#and i have an exam due two days after new years

[hollandsmoose]

i'm so stressed about everything that i feel like i'm gonna have a fucking heart attack at this point lmao

[moonlinos]

Call my bluff, call you ‘babe’

♡ Pairing: Lee Minho × fem!reader

♡ Genre: Childhood friends to lovers, fluff

♡ CW: Implied smut, alcohol consumption. Twenty solid seconds of angst, but it doesn’t even really count. It’s just tooth-rotting fluff.

♡ Word count: 5.5k

♡ Synopsis: Minho has been your best friend since you two could barely form coherent sentences. He was there when your last baby tooth fell, he was there when you failed your high school exams, and he was there as you walked down the aisle.

♡ A/N: This was going to be just word-vomit fluff to make me cry, but I couldn’t control myself and before I knew it there were… so many words.

You were four years old when you met Minho. It was the first day of kindergarten, and you were assigned seats together. The entire day was spent with you chatting to every kid you could reach from your seat while Minho quietly sat painting and doodling by your side. You vaguely remember thinking he was odd and whining to your mom about how your seatmate was boring, and that was why he was the only kid in class you didn’t talk to. She smiled and told you maybe you should make an effort to talk to him. That same day, you racked your little brain for a reason why your seatmate might be so quiet and promptly decided that he was too shy to start a conversation himself. You then asked your mom if the fact that you didn’t talk to him might have made him sad, to which she hesitated, and that was enough to have your bottom lip wobbling.

You remember tears streaming down your cheeks as you frantically sobbed, inconsolable at the fact that your seatmate was sad and that it was partially because of you.

The next day, you asked if Minho would like to use your special glitter pens — you even told him you wouldn’t mind if he used your favorite colors. That was really all that was needed to plant the bud of friendship between you two.

Ever since that day, you two slowly became inseparable.

You attended the same elementary school after begging your parents, writing a very concise list of reasons why you two could not possibly be separated. Reasons such as the fact that Minho still didn’t know how to tie his shoelaces, so it would be dangerous for him to be alone in a new school. Or the fact that you were always losing your gloves, and Minho always carried an extra pair in his backpack just for you, so you would surely catch a cold if you didn’t have him beside you during winter.

All extremely valid reasons.

Minho began walking you home from school when you were both nine years old. He was often left alone due to his parents’ work schedules, which made him become the most street-smart kid in your class. You had to beg your mom for a week, but she ultimately caved in.

Your favorite thing to do on your way home was to stop randomly and doodle on the sidewalk with chalk, with Minho joining you in no time. You even had your favorite little sketching spot — right in front of a nice old lady’s flower shop, where you two would spend far too much time decorating her entrance pavement with flowers, rainbows, and smiley faces. She would later introduce herself to you, Ms. Kim, and would always thank you both with a flower of your choice. You always picked tulips, and Minho always picked daisies.

On one hazy winter day, you and Minho were eager to adorn the flower shop’s entrance with a new set of doodles since the ones you had done just yesterday got covered in snow. As you two did your best to dig through the piled-up snow with your gloved hands, you suddenly felt something hard slide down your throat. Your hands stilled, and you turned to look at Minho with wide eyes.

“What happened?” He asked. “Did you lose your glove in the snow this time?”

You shook your head frantically, careful not to swallow. “Teeth,” you simply said.

Minho looked at you like you were crazy, squinting his eyes as he studied your face. “What?”

You felt tears well up, and he immediately abandoned his mission of shuffling through the snow before pulling you into a big hug.

“Why are you crying? Don’t cry. I hate when you cry, I feel weird when you cry,” He said, but no tears left his worried eyes. Minho never cried, that was something you had learned a while back. 

You, however, cried until Ms. Kim noticed you two from the window, cooing as she approached you two with a gentle smile. You tried your best to explain your predicament. Minho sat with you behind the wooden counter, holding your hand in his, the smell of flowers making everything feel less catastrophic than it did ten minutes earlier.

Ms. Kim explained that you had no reason to cry, as it was normal for kids to swallow their baby teeth. And you remember harshly shaking your head and explaining with a trembling voice that you hadn’t cried because of that. You had cried because that was your last baby tooth, which meant you were officially a grown-up. You didn’t want to be a grown-up. Minho wasn’t a grown-up yet, with his last baby tooth still holding on proudly in his gums. You didn’t want to be a grown-up all alone; it would be terrible and sad.

That afternoon, you two went home together in silence, your respective flowers clutched in your hands. Minho was never good with words. Sadness engulfed him because he couldn’t do enough to make his best friend smile again. What was the point of a best friend if they didn’t make you laugh when you were crying?

Minho walked into school the next day with a proud smile on his face before placing his last baby tooth on your desk. You eyed it curiously, brows furrowed.

“There, I took it off last night,” He simply said. “Now we’re gonna be grown-ups together.”

At eleven years old, your daily after-school video game appointments began.

You had just cut your hair short; a bob you thought looked cute on your favorite singer turned out to be cataclysmically unflattering on you. And, at eleven years old, it was earth-shattering and definitely the end of your life (despite what your mother told you).

You spent every second out in public with your hair hidden by a beanie, hoping it would distract people from your disastrous haircut.

Except it had the opposite effect.

One particular day at school, a boy came up to you simply to inform you that your head looked like a mushroom before running away, laughing with his friends. They were foolish words spoken by a foolish boy, but you were eleven. Once again, earth-shattering and the end of your life.

You avoided everyone the entire day — including Minho, whom you always talked to no matter your mood. You knew you wouldn’t be able to avoid him for much longer, seeing as he walked you home every day, so you simply prayed he wouldn’t notice your puffy eyes or that he at least hadn’t heard any of the other kids making unfunny jokes about your haircut.

After school, Minho sighed in feigned annoyance when you told him you had lost your gloves again before retrieving a pair from his backpack. Like a habit, you asked if he wanted to hang out at your house, although the answer was always unchanging.

“My mom’s baking a cake,” you told him. “We can play video games and then eat it together.”

Minho hummed in agreement, adjusting his backpack before grabbing your hand as you two began your daily walk to your house. It was something you always did, never walking anywhere without your hands clasped together. These past few months, however, this once ordinary gesture had begun making your heart beat faster. You didn’t understand why, and you would rather not think about it because every time you did, the words from your other friends would echo inside your head. Their stories about how they felt their hearts racing when their crush had hugged them or even looked their way, making you question if maybe…

But it couldn’t be. Minho was your best friend. How could he be your crush?

It was another one of those afternoons, your mom busily making you two sandwiches as you and Minho played New Super Mario Bros on your Wii under the blanket fort you always meticulously built. Minho had been acting weird all day — even weirder than you, who had to endure all the asinine jokes and hurtful words from your peers. As you completed the last level for the umpteenth time, saving Princess Peach, Minho all but threw his controller to the side. You turned to shoot him a questioning look, which went ignored as he rummaged through his backpack.

He retrieved a crumpled-up piece of paper, which he promptly gave to you.

You cocked your head, awaiting some sort of explanation, but Minho simply picked up his controller once more and hit play on the game.

Unfolding the paper, words greeted you in Minho’s messy handwriting.

YOUR HAIR LOOKS CUTE. STOP HIDING IT.

Your lips parted slightly, but before you could say anything to him, Minho reached out and snatched your beanie from your head. Your short hair and bangs cascaded onto your face, partially obscuring your view. But you could still make out his side profile, where a faint smile appeared on his lips.

After that, you two were silent for the rest of the day, eventually dozing off under the tent lulled by the sound of your mother’s hand mixer and Mario’s theme song. The sun eventually set outside the window, and you woke up to two plates of your mother’s cake waiting for you on the coffee table.

From that point on, your beanie was left forgotten inside your drawer.

You were fifteen when you realized that perhaps your feelings for Minho weren’t all that platonic after all.

It all started with a letter on Minho’s desk on a rainy Friday. October 25th, Minho’s birthday.

Minho’s quiet nature hadn’t changed one bit since you first sat beside him at four years old. He would rather die than start a conversation, rarely went out to the movies with your friend group and, most importantly, hated being the center of attention. That was why he told no one about his birthday since you two began high school this year. It was the subject of much debate among your little group of friends, with some bribing Minho with his favorite snacks or promising to do his assignments until college just for some sort of clue; a day, month, even the day of the week he was born.

But Minho never budged.

So, seeing a letter on his desk on the day of his birthday was odd, to say the least.

You arrived back to the classroom late after chatting to your friend from another class in the hallway, catching as Minho sat down with a puzzled look on his face and an open letter in his hands.

“What’s up?” You asked, sitting on the desk in front of him.

He looked up, thick glasses crooked from a dodgeball incident earlier that week. “Yumi found out it’s my birthday today,” He informed you, a bit too nonchalantly. “She organized a birthday party at her house tomorrow with our friends.”

You immediately took the letter, reading it and blanching at the words written in the girl’s pretty handwriting. She had found out Minho’s birthday by snooping around Facebook until she found his mother, who had a plethora of pictures of Minho on his previous birthdays. Not only that, the letter ended with a paragraph where she confessed her feelings to him — with all the clichés and dramatics only an adolescent crush could provide.

You still remember your first thoughts upon learning that information: Oh, Yumi. Of course a girl like her would do something like this.

You cringe at your words now, but at fifteen, you deemed no girl worthy of your best friend. Especially ‘girls like Yumi,’ who in your eyes all but threw herself at him. At the time, you thought you were looking out for the boy who was practically your brother. Now, you understand you were simply an insecure fifteen-year-old who allowed ugly, misogynistic thoughts to brew inside your mind out of fear of losing Minho. For your immature brain, every girl interested in Minho was an enemy because they could easily take him away from you.

And Minho had never reciprocated any girl’s feelings, always politely turning down the few confessions he had gotten during middle school. You were ready to berate Yumi, your brows immediately furrowing as your face contorted, but Minho beat you to it, speaking before you could utter a word.

“I know I should be mad, but isn’t it a little… cute?”

You couldn’t help but scoff, the sound escaping your lips like a burst of disbelief. You also couldn’t help how your hands began to tremble as your heart shot up to your throat.

“Cute?” You asked with the strongest voice you could muster. “You think her invading your privacy is cute?”

And Minho simply shrugged, tapping his fingers on his desk. “A little bit. I know you don’t really like her, but she’s part of our friend group,” He said, taking the letter from your shaky hands. “Plus, she’s always been nice to me, and she is cute.”

That was all you could physically bear to hear, excusing yourself from the conversation with the lie that your friend had called you from the classroom window before sprinting out into the hallway. As you continued walking, your palms grew clammy and your heart weighed heavily in your chest.

You felt tears well up in your eyes once you reached the stairs. Sitting on the steps, you cried into the cardigan of your ugly school uniform. You didn’t care that you would be scolded for skipping class; all you cared about was that your best friend was going to be taken from you.

After school, as you and Minho were about to exit the school gates — your hands tightly clasped together as they always were — Yumi appeared carrying a cake, the rest of your friends behind her as they all sang happy birthday. 

Minho blew out the candles and made a wish. Everyone cheered as his best friend, Chan, shoved his face into the cake. Minho yelled at him, grumbling with glasses covered in white frosting, but ultimately laughing along. Yumi was quick to clean his face with a napkin, earning her a smile from Minho before he released your hand to gently squeeze her rosy cheeks.

You remained quiet, forcing out a smile and looking up at the sky every now and then so your tears wouldn’t fall.

All because Minho had let go of your hand.

Minho’s fifteenth birthday — that was the day you learned you could fool everyone else, but never yourself.

Your seventeenth summer was a drag.

Minho had just been broken up with a couple of months before, Yumi crying as she explained her parents wanted her to focus on her studies, and having a boyfriend was simply a distraction she couldn’t afford if she wanted to be a doctor someday. An unwilling participant in the entire situation, you sat awkwardly at the bus stop as she spoke.

You were ready to witness Minho cry for the first time in your life, maybe yell about how unfair her parents were being, but he simply pressed a kiss to her forehead just as your bus arrived.

Not much had changed when he began dating Yumi, with you learning that suppressing how you truly felt was worryingly easy. You still hung out with them, battling through their cuddles and kisses like a soldier on the front lines of a war. Never unscathed, but always strong. Nobody needed to know about how you cried into your mother’s arms almost every night before falling asleep.

The only change had been you and Minho’s daily gaming appointments. You two had since outgrown your video game phase, both now interested in diverging things that made it impossible for you to enjoy them together. You discovered your love for flowers went beyond doodling on the sidewalk in front of a flower shop, but Minho complained that growing flowers was too time-consuming, and he loved dancing, which you were far too uncoordinated and lazy to even try doing.

And so, you two settled for simply hanging out together at your house. Your room had easy access to the roof, which you two took full advantage of, setting up a permanent blanket fort where you would snuggle up with pillows and talk for hours after school.

That summer was no different, with Minho stretched out across the old mattress, watching the light pink sky slowly fade away as night set in while you two busied yourselves talking.

That was the day you finally gathered the courage to ask Minho about his breakup, desperate to understand why he had appeared so unfazed. After the one-year milestone of their relationship in February, you had begun to make peace with the fact that she would probably be around for a while.

Minho shrugged at your question, hands resting on his stomach while he gnawed on his bottom lip. He explained he was sure that he liked her, but it turned out he valued her as a friend much more than as a girlfriend.

You couldn’t help but scoff at the answer. You knew Minho better than you knew yourself at times, which was why you knew he was lying through his teeth.

“Why did you stay so long with her, then?” You questioned, the resentful lilt in your voice a bit too obvious. You cleared your throat before adding, “I mean, you surely didn’t act as just friends.”

“I guess I felt lonely before,” He explained. “I was selfish for staying with her, but I enjoyed having someone. Was especially nice after…” Minho trailed off, dismissively shaking his head, and you remember being close to throwing him off that roof as he kept being so damn enigmatic.

“After what?” You prodded, “Minho, I’m your best friend. What’s the point of us talking if you’re not gonna tell me the truth?”

He turned his head to look up at you, the darkening sky making his eyes gleam as if they held an entire galaxy of stars. You felt that familiar nervousness return.

“It was nice to not be so alone after so many years of pining after someone.”

You cocked your head to the side, and Minho had the gall to chuckle at your puzzled expression. You shook your head, mumbling to yourself that your conversation was pointless if he wouldn’t tell you the whole truth.

Lying next to him on the mattress with a sigh, you could feel the weight of Minho’s gaze on you. You couldn’t bring yourself to move.

You remember the moon was already high in the sky by the time one of you finally moved — Minho, who slowly inched his hand closer to yours before clasping it tightly in his. Despite your racing heart, you thought nothing of it. He was now single, so it wouldn’t be ludicrous to assume a habit you two had cultivated for many years would naturally return.

However, after some beats from your erratically racing heart, Minho’s fingers intertwined with yours. You had never done that before, always holding hands in a way that all but screamed platonic.

That night, with his thumb caressing your skin and his hand squeezing yours, Minho finally spoke the truth after so long.

“It’s you,” He said, tone nonchalant but voice audibly shaky. “Think I’ve been pining after you since I was nine and ripped my tooth out ‘cause I thought that’d make you stop being sad.”

You remember gasping quietly and his hand tightening around yours as the clock ticked and your silence remained. You remember finally mustering up the courage to turn to look at him and being met by an expression you had rarely seen on Minho’s face in the thirteen years you had known him — he was scared, wide eyes dancing around your face as if he looked for an answer in your features, his chapped lips parted slightly as if he was ready to backtrack the moment he saw any hint of doubt in your eyes.

You remember smiling at him and how his expression shifted into pure confusion. All it took was for him to finally have the nerve to hold your hand in the way he’d always wanted to, and for you to use his courage as a catalyst for your own. You remember how you closed the distance between you two and pressed your lips to his. You remember it feeling weird because you were kissing Minho, your best friend.

But you also remember it feeling right because you were kissing Minho, your best friend.

Your transition from being best friends to being in a relationship was easier than you had ever thought it would be — it was also slower than you could have ever imagined.

Minho never asked you out or confessed his feelings beyond what was said on the roof, and neither did you. It was a shared knowledge between you, a silent agreement that didn’t need words — at least for now. The little gestures and subtle changes left no doubt in your minds that you two were, in fact, no longer just friends — like how you began to always intertwine your fingers while holding hands, or how Minho would pull you onto his lap when you hung out with your friends, or how you would rest your head on his shoulder as he played with your hair during lunch break.

Your friends certainly had questions, the confusion written all over their faces easy to read like a book, but you both knew they also understood your relationship without you needing to make a big deal out of it.

You picked him up from dance class every weekend, sometimes arriving earlier just to catch a glimpse of him through the glass door, as Minho insisted he was too embarrassed to dance in front of you.

One day, thoroughly unprompted, he reached into his backpack as you two exited his dance academy and pulled out a yellow tulip. You had furrowed your brows at the sudden gesture, and Minho nonchalantly told you that planting your favorite flower was surprisingly easy. Since becoming teenagers, you had stopped going to Ms. Kim’s flower shop, and you had long forgotten about how you two used to have your own respective flowers back in the day.

It seemed Minho hadn’t forgotten.

That was one thing you had come to know about him only after you began dating. Although he seemed cold and distant on the outside — rarely communicating his feelings through words — Minho secretly kept a mental note of every little detail about the people he cared about, and he unfailingly found a way to communicate his feelings through actions. Such as promptly handing you a brand-new flower he had picked before you even had the chance to mourn your tulip as it began to wilt.

You, on the other hand, had always been the type of person to communicate through words; spoken, written, or read, which is how you began saving your best daisies from the small garden you created in your backyard and practicing your flower arrangement skills exclusively by making pretty bouquets you could gift to Minho (always with little notes hidden among the flowers).

Your once explicitly platonic roof dates also left no room for doubt, as making out under your usual tent became a hard-to-break habit. In fact, that was how your family found out about your relationship. You were eighteen, with graduation just around the corner, when your mother caught Minho kissing you as tears welled up in your eyes at the thought of having to be apart from him during college (although you both knew that would never be the case, as you always moved mountains simply to stay together).

Everything was slow-paced, and neither of you had any desire to rush anything. Once, Minho told you he had waited eight years to finally kiss you, and somehow, that anticipation was what had made it all the more special.

And so, your first proper date only happened six months after your first kiss, and your first fight only happened a year and a half into your relationship. Not to mention your first I love you, which had been a slip-up that happened only in your first year of college after a drunken night with Chan and Minho. Your head on his lap, your tulip nestled among his daisies in a pretty vase on the coffee table as Chan hummed along to some song that came from his phone. You felt as if your entire being was filled with pure gratitude at that moment, and the liquid courage that flowed through your veins only helped you mutter out how much you loved Minho.

He looked down at you, hands cupping your cheeks with a silly smile adorning his face, and simply answered, “Well, I love you more.”

Your carefree attitude toward your relationship was almost a contrast to the one you had with your friendship. You and Minho had met so young that you could never truly pinpoint when you had become such close friends. You always wondered if that was what led you two to be so easygoing with what most people rush into. Things happened when they were supposed to happen.

You remember one of Minho’s new friends, Changbin, asking something about your sex life at some party during freshman year, and you two nonchalantly answering that you didn’t really have one. Your friends’ shock was understandable, but you and Minho only laughed.

Things happened when they were supposed to happen.

It was Minho’s 21st birthday, when your flowers were no longer in bloom, but your love remained blossoming like it was mid-spring. He had, as always, vetoed any and every plan of a celebration suggested by your friends. He opted to stay in with you, cuddling under a blanket fort like you had been doing for so many years. Chan graciously offered to sleep at a friend’s dorm, leaving your small shared apartment just for you and Minho.

He hadn’t planned for anything to happen, and neither had you. You were simply lying together, watching the flickering of the candles you had set up around the coffee table, recounting the innumerable memories you shared when you suddenly felt the earnest, all-consuming need to have Minho as close as possible.

It was clumsy, both of you inexperienced and nervous. Your teeth crashed together and your hands gripped each other tightly, the realization of the intensity of your yearning becoming undeniable. At some point, the entire tent collapsed on top of you, and laughter filled the room for a brief moment before being replaced by your sighs and whispered moans.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was you and Minho.

Graduation day was a blur in your mind.

It had all started with Minho and Chan drunk at eleven a.m., offering you the awful-tasting omelet they had cooked in your cramped kitchen. They then went on to zone out for most of the ceremony after stumbling out of your apartment.

You approached Minho after he was done taking pictures and getting scolded by his family for being drunk on his graduation day, his mother giving you an apologetic look as you whisked him away.

“You’re stressed,” you pointed out.

“Yeah.”

“Me too,” you replied with a sigh, resting against a large tree far enough away from the hustle and bustle of recently graduated students and crying families. “So is Chan. Don’t think I’ve seen him this drunk since Jisung’s birthday party last year.”

Minho chuckled, shifting on his feet and toying with the fabric of his gown. You furrowed your brows; he only ever got fidgety when hiding something. You learned that for the first time when you were thirteen and he had to wait until your birthday to tell you he’d gotten you two tickets to see your favorite band, and again when he had to keep Chan’s then-girlfriend’s plans of asking him to move in together a secret.

“You’re not nervous ‘cause of graduation, are you?”

You remember the way he stilled almost immediately.

“We always tell each other the truth, right?” He asked.

You remember the way your whole world spun as he pulled out a small box from his pocket and how everything seemed to fade into a white mist that surrounded Minho like a spotlight as he proposed to you.

Your wedding was small — both because that was how you had wanted it to be and because of your lack of money for a proper party.

After graduating, Minho became a dance teacher at the academy he attended as a teen, teaching little kids who he said always reminded him of you two. You used the money your parents had saved for you to travel after college to buy the old flower shop that held so many memories from your childhood. Neither of you used your degrees, and neither of you made a lot of money, but you were overflowing with an infatuation for life and a love for each other so great that it made up for any silly inconvenience that dared to come up.

The ceremony was held at a local church — although neither of you was particularly religious, that was the cheapest place available. You opted to walk down the aisle together; hands clasped the way you used to do for many years while walking home from school. Minho held onto a daisy bouquet you made, while you held the single tulip he had picked out for you that day.

“I’m not good with words,” was how Minho began his vows, the glow of the fairy lights and candles adorning the church rendering his attempt at hiding his tears futile. That was the first time you had ever seen him cry in the twenty-one years you’d known him. “But I think that never mattered with you. You know me better than I know myself. Most times, I don’t even have to say a word, and you’ll still understand me. It’s been this way since we were four, and you understood why I was so quiet, and you still chose to be my friend. Thank you for understanding me, and thank you for allowing me to love you. Loving you is what I do best and look how lucky I am; I’ve been able to do it for my whole life.” He then shot you a grin, the back of his hand wiping away your tears. He ended his speech with a line that was so very Minho, thought up with sincerity but spoken primarily to make you smile. “You’ve always felt like home, and I can’t wait to feel that way until we’re both food for the worms to eat.”

You had never cried so much as you did on the day of your wedding — which was remarkable, seeing as you’d been a crier your whole life. You remember the irony of it all; Minho, who had never been good with words, telling you about his love with words that came from his heart and spilled from his lips without any rehearsal, while you were rendered speechless and too emotional to even attempt to form a coherent sentence.

Your wedding vow was a simple, choked-up, “Thank you for being my best friend, Minho.”

Minho carried you home from the church, with your cheeks flushing pink and his smile beaming as your friends made rice cascade around the two of you like snow. It turned out the boy who hated attention didn’t mind the spotlight so long as it meant showing off his love for you.

Your honeymoon was spent in your small house above your flower shop — which you named Daisy’s Tulips — where you cuddled under a blanket fort the entire day, only leaving the comfort of the pillows and fluffy covers well after midnight to adorn the sidewalk in front of your house in a brand new chalk drawing.

“Can you imagine if we never said anything?” Minho suddenly wondered aloud, his chuckle echoing through the quiet street. “We were both pretty good at hiding our feelings for so long.”

And you simply shook your head, painting a daisy with white chalk on the sidewalk. “Minho, I know you. You wouldn’t have let me keep pretending after finding out I liked you too.”

“Who says I would have found out?”

“You said it yourself,” you explained, “I know you better than you know yourself, and that’s reciprocal. You would’ve found out ‘cause I can never hide anything from you.”

And Minho smiled, taking your hand in his just as you were done with your drawing. Your gaze shifted toward him, and you admired the man he had become. From the shy little boy who sat beside you to the quiet teenager with thick glasses to the man he had grown into; you loved every version of Minho you had the privilege to meet throughout your life, and you were certain you would love every new version of him you came to know in the future as well.

“Of course you can’t,” he stated matter-of-factly. “I’m your best friend, aren’t I?” He asked with a grin, and you nodded. He then added, “Thank you for being my best friend.”

♡ taglist: @bloom-ings, @linocz, @farahia, @mirbokk, @jisunglyricist

[cloudiewrites]

OMG. Hiiii. I love Tom Riddle and Theodore Nott. So I am totally going to ask you if you are comfortable to write either Professor Tom or a Professor Theo x fem reader fic with smut. Feel free to ignore this but I really struggle to find Professor Tom fics and Idk how to write them 😅

Professor Tom Riddle x f!reader

Warnings: strong language, toxic behaviour, manipulation, SMUT reader is a student in the beginning (still over 18!), reader becomes a little bit unhinged towards the middle (who wouldn't after meeting TR?) 18+MINORS DO NOT INTERACT

Author's Note: Wow, this took me ages to post! I was having a break from this blog due to my exams, but I promise I will be more active from now on. Also, this is actually my first smut! (Idk how to write them either, so I do hope you like it.) I tried to build some plot into it, so it is not just filthy p*rn, haha. Thank you so much for your request! <3

There are moments that change your life. Moments when you realise you will never be the same and your whole existence is divided into two parts - before this, and after this.

For you, this moment was meeting Tom Riddle.

The memories of that rainy day when your gazes crossed for the first time continue to haunt your thoughts almost every second of your existence. And no matter how hard you try to forget, they become more and more vivid. Sometimes you wonder if you are actually reliving it or if it is just a fruit of your imagination.

The rain was so cold that day, that your whole body was shivering under your soaking clothes. You were running across the courtyard, trying to get inside as soon as possible. Both of your hands were clutching your bag on top of your head, trying to prevent the water from getting into your eyes. You were almost at the door when your body collided with someone, and you lost your balance falling into a muddy puddle.

You looked up, ready to give a piece of your mind to whoever made you end up like this, but your words got stuck in your throat the moment your gaze crossed his.

Eyes as dark as the night. Skin as pale as the moonlight. Hair falling in elegant curls on top of the most beautiful face you have ever seen. He silently offered you his hand, before he took off his jacket and wrap it around your trembling figure.

"Are you alright?", he asked. His voice was smooth like honey, yet deep. You couldn't do anything else other than slowly nod before your cheeks turned a light shade of red. He offered you a small smirk, before guiding you inside the castle. No words were exchanged between you after that.

Looking back, you are sure that this was the moment that changed your life.

You didn't know who he was at first. He looked so young, that it was natural to assume he was your age. You have not seen him before, so he must be a transfer student, just like you were a year ago. "He did not wear a robe, so he must not been sorted yet", you said to your friends later that day and they just shook their heads. No one has heard of any transferring students this year, yet here you were claiming you have seen in the flesh the man of your dreams.

And you were almost convinced you were dreaming a few days later when you found yourself sitting in the back of the class, while he was neatly writing his name on the black board.

Professor Riddle.

"As your new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, I would like to establish a few ground rules right now", his voice was calm but dominant, "Always come prepared. I do not tolerate lazy students. No talking during class. No questions during lessons. If there is anything you do not understand, you can either conduct your own research in the library or visit one of my additional sessions every third Friday of the month."

Unlike you, the majority of the students have already heard of Tom and some even knew him personally, as he graduated just a few years ago. They carefully listened to all his rules, noting everything they should do to stay on his good side. No matter the house, the respect and fear felt towards Tom was felt by all students. You would lie if you said that this did not include you.

Yet in two weeks time during his first Friday session, you found yourself leaning over your notebook, while Tom was calmly explaining the lesson material to you. You were nodding your head, not paying even a little bit of attention to what he was saying. All you could focus on was the sound of his voice and the tingles that covered your whole body every time he lifted his eyes to your face, checking if were actually following.

"I am curious, miss, for the real purpose of your visit today", he said once you started packing your bag. You immediately froze in place, cold sweat forming on the back of your neck. Your trembling hands closed your bag before you turned to him with a tight-lipped smile.

"I am not sure I understand what you mean, professor."

He offered you a small smile, before grabbing his coat and briefcase and making his way towards you. Stopping just a step away from you, he lifted his hands toward your neck, making you gulp. You stood still, expecting him to wrap his hand around your throat, while his eyes burned into yours. His long fingers inched closer and closer to your skin, before wrapping around your tie and adjusting it so it could be centred.

"I am a patient and understanding man, miss", he said, his hand resting on the piece of cloth for a few more seconds, before moving away, "But I am no fool."

And you knew his words to be true. Because if there was a fool here, that was you. You knew it was wrong to pursue the foolish feelings that started to blossom in your chest. Despite the age difference being only a few years, falling for a professor was never a good idea. But how could you stop yourself when every time his eyes laid upon you there was a feeling of longing behind them? The small touches on your arms, every time he tried to explain to you the parts of the textbook you claimed "not to understand", the way his lips curved in a small smirk every time you volunteered to help during demonstrations in class, the way his gaze darkened that time he saw your friend's arms wrapped around your shoulders during dinner...

He may have thought he was subtle, but you knew there was some part of him that desired you as much as you did.

"What do you think of me, professor?", you asked one day, while sitting on the desk, arranging papers. As you were the only student who showed any interest in DADA sessions outside the scheduled classes, Tom moved the Friday meetings to his private office. They also started to happen every week, rather than once per month. And often, you were helping him with work, rather the other way around. "Why?", his gaze lifted from the papers he was grading, eyebrows furrowing in suspicion. He laid his pen down, crossing his arms in front of his chest and resting his body back on his chair. You sat next to him on a smaller wooden chair, but your hands did not stop arranging the graded exams, and neither did your focus move from them.

"I am...", you took a deep breath, thinking how to phrase your explanation, "Curious, I guess."

Tom watched you with interest, noting the way that your voice trembled in the beginning. Looking up at your face, his eyes trailed every single one of your features, before stopping at your lips.

"You are a good student", he finally said, his tone flat. Your shoulders immediately slumped and you let out a quiet "Oh.", your fingers now pressing the tower of papers on its sides to make sure it is stable. The silence between you grew longer as you tried your best to hide the disappointment you felt from his answer. Tom, on the other hand, was still staring at your face, trying to read your emotions based on your pursed lips and furrowed brows.

"All finished. I think it is better if I go", you finally said, unable to sit in his presence anymore. You stood up, ready to grab your bag from the floor, when cold fingers wrapped themselves around your wrist halting you in place. Tom stood up from his chair, moving behind you. Laying his free hand on the side of your waist, he leaned towards you, nose just a few inches from your hair. He took a deep breath, inhaling the sweet scent of your perfume, and let out a low groan.

"What I really think...", he murmured, the fingers on your waist digging into your flesh, "is not something I shall voice out loud. The thoughts that flood my mind every time I see you are too..."

Your breath hitched.

"Too?"

"Sinful", you felt his breath on the back of your ear and your body involuntarily shivered. Before you could think of an answer, his hands left your body and he took a step back. You turned around, eager to close the distance again, but were stopped by him grabbing your shoulder and gently pushing you away.

"Do not", he warned, "do not make this harder for both of us."

"But I-"

"I think it is best if you leave."

You gulped. And the first time your eyes did not cast down in shame - instead you held his gaze, your expression hardening.

"You cannot do this to me", your voice trembled, "Toying with my feelings , then pushing me away."

He raised his brow and his hand fell from your shoulder. You stood in place, not making any attempts to get closer.

"I did not do such thing", his voice sounded low and dark, his eyes suddenly turning colder, "In fact, I am telling you now... Whatever hope you hold in your heart about anything happening between us, you should kill it now."

"But you said-"

"I know what I said", he interrupted you impatiently, "And I mean it. But whatever affection I have towards you does not change the fact you are my student."

Your fingers wrapped around the edge of your skirt and you clenched your jaw, moving your gaze towards the door. The rational part of your brain was telling you to just grab your bag and dash through the door. The other part, the one led by your heart, was screaming at you to stay and confront him. It did not take you long to decide which one to listen to.

