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mylovejimimi · 10 months

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SNEAK PEEK | A MINIMONI STORY PT 1

— PAIRING: boyfriend!jimin x fem!reader x friend!namjoon x ??? — GENRE: smut +18. minors dni — WARNINGS: smut, dirty dirty talk (jimin's a menace), vaginal sex, oral sex (m receiving), not as much fluids as the last one lol but still fluids, riding, accidental vouyerism, talks of kinks, mentions of gang bang, jimin calls reader mean names, jimin and reader are in fluffy love, SOME plot — SUMMARY: It's your sweet, loving boyfriend's turn to plan your weekly date, and his sweet, homey plan comes with an exciting surprise in the form of a friend that he totally forgot was crashing at his place. — WORDS: almost 5k This one is like the holy scripture compared to the tae and jk one lmaooo but don't forget there's gonna be a part 2!!!!! promise to make it worse <3don't be shy and tell me what you think about my works! also i lied and say i would post it last night but my first draft didn't save <3 i love technology <3333 please remember you can send me a tip by buying me a ko-fi if you like this stories, it will meant the world to me and it will help me ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡ Enjoy !

Whenever your schedules coincide, you and Jimin always made sure to have a date. Today was no exception.

Having an idol boyfriend, it was never an easy task to find time to spend together. And to have quality time, on top of that; a moment when he wasn’t too tired or overworked, or even anxious, and could engage in conversations or activities with you as his stress-free, lovely self. You always understood and supported him because that was his passion after all – though it never got any easier to watch him be away in tours or stay in the city but be unreachable, busy every second of the day. Also, you worked too, a less glamourous job of course, but a lot of times you had to give up your free time for some extra-hours or documents to finish at home.

Luckily for you, the boys just wrapped up the promos for their latest comeback, which meant they were relatively free for a couple weeks. It was Jimin’s idea to have a date every week, as long as he wasn’t required to work 24/7, to make up for past or future time apart.

So, it was a late Friday night and both of you lazed around in Jimin's apartment. You two loved going out and about the city, doing whatever activity you could think of, but since it was your boyfriend’s turn to plan the date – and he had been feeling like a homebody lately – he decided to have a chill night with you, the love of his life. You cooked, laughed, drank, danced around a little to his songs and now you were drinking again, sitting on the mat in between the sofa and the coffee table, chatting while soft music played in the background.

“It was an awful fit to be ever seen wearing! Whoever told you it looked good was lying” you laughed out loud at your boyfriend’s frown, before downing what was left of a bottle of soju, one of the many that you and Jimin already drank. You had the capacity to hold gallons of alcohol if you wanted; Jimin often joked that was what made him fell in love with you.

“It was you who told me I looked hot! I sent you a mirror pic and you replied with fire emojis” Jimin accused you with an offended pout, pushing you playfully and, in your tipsy state, making you fall fully on the ground. You giggled.

“I surely wasn’t in my best moment. Must had been one of those weeks of forced celibacy you make me go through when you release music, and thirst possessed me.” Jimin rolled his eyes with a little smile.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. You get horny just like the rest of us, you’re not special.” You felt giddy and fuzzy inside because of both the alcohol and Jimin’s company. Goddamn, how you loved that man. Couldn’t help your big smile, heart in your eyes.

“Like the rest of you? You have no idea the depths and length of my horniness.” You started to draw random patterns on his thigh with your finger but kept staring adoringly into his eyes, always bold and teasing around him. With a hint of a smirk, he arched an eyebrow at your words and actions.

“Oh my God, right now too? You’re a horndog!” Jimin laughed heartily, pushing you again. You laughed along joyously, feeling happier than you ever been. You were sure you would never love a person the way you loved Jimin.

“Can you blame me? My boyfriend is way too hot.” Despite the dying laughter, Jimin, always up for flirting, had a smug expression that could be only mean problems. Sitting side by side, you only needed to crane your necks a little to be inches away from each other’s face, which was so helpful to your playing. You smirked, whole body facing Jimin’s now and buzzing with alcohol and imprudent ideas.

“Praising me for free? You’re totally too horny for your own good right now. But you’re right, I’m hot.” His smile got bigger and bigger the closer he got to you, stalking you slowly in the manner a predator about to attack his prey would. Soon enough, you could feel his breath caressing your lips: sweet with the fragrance of the flavored drinks, warm and intoxicating. Your eyes found his and in them you saw the glossy filter of alcohol mirroring yours, but the desire in his blown-out pupils was beyond comprehension. Your boyfriend was a menace – for you more than for anybody else. “And my girlfriend is hot as hell as well.”

“I am.”

“And we’re both very drunk.” Your heart accelerated in a second, just feeling the heat that radiated from Jimin and his gaze on your lips. And you knew Jimin was no better, if the ragged breaths escaping his mouth was any giveaway. “And we’ve been apart from each other for so long already.”

Call it a signal from the universe or simply your guts instincts being one step ahead of you, but a ray of clarity downed upon you carrying a possibility that, while it turned you on a bit, wasn’t completely right. Before taking things further, you frowned slightly.

“Baby wait, we’re in the living room, what if Taehyung or Jungkook just drop by without notice? They know the code for the door.” Jimin just shrugged, giving no importance to the very real, very probable problem. You, on the other hand, were too aware of it, remembering all the times you were there and any of the boys – usually the maknaes – would just walk in. Your boyfriend did not back off though; he just tilted his head playfully.

“Why does it matter? Everybody had seen us before at some point, and, like, this is my home. Plus, we’ll hear the door if anybody comes in.” Finally, he moved just the littlest bit so his lips could move yours whenever he talked. Jimin stared intensely into your eyes, speaking in this sultry, seducing tone that was so unique to him. “It’s been so long, baby, and I need you so much right now. I can’t even think of anything but having you right this moment. We’d waited long enough, my love.” And he closed the distance with a fervent kiss. You were never strong enough to fight his kisses, much less when you wanted it as much as him.

It always amazed you just how synced up you and Jimin were; but, well, everybody said all the time how right you were for each other for a reason. He knew exactly how deep to kiss, how fast or how sweet, and, of course, how to touch all the magical parts of your body to make you go feral. And you knew all of him too – but the truth is that both of you shared a lot of likes in every aspect of life, including intimacy. So, you knew he liked as much tongue as possible and as desperately as one can make it. Also, he liked to be touched everywhere at all times, because his body tended to get so sensitive, so brittle to your hands when he was turned on. Jimin loved feeling adored, and you loved to adore him.

He settled his hands on your ass, pulling until you were straddling him. Not missing a single beat, Jimin moved his lips to your throat, making sure to bit and kiss the most sensible spots. You gasped and whined and said things that Jimin couldn’t hear well with all the blood rushing in his ears. Then, all of a sudden, you gripped his hair in a fist and tugged his head backwards, away from your neck, because you knew he loved to roughhouse too. Jimin could clearly see the arousal and drunkenness swimming in your eyes, and he knew he must look just the same, but it was okay because you had been together long enough to be very acquainted with the wildest part of each other. Now it was your turn to attack his neck, and Jimin couldn’t help but think how good you were at it, surely more skilled than him. He groaned and whined loudly as the kisses became sucking and light nibbling everywhere; it went from his neck to his jaw to his ear and all the way down again, always mindful to avoid leaving too noticeable marks on the flesh.

At some point, he began grinding his crotch into whatever part of your body it could grind into, becoming impatient and whiny, so you stopped and left his neck to grip his jaw and look into his eyes. Only then, both of you realized what a mess of red lipstick you were.

“Who’s domming?” You asked, panting. As an answer, Jimin whined more and pouted, making you giggle. “You pretty, spoiled pillow bitch. You will have to do all the dirty work on your own someday, you know.” And you got back to work.

Not much time passed between the teasing and the doing, both of you needing to satiate the constant thirst you had for the other. You two were so high on arousal and desperation, aided by the alcohol, that you skipped the step of taking the clothes off. Jimin lowered his sweatpants to his upper thigh to get his girthy cock and heavy balls out, and then lowered your camisole enough to get your breasts out too, because he was obsessed with them.

“Baby –” you breathed when you took a hold of his member and felt how hard he was. He thrusted mildly and unconsciously, groaning when you tightened your hold on him. The precum his tip was leaking started to cover your fingers once you started fisting him, and you couldn’t resist the temptation: you released his member to take your hand to your mouth and lick his fluids away, making a show of it all for your boyfriend, who groaned loudly.

Before taking your hand down again, you licked your palm, but this time, instead of his cock, you took both of the man’s balls, playing with and gripping them. Jimin threw his head back on the sofa, moaning in a high pitch and tightening his grip on your hips, surely imprinting his fingers on the skin. Once again, you took his cock and got up your knees before moving out of the way your skirt and underwear. You were so wet that your folds squelched when you separated them to descend on your boyfriend, impaling yourself on the meaty, delicious member of his. The stretch left you breathless for a moment, because Jimin was large enough to fill you up fully even if he wasn’t hard. To get you out of the discomfort, he captured your mouth in a sloppy kiss, guiding you to move slowly on him and taking the liberty of put his thumb on your clit. You moaned, and mere seconds later, you were bouncing on your own, increasing speed and clenching your insides sporadically. Your boyfriend, in return, pushed you back down when you bounced up until you both found the perfect rhythm.

You two were too immersed in your own world; too consumed by pleasure to hear the distinct sound of the door lock being unlocked and the footsteps that followed.

“You’re my bitch, got it? This ass is only mine to fuck,” Jimin exhaled close to your mouth, trying to keep his eyes focused on you moving face. You whimpered but nodded. “I will use you like the cockslut you are, whenever I want to and however I want to. And with whoever I want to.” He thrusted up with vigor, clearly liking the idea of sharing you. “Can you imagine it? To get fucked by me and then by any of my friends? Or all of them, because I know the greedy whore you are.” And he made you gasp out loud by biting your nipple and suctioning it. You panted open-mouthed now, forcing your eyes to stay open and watch how your boyfriend went from one nipple to the other, and then to insert his tongue shamelessly in your mouth.

You almost lost your mind at the way he licked filthily your wet insides, but the idea of being shared was pushing stronger. It was no secret to your boyfriend that one of your deepest fantasies was to be shared by several people, submitting to them, being at their mercy; and despite the natural jealousy that arose in Jimin at the beginning, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head for days. He thought about it so obsessively that he got desensitized to jealousy, and, at one moment, he found himself getting hard and needing to jerk off to the made-up image of you being used by multiple people. So, it became his fantasy too.

“You always wanted that, to get passed around like a pretty toy, cock after cock fucking this useless pussy.” Jimin chuckled with gritted teeth, getting more turn on by his own words. You whined loudly, just as loud as Jimin was talking – because he simply couldn’t regulate his voice while fucking –, which was pretty loud for anybody else in the room to hear. And there indeed was someone hearing and watching you from the entrance. Not like any of you realized though. “You know what else a filthy slut like you wants? To choke on cocks. To get your pretty face fucked rough. To have cum dripping from your mouth and still get your throat fucked over and over again. And I know you want to choke on my members’ cocks, don’t you? Get on your knees for the seven of us, suck dry the cocks of those friends that think you’re just my cute, little girlfriend; their pretty, dumb friend.” Jimin hissed with a particular tight squeeze, so close to release. He gripped your hair, tight, and pushed your face closer to his. “Who is the spoiled pillow bitch now?” And he kissed you, knowing both of you were mere moments away from the best orgasm of the year.

And then, a phone rang strepitously right there in the living room, some meters away from where you were. And you knew it was neither yours nor your boyfriend's.

Both you and Jimin jumped in your places, separating from each other's body once you saw a blushing and frantic Namjoon hurriedly looking for his phone in his pants. With one hand, Jimin hurried to help you fix your bra and top that were half off your body, while with the other hand, he tried to put himself inside his own pants as hastily. As if Namjoon hadn't been watching your passionate encounter for the last five minutes.

