tokyo 2112 | baekhyun (m)
title: tokyo 2112
pairing: rich guy!baekhyun x reader
genre: sci-fi/cyberpunk au, enemies to lovers, angst, non-explicit smut
request: “hi, how are you? 💕 could i request some cyberpunk x baekhyun fic? i have in mind Tokyo, neon lights and explosive lovers. please feel free to choose the amount you want to write or you can. and thanks! ✨”
word count: 12.8k
warnings: body modifications/prosthetics, attempted robbery, physical violence (not between bh x reader, though reader does think about fighting him 💀), blood, non-graphic wounds, mentions of sex/one non-explicit sex scene, mentions of a car accident, frequent alcohol use/unhealthy reliance on alcohol, smoking, mentions of classism/poverty, mentions of experimentation, surgery is performed on the reader but not described, one mention of being weighed on a scale-like device
a/n: this is my first real, lengthy attempt at enemies2lovers (or maybe just the genre “reader’s an a-hole who makes a lot of assumptions”) because i’m a clown and like to challenge myself for no reason...and this is why i don’t fool with this particular romance genre 💀 feedback is appreciated, this fic is just a whole lot of me experimentally punching above my weight and i’m a bit undecided on my feelings about it
also, i imagined the reader’s arm with a similar structure to the winter soldier’s, for reference
Tokyo, year 2112
You meet him in a Lower Tokyo club, the neon lights bleeding into each other and creating a deep, vivid landscape. It’s an unnaturally pretty scene—unnatural like everyone and everything else inside this club.
There’s a look of subdued wonder on his face, which makes you roll your eyes. He’s all made up and way too pretty to be in this dingy club with his gaudy piercings and expensive rings. Still, he enters the building in all his affluent glory, standing out against the crowd of gritty and cobbled-together androids and half-humans.
He’s a rich man’s son and an even richer man’s grandson. He’s known for being attractive, intelligent, and ridiculously rich—and that’s about all you know of the man himself. Him and his family have been excellent at keeping their personal lives air-tight, only ever letting the public know what they want everyone to know. But ultimately, they are only human. You know they cannot be as perfect as they try to maintain, and you can only imagine the unsavory things in their family history that go much deeper than anyone could ever think up.
“Do you think he wears all that to make up for the lack of enhancements?” Your friend Valor asks. He’s gesturing specifically to the man’s lip piercing and the chains hanging off of it, attached to the collar of his shirt. It’s a little strange, but it’s a signature look for him, and certainly not one of the weirder things in here.
“I’d like to rip it right out,” you reply in lieu of an actual answer to Valor’s question.
The man appears misplaced—like a researcher conducting a study of alien beings rather than a regular club goer—though he doesn’t seem to mind this. He just observes everything around him.
Valor chuckles and shakes his head at the display, throwing back another shot. “Weird.”
“Hm. Come on.” You steer Valor in the other direction, looking to get away from the man before he can get near your area of the club. Though this is your first time being in such close quarters with Byun Baekhyun despite his popularity across Tokyo, you’d like to cut things short if at all possible.
Another hour passes, and the drinks keep flowing. Your mind has gotten pleasantly hazy by now, almost enough to make you forget about the trespasser in your club scene. Almost.
You, Valor, and three other familiar faces sit at a small table near the back of the club. One of the guys is recounting some run-in he had the other week with the Droid Commission, though you can barely hear over the music that’s only getting louder, so you just nod and pretend to understand. However, he suddenly falters in his tale and his eyes dart up to a spot above your head. Turning back, you see that he is standing just over your shoulder. Without thinking, you recoil.
Baekhyun slides from behind you and comes to stand in front of you all now, a strangely convivial smile on his face. He acts like he’s merely visiting you all at brunch instead of standing in a club in the roughest part of the city.
“Exquisite work here,” he says, though his words drown in all the noise. None of you know what he’s saying, or who he’s saying it to. Noticing the acute confusion, Baekhyun lowers himself to your level, his scent passing across your nose as he does. Some robust and fancy cologne you don’t know the name of. Your eyebrows furrow at his proximity, and your blood rushes; maybe out of anger, or maybe just from being drunk. Then he touches your left shoulder, right where the metal of your arm connects to your living flesh.
Yeah, definitely anger.
“I said, this work is exquisite. Quite fascinating, really. Who made it?” Baekhyun has to get fairly close to your ear for you to hear him above the commotion, and you can feel the heat of his mouth next to your skin. His eyes travel the length of your arm, which is fully exposed in your tank top. His voice is irritatingly smooth, and the chains of his lip ring lightly brush your shoulder when he pulls back after he finishes speaking. Though your arm may be made of metal, it still has artificial sensory “nerves” running through it that connect it to the rest of your nervous system—and right now, they are screaming from that slight touch.
Maybe you really are just too damn drunk.
You look into Baekhyun’s dark eyes, which are imploring, coy, and playful all at once. The others at your table watch this interaction as if suspended in time, probably trying to process the sheer nerve of this dude.
“Fuck off,” you blurt out, and brush him off your shoulder with your flesh hand.
He remains unoffended; he even looks entertained by your blunt rejection.
The man who was previously telling his story speaks up. “You heard her. Fuck off, pretty boy.”
Baekhyun straightens up and nods, then reaches into his jacket. Two of the men leap to their feet, thinking he’s about to pull out a weapon—which would not be the first or last occurrence in this club—but he only brings out a business card, tucked between two of his fingers.
“Ever vigilant, aren’t you?” Baekhyun says, laying the card on the small tabletop. Then he directs his next sentence to you. “If you decide you feel like telling me more...get in touch.”
Then he disappears back into the mass of moving bodies just as quickly as he came. You flex the fingers on your metal hand, trying to figure out what the fuck just happened.
Both men at your table sit back down, although they’re still a bit disgruntled. Valor picks up the card to inspect it. “You gonna call that weirdo?”
“Please. You know me better than that by now.” You pluck the card from his hand and rip it up without a second thought. However, it takes a little longer to forget about the heated imprint of Baekhyun’s fingers on your shoulder, or his whispering voice fluttering against your eardrum.
Getting the arm was merely an act of survival, the way you saw it.
Money was low and jobs were scarce—ones that weren’t dangerous, straight-up unappealing, or low pay. There had been a scientific research trial for a new cybernetics program, and it paid much better than many other opportunities around—enough to live on for at least a year, give or take, especially with the cheaper cost of living in your area. You’d been terrified about giving up a part of your body, thinking your body might reject the foreign technology and kill you for the offense, but your desperation outweighed the fear.
Thankfully, it worked.
That was nearly two years ago, though, and the trial was long over. Even with you spending as frugally as you possibly could, the money was close to running out.
Odd jobs here and there help you out some, but they are few and far between and don’t pay nearly enough to make a living on.
You’re getting increasingly anxious about the lack of options and dwindling money, though you also spend half of your time getting drunk, hitting up the club, and simply trying not to acknowledge your crumbling life. If worst comes to worst, you can always think about finding another research trial and exchanging another body part. Maybe. These cybernetics programs often crop up more in Osaka, which would require you to leave the city, but maybe you could get another gig and scrape up enough money for travel...
For now, however, you are back at the club’s familiar bar and making small talk with the bartender, who’s an android without a real name or identity. Everyone just knows it as T-4000, though it appears to be fine with its little niche in the world. Sometimes it teases you about your arm and wonders when you will make a complete transformation into a “metalhead” like itself. Though you cringe, the company is better than nothing when the others aren’t around, so you allow the jokes.
Alone at the bar, you’re too preoccupied with staring into your drink to register the body sliding onto the bar stool next to yours until you hear The Voice flowing out again.
“One Blue Lagoon, please.”
Oh, fuck. You put your head in one hand and angle your body away from his in hopes that he doesn’t notice it’s you. But just as your fortune turns out, he happens to be facing your metal arm.
“Oh, it’s you again.” Baekhyun sounds pleased to see you, like this is some great unexpected coincidence, though you know that’s not likely true. You lift your drink to your mouth and pretend you don’t hear him, though that doesn’t deter him. “I never did hear back from you. How sad.”
“I have no desire to talk to you or anyone like you,” you say, still with your head turned.
“Anyone like me?” He chuckles.
“You don’t belong here, in case you didn't notice.”
“By whose definition?”
“Everyone’s,” you retort. T-4000 comes back with Baekhyun’s drink, and it gives you a look of bright amusement and curiosity with its digital-screen face as it rolls away to help another customer.
“I don’t concern myself with ‘everyone’s’ opinions,” Baekhyun replies, drinking from his glass. “Just the ones who matter.”
“Right, like your rich friends,” you scoff. “Why the hell are you even here?” You turn to him then, though looking at him feels like a mistake—like staring into a solar eclipse. He’s still wearing his chains, like always, and his eyes are smoked out with dark shades of eyeliner. The makeup makes him look eternally tired, but in some high-fashion model way.
“Because I don’t like being around my so-called ‘rich friends’ any more than you would.” Baekhyun smirks.
“So sorry.” You roll your eyes. “Maybe you should become a hermit, then.”
“You seem to be doing a good job of that right now. Where’s your friends from last time?” He looks around as if they’ll materialize.
“None of your business.”
Baekhyun leans on the bar counter, placing his arms on top of it, and his cologne hits you again. You try to hold your breath against the scent, though you can almost taste it in the back of your mouth. Shaking your head, you peer directly into his eyes now, which are as exceedingly curious as the last time. They’re still inky dark under this lighting, reminding you of black holes that absorb all light and life.
“Is it bad for me to want to know more about your arm?”
“Like I just said, it’s frankly none of your business.” You cast a forlorn glance at your drink, which has gotten dangerously low.
“Fair enough.” He sips again. “Now. What if I want to know about you?”
The back of your neck flares with heat, though you can’t fathom why. “You must be truly bored if that’s what you came here for. Unfortunately, you aren’t as interesting as you seem to think you are.”
“You injure me.” But you both know he’s not hurt at all by anything you can think of to say to him. “But this isn’t about me—it’s about you.”
“What about me? How you want to steal my arm and use it for scrap metal, maybe? Or to build yourself a body mod, even? You really stand out in here being the only one who’s not partway made of tin or some shit, and it makes people distrust you. You can figure that out, right?”
