her curls as his shoulders shake with laughter while Julie tells him to get it together between her own giggles.

“Shall we try that again?” He asks after the last flash and the whirring has stopped and they’ve managed to calm their laughter down.

“I didn’t think it would be that quick!” Julie shakes her head, but fishes some more money out of her bag, tossing her hair over her shoulder as she sits up, “Okay. We need a plan this time around. Money in. A nice smiling one, a funny face, kiss on the cheek, classic peace sign. Got it?”

Julie waits for him to nod before leaning to put money in the machine again, and Luke honestly has every intention of following her plan. Smile, funny face, kiss on the cheek, peace. Cliche, just like he’d wanted. But as the countdown starts and Julie sits back, shoulder brushing against his as she smiles, he can’t help but turn to smile at her. At the way she’s tucked some curls behind her ear so he can see the butterfly earrings and the little stars that trail up from her seconds to her helix, at the collection of necklaces glinting at her throat, the chain of one resting below the pulse point on her neck that he knows makes her moan when he presses his lips against, the way her lips stretch into a smile that he knows if she was facing him he’d be able to see the little gap between her teeth.

A flash goes off and Luke licks his lips, mouth ticking up a little at the side as she turns to look at him with her eyebrows raised, “You were meant to be smiling.”

“I was,” he defends and proves his point by grinning at her, teeth sinking into his bottom lip as he tries to keep it in check.

“You’re not following the plan.” But she doesn’t seem to be too annoyed, even as the second flash lights up the booth and Luke knows they only have a few seconds before the third one goes off so he takes his chance and leans forward to capture her lips before she can say anything else.

They miss the third flash, and the forth.

When they leave the booth a few minutes later his hair is sticking up and his lips are a little swollen and Julie has to spend a few seconds readjusting her crop top so it’s no longer riding up. If the guy at the front counter had noticed them giggling or being in the booth for too long he doesn’t show it and Luke’s not about to push his luck.

“See, told you I was smiling,” he mutters as he looks over her shoulder to look at the two strips of photos in her hands, at the blurry giggling messes that they are in the first one and the heart-eyed cliche couple they are in the second. He’s starting to get what Alex, Reggie and Flynn mean about the way they look at each other.

“I’m going to go pay for these then we can go check out that place with the lamp you liked,” he says, pressing a kiss into her temple and reaching around her to pick up the records and gently pulls the second photo strip from her fingers, dropping her a wink as she turns to pout at him, “I’m going to put this one in my locker at work. They’re starting to run low on stuff to tease me about.”

Julie’s laugh follows him as he makes his way up to the counter where the guy doesn’t even blink at his messed up hair or the bruise he’s pretty sure is starting to show up on his collarbone given how tender it feels as he brushes past it to scratch his neck. Which is another thing for his friends to tease him about.

Luke grins at the strip of glossy photos in his hand. So worth it.

+ONE

As he waits for the shower water to heat up a little Luke taps out a quick reply to Julie promising he’ll be at her new place by two to help her move boxes and unpack. Which is all very exciting. He’d personally been round to check all the fire detectors and the wiring were up to code, and should anything happen, her new apartment was in his station's district so he’d be on the scene to help.

Apparently even Ray found that reassuring, and Luke was trying to not let that go to his head. His girlfriend's dad likes him. He thinks that’s pretty cool. Of course Ray had also taken up texting Reggie a lot which was a little weird but it was fine. He had bonus points of saving both his kids from fires.

Locking his phone he puts it on the counter, bobbing his head as a song from a tiktok plays in his head as he moves back over to the shower and stepping into the hot water.

He doesn’t really know what happens next.

One minute he’s lathering shampoo into his hair, head swaying from side to side and hips rocking in a circular motion as he hums along with the song in his head.

And then his mouth is opening and he’s singing.

“We're stuck where we are, with no house, no car. Castaways, ahoy, we are castaways,” his voice tails off as he starts humming again as he sticks his head under the shower stream to start rinsing off the shampoo. Only he only gets as far as leaning a little forward before he realises what’s just happened.

“Holy shit!” he sputters, stumbling a step backwards and wiping water out of his eyes only to wince and swear again as he rubs shampoo into them. Fumbling, he reaches for the face cloth he knows is somewhere nearby and wipes at his eyes again, blinking and heart racing.

For a moment the only thing he can hear is the water hitting tiles and his heart racing in his chest and that damn song still playing on a loop in his head. Swallowing, Luke sucks in a breath and tests his voice out again. He hasn’t sung anything in seven years but he can still remember the lyrics to Now or Never like he’d written them yesterday and as he pushes himself off the wall his fingers absentmindedly start picking out the chords as the words breeze out of him.

Like they’d just been waiting on the tip of his tongue all this time. And fuck, he really does feel like he’s been hit with an electric hammer to the heart with how fast his is beating right now.

He knows exactly what happens next. He acts on instinct. And instinct tells him he has to tell someone else.

Not stopping to turn the water off, or even grab a towel, Luke jumps out of the shower, fingers scrambling with the lock on the door before he can jank it open and then he’s running down the corridor, bare feet slipping on wood.

“Boys!” He shouts, skidding to a stop in the doorway of the living room, chest still heaving as he bends over a little to catch his breath. Pushing wet — and still soapy — hair out of his face, Luke turns a wide grin at the three pairs of wide eyes watching him from the sofa. He hadn’t known Willie was here. But that’s fine. Willie’s practically family, they’re all just waiting for one of them to propose at this point.

“Uh Luke—” Reggie starts, eyes firmly on his face even as his hand waves in the general direction of his legs, but Luke doesn’t have time to worry about dripping water on the floor right now.

“Boys. I sang again.” It’s a statement. A sentence that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. That wouldn't be a big deal or cause for celebration.