Your head? Empty, come back later. Your body? Burning with shame and, well... other things had arisen too.

“J-Joon” you started, still out of breath, but you had nothing else to say. You just stared at your friend, who arrived at the perfect time to see you being dommed.

By your peripherical vision, you saw your boyfriend getting red in the face, expression twisted into pure fury.

“Yah! You –“ And he stopped himself in his tracks, staying completely still for a second and then clearly his throat, his whole demeanor changing in an instant. It was completely weird for Jimin to stop himself from berating someone, being the most argumentative man ever as he was.

What the fuck is going on?

“S-sorry you had to watch us, Namjoon” he said calmly but still harsh. Overcoming quickly the initial surprise and change of behavior, Jimin showed his friend he definitely didn’t like the unconsented voyeurism.

Namjoon, on the other hand, was petrified in place, holding both of his friends’ stares. Mind completely blank, he couldn’t think of any excuse or justification, not even the very real reason he was there.

“It’s, uh, it’s okay. I didn’t see much.” He wanted to slap himself for saying that. It implied he had seen at least a little. “I just arrived, really didn’t see or hear anything. No big deal.” And then both you and Jimin saw it – the proof that Namjoon saw some and heard some and he even liked some. The bulging in the front of his sweats wasn’t that obvious but it definitively was there, where it wasn’t in everyday happenings. You both got visibly surprised, maybe a little aroused too, but said nothing. Instead, you two, in all your lipstick-messed glory, stared Namjoon in the eye with some sort of dignity.

“I would have appreciated it if you hadn’t seen anything or said something or go somewhere else.” Jimin was always borderline aggressive when he thought something was inappropriate; and, though you didn’t always agree with this approach, you stood by him on this one because he was right.

“But I told you we shouldn’t do this here in the open,” you whispered, a little ashamed. Namjoon blinked, speechless.

“I-I…” He swallowed and inhaled deeply. “You’re right, I’m sorry I watched you and I’m sorry I interrupted too.” He said all of that sporting the brightest color of red ever seen in someone’s face. “I forgot both of you would be here and that you both do these things. I should have called before coming, sorry.” Jimin was totally satisfied with that reaction but you were not. You felt bad that Namjoon was putting all the blame on himself when you had a feeling something like this could happen and did nothing.

“It’s okay, Joon. Just… don’t watch us without asking ever again.” Though it did feel a little hot. Being caught was one of the many fantasies you and Jimin shared, and you knew that Jimin felt as aroused and excited as you. But he was sterner than you and so, he was the one that put the ruthless mask on and delimited the boundaries to all the people outside your relationship.

“Ask you?” Namjoon asked in utter disbelief, like he was hearing the craziest nonsense ever. He could ask? He could watch? You and Jimin looked at each other. Of course he could watch. Any of them could watch, if they wanted. You both discussed it a million times; if any of Bangtan, six of them being single and unlucky, approached the couple seriously, they had no reason to tell them no. You trusted them a lot, and it wouldn’t necessarily ruin the friendship; not if they didn’t make it weird.

“Well, if you want to do something that involves other people, you usually ask if they’re OK with it.” And yet Namjoon couldn’t believe what his group member was saying. He felt weird. So weird that his nervous system was firing all alarms. His heart started beating faster than when he came home to the image of two of his friends doing each other. He felt so overwhelmed suddenly.

“Okay,” he said, before spinning on his heels and almost running to Jimin’s spare room. You were confused. Why did Namjoon go to that room instead of getting out of the house?

“This damn dumb bitch interrupted us in the best moment.,” Jimin grumbled, upset.

“Babe, why is Namjoon here?” you inquired harshly, crossing your arms. Jimin pursed his lips and looked at you with his big, puppy eyes. You didn’t buy it. “Jimin, were you the one that made Namjoon come tonight?” Your boyfriend sighed dramatically, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Yes, baby, but – Wait, wait! I didn’t ask him to come! I just let him come!” he explained in a rush when he saw you open your mouth to yell at him. “There’s a problem with the water system at his building and I told him he could crash here for a couple nights. He is out all the time so I totally forgot he was sleeping here this week.” You scoffed.

“You’re dumb, did you know that?” Jimin just giggled at your response. It was an accident, so there was nothing to get angry at. You grinned at him, playing with his fingers. “Can we finish what we started now?” But he grimaced at that.

“I don’t know how to feel about fucking you after what happened. I mean, is one thing to fantasize about it and other completely different to experience it without consent.” Jimin didn’t look convinced. You appreciated so much how tactful he was about the situation.

“You’re right, baby, maybe let the shock pass first.” You squeezed his hand and gave him a small smile. “But would you, at least, let me help you? As a reward for being a good friend.” He smirked, and passed his arms around your waist to hug you to his body.

“How could I say no to a reward?” …

And just as fast as you agreed, you were on Jimin’s bed. Currently, your boyfriend was laying on his back, sweats on his mid thighs, with you kneeling by his side and pumping him with all your heart. And yet, he was fixated on the ceiling, barely reacting to the stimulation.

“Man, why the fuck are you just laying there? I’m giving you a hand job right now,” you huffed, frustrated with the indifference your boyfriend showed toward your efforts. “If you want a blow, you just have to ask, you know.” You stopped all movements and Jimin finally focused on you, coming back from being lost in his head.

“Sorry, babe, you’re amazing as always. I just can’t stop thinking about what happened.” He sat up, now being face to face to look you closely.

“Well, same. It was awkward but also kinda hot.” Jimin nodded a little absent-minded.

“He seemed surprised that you said he should ask.”

“It’s not every day that two of your friends indirectly invite you to watch them have sex, though.” At that, Jimin arched an eyebrow, playful all of a sudden.

“So you were inviting him, huh?” You blushed.

“I mean, yeah. Wasn’t that what we wanted? Did I read your eyes wrong?” Jimin, once more, got closer to your face like a menace, until you were millimeters from touching.

“So, you really plan on having him watch while you’re getting fucked mercilessly, in every way, in full dom/sub display? I bet you would like to get dicked down by him too.” He smiled and you felt your heart racing. What was your boyfriend implying?

“Uh, I don’t know? I mean, sounds… Yeah.” You really tried to form a rational sentence, though it was difficult with all your thoughts all over the place. As an avid over-thinker, you needed three to five business days to sit down and dissect the whole situation from beginning to end to sort out your opinions. “And what about you? Would you be fine by that? Would you also like to get some of his dick?”

“Nah, love. I don’t think it flows like that between us. Would be super embarrassing to bounce on his lap and go to a company briefing with him the next morning.” And he smirked deviously at you. “But it wouldn’t be weird watching him thoroughly giving it to you. Or should I say, hammering it into you.” He extended his arm and fondly caressed the side of your face. “Mmh, I think the shock had already passed because I just unlocked a new fantasy. Baby, I really, really need to see you being fucked into dumbness by him” he expressed with a pout, like begging you to give it to him. “I can attest he has a horse dick too.”

“Jimin!”

“And I think it will help me to shut up that annoying ego of yours for once; you’d been domming for too long and need humbling” he added to tease you. You frowned at the teasing; frowned even deeper at the weird list of cons of fucking Namjoon that your boyfriend just gave you.

"You’re getting a little too brave for a man with his dick in his vengeful girlfriend’s hand,” you told him lowly, narrowing your eyes and gripping said dick harder. Jimin took a sharp breath but smiled anyways.

“That’s it, babe, that’s how I like it. Just tug a couple times more while I imagine Namjoon folding you into two and fucking you to tears.” You scoffed and pinched Jimin’s nipple, way too hard to be pleasurable.

“Ow! But I’m being honest!” Jimin complained with a laugh.

“If you want me to blow you, stay fucking quiet, whore” you warned Jimin, getting comfortable on your knees. Your boyfriend helped you by taking your long hair in a makeshift ponytail in one hand. And you did exactly what you said.

As always, Jimin was loud and, at times, rough. Whenever you bobbed up, he only let a second pass before push your head down on his cock again. He lived for hearing you gagging and choking on him. And, as expected, he loved it messy and with a lot of saliva involved.

“Holy fuck, this mouth is amazing, baby, just like your pussy. Dirty little bitch, where did you learn to deepthroat this good? Is because you used your whore mouth on many cocks? I bet that’s why.” With each word, Jimin thrusted his hips against your mouth rougher. He was very aware of your limits and knew that his words and movements were making you drip. “Those late nights waiting for me in the company? I bet you spend them being used by the guys. Whose cocks do you slobber, you fucking cumdump? Yoongi hyung’s? Hobi hyungs’s?”

Your eyes welled up just as your pussy creamed the skimpy panties you wore for Jimin. Though you had a pretty dominant and defiant personality, you became fully submissive from time to time to humor boyfriend. Like in that moment, when you let him control your head by taking fistfuls of your hair to make you gobble his cock however he wanted. His balls hit your chin each time he snapped his hips up, and, since all that movement made it very difficult for you to keep your saliva in your mouth, most of it ended up falling towards Jimin’s body, dampening his testicles and inner thighs.

“Ah, I know -shit- you act all innocent but you let Namjoon use your mouth every night, like the disgusting slutty toy you are.” He was really close; you could tell by the precum that his cock leaked on your tongue and how his member throbbed. You looked up at him and catched him devouring you with his eyes, plump lower lip tucked between his teeth (and you couldn’t help internally melting at his cute crooked front tooth). On the other side of the blowjob, Jimin felt his abs flexing uncontrollably while he fixed all his attention on you, the most perfect being that ever existed. You were a sight for his sore eyes, with that fucked up face he loved – the only thing that could make him come in seconds. “Oh fuck, I won’t stop thinking about his come dripping from your mouth. Shit, shit, shit—”

Despite having your mouth way too full and roughed, you moaned to assist your boyfriend in cumming. The thrusts became erratic and a loud, long moan left Jimin’s lips when he threw his head back to finally let go, coating your mouth and throat. He pushed your face against his crotch and held you there tightly until he stopped coming. In a couple seconds more, his breathing was steadier and he could let go of your poor head.

You lifted yourself slowly and breathed deeply, composing yourself despite being a mess of tears, saliva and cum. Wiping some off with the back of your hand, you looked pointedly at Jimin, who just raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

“You’re getting a little too insistent with this me and Namjoon thing. Are you really that fucked up? That you would enjoy the emotional torture of seeing me with someone else? Do you have a kink about being cheated on?” Even with a rough voice, Jimin understood what you said instantly, and his response was a roll of eyes and a snort.

“Don’t be an idiot, I just find it hot, ok? I DO NOT want you to leave me for him.”

“So hot that you had to talk about it so detailly to cum?” You helped to get his pants back on their place before fishing one shirt you found nearby to clean your face. Jimin admired you for a moment, hands behind his head.

“Yes.” He smiles brightly. “And I’m serious when I say I need to see you get fucked by him. It’s, like, vital for me right now.” It was your turn to snort. “Maybe all of us could benefit from his stay here.” Eyes drooping, you rested your body on his, using his chest as your pillow. Too many things happened in the span of an hour and just now all the alcohol intake had its effect of making you sleepy. Whatever other things Jimin said, you missed them after giving your veredict:

“Maybe.”

#jimin smut #namjoon smut #jimin x reader #namjoon x reader #jimin one shot #bts smut #namjoon one shot #bts one shot #bts x reader #Jimin #namjoon #Jungkook #Taehyung #Jhope #Hoseok #Suga #Yoongi #Jin #Seokjin

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assaily · 6 months

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Feeding the fandom some more. :)

Working Title: Hide the Morning from the Stars Colloquial title: Mute Five Themes: I don't even know anymore

This is a Very rough draft. Like so rough I don't even think my tensing is consistent throughout. This is Five's loneliest first year of retirement ever. And also him hanging out with Grace.