"Why does it matter?", you snapped, "I am an adult already. And you are only a few years older. It is not illegal or anything!"

Tom let out an annoyed sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose, before running his fingers through his dark curls. He turned around and walked around the desk, before slamming his hands on the hard surface.

"Merlin, you just do not understand!", his voice was full with irritation, "I can not lose my job. I can not lose everything I have worked for!"

"We can hide it", you protested, gluing yourself to his side and gripping his bicep, "Only for a few months! Only till I graduate!"

The man tore your hands away from his arm, cupping them in his palms instead. He tilted his head, searching your eyes, which were now starting to form tears of stress and frustration.

His face suddenly relaxed. The air between you felt lighter and a new spark of hope started to burn inside of you. His finger made its way to your cheek and wiped one of the tears that started to trail down your skin.

"Is it not curious, how weak love makes a man?", his finger trailed down to your jaw, before cupping it, "And no spell in this world is strong enough to save a man that has already fallen."

Your head instinctively leaned towards his hand and you closed your eyes, enjoying the feeling of warmth of his skin on yours. If you could only freeze time, you would stay in this moment forever.

"I don't want to be saved", you murmured and despite not being able to see him, you could feel the small smile that grazed his lips once you said it. You freed your hands from his and wrapped them around his torso, burying your head in his chest. It took a few seconds for him to embrace your body, resting his chin on the top of your head.

And if you could only see the satisfied smirk and cold gaze on Tom's face, you would have known how true his words are. There is no spell in this world that could save you not that you have already fallen...

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You can't say exactly when the dream had turned into a nightmare.

Private sessions became everyday afternoon meetings, where you talked about different random topics. Tom never opened up about his past, even his Hogwarts years. On the other hand, he was a good listener and without you realising it, he managed to unravel your whole family history just within a week.

His silent nature did not bother you, however. You finally had someone who listened to you. You slowly started to detach from your friends, excusing your unnatural behaviour on all the extra academic work you were taking. They were worried, but every time they tried to voice their concerns, you rolled your eyes, before running to Tom to tell him about their words. "They are just jealous of you, my dear, " he would always chuckle, gently stroking your cheek, "because you found what they would keep searching for a long, long time."

Soon, he was the only person you really trusted. And he claimed he felt the same.

This is why he couldn't ask anyone else to sneak into the Headmaster's office and get the little leather diary in one of his desk drawers. This is also why you had to find a way to get the books he was interested in from the restricted section without getting caught. This is also why you had to lure the naive fifth-year Hufflepuff into the Chamber of Secrets and leave her there.

There was simply no one else whom he trusted to do these tasks. And you gladly completed each of his requests without question, doing everything in your power to keep him happy.

But soon this was not enough. And once you graduated all the promises he made to you broke into thousand little pieces, which were discarded into thin air.

"I don't need you anymore", his cold voice said, his eyes glued to the papers in front of him, "You can leave. Make sure you close the door."

Without sparing you even a glance, he grabbed the pile of papers and left for class, leaving you to gather your thoughts and pieces of your heart by yourself.

What did you do wrong? Why did he change so suddenly? Was it all a lie?

These questions continued to poison your mind for the next few years, while you tried to rebuild yourself. You did not realise how dependent you were on him, till you were left on your own. The weight of all the unsaid feelings within you was forcing you onto your knees, making you unable to get up and continue with your life.

And this is how two years after your graduation you found your way back to Hogwarts. The place where it all began...

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The wooden clock on the wall was ticking dangerously close to midnight when Tom finally got to his office. The teacher's gathering has been prolonged unnecessarily due to Dumbledore's ramblings and him finding problems where there are none. The amount of control the young professor has exercised to endure this long meeting has left him completely drained of energy, but he knew he still had to do some research about the Founders' Relics. After so many years he was finally getting close to achieving his goal and he was ready to sacrifice as many nights of sleep as necessary.

He knew something was not right the moment he opened the door. The lights were still off and everything seemed to be in the exact place he left it... but there was just the faintest sound of someone breathing which made him immediately reach for his wand.

"Ah, look who finally came", your giggle reached his ears before he saw you turning on his chair, fingers moving towards the small lamp on his desk, "Terribly rude of you to make me wait this long."

Tom's lips pressed into a thin line and his grip around his wand tightened. He traced his eyes over the visible parts of your body, noting the little changes that had occurred since he last saw you.

Your hair, which was usually neatly combed and put in a bun, was now in a messy braid, the front pieces framing your face. Your lips, which usually curved in a shy smile, were now forming an arrogant, almost sinister smirk. Your eyes, which have always looked up to him full of admiration, were now staring down at him with a glint of insanity.

"Get out", he commanded, striding towards you with his wand pointed towards your head.

Your raised your eyebrows and your mouth shaped an "o" in a mock horror, before you reached for your own wand, pointing it back at him.

"Now that is not a way to welcome your ex-lover, is it?", your eyes squint.

Tom scoffed at your words, stopping at the edge of his desk, before his expression hardened.

"You were never my lover", he stated, his head tilting to the side, "And I thought I was extremely clear when I said last time I saw you that you are not welcome here."

You hummed, eyes moving to the ceiling. Still holding your wand towards him, you relaxed further into his chair, lifting your legs onto his desk. With a curious gaze, you followed the stone patterns of the walls around the room, while scrunching your face in disgust.

"3 years, Tom", you finally said, landing your attention back on him, "3 years you have been here and your office is as bland as it was when you first came here. It brings my mood down, you know? It's so grey!"

"You can leave then", Tom hissed through his teeth, making a few more steps till he stayed right in front of you. The tip of his wand rested under your chin and he pulled it upwards, making you look up, "I am giving you exactly a minute to leave, before I take your life."

A loud giggle left your lips and you pressed your neck further into his wand.

"How generous!"

"45 seconds."

You gently put your own wand back into your pocket, not moving your eyes from his. Tilting your head, your mouth formed a wide smile.

"Okay."

His brows shot in confusion, his jaw clenching. You could see his on the wand became tighter, his knuckles almost white.

"Okay?"

"Do it", you shrug your shoulders, "My ghost will be eager to see how are you going to explain why your new assistant went missing after coming to your office to drop a list of all the students that are going to be in your... our class this year."

Before you know it, his free hand flew to your face and gripped your face. His fingers dig into your jaw, lifting it dangerously close to his face.

"My assistant?", he let out a dry chuckle, "Good try, dear. And a terrible way to waste that minute I gave you."

With lips already starting to form the words of the deadliest spell, his fingers dug deeper into your face, before his eyes landed on the sparkling object in your palms. The unforgivable words quickly died in his throat and he withdrew his wand, stumbling back. Eyes full of anger met yours, who in contrast were sparkling with playfulness.

"How did you get that?", he demanded, reaching towards the object, but you pulled it back, before laying it on your head. Putting your elbows on his desk, you fluttered your eyelashes, smiling brightly.

"Do you think it suits me?"

"Stop playing around."

"You are such a bore", you rolled your eyes, "I went on a holiday to Albania. And I found this gorgeous, gorgeous diadem, which turned out to be Rowena Ravenclaw's. What are the chances?"

Tom seemed unamused by your story, instead twitching his jaw. His eyes stayed glued to the diadem on your head, the reflection of the sapphire on it sparkling in his cold eyes.

"How did you know where it was?", his gaze moved towards you, his hand putting his wand back in his coat. His tall form moved towards you again, this time taking a seat on the empty surface of the desk in front of you. With a smile, you took the diadem out of your head, twirling it between your fingers.

"You don't think you were the only one who managed to charm the famous Helena Ravenclaw, do you?", you raised your eyebrow, moving your tongue across your top lip, "You underestimate the power of women's empathy and love for gossip, Tom."

He let out an airy laugh, running a hand through his thick curls. After two years, he hasn't changed anything about his appearance. His face, his haircut, and even the suits he wore were the exact same ones he already wore when you were a student. You would lie if you said you didn't enjoy it - that meant that the Tom you loved was still somewhere inside of him. Your Tom.

"I'm impressed", he finally said, moving his hands towards his knee and locking his fingers around it. His face dropped into a serious expression once again, "Give it to me."

You tilted your head, pursing your lips. Your eyes moved to the diadem, before landing back on him.

"Oh, I can't do that, Tom", you rested your palm on your chest, looking up at him with doe eyes, "He would be very disappointed if I don't bring it back to him."

Tom took a deep breath, his upper lip twitching.

"He?", he pressed his tongue to the side of his cheek, "Who is "he"?"

You twirled in his chair, pressing the diadem closer to your chest.

"My Lord, of course", you let out a giggle, resting your cheek on your shoulder and closing your eyes. You still managed to see the way Tom's body tensed, however.

"He sent his regards to you", you smiled, standing up, "If you hadn't left me that day, he wouldn't have met me and subsequently learned all about making horcruxes."

The man's eyes immediately darkened and his hand flew towards your wrist, stilling you in place.

"Name."

"Huh?"

"Tell me his name", Tom hissed, his nostrils flaring. You stepped closer to him, noses almost brushing.

"And why would I do that?", you raised your brows, your voice turning into a mocking laugh, "Do you think I would betray him... for you?"

The sudden feeling of his arms wrapping around your waist and pulling you forward made you almost lose your balance and you grabbed his shoulder in reflex to keep you from falling on top of him. Nesting his head in the curve between your neck and shoulder, Tom pressed his lips next to your ear before muttering:

"You, my dear, are a liar", his teeth grazed the end of your earlobe, "And a very bad one."

Your whole body froze and you tried to push yourself away from him, but his arms were holding you firmly in place. Suddenly all the confidence you have displayed in his presence so far melted under the warmth of his touch, and you were left only with the hope you could still lie your way out of this situation.

"I am not lying", you protested with a quickening breath.

Tom lifted his head from your shoulder and rested his forehead on yours instead. His eyes stared deep into your own and his warm breath on your face made your whole body involuntarily tremble.

"I have already told you I am not a fool", one of his hands slid from your waist towards your arm and then hand, where you were still clutching the diadem. His fingers wrapped around it and pulled it out of your grasp with ease. Without looking at it, he placed it on the desk behind his back, before his hand found its way to the top of your head.

"I know you better than you know yourself, my dear", he muttered, his hand gently stroking your hair, "And I know there is no room in your heart for anyone but me. You would not be here otherwise."

He pulled back enough to be able to take a better look at your face. His gaze fell from your half-lidded eyes to your parted lips.

"You are mine. Always were, always will be."

A loud whine escaped your throat before it was swallowed by Tom's mouth on yours. His plump lips were chapped, a result of hours of his teeth sinking into them, trying to hold back all the snarky remarks he had for his fellow colleagues. The rough feeling made your knees buckle and you closed your eyes, relaxing fully in his arms.

Without breaking the kiss, he turned you around and with a swift move of his hand, pushed the diadem and a few books out of the way, before laying you on the cold surface. Your hands found their way into his hair, tugging the soft curls.

A low growl left his lips and he lifted his lips from yours, a trail of saliva connecting them, before it was broken by his fingers cupping your chin.

"This is what you wanted, is it not?", his voice was suddenly deeper and darker, "For me to take you on the same desk I once you graded you."

His words made a loud moan to escape you and your back arched up, seeking nothing more than to be close to him. With a low chuckle, he pressed his palm between your breasts, pushing you flat on the furniture beneath you. You opened your mouth to complain but were quickly silenced once he pushed his index and middle fingers in your mouth, almost making you choke. Fixating your gaze on his, you closed your lips around them and started to suck, making sure to flatten your tongue in the process.

The image before your eyes was something you had dreamt of countless times before - Tom, with his messy curls and parted lips, panting while the fingers of his free hand were skilfully unbuttoning his vest. You did not waste any time in helping him, focusing on shakingly unbuttoning his belt.

"So impatient", he clicked his tongue, withdrawing his fingers from your mouth, so could remove his shirt. Once his torso was in full view, you did not hesitate even a second before you lifted yourself in a sitting position and attached your lips to his neck. Nibbling and sucking the smooth skin, you started to nibble and suck your way down to his chest. His head fell back and he closed his eyes, his muscles relaxing under you.

Tom Riddle may not be a man who was capable of love, but he was a man after all. And it would be a lie to say he has never thought of you in a more... erotic way. You have always been so obedient and good, doing everything for him without any hesitation. He has always found that incredibly attractive, but not enough for him to act on his desires.

Now, however, the sight of you has ignited some primal urges within him that he never felt before. Maybe it was the few drinks he had consumed prior at the gathering or maybe it was the idea of the the crazy lengths you were willing to go in order to get back to him...

Tom Riddle would probably never know the reason for him giving up control for the first time in his life. To you, nonetheless.

His mind came back to reality when he felt you pushing him on his chair and nestling yourself between his legs. Looking up at him, you tugged his pants and boxers down, letting his erection free. You let your index finger gently caress the length of it, making it twitch. A small giggle left your lips before you repeated the gesture.

"Stop teasing me", the man groaned, and his palm rested behind your head in order to push you towards his member, but you swiftly moved to the side dodging it. You squinted your eyes, moving your hands to his thighs and digging your nails into them.

"You", the word was hissed through your teeth, "are in no position to order me around."

Tom scoffed and was about to argue when your mouth unexpectedly wrapped around the head of his penis, twirling your tongue around it. He let out a choked gasp and he tried to put his hand on your head again before you smacked it away. Swallowing his pride, he rested both of his arms on the side of his chair, bucking his hip forward.

Carefully watching his reaction you wrapped your hand around him, slowly moving it down and back up again, following the movement of your mouth. The feeling of him filling your mouth was causing some saliva to start dripping your chin, but rather than pulling away, you pushed him further into your mouth till your nose was buried in his dark pubic hair. The feeling of his swollen head hitting the back of your throat made you gag, causing Tom to groan in pleasure.

"Fuck this", he muttered, before grabbing you by your hair and pulling your head up, before pressing it down again. His hips buckled in harmony with your head, making sure you were taking all of him. His dick was now coated in your saliva, making it glisten in the dim light. You closed your eyes, the lack of oxygen making them sting. The rapid pace with which he was moving was making it hard for you to breathe through your nose and you tried giving him a warning slap on his leg, which he purposefully ignored. Instead, he moved his other hand towards your chin and held your head still, while he continued to thrust his hips up and down. Sloppy wet noises filled his office, being interrupted only by his heavy breathing.

Your thighs clenched together in a weak attempt to relieve the burning ache between your legs. The way he was using your mouth to satisfy himself was making your underwear damp, yet you knew better than to touch yourself yet. After so many sleepless nights during which you tried to relieve yourself, imagining how would it feel to taste him, you wanted to focus all your attention only on him.

Feeling he was close, Tom finally pulled your head back and examined your face. Both saliva and tears were smeared all over your chin and your cheeks were flushed in rosy colour.

"What a pretty sight you are, my dear", he smiles, wiping some of it with his thumb. You licked your lips, getting up on your feet.

"And you are such a smooth talker", your face leaner just inches from his, "I wonder if you are as good with the action as you are with words."

Taking this as a challenge, he stood up and pushed you back onto the desk, before lifting your skirt. His fingers hooked under the elastic bands of your panties and with one tug they snapped, leaving you completely exposed in front of him.

Tom gulped, burning the image of your waiting arousal into his mind. His fingers made their way towards your slit, gathering the wetness before easily sliding his middle finger in. You moaned at the contact, fluttering your eyes closed. He pumped his fingers a few times, his eyes carefully observing your facial expression before he slid it out. You whined at the loss of contact, opening your eyelids only to find him smirking down at you.

"Do you really think you deserve me wasting time on your pleasure?"

"Fuck you!", you snapped, resulting in him grabbing your neck and squeezing so hard, an airy cough left your lips.

"Such a dirty mouth", he lifted your face up, his jaw clenching, "but such a weak mind. Look at the pathetic mess you are..."

Your lips parted to offer a snarky response, but your mind quickly went blank the moment he slid fully into you. Arching your back, your hands found their way around his shoulders, while his rested on both sides of your head.

Tom did not waste any time in developing a quick pace, which made you roll your eyes back. With each thrust the head of his cock was brushing against your cervix, making your whole vision white. His left hand moved towards one of your breasts, pinching and twisting the oversensitive nipple between his fingers. His other hand made his way to your pussy, where his thumb started to draw sloppy circles over your clit.

Never in your life have you felt such pleasure in your life. Of course, you had previous lovers during the past two years while trying to get Tom out of your mind, but nothing compared to this. Curling your toes, you lifted both of your legs and rested them on his shoulder.

Both of you groaned in unison when you felt him going even deeper than before. His upper body collapsed on top of yours, his lips immediately latching onto your other nipple. Still gripping his shoulders, you dragged your nails down his back, leaving angry red marks behind.

The knot in your stomach started to tighten and your moans became louder and louder. Moving your hips so you can meet Tom's thrusts, you looked at his face, only to find him staring back with eyes clouded with desire. His fingers were now working faster on your sensitive bud and you let out a shaky breath: "Tom, I...", you could not finish your sentence, your vocabulary suddenly consisting only of his name.

"Shhh", he whispered, his hand moving from your breast to your cheek. He gently stroked it with his thumb and suddenly you saw in front of you the same Tom that charmed you years ago, "I've got you."

His words were enough to cause the knot to snap and your whole body went rigid, squeezing and pulsating around him. A few harsh trusts and Tom suddenly tensed on top of you, as he painted your insides white. You both held onto each other, fingers digging into soft flesh, as you melted into your shared euphoria.

It was not romantic.

It was primal. Rough. Dirty.

It was everything you have imagined.

Finally relaxing on top of you, Tom buried his head in your shoulder, trying his best to calm his breathing down. You laid under him, crushed under his weight, yet enjoying every second of the contact he allowed you to have.

Against your better judgment, you lifted your hand and started to gently stroke his hair. Against his better judgment, he allowed you to and closed his eyes in the process.

Tired from the long day and your office activity, Tom lifted you in his arms, his now soft member slipping out of you and he sat back on his chair, adjusting the backrest so you can both take a more comfortable position.

You lifted yourself from his chest and raised your eyebrow, but bit back your tongue the moment your gaze crossed his stern one, warning you not to voice whatever you had in your mind. Letting out a small chuckle, you shook your head and laid it back down on his skin.

There was an urge burning inside of you to mock him about showing gentleness, but deep down you knew this was your only chance to enjoy it. So you closed your eyes and relaxed, finally being able to fall asleep without the haunting dreams of what could've been.

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The sunlight was painting the whole room in a beautiful gold colour and Tom let out a low groan when he felt it hitting his face. His hand made its way over his eyes, shielding them from the light, while his mind slowly started to become aware of his surroundings. The uncomfortable chair was making all of his muscles ache and he immediately regretted not gathering the energy last night to make his way back to his room. The chill air coming from the window has not helped too, especially when we was only partly covered and-

Tom's eyes shot open looking down at his body and finding his suit jacket thrown over his waist and private parts. You, however, were not to be found. Not on top of him, not on the desk, nowhere in the room.

He immediately stood up, grabbing his pants from the floor and furiously putting them on, while breathing heavily. His gaze fell on the stack of books he pushed from his desk last night and he immediately fell on his knees, scanning the floor around him.

"No, no, no", he hissed under his breath, pushing his hair out of his eyes, "That little serpent!"

Not only you have left, but you also have taken the diadem with you. No matter how much he searched for it, it was definitely not here.

You tricked him.

Getting up back to his feet, Tom kicked one of the books on the floor, before slamming his hands on his desk. His breathing was hard and he could feel his blood boiling in his veins. Suddenly, his attention was caught by a small parchment of paper placed next to his quill. Unfolding it, he could have sworn his heart stopped for a second.

"My dear Tom,

Thank you for our wonderful night together. I did not want to leave you so early, but I had to be out of the castle before everyone else woke up. To be truthful with you, I am not going to be your new assistant. But your already knew that, so I guess it is not shocking news. I sneaked it yesterday when all of the teachers were having a party (or what you call a gathering, ha!). Neither do I have a new lord. You already knew that as well.

Do not stress about the diadem, as it is safe with me - if there is one thing I learned from you is that I need to take good care of horcruxes once they are made. I know it was probably foolish of me to bring it to you last night, as it does hold a part of my soul, but I promise that from now on I will take better care of it.

Without doubt your paths shall cross again. Remember Tom: You are mine. Always were, always will be.

Love, y/n

P.S. - I hope you do not mind that I helped myself by getting your keys from your jacket and getting a shower in your room. Also, I think you need to follow your own advice and start putting your objects away. I found your diary resting on your bedside table, so I had to take it with me. Do not worry - I promise I will keep it safe...

for now."

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CC artwork: Nasan Hardcastle

[kwanisms]

»» stray kids masterlist | join the taglist! ««

This year, I'm finally participating in Kinktober but instead of doing 31 stories for the month of October, I'm going to cut it down to just Stray Kids. Spooky Month is going to be very busy for me and so to avoid missing any days, I think this is a much more time manageable option for me. So not only is it Kinktober but it's also a Creature Feature. Thats right, it's monsterfucking season, bitches. Each story will feature monster!SKZ, 4 kinks, and a dialogue prompt.

See the details for each story below the cut!

Otherworldly 🌏

➮ alien/shapeshifter!Minho × f!Reader

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: While watching a meteor shower with her best friend, Y/N witnesses a UFO falling from the sky and crashing on her family's farm. The two rush to the wreckage site and find an alien spacecraft with a rather mysterious survivor.

𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬: tentacles + double penetration + anal + praise

𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭: ❛ what? Does that feel good? ❜

read now

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Accidents Happen🕯

➮ witch!Felix × f!Reader × incubus!Hyunjin

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: While studying for a witches exam, Felix leaves his materials out where his girlfriend, Y/N, happens upon them. When she reads an incantation, an incubus is accidentally summoned. Deciding to make a spectacle of it, the demon forces Felix to watch as he seduces his girlfriend.

𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬: somnophilia + auralism + cuckold + mind break

𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭: ❛ im going to have you screaming by the end of the night ❜ & ❛ do you really think you’re in a position to be giving orders? ❜

read now

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Monsoon Season 🌀

➮ kumiho!Jeongin × f!Reader

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: Jeongin has always been a bit of an outcast in his village being half fox demon (kumiho) until a kind stranger takes him in during a monsoon and gives him more than a place to stay for a few days.

𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬: virgin sex + degradation + begging + corruption kink

𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭: ❛ have you never been touched like this before? ❜

read now

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Run, Rabbit, Run 🦇

➮ vampire!Seungmin × f!Reader

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: Seungmin is a vampire and has lived a very long life and seen many ages pass him by. He’s grown weary of immortality until he meets someone one random night who really puts things into perspective for him.

𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬: blood play + dacryphilia + orgasm control + predator/prey play

𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭: ❛ why are you shaking? You're not scared of me are you? ❜

read now

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More Than Just Friends 🌖

➮ werewolf!Chris × f!Reader

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: Chris is a werewolf. His best friend is well aware of this. But what she doesn’t know is that during his heat, he often pictures pinning her down and breeding her. When she visits the day before his cycle is due to start, Chris finds it hard to not give into his urges when he smells she’s ovulating.

𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬: breeding + heat cycles + daddy kink + brat taming

𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭: ❛ we're not just friends and you fucking know it. ❜

read now

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Rough Waters 🌊

➮ samebito!Jisung × f!Reader

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: Y/N is a marine biologist who is obsessed with finding new sea life. During a night dive, she stumbles across a very well hidden underwater cave entrance and finds herself meeting something that defies all logic and evolution. She forms a bond with the creature and comes back almost every night to visit him.

𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬: cnc + dirty talk + pool/water sex + rough sex

𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭: ❛ I’m waiting for your permission to let me have my way with you. ❜

read now

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Unbearable 🐻

➮ werebear!Changbin × f!Reader

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: Changbin is a very reserved person. He tries to live a solitary and quiet life but after moving into a small studio apartment in what he thought was a quiet block of the city, his neighbor soon puts him to the test when she is extremely welcoming and outgoing.

𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬: strength kink + choking + body worship + facesitting

𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭: ❛ don't cover your mouth, I want everyone to hear how good I make you feel. ❜

read now »» coming October 31

ⓘ Graphics made by me. Content and support banners made using a template by cafekitsune. I do not allow reposts, translations, or continuations of my works. All writing and graphics are ©️ kwanisms.

[writing-in-the-impala]

Secret Smokes

Pairing: Teacher! Remus Lupin x Reader

Series Summary: When the reader bumps into the new DADA professor on the bridge in Hogwarts she begins to build a friendship with him all thanks to their shared feeling of not belonging and love for muggle cigarettes. Their friendship blooms while they both fight internal battles deciding what is wrong and what is right leading to a lot of fluff, angst, flirting and a rollercoaster of emotions.

Warnings: Swearing, Drinking, teacher-student relationship (but like it’s all legal chill), SLOWburn we’re in for a long ride

Word Count: Just over 1k

A/N:

This story takes place in a AU where Harry's parents are still alive so Remus Lupin still has all his friends and there is no war however that doesn't make him any less angsty. Everything else is pretty much the same as the canon universe! Enjoy!

MASTERLIST  | SERIES MASTER LIST | Part 1, Next Chapter

The wizarding world and the muggle world have always felt like two completely different worlds, maybe that's why Witches and Wizards who are muggle-born become outcasts. It's hard adjusting to a school but adjusting to a whole world at 11 is even harder. Even in your last year of Hogwarts you still didn't feel like you belonged, each summer going back to the muggle life that you have always known, working a summer job at a coffee shop and hanging out with muggles rather than wizards. You had friends in Hogwarts of course, some closer than others and even though it helped you feel more at home you knew that after Hogwarts you'd end up working a muggle job.

Maybe that's why entering your last year at Hogwarts didn't seem as intimidating because at the end of the day it didn't really matter what results you got in your N.E.W.T.S. Still in its own way you knew you'll miss the castle and the life you've lived in it. So your final train ride to Hogwarts felt a bit bittersweet. One thing didn't change, once again a new Defence against the dark arts teacher got introduced, this time one called Remus Lupin. He looked a lot kinder and nicer than the last one.

Your first week went by extremely quickly, quidditch practice hadn't started yet so you had more time to just hang out with your friends. All your lessons were easy so far as everyone was settling to being back. The new profesor was quickly becoming everyone's favourite due to his friendly nature, he seemed to befriend every student something no other profesor really did. You didn't really get to interact with him too much one-to-one during lessons as whenever he had free time the girls with a crush on him would jump onto the opportunity. You didn't really care about DADA as you wouldn't need it in the muggle world but you did understand why everyone was developing a crush, you had your own brewing for him.

It didn't take long for you to get home sick, homesick for the muggle world. Nothing really felt right to you, not even the food it just never tasted as good as what your mother would make, you missed your parents terribly it was a lot harder sending them owls than sending owls to wizard families, they didn't really grasp the concept. The twins could see that you were getting down again, they knew this happened every year after summer, and they've always tried to help lift your spirit. "Y/N we were thinking it was a good time to plan the first prank of the year what do you say?" Fred said. "Y/N is in her last year, she can't be participating in your silly games." Percy answered for you. "Who invited him?" George snapped back.

"Percy might be right I can't get in as much trouble as I did last year I don't want to get suspended, I'm on thin ice with old Minnie after the last prank we pulled before summer." You admitted, maybe you didn't care about your exam results but you didn't want to get suspended. The debate continued and you ended up agreeing to planning a prank that you may or may not help with. After dinner you decided to take a quick detour to the covered bridge, at the end of your fifth year you discovered it was empty in the evenings as it didn't lead to anywhere people would go at that time of night, it instantly became somewhere you would go for peace, and once you discovered smoking, it also got added to the list of secret smoking spots.

When you approached the middle of the bridge you saw a figure standing smoking a cigarette, you felt a bit gutted someone was using your spot but also excited at the idea of someone being so alike you. You approached them and they quickly put out the cigarette. "Don't worry man, I'm not a teacher I won't snitch." You claimed as you walked up to them before you could make out who it was.

"I know but I am." The figure replied, you were now close enough to make out that it was Professor Lupin. He was no longer leaning over the edge but standing straight with his hands in his pockets.

"I won't snitch if you won't?" You said pulling out your own packet of cigarettes. And his face turned to a gentle smile.

"I really shouldn't-" He protested. "Oh come on, you're new. This is normal." You preached. "Yeah Minerva and I do this all the time but don't tell her I told you." This got a laugh out of him.

"I may have believed you up until that point Y/N. But that's where you've lost me." He remembered your name and for some reason it made your heart skip for a second, he had so many students that he's met in one week and he still managed to memorise yours.

"Come on I'll give you a smoke if you don't tell anyone?" You reached out the pack to him "Camels?" He questioned while taking one. "You know them?" You took one out the packed for yourself before putting it away. "They're muggle smokes." He stated nonchalant, there wasn't any hate in those words which was rare around these halls. "I like them." You pulled out a lighter to light your cigarette while he snapped his fingers and it was instantly lit. "How did you do that? You instantly snapped back . "Do what?" He smiled while holding the cigarette in his mouth, he was attractive in the moon light. "Light it with a snap." You replicated his previous action. "It's a simple arson spell, just a small flame. I used wand less magic." He explained "If it's wand less why did you snap your fingers? Surely you could've just done it." You pressed. "Yes. You've got me there." He admitted. "So you were just trying to impress me?" Slipped out before you realised how those words could sound flirty, you barely knew the man. Truthfully if he wasn't your profesor and this was an interaction with a student you would be developing a stupid crush on them.

"You could say that." He said, with half a smile on his lips. "I'm the new profesor who you've just caught spending the evening by himself smoking, I don't want you to tell everyone I'm boring now I seem impressive."

"Or insecure." You shot back and he bit his lip and shook his head in disbelief at your words. He decided not to reply, instead went back to leaning over the bridge looking out into the darkness and smoking his cigarette and silence fell upon you both.

"I like the camel ones, just because the camel is cute." You broke the silence after a while, you felt bad for calling him insecure and wanted to kill the awkwardness. He laughed at your comment. "You know smokings bad for you? Even if the camel is cute." He said flicking the butt of his cigarette into the darkness. "I know." You quietly replied.

He checked his watch before standing up straight"Curfew has already started so don't stay out here too long as Snape is the one on duty today." He began to walk away. "Professor-" He turned around at your words. "This didn't happen right?" You questioned nervously. "What are camels?" He replied with a wink. "Have a good evening Y/N."

"You too Professor."

NEXT CHAPTER

[plutogist]

FIRST MEET

i. part one: your first meet with these characters. (part two here)

ii. gender neutral. reader | not proofread (lmk if I used any gendered terms!)

iii. characters: gon freecs, killua zoldyck, kurapika kurta, chrollo lucilfer, feitan portor.

GON FREECS

You and your family just recently relocated to Whale Island, primarily due to financial problems. You weren't particularly against the notion of relocating to the countryside, but you'll miss the city life in YorkNew. In order to become accustomed with the town, you first wanted to explore it.

While you were exploring, some of the locals approached you due to your new demeanor. Speaking with so many new individuals was a little challenging for you, but it was also quite a bit of enjoyment. You were strolling after shopping for new clothes in a store when you stumbled into a person and fell.

"I'm so sorry!" exclaimed an optimistic voice. You looked up and noticed a boy that seems to be in your age with green spiky hair and hazel eyes. He extended his hand, and you grabbed it.

"It's fine, don't worry," you said with a smile on your face.

"Are you new here? I don't recognize your face; by the way, my name is Gon Freecs!" He introduced himself to you.

"Yeah, I just moved here yesterday. My name is Y/N L/N. Nice to meet you, Gon," you introduced yourself, and the two of you have been acquainted since then.

KILLUA ZOLDYCK

You're Gon's cousin, who also stays on Whale Island. You agreed to accompany him to the 287th hunting exam after learning of his objectives. You were concerned that Gon's negligent conduct may bring him a lot of suffering or, worse, death because he can be rather impetuous when making judgments.

You met Kurapika and Leorio since you were on the same ship as them. During the first phase, you and Gon met a boy your age who had silvery locks and stunning blue eyes that captivated you.

"So, you two are cousins?" Killua asked while the three of you were running. Some of the participants were falling like dominoes due to how exhausted they were, but you chose to ignore them. This is just an endurance test, but they're already failing.