But Alex and Reggie had been there after the fire, after the doctors had told him to rest his voice, after he’d tried once and refused to do it since. It had been Alex and Reggie who he’d blown up at one day after school at 17 when they’d suggested going out for the school talent show as an attempt to help him. It was Alex and Reggie who have been with him every song-less day since.

So they get it.

“Holy shit,” Alex whispers, standing up from the couch at the same moment that Reggie vaults over it, both of them grinning just as wide as Luke is sure he is.

“And your voice, it was…” Reggie trails off, but his eyebrows wiggle and Luke gets the point.

“I don’t want to brag but I think a seven year vocal rest might have possibly made me sound better,” he shrugs one shoulder, but the calm, cool and casual air he’s trying to project is totally ruined by the way he’s practically bouncing in place. He feels jittery, his fingers itching for strings, mind racing with years worth of lyrics he’s suppressed.

“We told you!” Alex slaps his hand on his bicep, only to cringe as he wipes his now wet hand on his jeans.

“Dude you are so naked right now,” Willie laughs from his place on the couch, and Luke can’t help it, he drops one eye in a wink and dodges out of the way of Alex’s fist, which only makes Willie laugh more, “Happy for you though man. On the singing again. Does this mean the band is back together?”

The three of them look at each other, eyebrows raised and smiles stretched and Luke doesn’t know. But he does know that something has shifted back into place inside him. Like he’d been walking around a little off balance, not enough to really notice it until he’d been righted.

“How about we discuss future band plans when you’ve washed the shampoo out of your hair,” Reggie suggests, and Luke’s not self conscious about being naked in their living room, but he is starting to feel a little cold.

“Good plan. And then I need to get to Jules’ to help move furniture,” he points once at Reggie, and then at Alex as he starts walking backwards down the corridor, “And then we can get this band back together.”

The bathroom has filled with steam by the time he gets back, and the water is a little too hot, but Luke doesn’t care as he jumps back under the stream and finally washes the shampoo from his hair as he sings through Now or Never twice.

//

The second he steps through the door Luke knocks into a bed frame and only just manages to catch it before it topples on to him, raising an eyebrow at Julie who’s grimacing at him from the other side, “I say we move the bed first.”

Her eyebrows shoot up and she rests one hand on her hip, “Oh?”

“Not for— I just meant before it knocks someone out! Not for that,” his eyes trail down her body, at the denim shorts and plain purple t-shirt she’s tied up to making to a crop top that expose just a little of her skin, and he can’t help but grin, “Not yet at least.”

“You grab that end? And try not to drag it on the floor, I don’t want to scratch them,” she says, hands wrapping around one side of the frame and tilting her head at him until he follows suit. There’s a lot of awkward pulling and lifting and bumping into stacks of boxes with Julie’s neat writing scrawled along the sides. Then they spend a solid few minutes struggling to fit the thing through her bedroom doorway until they do some pivoting and silly impressions of Ross from friends that does little to help but make them laugh.

“Okay, okay,” Luke pants, resting against the wardrobe that’s already in the room and looking around, “I’ve lifted weights in the gym that were easier to move then that thing.”

“My tia says a sturdy bed frame is always a must have,” Julie grins at him from where she’s sat on the floor, with her legs outstretched and Luke wrinkles his nose at her before pushing away from the wardrobe to offer her a hand up.

“Come on, let's get the rest of your boxes into the correct rooms and we can test out this sturdy bed frame your tia recommended,” he pauses after pulling her up, the lack of distance between them meaning he has to look down at her as his brows pull together in a frown, “Wait that sounded weirder than I meant.”

“Just a little,” she agrees, nose wrinkling and reaching up on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around his neck and kisses him. It’s soft and quick, like they’ll have forever for something more. And then she pulls away, hands sliding down his shoulders to his biceps, “Can you move the boxes for the kitchen and I’ll get the ones for the bathroom?”

//

It’s a few hours later when all the boxes that had been stacked by the front door are spread out in the correct rooms and they’re sitting surrounded by pieces of wood and nails that are supposed to make an ikea table.

What Luke is learning from it is that Julie is not very good at flat pack furniture.

“It says the weird squiggly one goes into the inside holes at the bottom! But I can’t find any holes and the weird squiggly things won't turn!” she whines, jabbing the screwdriver in the direction of the half built table and waving the instructions at him like he’s personally written them.

“Well uh might help if you turn it the other way around,” he suggests, fingers wrapping around one of the legs and rotating it so the side that had been facing him and is now facing Julie and she can see the holes she was missing. The flush in her cheeks darkens a little as her mouth opens to form a silent ‘oh’ and Luke grins, stretching an arm out to pry to the screwdriver from her fingers. “How about we take a break from building furniture, have some lunch? I’m no Alex but I know how to fry an egg and bacon.”

Julie heaves a sigh, head falling into her hands and then pushing her hair out of her face as she looks back up at him with a tired smile, “I can go and grab us some coffees?”

“Sounds like a plan,” he smiles at her, pushing up onto his knees and kissing her cheek before pushing up further on to his feet with a groan and then offering Julie a hand up too.

“Try not to burn my new apartment down while I’m gone,” she taps her fingers against this chest and then picks up her phone and moves towards the front door to find her shoes.

“Think you’ll find you’re the arsonist in this relationship,” he calls after her, grinning as she laughs into the kiss that she blows to him before shutting the door. And then he’s in her apartment by himself. The place still feels a little empty and cold, with the only furniture in place being the sofa her dad and brother had helped carry up earlier and the bookcase against the wall that connects to the second bedroom. But Luke had caught a glimpse of her old apartment, and had seen her room at her dad's house and knew that while Julie might not be good at putting furniture together she was really amazing at decorating a space and making it feel like home.