Major warning for the beginning for suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

~Post Mute~

Five takes the gun out of his mouth, his tongue flexing against the heavy iron tang of metal. The weight of it is familiar and cold in his hand as he sets it down on the edge of the sink, his shaking fingers pressing the safety back into place.

He’s just being dramatic. It’s all those teenage hormones mixing badly with all the trauma Five honestly didn’t think he’d live long enough to have to deal with. Oh, and one hell of a hangover. That’s all it is, dramatics. If he thinks for a minute, plans this out, he realizes how horrible of an idea it is.

He can��t make Mom clean his brain matter off the walls. That would be cruel, even for him. Dramatics. Besides, his siblings would hear the gunshot. He doesn’t really want them to find him. Klaus would summon him before he had a chance to cross over and they’d give him a ream of shit for making such a mess. The idea of being yelled at again is exhausting.

“Can’t you have done this at a hotel or something?” He can imagine them saying to his corpse, scoffing and shaking their heads in disappointment. They’re right, of course, he shouldn’t do this at home.

He sighs, closing his eyes against the judgment staring back at him through the mirror. He tries to settle the shaking in his body but can only seem to draw it in, not vanquish it. He’s never really calm anymore. He wasn’t much before, but at least he could pretend.

These days it feels like every defense he’s ever built for himself has been stripped away, leaving him raw and naked and fragile in ways he can’t compute. It makes him nasty and hateful, covering himself in glass so that the moment someone reaches out, they bleed. He wants to be normal, he wants to be able to have a conversation with his siblings without thinking they’re judging him, and without picking a fight. He wants to scream and cry and beg them.

But he’s not sure what he would beg for, only that he wants something desperately, but something else inside of him, something old and stalwart and terrified refuses to let him ask. So he picks fights, he’s nasty without knowing why, and his siblings hate him for it.

He opens a drawer below the sink and tucks the little ruger beneath a pile of clean washcloths. This used to be his and Ben’s bathroom, but he’s the only one that uses it now. The others don’t really come up here, even less now that the honeymoon period has passed and they have no desire to keep him company anymore.

Allison mostly lives in California now, Viktor lives out there too, but they both come to visit every couple of months, staying for a week at a time. Diego lives outside the house with Klaus, and recently Luther found a job that would pay him enough to afford his own apartment. He hasn’t moved out yet, but he’s actively looking.

This is what Five wanted, them living their lives and moving on, but he has to remind himself like he forgot. He wanted to give them the opportunities he never had, and he succeeded. He’s not sure why it feels so terrible now, but he suspects it’s only a symptom of the sickness sitting like a rot in his bones.

He makes a point of not looking at himself, wetting his hairbrush under the faucet in an attempt to tame his bedhead. The scratch of the bristles against his skin hurts, so he pressed harder.

Allison and Viktor are at the end of their visit, and everyone is in the house. They’d be gone by tonight, and the house would go back to the coffin it was without the others, but in the meantime, Five wanted to look at least a little put together for them. He doesn’t want them to worry, but with the constant arguing he figures he can get away with less and less grooming.

His hair is getting long and he hasn’t really had the energy to cut it yet. It’s getting a little annoying, the way it falls into his eyes and curls at the nape of his neck. He’d go to a barber if he thought he could get through the encounter without snatching the scissors away and ending the life of the poor girl unlucky enough to draw the short straw.

When he finishes, he finally looks back at himself. He still looks like garbage, his skin an unhealthy pallor, accentuating the dark circles weighing down his eyes. The water managed to tame some of the mess of his hair, but it’s obviously greasy, flakes of dandruff like ash on his scalp. His reflection glares back at him, anger and disappointment like a stone in his stomach.

He really is a dramatic bastard. Today of all days, he figured he’d leave it in the drawer. Playing the wishing game with all his siblings home. He can’t even deny that of the cry for attention it is. Disgusting, really. His siblings could probably smell him rotting from here.

He considers a shower. It would make him feel better, a little more human at least, before he goes downstairs and has to pretend at it. The idea of getting wet, and having to put his clothes back on with wet skin makes him grimace. He doesn’t want to be cold either, because he can never seem to get warm. No use making it worse.

He flicks the light off and cracks the door behind him as he leaves. He shuffles back to his room to find something cleaner to wear. He should have washed his face, but now that he’s away from the mirror, he doesn’t have the energy to go back to it.

Mom keeps an ever revolving source of clean clothes for him, so that part of his routine is easy at least. He doesn’t have to think too hard about it, it’s the middle of winter so that means layers, and Five likes layers. They don’t really keep him warm, but that’s normal. No, he likes them because it’s a little like putting on a suit of armor. It’s just fabric, but it still manages to trick some animal part of his brain into thinking he might be a little safer. No more warm, but far less likely to freeze.

Which is an odd quirk, considering his insistence to play the wishing game every fucking morning.

In his defense, he doesn’t usually pull the gun out. He usually he just stares at the whelp in the mirror, wondering why the fuck he’s still here when he feels this horrible all the time. Then he bucks up, cleans up, and moves on with his day.

The ruger is just… He put it there in case of emergencies. Doesn’t hurt to have a few weapons hidden around the house in case the commission decides to come knocking again. He’s not sure when he started pointing it at himself. It’s a bad habit. There are better ways, less violent ways. Ways that don’t make a mess for his family to clean up after him.

He’s just being dramatic. That’s all it is. Nothing more. Being a teenager sucks. He remembers how much better things got when his hormones weren’t through the roof, making his emotions sharp and fragile all the time, making the loneliness so much harder to ignore.

This too shall pass, he would always say to himself. Over and over, like a prayer to an unloving universe. Please, just let it pass. Five is pretty sure he doesn’t really want to be alive anymore, but he also hates wanting to die. It puts a grayish filter on everything, on every thought and interaction. He’s alive, and hates living. Worse than surviving and already feeling dead. There’s a certain numbness to the in-between space of not wanting to be alive, but not wanting to kill himself either, and he yearns for it now in the throes of a worse agony.

But again, he’s just being dramatic. Pesky hormones. This too shall pass and all that.

He dresses quickly, changing from yesterday’s sleep rumpled long sleeves and sweaters into cleaner ones. He reuses a layer, the fabric of a knitted shirt warm in his nearly numb hands and it’s not something he wants to waste. The bottom hem on the back is dirty, and there’s a food stain on the front of it. It still smells vaguely like the alcohol he drank last night, but he puts it on as a middle layer. His hands are easily swallowed in the outer layers, and he has the idea some of it might belong to Diego. He stole a number of garments from them all last fall, and plans to give them back at the end of spring, if he makes it that long.

Spring still feels so far away, it’s hard to think that far ahead.

Five looks like shit, and he feels like shit, but he still dares Diego to say anything about it when he arrives downstairs. He walked the first part, then warped the last floor into the kitchen once he got close enough. The air was warmer down here, the heaters worked better on the ground floors, and no one had lived in the upper floors until recently. It was his first winter home, and he almost wonders if it’s worth trying to fix. Might be easier to just move, but he likes his bedroom high above the street. He spent a lot of last summer drinking on his fire escape; it’s familiar in a wildly unfamiliar world.

“Hey,” Diego greets, giving him an appraising look but not saying anything about the fact that Five’s wearing one of his sweaters.

Five nods a greeting before he busies himself pulling a mug from the cupboard and getting a cup of coffee. The pot’s still on and half-full, likely courtesy of Mom, so it’s a short lived distraction. He almost wishes he put something in his coffee so he has an excuse to linger without making it awkward.

“I heard you and Allison got into a fight last night,” Diego says, a hint of sardonics in his voice. “Well, pretty sure the whole block heard.”

Five grimaces behind the rim of his mug, throat too tight to take a sip. It seems he’s always fighting with someone.

“Nothing to say, huh?”

Five’s pretty sure he said enough last night, regardless of how little he even remembers. Might be time to lay off drinking, even as he already wishes for something to put in his coffee. He shrugs his shoulders, throat still tight and getting tighter. It’s almost hard to breathe and his head is pounding.

Diego sighs, sounding exhausted. “Look, I’ve been talking the othe–”

Five doesn’t hear the rest, pulling himself through a tear in space. He stumbles out the other side, managing to set the coffee on his desk before his knees buckle and he topples to the floor. He lays there for a while, wheezing softly and trying to catch his breath. There isn’t much going through his head, besides how grateful he is that he saved his coffee. There was no way in hell he was going down for another.

He helps Mom with chores in the evenings, usually after Luther’s gone to bed and the house is painfully silent. She hums while she works, washing the dishes and cleaning up after dinner. Five sits in with her, finishing up any leftover in the pots or pans. He follows her like a ghost back upstairs, and helps her fold laundry. The laundry room is usually pleasantly warm, and Five sometimes dozes off listening to Mom hum, sprawled out on a table.

When she’s finishes with all that, she heads into the library and settles down on a couch someone had moved there in the months following their return. This is a newer part of her routine, one that Five created with his presence and can’t make himself feel bad about. The blanket draped over the back is a deep verdant green and pleasantly soft texture.

Mom settles on one end, picking up a book from the table besides the couch. He’s not sure when she started reading, or if she always did that and he just didn’t remember. For some reason it makes her seem more human. Sometimes she reads heavy tomes of obscure information, sometimes it's children’s fantasy.

Five collapses onto the couch beside her, leaning his weight against her side and sighing in the deepest relief as she wraps her arm around his shoulders. He beyond caring at this point, and Mom’s not one to judge. He rests his body against her’s for a while, breathing with her simulated breath, forcing himself to relax and finding it hard.

He still can’t get himself to stop shaking, and now with an arm around him, his vulnerabilities and hurts come bubbling up like blood from a wound. He can’t pull it in, his hands shake horribly in his lap, and clasping them together just seems to make it look worse.

She never opened her book, and she senses his distress instantly, something he hates and can’t help but be grateful for. She doesn’t ask him what’s wrong, merely pushes the book away and turns toward him to give him her full attention.

It’s too much and he nearly begins to sob.

She shushes him gently when he swallows it down, one of her hands tracing his cheek before pulling him to rest his face against her. He wraps his arms around her back, clinging to her like a child, like he never had before and feels so stupid to do now. He can’t stop himself, it all hurts so much and he just wants it all to end. This doesn’t make him feel better, but it makes him feel something else beside the horrifying nothing eating at his bones.

She runs a hand through his hair and down the nape of his neck. He feels her hand pause and come back to his kneck, searching for his pulse. He pulls away, both out of confusion, and to allow her more access. Her face is neutral, but she frowns minutely at him before tucking his head against her.

“You’re experiencing heart palpitations,” she says, not at all asking.

He was ignoring up until now, the way his chest was tight and his heart was doing uneven little leaps and lurches. It was hard to get a full breath in, constricting in his throat, too. He nodded against her, swallowing hard when the words refused to come.

“You’re temperature is a little elevated. How are you feeling darling?”

Horrible, he tried to say, but while his mouth worked around the word, his throat spasmed silently.

#yeah i absolutely am in a different tense by the end lmao #tua #tua fanfic #the umbrella academy #fanfiction #five hargreeves

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thrawns-babygirl · 2 years

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Insufferable Pt 2 (Crosshair x F!Reader)

Writers block is killing me lmaoooo so I decided to make a part 2 to one of my first fics i ever wrote because its been sitting in my drafts for way too long. Hope Yall enjoy, let me know what you think. Likes, Reblogs and Replies fuel me so pls dont hold back. Thinking of writing a part 3 but idk yet lol

I proofread it but im tired as hell so let me know if i missed anything

Rating: (E (18+) Warnings: Gags, Unprotected PiV, Creampie, Oral (F!Receiving), mentions of drawing blood Word Count: 2600+

Masterlist

It’s been weeks since the Batch landed on Kamino. Weeks of tests and poking and prodding and nothing to do but wait for orders to come in. It’s been a while since the batch had been on Kamino for this long in between missions and tensions were running high. Hunter had snapped at Wrecker, Tech had snapped at Hunter, Wrecker was trying to keep his head down and Crosshair? Crosshair was being the most unbearable of them all.