"Yup! Actually, we're like siblings with how close we are and we also grew up together," Gon explained and his smile grew wider. Killua just hummed as a response, while the three of you simultaneously ran together.

Killua is considerably closer to Gon, yet the two of you interact and converse every now and then. Nonetheless, you wished to be more connected to the boy.

KURAPIKA KURTA

You grew up in Lukso Province along with your grandparents (mother side). Ever since your parents were assassinated by an elite assassin when you were 8 years old, your grandparents have taken care of you and ever since that day, you have pledged to seek vengeance on the assassin that killed your parents.

Your grandparents live in the Lukso Province predominantly because it is isolated from the rest of the world, which your grandparents prefer. Your mother moved to Zaban City, where your father dwells, after marrying your father, and shortly thereafter gave birth to you.

You spend your free time keeping an eye on your grandparents' nearby fruit and vegetable shop and entertaining the customers who stop by. A boy with grey eyes and medium golden locks appeared one day. He was a kind customer. He would stop by sometimes and you find him to be quite intriguing.

You later learned his name and that he is a member of the Kurta clan. You two grew closer to one another, and you also met Pairo, his other friend. But the day where he stopped visiting you came and the day turned into months. It was a normal day for you until you heard about the tragedy that was brought upon the Kurta clan. You were substantially devastated by his murder and the death of his clan once the word of their assassination spread throughout the neighborhood and worldwide. But you never knew that he wasn't killed and is the sole survivor of the clan.

CHROLLO LUCILFER

You are a resident of Meteor City, a forsaken city where citizens are not listed in the official records. You have no recollection of your parents or how you ended yourself in the city. You had no idea how you'd survive on your own as a child.

And you're completely aware that you'll die within a week. You're famished, and struggling to move. Your clothes are filthy and coated in dust spots. You witnessed a church while wandering around looking for food and approaching it carefully, utilizing your residual stamina.

The church's doors were closed, but not locked, thus you were able to open them by pushing them. The church was not equally huge as cathedrals, but it was vast and expansive for a city that had been abandoned. The walls have been coated white and are immaculate, but the ceiling was embellished with various fresco paintings pertaining to Christianity - quite reminiscent of Michelangelo's masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. The windows were shut down, so the sole source of illumination was coming from outside the door.

You sat on the long wooden pew bench, gazing at the hardened asphalt surface, absorbing the misery and starvation that had been devouring your body for days. Your eyes were gradually giving up until you felt a tap on your shoulder that made you flinch. When you turned around, you saw a boy with medium-length black hair and grey eyes, who was looking at you with a smile.

"Hello. My name is Chrollo. Who are you?" he sought out directly, an inquisitive expression on his face. You didn't respond promptly because you were considering all of the possibilities, but you concluded that he might be able to help you. "I'm Y/N...Nice to meet you, Chrollo...," you sloppily said, your hunger returning, and Chrollo appeared to notice.

He reached deep into his pocket and offered you an edible treat. "I'm sorry, this is all I have," he responded nervously, chuckling. While glancing at the snack on his palm, your eyes gleamed. You took it away and opened the treat, but before you bit through it, you smiled at the boy. "Thank you, Chrollo," you said as you devoured the snack. Unbeknownst to you, a pink hue was prominent in his cheeks, but you were too busy eating the food to notice it.

FEITAN PORTOR

You work as a clerk in a game store at YorkNew City's Saloma Mall. Even though working as a clerk isn't really your thing or something you'd enjoy performing, you don't want to rely excessively on your parents when it comes to buying the items you need and paying for your tuition as a college student. You opted to work as a cashier at a game store in order to make money because you are completely aware of how much they are paying and it makes you ashamed to ask them for something you desire.

However, it is a minimal wage. You work for a full 14 hours without ceasing to sleep or even take a break, but periodically you take a nap if there isn't a customer or if your friend Aki is there. You earn 1000 jenny every hour. (I based this on the currency of Japan [yen] + I also searched on Google abt this, so I'm sorry if it's inaccurate.)

It's Thursday, and it's 10:45 p.m. You yawned as you flipped through the pages of the novel you're reading, rereading the lines because all you've been doing for the past few seconds is reading the sentences and not processing or understanding them. "I'm so exhausted..." you whispered to yourself as you flipped over the pages of the book.

But your lackadaisical manner was shattered when a bell on above of the doors chimed, indicating that someone had entered. You noticed two persons enter the shop: a guy with blond hair and two green eyes, and a boy wearing baggy clothes and a skull-embroidered scarf concealing his mouth. He's also much shorter than the guy he's with.

You noticed the two walking around the aisles, looking for a game that piqued their interest. However, based on your insights, the boy with black hair appears to be apathetic in anything, as he simply follows the other person about, sporadically examining something but quickly leaving it, in contrast to the other, who seemed to be extremely thrilled skimming at various videogames.

"Hello, this is what we're getting," you didn't realize that they'd already arrived at the counter. You simply nodded and scanned the three objects he set on the counter.

"Your total is 3500 jenny," you said and placed the three items in a bag. He placed his money on the counter while you gave him the bag, and you began to count the money that he gave. "Oh, but before we leave, my friend here thinks you're attractive; my name is Shalnark, and his name is Feitan! See you later, Miss!" The person dashed away, while the other gazed at you for a brief time before chasing him down.

You're still perplexed by what just occurred while your hand is still occupied with the coins. And it turns out that as Feitan was sitting on the seats inside Saloma Mall waiting for the rest of the troupe, he noticed you wandering about in your uniform. And we'll...he's been watching you ever that particular day, but he's reluctant to approach you.

Here are your ages:

Gon - 12

You - 12

Killua & You ^

Kurapika (when you first meet) - 13

You - 13

Chrollo (when you first meet) - 11

You - 11

Feitan - 25

You - 21

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for not informing my pet's previous owner that he died?

I adopted a gecko off of Kijiji around a year ago. She had a different name when I adopted her but I ended up renaming her Fingergun when I adopted her. It was clear that her original owner cared about her quite a lot and after talking to her, I realized she was only rehoming because she was moving into university and couldn't bring Fingergun with her.

After I picked Fingergun up, her owner messaged asking how she was settling in and I sent her some pictures and said she was doing well with some specifics on her behaviour. Over the next week, her owner messaged every day or two for updates. I was happy to provide them, especially since it was obvious that Fingergun was very loved and cared for. I rescue and rehabilite reptiles fairly frequently (Not as an official rescue, just over Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace, sometimes partnering with official rescues) so it's rare for me to see somebody in as good condition as Fingergun. It's important to note that I got Fingergun for myself, not as a rescue/rehab case (Which I usually rehome or pass on to some rescues I partner with when I can).

Over the next few months the requests for updates kept coming but less and less frequently until around three months ago before Fingergun died, when they stopped completely. I expected that her owner had moved on and I didn't want to send unsolicited updates in case I jeopardized the healing process or annoyed her or something.

Well, around three months ago I had a house fire due to entirely unpreventable causes. I wasn't home and was honestly devastated when I found out. I lost Fingergun and one of my cats (I was at the vet with two new rescues and had just dropped the other cat at the groomers when it happened).

Although I only had her for a year, I really loved Fingergun. I handled her every day and we were working on some minimal training.

The whole issue here came up only recently, about a week ago.

Because there hadn't been any more messages from Fingergun's original owner, I decided not to tell her what had happened. I didn't see any reason to upset her out of the blue, especially when I know it was mid-exams for her uni and I hadn't heard from her in months. I honestly thought the update requests had stopped until she messaged a week ago, asking how Fingergun was doing.

I was honest and told her what had happened. I also sent her a couple pictures of Fingergun from the day before. She was silent for a day or so before she responded and essentially asked why I kept it from her/didn't tell her sooner and insinuating that the fire didn't happen/I made it up to cover something up.

I haven't responded yet since I'm still busy dealing with the insurance and stuff from the fire and I'm honestly at a bit of a loss here. I'm not good with people, there's a reason I refer my critters, but am I the asshole here? Should I have told her when it happened or even just lied and told her everything was fine when she asked?

[bookyeom]

A/N: Happy New Year, @seungkw1 ! This one’s for you (and for me, let’s be real).

Also, see: Seungkwan’s ‘fit in the live he did with Soobin to get where I was coming from with this. Help.

Snapshoot

Pairing: Seungkwan x Reader Genre: friends to lovers (can’t stop, won’t stop…) Rating: PG (kissing, a single swear maybe) Word Count: 1.8k Warnings: kissing, poor studying habits

You really should be studying.

It’s not your fault you’re distracted, though, not when Seungkwan looks like that.

He’s sitting beside you in the private library room you booked for the two of you, hard at work on his essay that’s due in two days. You should be hard at work yourself, but…

He currently looks like that. 

Hair messy from running his fingers through it, reading glasses perched on his nose, wearing his favourite hoodie. A pen resting against his lips as he thinks.

You aren’t sure what prompts you to do it, but soon your phone is in your hands and you’re taking a candid shot. And when you pull up the photo from your ‘recently taken’ album and onto your phone screen, you find it impossible to look away. 

He looks so… soft. Cute. Warm. Cosy. 

Your eyes move between the picture and the boy beside you, your entire body filled with a fuzzy sort of warmth at the sight before you.

You’ve seen him like this before, sure. He’s your kind-hearted, sarcastic, brilliant friend, and so you've been blessed to see him in all sorts of ways. You’ve seen him on early mornings and through late nights, you’ve seen him drunk out of his mind and performing karaoke as all of the Wonder Girls, you’ve seen him before and after coffee, and before and after shitty exams. Studying together is nothing new, either. You’ve seen him in all of his ways, so of course you’ve seen him looking like this — like the perfect boyfriend. You’ve never dared try and capture it anywhere other than in your mind, though, and now that you have it in concrete form, you aren’t sure what to do with it.

You have a lot of pictures of him. There’s a mix in your phone’s photo album of Seungkwan in all his glory: some of him caught completely off guard, some blurry ones where he’d shot a hand out to try and stop you from taking the picture, some of him laughing so hard his cheeks are flushed a pretty pink. To his dismay, you always joke that you’ll use the funny ones for blackmail one day, but he never actually makes you delete them. You cherish those. 

There are also some photos in your phone where he looks like everything you’ve ever wanted — ones where he looks so breathtaking that it hurts. This one you just took is quickly being filed into that same mental folder. It has to be your new favourite, and you’re sure it’s going to be your favourite for a long time to come. And as you continue to stare down at the photo, your eyes tracing over his features, you can’t help but smile down at it.

“Hello? Earth to Y/N.”

Your phone is suddenly being snatched from your hands, and your eyes snap up to meet Seungkwan’s gaze. He raises his eyebrows, your phone dangling between the two of you in his hand, and you resist the urge to grab it like a feral cat.

“What?” You ask, trying to sound nonchalant even though you’re freaking out. Your gaze stays locked on your phone as he holds it up in the air, your eyes following it like a hawk.

“I asked what you were smiling at,” he says. “You were zoning out.” 

“Oh, nothing, it’s just—“

You know it’s coming, but it still has you frozen when he inevitably glances at your screen. You watch in horror as his eyebrows raise, he blinks, and then he’s handing you your phone back wordlessly. It remains silent for a minute or two before he speaks again.

“Why were you smiling at a picture of me?”

You’re trapped — there’s no way out now. How are you possibly supposed to answer that? Because you’re the cutest boy I’ve ever seen? 

“It’s a good picture,” you finally manage, trying desperately to keep your voice steady. 

“It’s not that good.” 

His comment comes out much less teasing than you’d expected. You really thought you were in for it. He sounds a lot more serious, and your gaze finds him again in surprise. He’s looking at his computer, but you can tell he’s not really taking in any of the information as he crosses his arms and sits back in his chair. He adjusts his glasses on his nose, and you can hardly breathe. 

You don’t think you’ve ever been more embarrassed in your life.

“Jeonghan said you like me,” he finally says, and you suddenly want to sink into the floor. 

“Oh.”

He shrugs. “It would be cool if you did.”

“It would be… cool?” You think you probably sound slightly deranged, your voice at least two octaves higher than usual, but you barely register it. 

“Yeah.” He shrugs again, and you can only dream of having even an ounce of his nonchalance. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“You wouldn’t mind.” You have to be hallucinating. He’s just stated that he knows you have a crush on him, and he’s saying it’s cool? That’s almost worse than him rejecting you outright. Worse than him ignoring you forever and —

“As long as you don’t mind that I like you too.” 

You gape. You actually gape, mouth open like a fish as you process. His eyes meet yours, signature smirk on his lips as he takes in your expression.

“Does that really surprise you?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Well, it’s true,” he says, smiling amusedly over at you for a moment before he turns back to his computer. You watch in disbelief as he resumes his work as though nothing had happened. 

“Are you seriously working again right now?”

Seungkwan nods, eyes moving between his notes and his laptop. “I just need to finish this before we can make out, alright?”

The words coming out of his mouth send a shock straight to your system. Since when is he so fucking smooth?

“Yeah, I’ve been waiting for months,” you finally say sarcastically, slumping back into your chair. “Another hour won’t make any difference.” Your tone is dry, and you can feel him look over at you. You suddenly realize what you’ve just revealed, and your eyes squeeze shut. You're expecting him to tease you again but instead, his response comes out filled with confusion.

“Months?”

You freeze. “Hm?”

“Did you say months?”

“…Maybe.”

“How many months?”

You feel your face flush, and your hands lift to cover your eyes, voice muffled when you respond. “Since September, I guess?”

Pause. “Since we met?” 

You let out a groan. Now he’s teasing you. “Leave me alone.”

You can hear the smile on his face. “Cute.”

You’re about to cross your arms and let out a childish huff when you’re jolted by the sound of Seungkwan’s chair scraping across the floor, your eyes shooting open. He stands up, moving his chair closer to yours before sitting down again, and the sudden close proximity has you reeling. Then he moves to rest his hand on your thigh.

“Hold my hand?”

The question is soft, quiet, but you hear it. Seungkwan’s eyes search yours, a smile on his lips, and he raises his eyebrows. His palm remains face up on your leg, and you take a deep breath before shyly moving to rest your hand in his. His fingers curl into yours immediately, and then — he’s back to work. 

Since when has Seungkwan ever been this chill? About anything?

“Stop looking at me,” he speaks up again after a moment, eyes still on his paper, and you shake your head.

“I can’t.”

He looks at you then, really looks at you for the first time since he’d taken your hand, and you can feel yourself flush even more. 

“You can’t what?”

“Stop looking at you.”

You watch as he chews on his bottom lip. You wait, recognizing his silence as thoughtful, and hold your breath.

“Why, though?”

You furrow your eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“Are you not bored?” His eyes meet yours again, and you blink in confusion.

His hand is still firm in yours, and you’re silent for a moment before replying honestly, “Trust me, I’ve looked at you quite a few times since I met you, and I’ve never once wanted to look away.”

He searches your eyes, and you can see the surprise that flashes through them. You feel tremendously shy under his gaze, beautiful brown eyes peering at you from behind his study glasses, and you can’t hold strong for much longer. You pull your bottom lip between your teeth as your eyes fall to the floor.

“Hey,” Seungkwan says, squeezing your hand. “You just said you liked looking at me.” His tone is definitely teasing now.

“I just changed my mind. It’s not as easy when I know you’ll be looking back.”

You can practically feel him smiling. “Come on. Look at me, please?”

You brace yourself before doing what he asks. He smiles when you do, and your breath catches. His gaze is so fond, and you’re about to ask him why when he closes the rest of the distance, his mouth finding yours with ease. You let out a soft, surprised gasp against his lips, eyes immediately falling shut as you melt into him.

“I’m sorry for making you wait,” he murmurs against your lips, voice low. 

“Today, or for the last 6 months?” You manage when he pulls back just slightly, cursing the way you’re already breathless just from one kiss. He smiles at your question, his eyes hooded, but he doesn’t offer any verbal response. He simply kisses you again, and every single remaining thought leaves your mind. 

He kisses you one more time before settling back into his seat, turning back to his computer. His hand stays on your thigh, and you think you must look like the loading screen of a computer as you try and register what’s happening.

“You know I do it a lot, too, right?”

You tilt your head as his voice breaks you out of your daze. “Hm? Do what?”

“Look at you.”

You feel your cheeks flush. “Oh.”

“You’re very nice to look at, you know.” 

You have to be beet red by now. For claiming to not be the overly romantic type, he sure is doing a great job. 

“Seungkwan-“

“I’m doing this one more time and then I really, really have to finish this paper.”

You’re about to speak again, to ask more questions, when he pulls you in by your joined hands and kisses you again firmly. This time, his free hand finds your face, his mouth pressed to yours with intent. You let out another involuntary sigh, feeling terribly satisfied when he hums back against your lips.

He pulls back abruptly before letting out a breathy laugh. “You’re done with your work, right? You really might have to leave for the sake of my grades.”

You can’t help but pout. “Rude.”

He grins at that. “I’ll come over to your place as soon as I’m done.”

A/N: please please please reblog if you liked! it’s what us writers rely on :) 

TAGLIST: @gyuminusone @minisugakoobies @starsstuddedsky@hopeinthebox @tae-bebe @eoieopda @savventeen @wqnwoos

Message me if you want to be added to the permanent taglist!

[sister-lucifer]

An Attempt, A Failure, A Moment Of Forgiveness

The Demon Brothers x Gender neutral reader

Genre: Fluff, Hurt + Comfort, angst but with a happy ending! 

Summary: The brothers have had a particularly hard day, and you decide to make their favorite dinner to cheer them up. Unfortunately, it backfires, and now they’ve accidentally made you upset. It’s their turn to cheer you up instead. 

Content/Warnings: Hurt/Comfort, slight angst with a happy ending, sensitive reader, the brothers being uncharacteristically mean due to stress, Beelzebub showing his emotional intelligence, Lucifer has no idea how to apologize

*Asmodeus uses he/she pronouns 

*Levi is autistic 

Not fully proof read, let me know if you see any errors!

Like my writing? I take requests! NSFW or SFW for any fandoms in my bio! 

Also, please reblog! it’s free, takes two seconds, and really helps me out 

“Watch it, stupid human!” Mammon hissed as he passed by you in the hall, bumping your shoulder and nearly knocking you to the ground. 

“O-Oh, sorry Mammon!” You called after him, but he didn’t even turn back to you. 

“Listen here, human,” He growled over his shoulder, “I have five tests I have to get through today and like, a million assignments due tonight, so stay the hell out of my way today, got it?!” 

You didn’t even get a chance to respond before he had disappeared around the corner and into a classroom. 

You sighed, gaze falling to your shoes as you solemnly made your way to your first period class. 

This was not the first of these “mishaps” to happen today.

It seems that all of the brothers had some reason or another to be stressed; they all had important exams scheduled for today, and not to mention their countless other responsibilities outside of school. 

Like Satan, who wasn’t supposed to be working after school today but had been booked for a shift anyways because his boss was, as he so elegantly put it, “a huge fucking asshole with no respect for anyone but himself.” The harsh words hadn’t been directed at you, but the icy cold glare he gave you while he said them made it feel that way. 

Or Lucifer, who was up to his eyes in paperwork. He wasn’t sure how but it was ten times worse that usual, and each new paper on his desk was another grey hair. His head was pounding with a stress induced migraine that never seemed to really go away. He says he’s had a headache for the past hundred years. 

Or Asmodeus, who had a photo shoot directly after school that would run for god knows how long, and she simply could not find a way to squeeze in any homework despite the fact that he was swamped with it at the moment. He was in too deep to cancel the shoot now, which meant his grades would surely suffer. Not to mention that the stress would surely give him acne, which was only making her stress out more!

The entire day it felt like they were rushing past you without so much as a glance, often disrupting you with their franticness and sometimes even rudeness. You knew they didn’t mean it, but it still hurt when Lucifer angrily snapped at you or Satan sent a sarcastic comment your way. 

Fortunately, you knew just how to lighten the mood! 

Although you didn’t fancy yourself a chef, the brothers always loved when you cooked authentic human food. Even something like mac and cheese was enough to cheer them up after a long day. You decided on a simple pasta recipe, something filling and easy to make for so many people. 

You were only halfway through when you heard Lucifer enter the kitchen behind you. 

“Oh, Lucifer! I was hoping you’d be a bit later, I have a surprise cooking…” 

“What?” 

Oh. He didn’t sound nearly as happy as you were hoping. 

“W-Well, remember that pasta you all loved? I decided to make it for you! I figured it would take dinner duty off your hands and maybe make you all feel better after such a rough day, so—“ 

“Human, I already had everything ready for what I was going to make.” 

His voice had a slight growl to it, a clear sign of his anger. 

“I know,” You sighed, “b-but I thought—“

“Well you thought wrong. My brothers are already expecting the casserole I was going to make, and I already went through the work of prepping and storing the ingredients so I could just throw it together when I got home. Everything’s been so upside down today, I just want this one thing to stay on schedule.”

You really couldn’t blame him for that one. If there was one thing Lucifer hated, it was when plans changed. He needed everything to have an order, and if it didn’t he would get very upset very easily.

“Lucifer, I know you’re stressed, but you’re clearly exhausted. Why don’t you go rest while—“ 

“No, human!” 

Seems that was the final straw. Although it wasn’t rare for Lucifer to get heated when scolding his brothers, he never raised his voice at you like that. 

“I don’t care what you think you’re doing, I need you out! You can make your stupid pasta another night. The last thing I need is for you to muck up the one thing that hasn’t already been ruined today, so I suggest you scurry off to your room and stay there!”

You stumbled back, nearly falling before you caught yourself on the counter. You couldn’t look him in the eyes; you couldn’t even stand the thought of being in the same room. You could feel the familiar burning in your throat and the way your chest tightened as the tears began to fill up your eyes and blur your vision. You decided to give him what he wanted, and ran upstairs to your room as fast as you could. You passed Beel on the way, who opened his mouth to greet you but hardly got out a syllable as you rushed past. He could tell something was terribly wrong from the way you hid your face and teary eyes, and the way you slammed your door. 

He immediately headed to the kitchen, only to see a half stunned Lucifer staring at the doorway you ran out of. He turned his attention away when he saw Beel, though, pretending that nothing was wrong. When his brother inquired about what had happened, Lucifer merely shrugged. He was overcome with emotion; yes, he felt terrible for scaring you off, but he also had six brothers who needed dinner and so many other tasks to worry about that he couldn’t make himself take pause. He figured he would deal with it later. 

You had collapsed beside your bed and hid your face in your knees. You didn’t know what else to do. You’d lost your appetite and certainly didn’t want to go down for dinner, and you didn’t want to bother any of the brothers after everything that had happened. You had tried hard not to be upset and especially not to cry, to tell yourself that he didn’t mean it, but it didn’t matter. The fact that Lucifer would ever treat you that way—that ANY of the brothers would treat you the way they had today—was simply too much. 

Beel was the first one to come see you. He knocked about fifteen minutes after you’d first shut yourself in, calling your name and asking if it was okay to enter. All you could muster was a hum in response. 

He opened the door slowly, sticking his hand in first and revealing that he was holding a bag of blood strawberry candies. This specific kind were incredibly hard to find, limited edition with special colors, which means that he must’ve pulled them out of his secret stash. 

“Hey, you alright?” He asked as he poked his head in, and you gave no response. 

“Sorry, stupid question. Can I sit with you?” 

You only nodded, scooting over a bit and making room for him. 

“Want one?” He held out the open bag to you and shook it. 

You reached your hand in and took one, putting it in your mouth without so much as a word. Beel did the same, though he preferred to munch on an entire handful at once. You both sat in silence for a few moments, and Beel didn’t speak until he had swallowed. 

“So, wanna talk about it?” 

You weren’t really sure. You just shrugged. It would feel nice to get it off your chest, sure, but venting to Beel about how mean he and his brothers had been today would feel terrible, even if Beel wasn’t anywhere near the worst offender. 

“…Can I take a guess?” 

You nodded once more, slipping your hand into the bag for another few candies. 

“Well, I saw Lucifer in the kitchen. He seemed pretty shaken up. Does that have do with it?”

Your silence was all the answer he needed. 

“I figured. Look, I…I know we haven’t been the nicest today. I think we all owe you an apology. We’re all stressed and tensions were crazy high, though that’s not an excuse…and I’m sorry for growling at you at lunch. I was really hungry…” 

You couldn’t help but giggle at that last part. It was kind of shocking at the time, but you could laugh at it now. 

You had many of these kinds of talks with Beelzebub. He was the most emotionally intelligent of the brothers, he just didn’t speak enough to let it on. The truth was he saw and heard everything, he was just better at picking his battles and shutting his trap than the others. Whenever it was just you and him, though, he always found a way to open your eyes. As long as he wasn’t hungry he was calm, cool and collected, and hardly anything bothered him. 

“It’s okay, Beel…thank you.” 

He sighed in relief when he finally heard you speak. He moved in a bit closer, allowing you to rest your head on his shoulder. 

The next one to visit was Mammon, who was not near as subtle has his brother. He came barging in, clearly worried, and had to be shushed by Beel when he yelled your name. 

“Shit, sorry…” He muttered, making sure to close the door extra quietly. 

“Beel sent a text to the family group chat, are you okay?” Mammon looked you over for a few seconds, and when he didn’t see anything physically wrong, he sat down on the opposite side of you from Beel. 

“I’m a little better now, thanks…” 

Mammon was silent for a few moments, mouth hanging half open as he tried to find words. Eventually he gave up on words all together, instead reaching into the bag you’d just noticed he brought with him. He pulled out a small bouquet of flowers, all fresh and dewy, and your favorite color too.

“Look, I know I was kind of an ass today…okay, I was a TOTAL ass today—“

He paused to smile at your laughter. Good, he was doing this right. 

“—A-And I know this doesn’t make up for it, but I’m not good with words so…I figured I would do better if I could give you something with my apology…” 

You gently took the flowers from his hand, taking a deep breath and inhaling their subtle scent. Mammon stared at you expectantly, watching for any sign of disapproval. Fortunately, he found absolutely none. 

“Thank you, Mammon. Apology accepted.” You punctuated your sentence with a kiss on his cheek, making his face heat up a bit.

“Hey, can I have one too?” Beel asked through a mouthful of candy, and of course you had to oblige. 

The next two were Satan and Asmodeus, who as usual came as a packaged deal. 

“Hey love, how are you doing?” Asmodeus asked in a soft tone. When it came to comfort, he was the best in the whole Devildom. Satan trailed in behind him, hugging a book to his chest. 

“I’m okay, Asmo.” 

“I’m sure you are, but I’m about to make you much better.”

Asmo presented you with a small white box, which he opened to reveal a red velvet cupcake with a heart sugar topper. 

“I saw this in the window of a shop today, and I just had to get it for you. A treat as sweet as my human!” She booped your nose playfully before closing the box and setting it to the side.

He took your hand in his gently, stroking your knuckles with his thumb. 

“Satan here isn’t much for apologies, so I agreed to do his for him. I am very, so very sorry for how rude I was today, love bug. And Satan is very sorry for being a…what was it? ‘Total fucking asshole?’” 

“Watch it, Asmo,” Satan scolded, but his feigned glare quickly turned into a grin at Asmo’s sly giggle. 

“It’s okay guys, really. You didn’t have to do all this…” You assured them. You felt sort of guilty to be honest, getting such unusual special treatment from them even if the attention was nice.

“Don’t talk like that love,” Asmodeus replied, “I have no idea what came over us today, but you could at least give us a chance to make up for it.”

“Besides, it’ll give me a chance to make Lucifer look bad, so I’m all in.” Satan joked. He and Asmo both settled in next to you as well. 

Leviathan was next, awkwardly standing in the doorway for a few moments before speaking. 

“U-Uh, I wasn’t really sure what the state of things would be when I walked in, so—“

He held up the variety of things he had brought, sporting a lopsided smile. 

“—I have ear defenders, some chewelry, and that really soft blanket I know you love. Y-You can keep it all for as long as you need.” 

Levi knelt in front of you and pushed all the offerings towards you. Your hand hovered over all of them, but eventually you decided on the blanket. You held it close and rubbed it against your face, relishing the blissfully mellow texture and the subtle smell of Levi’s room before wrapping it around yourself. 

Levi tried to contain himself, to take time to find the right words the way you’d taught him, but he was so overcome with emotion he couldn’t wait. 

“Oh gosh, I’m so sorry!” He blurted out, louder than he meant to be. “Shoot, sorry…I-I don’t mean to yell, I just feel terrible. I didn’t even realize how mean I was being at the time but then I thought about how awful it would feel if you were saying it to me, and—a-and—“ 

“Shhh, it’s okay Levi. I’ve already forgiven you.” 

This stopped him dead in his tracks. He quickly shut his mouth, looking down at the floor in slight embarrassment. You reached a hand up to gently stroke his cheek as you thanked him for the thoughtfulness he had shown. 

Belphegor slinked in a minute or so later, yawning as he greeted you. 

“Am I late to the party? Sorry, I was asleep. That was the first nap I’ve managed to have all day. Guess that’s why I was being so cranky…” 

Belphegor lazily trudged over, his exhaustion clear on his face as he laid his head in your lap. 

“Sorry about that, by the way. Hope you didn’t wanna punch my lights out too badly.” 

“Oh come now Belphie, I would never.” You argued, reaching down to scratch his head. He stretched and pushed into the touch, sighing with relief when you found just the right spot. He got comfortable very quickly, almost immediately drifting off to sleep. 

There was a sizable gap between Belphie’s arrival and Lucifer’s. He had seen the text when it first came out, but tried to ignore it. When no one, not even Beel came down for dinner, though, he knew he had to go see you. He paced around the kitchen for twenty minutes before finally gathering the courage. 

The sound of your door opening made everyone freeze as they looked over. Lucifer’s expression was hard to decipher; you couldn’t tell if he was sad, angry, guilty, or all of the above. 

He was silent as he walked over, eyes fixated on you even though you were looking anywhere but him. He knelt down in front of you, letting out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding as he started to speak. 

“Human…” He began slowly, feeling the eyes of all six of his brothers, scrutinizing every move he made. He sort of deserved it, though. After such a terrible screw up his apology had to be perfect. 

“I’ve come to say that I’m…sorry for how I’ve been acting.” 

This made you look up with wide eyes. You expected him to beat around the bush, if you’re being completely honest. You’d heard Lucifer “apologize,” sure, but never once actually say “sorry,” his pride wouldn’t let him. 

The most surprising part though, was that he kept going. 

“I was dismissive of you all day, and on top of that I yelled at you when you were only trying to help because I always need to do things myself. I’m sorry. You deserve better than that—“ 

He was cut off when you had suddenly wrapped him in a tight hug, squeezing him with all your might. It took him a few moments to process what had happened, but when he did he hesitantly returned the gesture. 

“I forgive you, Luci…” You whispered, just loud enough for him to hear. 

He patted your back, allowing you to pull away from the hug when you were ready instead of pushing you away. He couldn’t help but gaze into your eyes for a bit longer than he meant to when you withdrew from the hug. 

“Alright then,” He began as he stood back up, leaving everyone else quite confused. “We’ve got dinner downstairs that’s going to be cold soon, so how about you all help me bring it upstairs and we’ll eat in here instead?”

“Woah, really?!” Mammon gasped, “You never let us eat in our rooms! Wow, you must feel really shitty!” 

This promptly earned him an elbow to the ribs from Asmodeus. 

“Don’t worry human, I’ll grab yours for you,” Lucifer said right as you began to stand. “You stay here.” 

Each brother gave you a kiss on the cheek as they left, some lingering longer than others. When no one was looking, though, Lucifer pulled you into a real kiss before he too was out the door (though not before flashing you a smile). 

You sat there for a while, enjoying the silence and your own company, when you felt your DDD go off. It was a text from Lucifer.

Luci 

   Hey, just so you know, I got your pasta out of the oven. It was amazing 💙

[sanctum-of-ramshackle]

🕷️🕸️The Chaotic Adventures of Spider-Mage✨🌟

[TWST AU]: The MC/Yuu may not be only one who encountered an unexpected turn of events.

[Synopsis]: In this timeline, an unknown stranger gets bitten by a spider that actually gave them spider-based magic to become Twisted Wonderland’s Spider-Hero.