After rooting through one box to find a frying pan and a second to find a spatula, Luke grabs eggs and bacon and glances at the spinach that’s part of Victoria’s welcome package before ignoring it and turning back to the stove. He’s pretty sure she’s got a speaker or a radio in one of these boxes somewhere, but he doesn’t want to go rooting through her things. Not that he needs to, because he can make his own background music now and it’ll probably be better then anything on the radio too.

Idly, as he cracks open an egg, Luke wonders if maybe he’s a little too cocky inside his own head for someone who hasn’t sung a note in seven years but well, he’s never been known as the humble one in his friend group.

“You can't start a fire, you can't start a fire without a spark,” he sings, hips swaying as he pokes at the eggs, “This gun's for hire, even if we're just dancin' in the dark,” he mumbles through the next sentence as he flips a piece of bacon before throwing himself back into the song in full force, “Radio's on and I'm movin' 'round my place. I check my look in the mirror,” he sucks in a breath and raises the spatula up to his mouth like a makeshift microphone and scrunches his eyes shut as he almost growls the last sentence, “Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face!”

“Oh.”

If he hadn’t been gasping for a breath he might not have heard her. Because he certainly hadn’t heard her come back in, but as lowers his spatula and spins around he comes face to face with Julie clutching a tray of drinks and staring at him wide eyed.

“Uh, hi,” and, for some reason, he waves at her with the spatula while his other hand rubs at the back of his neck with a sheepish smile, “Sorry I uh, didn’t hear—”

“When did you start singing again?” She blurts out before he can finish his sentence and right. He hadn’t told her. He’d nearly gotten squished by a bed frame and forgotten about his news.

“Um like, six hours ago?” He shrugs, finally putting the spatula down and taking a step towards her, suddenly nervous in a way he hasn’t been since their first date.

“That was— you’re—” she trails off, eyes trailing over his face with something that looks like awe, but Luke doesn’t understand why. Shit maybe time has fucked with his brain and he actually sounds shit? Oh god is she going to break up with him for being a terrible singer?

“Fuck Luke, you never said you could sing!”

“Yes I did,” he frowns at her, “I said it on our first date that I used to sing and then I stopped because of a fire!”

“Yeah but I didn’t know you could sing like...that!” She shakes her head slightly, her smile widening as she puts the drinks down on the counter and closes the gap between them, arms reaching up to circle around his neck and Luke’s hands automatically rest on her waist, fingers brushing against the strip of skin above the waistband of her shorts and below her top.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she asks.

“Nearly got hit by a bed frame,” he shrugs and flexes his fingers against her waist when she giggles.

“This is big,” she breaths, and her smile softens a little and Luke’s eyes dip to her lips before going back to her eyes, “This is big, right? Because you sounded pretty amazing just now. And it really fucking hot too, but if this isn’t an exciting thing I can—”

“No this...it’s big and it’s exciting,” it’s his turn to cut her off with a shake of his head, and his fingers trail down her ass and trace the edge of the top of her back pocket before sliding in and squeezing, Julie rocks forward, mouth opening to say something but Luke takes his chance to put his lips against hers and find her tongue.

She moans into his mouth and Luke walks them backwards until the hand that’s on her waist hits the counter. He lowers his hand to tap her thigh, and without breaking apart she lifts her leg up to his hip and he hoists her up the rest of the way until he can balance her on the edge of the counter and get better leverage. Julie pulls away first, her breathing heavy and Luke smirks at her before trailing his lips up her jaw and down her throat, paying extra special attention to her pulse point on his way down.

“You really found me singing hot?” he whispers as he sucks at a spot just above her collarbone, nipping at her skin when she only moans instead of answers.

“You already know you're hot,” she groans, fingers in his hair and tugging gently until he gives in and lets her tug his head away from his attack at her collarbone and can reattach her lips to his. And Luke’s not about to complain about that either. Kissing Julie in any way is one of his favourite things. He pulls away first this time, pulling his hand free of her pocket and wrapping it around her thigh to push her further onto the counter. Her whine of protest at the lack of contact pulls a grin from his lips as he leans forward to kiss her again quickly, once, twice, and then runs his hands down her legs slowly as he pulls away again, head lowering back to the dip between her clavicle.

“Fire,” she whispers, and Luke grins against her skin because yeah, he kinda feels like he’s on fire right now too. Julie runs her fingers through his hair again, nails scratching at his scalp, “Luke. Fire.”

“I know, Jules, me too,” he mutters against her, lips moving up the other side of her collarbone and half wondering if she’d mind if he ripped her t-shirt and — “Ow!”

He pulls away sharply, eyes widening as he looks at her while one hand goes to his head to rub at the spot where she’d pulled at his hair too hard, “What was that for?”

“Fire!” Julie shouts and points over his shoulder. Where the stove is. Where Luke had been cooking before getting distracted. Where a small grease fire is now raging in the pan with eggs and bacon for fuel.

“Fuck,” he hisses, dropping his grip on Julie’s leg to lunge for the box of kitchen equipment to pull out a metal baking tray before turning back to the fire and slamming the tray on top, wincing at the heat but pushing through to turn the stove top off and push the pan to the back.

Hands on his hips, Luke blows out a breath and is about to ask if Julie is okay when he hears her burst out into laughter. Eyebrows raised, he turns to see her still on the counter top, fingers gripping the edge as her legs swing back and forth and she leans forward, “I thought I told you not to burn down my apartment?”

“Guess I’ll just have to find a way to make it up to you,” he chuckles and, checking the pan isn’t about to burst into flames again, turns his attention back to what he was doing with a little more attention to detail then before.