The Batch were used to his clipped replies and scathing remarks by now, but at the moment it’s like he was trying extra hard to be a snarky prick and the others were sick of it. They had gotten a brief reprieve when Crosshair was called down to the shooting range for an evaluation by Nala Se and a couple of other doctors and scientists but according to Tech’s findings in the Kaminoan data base he performed ‘sub-optimally’ and was sent to medical for an examination.

The Batch shared withering stares, knowing that if Crosshair was being intolerable now then the results of todays evaluations were only going to make the sniper ten times worse to deal with. A new mission could not come soon enough.

Crosshair was stalking down the halls of Kamino, and if looks could kill, any reg that he passed would have dropped dead had he been brave enough to make eye contact with the furious sniper. He was seething to himself as his legs dragged him down to the medical wing, towards the one person he wanted to see less than anyone else on this maker forsaken planet at the moment, you.

Ever since he made the grave mistake of giving in to his sordid desires with you on his mind, he could barely look at you, not that the two of you had a good relationship to begin with, but now it was worse.

Any time he looked at you he would be reminded of how he debased himself to the thought of you. How he couldn’t even control himself enough not to give you the smallest amount of power over him, and he hated it. The worst part? It wasn’t even the one time. After the metaphorical seal was broken, he couldn’t stop. Every night since he would bring himself to mind-blowing, leg shaking orgasms by his own hand in the ‘fresher, your name threatening to escape him in the form of strangled groans as he bites down on his fist to stifle his sounds. Those same nights he would wake up, panting, painfully hard as your form invaded even his subconscious.

He knew his brothers were on the receiving end of his short temper more than usual, but they had luckily chalked it up to their lack of action recently and being cooped up together in a tiny barracks on Kamino. He’s not sure how he would deal with it if they had any idea of the real reason he was so short tempered with them.

He’s shaken from his reverie as the door to your office slides open, he was so lost in his thoughts he didn’t even realise he was just standing outside your door. You look up at him, datapad in hand and give him a sickly-sweet smile. A brief look down at the pad in front of you shows the results from his lacklustre performance at the shooting range as well as some requests for certain medical examinations to see if the cause of his frustration is physical or mental.

He barges past you into your office without uttering a word and takes a seat in front of your desk.

“Well hello to you too Cross” you beam at him. It’s like you enjoy watching him suffer, like you derive some sick pleasure from watching him fail. He can’t stand it; he can’t stand you. So why is his cock reacting to your taunting smile? Why does he have to actively resist the urge to push you up against your desk and shut you up himself? He still doesn’t say a word, just glares at you while he pops a toothpick in his mouth.

“Just a couple of things today before I move your ungrateful behind onto a specialist, shed your armour and take your top off so I can draw some blood” He’s totally silent as he removes the top half of his armour and blacks, revealing the planes of his scarred chest. You quickly and painlessly draw some blood from his arm before running it through a machine to test his hormone levels and to test for any diseases.

“Have you been sexually active in the last 6 cycles?” You ask while looking down at the machine readout that’s coming up on your pad. The question startles him, he knows it’s standard, its not even the first time you’ve asked him, but while his traitorous cock is trapped against his body and his codpiece the question feels… different. He concedes that he can’t remain non-verbal the entire appointment and the sooner he gets through this the sooner he can… relieve himself.

“Yes” his reply is clipped, he’s still refusing to make eye contact, preferring to look around the sterile white room. You give a light snort, before looking up at him from your pad.

“Something funny?” he grits out at you, teeth clenching down on the toothpick in his mouth.

“Oh just with your sparkling personality I just wasn’t sure how lucky you were wooing the ladies, or men, no judgment, you’re just a little… how should I say this… abrasive?” the machine has finished uploading the data from his blood samples to your pad and you continue flicking through the results to see if there are any anomalies.

“I’m nicer to people who don’t piss me off Doc” he’s looking away again, out the small window near the back of your office, watching the ever-present Kamino rain. “Besides working for the GAR you get a lotta ladies hanging around bases looking to have some fun with a clone or two. But I’m sure you know all about that don’t you?” he turns to face you, a cocky smirk painting his features.

You balk, gripping your pad, brows furrowed as you look for something to say. He’s not wrong after all, you have had a rendezvous with a few clones in your time serving as a doctor on Kamino. It gets lonely and the donor was a very attractive man, so naturally things were bound to happen.

“Jealous Cross?” you’re still inputting the results of his blood test into the system, refusing to make eye contact as you try to recover from being called out.

“Not at all, why would I need some reg’s sloppy seconds when I’ve got lines of women ready to throw themselves at me and my ‘sparkling personality’ any time I’m off world” he finally has the upper-hand again and you’re scrambling to keep up. You simply decide on staying quiet while you gather the instruments required for the rest of the exams and will the rising blush away from your cheeks. “Out of the rest of your armour and on the bed” you grit out at him, still refusing to look him in the eye.

“Oh Doc, you gotta woo me a little better than that if you want me in your bed” you can hear the cocky smile in his voice breaking through over the clatter of his armour hitting the hard floor of your office as he follows your instructions and sits down on the cot in front of you. “If I wanted a cocky di’kut in my bed I’d ask any of the clones from Tango Squad to join me, not you, now lie down so we can get this over with and you can be a pain in your brother’s asses instead of mine” you move the scanner over him, adjusting the settings before running it over his whole body, watching the readouts closely searching for any abnormalities.

“Those shinies wouldn’t know how to please a woman if it hit them in the face” he drawls, eyes trained on your form leaning over his body. You let out another involuntary laugh “Oh and you would hotshot?” your eyes don’t leave the readout in front of you, if they did you would see the tent that Crosshair is pitching in his blacks as his eyes rake up and down your form.

Every single lewd thought the sniper has had while touching himself in the refresher coming to the surface now that you’re so close, the confirmation that you have indeed slept with regs making his blood boil. He could make you feel better than any of those regs could ever dream of, he would make your body sing for him, and he’s certain you would let him.

“I would” he states simply and watches as a blush spreads its way up your neck to the tips of your ears, your throat bobs slightly as you swallow, and he knows he’s got you right where he wants you. You finish your scans, moving the machinery away and begin busying yourself with your datapad again. Without looking up you walk over to your office and punch in a code to the door panel locking it before walking back over to where Crosshair sits on the edge of the cot, leaning back with his hands planted on the fabric behind him, lets spread, rolling the toothpick in his mouth from one side to the other.

“Prove it then” you finally look up, placing your data pad on the desk.

“Now now Doc, who says I want to prove myself to you?” his voice dropping an octave as you saunter over to him. Your eyes land on the bulge caged by his blacks and you smirk up at him “Your body betrays you trooper, but if you don’t want to I have plenty of fine men on the other side of that door I can mmphh-” he silences you by slamming his lips against yours, his hands moving to your hips and pulling you against him as he runs his tongue along your lower lip, you open your mouth slightly and he slips his tongue inside, swallowing any sound that threatens to escape you.

You reluctantly break apart for air, panting slightly with kiss swollen lips as Crosshair stands up off the bed and slowly starts peeling your uniform pants and panties down your legs. “You talk too much Doc” he grunts out spinning you and placing your now naked ass on the bed that he was just occupying. “and what are you going to do abou-” you’re once again interrupted as Crosshair shoves your panties into your mouth and you look at him incredulously. “Much better” he growls as he lowers himself down to his knees, running his hands along your bare thighs before spreading them and gazing at your slick entrance.

“You’re already so kriffing wet doc, those regs mustn’t be treating you right if you’re already this soaked for me” you can feel the warm puffs of his breath fanning over your sensitive entrance as he talks. He looks up at you, not breaking eye contact as he licks a broad stripe up your cunt, swirling the muscle around your clit before diving in and eating you like a man starved.

Your groan is stifled by the fabric shoved in your mouth, saliva is threatening to spill around your lips as Cross laps at you. You close your eyes and lean your head back, indulging in the feeling of his tongue slipping inside you. You didn’t want to admit it but the clones you have been sleeping with have been somewhat lacklustre recently, with you often having to finish yourself off after they excused themselves back to their barracks. Tonight however, you can tell by the rapidly tightening coil in your stomach that that will not be an issue.

Cross groans into your cunt, and the vibrations of his voice send electricity shooting down your spine, winding the coil tighter. You open your eyes and glance down, the Sniper has freed himself from his blacks and his using his free hand to stroke his hard length vigorously. The sight sends you over the edge, your thighs wrap themselves around his head as all of your muscles tense and your orgasm washes over you and down onto his chin, your loud moans of his name muffled by the now soaked fabric still stuffed in your mouth.

Crosshair continues lapping at your juices, bringing you to overstimulation before extracting himself from your thighs and wiping your slick from his face. His smirk has evolved into a cocky grin as he stands and lines himself up with your entrance.

“You ready for the main course doc?” you nod vigorously as he runs the tip of his cock along your soaked entrance, teasing your clit before pushing forward enough for just the tip to slip inside only to pull it back out and continue teasing you.

You groan through your gag and tilt your hips upward hoping that he will get the hint and fuck you already. “Oh if only they could see you now, the high and mighty Doc just begging to be filled by a defective clone… if only they could see how much of a slut you are for my cock-” he punctuates his statement by finally slipping himself inside of you in a single swift thrust.

The feeling of your tight walls rips an uncharacteristically loud groan from the sniper, you felt divine, and after so long fantasizing about fucking you, he’s certain he’s going to bust early like some damn shiny losing his V card. He stays still for a moment, one hand gripping your thigh and the other reaching between the two of you to start toying with your already sensitive clit, causing your head to loll forward. Slowly, after acclimating to the way you stretch around his girth, he starts moving, his cock reaching perfectly inside to that sweet spot that has you rapidly approaching your second orgasm quicker than you anticipated.

You’re lucky your office is soundproofed, the loud moans that make it through your gag and the sound of his hips slapping against yours would paint any passer-by a very vivid picture of what exactly is going on behind closed doors. The drag of his length against your walls is heavenly, the tight circles he’s drawing against your clit with his fingers cause your muscles to clench around him, strangling his cock as your orgasm washes over you. You pant through your nose, squeezing your eyes shut as your peak engulfs you, loud moans of his name caught on the makeshift gag still stuffed in your mouth.

Placing both of his hands onto your hips and resting his head in the crook of your shoulder he chases his own peak, hips slamming into yours as he latches his mouth against your neck sucking a dark mark against your skin as his cock throbs inside of you, spurting ropes of hot cum into your abused pussy. Thrusting a few more times before stopping and resting his forehead against yours in a surprisingly intimate gesture.

You’re both panting, as he finally reaches up to remove the soaked fabric from your mouth. He slowly extracts himself from you, watching as his release starts spilling out of you onto the white bed beneath you and begins to redress. “I think I’ve proven my point doc; anything comes up on the scans let me know” he says as he continues clipping the hard plastoid of his armour into place. You nod, still somewhat at a loss for words as you watch him tuck your panties into a pouch on his belt. He gives you a three-finger salute before unlocking the door to your office and making a quick exit before you get a chance to say anything to him. Leaving you to redress alone and figure out what the fuck just happened.