“You make a lot of assumptions.” Baekhyun swirls his drink around in his glass, the blue liquid swishing around the sides. “Let me make some, then. You seem like a mysterious, closed-off, and perpetually discontented person. And despite what you might think, it’s not my first time seeing you around. I guess I can’t interest you in entertaining my presence just for company’s sake?”
You pause, wondering where Baekhyun could have possibly spotted you. You don’t hang out in any of the places someone of his standing would usually be seen in. But then again, does he even frequent those areas of Upper Tokyo? He’s always spending his time mingling in Lower Tokyo’s notable haunts instead. “...Are you some kind of peeping tom or something equally pathetic?”
T-4000 perks up at that, even from its distance on the other side of the bar, and it scoots a little closer as if it’ll need to call the Droid Commission in another minute. Which, in actuality, is a terrible idea—calling on one of the city’s many vigilantes would have a more effective outcome, if need be, but sending them for Baekhyun of all people might land you all in prison.
“Tokyo is big,” Baekhyun deadpans, like it’s something even a baby would know. “You can see anyone anywhere.” Then his voice melts back into its normal suave tone. “I’ve noticed you in passing, once or twice. Your arm is something special, but it’s hard to forget a person like you.”
Despite yourself, you don’t totally hate the comment. That alone makes you want to leave the club and not look back for at least the next month or so, knowing he’s probably said this to dozens of other people before. You stay in your seat, though, trying to see what easy line this man is going to throw out next.
“I wonder why I’ve never noticed you, then.”
“You seem to be too consumed with your own problems half the time, even though I don’t know what those are. The stress is written all over your face, though.”
Can never miss a chance to be insufferable, it seems.
“Okay Mr. Psychoanalyst.” You knock back the tiny bit of drink left in your glass and push it away from you. You shake your head at the android when it gestures for a refill.
“Not a psychoanalyst, you’re just achingly easy to decipher.” His tone is casual, like this isn’t meant to be an insult, though you take offense anyway.
“You’re not very good at whatever this is,” you say.
“What do you think this is? Flirting? Maybe you wouldn’t be wrong there.” He laughs.
“Yeah, well. Get some more practice and then maybe you can convince some other poor sap to get to know you better and sign over the rights to their cybernetics, but I won’t be falling for it.”
“I guess that means I’ll just have to try harder, then.” And then he finishes his drink, too. “Not the stealing your arm bit, but the getting to know you part.” He pauses for another moment, and then says, “It’s easy to become enamored with this place.” He waves his hand around at the club’s surroundings. “Expect to see me around more often. I think I’ve already taken a liking to you.”
Baekhyun tips his empty glass to you and gets up from his stool. His cologne swirls around you as he leaves, not overpowering, but enough to make its mark on your olfactory memories. You don’t look back to see where he walks off to, too busy trying to ignore the small headache building behind your eyes and your elevated heart rate.
He’s already taken a liking to you. Why would a ridiculous comment like that even get to you?
God. You really need to get laid.
So, you do just that.
Not with Baekhyun, but with someone from the club whose name you don’t even remember before it’s even over. It was painfully uneventful sex, and it did nothing to banish the man from your mind, which makes you feel even more irritated.
Walking back to your tiny apartment afterwards feels like a certified Walk of Shame even though it’s late at night and no one really cares to notice you. You spit on the sidewalk as if that could properly convey your disgust. You think of Osaka again—and what the fuck are you going to do to even get the money to get there?—and of the business card that you’d ripped up without remorse.
You shake your head, sending that thought back to the depths of your mind. Nevermind. That doesn’t matter. What could he possibly have for you, and why would you want it? Tucking your hands tighter in your pockets, you keep your head down and remain inconspicuous until you get back to the not-so-welcome sight of your own place.
You, Valor, and a few others sit around a makeshift bonfire at Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge—or what remains of it, anyway, with weeds and tall grass sprouting up in the space that was once its parking lot. For the past hour, this impromptu hangout been nothing but smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap alcohol and shooting the breeze. The nights are always much colder than the days, the chill biting into your skin and seeping into your clothes, but you try to ignore it and huddle closer to the fire. Maybe there is something, anything else you could be doing other than this, but you are just a bit too weak—and a little too lonely—to say no to the companionship. Even if it means listening to the uninteresting conversations of men who you barely know outside of the club or without a bottle of whiskey in their hands.
Your hangout session remains sleepy and boring for a while until someone makes a suggestion. One of them keeps going on about some steady, reliable work he’s supposedly found from a trusted friend, though he refuses to elaborate on what kind of work it is when asked. You make a sound of disgust and tune him out. Useless suggestions are as bad as none at all.
“Maybe we oughta rob that Baekhyun dude.”
You look up from the flames, fixing your eyes on the one who said it—a man called Lockjaw—and someone else chuckles in disbelief.
“You serious?” Valor asks.
Lockjaw sits forward in his ratty lawn chair, and with the way the light hits his face, it’s easier to see how his bottom jaw and teeth are completely metal. It makes you wince internally every time you see him, though you always feel kinda bad afterwards. That must’ve hurt exponentially worse than your own procedure. “Why the fuck not? He struts around Lower Tokyo like he has it all...and the bastard does. We sit and grovel for scraps, yet there’s a walking goldmine right in front of us.”
The idea of taking Baekhyun’s riches had never quite appealed to you or fully manifested in your mind. You didn’t want anything belonging to him, mostly because of your own disdain towards the man. However, the suggestion appears in sharp relief now, so obvious that it’s hard to believe no one else proposed it until now. You don’t immediately respond to this concept being thrown around, but something uneasy settles in your chest.
Valor sits back with a mildly disinterested look. “And you think someone like him doesn’t have major security hanging around waiting to incinerate someone with a ray gun if they tried it?”
“Do you ever see anyone hanging around him?”
“Doesn’t mean they’re not there. Somewhere.”
“Then we’ll be strapped up,” Lockjaw says, throwing his hands in the air. “And any of his little ‘security team’ who tries it will be blown into the stratosphere. That’s how we take care of that.” You shake your head only slightly, a movement not noticeable enough to be picked up by the others. You rub your tongue against the inside of your cheek, picturing all the ways this plan could go belly-up. To your irritation, Valor decides to drag you into the fold despite your efforts to stay out of the conversation.
“What do ya think, Y/N? Baekhyun’s been on your tail lately, maybe you could help lure him in.” That stirs up several murmurs and targeted stares in your direction.
“Yeah?” Lockjaw leans forward even more, his ass nearly slipping off the edge of the chair. “Think you can get in good with him?”
You shift uncomfortably in your seat. “Uh...it’s not like I’m buddy-buddy with him—”
“You don’t need to be, just tell him to bring his ass here and we’ll do the rest.”
Your mouth tightens. With all eyes trained on you, some expressions less friendly than others, it feels impossible to refuse. “I guess.”
“It’ll provide the money you’ve been worrying over for the past year.” Valor offers, and you shoot him a side-eye. Not like you needed him to broadcast your business to the world.
“That’s how life around here works,” another man chimes in, putting his cigarette out on the dirt and getting off his makeshift stoop of an upturned bucket. He stretches his arms and legs, and though you can’t see them under his long pants, you can hear the soft whirring and clicking of his metal legs. “Eat or be eaten. I’ve made my choice.”
Lockjaw gives a wolfish smile. Your apprehension rises, though you say nothing. “Eat, we will.”
You try to act nonchalant the next time you see Baekhyun at the club. You only notice him as you’re leaving, having already waited most of the night to see if he’d show up this time. You slow to a stop as you spot him in the alleyway behind the club, speaking to another club-goer—you’ve seen the person around before. You can only imagine what they were talking about before you’d interrupted their little scene, and the person scurries off, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, once it’s clear they’ve lost Baekhyun’s attention. Maybe that was the poor sap he’d finally found who’d be misguided enough to give up their cybernetics.
Baekhyun approaches you with a smile, his chains catching in the light of the flashy neon sign above. The kohl is dark and smoky around his eyes, in perfect sameness with every other time you’ve seen him.
“Hello, one who’s name I still don’t know—”
“You should come see me,” you interrupt. You want this to be as quick as possible, not wanting to dwell on any fake niceties.
Baekhyun lifts an eyebrow. “See you? At...your place, or—”
“At the ruins of Rainbow Bridge. Thursday night, around 9. Unless you’re too busy doing rich people stuff.”
“Rainbow Bridge…” He draws the words slowly across his tongue. Probably thinking of what a ruin the bridge is now—and has been for the past few decades—and wondering why you’re asking him to meet there of all places.
“I have a friend who lives around there—no fucking place to stay, you know, just holes up wherever he can. But he can...let you see the inner workings of my arm. Pick him up, take him back to your place; I’m sure you have a lab.” And because you know what he’s really looking for, you throw in, “He’s studied the technology, knows it inside-out. He could help you build...whatever it is you want.”
Baekhyun’s eyes, which you normally perceive as two lightless voids, sparkle at that last part. You can practically see the light increase in them. “Oh really?”
You roll your own eyes. “Yes, really. I’m not going to let you walk off with my damn arm, but you can...take notes on the mechanisms and shit. It’s up to you. I just got tired of you fuckin’ asking, so don’t think this is going to turn into some weekly meetup or whatever.”
He nods, slowly at first, and then more assuredly. “Alright, then. I’ll come.”
“So...yeah.” A sudden wave of anxiety crashes over you now that the trap has been laid. You feel as if you make one wrong move now, it’ll blow everything. He’ll find out and hate you for it. But why should you care about him hating you? “Then...see ya Thursday. Bye.” You decide to make your exit, walking briskly past him in the alley.
“Leaving so soon?” Baekhyun asks, turning back to watch your figure retreat. You wave one hand behind you in a dismissive gesture.
“I’ve been here all fuckin’ night, Byun. I’m going home now—to get some sleep, if I’m lucky.”
He chuckles, the sound fading behind you as you walk away. “Sweet dreams.”
Your steps falter just slightly when those words leave his lips, and several emotions begin warring in your chest. You ignore them all and continue on your walk back to your place, though you almost wish you could turn back to the club and ask for another drink or three. Something to get your mind off that ridiculously simple phrase that’ll be spinning around in your mind all night.