//

“I got you a gift,” he whispers much later after the sun has set and they’d ordered pizza and given up on building furniture to pile blankets and pillows on the floor of her living room to stretch out on. Julie turns her head from where it’s resting against his chest to look at him, eyebrows raised and a small smile playing on her lips.

“You got me a gift?” she repeats, “You didn’t have to get me anything.”

“I know but…,” Luke shrugs and gently dislodges her head so he can reach over to grab his boxers and slip them back on before getting up and padding across the apartment towards the front door to retrieve the wrapped box he’d left there earlier. By the time he’s padding back to their nest of blankets Julie is sitting cross legged and pulling her hair out of the neck of his t-shirt.

“It’s uh,” he rubs at the back of his neck as he sits back down, mirroring her position and carefully setting the box between them, it’s dark green paper rustling a little as Julie traces a finger down one edge, “Well you’ll see. And if you don’t like it or— or if it’s too much then that’s fine. I can uh I can take it back or something. But I just, you said it was important to you.”

There’s a quizzical sort of look on her face, brows furrowed and lips pursed as she pulls the box closer and finds the edge of the paper to unwrap it. Luke watches her face carefully as she pulls the paper free and then slowly lifts the lid off the box to see the record nestled in purple tissue paper underneath. Her hand freezes with the lid half in the air, and her lips part and fuck there’s tears in her eyes. He gives her a moment before tilting his head to try and catch her eyes, but they’re tracing over the cover art.

“Jules,” he whispers, though he doesn’t know what he’s going to say, if he should be apologising or comforting or what. “Is it too much?”

Julie blinks and Luke watches as a tear glides down her cheek and he aches to reach over and catch it but she’s closing her eyes, head shaking as a watery laugh bubbles past her lips.

“Where on earth did you find this?” She finally asks, turning eyes of unshed tears at him but she’s smiling so he’s going to guess happy tears.

“Remember that place with the photo booth?” He asks and shrugs when she nods, “I asked a bunch of people to let me know if they got any second hand vinyls in and well, just got lucky that day.”

“Dad looked everywhere to try and find another copy after the fire,” she whispers, and Luke sees her fingers shaking a little as she reaches out to trace the letters of Rose and the Petal Pushers on the cover before looking back up at him, “You’re— Thank you. This is...this is amazing Luke.”

“Good thing we dug your record player out, huh?” He nudges her knee with his own and nods towards the only table they managed to complete, where her TV and record player are set up and Julie wipes at her cheeks before reaching into the box and carefully pulling her mom's record out, holding it like it’s the most precious thing in her life. Which, he supposes it kind of is.

Julie pads across the room to put the record on the machine and set the needle and Luke watches her and thinks. He thinks about music and how it has always been such a large part of his life even when he couldn’t play it, couldn’t sing. How he’d once dreamt of filling his days like this, listening to songs sung by people who understood just how amazing music was. He thinks about how he’d given up on that dream and found a new one, but how he’d ended up back here anyway.

Luke thinks, as Julie sits down next to him, her arm wrapping around his waist, as his goes around her shoulders to pull her closer, his fingers making idle circles on her shoulder through the arm holes of his top, that maybe he was always going to end up here. With Julie in his arms and music playing around them.

He thinks maybe he has a couple of fires to thank for it too.

Luke's fingers are idly playing with one of Julie's curls as the her moms voice echoes around the apartment, drums fading into the background as a piano plays them out of the song and Luke's thinking about how much she sounds likes her, and how incredibly she'd sound singing this song when it hits him. It's sudden and harsh, like a hammer has just landed on his gut and he lurches forward pushing Julie up with him as she looks at him with wide eyes. 

"What? What's wrong?" Her hands hover in the air around his chest, like she's afraid she might hurt him by touching him. 

"The first song I sang after seven years was the stupid fucking Castaways song that people keep using on tiktoks," he whines, head falling into his hands and Julie's attempts at comforting him by rubbing at his shoulder is lost in the way her laugh replaces the music, both in her apartment and in his head.

[maybebanks]

Temper Temper

jj maybank x reader

⚠️: allusion to assault. please don’t read this if u get triggered by sexual assault mentions

“You look beautiful tonight,” JJ complimented, then leaned in to continue kissing you.

You giggled beneath his lips, “I don’t know. This is Sarah’s outfit..I don’t usually go for tube tops,”

“You look hot,” JJ smirked, and continued with you to make out.

The buttierflies in your stomach were so extreme you felt like you were going to explode. You and JJ had recently developed a thing, and now, you were both finally alone after a kegger.

Your hand cupped around his jawline and moved towards the back of his hair.

He suddenly decided to guide you somewhere else, you walked with him and realized he wanted you to go inside. John B’s place. John B wasn’t home of course.

“Are you sure..?” you began.

“Yeah..Shh!” he joked as he held your hand and pulled you into a bedroom there.

You walked in first, twiddling with your fingers as you assessed the bedroom.

JJ turned around and closed the door.

You tried to force a happy look on your face, but there were so many nerves. It’s just JJ.

You sat down on the edge of the bed. JJ turned on a dim light.

“You ready?” JJ smiled, sitting down next to you.

“Ready for what?” you said in confusion.

You and JJ locked eyes again, he brought his hand up to your face and tucked a piece of hair behind your ear.

Then he leaned in again, for a kiss.

You kissed him back again, moving your lips along with his while your hands rested on his shoulders.

His hand fell to your waist, causing you to tense slightly. He squeezed your skin slightly. And on instinct, you pulled away from his lips.

“Hey are you okay?” He asked, concern and confusion laced in his tone.

“I’m..yeah,” you said, adding a fake smile.

“Okay,” he smiled back, and leaned in to kiss again.