@where-is-my-mind-tho @starborncyare @antishadow2021 @healingskywalker@crosshairlovebot

#bad batch crosshair #tbb crosshair #crosshair smut #crosshair x reader #crosshair x reader smut #crosshair x you #tbb crosshair smut #bad batch crosshair smut #bad batch x reader #bad batch x reader smut #the bad batch crosshair #crosshair #tbb smut #bad batch smut #the bad batch smut #tbb x reader

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iaus · 3 months

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I SHALL return w specific scene but also ⭐️ bc I love hearing you talk about your v cool work 💖🫡

okay. we're. going to talk about porter. i talk about jace so much (not a bad thing!) but because i tend to draw towards epilogue for these.... i really don't ever talk about porter.

so. i'm gonna talk about a scene from the first chapter of darling.

which. looking away from the untouched draft and the new project.

anyway. i DID make a series for epilogue & darling finally. because. well they are a duo. :)

nsft writing under the cut. as is the nature of darling. <3

so. darling is also tagged unreliable narrator and i want to talk a little about that. specifically about the scene when jace and porter finally get to their honeymoon cabin. so far jace has mostly been kind of poking at porter. he's playing with him. seeing if he matches his memory. and porter's a bit adrift. he can't approach jace the way he used to because this jace is more independent (in a way... i'd argue he's swung more to codependent in a way but. we'll get into that later.)

so. they get to the cabin and look at the amenities. i wish i was more comfortable showing the pictures of the place i based this on but. privacy reasons because it really is a place not far from me. BUT.

their honeymoon cabin is literally one room. it has a little kitchenette that porter's disappointed in, it has a breakfast nook not made for a goliath-genasi (even if he is small <3), and a gigantic bed. well. we're not being subtle on what darling is really about but.

porter's biggest issue is. with the shower.

The shower, irritatingly enough, is not big enough for two. It’s hardly big enough for Porter. Jace finds it hilarious as Porter does his best to maneuver himself into the room. Gives Porter a mean little grin that Porter feels like he hasn’t seen in years. “Guess you can’t wash my back then,” Jace drawls as Porter closes the door.

i personally think this is very telling about their dynamic. in epilogue, at some point when jace is showering he remembers that porter would tend to barge in when he was conditioning his hair and bother him. porter's used to having access to jace all the time. jace was not afforded any sort of privacy in their previous playing house.

but now... there's a logistical issue with just the size of this place they're staying. porter is too big for this space. he cannot just barge in on jace when he's showering in this space. and jace immediately catches onto it and is mean about it. jace has gotten nasty over his week alone and he's more than willing to push that onto porter.

(and this is something else the audience gets to know. from epilogue, we know that jace will kill porter if he's ungrateful. jace is hellbent on having what he wants from porter. porter has no idea. he's still expecting their previous dynamic. he still doesn't know about the fact that there's a literal role reversal now. jace has the power. he's not about to ascend. he doesn't have the shatterstar. yea porter could physically overpower jace: but would he be able to get the opportunity to do that to this jace?)

TANGENT.

but anyway. porter's angry, jace is delighted. but then strangely enough from that frustration we get a bit of sentimental thought from porter:

He thinks about how Jace used to complain—that he hated showering together when obviously Porter just wanted to fuck him against the tile (not that he complained when Porter palmed at his hips, massaged his thighs, spread his ass, and pressed his cockhead up against his already stretched hole)—and then about how before he had the shatterstar in his chest, that Jace would sometimes draw a bath for Porter when they were at their house. Would sit at the edge of the tub and talk to hear his own voice as Porter alternated between dozing off and trying to get Jace’s clothes off.

they're extremely sexually charged thoughts. because i mean. you might be able to tell i think their relationship is really sexual even though they do have some sort of care for each other. but. porter thinking about fucking jace in the shower leads to a memory of jace taking care of him.

which. we never saw any of that in jace's memories of epilogue. in epilogue it was all about how porter took care of him, how porter happened to him. now that we're getting porter's pov we get to see how jace might have showed affection for porter.

(and how porter responds with trying to get in jace's pants.)

i personally think this paragraph is tender and revealing. because even though porter writes it off in the next few sentences and insists this connects to things that he did to keep jace around. it's the first thing he thinks of when he realizes he won't have access to jace.

it's romantic in a bit of a fucked up way. or as romantic as he can get.

He wonders, as he’s hunching over to wash the shampoo from his hair, if Jace remembers that. Little private moments that Porter was so sure Jace would find important. That he went out of his way to do because he knew it had been a good way to ensure Jace was loyal, that he was committed. That he wouldn’t leave.

this section right here. porter plays off his attachment to this memory. he says that he did this because he figured jace would find it important. it's something jace would want. and jace is already known as flighty at this point so i mean. of course he's trying to make it so that jace, known commitmentphobe, is comitted. that he won't leave.

but. there's almost an underlying desperation imo to this little thought.

he's trying so hard to keep this man here who has left him multiple times. he's going out of his way to create these moments and gestures that he thinks are VALUABLE to jace even though... he could get another caster. he doesn't have to entangle himself this deeply but.

porter, unreliable narrator in his own way, wants jace committed. wants jace to stay.

and what was it that jace said in epilogue?

you don't need me, porter.

you want me.

(jace does know him well, huh.)

#.asks #i ALMOST selected a section from the mentor fic #ALMOST #because cgu porter is vile but like jace. i too would climb that. who said that.

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lenialenient · 6 hours

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Fuck it, first 6 Real Jobs chapters under the cut

1 - Neither beautiful nor well written

A dark purple filter dims the crowd that makes up the bulk of the hall. Every seat is filled as the light remains on Julia and Julia only.

“Hi,” she says into the microphone bubble in front of her mouth. It resonates all the way to the last row, all four walls, and the double door entrance. Julia smiles sheepishly. The crowd smiles back. She takes a moment to breathe.

“As some of you might know,” Julia says, but is interrupted by another wave of star-struck cheers and whistles. “Yes, yes, thank you, thank you so much.” She starts over. “As some of you might know, I’m a writer and a poet and I wrote a little something called The Secret of Neverward–” Cheers. Jubilation. People with Neverward shirts rise from their seats. People raise their Neverward posters into the air. “And I am, obviously, extremely successful. Mad successful. And they ask me: Julia! How come you’re so successful? Well, I’m here to tell you!”

Julia clicks on a PowerPoint via a tiny remote in her hand, then grabs a bottle of revitalizing color-protection shampoo from the shower basket and squeezes a dime-sized amount into her palm.

“This right here is not what the writing process looks like.” Julia points at the screen behind her. The PowerPoint shows a photo of herself at a desk in a room with a large window, smiling a toothpaste-advertisement smile into the camera, one hand confidently placed on an old-timey typewriter, the other hand holding a cup of coffee up to her lips. It draws a sensible chuckle from the purple crowd.

“In actuality,” Julia says while massaging the shampoo into every centimeter of her pink-stained scalp, “it looks more like alarm clocks set to four-thirty in the morning. It looks like drafting scenes in the notes of your phone while on public transport, because every second counts. And also-” Julia turns up the water, picks up the showerhead, and starts rinsing, “I drink green tea rather than coffee.”

The audience laughs.

“Honestly, it’s healthier, and it gives you almost the same effect.” Julia smiles ahead and her reflection in the shower screen smiles back, water dripping from her lashes. She lets the hot water run over herself a bit longer.

“When I wrote Neverward,” she says, “it was sandwiched between jobbing at Subway and studying for my linguistics degree. I had no money. I had no guarantee anyone would want to read it. I had no time. I made time anyway. Because that’s the thing-”

Julia shuts the water off and watches the showerhead’s stream turn into a drizzle. The bathroom’s quiet now. “I knew that I wanted to create something meaningful, and to get this piece of myself out there in the world where it could be meaningful for someone else, too. That was what I really wanted.”

Carefully, she steps out of the shower. “Once you have a goal, a real goal,” she whispers, “you can start working toward it. You can start to figure out how to get there. And once you know how to get there, there is only one more thing you need. Determination.”

Julia dries herself off and wraps the towel around her torso. With it firmly trapped underneath her arms, she shuffles across the part of the apartment’s living room that’s actually the living room and to the part of the living room that’s actually the kitchen. She boils water.

Clipping her hair down to a crisp 5mm last week easily shaved ten minutes of blow-drying and ten minutes of styling off her morning routine. Not to mention, it saves her two hair washing sessions a week. No one can tell whether her hair is greasy if it barely exists, and that’s valuable, valuable time. Dress, cardigan, tights – laid out the night before. Another pair of tights because chub rub has chafed through the inner thigh area. Finally, Julia sits down at the kitchen/living room table with a mug of green tea.

The tiny desk in Julia’s room can’t rival the magical feeling of a common area before anyone else is awake. Hayal is the only possible encounter at five in the morning, should she drag herself out of her room on a quest for coffee. She’d give Julia that specific look and say “you really don’t need to sleep, do you?” and Julia would answer: “Oh no. Absolutely not.”

Julia closes her eyes and takes a breath, hands hovering above the keyboard.

Okay. Go.

She opens her mailbox.

Nothing. No subjects in bold, no names that haven’t been sitting there already, not a single message with a Re: in the subject line. Face illuminated by the white shade of empty inbox, Julia taps her fingernail on the laptop’s surface. She refreshes just in case, then scrunches her lip. Fine.

Still drumming on the laptop, Julia moves the cursor to the Sent tab, takes a sip of green tea, and leans in close. Then, she opens the Word document she wrote the email in.

Is this a pointless exercise? It might be. Pretty sure it’s not acceptable to send a query letter to an agent twice, even when the words have been switched out for better words.

… not just a whodunit with superpowers but an analysis of what makes humans lose their humanity. She deletes humans and writes people. Sure, it was a word play, but it made her sound like a psychopath.

It’s fine, one of these days she’ll have to send more queries anyway.

Actually.

The entire sentence feels like something an unpleasant person would write. Not just a whodunit – who does she think she is?

…it’s a whodunit with superpowers.

Julia takes a sip of tea.

… a whodunit with superpowers where every superpower fits into

… a whodunit with superpowers where every character’s unique power fits perfectly into the murder case, making it a mystery until the end

… until the very end

… until the end

… a whodunit with superpowers where every

Julia paces the kitchen. “A whodunit with superpowers…” The stove time display tells her that about twenty minutes ago it turned six. “A whodunit. With superpowers.” She catches the eye of her reflection in the microwave. “What the hell. You’re just saying words.”

With a fresh cup of tea, Julia sits back down in front of the whodunit with superpowers. She closes her eyes, shakes her head to rearrange her thoughts, and goes back in. Calmly, she reads the paragraph she’s been working on, whispers along. Then she reads the paragraph again, slower this time.

Julia leans back into the chair, all the way, as if she could merge into the backrest. Her eyes burn. She uprooted the entire paragraph. The sentence is nicer, but the rest doesn’t fit anymore. Everything’s just pieces, nothing’s connected. The query letter is falling apart in front of her eyes.

Julia reaches for the backspace button and knocks over the mug with her elbow. It sends a stream of green tea trickling down the side of the table and Julia watches. Watches, until two hot tears run down her cheeks and she wipes the mug off the table and listens to it break on the wooden tiles.

She sits there until it’s seven, waiting for this feeling to pass. There’s been a sob, maybe two, but she’s breathing now.

She takes another, deep breath.

She moves the cursor to the little x in the top right corner and closes her mailbox.

She closes the document and doesn’t save the changes.

She cleans up the shards from the floor and slides them into the trash bin.

She blots up the tea. She closes her laptop.

Julia sits there, pointless and still, as the room progressively sheds the night and the gray becomes lighter. Three hours gone to waste. Nothing got done today.

It’s quiet. Julia sits.

Then she stands up, grabs her Subway uniform, her university backpack, and leaves for work.

2 - That white canvas must be turned into something

Hayal wakes up dehydrated, disoriented, and with a side of that headache that presses down onto your nose bridge. She shifts in her bed, rustling the sheets, but doesn’t manage to get up. Sweeping her arms across the mattress, she feels for her phone, then for her charger, plucks it in, and finally unglues her eyelids to look at the time. It’s 13:38. Hayal puts her phone face-down and burrows herself in her blanket.