The night of the plan, you begin having major second thoughts.
It’s not as if you didn’t already feel shitty about it, but your mind keeps racing with how ridiculous of an idea this really is. It’s far too late to talk anyone out of it, as they’ve already stocked up on contraband weapons and laid their gameplan, but you feel less and less “okay” about being a part of it.
Most of all, you feel increasingly guilty about using Baekhyun’s trust in you for this; he never seemed to assume you had any other motives behind your invitation. Even if it’s ridiculously, oddly naive of him to trust you—someone he knows nothing about—you don’t feel great about exploiting that for your own gains.
It takes him less time to show up than you’d hoped. He’s right there at the agreed time, annoyingly punctual, his sleek black luxury car pulling up in the dirt and patchy grass. It looks like it was cut out of a magazine and placed there—almost comically out of place. Just like him.
Baekhyun gets out of the car and walks out onto the grass to meet you, uncaring of the mud and dirt he’s stepping in. He smirks, his hands in his pockets and his chains dangling. “Would now be a good time to get your name, or are we in too deep at this point?”
There’s no one else but him. Definitely too trusting.
You nervously chew your lip as you mull that question over. If everything goes like the others intend it to, there won’t be a point in telling him your name. But if he’s still alive by the end of the night, you could be exposing yourself. Still...a name won’t matter either way if he can give a perfect description of you to the Droid Commission.
Suddenly, you decide not to give it any more thought. “It’s Y/N.”
“Y/N, Y/N...” He says your name like he’s tasting a charming new food. “I like it. It suits you.”
Baekhyun’s smile is too sincere, and it doesn’t make you feel any better. “Come on.” You turn your back to him as you lead him through the tall grass and toward a broken section of the bridge’s main road. It leans against the main structure of the bridge and sticks halfway out of the muddy ditch that was once Tokyo Bay, its jagged edge reaching toward the night sky.
It’s darker under here, with the broken bridge blocking out the moon and stars and lights from buildings nearby. Your stomach rolls.
“So, who is this friend of yours?”
You turn to Baekhyun then, and you don’t know if he can read the anxiety on your face. Maybe he can. He’d proudly bragged about his own abilities for figuring people out.
It happens all at once, somehow slow and fast at the same time.
One of the men—the one with two metal legs—slinks out from behind the broken bridge and sneaks up behind Baekhyun, a stun spear in his hands. Its two large metal prongs are lit up with electricity. Those metal prongs are aimed directly at Baekhyun’s back, ready to make contact, but that never happens.
“Look out!” you scream, and shove Baekhyun out of the way. He stumbles off to the side, falling against the concrete bridge, and you wildly grasp the long spear with both hands, blocking the man from reaching Baekhyun.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Metal Legs shouts. He drives the spear’s metal bar forward, knocking it into your upper chest and collarbone with a force that makes your teeth chatter, and the pain and shock take your breath away for a few moments.
You’re not a fighter. You usually try to stay out of any ridiculous brawls when they do happen, whether at your apartment building or the club, but you do your best to hold the dude off. So even though you stumble back, you keep your hold as tight around the spear as you can and shove it back, putting your weight behind the movement and cracking it against the man’s chin. He howls with pain and anger and his hands momentarily loosen on the weapon. You take that opportunity to snatch it completely from him.
Nearby, Baekhyun is busy fending off Lockjaw with a long knife, both of them fully engaged in a fierce clash of blades. You feel a burst of surprise. He was armed this entire time? Had he realized something was suspicious after all? Most of all, how does he know how to fight?
You don’t have much more time to think about that, though. Metal Legs is recovering from the hit, his hand reaching for his side like he’s about to pull out his own knife or gun. You leap forward and shove the prongs of the stun spear into his ribs. He quickly collapses to the dirt, motionless after a handful of frightening convulsions. You feel cold fear at the idea that you might’ve just killed him, but you can’t dwell on that when you see the others bursting out of the tall grass a few yards away from you and Baekhyun. The backup, in case something went wrong—which it most definitely has.
Lockjaw has Baekhyun up against the concrete of the bridge, his knife near Baekhyun’s neck and Baekhyun trying to block the blade. The sharp metal inches increasingly closer to its target. With your legs shaking, you run up behind Lockjaw and dig the electrified prongs into his side, sending more volts through his body than you can imagine.
Lockjaw’s weapon drops, and Baekhyun stumbles away. The man takes a little longer to be knocked unconscious than Metal Legs, but you are relieved when he’s out a few seconds later.
You look at Baekhyun, who appears dazed and winded; you belatedly realize he might’ve received some of the shock too, with both men’s arms locked together when you initially used the spear. “Get out of here! The rest are coming—go!” A shot from a ray gun zips through the air between you two and burns the concrete of the bridge.
Baekhyun looks at you wordlessly. Then he grabs your wrist as tight as a vise. You glance at him questioningly, and your confusion mounts when he drags you along with him as he takes off towards his car. The red smearing across your hand and wrist tells you he must be bleeding from somewhere, and shock blooms in your chest for a wild moment.
The car door opens without him even touching the handle or speaking a command, and he jostles you into the backseat, trying to avoid the spear’s prongs; you’re still holding it tight, as you expected you’d need it to face the others—however futile that would’ve been. You’re so frazzled once you get in the car that it takes you a moment to realize Baekhyun is in the backseat with you. “What are you doing?!”
“Get on the highway,” Baekhyun speaks, ignoring your frantic question, and the engine roars in your ears as the car peels out of the grassy lot. The vehicle narrowly escapes another round of angry shots fired by the others, and the grass sizzles where the shots land.
A self-driving car. Of course he’d have one of those. You stare at the steering wheel as it turns on its own, maneuvering you both away from the scene of the crime and back onto the paved roads.
“Your arm…” You look at the sleeve of Baekhyun’s jacket. It’s torn now, and you can see the skin of his forearm underneath, which displays a long cut. Lucky for him, it’s not deep enough to need stitches. He has similar, smaller ones on his hands.
Baekhyun examines the wound and makes a sound of disgust. “It’ll be fine,” he says decisively. “The bastard wasn’t as good with a knife as he wishes he was.”
You nod silently, though the movement feels mechanical. As the reality of the situation seeps in, a whirlpool of dread forms in your stomach.
“Fuck, I-I’m fucked.”
Baekhyun gives a humorless laugh. “You’re fucked?”
“I’ll...need to lay low for a while.” Then you glance at him. “Unless you’re driving me to the Commission. Then, well…at least they can’t get to me while I’m in prison.” Your laugh is equally humorless.
“You’re going into hiding?” Baekhyun asks, and the corner of his mouth lifts. You don’t expect this reaction. Not after him almost being jacked and led into the situation by none other than you.
His smirk exasperates you. You almost want to roll your eyes at him not realizing why you’d need to hide. Or maybe he’s just playing coy about it; but you give him a break for now. “I ruined the plan and helped you out, so yeah, my own place is not gonna be safe anymore. ‘Friends’ are fleeting out here. Especially if you fuck with someone else’s money.” Valor crosses your mind, the only one you could really call a friend out of all the others—and only because you knew more secrets of his than they did. Your chest tightens with a strange guilt. You should’ve just said no from the beginning.
The car is quiet for a few long moments. Then Baekhyun shatters the silence with, “Come home with me, then. You can stay there for a little while.”
You bark out a laugh. “You can’t be for real.”
He sits back against the leather seat. “I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t. It’s a waste of time otherwise.”
“After I just—could’ve gotten you killed?”
“I said it before—you’re like an open book. Your emotions are practically written on your face. It’s pretty damn obvious to me you were never truly up for this plan. Unfortunately, you aren’t the badass you think you are, but at least your efforts saved me.”
“But I still—”
“You certainly don’t have to take the offer if you don’t want it.”
You become quiet at that. Even if you don’t think you deserve this level of mercy, you don’t want to shun this offer of safety and be left to contend with the streets alone. Your voice is tense and quiet when you respond. “I’ll take it.”
Baekhyun’s home is a penthouse in the heart of Upper Tokyo, which doesn’t surprise you. The contrast in his neighborhood’s appearance with what you’re used to seeing in Lower Tokyo is stark and painful—spotlessly clean streets with sweepers continually traveling up and down them, bright holographic billboards, people walking around with personal androids accompanying them. You begin to feel resentful again, and you wish you could swallow those feelings after he’s been gracious enough to rescue you, but you can’t help it.
You two must make quite a sight once you pull into the apartment building’s parking garage—you holding a stun spear, wearing a slightly shabby outfit of a T-shirt, jeans, and jacket, and Baekhyun walking out with disheveled, torn clothes and bloody hands. Someone gets out of the parking garage elevator once the doors open, and they give a startled look when they see you two.
“Good to see you, Jongin,” Baekhyun greets the other man. His tone is friendly, but his expression dares the other man to ask any questions—which you both know he won’t.
“Good evening, Baekhyun.” The man gives a slight nod in your direction as he walks past you two, though there’s no hiding the distaste he thinks he’s disguising. His eyes linger on your metal hand, and you feel exposed; you try to convince yourself he’s just looking at the spear, which would also make sense.
You try to shake the feeling off as you and Baekhyun step into the elevator cabin, but confusion rushes over you to replace it. The floor of the elevator is more like a scale, sensing the weight of your bodies and sinking slightly further into the floor once you step onto it.
“What’s that all about?” you ask.
“Oh, yeah. That. This isn’t like your typical elevator, it’s a teleportation channel,” Baekhyun says this nonchalantly as he reaches for the touchscreen panel on the wall.
“Um, what? I don’t want to be teleported anywhere.” You jump right back out of the cabin before the doors can close, and Baekhyun gives you a weary look as he holds them open with one crimson hand.
“It’s safe, you don’t have to worry about anything. All it does is take the atoms in your body and replicate them elsewhere; the floor measures your mass. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
“You don’t say.” Sarcasm drips from your voice. “Yeah, no thanks. I’m not interested in turning into ground meat on the other side of that thing.”
“There are no stairs in this building, just teleportation channels. If you want to climb the side of the building to get to my place, be my guest.” Baekhyun starts pressing on the panel as if he’ll leave you behind, and panic spikes in your chest. You decide to get back on with him, much to your displeasure.