His hands met your waist again, and this time, he pulled you over him so that you were straddling him. You continued the kiss, moving back your hair.

You felt something wrong in your gut. But you didn’t want to disappoint JJ.

“I wanna do this so bad,” JJ smirked playfully.

He broke the kiss again to flip you over, so now your back was on the bed and he was in a push-up position on top of you.

“JJ...” you started a little uneasy in your voice.

“What is it babe?” JJ said as he pulled his shirt over his head by the neck.

You didn’t want him to get mad at you now.

“Nothing,” you said, breathing a bit heavier.

“Need help?” He suggested, as he gestured to the shirt still on you.

“Um...” your breath was staggered.

JJs eyes trailed down your body, “god, I love you, Y/n,”

You gulped, he didn’t seem to notice as his hand met your thigh.

Suddenly, your vision got blurry. Maybe it was incoming tears, so you blinked a few times. Your throat still continuing to feel like it was closing.

JJ leaned closer to you.

“Are you okay?” He asked again.

“Uh...uh JJ?” You started quickly, feeling the anxiety completely take over.

JJ’s eyes widened, he looked as if he discovered the problem. “Oh shit, Y/n. Are you a virgin? God, I’m so sorry, I thought you wanted to,”

“I...I do want to. But I can’t,” you answer, trying to avoid eye contact.

Now, JJ shuffles off of you, “why not?”

You didn’t want to tell him. You must have acted like you never really read into things like this. Because you didnt.

However, your last “relationship” had a rocky sex life. You didn’t want to have sex, but you did it with him. He said you owed it to him.

“I’m- I’m sorry. We can keep going if you want,” you offered, still feeling uneasy.

“If you don’t want to then we don’t have to, Y/n,” JJ pointed out. Handing you your shirt.

Your heart broke as your breath continued to be uneasy. His tone conveyed sort of sadness, or maybe sympathy. He thought you didn’t like him.

“I do..I really like you. I um....I’m not ready I guess,” you said.

“So...you’re a virgin?” he asked.

It would be so much easier if you were.

“Yeah,” you lied. Feeling the guilt sink in as soon as the words spilled out of your mouth.

“So you and your last boyfriend didn’t...” JJ trailed off, suggesting you knew what he meant.

You didn’t answer for a few seconds, tears building up in your eyes, if you blinked, they would fall.

JJ turned to you, and noticed your state. Causing more confusion on his part.

You looked away.

“Y/n...” JJ said gently, reaching out and touching your shoulder.

“I’ll do it. I will. Just please don’t get mad,” you pleaded.

“I’m not mad,” JJ answered.

You nodded. Then moved closer to him, you took a deep breath before you reached for his buckle and started to undo it.

“Wait! What- Y/n! Hey. Stop. Babe...what’s going on with you? If it freaks you out we don’t have to do it. I’m not going to force you!”

“Why? I thought- I thought you wanted me to,”

“Y/n- what are you talking about? We can wait, you’re not ready,”

“But...it doesn’t matter about me. I’m suppose to make you feel good,” you muttered.

“What?” JJs expression was difficult to read, you expected him to be mad, and he was a little, but more confused,

“I just mean because...” you stopped your sentence when you realize you couldn’t state a valid reason, not knowing how to convince JJ.

“Who told you that? Is that what you’re last boyfriend said? That is so fucked up!”

“I’m sorry,” you whimpered.

JJ cupped your face in his hands, one holding each of your flushed cheeks.

“Don’t ever be sorry for that, okay? I shouldn’t have rushed this on you. You’re last boyfriend is wrong. You don’t just exist to me to make me feel good. I love you Y/n. You can always tell me if your not ready. It’s okay to say no,” JJ explained.

You wiped some tears off your cheeks.

“But-“

“No. You’re last boyfriend was wrong? Okay? He shouldn’t have raped you,” JJ said quietly.

You pulled back out of his hands, quickly feeling the need to get defensive, “that’s not what he did! How could you say that?”

JJ held his hands up, “he made you think that it didn’t matter if you wanted to. It’s called consent,”

“No. You’re wrong. You didn’t have to call it that,” you said. That was a harsh word to you. Because it was.

“Y/n, it’s okay...” JJ started.

“He was my boyfriend! It wasn’t rape,” you defended.

“If it was unwanted-“ JJ sighed.

“Get out. Seriously JJ leave me alone,” you demanded.

“You have to understand, babe. I’m not trying to hurt you,” JJ pleaded.

“I don’t...I don’t want to...” you started to panic, the realization of the truth had never hit you so hard.

“You ‘don’t want to’ what?”

“I don’t want to have been raped...I just want to be with you,” you cried, letting out sobs.

“Hey, hey, hey. That’s not what you are. It’s not who you are,” JJ assured, allowing you to collapse unto his arms.

You didn’t respond, just continued to cry.

“Shh. It’s okay. Just breath for me. Follow my breathing. I’m here Y/n. Right here,”

“I’m sorry. I never wanted you to find out...” you mumbled, your voice muffled against this chest.

“I love you no matter what.”

*

[seeminglydark]

So I've posted my story before, lots of times, but the art is old and back then I didnt realize I should probably have some trigger warnings and all that. So I'm gonna tell it again. Cuz maybe it, like the comic i recently posted, can spare you a moment of the trauma I experienced while finding myself. So if you're interested in my Asexuality journey, you can read under the cut. I don't go into detail on any of the triggers in the story, its all alluded, but just in case, stay safe. Triggers for assault, bullying, self esteem issues, ED, isolation and emotional abuse. But mine, like Johnnys, has a happy ending.