The fact that she didn’t have to be anywhere was such a cathartic thought to wake up to in the first weeks post-uni.

Several minutes pass.

Hayal groans and pulls the phone into her cocoon. There are things. So many. The little bar at the top of the screen is littered with icons. Instagram and Twitter, four new emails. Four? Hayal resists the urge to shut the whole thing down. Air starts to become scarce in her blanket shell, and she strikes a deal with herself that she’s allowed to break out of it as soon as she’s answered those goddamn emails. She slows her breathing, and the sound of her overgrown nails hitting the phone screen takes over.

Two people are inquiring about new commissions and two people are inquiring about commissions that are overdue. One week and two days, respectively. Hayal goes into her notes and copy-pastes her answer templates. She tells the first two people what she’d charge and that she’d be happy to accept their commissions on those terms. She updates the other two on the status of their art pieces and asks them to be patient just a few days longer.

Finally, she wrestles herself out of the blanket. For another several minutes she lies there, head on her pillow, eyes closed, and breathes in the recycled air as long as it still feels fresh. She’s won that battle, let’s not lose that grip. Get up. Get some water, don’t let dehydration make a home here.

Hayal rolls off the mattress and manages to catch herself just before stepping on the drawing tablet on the floor. God, that would have been fatal. She makes a mental note to either put it away properly next time she passes out for the night or pull back the curtains before she tries to navigate her room. She knows neither of these will happen.

Tablet under her arm, Hayal emerges from her door and squints into the kitchen/living room. “Morning.”

“Morning,” replies the green-dyed weirdo at her kitchen table without so much as raising an eyebrow. “How long have you been going for?”

“Don’t know. Five or six. Seven, maybe?” Hayal drops the tablet on the couch and trudges over to the overstuffed cupboard to pry out a can of instant coffee powder. “I see the SAI interface when I close my eyes.”

Kiwi hums thoughtfully and returns to the academic discipline of distressed typing.

While the electric kettle labors, Hayal fills a glass with tap water and sips it looking over Kiwi’s shoulder. “Do you think you’ll ever be tired of writing Stasi papers?”

“I’m legally not allowed to be tired of writing Stasi papers, I think.”

Kiwi’s sacrificing a lot of typing speed on account of the fact that only one of his hands is actually on the keyboard. With the other, he attempts to simultaneously text what Hayal can only guess are several people.

Hayal spoons a generous amount of coffee powder into the communal Stay strong, Friday’s coming! mug Kiwi got from his parents. While pouring hot water, she takes a moment to mourn the broken espresso maker. “Julia’s gone already?”

“Yeah, Subway.”

“I thought she didn’t have to work until evening.”

“That’s Monday.”

“What’s today?”

“Wednesday.”

“Oh.” Hayal blows onto the coffee-adjacent broth. “That’s harsh.”

“Yeah.”

The almost comfortably familiar sound of Kiwi bouncing his foot like an industrial grade jackhammer draws Hayal’s attention toward the fact that he not only has his stupid-big platform boots on, but also a generous amount of stupid-big eyeliner. His phone keeps buzzing.

“You heading out?”

“I’m meeting the band in a minute,” he says. “But also I’m rushing a deadline, so.”

Hayal takes a careful sip. The coffee still burns her tongue.

“And I kinda messed up because Tien’s already at the bus stop.” Kiwi’s fingers stop typing as he throws Hayal a glance from the corner of his eye. “She’s coming over so she doesn’t have to wait in the cold while I finish this thing up.”

Hayal holds her breath to narrowly avoid choking on her coffee and pulls the mug away from her face. She wipes at the few drops that hit the ground with her sock. “Is she? Now?”

“I mean,” Kiwi turns and holds onto the back of the chair. His voice is drawn out and apologetic. “You were kinda still asleep five minutes ago, so I didn’t really...”

A key turns in a lock, followed by a click. There’s just enough time for Hayal to shoot Kiwi a strong-eyed look before the door swings open to reveal Tien in all her pierced face, spiked hair, combat booted glory – the living proof that punk is on life support.

Hayal is painfully aware of how she’s standing here in her pajamas and dark under-eye circles and overgrown side-cut, leaning against the counter with a mug of coffee in her hand at two in the afternoon like someone who’s got nothing better to do.

Hayal looks at Tien, Tien looks back.

“I thought you’d ring,” says Kiwi.

Tien tears her eyes away from Hayal and jangles a pair of keys. “Yeah, well, I still got those.” A glance back to Hayal. Back to Kiwi. “I can still give them back.”

“No, no, someone reliable outside the apartment having spares is a good thing.”

Tien pockets the keys and closes the door.

“Give me like five more minutes,” says Kiwi and – now two-handed – steps up his typing pace.

Hayal would give a leg for something to type. Kiwi’s the only one barely escaping the weird energy in the room. She tries giving Tien a smile but it ends up all teeth, and all sideways instead of upwards. Tien blinks at her a few times, no smile, but nods. Then, she leans against the doorframe, going through her phone. God.

Hayal stands there, winding the grimace off her face. She could go and hide in her room but not without making the impression that she’s going to go hide in her room. She sips her still too hot coffee and reads Kiwi’s Stasi paper over his shoulder.

“Alright,” he says finally, and shuts the laptop.

Tien sighs in relief. “You done?”

“No.” Kiwi stands up, disappears into his room, and emerges with his guitar case. He slides the laptop into his backpack. “I’ll take it along.”

“You suck at multitasking,” says Tien.

“I’ll make it work.”

Kiwi slips on his leather jacket and throws his guitar case over one shoulder, the backpack over the other. He waves to Hayal before heading out of the door. “I’ll be back at some point tonight.”

“Have fun, be yourself, et cetera.”

Tien gives a slight smile before pulling the door shut. “See you around, Hayal.”

With the door closed, the apartment is vacant. Except for Hayal, of course. She empties her coffee mug in silence, drops onto the couch, and pulls out the drawing tablet from underneath her.

See you around.

What the hell, she thinks, as she puts pen to screen, is that supposed to mean.

3 - An oddity, a nonentity, or a disagreeable man

“I feel like I should’ve warned either of you,” Kiwi says, trying to sit on the metal bench in a way that wouldn’t have him freeze his ass off. Throughout all of December there’s been the cold without the snow and that trend is continuing well into January.

“We can handle it,” says Tien. “We’re all adults here.” She’s given up on the bench, instead leaning on the glass wall of the bus shelter, partially blocking out an ad with a grotesquely big and uncomfortably close face of a white woman with white teeth that watches over the bus stop.

Kiwi and Tien may have occupied the glass house, but they’re not alone at the stop. Three teenagers on their way home from school and two older women shift impatiently. Kiwi can look at them through the ad-free wall to his left and they can look right back. Which, he supposes, is the reason why they’re staying outside, limiting themselves to the occasional outraged glance thrown his or Tien’s way. The teenagers whisper and giggle with each other.

Kiwi drags the soles of his boots – five centimeters thicker than they need to be – back and forth over the concrete and fidgets with the straps of his guitar case. It could be the eyeliner, it could be jeans so thoroughly ripped that he’s wearing tights underneath to not freeze to death. It could be the fact that his hair is green – or meant to be green, as it’s also bleach-blond where Hayal’s missed a spot or two with the dye, and dark brown where the roots have grown out. It could be the fact that all that spills over a wildly outdated glam-punk bandana. It could also be the fact that he’s a man* with an asterisk that, no matter how hard you look, never leads to any tangible footnotes. At least Tien is flashier than him. And at least she’s here. Had he been alone, he would’ve had to tone it down.

Kiwi pulls out his phone and texts Oskar.

Kiwi [14:11]: We’re on our way

Kiwi [14:11]: For real this time

Kiwi [14:11]: Sorry

The bus turns into the street just as he shoves the phone back into his pocket. When they get on, Tien manages to snatch seats facing each other. It’s not too crowded yet, just enough for each double-seat to have – in true German fashion – exactly one person and one bag on it.

Kiwi doesn’t want Hayal to be the topic hanging in the air so he says: “I’m just gonna need five minutes to work on the essay at Oskar’s, ten tops.”

“You’re not gonna do it.”

“Am too.”

“Wait.” Tien’s eyes focus on something Kiwi doesn’t immediately manage to pin down.

“Wait, let me see your tongue.”

Kiwi scans the interior of the bus – he catches the gaze of one of the women from the bus stop, who immediately averts her eyes – before he turns back to Tien and reluctantly sticks his tongue out just enough for her to see the piercing.

“Goddamn,” says Tien. “When did that happen?”

“Last week. Saturday.” Kiwi lowers his voice. “Does it look infected? Because it’s kinda…” He gestures vaguely.

“Yeah, no. It’s just gonna look shitty for a while.”

Kiwi’s phone buzzes.

Oskar [14:13]: oh nice cause mona and I realized songs arent quite the same without any strings

Kiwi [14:16]: I said SORRY

Oskar [14:17]: are you bringing food as an offer for forgiveness

Kiwi [14:17]: I’m not

“Had no idea you were planning on getting something like this done,” says Tien. Her legs are stretched all the way to the seat across from her. “I could’ve recommended you a place.”

“I wasn’t.”

Tien slides a few centimeters up on her seat, props her elbow against the window, and tilts her head against her fist. “Did you have beef with your mom?”

“Why is that – why are you the second person asking this?”

Tien gives him an overstated shrug. Kiwi squints at her before he goes back to typing.

Oskar [14:17]: boo

Oskar [14:18]: but seriously

Oskar [14:18]: you ready for now?

Kiwi [14:19]: If you mean the song you gotta put that in quotation marks or something because otherwise that’s confusing

Oskar [14:20]: youre the one who named it that

Oskar [14:20]: ready for “now”, the song?

Kiwi [14:21]: Actually I think we should take out the spoken part before we try the whole thing for the first time

Kiwi [14:21]: The “I tried wanting less, I tried wanting more” part

Oskar [14:22]: kiwi, my dude, my love

Oskar [14:22]: weve been revising for the past like month

Oskar [14:22]: you have that is

Oskar [14:22]: and i mean didn’t you text me at 2 in the AM about how we need that part

Oskar [14:23]: about how important it is

Oskar [14:23]: about the emotions

“By the way,” Kiwi taps his fingertips on the phone screen without actually typing. He speaks very slowly. “Did I mention that she invited herself and dad over? Again?”

Tien grimaces. “Seriously?”

“They’re still guilt-tripping me because I didn’t come home for Christmas so I couldn’t really, you know, say no.”

Slowly, Tien’s face transitions from empathetic disdain to suspicion. He sounded too prematurely apologetic just now, didn’t he? “When did they say they’re were gonna come exactly?”

Kiwi shifts his weight, keeps his eyes on the phone. “Friday.”

Tien rises in her seat, lips thin. “So, what, you’re gonna miss practice?”

“I’m trying to move it to Saturday, okay? My mom just takes two days to reply to a message.”

Tien drags a hand down the side of her face. “Kiwi…”

“’I’ll be there. I’m gonna make it work somehow. Promise.”

Kiwi [14:24]: I guess it’s too emotional

Kiwi [14:24]: Kinda cringy

Kiwi leans back against the squiggly bus seat pattern and looks at Tien. “You’re so serious about this lately.”

“Maybe,” says Tien, “I’m getting kinda impatient. We’re not really doing much.”

“We can’t really do much until my finals are over.” Kiwi bounces his leg. On the other side of the dirty window, towering grey blocks start to make way for yards and fences. “At least I can’t, anyway.”

“When’s that?”

“The last one’s Monday in two weeks.”

“Hmm,” says Tien.