[Gender Neutral!Spider!Reader]

[(A/N)]: Happy New Year! I’m sorry I haven’t been posting much on my TWST blog. Been busy IRL and stuff like that. I hope this makes up for missing out and enjoy reading.

So…about the Arachnohumanoid Polymultiverse- This is a stupid name. I don’t know why O’Hara chose this over the Spiderverse. That name makes more sense and easier for people who can’t decipher scientific names right away…

Anyway…

There are many variants and other dimensions who have their own spider like protectors.

There’s one particular Spider who has an interesting upbringing with their situation.

Maybe it’s better to let them introduce themselves to the people reading this…

[Y/N]: “My name is [Y/N] [L/N]. I’m a Second Year of Night Raven College and part of the Ignihyde Dorm. One day during last year, I get bit by an experimental and magical arachnid which granted me spider-based magic. I became to the public as “Spider-Mage”.

“I climb up on flat surfaces, having a Spider sense to alarm me for potential danger, the usual things.”

“I created an algorithm to alert me for crimes occurring and use my newfound powers by casting web-like portals to reach to that specific location.”

“Following my backstory: I was raised by my aunt and uncle, Aunt Mei and Uncle Benji. However, Uncle Benji passed away due to saving someone from an Overblot attack. He asked me if I were to become somebody having great magic, listen to his advice. With great power, comes with great responsibility.”

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

[Chapter 1]

OB!Riddle: *On a rampage* YOU ALL WILL BE OFF WITH YOUR HEADS!!!! *Throws a rose bush towards MC/Yuu and Grim*

MC/Yuu & Grim: *Gasps and embrace for impact*

[Then a mysterious figure jumps into action. They cast a magical web barrier to protect MC/Yuu and Grim from the thrown plant.]

Spider-Mage: *Looks back at the two Ramshackle students* It’s okay. I got you two.

OB!Riddle: WHAT IN THE QUEEN’S NAME? WHO ARE YOU?!

Spider-Mage: Hi! I’m Spider-Mage. The friendly arachnid type magic user you hear people talk about. Y’know, you have some serious issues and hopefully seek anger management after this.

OB!Riddle: *Throws another bush at them*

Spider-Mage: *Shoots web at the bush and triggers a fire spell to burn the plant to ashes* Bad idea, buddy.

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

MC/Yuu & Grim: *Running late for class*

MC/Yuu: *Carrying Grim in their arms* You just have to try sleeping in.

Grim: It’s not my fault I was studying late!

MC/Yuu: You were cramming for an exam today!

Spider-Mage: *Just saved some people from a robbery* Huh? The Prefect and their familiar?

MC/Yuu: Spider-Mage? Hey! We’re late for our morning class and it’s at the other side of the building.

Spider-Mage: Need a lift?

MC/Yuu: Of course! Thank you.

[Cut to a scene where MC/Yuu and Grim were dropped off to their class and have messed up hairdos from all the swinging around.]

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

[Ignihyde Dormitory]

[Y/N]: *Crawling back into their dorm without disturbing anyone* *Lands on their feet from the ceiling and stalks over through the hallways*

Idia: Ortho, did you get my- *Stops mid-track and eyes widened at them* …

[Y/N]: …It’s not what it looks like. *Deactivates their suit*

[Y/N]: *Looks down at their body* Shit.

Idia: Y-Y-You’re Spider-Ma-

[Y/N]: *Shushing him* Don’t say another word. I’ll explain everything somewhere private.

[Back in Idia’s room]

Idia: You’re Spider-Mage.

[Y/N]: Yes, I am. I got these abilities last year and then bam! I’m a magic superhero.

Idia: You kept all of this from me?

[Y/N]: Well, I tried to explain everything to you since you’re my Dorm Leader but duty calls and assignments.

Idia: …I still can’t believe one of my dorm members is Spider-Mage.

[Y/N]: It’s alright. It’s a lot to take in.

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

[Rose Queendom]

Spider-Mage: *Shooting webs and swinging around the city* *Lands onto of an apartment complex’s rooftop*

Fan 1: Oh my Seven, It’s Spider-Mage! *Pulls out their phone* Hey Spider-Mage, can you do a flip?

Spider-Mage: *Does a flip*

Fan 1: *Recorded the whole* Thank you, Spider-Mage! I’m showing this to my friends.

Spider-Mage: No problem! Tell your friends I said hello!

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

[In the hallways]

Kalim: Hi [Y/N]!

[Y/N]: Oh, hey, Kalim! Uh…What’s up? How was your break?

Kalim: You wouldn’t believe who came by. Spider-Mage came to rescue Jamil and everyone. They were amazing! They shot their magical webs and swung around kicking off the ‘Blot!

[Y/N]: Really? That’s crazy. “Great Seven. I’m jealous of myself…(T . T) Fuck me…”

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

[Monstro Lounge]

[Y/N]: *Working there to fill in a deal*

Floyd: [Y/N]-chan/kun~ *About to squeeze them*

[Y/N]: *Spider sense triggered and kicks back at Floyd in the stomach*

Floyd: OOF- *Crashes into Jade*

[Y/N]: Crap! I’m sorry, you two. I’m just on edge today.

Azul: What is going on here? *Sees Floyd and Jade on the ground*

[Y/N]: I’m so sorry, Azul. I’m just super anxious today and Floyd was about to squeeze the shit out of me.

Azul: …Why don’t you take a half day off? You claimed you’re anxious enough to beat the two most valuable people in my dorm.

[Y/N]: Yes! That’s true and I’m going now. *Sprints out of the restaurant* “Fuck me and my Spider sense! I need to lie better.”

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

[Afterglow Savannah]

Spider-Mage: *Battling against a weird-looking guy with lightning bolt accessories*

The Shocker: Well well well, love the new look Spider-Man.

Spider-Mage: Uh…Who? I’m not Spider-Man.

The Shocker: Oh, I see. Playing dumb to distract me.

Spider-Mage: Great Seven. Dude, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let’s just get this over with. I have clubs to attend.

[The Shocker charges at Spider-Mage throwing rays of electricity at the magic user.]

Spider-Mage: *Shoots their web casting a Water spell to absorb the attack* Think fast! *Shoots the water spell at The Shocker*

[The water spell webbing was effective to short circuit the electrified villain.]

Spider-Mage: Now I can leave.

[Then a portal opens in front of Spider-Mage.]

Spider-Mage: What the…

[Three people appear out of the portal and they’re picking the unconscious Shocker anomaly.]

Spider-Mage: Uh… *Spider sense triggered*

???: Wow. Another Spider variant in this dimension.

???: Yeah, and explain what we’re doing here.

???: While also grabbing the anomaly who’s waking up. *Knocks The Shocker out*

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

[After [Y/N] was taken to the Spider Society on Earth-928, everything was explained to them and how their Canon Events will happen.]

[Y/N]: Y-You can’t be serious. I couldn’t let it happen. There has to be another way.

Miguel O’Hara: There are no other ways-

[Y/N]: You’re wrong! The multiverse is wrong! I’m doing everything I can to prevent any more disasters back in my already chaotic world. I can’t lose him…

Peter B. Parker: Kid, everything’s gonna be alright.

[Y/N]: Tell that to “Leader of the Spider Society”. I’m going and won’t stop until everyone’s safe.

[[Y/N] casts a spell to disappear from everyone’s sight.]

♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️ ♢🕷️

Arachnis: No no no Miguel. *Blocks his path* Do not chase the teen like last time with Miles.

Miguel: They can’t interfere with the Canon Events. Their world would already start falling apart.

Arachnis: Miguel, you don’t know that. Remember when I saved you from your supposed event? My Canon Event overlapped with yours which should interfere but didn’t, preventing your untimely death. What if [Y/N] can save their friends and loved ones like us? We almost lost everyone when we were against The Spot.

Miguel: *Glare softens and sighs* I don’t want this kid to make the same mistakes.

Arachnis: I know. It’s tough to accept the possibility, but we been through this before. Doing everything we can to help others. Hey, look at me.

[As the Spider-Man of 2099 and Arachnis share an intimate moment, [Y/N] ran back because they dropped their Magic Pen.]

[Y/N]: Uhh…Is this a bad time?

Arachnis: Kid, I’m gonna shoot your ass if you don’t rush back to save your world.

[Y/N]: Right! Sorry! *Sprints out of their sight*

✨[Reblogs helps creators and creates for more content]💫

[Tagged]: @windblume-wishes @hhurric4ne @theladyheroine

[skzsauce01]

What Was I Made For

Synopsis: College is hard, but it's even worse when you're a pre-med student and it's even, even worse when you don't want to go into medicine. Fortunately, the ghost that haunts your apartment is more kind, more annoying, and more helpful than you ever thought possible. College AU, ghost AU.

Warning: alcohol, bad parental relationship, mentions of death

Word Count: 6.2k

Pairing: f!reader x ghost!Kim Seungmin

A/N: Good luck with exams and classes!

“Honey, I’m home,” you call. The handles of the reusable grocery bag you picked up from a club booth at the beginning of the semester are already starting to fall apart, so you’re forced to flip on the light switch with your shoulder blades. You glare at Seungmin, who is lounging on the couch, staring at the ceiling. “Could you at least pretend to help?”

“What’s the point? I can’t even eat whatever you bought.”

You sigh and set down your haul onto the tiny kitchen island that doubles as a dining table. When you make a big production of taking out your groceries, Seungmin still doesn’t look up. Despite his inability to eat food, he usually shows some interest, if only to judge your snack choices.

On the counter, bananas in a plastic produce bag to prevent fruit flies, and a new roll of paper towels. On the top shelf of the fridge, a tub of Greek yogurt that Seungmin makes fun of you for liking. Assorted salad mixes in the crisper. A whole rotisserie chicken and a carton of eggs on the middle shelf. In the cabinet goes a party-sized bag of barbeque chips, a pack of chocolate chip cookies you don’t want to discuss how much you paid for, and a box of protein bars. 

You take the last item out of the bag and hide it behind your back. You hover over Seungmin. “Guess what I got?”

“A bag of potatoes that will grow spuds because you can’t finish them all.”

“That was one time! Try again.”

He guesses wrong again and again, so after the fifth attempt, you hold your prize in front of his eyes. “A better vegetable peeler, just like you told me to. Are you proud of me?”

For a moment, his sullen eyes brighten at the memory of you struggling with your old peeler. He watched with great amusement as the flimsy blade repeatedly got caught on carrot skin and you grew more infuriated with each catch. In the end, you gave up and ate the skin, fuming with each bite of your meal. Seungmin laughed so hard, you thought he would lose control of his physical form and slip through the floor. 

He sighs, all of the joy escaping through his lips. “Yeah, sure. Sorry, it’s just one of those days.”

“We all have them. Hey, why don’t we do something tonight? I’m done studying, so we can watch a movie or play Mario Kart or something.” You plaster a smile on your face. “Fun, right?”

“You’re never gonna get into med school if this is how you work.”

Despite his admonishments, he sits up and swings his legs off the couch to make room for you. He didn’t choose an activity so Mario Kart it is. You leave your peeler on the coffee table and grab your joycons. When you flop beside him, tossing the blue one in his lap, he grumbles as he’s jostled around.

“I don’t even wanna go to med school,” you remind him. He already knows since it’s all you complain about these days as the MCAT draws closer, but that’s never stopped you from repeating yourself.

“Wow, what a problem. I’d die to go to med school.” 

Without thinking, you snort. “Too late for that.”

Seungmin has been dead for nearly two years. The old apartment complex burned down in an electrical fire, and due to the housing demand in the area, the university quickly built a new one in its place. Sure, you suspected it was probably haunted, but rent was on the cheaper side, especially for a single room, so you moved in and learned about your unofficial roommate during your first night. You thought you were going to faint when you saw a stranger leaning over your stack of practice books, and you thought you were going to be killed when he simply said, “I was also pre-med.”

“Sorry,” you meekly say. Why is the Mario Kart music so cheerful? It would be worse if it was sad, but the upbeat tune just makes your mistake more poignant. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Well, you’re not wrong,” he interjects. “Doesn’t matter. You better not pick Birdo this time.”

While you normally would have fought him six ways from Sunday for Birdo, you choose Yoshi instead and pick his favorite circuit to start off the night. He makes no comment about your sudden generosity, but you both know the reason. There’s no such thing as pity in this household, but apologies are aplenty.

When you come back from your anatomy lab the following day, whatever guilt you felt is gone when Seungmin holds up your pack of cookies with a disapproving look. You must have forgotten to put it back in the cabinet before you left. Either that or Seungmin rummaged around your belongings when the roommate contract stated that he could not and would not.

“You seriously paid for these?” he says. 

“They’re good! And artisan,” you huff as you snatch the package from his hands. You hope you didn’t crush any cookies in the process. “I support small businesses.”

“They haven’t been a small business or artisan in, like, twenty years. How did the cat dissection go?” 

You reach for an overpriced cookie and snap off a piece with more force than necessary. “Fine. A little gross, but I guess I’m used to that by now. You wanna see the pictures I took?”

He tries to feign nonchalance, but his body seems more substantial, less ghost-like as you scroll through your camera roll. Even though he oohs and aahs at the most inappropriate images—you really don’t think the digestive structures of a cat deserve that much admiration—you can’t help but smile. He hasn’t looked or sounded this lively in weeks. You thought it might have been your snark rubbing off of him, but he always has a biting remark at the ready, remedied only with his good-natured demeanor. Of course, that demeanor has been slowly crumbling, so to see him be his usual self again feels good.

Satisfied, he lets you take your phone back. “Sometimes I miss lab. I hated doing the lab reports though; have fun with that.”

And just like that, your happiness goes out. “That’s tomorrow’s problem. I should study before work. You wanna help me out? I hate physics.”

Look, if your roommate were a pre-med student, had unlimited time, and no other obligations, you would force them to help you study, too. Plus, Seungmin loves MCAT practice, so it’s a win-win.

To your surprise, he doesn’t jump at the opportunity like he typically does. Under normal circumstances, he would be scouring the living room for where he last left his flashcards. Instead, he says, “Why don’t you take a break?”

“A break? You, of all people, suggest that I take a break when you were just telling me about my bad study habits? Who are you, and what have you done with Seungmin?”

He rolls his eyes. “I didn’t realize you wanted to do physics that badly.”

“I don’t. This is weird from you though.” However, after a moment of contemplation: “Whatever. Pick a show to watch. I’m gonna draw.”

He selects House because he’s still Seungmin after all. This is the show that inspired him to go into medicine, and is, as he’s mentioned many times before, “the greatest show on the planet.” It’s entertaining, you admit, and you do like seeing all of the obscure medical cases Dr. Gregory House solves, but it’s a grim reminder of your parents’ dreams for you. With the dialogue of the characters echoing in your head, you sketch a frog sitting on top of a stack of pancakes. You initially bought your tablet for note taking, but it really is much better as a tool for art. 

“It’s always animals, plants, or dessert now,” Seungmin remarks, craning his head to get a better view while you continually pull your screen away. “What happened to your big fantasy pieces?”

“Rule one: no looking until I say so. Rule two: no questions unless I say so. Remember?”

He ignores you. “You used to do a lot of those things when you first moved in. With the crazy landscapes, guys with abs in crop tops, cat-ear ladies with fancy dresses, villains who you definitely wanted to—”

“I get it!” Your face is blazing. He makes your artistic—purely artistic—interests sound so much worse than they are. “I’ve just been busy with life, so I don’t have time to work on them anymore. Anyway, animals, plants, and desserts are cute.” In a smaller voice, you add, “And they make me happy.”

Just like pictures of a flayed cat makes him happy.

He goes quiet and lets Dr. House fill the air. While he pretends to be engrossed in the show, you turn back to your sketch to fix your frog’s eyes to be less downcast. No sad frogs allowed.

You don’t remember exactly when the dread began, but you do distinctly remember glancing over the syllabus for your genetics course and wanting to collapse. Each item was manageable by itself, but the totality of the class, of your future classes, of your future hurtled at you at full force. For so long, you convinced yourself you could do it. You would complain the whole time, but at the end, you would be addressed as ‘Doctor’ and you would be happy. Your parents would be happy, so you would be happy and realize that it was all worth it.

Even if you cried every night, it would be worth it. 

You took a deep breath, looked at the list of assigned textbooks, and pulled out your credit card. You went through more dire situations than this stupid course. This would be easy enough.

Two weeks after the art fiasco, you finally test out your new vegetable peeler on potatoes. Your friend gave you five for free since she was having trouble finishing the large amount she bought. While you stand over the sink, humming a song your neighbor has been practicing for the past week, Seungmin is hunched over the coffee table, doing something secretive with flashcards. He’s been working on a new set of them since the art fiasco, which makes no sense since you have a perfect set of a thousand that you bought online. But no, he has been toiling day and night to create handmade ones. You don’t even want to know where he got the supplies.

Well, you already know where and how, but if your neighbors come knocking, you know nothing.

In fear that you’ll “ruin the surprise,” you have been forbidden from even stepping foot onto the living room carpet. Really, there’s no point because you can get a glimpse if you lean across the island. Nevertheless, you keep your eyes on the growing pile of potato skins. You have five potatoes worth of fries to make.

Ten minutes later, when you have moved onto slicing, Seungmin declares that he’s done. He places the baking sheet you left on the island onto a chair and triumphantly sets down his masterpiece.

When you pick up the topmost one, you can’t help but smile. Alongside the words “absolute threshold” is a cartoon rabbit with alert ears. Tiny music notes are dotted on the top edge of the card. 

“To make your studies less stressful,” he says. 

You don’t have the heart to tell him that you’re always some degree of stressed but nevertheless thank him. The flashcards are adorable, even if Seungmin’s drawing skills aren’t the best. “Newton’s first law” has an indistinguishable creature kicking a ball, and “law of independent assortment” features some of the strangest plants you have ever seen.

“I love them.”

“What do you think of my art skills? Better than you, right?”

You laugh and turn back to your cutting board. “You should’ve considered art school instead of med school. Professional artist Seungmin,” you muse. “I can see you in galleries and museums.”

“Don’t forget the history textbooks. Why didn’t you consider art school? You would be perfect for video games or something.”

For some time, you did consider art school. You spent the first two years of high school daydreaming about sitting behind an easel, translating a model’s likeness onto paper. Perennial paint splatters on your jeans, permanent charcoal stains on your fingers—that was the only way you wanted to study human anatomy. 

“My parents. You know how it is. Can you season the fries in the bowl?”

While Seungmin dumps copious amounts of salt, pepper, and whatever random spices he picked from the cabinet, you reflect on your teenage self. A part of you knew that drawing would only be a hobby, but another part kept hoping your parents would come around. When Hyunjin’s parents announced he was going to study chemistry, your mom wondered why he didn’t choose art when he was such a good artist. In fact, half the neighborhood, whose children went into STEM fields one way or another, were shocked he chose chemistry. Of course, if their own kids had opted for non-STEM majors, they would have been livid. Just like your parents had been.

“Did you ever think about not going into medicine?” you ask as you add more potato slices into the bowl.

He adds a swirl of oil to the mix. “No. It’s all I ever wanted to do. I volunteered at the hospital in high school, got an internship at a clinic here. I was studying for the MCAT and then…”

And then the university’s outdated housing killed him. It sounds horrific when phrased like that, but it’s more truthful than “Promising Young Pre-med Student Kim Seungmin Dead After Apartment Fire,” as the city newspaper headlined. His student ID photo smiled earnestly at readers, and a recent picture showed him posing in a lab coat.

It hits you then. Seungmin is dead. You knew this logically; you saw the articles, passed by the vigil, and signed the student letter demanding better accommodations. Then you forgot his existence until you applied to live in this building and when he appeared in your bedroom, you forgot about his death. Despite witnessing him walk through walls and tiptoeing around his deceased status, Seungmin has never really been dead to you. He’s your roommate who sleeps in the living room, your study partner who loves all things related to biology, or your friend. He’s too alive to be anything else.

“Did you preheat the oven?” he asks, breaking you out of your spiraling thoughts. Your body went on autopilot, and now the baking sheet is covered in pale potato sticks.

You glance at the dark oven and head over to do what you should’ve done twenty minutes ago. “My bad.”

“You’re the one eating these. Can you even finish all this?”

It’s far too much, but what else were you going to do with five potatoes on the verge of going bad? You suppose you could have not accepted them from your friend. “I can try?” you say, more to convince yourself than him. “I’m no coward.”

“Really? Then why do you hide when we watch horror movies?”

“That’s different. Mario Kart while we wait?”

“I call Birdo.”

Despite his declaration, you’re the one playing Birdo while he settles for Waluigi. Seungmin gloats when he hits you with a red shell, laughs when you fall off the track, and celebrates when he gets first place. He’s practically corporeal, alight with hopes and dreams you wish were your own, but he’s only the echo of the past. Meanwhile, blood flows through your veins and oxygen into your lungs, yet you’re stuck in a potential future you don’t even want.

At the end of fall, between your human biology midterm and that stupid philosophy paper, you break. It’s during one of your MCAT practice exams, so you at least can cry at your desk. You can’t even cry without guilt; your mind immediately starts trying to reread the problem you’re stuck on through your tears, as if trigonometry will solve your crisis. 

It feels like an elephant is sitting on your chest. Every time you think you’ve calmed down enough to begin again, another wave of sobs overcomes you. Just holding your pencil makes your throat tighten.

“Are you okay?” Seungmin’s voice is slightly muffled by your bedroom door, but you doubt that a thin piece of wood concealed your cries.

You choke out, “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“... No.”

You swing open your door with sardonic fanfare, spreading your arms like a ringmaster. Seungmin makes no comment about your swollen eyes or your sniffles. You almost wish he had.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” he asks. He takes a tentative step into your room, and when you nod, he lets himself fully in. It’s been several months since he’s last been inside. Unmade bed, cluttered nightstand, paper-strewn desk—nothing much has changed. He sits on your chair, resting an arm on top of the throw blanket you’ve thrown over the back.

“I don’t know what there is to talk about,” you say after a moment of silence. “I hate class, I hate work, I hate my life. A breakdown has been long overdue.”

You stare at the floor, afraid to meet his gaze now that he’s seen you like this. Ever since you discovered Seungmin, you’ve crafted the perfect blasé attitude to accommodate your new living circumstances. He leaves you alone sometimes and stays cordoned off in the shared spaces to give you privacy, but you don’t break apart in your apartment for good reason. You’re open and raw like a bloody wound. Will he want to patch you up with bandaids, or will he pick and prod?

Pick and prod, you pray. Make some flippant remark about how easy you have it, how he wishes he could be in your position instead. Because if he does, then the situation must not be that bad.

Softly, Seungmin says, “What can I do to help?”

Your heart drops to your stomach. “I don’t know… I should probably get back to studying anyway.”

“Really? Are you serious?”

“What else am I supposed to do?” you snap. Seungmin at least has the decency to look sheepish. “The MCAT’s in July, and I don’t even understand half the things I’m supposed to know. I’m barely getting C’s in philosophy and art history because of it. That’s so humiliating.”

“Have you thought about, you know, not going to med school?”

A harsh laugh rips out of your throat. “Every single day. But it’s too late. I’ve already wasted four years, so what’s another four?” That doesn’t even include residency.

“You’d hate it.”

“Story of my life.”

The room goes quiet. Maybe you were too severe with your words, but how else do you explain it? 

“What if you became a medical illustrator?” he abruptly suggests. “You’d know exactly how to draw everything. It’s perfect for you. And it’s still STEM-related.”

It doesn’t matter if it’s in STEM. Your parents laid out your options very clearly: doctor or disappointment. Some career choices were less disappointing than others, but they would still be disappointments.

“I need to study,” you say.

He stands up from your rightful seat at your desk. Softly, so very softly, he says, “I’ll let you get back to it then.”

“Thank you.”

He shuts the door behind him and leaves you with your despair. True to your word, you return to your practice exam, this time without crying. Your mouth is dry the entire session, but you don’t dare drink any water in fear that rehydration will trigger your tears. It’s stupid but keeps you holding on. 

When you check your answers and review terminology, you refer to the set of flashcards Seungmin made for you. He didn’t expect you to use them, but his drawings have helped you better memorize the definitions. You shuffle through them, occasionally trying to figure out the relationship between whatever Seungmin drew and the word written. Other times—but not enough for your liking—you know exactly what they mean.

The rabbit from “absolute threshold” stares at you with lopsided eyes, and Mendel’s warped pea plants grow beneath your fingers. The whole world blurs.

A month after move-in, after too many beers and barbeque chips, you asked Seungmin, “Why do you haunt only me? You can travel through the whole building, but you’re only ever here.”

He gestures at the room with a sweeping flourish. “This used to be my apartment. Sort of. They changed the floor plan, but this is the approximate location of where I lived, so when you moved in, it felt like fate.”

“Ah, a med school sufferer to keep you company.”

He laughs, but it sounds insincere. “How drunk are you right now?”

You glance at the row of empty cans you lined up on the counter. One, two, three, four, five. Five and a half, if you count the one in your hand. “Pretty drunk, I think.”

“So you won’t remember what I tell you, right?”

“Probably not,” you lie. “What is it?”

With a sad smile on his face, he says, “I haunt you because it’s like seeing someone live the life I could’ve had. Would’ve had.”

Your outburst doesn’t go forgotten, but you and Seungmin dance around the topic with the grace of a seasoned ballerina. You show him your grocery hauls, he scolds you for buying expensive cookies. The two of you play Overcooked instead of Mario Kart and pretend that Overcooked will strengthen your friendship instead destroy it even further. Seungmin is really bad, embarrassingly so. 

“Are you going to the party this weekend?” he asks as he drops onions all over the floor. There’s no health department in the game.

“I would ask you to be more specific,” you say, “but we both know I’m not going to any parties. Go chop the onions.”

“You need friends.”

“I have friends. Who do you think keeps us giving us potatoes?”

He scoffs. “That’s not a friend. That’s an enemy. We need more dishes.”

While you wash a stack of dirty dishes, Seungmin dashes between prepping ingredients and watching the timer on the soups. As expected, he doesn’t take the pot off the stovetop quick enough, and soon enough the whole kitchen is in flames. You scream at him to get the fire extinguisher, he wades through the sea of onions, and the level ends with a single gold star.

You set your joycon down and lean your head back. “Three stars or nothing” is your motto when playing Overcooked, but perhaps you can make an exception for Seungmin.

“Why’d you ask me about a party?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Seems like a college student thing to ask. And a college student thing to do. Go to parties, I mean.”

“Not for us.” You stretch your arms and legs out, knocking your socked feet against the coffee table. “When have you ever seen me willingly leave the apartment?”

“Never,” he admits, “but you should enjoy your youth.”

Whatever mutual agreement you thought you and Seungmin had does not exist. You have long known that you would have to sacrifice your twenties for your future. There would be good moments among your struggles, but so many of your memories would be of test prep and studying. As your parents so eloquently put it, “You can draw after you retire.” 

“That’s funny coming from you,” you say. You wave a hand in front of his face and observe the way his eyebrows scrunch together. “Are you really Seungmin?”

“Do you know any other ghosts?”

“Do you actually regret dedicating so much time to studying?”

“No. I mean, I went out when I could, but you…” He mindlessly thumbs the buttons of the controller as he tries to find his words. “Well, maybe I do a little bit, but it was fulfilling. Or was going to be anyway. You’re miserable. I’ve never seen you without dark circles or eye bags.”

How needlessly observant of him. “Thanks. It’s the quintessential college look.”

“Take care of yourself.” He raises his joycon and nods at the TV. “Let’s go again. Three stars only.”

And just like that, you and Seungmin go back to pretending as if everything is fine, like the last few minutes were idle chatter about the weather. You yell instructions at him, and he retorts back with something snarky; all is well.

You suppose you should have realized why Seungmin asked you such out-of-character questions two weeks ago. Death anniversaries don’t typically go onto your calendar, but you could have made an exception for Seungmin. How did you forget? As you walk down the stairs, a wave of guilt washes over you.

The annual university-held vigil occurs on campus, but the apartment complex has their own small affair in the courtyard. Framed photos of the victims huddle together at the base of a half-wall. Already, there are several flowers and notes strewn about, and you add your own carnation to the pile. You have a note as well, and it burns your hand as you debate whether to leave it or not.

Twelve people died that night. “Only” twelve, as some papers reiterated. Twelve out of three hundred doesn’t seem too horrific given the state of the fire, but that’s still twelve people dead. Plenty more got injured trying to escape, and they aren’t honored at this memorial. The living don’t get commemorated—they live with the memories of the day, and that’s remembrance enough for the public.

“Hey.”

No one else is around, so you say, “Hey,” back to Seungmin. He disappeared for a few hours, and you assumed he would be gone until sunrise. In the days leading up to his death anniversary, he has grown increasingly depressed, looking vacantly out the window and mouthing words to himself. You idiotically thought he was just having one of those days.

“How are you holding up?” you ask.

“Fine, I guess. Good turn out this year,” he remarks as he kneels down to pick through the gifts. “The construction workers didn’t even show up to work because of superstition or something.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know, it’s just…” You wave the folded notebook paper in your hand. Maybe you should’ve bought some stationery after all. “Read this later. I’ll see you whenever.”

You gently place it beside your carnation, return back to your apartment, and lock yourself inside your room. It’s too quiet, and you’re too restless. Your head tells you to do practice problems to burn off your energy, but all you’ve been doing as of late is listen to your head.

As you sketch an anatomical heart—underneath a completely necessary and painstakingly accurate rendering of a male torso—your bones say that this is right. 

To Kim Seungmin, a star that went out too soon—

You deserved so much more than this. I don’t even know what else to say because nothing feels more appropriate. 

I’m living in your old apartment—where it used to be, at least—and I can’t help but feel that I’m living the life you should have had. Sometimes I can feel your presence when I’m studying. I can hear you reciting definitions and shuffling flashcards. When I’m really losing my mind, I can see you sitting on the couch watching House episodes with me. It’s comforting and terrifying.

You already know this, but I don’t want to go to med school. I hate it and I hate being a disappointment to my parents, but I hate being a disappointment to you the most. You should be in my place, so I thought I should try and complete your dream for you at the very least. I’m already miserable, so I should make the most of it. For a while, I thought this would make you happy, but it’s been making you sad and worried recently. I thought if I could make you happy, then it would be worth it, but I’m realizing it’s not, but I’m too scared to leave this path. Sometimes I don’t know who I am without med school looming over me, and it 

I wish we would’ve met earlier. You’re an amazing person, full of light and kindness. The world is darker without you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything that I’ve done and for everything that I didn’t do because you deserve so much better than whatever you’ve been given.

“Do you want to talk?”

Seungmin’s upside down face appears between you and the iPad you have been holding up with both arms. Philosophy review is simultaneously boring and maddening, but you have a final to be studying for. You should’ve started much earlier, but twenty-four hours of cramming has not failed you when it comes to general education elective courses yet.

“Not really,” you say as you push his face out of view. He’s corporeal at the moment, so your hand meets resistance rather than going right through. “I’m busy.”

“Did you apply for a ‘biomedical visualization’ program? That’s a medical illustrator thing, right?”

You don’t need to look at him to know he’s thrilled. Since the memorial, you began looking into medical illustrators as a backup plan. You only meant to learn about the basic requirements, but curiosity got the better of you, and you attended an online informational session. Seungmin overheard bits and pieces because of how thin the walls are, you got cagey when he asked, and he put his endless hours of free time into detective work. 

“I didn’t apply. I’m just looking around. Now go away.”

“The living room is a communal space. So you’re considering it then?”

You don’t respond and bring your iPad closer to your eyes. To read the tiny notes on the margins of your classmate’s notes, of course.

Seungmin cackles and claps his hands. “You are! This is good! Why are you so morose?”

“Because you interrupted my studying? I have less than ten hours to cover three months of content.”

“You’re deflecting. Are you worried about your parents?”

“Morose and deflecting,” you murmur. “Two gold stars for your vocabulary usage.”

“Are you?”

You shut your eyes, envisioning the stern faces of your parents when you announce over dinner your plans to spend your life not being a doctor. Their expressions morph from confusion to anger to grim when they realize how serious you are. 

Are you serious about this? You’re not even sure yourself. It feels like you’re in high school again, holding onto a shred of hope for a future you aren’t allowed to have.

“What if I lie to them?” you say. “I tell them I got into a school that’s super far away, go there, and return when I’ve firmly established myself as an illustrator or whatever I end up doing. It’ll be too late for them to do anything.”