So I guess I don’t really have a timeline. I’ve probably been Ace my entire life without even knowing it cuz how could i have even known what it was at 15 in the mid 90's. It wasnt something anyone talked about. In school I never dated and I got teased all the time for being super skeeved out by any kinda sex discussion. All this coupled with being incredibly awkward and over six foot afab made for a lovely high school experience. Anyway at some point I met this dude and he was nice, made me feel pretty and all that. I married him shortly afterward, quickly, because i thought that was what I was supposed to do. I thought getting married would change my feelings on sexual experience. I didn’t realize it at the time but he was emotionally manipulating me to believe he was the only person who would ever love and find me attractive, he isolated me from my friends and family. Throughout our relationship I always found excuses to avoid sex, even after we were married. I stopped eating and lost way too much weight, i worked endless hours so he could stay at home and play video games, anything to 'make up for' not being able to perform my marital 'duties.' I’m not going to drag anyone through the mud here, but lets just say things escalated fairly quickly in an ugly way and I had to exit the relationship and move to another state. I thought what happened to me was my fault, because I couldn’t perform the way i thought a spouse should.  At this point I didn’t understand asexuality was a thing. I thought there was something wrong with me, and I tried to force having sexual relationships. I was told by everyone that no one would ever love me if I couldn’t figure out how to perform the simplest sexual activities. This went one for several years, through another tried and failed marriage (I will emphasize this man was not abusive, and a quite lovely person, but i never told him how i felt about these things, and so he never even had the chance to try and work with me.) I wanted to badly to be in what I thought was a normal relationship, it never occurred to me this wasn’t my fault. it never occurred to me sex doesnt have to be the basis for relationships. No one told me. I went to sex therapists trying to fix my issues but no matter what i did I still hated the idea of sexual contact in anyway.

At some point I met my current partner, about 15 years ago. I told him the truth, despite still not having a word for it, and to my surprise he's always been ok with me the way I am. It’s insane, and my relationship with him is what made me start to realize what Asexuality is and that I’m NOT broken, that love and sex arent the same thing (that being said ofc there are people whos love language is physical touch, mine is not.)

I’ll end this with one of the last conversations I had with my dad before he died. I remembered telling him one night that I was Ace because he found me crying in the kitchen. Even all these years later, in a healthy relationship, i still experience trauma about it. I explained everything that led to that decision, a strange moment because we normally didnt share like this, but as i said, he was nearing death and sometimes you want a parent to hear and understand your words. I remember he looked at me across the table with tears in his eyes. He said ‘I wish you would have told me this when you were a a young adult. I wish you would have explained how you felt then. I would have told you everything was ok, and that you were ok and not broken. I wish I could have spared you all that pain you experienced finding yourself.’

So now I look to you and I say what he wished he could have told me.

You’re ok.

You’re not broken.

You’re not alone.

We exist.

[nxrthmizu]

hey babe! idk if u take this kind of requests, im terribly sorry if u dont, i didnt saw anything bout it so im sorry once again. im also sorry if this so happens to trigger u or make u uncomfortable, but if u could perhaps make suna and osamu's reaction to having an insecure s/o? like, she was bullied when younger bc of her weight, so she avoids mirrors, tries dangerous diets and overexercises herself trying to feel better? i had to go to the hospital bc of that and could really use some comfort

»»——⍟——««

request | suna and osamu with a s/o who’s insecure about their weight

warning(s) | self-insecurity, overexerting 

words | 1.3k

author’s note | Hey Ana! (It’s been a while, watch me drop into your inbox later >:)) Of course I’ll write this, feel free to dm me if you need someone to talk to okay? I hope you’re feeling better now, remember that your body loves you, so love your body too, okay? <3 mwah 

»»——⍟——««

↬ suna rintarou 

the first time he brought you to his apartment, he noticed how you eyed the reflective surfaces like they were a threat 

you avoided the windows and the one floor-length mirror he has in his room 

he didn’t understand why you hated reflective surfaces so much, but the next time you were over at his apartment, he had installed curtains and he hid his mirror inside the closet 

when he brought you to a family gathering, he noticed how you flinched when some of his aunts made comments about your weight (he didn’t like them much either, but after seeing how much they affected you he swore he was going to tell them ‘Hi Aunty, you still look pretty young for 75!’ his aunts are only 40-50 years old.) 

his aunts eyed you and told you ‘Wow ah girl, you gained some weight since the last time I saw you! Come come, I introduce you to this weight-loss drink, my friend sells it so you can get it for cheaper price!’ 

the whole time suna was narrowing his eyes and thinking to himself that you didn’t need the stupid weight-loss drink because he thinks you’re perfect the way you are 

he’ll be darned if he let them talk to you let that, especially since you look even more uncomfortable by the passing moment 

so he interrupts, putting his arm around your waist ‘Wow Aunty, your skin still looks pretty clear, especially since you’re already 70!’ 

they definitely looked offended but he continued, ignoring them ‘And this weight-loss drink that your friend is selling... Are you drinking it? Because if so...’ he looked them up and down ‘It doesn’t look very effective.’ 

you’re confused, but you let him do what he wants 

your man totally tore down his aunts, no mercy at all 

when he was finished, he smiled sweetly at them, told them the two of you needed to get going, and high-tailed out of the family event he didn’t really want to be at anyway 

his younger sister covered for the both of you, saying that one of suna’s friends had an emergency and the two of you needed to leave to help his friend 

after he brought back to his home, he dragged you into the bedroom, plopped you on the bed, and asked you to be honest with him 

you admitted that you were bullied when you were young, and that throughout your teenage years you were constantly picked at by family members/classmates about your weight 

you also told him that’s why you avoid mirrors and reflective surfaces, and that you tried dangerous diets and overexercised to the point you collapsed 

the whole time he was getting even angrier but he tried not to let it show because damn it he loves you so much why can’t you love yourself too???