You close your eyes tight just as the inside of the cabin starts glowing with light, and you can only hope your last lived experience won’t be riding a teleporter with Baekhyun in the same night you tried to mug him.
Surprisingly, the transportation doesn't feel like anything. One minute you’re there on the parking garage ground floor, and the next minute you hear the whoosh of the doors opening again. It’s like you never moved an inch, but you obviously have when the doors reveal the lavish interior of Baekhyun’s home.
Grateful to be at your destination, you step out of the teleporter as quickly as possible. “How did we end up right inside your place?”
“Clever, right? It uses fingerprint recognition so no one else can get access but me, but you’d know that if you hadn’t slammed your eyes shut.”
For all your talk of Baekhyun being out of place in Lower Tokyo, you suddenly feel like the fish out of water inside his penthouse. There’s metal and glass and holographic materials everywhere, which is the same stuff you’d find in Lower Tokyo, but here it’s all much more sleek, shiny, and well-maintained. His living room alone looks bigger than your entire apartment.
“Come on, don’t just stand there.” He gestures for you to follow him further down the hall, and you hesitantly do.
“Um...I don’t really want to carry this all night,” you say, referring to the stun spear still in your hands.
Baekhyun turns back to you, blocking the path to the rest of the hallway. “Do you even know how to turn it off?” It’s still charged with energy. You look at it up and down, but it isn’t immediately obvious to you. You don’t want to admit that, though, and keep awkwardly looking for some sort of Off switch until Baekhyun can’t stand the silence anymore. “Look, just give it to me.”
Your mouth twists at that. It seems nonsensical considering he’s just given you a safe haven, but you’re wary he’ll try to turn the weapon on you. Maybe he was waiting to get you alone and dispose of you himself. He appears to understand your thought process, because he scoffs loudly and holds his hand out for the spear.
“If I really wanted you dead, I could’ve done it in the car—or better yet, let your friends take care of you. Just hand it over.”
“Mm, I think not. I don’t think you’d want to get blood on your pretty leather seats.” Still, you give him the spear, if a bit reluctantly. You don’t know what he does with it, but he takes it into another room and tells you to wait in the hall. When he returns, it’s gone.
Baekhyun leads you to a clean and unoccupied guest room. It’s large, with floor-to-ceiling windows that give an expansive view of the city below. It’s also nicely decorated, much like one of Upper Tokyo’s many upscale hotels, but it seems like it hasn’t seen a warm body in months. There’s a certain lack of warmth to it. “Don’t get many visitors?”
“Now is not the best time to make jokes about me filling my perpetual loneliness with frequent trips to your club, if that’s what you’re attempting to lead up to.” He steps through another door, which you find out leads to the bathroom. “Everything you need should already be here—except clothes. I’ll get those in a moment.”
“Right,” you mumble, your eyes carefully tracing over everything in the bathroom. You know your skeptical behavior is probably pissing him off at this point, but distrust has long become an inherent feature of yours. You’ll keep this act up if you know it’ll get under his skin.
The hot water in this shower doesn’t run out after five minutes like the one back home. You can’t shake the old habit, though, and you wash yourself as quickly as you can, body tensed with adrenaline as you expectantly wait for the warm flow to stop after the five minutes are up. When that doesn’t happen, your muscles relax a little. Though it feels good, you don’t know if you’ll get used to this any time soon.
The clothes he lays out for you on the bed are plain and black, but still better quality than what you’re used to seeing and wearing. Soft on your skin. Smell good. You wonder where he’s went off to—maybe to wash up and patch up his wounds, if he has any sense. You also wonder if you should try exploring his place, but you feel like that’ll be risky; he has too much advanced technology around here that would probably find a way to kick you out of the penthouse window at the first sign of nefarious activity.
...Which is how you end up merely sitting on the bed and waiting to see what will happen next. But not before checking the entire room for any signs of surveillance tech or something else foreboding. This is also when you make the joyous discovery that your phone is missing, and you reason it must’ve fallen out of your pocket in the earlier clash; you know you had it when you first met up with Baekhyun. That pisses you off, but there’s nothing you can do about it now. Though you feel disconcertingly cut off from the outside world without it, who would you even contact anymore? One of the others, who’d probably try to track you down and enact a cold, hard revenge for you blowing up the plan? Lockjaw’s face flashes into your mind, along with the other scalding looks you received the night of the planning, and you shudder slightly.
When Baekhyun comes back to your room—and you’re almost surprised that he does—he looks significantly smaller in presence without his all-black clothes, glittering face chains, and heavy makeup.
Indeed, the man standing in front of you with damp hair, baggy pajamas, and bandaged hands doesn’t seem like the same suave person from the club at all.
“So now what?” you say, raising an eyebrow at him.
He shrugs. “Well, if you’re going to be living here, you need a tour.”
Living with Baekhyun isn’t quite what you expected it to be. He’s home more often than you’d think, for one. You would’ve thought he’d always be in business meetings or off somewhere finding more luxury goods to buy or just doing whatever. You can’t really get mad at him for being in his own home, but you try to keep space between the two of you. With your own designated spaces, it’s not hard to do this, which you are at least marginally glad about.
Trying to deal with Baekhyun while completely sober isn’t your idea of a walk in the park. Despite yourself, you wish you could go back to the club even once; Baekhyun certainly won’t let you drink up all his liquor, nor will he tell you where he’s hidden it. For your own good, he claims. Sure.
To your surprise and slight relief, he doesn’t ply you for any more details about your arm, though you’ve definitely caught him running his eyes across it more than once—studying it like words on a page. Whatever’s spinning around in that mind of his, you can only guess. His lingering interest only makes you think he’s scheming for a way to take the arm off you when you’re sleeping or equally vulnerable, though, so you remain guarded around him.
“One day, you’ll have to understand that I’m not the evil villain you think I am,” he tells you. He regards your attempts to avoid him with a certain bored amusement, like how one might think of a particularly entertaining pet cat.
You let the steam of the food you’re cooking billow up across your face, making your eyes water from the slightly-too-warm heat before answering. Leave it to him to bother you during one of the times when you can get some undisturbed, Baekhyun-free peace. “Maybe you should stop dressing up as one whenever you go out, then.”
He chuckles. “It’s like you’ve made it your personal mission to throw verbal stabs at me whenever possible.”
You shrug. “I have to do something to pass the time here.”
Baekhyun rolls his eyes. “You could do that just by having a normal conversation with me.”
You cross your arms, looking at him from where he stands at the kitchen island. He’s in his dressed-down form now, sans eyeliner and jewelry.
His kitchen is not like any other you’ve encountered, fully equipped with the capabilities to make every single one of his meals by itself—and order more ingredients whenever necessary. It’s undoubtedly convenient. But you often still like to make food of your own, just so you don’t have to feel so...dependent on him for every little thing. “About what?”
“About who you are. What you like. What you dream about—I don’t know, something.”
“What I dream about.” You make a noise of disbelief. “How can you waste time on dreams when you live the life I do? I just focus on trying to survive. That’s it.”
Baekhyun opens his mouth automatically like he’ll say something, but he pauses as if he’s just absorbed the full weight of your words. Suddenly, there’s a certain sadness pooling in his eyes and pulling at the corners of his mouth, and you hate it—intensely. You don’t want his pity or sympathy. And yet, he’s already given it to you by letting you live in his home.
“Before you say something pathetic, just don’t,” you blurt out, wanting to stop him before he can start. “You want to talk? My favorite color is green, and my favorite food—alcohol. I have an arm made of fucking titanium, the club was my main hangout spot, and I hate entitled people. Talk about that.”
Baekhyun’s sympathy evaporates into an unimpressed expression, lost just as quickly as a whisper on the wind. “Closing the door again, I see. Alright. Have it your way.” He leaves the room then, giving his back to you and shutting you out similar to how you just did to him.
This should be what you wanted. But it only makes you feel oddly unsatisfied.
“Here.” Baekhyun slides something across the table towards you after dinner one day—another dinner where you sit on opposite ends of the table and where you try to ignore his existence. You instantly recognize the small, glistening package as a cellphone, though it’s a model much more advanced than you could’ve afforded.
You look up at him as he stands in front of you, one of his hands shoved into the pocket of his black pants. “...What are you doing?”
“Giving you something to communicate with so you don’t feel like some princess stuck in a glass castle.” You roll your eyes at that. “I’m not sure who you’d talk to since all your friends do hate you, but the thought counts. And everyone needs a phone.”
You sit forward to look at the phone in its packaging, tracing your metal fingers against the surface. The sensation circling around in your stomach is an odd one. “Please don’t tell me that you hosting me in your penthouse was just an easy way to get a sugar baby.”
Baekhyun looks slightly flustered at that accusation, and you’re gleefully, childishly pleased about taking him off guard. His surprise is quickly replaced with a shit-eating grin, though. “It’s nothing like that; I could’ve already had that kind of arrangement 100 times over.” His tone suggests that he has, which sends a chill crawling up your spine. But maybe not 100 times over. “I did it to help you out. But if thinking of it that way gets you off, be my guest.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Byun,” you say, taking the phone out gingerly. It’s a lightweight thing, looking like it might dissolve if you look at it too hard. Its screen is clear raised glass—which you assume will project out the hologram technology this phone is inevitably equipped with—and has silver backing. It’s a piece of work. Though it appears fragile, you know it’s sturdier than that—or it wouldn’t be such a popular model as it is now. “It’s...nice, though.”
Baekhyun waves his hand noncommittally. “I wouldn’t settle for anything less—even if it’s for someone as eternally pissed-off as you.” You bite your lip against the rebuttal that wants to come rolling out, instead preoccupying yourself with figuring out the controls on this thing. Which takes an embarrassingly long moment. Baekhyun watches you for the duration of it, biting his own lip against the urge to laugh at the frustrated furrow between your brows and the crinkling of your nose. Really, the phone looks like a thin sheet of metal with a slice of glass over it; how are you supposed to operate this? Eventually, he says, “There’s a button on the bottom that activates it...you have to press that.”