“That’s one way to do it. But wouldn’t it be better if you were upfront?”

You groan and turn back to your classmate’s notes. What is it like, you wonder, to not be crushed by the weight of approval? What is it like to know you won’t be scorned for your choices? No matter what you do, someone—your parents or Seungmin—will be upset.

“Upset” is a very mild way to describe your parents’ reactions. After six cans of celebratory beer—you passed all of your classes this semester!—you called your parents to tell them good news. Somewhere between the silent congratulations and questions of your home arrival, you blurted out, “I think I’m gonna do biomedical visualization. Medical illustration. Art. It’s still medical-related, but not a doctor.”

And after a lengthy discussion filled with shouting, you’re not allowed to come home this year or ever again. CALL ENDED flashes on your screen, but you grip your phone so tightly you can feel your heartbeat in your fingertips. Your whole body is tense, flushed with indignation and shame. No tears come. You expected something like this but nothing to this extreme. Their words echo in your ears.

Ungrateful. Selfish. Disgrace. 

Logically, you know you’re none of those things, but you can’t help but feel they’re at least a little bit right. You sink into your desk chair and wait for the inevitable knock on your door. To step out of your own accord would be mortifying. 

“Are you okay?” asks Seungmin.

“I’ve been disowned in every way except legally,” you answer as you let him inside your room. “What do you think?”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s…”

It’s not fine, but your mouth started saying so by default. You perch on the edge of your bed and stare at the stack of practice books that have been untouched for two days on your dresser. They would belong better under your bed where they’ll be out of sight.

Suddenly insecure, you ask, “You’re not gonna leave me, right? You’ll still help me peel potatoes and let me know when my artisan cookies are on sale?”

He chuckles. “The only way you can get away from me is by moving or by graduating. I’ll be here. Instead of nagging you to study, I’ll critique your anatomy.”

“That’s against the rules.” Nevertheless, you smile at the thought of Seungmin hyperfixed at your artistic renderings and comparing them against pictures from a textbook. “Thanks.”

Seungmin smiles back, and he radiates so much warmth that you forget it’s winter.

EPILOGUE

“Honey, I’m home,” you call. 

You nearly trip over the door sill in your heels but catch yourself in time. Wearing heels to commencement is a bad idea for more reasons than one. Clutching your friend’s graduation bouquet, you flip on the light switch with the back of your hand and glance over your apartment. Other than the dozens of boxes scattered across the living room and kitchen, nothing else belongs to you; goodbye coffee table you stubbed your toes against too many times; goodbye peeling school-issued couch. You half-expected to see Seungmin lying on it, staring at the ceiling like he used to. 

“Seungmin, where are you?” When he doesn’t answer, you try again. “Anyone home?”

You wander around the small apartment, checking behind doors and furniture like you’re playing hide-and-seek. He’s nowhere to be found, and you go through the apartment again in a frenzy. He could be in a different part of the building, but he always knows when you’re looking for him.

“Where are you? Seungmin, this isn’t funny! I know you can hear me.”

It takes twenty minutes, but you eventually realize he’s gone for good. No goodbyes, no hugs, no teasing—he just waved you off to your ceremony and shut the front door. You knew he wouldn’t be able to help you move out, but you thought he would still be here when you returned. He researched additional art classes for you, suggested works for your portfolio, and consoled you whenever you were overwhelmed. It’s a knife to your heart that he’s not here.

In between tears that you don’t allow to fall from your eyes, you carry your boxes of belongings to your car. You have a new place to call home, but two perfectly nice housemates and a dog aren’t good replacements for a ghost who annoyed you from sunrise to sundown.

I hope you find this note eventually. I know we have the rule where I’m not supposed to go through your belongings, but since we’re not going to be roommates any longer, I hope you’re not too mad. Completely unrelated but you’re really good at Mario Kart. So good. Birdo was designed specifically for you.

Congratulations on graduating. You’ve worked hard this year. Could have worked harder sometimes but you did it! Relax a bit during your gap year and enjoy your youth. Those art classes will be easy for you. Biomed visualization will be easy after pre-med studies.

Stop rolling your eyes and sighing. You know I’m right.

I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. I know you wanted it, but I don’t think I could have handled it. The truth is that I was ready to go a couple months ago when you started compiling your portfolio. For two years, I didn’t know why I was still here. At first, I thought my unfinished business was about the circumstances of my death. (Stop wincing. I’m dead. It’s a fact.) Then the administration stepped up. They did the bare minimum, to be honest, but at least changes were made. When you turned up, I thought I was supposed to fulfill my dream of going to med school. Turns out, I still have no idea what exactly why I was here, but seeing you live the life you want and choose the future you want makes me feel like business is finished.

To L/N Y/N, a star that will keep shining for decades to come—

I’m so proud of you and everything you’ve done so far. There are so many opportunities waiting out there for you, so don’t be afraid to take any chances. I’ll be with you always.

[moonlinos]

Invisible string (pt. I)

♡ Pairing: Lee Minho × fem!reader / Hwang Hyunjin × fem!reader

♡ Synopsis: With your terrible history of boyfriends during high school, you swore off love and vowed to get through university without a relationship. Things are great: you’re in your junior year, in an uncomplicated arrangement with a friend with benefits, and living in a nice sharehouse with two amazing roommates. But things begin to change once you meet Lee Minho, a student in your new class who vows to change your perspective on love.

♡ Genre: A ‘lite version’ of a soulmate AU, fluff, eventual smut, light angst, pining, jealousy, strangers to friends to lovers, friends with benefits

♡ CW: Swearing, sexual themes and discussions, mentions of anxiety/panic attacks, alcohol consumption, mentions of smoking

♡ Word count: 16.4k

♡ A/N: This is a three-part story because I can’t shut up. The second part will be posted sometime next week, and I’ll link it here. I’ve been writing all my life and have written for maaaany fandoms, but being on Tumblr as an active reader of SKZ fics made me want to write for them. So, yeah, guess this is what I’m doing now.

part II →

You are woken up by Hyunjin shifting beside you on the bed. He groans, arm reaching to mess with your already closed curtains. You chuckle.

“You know, the curtains won’t close any more than that.”

“I keep telling you your bed is in a terrible position,” He grumbles as you turn to face him with a smile. “Who thought placing a bed right under a window would be a good idea? Mornings are fucking hell here.”

You shrug. “Well, it’s not my house so I didn’t exactly have a say in that matter.”

“I told you a million times I could help you move it.”

“And I told you a million times Mrs. Choi doesn’t like for us to mess with her furniture,” You explain, turning under the sheets so you could face him before bringing your fingers up to pinch his cheek. Hyunjin scrunches his nose. “Speaking of which, you need to leave. You know her rule: no—”

“No boyfriends spending more than two days at the house,” He interrupted you with an eye roll. “I’m not your boyfriend, though, so that rule shouldn’t apply.” He shrugs.

Hyunjin has been one of your best friends since you first met over two years ago. It was Hyunjin’s first college party and one of the many times your housemates had dragged you along on a night out. His friends had dared him to try and chat you up, arguing it would be hilarious to see him get turned down by an older girl. What they hadn’t expected, however, was for Hyunjin’s clumsy attempt at flirting to be so endearing to you; his pink cheeks and bowl-cut hair made him look like a helpless kid despite his height towering over you. Before you knew it, you had spent the entirety of the party talking to him about everything and anything, only stopping once your housemate Eunha emerged from inside the house to drag you home with her as she desperately tried to dodge a rather insistent guy’s advances. After that day, you and Hyunjin became almost inseparable.

You can’t quite pinpoint when you began hooking up. It was meaningless in the best sense of the word. It was simply something that had happened. All you can remember is that Jisung had recently bleached Hyunjin’s hair after yet another dare from his friend. It had started with cuddles, which turned to kisses, which turned to touches, until you eventually slept together for the first time sometime last year after an excruciatingly stressful exam period. It had never once gotten weird between the two of you; the line was always clear: you were just friends who hooked up due to convenience. Everybody had needs and stress and shit complicating their lives, and fucking your best friend was far more practical and safe than going out to look for a random hook-up whenever you needed it.

You find yourself smiling at Hyunjin once again. His now long black hair fell in his eyes as he stretched his arms over his head.

“Yes, you’re not my boyfriend, but how am I supposed to explain what we are to a little old lady?”

“Doesn’t she always say she’s super modern?” Hyunjin raises his eyebrows at you with a chuckle. “Maybe she’d like a situationship of her own and you’re depriving her of that by keeping this knowledge to yourself.”

You roll your eyes at his words, attempting to push him off your bed. “Why did you sleep here, anyway?”

Hyunjin sits up on the bed, a pout on his full lips. “I had a shitty date. I was sad and lonely. Glad to know you were paying attention to my story.”

“Hyune,” You sigh, ‘When you tell me said story while fucking me, can I really be blamed for not remembering anything?”

Hyunjin flicks your forehead lightly. “Yes, you can. At this point, it’s like our thing to vent about bad dates during sex,” He argues before getting up from your bed, finding his shirt, which had somehow been thrown over your study desk.

“You mean it’s your thing,” Correcting him, you get up as well, turning to fix up your sheets. “I don’t even go on dates and you know that. The only thing I vent to you about is how awful academic life is.”

Once you turned to face him again, Hyunjin was busy messily tying his hair. His brows promptly furrowed as he took in your words. “Remind me why you literally never leave the house again?”

“Just don’t want to get distracted. Getting my degree is more important than getting a boyfriend.” You lie with a shrug.

Your history with relationships was something you kept secret from everyone you met after high school. You feel embarrassed, as if it was all somehow your fault. After five failed relationships where you had been the one to be broken up with or cheated on, you began to accept that maybe the problem really was you. Maybe something about you makes men want to yell at and cheat on you. Perhaps you are just bound to be a distraction until they find someone better.

Which is why you don’t date.

Would anyone go through the hassle of reading a long, tedious book if they already knew about the bad ending?

Hyunjin rolls his eyes at your answer, crossing his arms over his chest. “Your degree isn’t going to keep you company when you’re eighty and alone.”

“Well, my degree isn’t going to wake up one day and suddenly decide to leave me either,” you refute, earning an annoyed groan from your friend as you walk past him to leave your room.

“You literally never have fun, though. All you do is go to class, work, and study. You should at least pick up a new hobby,” Hyunjin insists as he follows you, walking into the kitchen-living room area. “Go out more, stop avoiding college parties like the plague before it’s too late to experience the joys of watching your friend throw up on some random person’s couch.”

You make a face at the offers, grabbing your mug from the cupboard. “Why would I want to see that? Besides, I have hobbies.”

“I meant a social hobby. Sitting in your room watching fucking iceberg videos isn’t sociable,” He explains, and you let out an aggrieved gasp. Your iceberg videos were educational and entertaining, thank you very much. Behind you, your housemate’s bedroom door opens, and you turn to watch as she stumbles out of her room, looking half-awake. “Soojung, don’t you think she should get a new hobby?” Hyunjin addresses the blonde girl, who stares daggers at him.

“If I say yes, will you two stop speaking so loud?”

Hyunjin slams one hand on the kitchen counter, his other pointing a finger at you. “See, she said yes. You’re outnumbered, now you have to stop spending all your free time holed up inside your room.”

Soojung groans, stepping into the kitchen and shoving Hyunjin to the side. “He’s annoying, but he is kind of right,” she mumbles.

Truthfully, you did feel bad about having essentially wasted three years at university by actively avoiding parties and invitations any chance you got. The only parties you did attend, however, only served as an irritating reminder as to why you shouldn’t put yourself in those situations. Parties and bars only meant desperate college boys. Desperate for sex, for attention, for a potential relationship. For someone’s heart to break. You had met Hyunjin at a party, for fuck’s sake. Who knows just how south things between you two could’ve gone if he had become interested in you romantically?

But, as much as you hate to admit it, Hyunjin is right. Your life is essentially an endless loop of studying and working. You only socialize when your roommates are home, when your few friends come over, and when you and Hyunjin hook up. But you aren’t ready to step out of your comfortable bubble of avoidance, so you settle for the best thing you can think of.

As Hyunjin rummages through your fridge like he lived there and Soojung stirs her coffee blankly, you loudly set your mug down on the counter. “An elective course,” you announce.

The both of them turn to face you with the same puzzled expression.

“The fuck?” Hyunjin questions, and you roll your eyes.

“I’ll take an elective,” you explain matter-of-factly, “The university offers a lot of great courses in things I’m actually interested in. It’ll be a way for me to get out of the house without having to watch a friend of mine puke on a couch or whatever atrocity it is that you said.”

Hyunjin slams the fridge door closed, earning a scolding scream from Soojung, and walks over to where you’re standing. He pulls you into a tight embrace, and you can hear the smile in his voice as he says, “You’re such a fucking nerd, what the fuck, but I’m so glad your hermit life is coming to an end.”

The elective course you choose is Japanese. It’s a language you’ve always been interested in learning, and while you know the class is merely introductory, you figure it will be fun to learn some phrases and expressions. You might even find yourself wanting to learn more in the future, and you’ll undoubtedly be glad you took this class during university.

Even if that means having to endure Hyunjin calling you a weeb.

You are able to begin attending classes a week after signing up; the lessons lining up with your work schedule to a T. The professor explained that, since you had joined the course late, you would likely need some guidance with phrases and words the class had already been taught. You didn’t mind, actually feeling excited in the morning despite your boring routine classes since you knew you would be doing something new you enjoyed in the afternoon instead of simply killing time around your house until it was time for you to work.

You walk into your first class ten minutes late, mentally cursing Eunha for being so good at telling stories about her weirdly entertaining life that it made it physically difficult for you to drag yourself away from her. You mouth a brief apology to your professor before scanning the room and scurrying over to the only available seat. 

You sit down in haste so as to not disrupt the class any further, swinging your bag over your chair and accidentally knocking over your seatmate’s water bottle all over his side of the desk. Luckily, the bottle lands on the soft surface of his notebook, barely making any noise. Unluckily, said bottle had been filled with coffee, staining his notes a faded brown color. You silently gasp, instinctively reaching out your hands to fruitlessly try and dry the pages that are now sticking to each other.

“I am so sorry, what the fuck,” you mutter under your breath as you continue to inspect his notebook frantically. “I’ll buy you a new notebook and another cup of coffee as soon as class ends, I promise,” You whisper to him, your eyes boring holes into the stained pages as you watch the bitter liquid slowly dissolve some of the black ink. At this point, you’re rambling out of nervousness, but you can’t seem to stop, adding, “Hell, I’m so angry at myself for what I did I’d bind you a new notebook and brew you some fresh coffee myself.”

You mentally berate yourself for your word vomit. It was just your luck that you would make someone hate your guts on the first day you attended a class.

After what feels like minutes of silence from him, you are prepared for the imminent burst of rage bound to come your way, the guy’s wrath more than likely stirring inside him as he sits beside you and watches as you foolishly shake the piece of paper, hoping it will miraculously return to its untainted state.

However, what you aren’t prepared for is the small burst of laughter that leaves your seatmate’s lips; it’s quiet, but you’re close enough to him to be able to hear it.

You furrow your brows, finally mustering the courage to look up at him for the first time.

“Did you…” You trail off. You feel a strange sensation inside your chest as your eyes meet his. It was something you had never felt before, a small burst of a fluttering that briskly washed over you before disappearing just as quickly. Like a pinwheel was placed inside of you and a strong wind had suddenly started blowing. You shake your head, returning to the matter at hand. You are probably just experiencing some anxiety due to what has happened, you argue mentally. “Did you just laugh at me?”

As you finally take him in properly, the guy before you looks as dazed as you felt just now, courtesy of your minor panic attack; his lips agape and his round eyes blinking while his dark pupils are fixed on you. You two remain that way for a few seconds in an impromptu staring contest that causes the peculiar feeling to bloom inside your chest once again.

When he finally speaks, his voice is soft. “You… offered to bind a notebook for a stranger,” His lips twitch into a grin. “It was a little funny.”

You open your mouth but promptly close it, unable to come up with an answer that wouldn’t make you appear like more of an idiot than you already do. You sigh. “Sorry,” you mumble, your voice low as well. “I say stupid shit when I’m nervous.”

He waves his hand dismissively. “It’s okay. I’m—”

“You two, on the back,” your professor calls out in a louder voice, however still keeping her calm demeanor. You and your seatmate turn to look at her. “I’m going to teach a few new phrases useful for traveling now. How about you two talk after class? This is actually quite perfect. Minho is one of my best students, so he could help you catch up to where we are.” She offers the two of you a small smile, and you feel your cheeks burn.

This class wasn’t mandatory, and you didn’t need it to get your degree. It is still a class, nonetheless. Ever since high school, you’ve always hated people who disrespect their professors by brazenly talking or sleeping during class.

“I’m sorry, professor,” You muttered. Beside you, your seatmate — Minho, as he was just called — scoots closer to you and whispers something you don’t understand under his breath. You look at him, confused. He chuckles, and you feel his breath on your cheek. It makes the odd fluttering return.

“Gomenasai,” He repeats more clearly, his voice louder, “It’s ‘I’m sorry’ in Japanese.” He offers you a smile, and you soak in just how good-looking he is. Ever since you first raised your head to look at him — when the pinwheel inside your chest rapidly spun and unexplainedly made you feel nervous — you knew he was a handsome guy, but his soft smile and calm eyes made him look even more annoyingly pretty.

Before you’re able to do it yourself, your professor speaks again and pulls you out of your trance.

“In this case, Sumimasen would be a bit more appropriate,” she corrects Minho, who clicks his tongue and mutters something under his breath. The woman chuckles at his reaction. “It’s okay. This is also something you can explain to Y/N after class.”

As the class went on, you couldn’t help but notice how Minho didn’t take any notes. Your mind latched onto how you ruined his notebook and how it was your fault that he couldn’t properly study during today’s class, so you couldn’t find the courage to offer him some paper so he could take notes.

After almost an hour of unrelenting guilt swallowing you up slowly, you place your hand on Minho’s shoulder as soon as the professor announces class is over after assigning the students a small written assignment.

“We could talk outside? If you want,” you offer him, feeling the now-familiar nervousness come back, making your mouth speak faster than your brain can even think to rationalize, “There’s a bench I really like outside this building. It’s a good spot. There’s a nice shade, and it’s secluded enough that people don’t bother me when I’m studying. Or googling how to bind a notebook.”

Minho lets out a brief chuckle. “Okay. I would love to talk on your favorite bench.”

You blink at him. “I don’t have a favorite bench.”

“Hm, it sure sounded like it. You listed some good attributes of that bench,” He argues, a grin etched onto his lips.

“I told you I say stupid shit when I’m nervous.”

He raises an eyebrow at your words. “You’re nervous?”

“Of course I am. I never bound a notebook before.”

Minho lets out a hearty laugh this time, his head thrown back and his eyes turning into crescent moons before he shakes his head. He picks his notebook off the table, showing you the crinkly light brown-tinted pages. “It’s dry now. I actually kind of like it, gave the pages a sort of vintage vibe. You don’t have to bind me a new notebook,” He reassures you, placing the small book into his bag. “As much as I would love to see how that would turn out.”

And just like that, your nervousness fades away. You smile at Minho, asking that he follow you over to your favorite bench.

The two of you talked for almost two hours. During that time, Minho helped you catch up with the vocabulary and phrases you had missed in class. When you asked him how he was able to know so much off the top of his head, his lips curled into a crooked grin as he sheepishly told you that he had been taking Japanese lessons since he was in high school. He explained that because he procrastinated signing up for an elective course, the advanced class was full by the time he got to it, so he decided to go for the introductory one instead. You chuckled and questioned why he would choose to spend his time on a course when he already knew everything being taught. He shrugged and explained that it was nice to have at least one class in which he didn’t have to try and that the fact that it made him feel smart also helped.

Not even your shift at work was able to make your conversation stop flowing, as Minho offered to walk with you to the coffee shop upon realizing it was near his apartment.

That was one of the many coincidences and things in common you found to have with each other that day.

It started with ordinary things like the fact that Minho had three cats back home just like you and how he had been collecting plushies since he was a child, while you had started your own collection as soon as you had access to money of your own. Or how your favorite authors were Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë — Minho swore you would die if you saw the special edition books he had back at home.

Then, it became a bit more amusing as you found out that Minho had worked at a convenience store chain when he first finished high school, and it was the same one you worked at for your first job after starting university. And you both had worked there for exactly a year and two months before quitting. You then told him about how you ended up attending this university after your top three choices turned you down, and his choices were the same as yours. And just like you, he also got rejected by his top three options, which led him to attend the same university as you.

You two couldn’t hide your bewilderment, eyes widening and lips bursting into laughter as these linked facts kept spilling out during your conversation. It was strange, you thought, but in a comforting way. It was almost as if you two had been living weirdly similar lives, all while having no clue about the other’s existence.

The two of you approach the small coffee shop while talking about your degrees. You try your best not to bore Minho with your ‘existential crisis-inducing psychology talks,’ as Hyunjin always put it, and you mostly listen to him as he talks about programming. He tells you that his dream is to develop cozy games that people can jump into without much thought, simply to relax. He says he knows how stressful life is and that people sometimes need something they can mindlessly do to get their minds off of shit. You resonate with it more than you care to admit, as cozy idle games are one of your favorite things to do while locked inside your room.

“So I do these freelancing gigs to make money but I’m actually set to start my first quote-unquote real job in two weeks,” he beams as you two stop in front of the coffee shop. Minho’s eyes lit up the moment he started speaking about his degree, and although you didn’t understand most of the terms he used, it is always endearing to watch someone talk about something they’re so passionate about. “There’s this guy who’s graduating soon who recruited me and a friend for a project he’s working on, so it’s not technically a job and we’ll work in his living room. I’ll still get some money and the chance to actually develop something, though, so it’s better than nothing.”

You smile at him. “If you like programming as much as your words led me to believe, I’m sure it won’t even feel like a job.”

Minho’s ears turned a faint shade of pink, and he scratched his head. “Sorry, I talked your ear off about shit you don’t even understand.”

“I think everybody likes to hear people talk about things they like,” you assure him, “It was a good talk. I still can’t believe we have so many things in common. It was kind of funny how they kept coming up.”

Minho chuckles, bouncing on the heels of his feet. “Guess the universe is giving us signs that we should be friends.”

“It seems like it.”

That day, you work with a persistent smile engraved on your lips. You can’t remember the last time you felt so good about meeting someone new. Despite your awkward first encounter, you found that talking to Minho was as easy as talking to an old childhood friend. It felt refreshing. The last friend you made was Hyunjin — whom you were so grateful to now for pushing you out of your comfort zone — and after that, you had unknowingly closed yourself off.

Minho had managed to open up your mind to the idea of letting someone in almost comically fast. And you loved that.

It’s been a month since you’ve been attending Japanese classes, and your studying sessions with Minho — which always turned into long conversations on what now had really become your favorite bench — were a weekly appointment, much like having him walk with you to work twice a week.

Today, however, Minho stopped you with a hand on your shoulder as you made your way toward your usual spot. When he asked you if you would like to study at his favorite bakery today instead, his eyes rapidly blinking as he looked at you through his bangs which had grown to slightly cover his eyes since you met him, you just couldn’t say no. He stammered as he promised that the place was even closer than the one where you worked, so you wouldn’t be late for your shift.

You smiled at his apparent nervousness, finding it endearing. You knew all too well how stressed you felt when offering something new or initiating plans with a new friend, and Minho seemed to be the same.

“Good thing you made this offer today, on my day off,” you bumped shoulders with him. “It’s almost like you knew.”

You begin walking, and Minho gently pushes you to the side so that he’s the one walking on the edge of the side of the sidewalk. You shoot him a questioning look, and he blinks at you again.

“Sorry, force of habit,” he chuckles, “My mom taught me a guy shouldn’t let a girl walk on the street side. I know it’s old-fashioned and probably made me seem like an ancient guy who wouldn’t let his wife work or something. Sorry.”

You shake your head. “No, it’s kind of sweet. I never had anyone do that with me.”

You feel the pinwheel twirl inside your chest again.

The two of you approach a familiar building together. You furrow your eyebrows as you take in the floral curtains on the windows and the pretty font adorning the store sign of your favorite bakery. You think about how it would be nice if you two came here on another day. Maybe you could use that opportunity to finally introduce Minho to your other friends.

You only realize Minho has stopped walking when he calls out your name. When you turn around, he’s standing in front of the bakery with a smile.

“This is the place.” He points toward the white door with a nod as you return to where he’s standing.

No fucking way.

“This is your favorite bakery?” You ask, although it is a stupid question. Minho nods. You play with the strap of your bag. “Okay, this is starting to sound ridiculous, but I swear I’m not lying. This is my favorite bakery, too.”

Minho’s eyes widen at your words, and his lips curl into a smile again. “Shut the fuck up.”

“I will not,” You chuckle.

Minho opens the door and the two of you walk inside, the familiar smell of freshly brewed coffee and baked goods bringing back great memories you made in this place. You often come here with your two roommates; it’s close enough to both your house and university that you can skip out on taking the bus, the atmosphere is always relaxing and comforting, not to mention the delicious cakes they sell. You smile to yourself as you remember Eunha scuffing down far too many slices of their chocolate cake after a nasty breakup a couple of months ago, tears streaming down her face so violently that the poor little old man who owns the shop appeared to check up on her.

“Their lemon cake is my favorite.”

“The lemon cake is what made me—”

You and Minho speak concurrently, with you unable to even finish your sentence before you both freeze for a couple of seconds in front of the only small table available at the crowded shop.

He’s the first one to move, pulling out his chair a bit awkwardly. “We should…” He trails off before clearing his throat as you sit down before him. “Should really make a written list of things we weirdly have in common.”

“At this point, I think it’d be easier if we made one of what we don’t have in common.”

You two settle for the obvious choice of two pieces of lemon cake with a cup of coffee for him and a glass of cola for you. Minho almost looked offended when you informed him that you hate coffee, wondering out loud why you even worked at a coffee shop before ensuring he could change your mind with just the five amazing facts about coffee he thought about off the top of his head. You shrugged him off with a grin. You couldn’t deny the irony of being a barista and having to make endless cups of a drink you despised daily, but you were sure Minho could never change your mind about coffee.

You two talked about your improvement in Japanese in the last month until the waiter returned with your order. Minho insists you’re a natural and could be on his level in a couple of years if you tried, but you roll your eyes at his compliments. You’ve never been naturally good at anything. That wasn’t about to change now.

“You know,” Minho begins once the waiter steps away from your table, looking around the coffee shop. People slowly started to leave as it got later in the day; the place was now much quieter, and the atmosphere even more cozy. “I used to think I would meet somebody in a place like this.”

“Like, in a romantic sense?”

Minho hums, still looking out to his side. You notice his side profile is really pretty, and you have to hide your smile by sipping your drink.

When he returns his gaze to you, he’s the one smiling. “Yes, in a romantic sense. Like being destined to meet someone.”

“Look at you, a hopeless romantic,” You roll your eyes with a chuckle. You never thought of Minho as someone like that. He seemed rather methodical, always following a routine and too engrossed in his codes to be preoccupied with something like love.

Minho furrowed his brows. “Why the eye roll?”

“I just don’t believe in that stuff,” you shrug with a small smile, “Stuff like destiny, soulmates, love…” You trail off, taking your spoon and poking the slice of cake in front of you. “Love has the awful tendency of being bad.”

Of course, you once believed all those things. Doesn’t everybody? But love has shown you time and time again that those are things reserved only for some people. And, clearly, you are not one of them. So why believe in it?

“It’s the most amazing thing in life,” Minho’s voice almost startled you as you were so deeply entranced in your thoughts.

You don’t lift your head to answer him, instead drawing mindless shapes on the icing on top of your cake.

“What is?”

“Love,” He replies in a soft voice. When you finally look at him, you’re surprised to find Minho’s deep eyes already looking at you, a small smile adorning his lips. “Love is the most amazing thing in life.”

You freeze.

You tear your eyes away from him, gaze focusing on the plate in front of you again.

You were careful with your rules. No parties, no bars, no talking to your male co-workers unless absolutely necessary, and no male friends unless they were in a relationship or proved beyond a reasonable doubt to only be interested in you platonically — which was what Minho was. So, why did him bringing up love make you feel so nervous?

Under the table, you unwittingly bounce your leg. This was stupid. Minho has been your friend for a month now; you see each other twice a week, and you talk for hours, always so comfortable around each other in a way that is still so new to you. He has never flirted with you or treated you in any way that led you to believe that he wanted anything more than to be your friend. You will not let your foolish trauma ruin what was proving to be an amazing friendship. He was simply sharing his thoughts on a topic. That’s all love was: a conversation topic.

You force out a chuckle as you snap yourself out of your senseless panic and look up at Minho once more. “We can just agree to disagree?”

He’s quiet for a few seconds, something you can’t quite pinpoint swimming in his deep eyes as he looks at you. Instead of breaking the silence, he scoops up a piece of cake with his spoon and raises it like a glass. You shake your head with a giggle as you realize what he’s doing, toasting your spoons together at the center of the table before you both eat your spoonfuls of cake.

“You know,” He speaks as soon as he’s done eating, his eyes having never left yours. “Love can never be bad. I don’t think so, at least. It never makes anything worse. It can only ever make things better.”

You hum and shift in your seat, lowering your gaze toward the table. The truth is, you hate talking about love. That — coupled with your shame regarding your past relationships — is the reason why you never indulge in this type of conversation, even with your own mother. But years of swallowing down your thoughts and opinions whenever the subject was brought up only caused a buildup of emotions in your throat. So much so that you only realized you were talking once you were midway through a sentence.

“Love can make so many things worse,” you affirmed, your eyes following the polka-dot pattern on the tablecloth, “Losing someone is bad enough, but put love into that equation, and it just worsens tenfold.”

Minho nods. “By that logic, you can say that having someone by your side is always good, but if it’s someone you love, it makes it better tenfold, right?”

You let out a chuckle as you realize you two could go back and forth about that subject for ages.

But it felt good to finally speak out your feelings on the matter, so you continue, “Love can’t be that great if people can so easily fall out of it and for so many different but equally stupid reasons. You’re suddenly not attractive to them anymore, or you have different opinions, or they love picking fights but hate it when it’s the other way around…” You trail off, swallowing down a lump in your throat as you speak out of experience. But Minho didn’t need to know that. You lift your eyes. “Not to mention falling in love with a new person all while supposedly already being in love with someone.”

“That’s not genuine love,” Minho shakes his head with furrowed eyebrows, as if it was his first time hearing of such things happening. “Real love is unconditional and understanding. Real love makes the person you love beautiful simply because they’re them. Real love doesn’t allow you to hurt the person you love because it feels like you’re hurting yourself as well.” His expression softens, and his eyes lock onto yours. “And real love makes it so that you can only see the one you love. You can’t possibly fall in love with someone else if you’re truly already in love.”

You gnaw on your bottom lip, nodding slowly. You hate the fact that part of you is desperate to believe that what Minho said was true. And you hate it even more that an even bigger part has already dismissed every single word that left his lips.

Desperate to shift the subject from Reasons Why My Exes Left Me — which only leaves you feeling sad and pathetic — back to Love Is Amazing, you decide to try and lighten the mood.

“Okay, but then explain to me how love is so great when you can just have sex with anyone, and it feels the same either way?” You question him with a teasing grin on your face. Minho shakes his head with a smile and eats another bite of his cake. You continue, “Be it a stranger at a party you met ten minutes ago or the love of your life, sex will always be sex. Therefore, you’re wrong, mister Love-Makes-Everything-Better.”

Minho chuckles around his mug, eyes closing as he almost spits out his coffee. His eyes are like crescent moons when he looks at you again, clearly amused by your words. “Well, yeah, of course, sex will always feel good no matter who you’re doing it with. It’s sex, and sex feels good,” He shrugs dismissively. “But sex with love is different. You aren’t just fucking, just fulfilling your own desires selfishly. Love makes sex better because you feel good simply by making the person who’s so important to you feel good. It makes you want to melt into the other person and become one with them because close isn’t close enough when you’re in love.

“Touching them feels like a gift, like heaven. Tasting them feels like heaven. Hearing their voice in their most blissful state feels like heaven. The trust and connection you feel in that moment is heaven, and that’s only possible through love. You can have sex with anyone, but you can only make love to someone you love, and those are two different things. That’s how love makes sex better. Therefore, I’m not wrong.”