proceeded to drag out the floor length mirror and pointed to every part of your body and explained what he liked about it 

‘your arms. I like how they feel when you wrap them around me for a hug’ ‘your stomach is always so warm and I love when you let me lie on your stomach’ ‘your thighs are so cute and they feel nice when they’re tangled with my legs’ 

suna would set an alarm on his phone to remind him to tell you he loves your body every day 

he also set up a healthy diet for you, and if you want to go back to exercising he would join you and make sure you don’t overexert yourself 

this man would appoint himself as your personal trainer, he’ll go on jogs with you every morning, would help you with your sit ups, will massage your sore muscles after a workout 

10/10 the most supportive athlete boyfriend ever 

↬ miya osamu 

he expresses his love for you in onigiris, so imagine his surprise when you decline his newest salmon onigiri recipe 

‘what’s wrong?’ immediately drops everything, has a mini crisis because do you not love him anymore??? did you find someone who makes better onigiris??? 

you shake him off, tell him it’s nothing, that you’re just not hungry 

do you take him for  idiot because nope he’s not convinced, not at all 

but you didn’t seem like you wanted to talk about it so he lets it be, he won’t push you if you don’t want to tell him 

osamu started questioning his cooking skills because you’ve been eating less, you’ve been telling him you have no appetite 

please tell him it’s not his fault this man is panicking 

it went to the point where he called atsumu for help because he’s desperate 

atsumu listened to him (without interrupting, what a miracle) and these two clueless brothers tried to piece together what’s wrong 

they did not come up with a conclusion lmao 

it isn’t until the two of you went to eat dinner with your family that he realises what the problem was the whole time 

your cousin, who’s a model, eyes you and tells you you’ve gotten fatter, you should probably get on a diet again

he doesn’t miss the way you flinch visibly 

your mother snapped at your cousin, saying that as long as you’re healthy it’s fine 

your brother/father told you to ignore your cousin and put some food in your plate 

but you didn’t touch your food after that, you just smiled weakly and said you weren’t hungry- That was the point that he realised that his cooking wasn’t the problem 

the drive home is quiet, because you’re just staring outside the window with this blank expression 

the first thing he does when he gets home is make you an onigiri and a cup of tea, because you didn’t eat much and he will make sure you at least get something in your stomach 

he had that expression that said ‘if you don’t eat I will feed you this one mouthful at a time’ 

so you ate until he was satisfied 

he sat down on the couch next to you and made you look at him 

‘you are amazing the way you are, I love your body just like I love every other part about you’ he told you with a very determined expression ‘I’ll find a way to make my onigiris with less calories as long you promise me you’ll eat enough’ 

‘I don’t know what happened to you when you were younger, but all I know is that your cousin is an idiot. you shouldn’t go on a diet, instead you should eat healthily. I’ll research what foods are good for you and I’ll come up with new recipes.’ 

you were ready to cry because how much more romantic can he get, making new recipes just for you 

you told him that you were bullied for your weight when you were younger, and that you tried dangerous diets and once overexercised until you collapsed and had to go to the hospital 

not gonna lie, this man was ready to hunt down your cousin and murder someone 

‘if you ask me, you look pretty healthy, but if you want to exercise we could do it together, I used to play volleyball in high school after all- And I’ll look up on foods that will help you with your weight’ 

he made you promise him that you wouldn’t keep saying you weren’t hungry and that you would eat 

was the human version of a golden retriever puppy when you tried his new, less-calorie salmon onigiri :) tell him it’s delicious, he’ll love you forever 

»»——⍟——««

I hope this was satisfactory! Like I said before, feel free to dm me if you need to talk okay? Also I’ll send some extra comfort your way later <3 mwah take care of yourself! 

»»——⍟——««

[thechangeling]

Eutony in a whisper

Genderbent kitty!!!! Thank you so much to El for letting me use her username.

Tiberia Blackthorn had grown up constantly having her boundaries violated to the point where she was trained to expect it. Right from a very young age people were always demanding things of her and her body. Telling her to hug people, be polite, make eye contact, eat your dinner without complaining, no matter how terrible the sensation of cooked vegetables is. Be nice. Put on a smile.

So Ty adapted, she learned to control herself in public and suppress her urges. The urge to move her hands, and tap and spin around or rock back and forth. She still did those things sometimes, but less so, and never in public. Ty had the tendency to be quite blunt and harsh with people, and her parents were absolutely not a fan. In fact most people weren't.

"You're so aggressive," was the comment she got the most. Right along with, "act like a lady!" Which wasn't fair because she was usually right in these situations. She was only being honest, but everyone seemed so afraid of the truth. So utterly unwilling to listen to anything she had to say.

After awhile she had just gotten used to it. So when people came to take things from her, she let it happen. Because it was polite. And when people touched her she let it happen because that's what she was supposed to do. Livvy tried to help Ty with boundries. Tried to teach her how to say no when men put their hands all over her. But Ty was so used to always having to say yes. And she didnt want to be rude.

So after years of, "you have to" and, "you'll get used to it," when Katherine (Kit) Herondale came blazing into her life and told her with such an easy going sincerity that she didn't have to do anything she didn't want to. Ty had honestly felt like she could cry.

Fast forward four years and they were in Kit's bedroom at Ciernworth and her 19th birthday had just passed. Kit was trying to master her first heir powers with no luck. Tessa had told her to try and focus on something that might work as a catalyst for her powers. Usually it had to be something that would trigger strong emotions, but nothing was working.

"I give up," Kit cried out, flopping back onto her giant bed, her blond curls spilling out around her. She groaned, squeezing her eyes shut. "I'm hopeless. There's no point." Ty fought the urge to reach for her. To stroke her hair, or touch that small sliver of bare skin on Kit's stomach from where her shirt was riding up.