“Right, clearly.” You try to rid yourself of your embarrassment as you turn the thing on, but even as Baekhyun leaves the room you can hear his chains clinking together as he laughs silently at your confusion.
As if your life could not get any more chaotic, your metal arm begins malfunctioning.
The metal is not as flexible as it was just a few days before, and it gives you a hard time whenever you try to do simple maneuvers. Your arm is overtaken by a sensation that feels like nerve damage with how the entire limb and shoulder tingle and burn from wires that no longer want to do as they’re told. You’re not entirely sure what’s wrong with it—a good oiling could usually fix any stiffness when necessary, but this nervy feeling is new.
For a while, you try to hide it from Baekhyun, which feels kind of ridiculous even to you. You’re only hurting yourself more, but you are a little too prideful to give him the pleasure of inspecting your arm like he’d always wanted to from the start. You don’t want to be his science experiment.
However, it comes to a point when you must ask for help when your arm stops working entirely.
You wake up to this terrible realization. After another morning of having gotten only a little sleep the night before, something immediately feels wrong. Your arm is dead weight beside you. When you try to sit up, it doesn’t respond to your movements. You can only feel the painful tug on the flesh part of your shoulder where the weight of the metal pulls at it, and you groan in pain and annoyance.
You support your arm with your other hand to prevent the tugging, which quickly gets exhausting and annoying as you try to go through the morning motions. You can’t keep this up while washing, so by the time you get out of the shower, your shoulder is killing you from where the arm dangles.
When you get to the common room, Baekhyun isn’t there. He isn’t anywhere else in his penthouse, either. You don’t even know how long he’s been gone. When you bring yourself to finally call his number, you bitterly remember that you still don’t have it saved in your phone. You want to scream in irritation. You can’t leave to go look for him—yeah, right—or get help from anyone else, either, because of the fingerprint recognition on his apartment entrance. Now that you think about it, you are like a princess in a glass castle here. That reawakens another bout of anger in you. Safe haven or cage?
Baekhyun appears an hour or two later—you’re not totally certain, having refused to expend the strength to move from your current spot to check the time—wearing his usual getup. You don’t know if you should be relieved, but an emotion similar to that sweeps through you despite your lingering apprehension and dislike.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. His eyebrows crease when he sees you splayed across his couch, your metal arm propped up on the couch back.
Don’t be combative, you think to yourself. But it’s like an impulse; you can’t stop yourself. “Why do you immediately assume something’s wrong?”
“You’ve never been so casual,” he gestures to your posture, “around me or in my place before, so I’m trying to figure out if your brain has been infected by cyber bugs or something. Because if we need to quarantine, then—”
“Well, you’re not totally wrong for once.” You struggle to sit up, your movements stiff, and your arm slides off the couch back and slumps limply to your side. Baekhyun's eyebrows shoot towards his hairline at that, and he looks at you questioningly, stepping closer to you.
“What happened to your arm?”
“Don’t even fucking know…it’s been feeling weird for a week.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
You look up at him, cynicism coloring your expression. “I’m sure you can take a wild guess.”
He gives the familiar sigh-and-eye-roll combo, like he’s done probably a hundred times since he’s met you. “Yeah, I can.” He waves his hand. “No matter. I’m calling Yosuke.”
“Who’s Yosuke?” You turn to watch Baekhyun retreat—probably to his bedroom or office. He turns back to you momentarily.
“Someone who can fix your arm.”
—
Yosuke turns out to be a man around the same age as Baekhyun—a big contrast to the older, wizened cyberneticist you’d pictured in your mind. He and Baekhyun act overly familiar with each other, apparently being long-time friends since their younger years.
There is no difference in how he treats you and Baekhyun, which is another thing you didn’t quite expect. He is clearly wealthy like Baekhyun, coming in with a nice suit and expensive jewelry and a suitcase full of more tools than you’ve even seen before, but he doesn’t have the haughty rich man aura. That makes you feel a little more comfortable, and you are glad that Baekhyun let you have some privacy with this and left the lab for the actual procedure. Even if it meant he didn’t get his wish of poring over your arm’s wiring like some kind of cybernetics kinkster.
To your relief, the fix is simple enough. The implanted electrodes in your shoulder that help send signals between your brain’s neurons and the artificial nerves have failed, but those are relatively simple to replace.
“Shitty tech, I guess,” you mumble, casting a displeased look at your arm. You aren’t sure why, but you feel embarrassed about it failing on you. Maybe you just thought it’d be reliable forever. “I got it as part of an experimental research program, so it was probably never going to be the most dependable thing anyway…”
“Hm.” Yosuke smiles. “Maybe not, but it’s still an extraordinary piece of work—especially in this early form. Some of these mechanisms are new even to me. Was that the 2110 Tokyo trial, by chance?”
You nod, though you feel a tiny bit less relaxed with knowing that even Yosuke doesn’t recognize all the intricacies of your limb. Hopefully you’ll still walk out in one piece. “Yeah, the very one.”
“Excellent work,” he reiterates. “It was an early research trial, but still yielded some of the most functional and human-like large-scale cybernetics of the last few years. You could’ve done a lot worse. Maybe you already know that, though.”
“Maybe,” you repeat quietly, but you are mostly speaking to yourself now.
—
After the electrode replacement is done in Baekhyun’s home lab, you can finally feel your arm like normal again. Yosuke does a few sensory feedback and dexterity tests to make sure your arm can function as it should, and he promises to come back the next day for another round just to be sure.
You almost don’t want Yosuke to go when he finally does pack up to leave. It feels nice to be around someone who doesn’t inspire some wretched, nonsensical anger in you.
Baekhyun slips back into the lab after Yosuke leaves, and you glance up from your arm at his arrival. He looks at your bandaged shoulder and watches appreciatively as you flex your metal fingers. “All good now?”
“It’s fine,” you mumble. “Thanks.” Saying that word to him is not easy, but you relent, figuring you should at least give him that much. “You should be thanking the gods you don’t have to go through this kinda shit.”
“Really.” It’s not a question, the way he says it. It’s filled with sarcasm. Baekhyun reaches down and rolls up his left pant leg, his chains hanging as he does, and you recoil, confused. Why the fuck is he showing you his bare leg?
“It’s cybernetic,” he says, barely concealed pride in his voice. “You can’t even tell, the work is so good.” Something like jealousy and anger stirs in your chest. Even if you had wanted to tuck those emotions back in, they’ve escaped from the cage now and are intent on running rampant.
“So. Byun Baekhyun is part-metalhead, after all?” You slide off the surgical chair you were sitting in for Yosuke’s procedure, coming to stand a couple feet in front of Baekhyun. You look down at his leg—which, for all intents and purposes, looks like a completely flesh-and-blood limb. “You joker. Quit fuckin’ around.”
“It’s not a lie.” He knows you won’t believe him, so he taps a spot behind his ankle twice. A long, thin panel that stretches from just above his ankle to his upper thigh opens on his leg, exposing the wiring and metal within. You can’t school your expression in time, and your mouth drops. “Incredible, right? Custom-made. So, yes…I do have an idea what it’s like.”
“Custom-made, huh.” You bite your lip so hard you think it might bleed. “Unbelievable. You’re the kind of person who does these things because you want to, because you can, not because your survival hinges on it. You must truly think you’re special.” The words come hurtling past your lips like venom.
“I didn’t choose this on a whim,” Baekhyun argues, straightening up to face you and letting his pant leg back down. The look on his face says his patience has finally run out, presumably tired of you throwing insult after insult at him since you’ve been in his home. “You don’t know anything about me other than what you’ve seen and heard on screens and from others. I’ve tried to get familiar with you. You reject it at every turn.”
“I don’t want to ‘get familiar’ with someone who gets custom cybernetics that cost hundreds of thousands just because they fuckin’ felt like it, while the rest of us have to do it just to get enough money to live for maybe a year on.” You’re gritting your teeth so hard that your jaw feels like it might crack.
Baekhyun steps closer to you, diminishing the space between you further. His eyes burn with animosity. “I was in a car accident, Y/N. I was just a teenager. No one even knows this but the people closest to me, and I don’t want anyone else to know it. I lost my leg and nearly my life with it. Before you start preaching to me about choices versus survival, realize that you aren’t the only fucking person in the world who’s ever had to do what was needed to survive.”
Your breath catches. You feel like the wind has been knocked out of you. Suddenly, all the fight drains from your system, and you are left feeling deflated and cold. His blazing eyes feel like two bullets trained on you, and your gaze falters.
Baekhyun doesn’t wait to see if you’ll have another response lined up for him; he turns heel and stalks out of the room.
As promised, Yosuke returns the next day for your additional tests. Your conversation with him isn’t as enjoyable as it could be. You are still reeling from Baekhyun’s revelation and unsure how to approach him. Neither of you spoke to each other for the rest of that night, instead choosing to actively avoid each other. You know you can’t keep this game up forever, though.
“Baekhyun’s in a sour mood today,” Yosuke remarks. “Rare for him. Any idea why?”
You shake your head, worrying your lower lip with your teeth. “Mmm...no.”
The slight smile on Yosuke’s face tells you he doesn’t believe you. “Well...I’m sure you two will figure it out sooner or later. He seems to have an affinity for you.”
“What?”
“He was pretty concerned when he contacted me about your arm. He’s mentioned you before then, too. He seems fascinated by you.”
You purse your lips together. You remember his days of annoying flirting in the club, which feel so far away now, and how he’d come to you with a bunch of flowery words and told you he’d taken a liking to you. Perhaps he was really telling the truth about that. You wonder if he possibly mentioned the attempted mugging to Yosuke, and you cough nervously.
“Well, he’s…” you wave your flesh hand, “...a character.”
Yosuke chuckles. “You two seem kind of fitting, I don’t know why. Similar love for recklessness, maybe—from how he describes you, anyway. Like peas in a pod.”
Fitting? Peas in a damn pod? The next words come thoughtlessly rushing out of you in an effort to change his mind and slap away whatever outlandish idea he has of you and the other man. “I don’t want Baekhyun.”
Yosuke raises an eyebrow, though he keeps his gaze on your arm as he watches the movements of your metallic fingers for any irregularities. “I never said you did, Y/N.”