As you take in Minho’s words, spoken so casually, like it was common knowledge, they leave you speechless. You watch him as he smiles triumphantly when he realizes you aren’t going to refute him — because you can’t refute him.

You berate yourself mentally as you notice the familiar feeling of arousal wash over you as you repeat his words inside your head. Not because it was Minho who said those things, but simply because that kind of sex sounded so good. Good in a way you had never once experienced before. Like heaven, as he had put it.

Your experience with sex has always been simply about fulfilling desires. You thought that was all there was to it.

Until now.

And even so, with your ex-boyfriends, it was always unbalanced. Ninety percent about their pleasure and only ten percent about yours. The first time you had a guy go down on you was the first time you had sex with Hyunjin, and by that point, you had already had five boyfriends. It felt weird when it happened, and you remember Hyunjin whining about how you didn’t have to ask him every five minutes if he was really okay with doing that. It had always been different with him, the good kind of different. He had never been selfish during sex; if anything, Hyunjin was too much of a giver, sometimes forgetting about his own pleasure in order to focus on yours. You thought that was the best sex you could ever have.

Until now.

Because, even with Hyunjin, there was never a genuine connection. It never felt like a gift to touch him and have him touch you. It was never anything more than sex, more than something you both did because it felt good and it was easy. He slept in your bed, and he cuddled you until morning came, but it had never once felt anything close to what Minho described.

You can’t help but wonder if Minho has ever experienced that. You desperately want to ask him, but you two aren’t close enough for that yet.

You also can’t help but wonder why you spend the rest of the evening raging a war against yourself as your mind is consumed with thoughts of what it would be like to experience that kind of sex with him.

It’s late in the night on the following Saturday, and your phone incessantly vibrating under your pillow rudely demands your attention just as you’re about to fall asleep. You squint your eyes as you type in your password. You sigh as you see Hyunjin’s name on your screen because of course it’s him.

Hyune: I’m outside open the door Hyune: please open the door? quick? Hyune: mrs. choi is gonna kill me if I use the intercom pls I don’t wanna die Hyune: I’m in my pajamas do you know how humiliating this is

Hyune: and I’m highkey pissed off Hyune: I WILL sleep on the bench outside your house if you don’t let me in and then I’ll die and who’s gonna live with the guilt? Hyune: you Hyune: OPENM TEH DOOR

You roll your eyes at his dramatic texts, stepping out of the comfort of your bed and padding across the floor as quietly as possible so as not to wake up your roommates. You open your front door and speed past the hallway and Mrs. Choi’s home, reaching the outside door in record time. It’s something you’ve done more times than you care to admit in order to let Hyunjin into your house. Your tenant was a sweet woman, insistent that she was modern and understanding of ‘young people’, but she despised people coming into your home any later than midnight.

You step outside, finding Hyunjin pacing back and forth like a creep in front of your house. True to his words, he stood in his checkered pajama pants and a black t-shirt. His hair was in a ponytail, the strands messily sticking out everywhere like he had tossed and turned in bed before coming here.

“You look like shit,” you speak up, causing him to jump and let out a gasp. You chuckle as he scowls at you, climbing the few steps to reach the door.

“I had a fight with Mingyu,” he grumbles as you two walk toward your front door. “He told me I spilled paint on his favorite shirt, which is fucking impossible since I don’t even paint anywhere near his shit.” 

“I mean, you are a messy painter.”

Hyunjin shoots you a look as you close your front door behind you. You take off your shoes and walk toward your bedroom in silence. This was routine. Hyunjin knew the rules: no knocking on the outside door, no buzzing the intercom, no shouting from outside, keep your voice down in the hallway, no talking until you reach your bedroom. It was all automatic at this point.

His voice is louder when he speaks again inside your locked bedroom. “First of all, I am not a messy painter. The paint is messy, not me. Second of all, if Mingyu wasn’t a fucking idiot, maybe he wouldn’t leave his favorite shirt on the floor of the living room right by my art corner,” Hyunjin huffs and crosses his arms over his chest, “If that’s how he treats his favorite shirt, I feel bad for his girlfriend.”

You let out a chuckle, which is cut short by him pulling you into his arms. “Hyunjin, that analogy makes no sense.”

“Yes, it does. You treat your favorite shirt like shit, you treat your girlfriend like shit,” he states matter-of-factly before pulling you into a kiss.

This was routine. It was all automatic at this point.

Hyunjin kisses you like he’s angry. Because he is, and that’s one of the reasons why you two do this. You let out your frustrations during sex. You complain, and you let off steam until you both feel okay again. It’s been this way for a year and some months now, and you never once thought anything of it. It was beneficial for you both, so why change or question it?

But that was before your talk with Minho. Before you were awoken to the truth that you’d been having meaningless sex your whole life.

When you’re pulled away from your thoughts, you’re already laid in your bed with Hyunjin hovering over you. His lips and hands wander through your body as he mumbles things you can’t quite understand; you can only make out your name and Mingyu’s mixed with curses. You try to bring yourself back to the moment, bringing your legs to wrap around Hyunjin’s waist and bring him closer to you.

He stops kissing your neck and yanks his shirt over his head, his hair untying in the process and falling on his face like a curtain. You giggle and try to fix it with your fingers. Hyunjin pouts.

“Don’t you think I’m right?”

You frown and hope he can’t see your confused expression in the dim lighting. You truly weren’t paying any attention to what he had been saying, too engrossed in your thoughts and too busy feeling sorry for yourself. Hyunjin’s tendency to tell you about his frustrations during sex always left you a bit puzzled, but it was also oddly sweet. It was like he trusted you so deeply as a friend that he believed he could share anything with you, no matter the time.

So you nod, lightly pulling at his hair. “Of course you’re right.”

He hums and buries his head on your chest, grinding his hips into your clothed core. “Of course I’m right,” he mumbles under his breath.

Everything is a blur after that, your mind insistent on repeating Minho’s words like an annoying echo. When Hyunjin’s tongue fucked you hastily, and he murmured something about you tasting so good, all you could hear was Minho’s voice telling you how tasting the person you love feels like heaven. When Hyunjin pushed his cock into you, his hands gripping your thighs and head buried in your neck, all you could think about was how this sex paled in comparison to what you could’ve been having — what you could have already had — if only you weren’t so damn unlovable. 

You knew that Minho didn’t intend to make you feel bad with his words. They weren’t targeted at you. But that didn’t stop your mind from sabotaging and putting yourself down. It was one of your biggest talents, after all.

Your body was present and responsive the entire time; you moaned because it felt good, and you kissed Hyunjin because you wanted to. But you were mentally somewhere else.

And the worst thing is, you’re a hundred percent sure Hyunjin doesn’t even notice it.

Because this wasn’t love. This was only sex.

And this was all you had ever known.

Time flies by faster than your brain can comprehend; before you know it, another month goes by. You only managed to go to your favorite bakery with Minho one more time before your work hours were changed, your shift now starting a mere thirty minutes after your Japanese class ends. He still walked you to work twice a week, but you would be lying if you said it didn’t upset you to have to let go of your weekly talks.

Minho also became busier due to his own job. With so little time to see each other face to face outside of class, most of your talks took place over text. He talked about his job with so much adoration it made you a little jealous; his partners were now simply friends he worked with, and his joy over finally being able to create a cozy game made it so that he pushed himself over his limit, often sleeping on his friend’s couch after working until four a.m. and getting through the next day on excessive amounts of coffee.

That was how you two came up with the idea of Minho dropping by the café where you work to pick up coffee for him and his friends. He would drop by at least twice every day, his friend’s house — which also served as their office — only one bus stop away.

The first time Minho came by, he had his wallet and phone in one hand, a sharpie and a block of sticky notes in the other. You eyed him curiously as he scribbled on the piece of paper while your co-worker prepared his coffee. When he was done, he stuck the note to the monitor in front of you on the counter. You furrowed your brows as your eyes shifted from the Japanese words on the bright yellow note back to Minho’s smug face. You were certainly grateful he at least had the courtesy of including the romanization of whatever he had written down. Not that it helped you in any way.

“Since our studying sessions after class were rudely taken from us, this is your extra homework. It’s all words we already learned. You just gotta think a little bit, and you’ll figure it out. You’re smart, I know you can do it,” He assured you.

Expect you weren’t that smart and ended up giving up by the time you got home that night. The piece of paper was no longer sticky on the border due to you carrying it around all day, boring holes into it as if that would magically give you the answer. You snapped a picture of it as you got ready for bed and sent it to Minho, begging him to put you out of your misery and simply give you the answer. ‘I want to drink coffee,’ he replied. You slapped your hand over your forehead with so much force you were sure the entire house had heard you. He was right; you did learn that in class. Curse the Japanese language for being so difficult.

After that, it became a routine. You waited expectantly for Minho’s visits daily, but you are extra excited today. It’s a Friday, and your birthday is tomorrow. After much pestering from Eunha, you agreed to have a small gathering at your house. It only made sense to invite Minho; he’s become one of your closest friends in the two months you’ve known him, after all.

As he walks into the coffee shop, sticky notes and sharpie in hand, you chuckle to yourself. You two chat about the development of his game, with Minho kindly using layman’s terms when explaining it to you. He also tells you about how one of his friends got so frustrated with a code that he threw his phone at a wall before immediately regretting it and crying on the floor next to Minho’s desk. Before you can get worried, he assures you that it’s just an ordinary day at the office, and the three of them end up laughing everything off at the end of the day.

After taking his order, you watch as he begins writing down your homework for the day on the small piece of paper in his hand. As you look around the coffee shop, most tables are empty, and the sun is starting to set outside the glass doors.

“You wanna come over this Saturday?” You ask Minho, who looks up at you before adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. That was one thing you learned about Minho since he began coming over: he wears glasses. Not every day, but enough times for you to notice how good he looks with them. But friends find each other attractive all the time, you justify it. “You never came over to my house, and my roommates really want to meet you. Plus, it’s my birthday tomorrow.”

Minho’s eyes widen. “Your birthday? And you save that information to the end?”

“It’s not a big deal. I usually never even celebrate.” You shrug lightly. You’ve never been big on birthdays, as you just don’t see the reason why it’s supposed to feel different from any other day of the year. “But my roommate pestered me to do something this year, so I agreed to have a party.”

Minho shifts on his feet. “I… really hate parties…” He trails off.

“It’s not a party party. I promise!” You hold up your pinky finger. “It’s more of a get-together, just my roommates and my only two other friends. And, you…” You trail off, “If you come.”

Minho blinks his eyes a couple of times before tearing the piece of paper he was writing on from the pad and crumpling it in his hand. He quickly jots down something new and sticks it to your forehead.

“Minho!” You scold him, to which he laughs, his nose scrunching and eyes crinkling. You advert your gaze from him as your persistent thoughts regarding how unfairly pretty Minho is begin to flood your brain once again. You take the note and analyze it:

はい (Hai)

You smile as you understand the word, looking up at him.

“I’d love to come to your birthday party,” He beams. “Thank you for inviting me.”

To say Minho is nervous would be an understatement.

He gets out of his car twice, ready to march back inside his friend’s apartment like a coward and pretend that nothing happened both times. Only when he thinks back to how you smiled at him when he agreed to your invitation does he find the courage to start the car and drive to your house. He’d noticed for a while now how much he likes you. But it was when he agreed with the idea of going to the café you worked at to pick up coffee that it truly dawned on him that he really liked you. Minho hated taking the bus, he hated doing anything other than zoning out on the couch during his breaks, he hated bustling shops, and he hated how his co-workers both managed to have such intricate coffee orders.

Yet he agreed to that idea, even suggesting he drop by two times a day.

He noticed he’d felt a familiar small whirlpool inside his chest whenever he was with you, when he heard you talk about something you liked or saw you smile. He’s also noticed that this tiny whirlpool has been growing bigger and bigger the more he’s been around you.

But that doesn’t scare him. Minho loves love. He loves to be in love, to love someone, and to make that person feel loved. It’s his favorite thing about life. If he was honest, he missed it so much he didn’t know how he was able to live without it.

Just down the block from your house, he parks his car and gathers his phone and his present for you — clearly clumsily wrapped, even with his co-workers’ help. He feels another wave of nervousness wash over him as he approaches the house; he’s an hour late and needs to mentally prepare to socialize with people he’s never met before. Minho chuckles as he realizes a silly party makes him more nervous than the prospect of possibly falling in love.

You open the door almost as soon as he rings the intercom, and he walks down the hallway into your house door; the crooked box he’s been holding makes his hands sweat. The first thing he notices as you open the door is your styled hair with a big white bow on the back, looking much prettier than the ugly bow he and his friends managed to stick on top of his present. He smiles at the sight and scratches his ear in a futile attempt to stop them from turning red.

God, he really liked you, didn’t he?

“Thank you for coming,” you tell him with a smile. Minho notices the quiet music playing inside the house, the simple decorations, and the cake on top of the kitchen counter. He mentally sighs in relief. This truly wasn’t anything like a big party. “You’re wearing your glasses again,” you point out as Minho walks inside and removes his shoes. He subconsciously reaches his left hand to touch his wire-rimmed glasses that sit on his nose bridge. He grimaces and curses at his friend for making him stay later than he was supposed to today.

“I had no time to go home and change,” He apologizes, fingers now toying with the stupid bow on top of the box. “I usually wear contacts, but they make my eyes dry if I stare at the computer for too long, so I just… wear my glasses at work…” Minho trails off, suddenly feeling stupid, his eyes looking anywhere but toward you.

You chuckle, lightly touching his glasses for a second before moving away again. “You always come to the coffee shop wearing them, and I think you look really good,” you assured him. His eyes quickly met yours, only for you to advert your gaze this time. “You should wear them more often.”

Minho only hums, lightly nodding his head. He feels stupid all over again as the image of himself throwing his contact lenses down the drain crosses his mind.

Clearing his throat, he finally hands you your gift. You giggle at the mismatched wrapping paper and poor excuse of a bow, which makes Minho let out a chuckle and murmur an apology. You open the box, and your eyes light up when you spot the stuffed bunny you have been raving about since you two met. It was the only animal missing from your collection, but you couldn’t find the right time to save up money to buy it. Minho didn’t need to ask if you liked it as he watched your smile grow bigger as you looked at the brown bunny.

“Come, I gotta put him in my bed now,” you beamed and took Minho’s hand in yours, leading him to the living room. There, five people sat on the couch and on the floor. Minho furrows his brows as he takes in a head of light brown hair covered by a familiar beanie. “These are my friends. Eunha’s the girl with short hair on the floor, and Soojung’s the one with blonde hair next to her. They’re also my roommates,” You point at them as you speak. “That’s Jisung sitting next to Soojung; he’s also her boyfriend. And then Hyunjin, with the long hair, sitting next to Chan on the couch. Everyone, this is Minho from my Japanese class.”

With that, you pad off to your room with your bunny in tow. As Chan finally turns to look at Minho, his shocked expression mirrors his. They stare at each other for a while before Chan finally breaks the silence.

“What the fuck, that’s my co-worker.”

Minho narrows his eyes. “So this is why you had to leave an hour earlier today?”

As you come out of your room, you chuckle. “Chan is your co-worker?” You ask Minho, “I can’t believe this. He’s been our friend for longer than I’ve known you. He came like a package deal when Jisung began dating Soojung.”

“Damn, dude, you hate me so much you never talked about me to your friend?” Chan gasped, a hand over his heart. “I’m hurt.”

Minho rolls his eyes but is unable to stop a small grin from forming on his lips as the entire living room erupts in laughter. “Of course I talked about you. I talked about you and Seungmin all the time. It’s just I…” Minho shifts on his feet, shrugging. “I never said your names.”

More laughter seeps out of the group of people, including Chan, and Minho finds himself laughing along this time, shaking his head at his own stupidity. 

He sits beside Chan on the couch while Hyunjin heads to the kitchen with you. He quickly asks him how he came to be friends with you in the first place. Chan explains that he’s been in a class with Jisung for almost two years, and the boy had always pestered him about ‘old people’ needing to hang out with people their age. That’s how he ended up meeting Soojung as soon as she became Jisung’s girlfriend. You and Eunha were an inevitable addition, seeing as you were not only roommates but also great friends.

You offer Minho a beer, which he declines. As much as he wanted to, no beer was worth having to take the bus back home. He silently sips his cola as he watches your group of friends chat. You end up sitting beside him on the couch, your friend Hyunjin to your right.

Minho finds that he missed getting together with people like this and didn’t even realize it. His only friends were left behind back at home, and although they were less than an hour away by bus, their busy lives prevented them from meeting in person. Minho’s favorite memories from his teenage years were having his friends over and just doing nothing for hours, talking about stupid shit until their stomachs hurt from laughing. Eating takeout on the couch with Chan and Seungmin after work came close, but they were always too tired and too stressed to entertain the idea of making jokes. Those were times when Minho realized he had really become an adult.

Jisung’s loud voice suddenly booms through the living room and startles an already drunk-looking Eunha, who murmurs something about the younger boy giving her a heart attack one day. 

“I’m bored,” he grumbles, draping his body over Soojung. “Let’s play spin the bottle.”

Soojung rolls her eyes at him, flicking his forehead. “Are you a teenager?”

Jisung pouts, sitting up straight once more. “We’re in university. University students play this fucking game all the time,” he states matter-of-factly. “Don’t make me regret falling for an older woman.”

“Jisung, I’m only three years older than you, I’m not—”

“Don’t make me call you noona.”

Soojung inhales deeply before turning to face the people sitting on the couch, placing one of the empty beer bottles scattered around her feet on top of the coffee table. “Let’s play spin the bottle. But let’s do dares instead of kissing, that’s too boring.”

Jisung beams, cuddling close to her like a needy child. Minho chuckles at the sight.

Eunha scoots closer to the couple so the group is seated in a circle around the coffee table, half of them on the couch and half on the floor. Minho never had the chance to play spin the bottle, which seemed to be such a staple game of one’s teenage years. By the time his friends were off sneaking into clubs and drinking behind their parents’ backs, he was already in a committed relationship and well aware of the fact that he didn’t enjoy parties.

It seems silly, but he’s glad he won’t live past his youth without experiencing such a trivial thing.

Soojung spins the bottle, and the neck stops facing Chan while the bottom faces Jisung.

“Take your shirt off,” Jisung waves a finger at Chan, who looks somewhat disoriented. Minho chuckles under his breath just as you do the same. You two face each other and let out a hearty laugh, your arm coming to rest on his bicep before retrieving back to your lap faster than Minho hoped it would.

Soojung squishes Jisung’s cheeks and places a small kiss on his lips. “You’re such a fucking chaotic bisexual,” she giggles, “Y’know, Chan, Jisung has had the biggest crush on you since you two first met.”

Chan shakes his head with a stifled laugh and proceeds to remove his shirt, neatly placing it on his lap.

Jisung is next to spin the bottle, this time landing on Soojung, who you dare to show her most embarrassing text. After showing the group a string of texts showing raunchy screenshots of a manhwa she’d been reading at that time, all sent to one of her class group chats which included some professors, she lets out a heavy sigh and orders Eunha to spin the bottle before any questions can be asked.

This time, the neck faces you while the bottom faces Eunha herself. With a smile, the short-haired girl dares you to kiss Minho.

He feels his smile drop at the very second the words leave her lips. This was not what he had in mind for tonight.

“What?” You sputter, “Why?”

Eunha shrugs, adjusting herself so she’s seated upright and staring right at you. “Well, he’s the only one here who would be actually fun to see you kiss. Jisung and Soojung are okay with each other hooking up with other people, so that’s no fun,” she explains, using her fingers to list her reasons, “I’m not into girls, so that’s no fun for me. Hyunjin is too obvious. We all already know Chan, so it would also be boring. Minho is like fresh meat. That is fun.”

Minho’s brain begins finding a suitable excuse for why you two can’t kiss, because he’s certain you have no interest in doing it. Not only are you friends, but your reaction didn’t exactly exude excitement at the prospect of kissing him. Just as he’s ready to lie through his teeth, you turn to him and place your hand on his shoulder, a touch so soft he’s barely able to feel it through the fabric of his shirt.

“Is this okay with you?” You ask him, the tone of your voice so sweet Minho feels like it melts his every thought until his brain is nothing but a sugary pool filled with only you. So he nods because god, yes, this is okay with him.

You gingerly place your right hand on his cheek, bringing your faces closer until your lips press together. The whirlpool inside his chest spins fast, like a vortex dragging every sense of his body toward you and only you.

You remain still for a few seconds, Minho’s eyes opening slightly to search for any sign of regret on your face. Before he can even properly look at you, your lips begin to move against his — gently and carefully, like you’re not sure if this is what he wants. Minho deepens the kiss and hesitates three times before committing to placing his left hand on your waist. The giggles around the two of you nothing but a muffled murmur to him. He presses another kiss to your lips, his body shifting until he is all but caging you against the back of the couch. But just as he swipes his tongue across your bottom lip, you push him back with a smile, Minho chasing after your lips.

He blinks a couple of times, eyes zoning into your smudged red lipstick. He subconsciously bites his own bottom lip, wondering if any of the color transferred to him. The surrounding murmurs bring Minho back to the moment this time, awkwardly clearing his throat before lifting himself off of you and sitting upright on the couch. He tunes out every comment regarding the kiss to the best of his abilities, focusing his energy on slowing down his heart rate. When he catches you giggling while looking at him, your arm touching his bicep yet again, he nods, grabbing his cola bottle from the floor and taking a sip.

Minho can’t remember the last time kissing someone got him so worked up. He entered a long-term relationship at such a young age that he’s only now realizing how unaccustomed he is to kissing someone new, to the rush that comes with having your lips pressing against the ones of someone you like. It was exhilarating and a bit terrifying all at the same time. He was awkward, unsure where to put his hands, uncertain if you were enjoying yourself. He was also greedy, wanting the moment to last for much longer than it had.

This had cemented the fact that he does, in fact, really like you.

After kissing you, the whirlpool living in his heart had now fully transformed into a tiny hurricane — with great chances of growing even bigger.

Minho only notices the game has continued upon hearing your voice complaining beside him. He watches as Soojung shrugs.

“It’s the only thing I could think of, sorry.”

“But why?” Hyunjin asks, placing his cup on the coffee table. “It’s a stupid dare.”

The blonde girl scoffs. “No, it’s not. I’ve had to basically live with you two for the past year, and it’s common knowledge how easily you get a boner for her.”

“Not true,” Hyunjin retorts, although it sounds more like a question than an affirmation.

Eunha blurts out, “You once got a boner watching her stir a cake mix.”

Hyunjin opens and closes his mouth before groaning, pulling you into his lap by the waist. You apologize to him quietly, to which Hyunjin shakes his head with a small smile.

Minho feels as if he’s intruding on something private.

You sit on Hyunjin’s knees, almost falling off his lap as you clearly try to keep some distance between the two of you. Hyunjin clicks his tongue and pulls you closer to him until your back is pressed up against his chest. He whispers something in your ear, to which you lightly slap his arm as his lips upturn into a grin.

Minho is definitely intruding on something private.

At some point, you turn so you’re sitting across Hyunjin’s lap, your body now facing Minho. He can’t help but watch with dark eyes as the younger boy’s hands wander through your body; playing with the buttons on your blouse, squeezing your thighs, and caressing your skin a little too close to the hem of your skirt. He furrows his brows as he tries to understand your relationship with Hyunjin, seeing as you’re obviously not put off by his hands on your body.

Minho is so transfixed by the sight and his racing thoughts that he only realizes the game has ended when someone taps his shoulder from behind the couch.  When he looks back, Chan is holding a cigarette and motioning towards the stairs that lead to the house’s terrace.

In the chilly open space above the house, they sit on a bench behind a tall vertical planter. Minho wonders who tends to the garden as he observes the various flowers, as well as some vegetables and herbs scattered around him. The terrace is small; the garden taking up all the space, an old wooden railing that overlooks the quiet street the only other thing in his sight.

He and Chan chat about school and work, as they often do nowadays. After Chan recently broke up with his girlfriend, Minho found that his friend had become much more closed off, so the list of subjects they would talk about became minimal. Chan bites his thumb before taking a long drag of his cigarette. He chuckles when he mentions being scared of graduating next year. Minho bumps his shoulder with him, arguing that being in his situation is worse. He admits that he regrets starting university late and that being in his first year when he should already be in his third is discouraging. Chan dismisses his worries, reminding him of how Minho is often the one to fix broken codes and come up with ideas for their game whenever Seungmin gets stuck.

“A degree is just a piece of paper,” Chan says, throwing his cigarette butt at a nearby trashcan. “You’re already a fantastic programmer, Minho.”

“You’re just saying that because I saved your ass today.”

Chan shrugs. “You’ve saved my ass basically every day since we started working together.” After a beat of silence, he asks, “Why did you start uni so late, anyway? You never told me.”

Minho hums, digging his brain for a way to sum up the entire story. “It’s complicated—”

He’s interrupted by footsteps on the stairs leading to the terrace. A loud giggle echoes through the open space before you and Hyunjin step into their field of vision. The long-haired boy holds you from behind, and you two stagger toward the railing.

“Wish everyone would go home already so I could just fuck you,” Hyunjin whines as he turns your body around so you’re facing him. Minho almost chokes on nothing at those words, and Chan stifles a laugh with his hand. He curses the small space as they’re able to so clearly hear everything you’re saying.

You playfully kick Hyunjin’s shin. “Don’t say it like that, Hyune, what the fuck.”

“It’s true, though,” Hyunjin continues, pressing you against the railing. He towers over you, so the only thing Minho can see from where he’s seated is your white skirt floating in the wind behind the tall boy. “I had a stressful, terrible, awful, dreadful week. All I kept thinking about was coming over and relaxing with you.”

“See, when you put it like that, it doesn’t sound so awful.”

Hyunjin clicks his tongue. “There’s nothing awful about fucking. I know how much you like it, don’t act so coy.”

Minho watches as your hands clench around Hyunjin’s gray shirt, pulling him closer and kissing him softly, much like you had done to him a few moments before.

Minho presses his lips into a thin line. He connects every dot available to him inside his head and suddenly feels pathetic.

Hyunjin being too obvious of a choice for you to kiss, his hands all over your body, his words about fucking you, the way you kissed him like it was a habit.

If you had a boyfriend, why did you agree to kiss him?

The words swarm Minho’s brain. He vaguely recalls you and Hyunjin eventually walking out of the terrace. Chan starts a one-sided conversation about one of his classes, with Minho humming after every couple of sentences to appear like he’d been listening when his head is too busy wondering how to feel about everything.

Minho recalls Eunha walking up the stairs and shouting for the two of them to come downstairs to sing you happy birthday. He recalls Hyunjin’s hands wandering through your body throughout the song, his lips pressing small kisses on your face and lips as you smiled. He recalls feeling confused, stressed, jealous, and pathetic.

Minho is only truly back to the present moment once Chan’s voice bids him a loud goodbye, and the door slamming behind him makes his senses finally return to him. As he looks around, he notices that the only people left in the living room are Jisung, Hyunjin, and you. Beside him on the couch, Hyunjin stretches with a loud groan.

“I’m gonna take a shower. D’you have any of my clothes in your room?”

You sigh from where you’re sitting on the floor, resting against the television stand. “Of course, I do. You’re always living shit behind, you’re like our third roommate at this point.”

Hyunjin chuckles, walking over to give you a small peck on the lips before disappearing into your room. Minho gnaws on his bottom lip with a bitter smile as he realizes Hyunjin will sleep over at your house. The ugly feelings return as he remembers his thoughts about you these past few weeks when he unknowingly cultivated too big of a crush on you. Even on his way here tonight, when he had chuckled to himself at his lack of nervousness in the face of potential love.

Love.

Minho can’t help but wonder why your view of love is so negative when you’re in a relationship. And, at the same time, he doesn’t dare to think about it for too long, fully aware that his foolish affection-filled brain will come up with a myriad of reasons — all where your boyfriend is the sole culprit for your distaste — and Minho knows better than to let those thoughts linger for too long inside his mind. He knows himself all too well, knows only awful shit would come out of assuming things about your relationship; the urge to beat Hyunjin senseless for being a shitty boyfriend and making you think that way about love being the worst of them.

“I’m too drunk to go back to my dorm,” Jisung suddenly speaks, his eyes glazed over as he stares ahead. “Gonna crash here tonight, too.”

Minho takes that as his cue to leave.

You walk him outside, a small smile on your face the entire time. He feels guilty not being able to reciprocate the gesture. As you tell him goodbye, thanking him for coming, you pull him into a hug. You hadn’t hugged much since you met, and Minho foolishly wants to draw you closer to him, to feel your body pressed against his just as it was pressed against Hyunjin most of the night. But he can’t do that.

“Are you okay to walk back by yourself?” You ask him as you pull away.

Minho nods, forcing out a small smile. “My car is parked just down the block.”

“That’s why you didn’t drink!” You exclaim with a giggle, “I forget that most people our age already drive. My anxiety didn’t allow me the chance to even try and get a license, so I just accepted my fate of taking the bus.”

“I could drive you…” Minho trails off. There he goes again, being pathetic. “If I have the time… You can give me a call and I’d be happy to drive you anywhere.”

You smile at him, wrapping your arms around his neck and pulling him into another embrace. Minho smiles genuinely as he buries his head in your hair.

The drive back home has Minho feeling stupid all over again as he thinks about how you’re probably in bed with Hyunjin by now. The whirlpool is back inside his chest, but it isn’t good or welcome this time. It’s agonizing and painful.

Love had never been painful. Love had never been bad.

But he had never experienced love toward someone who already loved somebody else. Although you brazenly state that you don’t believe in it, you must feel some type of love toward Hyunjin if you’re willing to be his girlfriend.

As he silently drives home, Minho finds himself agreeing with you.

Maybe love can be bad, after all.

Minho feels stupid.

This has become a constant in his life.

He had always thought of himself as a logical person. Programming had taught him that everything is predictable and fixable if you work on it hard enough. A broken code? It may take him six hours of staring at the computer to figure out it was nothing but a missing semicolon, but he will get there in the end. It was annoying and frustrating, but it was always something easily fixed.

He thought love was like that. It had always been like that with him.

Until he fell for you.

Minho was coming to terms with the fact that maybe love and programming were nothing alike. Love isn’t predictable. Loving someone who is already in love with someone else isn’t easily fixed. He can’t backspace and delete your boyfriend from the equation.

It’s been a little over six months since you two first met. Minho has consistently gone to the café you work at every day, and you two still had endless talks over text messages. You talk about everything and anything, from silly things like sharing pictures of both your growing plushie collections or your love of that particular coffee shop’s lemon cake to more serious topics like how Minho learned how to cook when he was twelve so his mom wouldn’t have to do it by herself, and now his roommates take advantage of that, or how sad you are that next year you will have to leave the house you’ve grown to love so much.

But, whether it is in person or through text, you still avoid the topic of love. You don’t ever bring up Hyunjin unless he’s part of a story you were already telling, and Minho feels his heart heavy as he slowly allows himself to imagine what it could be that led you to hate love so much.

He desperately wants to ask you, know your reasons, and make sure you’re happy with your boyfriend. But he doesn’t want to overstep any boundaries and doesn’t know how to go about it without scaring you. So he never does anything, like a coward.

Minho finds himself coming over to your sharehouse on most weekends since summer break ended. Your countless get-togethers at that house have become a hard-to-break habit. Hyunjin, Jisung, and your roommates are always assured to be there, with Chan joining whenever he isn’t overwhelmed with work or school, which was rare.

Minho had always been a hopeless romantic, always doing things for love that people repeatedly warned would result in regret. This time, it was forgoing visiting his parents and friends back home just to spend most of his summer with you. Despite not being able to pursue you in the way he truly wanted to, Minho still wanted to be your friend. You were still a fantastic person he loved to have around; that didn’t change simply because you had a boyfriend. Although he could feel a bit of his heart cracking every time he had to see you, all while knowing he couldn’t do anything about his feelings for you.

He couldn’t change your perspective of love if he weren’t allowed to love you.