Oskar [14:25] were not gonna film today

Oskar [14:26] so id say lets try it out anyway

The outskirts of town harbor a now empty house that belonged to Oskar’s grandparents before they died two years back. In those two years it’s been left mostly untouched, which is why Kiwi would never dare to actually go inside the house, but the shack that stands in its yard – formerly a workshop and equipped with electricity – couldn’t be a more convenient place for Divine Discontent to practice their songs.

Kiwi and Tien haul their instruments off the bus and walk the rest of the way through a desolate early afternoon suburbia. Fewer eyes means Kiwi doesn’t feel compelled to powerwalk constantly, but there’s something eerie about this place. Like it’s saying that if he only changed the trajectory of his life five centimeters to the right, he, too, could have a lawn and a fence someday.

Because you can’t hear the doorbell in the workshop, Tien hands Kiwi her bass case, vaults over the fence, and opens the gate from inside. The stiff winter grass crackles under their boots as they make their way across the yard.

Mona’s spinning idly on the stool behind her drum-kit as Kiwi opens the door to the practice shack. Her drumsticks are fixed behind her ear in her rose-colored hijab, and with the matching pastels and expertly-carved makeup, she looks like someone who either has fifty thousand followers on Instagram or who aspires to have fifty thousand followers on Instagram. Oskar rests one of his arms on the mic stand, the other in the pocket of his sweatpants. He wears big shirts and lets his dark hair grow to his shoulders. Hayal once said that nobody in Divine Discontent looks like they’re playing the same music. Tien argues that they can make the lack of consistent style work as a style in itself. Kiwi, meanwhile, maintains that post-progressive pseudoglam queercore cannot be reduced to a singular cohesive look.

Oskar and Mona abruptly turn and start clapping in formal unison as Tien and Kiwi enter.

“Oh, fuck off,” says Kiwi. A grin sits on his face though, and he can’t seem to wipe it off. After easy greetings and one-armed hugs, he squats down to unpack his stuff. There’s no point in taking any jackets off, since the workshop is barely any warmer than outside.

“So, are we all good to go?” Oskar asks.

“I’ve been for weeks,” says Mona. “I really wanna know what it sounds like in all its glory.”

Kiwi sits there, backpack unzipped, his hand inside instinctively grabbing his laptop.

He looks up, at Tien, her bass guitar hooked to the amp, and at Mona, drum sticks in hand, hovering over the toms. One second passes, two seconds pass.

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” Kiwi zips the backpack shut again.

Oskar picks up the mic and throws Kiwi a glance. “So, with or without the spoken part?”

Kiwi breathes in. “Without.”

Disappointment flashes over Oskar’s face for a second, but he shrugs. “Sure thing.”

Kiwi leaves his backpack by the door and unsheathes his guitar. He throws it on and takes his spot in Divine Discontent’s formation.

4 - Times New Roman, Twelve-Point, Double-Spaced

Julia kicks the door shut behind her. Her legs are sore, her backpack is heavy, a grocery bag dangles from the crook of her arm because her hands are busy – one with the keys and the other holding the phone that she, under no circumstances, can take her eyes off.

It’s all about the tiny 1. All about that little symbol and the promise of 1 new message(s). She saw it on the tram home, the sender, the subject, everything but the actual email. Reading the actual email requires preparation and a specific setting, but she can confirm that the email’s neither from Amazon nor Duolingo and that is, in fact, a Re, and what’s more, it is Re: QUERY SFF.

A drawn out “Welcome back” wavers over to Julia. Groceries in her arms, she crosses the living room, past Hayal who’s sprawled over the entire length of the couch, eyes staring up at the ceiling and the drawing tablet on the floor.

“Having a crisis?” Julia asks, pulling discounter pasta, tea, and soup cans out of the bag and stuffing them into her third of the cupboard. There’s no time to actually cook dinner tonight.

“Yes.”

Julia stocks her part of the fridge in record time and throws the shopping bag on the shopping bag pile. An unheard-of amount of energy is bristling within her, as she slips into her room and re-emerges with her laptop. “What’s the crisis about?”

“I thought I could take a break and play Animal Crossing for like an hour,” says Hayal.

“And you can’t?” Julia props the laptop up on the kitchen table, presses the power button, and sits.

“I can’t.”

The moment the laptop whirs to life, Julia starts drumming her fingers on the table. Deep breaths. She knows there’s nothing to expect. She knows that everyone who’s ever published anything will tell her that they’ve collected fifty or seventy or a hundred or two-hundred rejections before there’s been a trace of interest from a literary agent. So, this is going to be a rejection, and that’s fine.

“But aren’t you having a break right now?” she asks Hayal.

“I guess I’m having a break.”

Julia’s desktop appears and her fingers fly over the trackpad. Her inbox still shows her the same notification when it stretches across her screen – as if she needs reminding. This wasn’t the first agent she messaged, but it was the first who responded. Okay, reject me.

“Then what’s stopping you from playing Animal Crossing?” she asks, hovering the cursor over to the email.

“Gee, Julia.” Hayal says. “Am I supposed to have my break and enjoy it too? Like some hedonistic glutton?”

The notification dissolves as Julia clicks the email. Then it sits before her, open, accessed, unveiled. It’s shorter than expected, just a small block of text, but you can’t start a message like this at the beginning. You start in the middle, you start where your eyes happen to look the moment it appears, and you start with keywords. And there is one:

Unfortunately.

That’s a rejection. That’s a rejection, alright.

Julia reads the whole message, beginning to end. Beginning to end, again. Still a rejection.

Julia breathes in and out. A rejection was fine five seconds ago and it is fine now. She expected nothing else. It’s time to say ‘okay then’ and close the email and make soup for dinner. But the cursor doesn’t move a pixel and neither does she.

A wave of some type of emotion washes over Julia, and that’s a problem. There’s a problem and it needs to be reviewed right now, or she’s not going to last.

She opens a blank Word document.

You got your first rejection, how are you feeling?

Bad.

But why so?

Judging by the immovable blinking cursor, she’s already written herself into a corner.

Am I arrogant? I didn’t really think the first rejection wasn’t going to be one. This is the first agent who responded. Of course it was going to be a rejection. It would be so incredibly arrogant of me to think it wouldn’t be one.

Behind her, the couch rustles. She turns and watches Hayal collect her drawing tablet and pen from the floor. Julia refocuses on the Word doc in front of her and tightens her lips.

Did you hope it wasn’t going to be a rejection? She types.

I guess. But wouldn’t everyone?

She taps her finger on the table and straightens up.

Why did you hope it wasn’t going to be a rejection?

Julia already knew she wouldn’t be able to answer that question when she typed it, so she’s not surprised when all she can do is sit and stare at the letters.

A few seconds pass before Julia hits the table with the palm of her hand and rises from her chair in the same motion Hayal jumps.

“Sorry.”

“Writing problems?”

“No. Not at all.” Laptop in hands, she scurries off to her room. There, she powers up her old printer. While it sputters ink onto paper, Julia rummages through her drawers until she finds a roll of tape and rips a piece off with her teeth. She snatches the email – still warm – from the printer, climbs on top of her office chair, and tapes the rejection to the wall.

Carefully, she steps back down and takes a moment to behold her work. A white A4 paper – two thirds blank and one third standard rejection lingo – taped to the center of the wall above her desk.

She can work with that.

4.5 - Julia is sixteen

And the pattern of her room’s carpet stamps itself onto her calves as she sits cross-legged on the floor, leaning in on the screen in front of her.

“Once you know what you want, you can start to figure out how to get there,” Michelle says. Very emphatically, because it’s very important. “You break that huge goal into tiny goals and then you set yourself one or several tiny goals every year, or half a year, or even every month, whatever works best for you. You’ll be there before you know it.”

Julia pauses the video and pats the carpet in search of her journal.

Monthly goals, she writes down, underlines it.

Monthly chapter goals.

Monthly submission goals?

She unpauses the video.

“But you need to put in the work,” Michelle continues. “It’s not going to be a walk in the park, alright? If you don’t ‘have time’” – she does air quotes – “to work on your project, you need to make time. If you don’t feel like writing today, that’s just a feeling, and you can push past that.”

The background in Michelle’s videos is one giant bookshelf. Some of the books are facing forward – those that have her name on them.

“Number three. Effective time management is pivotal,” says Michelle. “Try taking the twenty-four hours of the day and assigning them a purpose. If you mark down work for eight hours, plus getting there and back – that makes it nine hours – and sleep for eight hours, you are at seventeen. That leaves seven hours you can potentially spend working on your project.”

Julia seesaws her pen up and down against the pages of her journal. On bad days, school’s also eight hours. But she needs to account for homework. The view count below the video hits around thirty thousand. How many of these people are still in school, Julia wonders. Not a lot, probably. She’s got a head start.

“Number four. It’s obviously a long-term commitment, maybe a forever commitment, and putting in the work is key, but there’s a useful thing that you can do right now. It sounds cliché, but I promise it’s going to give your confidence a boost, and it seems like it worked for Octavia Butler, if that’s anything to go by. That is, speak your goals into existence. Say ‘I’m going to be a best-selling author.’ Or write it down, after all, we’re writers.”

Not all thirty thousand are going to be bestselling authors. Or authors at all. Who knows how many of these guys even have a finished novel to their name? Julia does. Almost.

“Say it not like it’s a thing that you want to happen,” Michelle says, “but say it like it is a thing that is going to happen. Make it destiny. Make it inevitable.”

Julia grabs her journal and her pen. Then she puts the pen back down it in favor of a sharpie. She dedicates one page for each statement.

I am going to be a published author before I’m 20.

She flips the page.

I am going to be a renowned author before I’m 25.

She flips the page.

I will be extraordinary.

5 - The Sad Lesbians, not the Cool Ones

With a single tap of Hayal’s pen, gray fills the entire canvas. She sighs and reverses, zooms in and squints for gaps in her line-art. Ah, there we are. A shirt line doesn’t quite connect to the skirt. She draws in what’s hardly more than a dot and tries to match the pressure so it’s the same weight as the rest of the lines. Good, fixed. On the next, resolute tap, gray spills over the entire canvas again and Hayal hangs her head in defeat.

She shoves her tablet closer to the edge of the bed and drops onto her back, closes her eyes, and takes a second to very purposefully, very consciously, groan. With a question of what’s the time, anyway, she pulls out her phone. 22:31, the night is still young.

A couple of seconds later, Hayal’s scrolling through Twitter. And another couple of minutes later, a notification pops up on the top of her screen.

“What-!”, she yells, before the phone slips out her hand.

For a moment Hayal lies there in silence and accepts that she dropped her phone on her face. She picks it up and rubs her nose. When she turns the screen back on, she does so carefully, with the lightest press of a button, like the message is going to disappear if she looks at it directly.

No, it’s still there.

Tien [22:34]: How are you?

“What!” Hayal reiterates.

She stares at the message until another one comes in.

Julia [22:36]: What are you yelling about

Hayal pushes herself off the bed, zigzags through her mess and, two seconds later, stands in Julia’s room, gripping the doorframe.

“Tien messaged me,” she says.

“She did?”

The tidiness of Julia’s room is passively shaming. There’s not a thing on the floor, instead, the things are on shelves, and some of them are organized alphabetically. All that’s on the bed is Julia, already in her pajamas, the phone next to her, and the journal she’s just putting down.

“Look,” says Hayal. She clambers onto the bed and levels the phone to Julia’s face. “It’s all spelled out, too. And the first letter is capitalized. I know she has auto-capitalization off. She’s a lowercase texter. And the punctuation? There’s a whole question mark.”

Julia’s eyes move from left to right until a smile springs up in the corner of her mouth. “’Lean Mean Tien Machine’?”

“That’s from back when we were still together.”

“And you didn’t change her name?”

“Was I supposed to?”