In your haste, it occurs to you that maybe Yosuke really was just referring to your similarities—which you’ll continue to vehemently deny—rather than suggesting any deeper connection. Though that’s what it sounded like to you. Fuck. You don’t know anymore.
Is this what they’d call a Freudian slip, then? How wonderful. You rub your temples with your free hand and shake your head. “Then let’s just forget the last few minutes of this conversation.”
Yosuke smiles. “Whatever you’d like to do.”
—
Yosuke leaves soon after he’s finished testing your arm, but he reassures you that you can see each other again if you feel like having the company—just have Baekhyun arrange things.
Speaking of Baekhyun. You should probably say something to him. You’re not enthusiastic about puttering around his home feeling even more awkward than you did when you first arrived there. So, you walk to his office and knock on the door, turning your ear to it to see if he’ll give a response. You don’t have to wait to hear one, though, because the door panel slides back on its own.
You’ve never been in his office before, though you knew where it was—it was one of the places he decided not to show you on his little house tour—but it’s just as obnoxiously streamlined and full of tech as every other part of his home. Baekhyun sits behind his desk, elbows propped on its surface and fingers crossed together.
“Y/N.” His voice holds none of the playfulness, casualness, or even cool sarcasm you’ve heard from him before.
You step a few feet forward into his office. You feel like you’re standing underneath a spotlight, lit up for the entirety of the world to see. In reality, it’s just you and him here—Byun Baekhyun, one of the richest men in Japan.
He stays silent, presumably waiting for you to speak first. That is what you came here for, so you do, even if it makes you feel like you’re going to peel out of your skin.
“I was a dick. I’m sorry.”
Baekhyun blinks. “An apology? From you? The world must be ending.”
“I’m trying to be serious here, Byun.” You sigh. “I was...wrong to assume what I did about you. I guess...I don’t really know anything about you...but. I felt like I had you all figured out already. So, I’m sorry.”
The tension in Baekhyun’s shoulders releases, if only a little. His expression shifts into something not quite as impenetrable as it was just a few moments ago, but not completely open, either. “Apology accepted, then.”
“Thanks.” You shove your hands into your pockets. “Well, I thought...if I’m not to make any more assumptions about you, I should probably get to know more about you?”
Baekhyun looks interested now, and he releases his hands from their formerly tense position. He leans forward slightly. “Then I should do the same with you.”
Your hackles raise, despite you trying to keep yourself more open-minded. “I...don’t want to. You know enough already.”
Exasperated, Baekhyun spreads his hands out in front of him. “Here we go again. What are you so afraid of? And why even ask me about myself if you don’t want to share anything about you?”
“You can think of it as gathering intel—not making friends. I’m not asking you about your life story so we can have picnics together and talk about our wildest dreams.”
Baekhyun scoffs in disbelief. “When are you ever going to be honest with yourself? Emotional constipation isn’t a good look for you.”
“Honest with myself about what?”
“You are attracted to me. You are interested in me beyond supposedly gathering intel. And for some reason I can’t conceive, it enrages you.” The words come off his lips with the trace of a smirk, and though they make your skin prickle with heat, his smirk makes you want to jump across the desk and land one good punch on him.
You snort. “You’re a piece of work. Attracted to you? Everyone doesn’t throw themselves at the first person with a whiff of money or notoriety.”
Baekhyun gets up from his desk to step closer to you, much like he did the other day. He’s close enough for you to count the moles on his face, barely noticeable except for when he’s at this proximity. His cologne wraps its scented arms around you and pulls you in. You didn’t notice it as acutely yesterday, too embroiled in the argument and trying to process what he revealed to you, but now it hits you full on. How is this not considered some kind of olfactory warfare?
“Then tell me you don’t want me.” He whispers it to you in that same stupid, silky voice he’d always used in the club. That voice, combined with his scent, transports you straight back to that environment—the pungent taste of alcohol, the blinding neon lights, the ear-splitting music. And the one man who you just can’t figure out.
You open your mouth only slightly, afraid to breathe in more of his fragrance and lose yourself to it like a fool. “Fuck you.”
“That’s not an answer.” Baekhyun’s voice remains in the same low whisper, and he grins like he already knows the truth. “But I can do that, if you’d like.”
It doesn’t take much effort for him to close the rest of the space between you. When he kisses you, you don’t slap him, stomp on his foot, or knee him in the balls like you might’ve thought you would. Instead, you kiss him back—gradually, tentatively, but your lips fall into a rhythm with each other’s.
His lip piercing is unyielding on your skin; the edges of it press into your lip. The kiss is not rough or even frantic. You think this all might’ve been easier if it was—easier to allow yourself to keep hating him so intensely and channel that energy into your actions. However, all your previous thoughts of knocking his head off or pulling his lip ring off fall away; you just allow yourself to exist solely in this moment and absorb the feeling of his lips on yours.
Maybe now you could allow yourself to admit—internally, at least—that yes...you did want this. You wanted it from the first ridiculous time you met him in the club, and when he put his insolent hand on your shoulder. Whispered into your ear like he knew exactly what effect it was going to have.
Baekhyun’s bedroom—the one other place he hadn’t shown you besides his office—is neatly arranged and smells entirely like him. Other than those base things, you don’t care what the rest of the room is like. When you both somehow make it there, Baekhyun backs you up onto the bed, his lips still attached to yours.
The weight of his body is solid on yours. His tongue nudging against your lips and asking for entrance makes your body flush with heat. Before you can get fully invested, you pull away. He looks at you questioningly.
“Take this off,” you mutter, pushing his face chains away from you. He laughs lowly, pulling away from you to take his piercing out and put the chains away.
Pulling your clothes off comes naturally; it doesn’t feel clumsy and stilted like it did the last time you slept with someone. Baekhyun’s hands flit over every inch of newly exposed skin he can access.
The way Baekhyun touches your metal arm is reverent, worshipful, and you hadn’t realized how much you needed this—this kind of unabashed admiration—until it happened. No one has ever touched your metal arm in a way that wasn’t clinical or otherwise similarly detached. His fingers glide across it like it’s still made of skin and blood and bone, and he kisses the length of it, up to your neck and all the way back down to your metallic fingers again.
Water beads at the corners of your eyes. You try to ignore it. You don’t even acknowledge the few tears that do slip out, sliding towards your ears from your supine position.
Baekhyun lifts himself to be level with your face again. You turn away from him, too afraid to see whatever emotion will be lying in his eyes—not wanting to reveal the full magnitude of your vulnerability to him—but you don’t say a word when he presses his lips against the tear tracks on your skin.
Funnily, ironically, every motion comes instinctively. Him rocking against you, his heavy, dark breaths echoing in your ears, his long and low moans—your lips searching for his, your teeth creating blooming bruises on his skin. Though you have pushed him away and dismissed his proffered company at every opportunity, this intimacy feels like a grand coming-together—something that was bound to happen at the end of every road.
—
The sheets are twisted, the sweat is cooling on your skin, and you are both tired but satisfied. Content in a way that neither of you have truly been in a long time. You rest your head on Baekhyun’s chest, closing your eyes and listening to him breathe underneath you, the metal of your arm still warm from the heat of his skin.
“I could give you an upgrade.”
Your mouth twitches. You think you might have imagined the words, so you stay silent for a while longer until Baekhyun nudges your arm, checking if you’ve already fallen asleep.
“Upgrade?”
“Your arm. I could...have a new arm built. One like my leg.”
You sit up to look at him, the sheets falling from your body. “Don’t say pretty things you think I want to hear just because you’re still in the post-orgasm haze.”
Baekhyun blows air out of his nose, too tired to properly argue or even scoff at you. “Like I said before, I don’t waste time saying things I don’t mean.” His voice quiets. “We both know you can’t get your limb back, but...I could...give you something to help, at least. It’s...easier to deal with the cybernetics when they actually look like they belong on your body.” You know he speaks from experience there, by the way his gaze falters and drops to his lap.
“To feel more like a human again, huh.” Some part of you—multiple parts of you, maybe—had still been grieving over the arm you’d given up almost two years ago. Maybe it was a silly thing to be hurt over compared to the many other problems in your world, but it was difficult to stop feeling like you’d sold away a portion of yourself for nothing. Nothing but fleeting money.
Baekhyun’s offer stirs something in you. You turn your body away from him, feeling the tingle in your nose and eyes again that could only signal one thing. “Stop doing this. Being so...I don’t know, forgiving. Not after all I’ve done and said to you.”
Baekhyun sits up then, resting his hands on your arms. “I want to do this for you. Stop acting like you don’t deserve anything good in the world.”
You turn back to face him after a long moment, though the tears still linger in your eyes. “I don’t want to be the only one who benefits.” You shake your head slowly. “If you really agree to give me a new arm...you have more than enough resources to help change the nightmare Lower Tokyo has become. Help them. Help us. I don’t want to be some one-off experiment or pet project you discard once you’ve gotten your fill—some broken bitch from Lower Tokyo you think you can fix and turn into one of your family’s many success stories.”
Baekhyun is breathless from your admission; this is the most transparent you’ve been with him since you’ve met. Though part of him wants to shrivel back from your words, he clings to your long-awaited honesty, even if it is only shared with him to rebuke him and his family’s selfishly opulent ways. He thinks of why you pushed so hard against him trying to make a personal domain of Lower Tokyo, leaving the comforts of his own place to absorb the shadows of yours, and a better understanding of your rejection begins to dawn in his mind. Tentatively, he brings one of his hands from your arm to your cheek, thinking you might still wince away from him, but you don’t move.
“You’re right.” His voice is tight with the knowledge of it. “I can help, Y/N. You, and everyone else. I mean—I will. If there is one thing you can trust me on…let it be this.”
You stare into his dark brown eyes, trying to hunt for any signs of dishonesty, though you find none. There is only the heat of his hand on your face, and his open, yielding expression. “I will hold you to that, Byun Baekhyun.”
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2020 Fanfiction Round-Up
I do one of these every year! And have since I think 2016. Can’t break a tradition even if it’s been a clusterfuck of a time and filling this out was in some ways an exercise in remembering the ways I have failed myself as a writer this year.
But oh well!