In all the time he spent at your house during summer break, he ended up becoming good friends with Jisung, as you tended to stick next to Hyunjin most of the time. Minho didn’t mind it; he is your boyfriend, after all. At least, that’s what he repeats to himself every night he comes over like a mantra as he almost masochistically forces himself to watch how Hyunjin kisses your lips and caresses your skin or how you play with his hair and snuggle with him on the couch. He also endures the countless nights he’s left your house knowing all too well that Hyunjin would be spending the night with you in a way that Minho can only ever dream about.

Tonight, in particular, Hyunjin seemed to be all over you like bees on honey, buzzing around you everywhere you went, his hands never leaving your body as he pulled you closer to him every time you even slightly pulled away. Because god forbid your bodies not be touching in some way for even a split second. Before he knows it, Minho is downing his third bottle of beer of the night.

From where he’s sitting on the couch, Minho rolls his eyes as discreetly as he can while he watches Hyunjin pull you to sit on his lap on the floor as you all get ready to play a game of cards. He gnaws on his lower lip because he knows he’s being petty and borderline childish. You’re Hyunjin’s girlfriend. Of course he’s all over you, of course he wants to be close to you, of course he wants you on his lap. Minho concludes with a bitter chuckle that he is, indeed, pathetic when it comes to you.

He gulps down more of the awful-tasting cheap beer.

The night comes to a close after far too many rounds of Cards Against Humanity, with Jisung winning more than half of them. His ethics and morals fly out the window the moment the cards are handed to him, as he manages to create the most absurdly offensive phrases known to men every single time. Minho found himself groaning and yelling at the younger boy as the alcohol took over his system. He doesn’t know how much of it was simply his annoyance at Hyunjin clinging to you like a koala throughout the entire game disguised as competitiveness.

He doesn’t think he’d like to know either.

Like every night he comes over, Minho is the last person to go home. He has to call an Uber, far too buzzed to want to sit at a bus stop all alone at this time of night. He hadn’t even noticed how he kept downing his drinks until he felt the familiar buzz of inebriation wash over his body a while before the game ended. Although slamming his fist into the coffee table with a whine about how he had only been given lame cards should’ve been a sign.

As he waits outside your house by the fence, he suddenly hears the door shut behind him and your voice calling out to him. He smiles at the faint slur of your speech and the way you drag out the last syllable of his name like you always did when you were a bit drunk.

“I told you to wait for me!” You reprimand, opening the gate to stand next to him. “Look how lonely you look here all by yourself.”

Minho just shrugs with a smile, shaking his head. He did wait. He waited almost half an hour after announcing he should leave as you disappeared into your room with Hyunjin. He was still waiting, in fact, only mindlessly scrolling on his phone for the past ten minutes instead of finding a ride as he hoped you would come outside when you saw he wasn’t in the living room anymore.

You poke his shoulder, bringing his attention away from his phone to your smiling face.

“Tonight was fun, wasn’t it? Especially that last round when Hyunjin won after being tied with Jisung for the whole game,” you grinned, “Seeing Jisung make a whole damn case about how much better his card was really made my night. Think that’s the first time I’ve seen him act like a law student since I met him.”

Minho chuckles, bringing his attention back to his phone. Seeing your smile and how your eyes light up while you talk about something you like brought back the whirlpool inside his chest, which wasn’t a pleasant feeling any longer. It made him glum to think how a once beautiful feeling had turned into nothing but discomfort simply because he was lovelorn.

He hums. “You must be proud to have your boyfriend put an end to Jisung’s annoying winning streak.”

“What do you mean?”

Minho looks up from his phone, eyes wandering through your puzzled face. He furrows his brows for a second. Maybe you’re both drunker than he’d thought.

“I mean, it must’ve been nice to see Hyunjin win after Jisung basically made us all want to quit the game,” he explains, watching as your expression turns from confusion into shock before you let out a loud laugh.

Minho’s eyes widen, worried your laughter might wake up your neighbors. He gently shushes you, his arm grabbing your shoulder, but your smiling face only makes his lips stretch out into a grin. He suppresses a giggle as you catch your breath, shaking your head.

Minho smiles at you so fondly he’s certain he looks like an idiot. “What’s so funny?”

“Hyunjin isn’t my boyfriend,” you explain like it’s obvious. “We’re just friends. I thought you knew that.”

Minho only then realizes he had never once heard you refer to Hyunjin as a boyfriend, nor had any of the people around you. But his assumptions weren’t so ill-judged, either. You two acted like a couple. It wasn’t so absurd to assume that you were one.

He finds himself staring at your amused face for a few seconds before forcing himself to turn his attention back to his phone.

You acted like a couple, but you were just friends. Minho groaned mentally.

“So, you’re like friends with benefits?”

“Yeah… I don’t particularly believe in love anymore, Minho. I thought you knew that from our talk a while ago,” You chuckle, shifting on your feet. “Hyunjin is one of my best friends. We just hook up ‘cause it’s convenient.”

Minho hums, his fingers ghosting over his phone screen. “Sounds like you’re running away from love.”

He blinks a couple of times as he takes in his own words. He would have never said such a thing if it hadn’t been for the liquid courage flowing through his veins.

You shrug, moving to sit on the white bench just outside the house. “Well, yeah, that is what I’m doing. Love hasn’t been kind to me at all. I have no interest in going after it, only to be hurt again. It’s a movie I’ve watched before and I hated the ending every time.”

Minho bites the inside of his cheek, finally clicking the button to find a ride, his thumb pressing on his phone screen more forcefully than he intended. He felt angry. You didn’t deserve to settle for a friend with benefits due to convenience. Had you wanted to be in that situation, it was your every right to do so, but you were in it out of fear of being hurt.

He felt sad. He wished you didn’t equate your past experiences with love to everything it could be. Bad experiences in love were possible for everyone — even for him, who used to believe unwaveringly that love could never be hurtful — but that didn’t mean it was all there was to it. Minho desperately wanted to show you that. The good side of love, the side that made him put it above everything else in his life on so many occasions, the side that made him crave it even now when it hurt more than it felt good.

And, strangely, Minho felt relieved. It was a small percentage of the chart of current emotions he was experiencing, but prevalent nonetheless. He would be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he felt happy Hyunjin wasn’t your boyfriend and, most importantly, that you weren’t stuck in an unhappy or toxic relationship, as he had so often feared.

His ride arrives, and he’s overcome with a wave of courage. Minho would much rather live with regret than with a constant ‘what if’.

Shoving his phone inside his pocket, he offers his hand to you, who looks up at him curiously from where you’re sitting on the bench before taking his hand. Minho pulls you to your feet and hugs you. With his hand on your waist, he pulls your body closer to him, finally holding you tightly the way he’s always wanted to do. He presses a kiss to your head, bringing his lips to your ear and whispering, “I’m gonna change your mind.”

He feels your body shake with a chuckle, but he only tightens his hold on you.

“What?”

“About love, I’m gonna change your mind,” He answers matter-of-factly, “You deserve to feel love without being afraid.”

Minho pulls back from the embrace just enough to see your face, and he’s surprised to find you smiling up at him. He smiles back.

“I will change your mind.”

Minho had just dropped you off at your house, ready to drive around aimlessly until he absolutely had to go back to his dorm, when Seungmin texted him.

Kim Seungmin: hey my sister’s engagement dinner is tonight Kim Seungmin: and i might have fucked up something in the code i was working on so now there’s a chance that you fish 100 rare fish at once 🤪 Kim Seungmin: pls pls do me a solid and fix it before chan sees it and kills me? Kim Seungmin: love you hyung 💚

Minho initially groaned at the messages, thinking of the many ways in which he could murder Seungmin and get away with it. But, ultimately, he didn’t want to go back to his dorm anyway, so he gladly turned his car around. If he was lucky, this would take hours and he would have a valid excuse to crash in Chan’s cramped living room.

He punches the code to the front door and his friend greets him with a puzzled expression.

“I forgot to do the, uh, troubleshooting for this week,” Minho blurts out. It’s the first lie he can come up with, and he hopes it’s convincing enough. Chan nods slowly. Seungmin might have saved him from having to endure his roommates on a Saturday night, but he still owes him.

“It’s all good,” Chan says with a sigh, “I’m most likely gonna pull an all-nighter designing these new characters. Anyway, how did you waste your time today?”

Minho has been taking you on what he likes to call Subtle Dates for a month now.

Chan affectionately calls them Waste of Time Dates.

Minho rolls his eyes, sitting down on his own desk. “We went to Han River and walked around till sundown, then watched the Banpo Bridge water show.”

Days like today were rare, so Minho was happy. Most weekends, it seemed as if the whole world was conspiring against anything he planned with you.

“Oh, how romantic of you,” Chan gasps, feigning amazement. “Did you at least kiss her this time?”

“You know I can’t just kiss her like that. I know she’d freak out if I tried to do anything romantic with her,” Minho taps his fingers on his desk, knowing he sounds ridiculous. But he has a plan. He just hopes this plan actually works out soon. “I don’t mind being patient.”

He hears Chan scoff. “So, you took her on another one-sided date and then drove her home so Hyunjin can fuck her?”

Minho’s fingers stop tapping on his desk, his hand coming down to slam on it before he can stop himself. He lets out a heavy sigh, and Chan mumbles an apology. But, the truth is, he knows his friend is right. Just last weekend, Minho dropped you off straight into Hyunjin’s arms, the younger boy waiting for you to come back in front of your house.

And Hyunjin wasn’t the only inconvenience that rendered it almost impossible for the two of you to spend time together. Minho had to cut most of your dates short due to Chan calling him about something urgent that only he could fix at work, or you canceled altogether because your roommate was upset and you didn’t have the heart to leave her alone like that. There were also times when Minho was too tired to even go out at all, like on the day of his birthday, which resulted in you coming over to Chan’s apartment and eating cheap takeout food with him and his two friends.

Minho found himself dealing with countless bumps in the road when it came to finding a way into your heart.

“I didn’t mean to say it like that,” Chan says hesitantly, “You clearly like her a lot.”

Minho repeatedly opens and closes the code he’s supposed to fix. He sighs. “I like her more than a lot, and I don’t even know when that happened.”

“I don’t want to see you get hurt,” His friend explains, his face disappearing behind his own computer screen. “I just can’t see what will change if you go on dates with her when she doesn’t even know they’re dates and if she’s just gonna go home and have sex with someone else. I don’t get it. What difference does it make?”

He can hear Chan scoffing, although he tries to disguise it by clearing his throat. Minho shakes his head.

“It makes all the difference because that’s not love. I wanna show her what love is, and that it isn’t always bad. I promised her that I would.”

Chan sighs, sliding his chair toward the mini-fridge by the couch. “Agree to disagree?” He asks, grabbing a bottle of water and tossing it in Minho’s direction. He grabs it mid-air, just before it hits him in the face, and clicks his tongue.

“Agree to disagree.”

Minho plugs his headphones into the computer, drowning out the noise of Chan’s pen sliding across his iPad with his brown noise playlist. But he can’t drown out the obstinate thought ringing inside his head, screaming at him that Chan is right.

Taking you out on dates — which you don’t even know are dates — doesn’t really make a difference if you’re just going to go back to your convenience with Hyunjin at the end of the day. If you think you’re just friends going out together, and you go back home at night to the comfort of sex without the love you’ve been running away from for so long, what Minho is doing truly is useless. 

It’s just like when he argues with Seungmin through their codes, screaming at the younger boy in all caps about something that’s broken, even though he knows he’s going to be the one who will end up having to fix it.

Minho’s fingers come to a halt on the keyboard.

Closing his work, he opens up Google and finds the first flight he can to Japan. Almost as if he’s on autopilot, and his brain is completely shut off. He books the flight and the cheapest hotel he can find, using almost all the money he’s saved up to move out of his hell of a dorm. It might be the most idiotic thing he has ever done in his life, but he’s so in love it hurts him. And he loves love, and love with you — the thought of that alone has his heart beating at his throat. He doesn’t want to keep on with these futile attempts at trying to make you see that love is good and that, maybe, love can be good with him.

The truth is, he feels scared. Maybe even more scared than you do. He is terrified of knowing the answer, of finding out that maybe he could change your mind about love but that it would simply lead you to someone else’s arms and he would have to endure the pain of unrequited love until it inevitably faded away with time.

Minho would gladly live with that pain if it meant you were happy.

But he needed to know.

He adjusted his glasses — a childhood nervous habit that returned after he started wearing them more often since you complimented him months ago — and retrieved his phone from his backpack.

He typed and deleted more times than he’d like to admit.

Me: Hey, it’s late sorry  Me: Just wanted to know if you’d be up for a trip to Japan? Me: In two weeks Me: For study purposes Me: We’d finally have the chance to use what we learned in class lol Me: Chan was supposed to go with me but he has a family thing so he can’t anymore Me: Everything’s already paid for and he said he doesn’t mind if you go in his place Me: Lmk what you think

Minho’s fingers typed as his brain came up with excuses and lies, sending more messages than he needed to. He couldn’t tell you he booked a whole damn trip with you just to see if maybe, possibly, you have feelings for him too.

He all but throws his phone across his table after turning on Do Not Disturb. He’ll need to muster up the courage before reading your answer, and having his phone buzz for anything that wasn’t your reply would just be torturous. He felt stupid, would feel even more so if you turned down his invitation. He almost doesn’t want you to answer, wants to pretend he never even sent anything.

Because it was stupid.

But love is stupid, and he is in love.

Worst-case scenario, he’s stuck with Chan in Japan for a weekend while he laughs at him.

Best-case scenario, he spends a weekend with you in Japan. No letting you go back to another man at the end of the day, no more hiding that he is taking you out on dates, no more distractions, no more inconveniences of your daily lives.

Minho opens the code he was working on again, quickly typing out:

// NOTE: Minho will fix this.

[alcazarofthestars]

Hello can I request yandere platonic fontaine with y/n that is like Kohaku from enstars by personality?

Of course! But I've only started playing enstars a few months ago, so my knowledge of his personality is a bit restricted and I'll be using the wiki... Sorry for being late, my practical exams are around the corner and then my end of semester tests come right after that....

Summary: After growing up as a very sheltered kid in the house of the hearth, you are trying to achieve your dream in Fontaine as a performer. But you have unfortunately managed to gain the interest of many famous figures and obsessive people in Fontaine...

Warning!: Yandere content (Obviously), bullying, ooc, insecurities, fighting, stalking, abuse(?), bad writing, disfiguration?, murder, harassing, taking pictures without consent, physically harming (not to the reader... kinda), manipulation, Fontaine cast girlbossing, gatekeeping, and gaslighting. (If any of those make you uncomfortable please leave.)

{~} So imagine this, you were born in a branch family of a rather noble family from Inazuma. But you were given up to Arlecchino by your parents because the main family isn't really welcoming of an heir of your gender in fear that the branch family will get any power against them. Even though the family was trying to modernize out of such beliefs, the current head of the family still firmly believes in it. So out of concern, your parents hid you for the first five years of your life until they gave you up to the house of the hearth.

{~} There in the orphanage you meet a pair of twins from Fontaine who aspire to be great magician and his assistant, the twins consist of one male and one female who introduced themselves as Lyney and Lynette. They were older than you by a few years and they would also love to put on a show for you! By this point you see them as your older siblings, and they also see you as their adorable younger sibling who has to be protected from the cruel world. But sadly, they go on a lot of missions outside of Snezhnaya... But don't worry, they always think about you during their missions and they bring back souvenirs from their travels!

{~} During your time at the orphanage, you've managed to meet Arlecchino herself. At first she scared you, but you soon warmed up to her! She became your parental figure during your stay at the house of the hearth after an event where she saved when you almost died. But she would never allow you out of the orphanage grounds unlike the other kids at the orphanage. You first thought it was because you were too young, but when you grew up she still didn't allow you to leave whether it's for missions or just walking around. Whenever you asked she would answer by saying, "It's for your safety. The world is a harsh place." or something similar to that...

{~} This made you grow up as a rather sheltered kid compared to most others your age. You learned about the outside world by books, newspapers, and gifts that were brought back by the others in the orphanage. You also have very little knowledge about fashion due to always wearing uniforms provided by the orphanage.

{~} One day, you were introduced to a new addition to the orphanage. He introduced himself as Freminet as he hid behind Arlecchino. She wanted you to welcome him to the orphanage because the two of you are the same age. At first he was rather shy and quiet around others, he still is but now he doesn't run away the moment someone goes near him. You would talk and hang out with him during the first few weeks of his stay, but he would always hide from you...

{~} This one time, you were walking around the orphanage in search of Freminet to play with you as usual. You did manage to find him, but he was surrounded by other kids that were all older than him. From what you heard from afar, they were talking about him. And not the nice type of talking, more like the harassing kind. So as a young kid with a naive mind you went up to the group and confronted them head on.

{~} ... It didn't go well. You ended up fighting with most of the kids while the others ran to find Arlecchino or because they were scared. After Arlecchino came, she sent all the kids (including you) to her office. In the end, after asking the bystanders and witnesses you got off with only a long lecture while most of the other kids got lectured and were given more chores to do. When you left Arlecchino's office, Freminet went over to you and hugged you, thanking you for helping him. Since that incident you and Freminet had gotten closer up to the point he would follow you around like a lost puppy.

{~} On one afternoon, Lyney and Lynette came back from one of their missions. They also brought some souvenirs back from Fontaine for you. Lyney handed you their souvenir, it is a voice recording of a popular idol from Fontaine singing their most popular song. You would love to listen to it and you really treasured it. A few days later, you were playing with the twins and Freminet when you excitedly announced that you want to be an idol or performer when you grow up.

{~} They were very supportive of your dreams, Lyney and Lynette offered to teach you some tricks for when you're performing so you don't get nervous on stage. Lyney had also invited you to come to one of their performances in the future! When you told Arlecchino, she seemed supportive of this idea as well. So after all that, you began practicing with the help of Lyney and Lynette with Freminet and Arlecchino who would occasionally drop by and watch you practice.

{~} When you turned 15, Arlecchino finally gave you your first mission (you kept on begging her) with the twins and Freminet in Fontaine. The mission was rather easy, 'perform a show as your 'debut' as a performer to prepare for future missions', you were still excited nonetheless!

{~} When you, Lyney, Lynette, and Freminet arrived at Fontaine you were in awe by the atmosphere of the said nation. Compared to Snezhnaya, Fontaine was more welcoming and peaceful especially with way less snow and blizzards. Your group split up to find a place to stay, so while Lynette and Freminet search for an inn you and Lyney would go explore together.

{~} After a while, you managed to get separated from Lyney. While searching for him you decided to ask some people nearby. The second you asked they started to give weird looks to you, narrowing their eyes as you spoke. You, who noticed this, started to get more and more nervous. They answered you by saying that they haven't seen Lyney. When you were far enough they started to talk amongst themselves, mainly about you and your weird accent. It wasn't much of a problem for you back at the house of the hearth because of the kids' innocent minds, but now that you're in a whole different nation with a lot of judging people, you start to feel somewhat insecure...

{~} Thankfully, Lyney had found you accompanied by Lynette and Freminet trailing behind him. "Ahah! There you are! We were so worried, where did you go?" He questioned. "Now, now, it was your fault that you two got separated." Lynette commented in a rather harsh tone. "Anyways, we found a suitable inn to stay at." She added.

{~} Although that incident happened a long time ago, you still found their words ingraved in your head. Now ever since you started your 'career' as a performer, people have grown to like your accent. But you still have problems accepting it...

{~} In present times, you are a famous performer in Fontaine and other regions. So it's only natural to have performed in front of many important and known figures from many different nations. But today's performance makes you feel nervous... Why you ask? It's because you're gonna perform for the monsieur Neuvillette and hydro archon herself along with a few more important people! Usually Lyney and Lynette would do these, but it seems that they want you to perform instead....

{~} It went smoothly, as usual. The crowd was cheering, the guests were happy, and you did a job well done! After the show the hydro archon, Furina, had approached you to congrat you on a good show while Neuvillette had given you a nod and a faint smile. You were happy of course, but there was a bad feeling that you couldn't really shake off from them...

{~} During your stay at Fontaine you have met many incredible and nice people! Such as Navia the president of the Spina di Rosula who would always invite you to tea parties with her to talk about your day, Clorinde the hydro archon's personal bodyguard that would help you out with security during your performances, or Chiori the fashion designer from Inazuma who likes to make you dress up from time to time. Over time, you had also managed to get closer to the hydro archon, melusines and Neuvillette. Although being somewhat close with them, you still continue to get a bad feeling from them.

{~} There was a certain incident that had happened a while back where during one of your shows a person from your audience made a remark on how you have a strong accent and how it ruined the whole performance. When you went to talk to the people who said that earlier it is as if they just went POOF! Cause it was like they just... vanished... Until a few days later where their bodies were found, looking so disfigured that they could only be identified by their outfit.

(TIMESKIP TO AFTER THE ARCHON QUEST CAUSE I'M STARTING TO GET LAZY)

{~} Over time you have managed to see the fountain cast as your 'found family' and they seem to see you in the same light! But day by day the amount of missing people cases has increased up to the point your 'family' starts talking about how dangerous it is and how you should just stay with them for the time being.

{~} Maybe they are right. You shouldn't worry much about people whom you barely know and spend time with your friends and 'family' instead! Things have been going great, the culprit is almost found and you get to spend time with the people you love without being worried. Isn't that just nice? Well... that is until a renowned detective from Inazuma comes to help in the case...

A/N: AHHHH....! I hate tests... This will probably be my last post before going inactive for a while.... Sorry for the rushed ending, feel free to leave the rest up to your imagination!

[jeankluv]

Birdie - Satoru Gojo | Chapter 09

Words: 4,3K

Summary: You didn't like him, at all. But due to your bad luck you would have to be forced to work with him and different circumstances end up leading you to the fact that perhaps the word dislike is not the one you would use to describe him.

ac: _3aem

Tags: modern au, college au, fem!reader, academic rivals, he fell first, fluff, old money Gojo Satoru, abusive parents, slight slow burn, Satoru is a softy, secondary couple (Geto Suguru x oc), a bit of angst, no use of y/n, eventual smut, Gojo plays basketball

Notes: we are getting into business with this new chapter. I haven’t written almost anything during the whole week, I was busy studying but hopefully I can finish the chapter I was writing and start with the new one. I’m so excited for all of you to read the next few chapters.

Before you read the chapter: i know this post will be seen by a lot of people and I wanted to share this gofoundme link, she is my moot on twt, her name is Noor and she is trying to evacuate her and her family from Gaza and she is still trying to raise money. I know not everyone can donate but if you can rt and share it’s very useful. Thank you ❤️

materialist | previous chapter | next chapter

Pinteres board || Birdie playlist || ao3

“Fuck me.”

You opened your eyes in surprise after hearing your best friend’s words.

“Sorry.” She covered her mouth. “But Jesus! You look so freaking hot.” She looked up and down several times.

“You think so?” You looked at yourself back in the mirror.

Kyoko nodded. “That red dress looks breathtaking on you. And your breasts look just so good with it and please tell me you are wearing the high boots.” She said looking around, searching for your boots.

“Yes.” You smiled.

“My femme fatale girl.” She joked. “Girl, I’m afraid I might come back home alone.” She cried.

“Pfff.” You rolled your eyes. “I’m not the one who has a boyfriend, you are!” You pointed at her. “I will probably be the one coming back home alone because you will be too busy with your lovely boyfriend.”

“C’mon girl, when was the last time you hooked up with someone, just anyone.” Kyoko said while stealing one of your lipsticks.

You felt silent, trying to think when was the last time you hooked up with someone. Last year’s New Year’s party? No you were working at the bar, so was two years ago with that guy?

“Oh god!” Kyoko gasped. “You don’t even remember it!”

“Shut up!” You took away your lipstick. “I was busy working and studying. I couldn’t go parting.”

“That’s why.” She positioned herself behind you. “Tonight, you will hooked up with someone.”

“Kyoko…”

“C’mon! The entire basketball team will be there.” She winked at you. “Satoru will be there.” She dropped it.

You tried to ignore the growing feeling on your chest. “And what about it?” You said with no emotion on your voice.

“What? You are going to tell me, that now you don’t dislike him, you haven’t imagine yourself hooking up with him.”

You rolled your eyes and shook your head. “No I haven’t.” That idea hasn’t crossed your mind. Yet.

“Whatever, but there are a lot of hot guys in the team. But the hottest is already taken and it’s mine.” She joked. “Oh…” She gasped. “Probably the hot guy, the one you used to crush on, the one with the face tattoo and piercings will be there, he is also part of the basketball.”

“That was back when we were in our first year.” You snorted. “And besides, I think he has a girlfriend.”

Kyoko grimaced and sat on your bed while you finished making the final arrangements. You had to say it, you looked hot tonight.

At first you were doubtful about going out, because you didn’t feel like it. But you were young, you were having an extra free day and you nailed your exam, although you still didn’t know your score. But it was going to be good.

You turned around and looked at your best friend with a huge smile on your face.

“Ready?”

“Absolutely!” She screamed and held your arm.

Exiting your room, you exchanged polite farewells with Kyoko's parents before stepping out into the cool night air. There, standing by the front gate, was Suguru, patiently waiting for both of you.

Kyoko let go of your arm, her demeanor shifted, and she moved swiftly into Suguru's awaiting embrace. She leaned in, pressing a tender kiss to his lips.

You couldn't help but feel a pang of loneliness as you watched the intimate moment that they were sharing. You put on a smile and greeted Suguru warmly, acknowledging his presence with a nod. You sat in the back seat, while Kyoko sat next to Suguru in the front seats.

During the trip, the three of you talked about various topics, creating an atmosphere of fluid conversation that never made you feel out of place, as if you were holding the candles.

You couldn't help but notice how Kyoko was watching Suguru with bright eyes and a radiant smile on her face. Seeing her like this only filled your heart with warmth and joy.

In love, reciprocity was comforting, but when only one loved, the result was heartbreaking for those left longing.

Have you experienced love? Maybe, if you could call it that. At fifteen, your understanding of love was as ephemeral as the changes of the seasons, based mainly on the representations of movies, series, and books you found in the library.

At that age, you embarked on a relationship that lasted almost a year with a boy from your town. He was two years older than you, knew much more than you and was more experienced. However, as quickly as it began, what you could feel for him faded, now with the years that had passed, you were aware that for him you had only been a whim and for you he had been an exciting moment at that stage. Dating someone older had sounded exciting, but nothing could be further from the truth.

But life hit you in the face, once again, when you were sixteen years old and the idea of ​​love was pushed aside. The last thing you wanted was to tie yourself to another in the middle of the chaos of your life.

After that relationship you had had one or another, more like attempts at relationships. In fact, when you were in first grade, Kyoko forced you to go on more than one blind date. I wanted to go on a double date one day.

But after breaking up with the prick he stopped insisting and you were never interested again. So the last time you had made out with someone, it had been during the New Year's Eve party two years ago. After that your life had been too hectic to have time.

Suguru parked the car in the crowded parking lot and the three of you stepped out of the vehicle into the bustle of the night. As you adjusted your dress, you looked at the happy couple, Kyoko and Suguru, who were arm in arm, radiating joy.

Kyoko caught your attention and made a playful gesture with her hand, motioning for you to join them in walking hand in hand towards the nightclub. His smile was contagious.

You took a moment to compose yourself, then offered a smile in return, nodding slightly as you closed the distance and linked arms with Kyoko. Then, the three of you headed towards the club where the basketball team had agreed to meet.

“I think I haven’t told you.” Kyoko said to your ear. “Shoko is coming tonight too.”

“For real? That’s great, she is nice.” You smiled. “I just hope you two don’t end up like last time.” Kyoko blushed a little bit.

“It was a one time thing.” She defended herself with a pout.

"Yes, but the one who had to drag your drunk asses around the house was me." You stuck your tongue out at him.

"Shoko and I will make it up to you, we'll invite you." Kyoko said still without erasing the pout from her lips.

"It's the least I hope for." You said jokingly.

“Girls, we are here.” Suguru spoke, moving his head towards the club.

You entered the club, being welcomed by the heat of the place and the music at full volume. Suguru began to greet his teammates, most of them were faces you recognized from the game you had attended, but others were new faces.

“Suguru!!” You heard the voice of the person, who had been embedded in your brain for some time.

He appeared in the crowd, with a smile on his face and a glass in one of his hands. He was wearing a suit, just like that time he showed up at your work, but this one wasn't as elegant, it was more casual. His shirt was unbuttoned, revealing part of his chest.

You wondered if it was his doing to unbutton those buttons or if he had already been having a good time with someone before you arrived. Maybe with that girl from that time.

You turned your head away from where he was and cursed yourself for thinking that.

“Hey Satoru.” Your best friend spoke.

“Oh girls!” He said happily. “You are here too.” You felt him approaching you. Shit.” Hey birdie, you are not going to say hi to me?” You were looking away from him.

You slowly turned to look at him and put on your best smile. “Hi Satoru.”

Satoru stared at you in silence, for longer than you thought he would. You could see his Adam apple moving up and down, as if he was trying to regain composure with that movement.

You smirked to yourself knowing it was the perfect opportunity to tease him. “What Satoru the cat got your tongue?” Placing a hand on your waist you spoke again. “Or I look so hot that you forgot how to speak?”

He closed his mouth, which was slightly opened and a small smile draw on his lips. “Yeah birdie, you look so freaking hot that I forgot how to breathe for a moment.”

Shit.

You should have prepared yourself knowing what Satoru Gojo was like and that he could come up with something like that. But damn, you loved it.

Trying to suppress the restless rise and fall of your pulse and chest, agitated by the impact his words and that hoarse voice had had on you, you forced a smile. You smiled as if it didn't matter, as if her words hadn't unleashed a whirlwind of emotions inside you.

But the reality was very different. Satoru's words had ignited a storm inside you, swirling with a tumultuous mix of feelings that you struggled to contain. Despite your best efforts to appear unaffected, the turmoil it had caused remained beneath the surface, threatening to erupt like a volcano.

You took a deep breath. Would it be that night? The night you'd finally accept something you'd been trying to suppress for weeks? Or would you just let it go and lock it in the deepest drawer?

Satoru Gojo pov

Satoru felt like his legs might give out beneath him, which is why he had held them steady when he saw you.

His gaze first saw his best friend Suguru, then Kyoko, and finally his eyes landed on you. And damn it. The word beautiful was not enough to describe you that night.

Seeing you in that red dress, accentuating every curve of your figure, along with those impressive high boots, took his breath away. Satoru felt helpless in the presence of your beauty, and tonight he knew he would be at his weakest point.

Unbeknownst to you, just like you, Satoru Gojo's insides were a whirlwind of emotions, he was reeling, overwhelmed by the sheer magnetism you exuded. He knew that tonight he would be at your mercy, completely captivated by just your presence.

“You want a drink?” He spoke pointing at the bar behind him.

“Yeah, sure.” You walked besides him. “I though you didn’t drink.”

Satoru looked at his cup. “It’s mainly soda with a bit of alcohol, but only from time to time. I am not a big fan of alcohol.” You nodded and turned to ask for a drink. “It’s good you came.” He got closer so you could hear him.

“And why it’s that?” You smirked, grabbing your straw and taking a small sip. “You would miss me if I didn’t come?”

Yes. But he was unable to say it out loud. “You deserve a break from all the stress.”

“That includes you.” You said teasing him.

“Don’t be bad birdie. I know you love me.” He joked but he secretly longed for it.

“Nah.” You shook your head , you approached his ear to speak to him. “When they called your name and then mine for the project I seriously considered leaving class.” Satoru felt offended by your words, did you hate him that much? “But now my dislike for you has gone from 95% to 35%.”

“A 35%?” He opened his eyes.

“There are times I want to kick your ass so badly.” You shrugged and sipped at the straw again. “You should be glad it went from 95 to 35.”

“Of course it went down, with this face.”

“Now it’s 37%” You said while rolling your eyes.

“Ouch.” He touched his chest as if it hurt his feelings. “Anyways, birdie, let me introduce you to some of our teammates.”

Satoru hesitated for a moment, contemplating whether he should reach out and take your hand. It wouldn't be the first time he did it, but this moment would be different. The last time he held your hand, at the lake, you were on the verge of tears, almost having a panic attack. Now, at this party, you were both having fun.

He looked at your hand and then back at your face, noticing the confused expression as you wondered what he was doing. Gathering all the courage he could muster, Satoru decided to act. He gently took your hand and led you in front of him to where his teammates were gathered.