"Don't say that!" Ty protested. "You've done it before remember?" Kit gave her a solemn look and Ty thought of the events that had taken place before Kit had made the riders disappear.

But things were different now. They had made up, and now they were dating. But the wounds would probably always be there.

Ty decided to reach over and touch Kit's face slightly. Instantly she stopped tensing up. "It'll be ok. I promise," Ty said softly. "You're more capable then you realize. I believe in you."

Kit stared at her, gaping a little. Her big blue eyes were filled with not only surprise, but overwhelming adoration. Kieran had once called Kit's eyes the colour of an ordinary sky, but Ty disagreed. They were the most beautiful baby blue colour. Soft and calming. Not too bright or overwhelming.

Ty smiled involuntarily, sliding her fingers through Kit's hair. "I don't believe in anything except you." Kit let out a harsh breath and gazed up at Ty with a soft, worshiping look. She smiled.

"Baby I just don't know what to do," Kit whispered. She looked a little scared. "I feel like I've tried everything." She squeezed Ty's free hand.

"I'm really scared," Kit admitted.

Ty was overwhelmed with a frightening intensity of emotions. She wanted to wrap Kit up in her arms and never let her leave. She wanted to go out and kill every single person or thing on the earth that was making her so afraid.

Ty shook her head feverishly. "Dont be scared," she said firmly. "I will protect you." Kit looked a little shocked at that, but then she broke out into a grin. She smiled at Ty like she was the greatest and most beautiful thing Kit had ever seen.

"Hey I know something we haven't tried yet." Kit smirked mischievously. She slid her arms carefully up Ty's sides and gripped her arms, pulling her down slowly.

"Kiss me," she murmered. Ty felt her heart do a flip as she instinctively brought their mouths together in a soft, slow kiss that rapidly became more passionate as Kit pulled Ty on top of her. Ty continued kissing her girlfriend as she placed her hands on Kit's and pushed them down, closer to the skin so that Kit was gripping her more tightly. Satisfied with the pressure, Ty weaved her fingers through Kit's long golden curly hair, stimming with the thick, rough peices.

Kit deepened the kiss and instantly Ty felt metal against her tounge from Kit's piercing. It was a weird sensation, but she could bear it. Ty dug her fingers into the blanket on the bed and felt the fabric. Kit was scratching slightly along her lower back, pulling at Ty's shirt. Ty moaned into her mouth before slowly breaking the kiss and leaning back.

"I dont think anything's happening love," Ty said apologetically. Kit pouted adorably. She looked Ty up and down slyly.

"Well theres only one way to be sure right?" She asked innocently. Ty rolled her eyes fondly and laughed

"If you wanted to make out with me all you had to do was tell me," she pointed out. Ty bopped Kit's nose lightly and Kit squished up her face. She brushed the hair out of Ty's face carefully. Ty avoided Kit's gaze.

"Are you ok?"

Ty was fiddling with the bed cover in her hand. "No it's fine. I was just getting a little overwhelmed." She lay her head down carefully against Kit's chest, breathing deep.

Kit pressed her face to the top of Ty's head, nuzzling her. "Say your words," she suggested. "Your favourite words."

Ty smiled at the fact that Kit still remembered. "I added some new ones."

Kit pressed a kiss to her head. "I wanna hear them if that's ok." Ty could hear the steady sound of her heart beating.

"Glass, twin, apple, stars, crystal, lilt, shadow," Ty stopped and looked up at Kit, staring into her piercing blue eyes.

"Whisper."

Kit looked like she was trying not to cry. "Whisper would be one of mine too." She quoted. Ty grinned and bent down to kiss Kit on the cheek.

"Mine," she whispered in Kit's ear. Kit shivered underneath her, gasping.

"That's one of your new words?" Her voice was shakey as Ty pressed a kiss to her pulse point.

"Yeah. One of them. Along with sister, remember and forever," Ty avoided Kit's gaze slightly. Kit squeezed her arm.

Ty shook her head, shaking herself out of thoughts of Livvy. They had finally found a spell to put things right and let her rest. It had been excruciatingly painful, letting her go for good. But Ty knew it was right. She had already caused too much damage.

"I'm fine," she reassured Kit. She traced the outline of her lips. "I also have another one. Wanna hear it?"

Kit's eyes shone as she kissed Ty's fingers. "Tell me."

Ty leaned over her, pressing their foreheads together. Ty's long dark hair fell like an ebony curtain, shielding their faces.

She closed her eyes, letting her emotions wash over her.

"Kit," she breathed.

"Yeah?" Kit answered, clearly puzzled.

Ty laughed, drawing away. "No. I mean Kit is one of my words," she explained.

An unreadable expression fell over Kit's face before she smiled in awe. "Really? One of your favourite words?" She seemed taken aback.

Ty reached for her, gently pushing a lock of blond hair out of her face. "My absolute favorite," she whispered.

"It's my favorite word in the whole world."

Kit made some sort of indescribable sound and grabbed at Ty's shirt, pulling her forward. "I love you so much," she whispered, pulling her into a brusing kiss.

As Ty kissed her back, framing Kit's face with her hands, a burst of light exploded, shining so bright Ty could see it through her closed eyelids.

She frantically broke the kiss and opened her eyes, completely unprepared for what she was about to see.

Kit was glowing.

@bedspells @ti-bae-rius @zfoxdraws @anxiousbookenthusiast @dianasarrow @julieandthefandoms @older-brother-kit @stxr-thxif @magnus-the-fabulous-entp-bane @waterlillies @thelandunderthehilll @doitforthecarstairs @banesbitch @talia-lightwood @jazzkaurtheglorious @flynnsupremacy @adoravel-fenomeno