Total Year-Long Wordcount: I’ll post the final final number tonight after I finish the writing I want to do this afternoon (and plan to do this afternoon), but it’s currently 451,803 words written this year. Guessing I’m going to land somewhere around 453,000ish. (AO3 claims a higher number than that but that’s because it is counting the entirety of fics where I posted chapters this year.
This year I wrote and posted: I wrote a fair number more than I posted (there are five fics finished but for various reasons unposted on my hard drive) but based on Tumblr I posted 78 posts in my fic tag, which, not including chapter specific updates and three sentence meme answers (but including at least two Tumblr-only longer fics), probably comes out to about 60 or so “full length” fics that saw the light of day in 2020.
Overall Thoughts
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted?
Well, I wrote more than I did last year, which is sort of a surprise to me (all things considered) but also maybe not, because I was doing a lot less of most other things that could’ve been occupying my time, including two hours daily of commuting.
But still less than I did in 2018. Which is fine.
What’s your own favorite story of the year?
Lord, I don’t know. It depends on when you ask me. Lately I’ve been in a bit of a “I hate everything I’ve written ever” state of mind, so that makes it sort of hard to do any kind of...reasonable assessment.
I know I’m proud of With Absolute Splendor but I have all these reservations about it and I can’t reread it for the most part because I always notice new things I wish I’d done differently. I feel pretty good about efforts in a common cause but something about it still makes me cringe, which I suspect has to do with my general self-consciousness. I have a hard time feeling unreservedly proud about...anything I wrote this year, really.
I feel like the closest I get is maybe nor autumn falter which I am pretty pleased with and also which does hurt me a lot personally. Or I did end up overall pretty pleased with what came out of By Proxy.
But also the more I look at this question the more I start hating all my own work, so...guess this is kind of coming at a bad time.
Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?
I mean, I started writing in my first non-English fandom in many years, and specifically one where I was trying to engage more with the cultural background of the setting (in a way I wasn’t with, say, Death Note, when I was writing Death Note fic). So that was a risk. And I learned that it’s very stressful and there’s so many ways to make mistakes and I am, in many ways, a coward. But also I think I’ve learned a fair amount thanks to a lot of very patient people on the internet, so...there’s that.
Otherwise...I mean, I got ambitious with a few projects this year (the Big Bang fic and With Absolute Splendor stand out), but I’m not sure how much I really tried new things.
I feel like I had to fight myself a little on writing straight up bad sex for By Proxy - I planned on it being hot, and it really wasn’t. It was mostly just miserable. Which made for a better fic, but was a new experience for me as far as ‘I thought I was going to write porn and that isn’t what I wrote.’
From my past year of writing, what was….
My most popular story of this year:
By far, With Absolute Splendor. In fact, it has now become my second most kudosed fic of all time, behind only fuckin Life in Reverse. So like. That’s a thing.
(It is still less than half as many as Life in Reverse, but for context Life in Reverse has been around for going on eight years.)
Most fun story to write:
Most fics where I feel like “I’m having so much fun writing this!” also go through a “oh god I hate this it’s terrible” phase which makes this sort of hard to assess. But I did have overall a lot of fun writing Mutual Friends despite all my frustration with the canon-wrangling I had to do to make it work in my head.
But also I feel like both Retributive Justice and Embedded were in different ways deeply iddy fics that were just fun to write. That actually goes for a lot of the Whumptober fics. That was a very self-indulgent month. Excited to do it again in February (hopefully, if I can write things in a timely manner at all).
Story with the single sexiest moment:
I feel like the beauty of your repair might be my personal favorite smut I posted this year, but I think my personal favorite that I wrote is in the big bang fic nobody will see until January.
I feel like most of the sexiest moments I’ve written this year are in the porn fics I’m going to start posting in January also. But just generally I feel like the beauty of your repair is the sexiest thing I wrote and posted.
Most “Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story:
I mean, I Come With Knives is definitely up there. It’s not that wrong or anything, but it got pretty intense in some ways I wasn’t expecting. Mostly in how much blood got involved, which was actually more than I’d had it involved in a sex thing before! Kind of surprises me that I haven’t previously done more with bloodplay stuff but. Well. First time for everything!
I don’t think this was a year that really had any “wow, what the fuck, Lise” things in it. Nothing on the level of last year’s winner. I’m almost disappointed in myself.
Abattoir was definitely the story that generated the weirdest conversation and creepiest search questions, though, so it does get points for that.
Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:
I feel like the writing of everyone else is spring bound was a lot of...me thinking through my Jiang Cheng feelings and specifically my Jiang Cheng post-canon feelings.
the martyr, the victim was pretty formative in shaping how I think about both Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji and their relationship with each other. It was the first fic I wrote that really dug into them in any way, I think, and definitely one that informed how I thought about writing Lan Xichen later.
Hardest story to write:
I was thinking it was the one that I haven’t posted yet but I did technically finish, aka my Big Bang fic, the terrible threesome fic, the massive “I’m gonna keep everyone in the Yi City arc alive” AU that I started shortly after finishing The Untamed and finished in December. So I spent most of the year writing it.
But then I was like - no, I’m going to have to go with we live until we die even though it’s technically been ‘in progress’ for five years and really kicked into gear in 2019 and I just finished it and posted it this year, because that fic was like. The culmination of a big arc in an enormous verse dealing with a whole lot of balls in the air and trying to tie up a whole lot of threads. It was ambitious and the stakes were high and it was full of plot and action which are not two of my strengths...frankly I’m still amazed I pulled the damn thing off.
Biggest Disappointment:
I think it is better if I refrain from going too in depth on this because it would just end up as me listing a bunch of my perceived failings. But I think off the top of my head I’m frustrated by the fact that I still haven’t really managed to write a XueXiao smut fic that quite hits the spot for me, myself. I’ve written two and for various reasons I don’t really like either of them.
Biggest Surprise:
The fact that my Jiang Cheng fic took off the way it did. Legitimately did not see that coming! At all! I mean, I’m delighted by it but it wasn’t what I saw happening as far as “niche I’d find in this fandom” or “thing I’d write that people would really enjoy reading.”
Particularly with By Proxy. That fic got a lot more attention than I would’ve expected.
Most Unintentionally Telling Story:
I feel like every fic I write with Xue Yang in it tells you something about me and most of those things are things that make me, on some level, deeply self-conscious, but I try not to think about that too much.
I feel like the most telling story is maybe we all drift sometimes because I literally wrote it out of a depressive episode about a bad brain day but that wasn’t unintentional.
Favorite Opening Line(s):
1. So it turned out that if you touched the tendons of a dead person’s wrist and channeled a little bit of spiritual energy just right, it made the fingers twitch and curl like they were still alive. (Abattoir)
2. Here’s the thing: your Daozhang is glorious when he kills. (tear out all your tenderness)
3. Turned out that a sect leader’s head came off like anyone else’s. (Unnatural Selection)
4. The first hint that anything had gone awry was the letter from Lan Wangji (His Excellency Hanguang-jun, pardon me) that simply said have you heard from Wei Ying? (some good mistakes)
5. What Jiang Cheng wanted to do, more than anything, was to go home and take a nap. (everyone else is spring bound)
Favorite Line(s) from Anywhere:
I usually keep this to 10 but because I’ve been in such a :| place about my own writing I indulged myself this once.
1. Sometimes it felt like all he had done since descending the mountain was shatter his own dreams and accumulate regrets. (nor autumn falter)
**
2. It felt like she was holding all the components of a bomb in her hands, half assembled. If she moved the right way they would stay just that: components. But if she moved the wrong way… (til my judgment day)
**
3. He should have killed him. Should have been the one to strike that blow, in revenge for Jin Zixuan and their sister and everyone else dead for Wei Wuxian’s pride. Maybe then there would not be this gnawing, aching thing embedded in his chest; this itching, unfinished feeling. Maybe then he would not feel torn in two, sometimes like he should have reached out with his other hand and sometimes like he should have struck truer and sometimes both, in the same moment. (Interstitial)
**
4. He owed Wei Wuxian more than he could ever give back in this lifetime. Forgiving him felt like betraying his sister’s memory. Not forgiving him felt like trying to walk with a thorn in his foot. He was just - stuck, caught like a demon in a spiritual net.
Jiang Cheng thought of the way Wei Wuxian looked at Lan Wangji, with warmth and trust and love, and the aching, sick jealousy he had no right to feel returned. He felt a little like a child watching someone pick up a toy he’d abandoned and suddenly realizing that he wanted it back. (everyone else is spring bound)
**
5. You close your eyes and think about how he looked back in that town, Shuanghua slicing clean through a man’s neck, opening it to the spine, and think dizzily that he could open you like that and it’d be good, as long as it lasted. (tear out all your tenderness)
**
6. When Wangji loved, he loved with his whole being, without reserve. And now he had been placed between the rock of his convictions and the hard place of his devotion to Wei Wuxian. (the martyr, the victim)
**
7. He spent a week turning the idea over in his head. Studying it like a corpse he was going to dissect, poking at it, cutting it open and examining its insides. (dead reckoning)
**
8. When the world hurt you, that was the only thing to do, after all. Hurt it back, harder, worse. Spill rivers of blood for every drop it squeezed from you.
And when the end came, never go quietly. (the blood in your mouth)
**
9. I would stand with you through the end of the world, said Loki’s voice in his head, and Steve’s heart wasn’t in his chest anymore, was somewhere off on another planet where Loki was lying dead in a ruined city. (we live until we die)
**
10. Was it always going to be like this? Stumbling into traps, tripping over familiar skeletons, slicing himself open on the edges of old hurts. Was there really such a thing as leaving the past behind? He still felt stuck in it, unable to move, and every time he thought he might be finally dragging himself free something pulled him back. (With Absolute Splendor)
**
11. His chest was full of poison. His throat was full of grief. And he was still a little drunk.
Jiang Cheng went to his room, sat down on his bed, put his face in his hands, and cried until he couldn’t breathe. (By Proxy)
Top 5 Scenes from Anywhere You Would Choose to Have Illustrated:
I think the scene from nor autumn falter of Xiao Xingchen just crying his heart out over Xue Yang’s dead body would be up there.
The Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian hug from the end of With Absolute Splendor.
Okay, just gonna say it: Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao having sex by the table with Nie Mingjue’s headless corpse on it. So sue me.