As he led you through the crowd, Satoru's heart raced with a mix of excitement and nervousness. His hands were sweating and he prayed that you wouldn't notice.

Upon reaching his teammates, Satoru gave you a small squeeze and placed you next to him, still holding onto his hand.

“Guys!” Satoru's voice echoed in the space where the team was, causing the curious gaze of his teammates to rest on him and also on you. “She is…” Satoru said your name pointing his hand at you. His companions then began to murmur under their breath while his gaze remained glued to you.

“Captain! Is she your girlfriend?” Satoru swallowed hard and controlled himself so that a crimson red wouldn't stain his cheeks.

“No Yuji, she is not.” Satoru responded a bit irritated.

“Do you really think Captain Gojo would be able to get a girlfriend?” The vein on Satoru's forehead began to swell. It had definitely been a bad idea bringing you to meet these brats.

“Megumi…” Satoru snorted through his nose. “Don't pass or you'll be on the bench next week.” To which Megumi responded by turning around and sitting in one of the back chairs, without giving it any importance.

“I’m Yuji!” Yuji approached you with a smile.

“Nice to meet you Yuji.” You said finally letting Satoru’s hand go.

“You should meet the others too!” He said. “This is my first year in the team, well I just started college, but everyone is very nice.”

“Is Satoru nice too?” Satoru felt a small blush on his cheeks again after hearing you ask that question. “If you want we can get away from him and then you can criticize him.” You joked and Satoru smirked.

“Oh no, no.” Yuji shook his head. “Captain Gojo is truly an amazing player and amazing captain! I’m glad he is my mentor.” He widely smiled.

“Oh impressive Satoru.” You said looking at him.

Satoru shrugged and smiled. “What can I say, I'm the best.”

“You’re the best.” You said at the same time laughing.

“Captain…” A deep voice talked behind both of you, you lifted your head to be met with a tall blonde guy.

Oh Haibara’s friend.

“Nanami!!” Satoru happily shouted, to which Nanami reacted rolling his eyes. “Birdie, this is Nanami.” He pointed at him.

“Nice to meet you.” Nanami did a small bow.

“You are Haibara’s friend right?” He nodded. “I saw you a couple of times outside the store waiting for him.”

“You work with Haibara?” You nodded. “Oh so you’re the super nice coworker he always talks about.”

“I guess so.” You smiled. “You also play on the basketball team?” You tilted your head.

“Unfortunately.” You looked at him confused for his response. “Captain Gojo is a pain in my ass most of the time.”

“I understand what you mean.” You laugh recalling how you had Satoru saved on your phone.

Satoru coughed sharply causing you both to turn to look at him. “I think that's enough for today, Nanami, why don't you go get some drinks? I want the same thing as always, okay?” He said as he pushed Nanami away.

“Satoru, why was that?” You crossed your arms in front of your chest.

Satoru rolled his eyes again. “It’s just that…” But the sentence was left in the air when Shoko’s voice sounded louder than his, calling your name.

“I finally found you.” She hugged you, resting her head on your shoulder.

“Shoko!” You said as you moved away a little. “You already drank something?”

“Just a shot. I’m okay, I swear.” She raised her hands. “Now come with me, Kyoko and Yuki are waiting for us to dance.”

“Yuki?” You said confused.

“I will introduce you now. Now let’s go!” She started pulling you. “Let's leave these idiots here.”

Taking one last glance at Satoru and offering a small smile, you bowed your head before disappearing into the bustling crowd of people. Satoru watched you leave, a slight smile on his lips, before exhaling heavily through his mouth.

He walked over to the couch where Megumi was sitting and sank down next to him. Leaning back against the backrest, Satoru looked up at the ceiling, lost in his thoughts.

“Captain Gojo, you seem distressed.” He heard Megumi talking.

“It’s nothing, kid.” He shook his head. “And by the way how come you are here? You usually hate this type of place.”

Megumi sighed heavily. “That idiot brought me here.” He pointed at Yuji who was now grabbing snacks from a nearby table.

Satoru opened his mouth in o shaped form and nodded. “You two are really close aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?” Megumi inquired with a nervous look.

“Nothing. I mean if you two are close in that type of way then it’s fine by me. And if anyone in the team says something inappropriate, make sure to tell me. I will handle it.” Satoru explained.

Megumi stood up. “Thank you captain, but it’s okay… we are okay.” Satoru noticed the small blush on Megumi’s cheeks and smiled as he walked away to where Yuji was.

Satoru looked around the place and spotted you on the dance floor. He watched you from the side, he observed you as you danced and laughed with Kyoko, Shoko and who he guessed was Yuki, the one Shoko mentioned before. It was rare to see you so carefree, and he couldn't help but feel his chest swell with happiness at the sight.

As you moved gracefully on the dance floor, your laughter filled the air and Satoru found himself captivated by the joy that radiated from you. He couldn't look away from you, mesmerized by the way you moved, the way you laughed, the way you simply existed in that moment. It was as if the world disappeared into the background, leaving only you.

He looked at his drink and his thoughts returned to the conversation he had with Suguru last week. It had been a jolt of reality, to say the least.

Satoru had come face to face with the truth: the feelings he harbored towards you had been there for a long time. It wasn't a simple crush; he was deeper than that. The weeks of interaction had only intensified his emotions, revealing a deep feeling he had rarely experienced.

Reflecting on it now, Satoru realized that he had been in love with you long before he fully acknowledged it. He had fallen in love with you from a distance, watching how you interacted with others, listening to what people said about you, and admiring your dedication and diligence.

It was a realization that excited him and at the same time made him nervous. Satoru was used to being confident and self-assured, but when it came to matters of the heart, he found himself navigating uncharted territory. If he had had girlfriends, he had dated different people, but on the vast majority of occasions he had been without any deeper interest.

Sighing he looked back at your figure on the dance floor.

“If I didn’t know how you felt about her I would think you are a pervert or something like that.” Suguru sat next to him.

Satoru just rolled his eyes and took his cup once again. “I’m just watching her, nothing else.”

“Yeah like a creep.” His friend pointed out. “Why don’t you go and ask her to dance with you?”

“You think she will accept?”

“What’s the worst that could happen? You get your ass kicked? I will have my phone ready just in case.”

“Geez you are annoying.” Satoru said punching Suguru’s arm.

“C’mon man! Where is all your ego and confidence?” He challenged.

Satoru stood up and looked at Suguru. “Watch me.”

“Your legs are trembling Satoru!” Suguru shouted from the distance to which Satoru responded by showing his middle finger.

But oh boy, he was for real trembling. That was the effect you have on him after all.

Your pov

Your body swayed to the infectious rhythm of the music as you continued sipping from your second glass of the night. You were cautious not to drink too much, but Shoko's insistence that it was a night to let loose and have fun had led you to indulge a bit more.

Amidst the pulsating beats, you also met Yuki, she was older than you and she happened to be dating Choso, your old crush from your first year. Now, the four of you were on the dance floor, fully immersed in the music, letting the heat and energy of the moment wash over you.

The dance floor became a blur of movement as you all threw yourselves into the music, laughing and enjoying each other's company. The atmosphere was electric, the air filled with excitement and camaraderie as you danced the night away, feeling the warmth rising through your bodies with every step and beat.

You noticed Shoko giving Kyoko a subtle nudge, followed by a knowing smile and a raised eyebrow exchange between them. “I'm exhausted.” Shoko announced abruptly. “Let's sit.”

You nodded, ready to follow Shoko, but Kyoko halted you with a smile and a nod towards her side. Confused, you followed her gaze, only to find Satoru standing a few meters away. His cheeks were flushed, likely from the heat of the club, and his gaze was fixed on you with unwavering intensity.

Your heart quickened as Satoru began to make his way towards you, his eyes never leaving yours. Glancing back at Kyoko, you found that she, along with Shoko, and Yuki had vanished from your sight, leaving you alone with Satoru.

“Hey.” Satoru said when he was finally near you.

“Hi.” You said with a louder tone so he could hear you.

“You having fun?” He questioned getting closer, so you could hear him.

You nodded. “So much. I was dancing with the girls until now.”

“Is that your second drink?” He pointed to the cup in your hands.

“Yeah! Shoko insisted but it’s fine by me, so don’t worry.” You moved your hand around. “Are you having fun too Satoru?” You asked him this time.

“I am.” He smiled and took a deep breath. “Wanna dance with me the next song?”

Oh. You were caught off guard by Satoru's invitation to dance, you hesitated for a moment, the pulse of the music pounding in your ears. But the prospect of dancing with him, of being close to him, was too tempting to resist.

“Yeah, sure.” You finally replied with a smile spreading across your face. “But let me finish my drink.”

“Drink slowly, I don’t want you throwing up on me once again.” He once again teased you, so you decided to tease him back.

“Oh. It went up.” You smirked looking at him. “Now it’s 39%.”

“Okay, okay, I will stop teasing but just be careful.”

“Yes dad!” You said, rolling your eyes. “Alright.” You placed the empty glass on a table. “Let’s go!”

Satoru's smile widened, a sparkle of excitement in his eyes as he took your hand and led you towards the dance floor. When the next song started playing, you fell into rhythm with him.

In the dim lights of the club, surrounded by the pulsating energy of the crowd, you lost yourself in the moment, swaying and spinning with Satoru, as your bodies moved in perfect synchrony, as if you had been doing this for years, as if you were one.

And as you danced, the world started to fade away, leaving just the two of you, lost in the music and lost in the connection that existed between the two of you.

As the music hummed around you and the heat of the dance floor enveloped you. Satoru's hand rested on your waist causing a surge of electricity to course through you, igniting a fiery passion simmering just beneath the surface.

With every step, every movement of your bodies, the tension between you became palpable, the air thick with anticipation. Your movements became more fluid, more sensual, as they let themselves be carried away by the rhythm of the song that was playing.

As the song reached its climax, Satoru pulled you closer, his gaze looking at you with burning desire. And in that moment, with the music pulsing in your veins and the heat of his body against yours.

“Birdie, I swear you are driving me fucking crazy.” He said but only you were able to hear his words.

You wanted to play, you wanted to wrap him around your finger. “How Satoru?” You got yourself closer to him. “How am I driving you crazy?” You lifted your gaze, leaving both of your gazes connected.

One more step and your chest would be completely stuck together. One more step and what you would feel would be his heat mixing with yours. One more step and everything you have been trying to ignore would fall on you like a house of cards.

It was just one step.

Just one.

And you were about to give that step when you saw a silhouette in the distance, making your blood freeze.

“Fuck.” You muttered realizing who was in that club too, someone you had secretly hoped and prayed to avoid encountering him again ever since you quit working at that bar.

Final notes: itafushi and chosoyuki crumbs on the same chapter? exactly 🙂‍↕️ Also who do you think Birdie saw?

— if you want to be tagged, comment below

🏷️: @lavender-hvze, @crybabytoru, @sanriosatoru, @norvacaine, @sadmonke, @faetoraa , @hexipessimistic, @gojoful , @kitzusune , @sh0jun , @manyno , @ropickle , @lolsasuke , @milk3evee

[spence-whore]

HIHI!! can I request spencer celebrating reader for finishing all their exams?? you write him SO SO well and I know it'll become an instant fav 🤭 <333 (if you do want to write it!)

Final Exams

Spencer Agnew x Reader

A/N I’m obsessed with this because I just finished finals last week and I’m pretty sure I failed every single one of them woooo i have no clue if there’s any university’s close to the area that the cast lives in but for this, let’s just act like there is:) one last thing, I thought of going the route where he throws a big party but i felt like the more laid back comfortable type of celebration would be more him whenever it comes to something like this. please overlook the typos and incorrect grammar, im v sick.

one last thing, im trying something new with these. im trying it out in third person instead of using ‘you’ whenever talking about the reader. im also using they/them pronouns to be gender inclusive:) let me know if you like this better or if you liked how i wrote it before with using “you”.

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Everyone knew how stressed out Y/N had been for the last month due to their finals. They become so obsessed on the idea of making the best grades that they can or they feel like they simply have not done good enough. This leads to their mental health declining rapidly and them being in a very low spot for a while. Spencer knew this and thought of something he could possibly do after their last final. That last final happened to be today. Y/N had spent the entire night studying, only got two hours of sleep, then got up a few hours early to study before heading to their university.

A few hours had passed and Y/N was finally back in their car, heading back home.

They had dialed Spencer’s number before heading home Y/N sat in silence for a minute before Spencer answered, “Hey Y/N! How did the exam go?”

“Honestly? I feel like I completely flunked it. I’m just so glad it’s all over till the fall.” Y/N said sighing while taking a turn.

“I’d say so, bub. You need a break.” Spencer responded with a soft tone.

“I’m gonna head back to my apartment for the rest of the day. If you maybe wanna come over after work, you’re more than welcome to. I might order out food then watch a movie or something.” Y/N said, trying to think of some way to destress for the rest of the day.

“Of course. I’ll shoot you a text to let you know whenever I’m heading your way.” Spencer said, they could hear the smile on his face.

Little did Y/N know, Spencer was already at their apartment. Y/N had given him a key whenever they moved to LA and became best friends. He practically lived there whenever the two of them were best friends. That was around four years ago. Now, Y/N and Spencer have been dating for two years. He still practically lives there whenever he isn’t busy with work. He thought of setting up a little self care day for them. He was going to draw a warm bath whenever they got closer to the apartment. The bathroom had candles everywhere’s, alongside snacks, and two wine glasses. The bath was big enough to fit three people, so Spencer thought he could either join Y/N or he could leave them to take the bath while he hung out in the living room. The kitchen was set up because during this time, he was going to order their favorite ramen from this restaurant near their apartment. He had also decked out the living room, so it was a huge comfy dream. The couch was covered in soft, fluffy blankets and pillows. There were fairy lights hung above the couch and a gift Spencer had fixed together for them on the table.

Spencer practically was burning a hole into his phone. Whenever he seen Y/N’s location was finally close to the apartment, he jumped up from the couch and booked it to the bathroom to start the bath. He let the water run until it was scalding hot and then plugged the drain. The water ran around three minutes then he turned it off. Y/N’s location had finally arrived to the apartment and he could tell they were making their way up to steps.

He felt like a little kid waiting for their christmas presents. He was about to explode, just sitting there waiting for them on the couch. A few minutes passed and the noise of keys come from the front door, placing into the lock. He jumped up and stared at the door, waiting to see his partner come walking through the door.

“Spencer?” Y/N’s voice came from the front door, obviously confused.

Spencer jumped up and ran to the front door. “Hi! Okay, so stay there for one second. I just want to explain this before I blindfold you.” He stopped talking for a second to giggle. “That sounds kinky but I got today off from work. I told Ian about how today was your last final. They all decided I could take today off to celebrate with you. At first, I thought about throwing a little get together with some friends. I sat and thought about it for a while though and thought, they could really just use a day of self care. That leads us to now.” He explained with a smile on his face. “Are you in the mood for a bath?” He asked, with hope in his voice and a slight smile on his face.

Y/N was just frozen at the front door and was wanting to burst into tears. This is the sweetest thing someone has ever done for them. “That sounds nice.” Was the only thing they could muster out while staring at him and tears welling in their eyes.

“Oh, don’t cry.” Spencer said quickly while rushing to them and wrapping his arms around them.

“Sorry, I’ve just not really been okay here lately. I can’t thank you enough for being you, Spencer.” Y/N explained wiping at their face while their arms were still wrapped around Spencer neck.

“Well, let’s get you into the bath.” Spencer said before placing his hand in front of their eyes and lead them to the bathroom. He pushed them into the bathroom, “Keep your eyes closed till I tell you to open them.” He explained while stepping in behind them and shutting the door. He very quickly lit the candles around the bathroom and placed the lighter back under the sink. “Okay, open them up.”

Y/N opened their eyes and looked around the bathroom to take the scene in. It looked like something straight out of a cliche romance movie. The bathtub was filled with water and bubbles. There was a tray sitting across the tub with two wine glasses and different candies. They immediately started to tear up and turned around to pull Spencer into a hug. “I cannot thank you enough for this.” They whispered into his shirt.

“Oh, this isn’t the end of it. I have a few options for you. So, would you like this bath alone? Would you like for me to join you or do you want me to sit in here with you and you can tell me about your day?” Spencer said while leaning against the sink.

Y/N stared at the man in front of them before grabbing his face and kissing him very quickly, three different times. “Wait, if I say I want you to get in with me, would you give me a massage? My legs and back are killing me.” Y/N explained, hoping that he would give in.

Spencer didn’t even answer them. He just started stripping from his clothes and Y/N could’ve started crying on the spot. The two took their clothes off and climbed into the tub. At this point, the water was now the perfect warmth. It wasn’t too hot and it wasn’t too cold. Y/N sat on one end while Spencer sat on the other. He pulled his hands under the water and pulled their legs over onto his. “I was told someone needed a massage.” He commented while rubbing his thumbs into their calve.

“I literally don’t know what I do to deserve you.” Y/N said while moaning and placing their head back onto the side of the tub.

Spencer just laughed and shook his head. “You’re a dork. I love you though. Can you grab that wine from the side of the tub and possibly pour us some?”

The two sat in the tub close to ten minutes, drinking their wine and eating candy while talking about their day. Spencer eventually moved the tray and Y/N moved over to his side, with their back facing him. He sat, rubbing their shoulders for a while and they just sat in silence, taking the moment in.

“I can’t thank you enough for everything you do.” Y/N whispered looking over their shoulder at Spencer.

Spencer smiled at Y/N and placed a soft kiss on their shoulder. “Of course. You deserve this after how rough this semester has been on you.” Spencer explained. A few minutes before this, Spencer had placed a door dash order for the food without telling Y/N. It was close to time for them to get out.

“You’re so beautiful.” Spencer randomly blurted while rubbing his hand up and down their arm. Y/N could feel their face getting warm and they just shook their head. They turned around and placed their knees on both sides of Spencer thighs, so they were facing each other. Spencer placed his hands on their waist and just stared at them for a minute. “You literally make me speechless. Like, I can’t put it into words. I know I’m usually the worst with verbalizing how I feel and what I’m thinking but god, I just have to tell you that. You are beautiful.”

All Y/N could do was laugh and shake their head. “I look awful today but thank you love.” They whispered and tried hiding their face reddening.

“Look at you.” Spencer said while placing both of his hands on their face and pulled it close to his. “You do not look awful. You look so beautiful.” He placed a soft kiss on their lips and pulled them into a hug. Y/N leaned back and took this as a moment to kiss Spencer. The two got lost in a kiss for a minute before Spencer pulled back really quickly.

“I don’t mean to cut this off. Trust me, I really don’t want to. I just remembered though, I might have ordered us food and I think it should be arriving any minute.” Spencer explained very quickly, giving Y/N an awkward smile.

Y/N just laughed and climbed off of Spencer, giving him room to climb out of the tub. He handed them a towel and a change of clothes. “I’m gonna dry off and run to the door really quickly. Whenever you get done, just head to the kitchen.” He dried off while explaining this and threw on some clothes.

Y/N took a minute to dry off and pull their hair back while listening to Spencer talk to the door dasher. “Foods here!” His voice boomed throughout the apartment. “My spidey senses were tingling or something. The second I got the door, they were about to knock.” He said throwing the bathroom door open.

It was like time froze for him. He never knew he could love someone like how he loved Y/N but god. He falls harder and harder for them every second. “Wow.” He whispered, just staring at the person in front of him.

Y/N laughed and shoved his shoulder. “Stooooop. You’re gonna inflate my ego, if you’re not careful.” They said while pulling their sweatpants on, which were a pair of old sweats Spencer had and gave to Y/N cause they always stole them whenever they were at his house.

“Maybe, that’s my intentions.” He said with a big grin on his face. “Let’s head to the kitchen, now. Close your eyes though, you’re not allowed to see anything else yet.”

Y/N closed their eyes and placed their hand in Spencer’s, so he could lead them into the kitchen. He stopped and pulled out the chair that faced away from the living room. “Whenever you sit down, you’re not allowed to look into the living room. Whenever we get done eating, we’re going to go in there. Just please, promise me, you won’t look in there till them.” He practically begged them.

Y/N could feel themselves starting to get emotional again because all of this, is just so much. They couldn’t wrap their head around, why someone would want to do something so sweet for them. “You can open your eyes now.” They heard Spencer say from across the room. They opened their eyes and looked around in the kitchen, without turning around and looking towards the living room. Spencer had set up the table with fancy ramen bowls he had found online. They had designs on them with little Totoro’s and soot sprites around the bowl.

“Oh my god, are these Totoro bowls?” Y/N exclaimed, leaning down to look at the bowl in front of them.

Spencer sat in front of them with a big grin on his face. “Yep, I found them while online one day. I got them for us to put our ramen in. They were washed before you got here. So, you can just pour your ramen into the bowl.”

The two sat, talking and eating for around twenty minutes. They just really took their time to take in each other’s company and mainly because Y/N couldn’t stop ranting about one of their professors that really got under their skin.

“Are you ready to head to the living room now?” Spencer asked, pushing himself back in his chair, ready to stand up.

Y/N just nodded their head and stared at Spencer standing in front of them.

“I’ll wash the bowls here in a little bit.” He said while grabbing the one in front of them and placed it in the sink.

Spencer rounded the table and stood beside Y/N. “You can turn around now.” He said while fiddling with his fingers resting at his waist.

Y/N turned around and finally broke into tears. It wasn’t sad tears, they were just so overwhelmed with the amount of love Spencer has for them.

“Hey, hey. What’s wrong?” Spencer said in a hushed tone while pulling Y/N into a big hug.

“I told you about how everything has just been really rough for me here lately. I just got into a really bad spot and everything felt useless there for a while. You always are the sunshine in my day. You always remind me how loved and wanted I am, here.” Y/N explained while trying to not get choked up.

Spencer started to tear up over hearing his partner say this. He looked at them and wanted to break just from looking at them crying. “I am beyond proud of you and I need to tell you that more often. You have worked your ass off for this degree, especially with how tough the things are that you have been learning about. These finals always drain everything out of you and I should just be there for you way more often.” He said while wiping the tears off of Y/N’s face. “Let’s head int the living room.”

The two walked into the living room and Y/N leaped onto the couch. “Oh my GOD.” They practically shouted. “This is like one huge pillow. I literally could just pass out, right here.” Spencer laughed and yanked them up into a sitting position. He nodded towards the table in front of them and that’s when Y/N noticed there was a huge basket sitting there.

“Oh, well, what is this?” Y/N said acting like they were confused and trying to hide a smile on their face. They picked it up and pulled it over onto the couch.

“At first, I thought about just bringing you this whenever I got off work. That was before I got the idea to do all of this.” Spencer explained, giving Y/N a little smile and sat back onto the couch.

Y/N looked throughout the basket and there was many things in it. There were new pjs, one of his sweatshirts, their favorite candy, their favorite coffee, with three gift cards to books a million, target, and dunkin. There was also a huge fluffy blanket, a ghostface plush, and three new records.

Y/N just sat there staring at all of the stuff for a minute before placing the stuff on the table and tackling Spencer into a huge hug. He didn’t move, he just laid there in the spot, holding them. “I did plan on us watching a movie but honestly, do you just want to take a nap?” He whispered.

Y/N very quickly nodded. “A nap sounds real nice. Plus, you’re hilarious if you think I’m going to move right now for you to turn on a movie.” They got quiet for a minute before squeezing Spencer in a tight hug. “Thank you for all of this.”

Spencer didn’t say anything. He just pulled Y/N tighter into him, with his arms wrapped around them resting on their face and one of the back of their head. “Go to sleep, you loser.”

[raainberry]

Studious Confession

« Done deliberately or with a purpose in mind. »

Yunjin x gn!reader

Fluff

synopsis - you and your friend yunjin get sidetracked while speed running revisions for finals

wordcount - 1.8K

A/N - save me scholar yunjin, save me…

Absolute academic weapons.

That’s what you and Yunjin aimed to be when you scheduled a study session at your campus library. Exam season was breathing down your necks, and you ignored it for as long as you could, taking each other on the most impromptu hang-outs instead.

Convenience store runs that lead to mukbangs, walks around campus that somehow turned into treetop adventures, late night drives after a long day of classes you spent screaming to whatever she played on the aux… Risking your education (and probably your future) had never been so fun, but all good things must come to an end.

As the end of your junior year approached you were the first one to bring up studying, suggesting you should probably pump the breaks on the distractions. She only called you a nerd, but gave in when you proposed to study together.

The time itself wouldn’t be fun at all, but at least she’d spend it with you. “A win is a win.”, she’d said over the phone, and it only took a few more days to actually motivate yourselves. Reserving a study room was a step in the right direction, but what happened in there would only make you take two steps back.

“That doesn’t even look like me.” You said after she revealed her doodle in the corner of your notebook.

She spent the last five minutes trying to sketch your features out on the bit of blank paper left on your notes instead of focusing on her own.

“Yes it does, look!” She gestured at the messy drawing. “That’s your eyes and your mouth.”

“I am looking, I’m just not seeing.”

It actually did look like you, Yunjin was too talented for it not to. You were just looking at it upside down as you sat across the table from her.

“Well look harder!”

“I don’t want to, stop distracting me!” You whined, switching your pen for a highlighter.

“You’re so mean! Give me my airpod back.” She whined back, actually catching your attention this time.

“What?”

“I don’t want to share my music with you anymore. I need to listen to sad music alone because you’re so mean to me.” She argued, her hand out waiting for the airpod in your ear.

“Are you serious?” You asked, and she only stared at you, retreating her hand only to fold her arms over her chest. “If I say it does look like me, can I keep it?”

“You can keep the drawing, yeah.” She scoffed and you sighed.

You were unsure whether she was serious or not, so you decided to try something that could only have a positive outcome.

“Coffee break?” You proposed, and just like that, her smile was back.

Relief washed over you when her hand found yours, dragging you down to the nearest vending machine. The latter was familiar, it has seen your faces more times than the study rooms as you sometimes only came by to get a coffee from the machine right next to it.

That’s where you met Yunjin, on one of the rare nights she dedicated to her due projects. You’d offered her one of those cheap paper cups, a hole in your student wallet but nothing compared to the world she invited you in afterwards.

Her own little world, the person she was within it, the things she saw and built… It was all so beautiful. You’d get her a thousand of them if it meant learning one new thing every time.

Sometimes you brought her here in hopes for it, and it never failed. The same thing would happen: you’d get her a coffee, she would fight you, try to pay for yours, and you’d ask her about something you’d noticed about her to change the subject. Small details you’d noticed; a pretty necklace, some new earrings, a new hairstyle or the way her makeup looked. Sometimes her mood stood out to you, had you curious. She’d soon forget about her self-imposed debt, getting caught up in the excitment of whatever had caught your attention that day.

“I like your glasses today. How many pairs do you have?” You asked after she sighed out your name. “This is like the fifth pair I’ve seen you wear.”

“Thank you. I have a few. Even more back home.” She said, making you raise an eyebrow.

Her answer was shorter than usual. No spilling over to another subject that your question reminded her of. No squealing about where she got them from, holding your arm as she practically begged for you to come check the small store out with her next time.

Her hands stayed put in her pockets, below the sweater you’d asked about a few weeks ago. It looked comfortable and cozy, and she seemed to grow fond of it based on the way she pulled her hands into the sleeves so often.

“Do they even help you see?” You asked, joking around in an attempt to pull a little more out of her.

“Only two of them do. These aren’t one of them, though.” She giggled to herself, and you could only shake your head at her absurdity.

“Do you even want to pass?” You chuckled as the machine made all kinds of mechanical noises, signaling that the coffee was ready.

She rolled her eyes, getting her hands out of her pockets to grab the cup from yours. The heat emanating from it was the last thing she needed on this fair weather day, but the taste of that coffee was just too good to pass on.

The taste wasn’t the only thing that pushed her to accept each and every one of the cups you offered her. She didn’t even pay attention to it at first, but as time went on, she started looking forward to it. Sometimes to the point of craving it.

Caffeine was dangerous, sure, but she’d come to realise it wasn’t what she had become addicted to.

“How long are you going to keep this up?”

She broke the small silence that had taken its place between the two of you. One of your favorite songs was playing at a faint volume from the airpods you were still sharing, filling in for the lack of words. Your mind had drifted off, long gone and barely listening to your favorite melody as thoughts of her occupied the back of it.

The sound of her voice brought you back, all conscious and hiding how crazy you felt thinking about someone standing right next to you.

A curious hum resonated from your chest, and your eyes met her questioning ones.

“The coffee. When are you gonna let me pay you back?” She asked, and you smiled.

“You don’t need to.”

“But I want to. You spent like a hundred dollars since the beginning of the year.” She frowned.

“That’s a bit excessive. I’d say 30 dollars at the most. It’s really cheap coffee.” You pointed out.

It took everything in her not to call you a smartass. It seemed like a terrible way to confess her feelings. Especially when what she felt, the light she saw you in painted you as far more than a smartass. The opposite, or maybe a more positive and kind alternative.

“You really don’t want me to pay you back?” She insisted, and you shook your head, amused.

This wasn’t the first time she was asking, and you didn’t expect it to be the last, but your answer would remain the same.

You didn’t want her money.

“You could at least admit you want something in return.”

Her words wiped the delectation right off your face. The lighthearted atmosphere suddenly vanished, replaced by a heavy and uncomfortable one.

You had trouble finding the right way to breathe, scared it would shift the conversation into a much too unpredictable path.

“Wh—what?” You stuttered, furrowing your eyebrows in the most natural way you could.

Yunjin wasn’t having it, although in a simpler moment she would have laughed at your poor attempt.

“Come on, Y/n.” She probed. “No one gives out that many compliments out of pure kindness only.”

“There probably are a few people—” You started, but the way she stared at you kept you from rambling further.

There was no escaping it, she obviously knew what was going on. In theory, you couldn’t be surprised as you hoped for your actions to be obvious, or at the least for her to notice them.

Now that she did, you weren’t sure what to do. Hell, you didn’t even know where or how to stand anymore, you hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“Well—I mean, I kind of have been doing this to get to know you a little more.” You mumbled.

One of her eyebrows furrowed, and you sighed. This wasn’t exactly ideal for the embarrassment you felt.

“We’ve been friends for months, is it so difficult to do that? Am I that hard to read?” She wondered, amused.

“I don’t know, it feels easier this way… For me at least.” You looked down, eyes sweeping the floor as you did your best to avoid her gaze.

Embarrassed was only the start to describing how this whole thing made you feel. Everything you did, everything you told and asked her in order to find out more, as sincere and truthful it all was… It all seemed so silly. Collecting all those bits of her personnality, of her mind; piecing them all together in sercret and falling behind closed doors…

What was the point of putting yourself through so much if it would all come to light anyway?

Would it even be worth it?

“Right. Well…” She trailed off, and your eyes were pulled by the sudden movement of her hand between the two of you.

You watched as it hesitantly approached yours, waiting to see if it would welcome it only for you to wrap your fingers around her palm in a heartbeat— that was to say it happened fast as your heart had picked up the pace for a while now.

Yunjin kept her smile to herself, hiding her appreciation behind treacherous eyes that she focused on your joined hands. The spark she held in her gaze whenever she looked at you was hard to erase—she couldn’t believe you hadn’t noticed it.

“Let your wallet rest a bit.” She joked, finally looking up at you. “Whatever you want to know, next time you can just ask.”

“Do you like me?”

“Oh.” Her eyebrows raised in surprise as you shared a laugh over the sudden, bold question.

It wasn’t exactly unlike you, but judging on the past couple minutes, neither of you really expected it.

“I do like you.” She admitted, a shy smile letting you know she wasn’t as cool about it as she tried to be before adding. “When you’re not nagging me about finals.”

“If this is one of your ways to get out of studying I’m gonna be so mad.” You half-joked.

It would be a pretty insane thing to pull, but you wouldn’t put it past her. She loved to avoid schoolwork, no matter the excuse.

“If it was I wouldn’t ask you to get back to it.”

“You haven’t.”

“I am now.” She smiled, tugging on your hand the same way she had to bring you here.

You could only follow as she jogged back to your study room. Whether her excitment came from studying or the progression of your relationship, you had a small idea. It put a smile on your face that you wouldn’t be able to get rid of for as long as she was the one holding your hand.

And wherever she’d lead you, you’d follow.