The scene in the blood in your mouth where Song Lan has stabbed Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen is following the line of Fuxue to the latter. I have a very clear visual of it in my head and if I could art I’d art it.
Xue Yang with the hallucinatory Xiao Xingchen from liberate spirits, liberate souls.
Fic-writing goals for 2021:
Finish Walking Far From Home.
Maybe I’ll finish some of these MCU WIPs? I’d kind of like to, on an abstract level if nothing else.
Become a more well-adjusted human being about the relationship between my productivity and my self-worth.
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EyeBeast 2021 Interest Survey Results
The votes have been cast so let’s do a quick recap of the results and address a few things.
General Interest
Male Subjects in Fetish Stories: 57.5% Yes, 42.5% No
Female Subjects in Fetish Stories: 99.1% Yes, 0.9% No
-No surprise considering most of the subjects of my stories are female focused.
Preferred Subject of Fetish Stories:
Females: 70.8%, Both Male and Female: 22.6%, Male: 6.6%
Futa (Females with male genitalia): 53.8% Yes, 46.2% No
-I’m honestly surprised by the response to this question considering how taboo the subject of futa appears to be.
Direct Sexual Content in Fetish Stories: 77.8% Yes, 22.2 % No
Burping: 85.4% Yes, 14.6% No
Farting: 75.5% Yes, 24.5% No
Body Hair (arm pits, groin, belly, etc.): 54.2% Yes, 45.8%No
-In retrospect, I probably should have let people vote on the amount of hair on a person’s body.
IQ Loss/Mental Regression: 50.9% Yes, 49.1% No
Personality/Mental Changes: 77.4% Yes, 22.6% No
-Interesting to see the division between straight up intelligence drain as opposed to the general idea of mental changes considering how close the two subjects are.
Hypnosis: 66.5% Yes, 33.5%No
-I haven’t touched this subject very much, but judging by the reaction and my own interests, I wouldn’t be opposed to trying a hypnosis story again in the future.
Expansion and Growth
Weight Gain: 96.7% Yes, 3.3% No
Slob: 83.5% Yes, 16.5% No
Belly Expansion: 53.8% Yes, 46.2% No
-Strange considering how popular WG appears to be.
Breast Expansion: 62.3% Yes, 37.7% No
Butt Expansion: 74.1% Yes, 25.9% No
Inflation: 52.4% Yes, 47.6% No
Pregnancy (Female Only): 57.5% Yes, 42.5% No
Muscle Growth: 67% No, 33% Yes
Giant/Giantess Growth: 62.7% No, 37.3% Yes
Blueberry/Fruit-Based Expansion: 55.7% No, 44.3% Yes
Vagina Expansion: 66% No, 34% Yes
Penis Growth/Expansion: 60.8% No, 39.2% Yes
-Interesting that Penis Growth outdid Vagina Expansion considering the survey shows a higher a approval rate of female subjects. Must have something to correlate with the futa approval rate.
Shrinking: 71.2% No, 28.8% Yes
Transformation
Personality TF (Nerd, Bimbo, Himbo, Princess, Punk, Goth, etc.): 69.3% Yes, 30.7% No
Uglification: 62.3% No, 37.7% Yes
-Odd considering how close it is to slob, one of my more popular subjects.
Shortstack TF (Goblins, Dwarves, Imps): 56.1% Yes, 44.9% No
Age Progression: 62.7% No, 37.3% Yes
Anthro Animal TF: 51.9% Yes, 48.1% No
Full Animal TF: 76.9% No, 23.1% Yes
Humanoid Inanimate Object TF (Statues, Mannequins, Sex Dolls): 77.4% No, 22.6% Yes
Non-Humanoid Inanimate Object TF ( Clothing, Sex Toys, Appliances): 80.7% No, 19.3% Yes
Male to Female Transformation: 55.2% Yes, 44.8% No
Female to Male Transformation: 75.9% No, 24.1% No
Deviant Transformations (Fuckplant/Succplants, Buttfaces, Dorses/Queen's Stallions, Lady Pots, etc.): 67.9% No, 32.1% Yes
-Honestly surprised this category did this well, but that might be due to the sheer variety this subject matter covers. Might have to do another series of polls with each one individually to get a better idea.
Overall, I’d say the results were rather enlightening. If a subject you are interested didn’t get a high approval rating, it doesn’t mean I won’t ever write about it. I intend to keep things varied up like I usually do, but I will consider my options when doing polls in the future regarding these kinds of things.
Miscellaneous Questions and Comments
Starting off, let me address a few things people have mentioned I missed in this survey.
Hyper Expansion
-I kind of include this along with the other expansions, however my personal preferences usually steer me towards nothing too big with my stories. It’s very rare that I go anything beyond the size of a house for anything.
Bodypart tf ( butt tf, breast tf E.T.C)
-I find that very similar to inanimate object TF, but I can see enough differences to make it a different category. That being said, I’m not sure I’m too fond of the identity death usually associated with these.
Femboy
-Noted and definitely on the table depending on if the right story comes along.
Cavewoman/De-Evolution
-I originally had this on the poll, but I decided it’s more lumped into the Personality TF category.
General inflatable transformation like pool toys. Also flattening.
-I consider those part of the inanimate object TFs. As for flattening, nothing against it, but my usual repertoire consists of making things grow, not the other way around.
Head, hand, leg, and other body part inflation
-I’ve done head expansion to a certain extent in my recently done Raven slob story. As for the others, I think they’re a little to niche of a topic for me. Not forbidden, just not something I’m particularly interested in.
Fart Inflation
-Considering the positive reaction to both the inflation and fart category, I would have to assume this is a definite yes for most of my audience.
Candy/Sweets TF
-This has always been something I’ve wanted to do, but could never think of a good scenario to place it in. I’ll definitely put it on the table once I find the right premise for it.
Supernatural transformations (demons, angels, mythical creatures, etc.)/ Monster People
-For demons and angels, I feel like those should be included with the personality TFs. As for creatures, that depends on what we’re talking about. May need to do separate polls for each type to gauge interest.
Robot TF
-Not a particular interest for me, plus it kind of falls under the humanoid object TF category
Mutant TF
-Too vague
Monterfication
-Falls under both the uglification and/or anthro TF categories
Strong Fat
-A little too specific but seen as favorable with the results of the WG and muscle growth categories.
Clown
-Part of the personality TF category.
Possession
-Sort of close to hypnosis, but I can see enough differences to warrant a separate category. Just have to be careful to tread the line without going towards anything to icky in terms of rape or anything like that.
Immobility
-See hyper growth.
Clothing TF
-Already covered in inanimate object TF
Multibreast
-An excellent addition that’s more than welcome in my stories. Will definitely need to include this in a future poll.
Comments and Questions
Now let me address some questions and comments from the survey.
“But what about princess deadpool? watch the second deadpool musical.”
-I didn’t realize there was a Deadpool musical to begin with. I’ll have to take a look at that.
“Personally i always like if there is transformation between couple like male and female. Or even female and female. Rather than one transformation. Like i like it when one of slob, transformation can share with another person”
-I share this sentiment. Nothing better than two people indulging in one another’s desires. Although, I feel that’s for any fetish, not just slob.
“Your stuff is always a pleasure to read! Question though would be what are YOUR favorite things to do and such due to some of your things being commissions? Other than that you are quite grand at making kinky stories!”
-My personal favorites are just anything that can give me a challenge and an opportunity to try out things I haven’t thought of before, ergo my tendency towards variety.
“Dude i stay up day and night waiting for you to post everytime you do it makes me feel better about the evening btw if you want to chat sometime my discord is (NAME WITHELD)”
-I appreciate what this person is trying to do, but they really shouldn’t be posting information like this so willy nilly. Thank you for the offer, but you have to realize that there is a time and place for these sorts of things. Please do not come at me with friend requests or anything like that out of the blue. Regardless, I do thank this person for their kind words.
“I really like some of your darker stuff. I don't know if it's a common sentiment but I love unhappy stories.”
-I tend to avoid going dark in my stories, this is due in part to the prevalence of bad ends I’ve seen in most fetish content, especially things like hentai or doujinshi. Like I’ve said, it’s not off the table, but I usually prefer to keep things on a lighter tone in my stories.
“For the record Fat giantess slobs are the best.”
-That seems very subjective, but I won’t deny it’s a good combo.
“Recently I have noticed that you been doing a lot more slob material then just about anything else for the past few months. I admit I'm not a huge slob person it kind of comes down to my mood. while I would appreciate more variety in your subject matter you are the writer and I (and several others) appreciate you sharing your artistry with us.”
-A lot of that comes from what both my commissioners and people on my Patreon ask for. Keep in mind that I do have to oblige people that give me money to write. I do try to find time to write other things though.
“Just do what makes you happy. But i'd love to see more male focused expansion/transformation.”
-As I’ve said, I’m up for it, but I need the proper story and opportunities.
“male on female facesitting/squashing/trampling is always good.”
-See the above question.
“Do you ever feel discouraged to write something if it's about something you don't enjoy OR feel like you write too much of? Other than that, keep up the good work, take care of yourself, and good luck with your future stories!”
-For stuff I don’t enjoy, it depends. If it’s a fetish I’m not into, I treat it as way to try out some new things and vary up my writing ability. Whether or not I learn to appreciate said fetish is another matter. That being said, I’ve made it well known what fetishes I won’t touch at all such as rape, scat, or vore. I find that I don’t have too much of the second problem since I keep finding ways to vary things up with similar fetishes with either varied scenarios or interactions.
Various words of encouragement
-Thank you to everyone that sent me these, as they’re always a good pick me up for the day.
Finally, the Disney Princess empathy votes are:
Rapunzel: 37.7%
Alice: 24.1%
Belle: 20.8%
Tianna: 17.5%
Now you may be asking what this survey is for. Well…that’s for me to know and for you to find out at a later time. Although, I may be prompted to answer any requests about any associated writing things that come from this survey.
Summary
Thank you everyone who took the time to answer the survey and let their opinions be heard. In the end, we had over 200 people participate to give a pretty sizable sample size. I may consider doing several more of these in the near future to focus on specific topics and cover things I may have missed.
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