“I guess people usually would.” Julia shrugs. “One could argue that it implies that you’re not over her.”

“I mean, I absolutely am not over her but that’s got nothing to do with my shitty phone organization.” Hayal withdraws her phone and scrolls. “Most of my contacts are just numbers. I read the messages to figure out who it is.”

“Am I saved as anything?” Julia asks.

“Yeah, you’re ‘Julia’.”

“Ah.”

“Okay, focus.” Hayal calls up the message again. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Well, how are you?”

“That’s a loaded question.”

“You could tell her that.”

“I don’t know,” Hayal sways from side to side. “She’s being serious, right? She’s using her serious voice, with the question mark and all. Shouldn’t I be serious, too?”

“You weren’t?”

“No, it was a joke.”

Julia shuffles a bit. Hayal squints at the phone, chewing on her lip.

“Do you think she wants to get back together?”

“Did she text you at all since you broke up?

“No.”

“Chances are good, I guess.”

“Ah. Oh.” Hayal grinds her teeth and leans against the wall. “Oh man. Oh boy.”

“Do you want to get back together?”

“No.”

Julia smiles a little helplessly. “You should probably tell her that?”

“Don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“’Cause. That’s not really a good answer to ‘how are you’. Also I love her so, so much.”

“Oof,” Julia sits back, journal clutched to her chest. “Oof, Hayal.”

Hayal keeps sitting on Julia’s bed, back to the wall and the phone in her lap. She takes several deep breaths. She calls up the messenger keyboard and backs out again. She briefly considers sending only a solitary crying-laughing emoji. Then she’s typing.

“You got something?” Julia flips through the pages of her journal, furrowing her brow every few entries.

“Mhm.”

Why are you asking, Hayal types, and deletes.

How come?

She deletes.

Why do you ask? She hits send, sets her phone to vibrate, and puts it face down on the blanket. Don’t look at it again, don’t wait for typing… to pop up next to her name. Just chill. But how? Julia’s scribbling something in her journal. Hayal slides down the wall a couple of centimeters and folds her arms. There are tall stacks of paper and even taller stacks of books on Julia’s carefully organized desk. The walls are blank save for a singular slip of white paper printed in a font too small to read from here.

The phone buzzes.

Tien [22:54]: You looked really done when I saw you today

Hayal’s mouth opens as if she’s going to say something. Obviously, she isn’t.

Hayal [22:54]: Yeah I’m kinda tired

Tien [22:55]: can’t sleep?

Hayal [22:55]: Drawing all night

Should she mention it? Yeah, she’s gonna mention it.

Hayal [22:56]: Sort of live off it now

Tien [22:56]: FOR REAL?

Tien [22:56}: THAT’S INSANE

Hayal [22:57]: I guess

She peppers the crying emoji into the message. Twice. Then she deletes the second one and sticks with that.

Hayal [22:58]: It’s a lot tho

Hayal [22:58]: I haven’t seen the sun in months

Tien [22:59]: don’t leave the house much?

Hayal [22:59]: Not at all

Hayal [23:00]: Like I straight up couldn’t tell you when I last went outside

Tien [23:00]: hayal. that’s like a recipe for depression

Hayal [23:01]: I know

Hayal chews on her bottom lip. She’s halfway into deciphering the individual book titles on Julia’s desk, when the phone buzzes against her palms.

Tien [23:03]: actually

Tien [23:03]: do you feel like leaving your cave

Tien [23:04]: cause I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a while

Hayal slams down the phone like it bit her. She looks at Julia with big eyes. Julia looks up from her journal.

“She says she wants to talk.”

“Oh, there it is.”

“What do I say?”

“Don’t ask me, you know yourself better.” Julia furrows her brow. “And Tien definitely. Do you want to talk to her?”

“I think. I wanna see her.”

Julia vaguely gestures towards the phone. Hayal picks it back up and takes a deep breath.

Hayal [23:05] When?

“I’ve never actually been in a real relationship, you know?” Julia says, eyes back on her journal. “I’m probably not the best person to ask for advice.”

“You haven’t?”

“I mean technically I have.” She bounces the closed pen off the current page. “But I don’t really think that counts because both of them were before I realized I like girls.”

“Ha,” says Hayal, “how long did they last?”

“Longest was three weeks. I honestly thought I was the problem.”

The phone in Hayal’s hand buzzes.

“Still not entirely sure I’m not.” Julia says.

Tien [23:07]: i’m kinda tied up with some band organization stuff right now, but have you ever seen us all play

Hayal [23:07]: Only on youtube

Tien [23:08]: you could join us for next band practice

Tien [23:08]: that is if you want

Tien [23:08]: it’s friday

Hayal holds her breath, tracing the little letters with her eyes. She gets up, opens Julia’s door, and shouts into the rest of the apartment: “Kiwi?”

After a couple of seconds, there’s a muffled answer through the wall: “Yeah?”

Hayal crosses the kitchen and pokes her head into Kiwi’s room.

“Do you mind if I tag along on Friday?”

5.5 - Hayal is seventeen

Closer to eighteen, and when she comes home from school, her mom is waiting for her in the kitchen, sitting at the table in a superficial state of calm, holding a dainty cup of coffee to her lips. The green-white-checkered tablecloth has been cleared of everything but an equally dainty saucer, and a stark white envelope.

There’s a moment of pause in which Hayal’s brain time-lapses the past couple of months, trying to recall something that she’s done that she shouldn’t have, and arrives at the conclusion that there’s nothing in that A-student life of hers that fits that description. But then – hold on – hold on. Hayal steps closer and scans the address on the letter.

“No.”

“It’s the moment of truth, baby.”

It’s been how long since she sent in the portfolio? Months, too many. She thought they’d ghosted her by now. Hayal hesitates to pick up the envelope. It’s all by itself on the table, flat and white, and automatically generated, valid without signature. Looming.

Hayal grabs it. Pokes through the glue, pries it open with her fingernails. Unfolds the letter.

It’s quiet. Enough for Hayal to hear the ticking of her mom’s wrist watch.

“’You have been admitted.’”

The cup clinks against the saucer, Hayal’s mom rises from her chair.

“You have been admitted,” Hayal says.

Her mom wraps her arms around her, actually picks her up a little, which she hasn’t done in approximately eight years.

“’You have been admitted’!” Hayal screams. She pumps her fist into the air, letter still in the other one, nearly topples her mom. “I’ve been fucking admitted!”

“I’ll excuse the language this time.” Hayal’s mom sets her down, hugs her again. “This is fantastic. I’m so proud of you, Hayal.”

There’s a sting in Hayal’s eyes, but it’s the best kind of sting that could possibly be in one’s eyes.

“Oh,” she gently frees herself from the hug. “I need to –”

“Yes. Go.”

Hayal runs to grab the jacket she put down five minutes ago and pockets her phone, her keys. Erdem’s head pokes out from the corner, exuding an aura that only a thirteen-year-old with headphones dangling around his neck can exude. “Why are you yelling?”

Hayal doesn’t stop walking as she turns around, claps her hands in front of his face.

“I’m going to art school! Ha!”

Two seconds later she’s on the stairs, speeding past the other doors and speed-dialing Tien.

C’mon, pick up.

It rings two, three times, then it clicks.

“What’s wrong?”

Neither of them are phone call people.

“Guess what,” Hayal says.

There’s a moment of static silence, as if Tien is actually trying to guess.

Finally: “No!”

“Yes!”

“Oh, fuck.” Tien laughs, first a little, then a lot. “Oh shit! Wait, hold on, I’m coming over.”

“No! I’m coming over already, you stay where you are!”

“Let’s meet in the middle.”

The park’s rusty with fall and the onset of evening. Between the people lying in the grass, catching the last scraps of light, Hayal sees Tien jogging her way. She’s not hard to spot in her all-black. Her shoulder-length hair is up in a ponytail, she’s wearing her glasses instead of contacts.

“You fucking –” is the first thing Tien says when she’s within shouting distance. “You fucking artist, you!”

There’s the tightest possible hug, and when they separate, Tien takes Hayal’s face in both hands and kisses her, again.

6 -Local Bassist Tien Thanh Le Demonstrates German Efficiency by Causing Two Crises at Once

The bus smells almost like new car. Hayal traces the randomized pattern on the seat in front of her. She knows her shoulders are up to her ears, and she knows that must be terrible for her already wonky posture, but she’s going to cut herself some slack because, after all, she’s out here, in public. She sits in the window seat and Kiwi by the aisle. If he hadn’t managed to push his parents’ visit back, chances are Hayal wouldn’t have come either.

“Okay, but,” Kiwi sends a text and sets his phone down on his leg, “how come? Since when have you two been talking again?”

“Literally only the two days. She really just went ‘hey, Hayal, how’s it going? I wanna talk to you, so how about Friday’ and I was like –” She looks at Kiwi with the most shaken-to-the-core expression she can muster.

Because the silence had been broken, she had wondered if they’d go back to sending good morning and good night texts now, but Tien hasn’t messaged her since. Hayal also hasn’t messaged Tien.

“How do you feel about that?” Kiwi asks.

Hayal leans her head back against the seat and stretches her legs under the one in front of her. “I don’t know.” She eyes the lifeless fluorescent lamp on the ceiling of the bus. “I’ve been missing her.”

There’s a beat of silence, then another one while Kiwi checks his phone.

“Hope this doesn’t get messy,” he says. “Even if you two get back together, Julia’s in her room now, so-”

“Hw- Wha- Now, hold on, now, mister. You’re kinda skipping several – kinda skipping the whole staircase here. We’re not trying to get back together.”

“Okay,” says Kiwi, with special emphasis on the ‘o’. He passes his phone from one hand to the other. “So, what is it, then? A ‘we should stay friends’ thing?”

Hayal gives him a Look.

“See, this is important to me because I love you both.”

“I genuinely don’t have a clue.”

“But, I mean, you…” Kiwi fizzles out at the sight of Hayal’s index finger raised towards his face. “Yeah?”

“You know, you can keep prying,” she says, a twitch in the corner of her mouth, “but I will pry back.”

“I’m like ninety percent sure there isn’t a single thing about my personal life I haven’t told you at some point.”

“Mh-hm.” Hayal glances at Kiwi’s phone. “Like whatever is going on between you and Oskar.”

Kiwi shoves the phone in his pocket and folds his hands. “Fine.”

Another bus stop, five minutes of walking, and a few jabs at a lack of punctuality later, Hayal finds herself holding a camera and filming Divine Discontent starting the same song over and over. That’s something she’s volunteered to do, not just because she’d hate to sit on her ass and watch while everyone else is trying to create something, but also because she’d like it to seem as if Tien wasn’t the only reason for her being here.

The aesthetic dissonance between the four members is only more potent with the thick jackets everyone’s wearing. Yet Divine Discontent come together to deliver the world’s most concentrated and also only interpretation of post-progressive pseudoglam queercore – a genre that Hayal had trouble visualizing up until right this moment.

She’s got to admit, they are leaving an impression.

It’s mindboggling how Oskar’s able to sing his heart right out, even though he knows people can hear and see him – and how Kiwi plays as though they couldn’t. Either the bass is more prominent in this song than in others, or you only really notice the bass when you begin to notice the bassist. In her heavy leather jacket and fingerless gloves, Tien works through the strings. In this moment, she radiates such an unfair amount of confidence that in the rare case of Tien messing up her chords, Hayal is more inclined to believe that something is wrong with her own ears. Mona’s awkwardness around people that aren’t part of her little in-circle falls away completely and Hayal hopes for a drum solo in the other half of the song, because the vision of her unrestrained drumming is just delightful.

The problem is, Divine Discontent has yet to get to the other half of the song. The second verse is as far as they get before someone – usually Kiwi – overwhelmingly Kiwi – calls for a redo.

Every time the music stops and the band take a couple of seconds to refocus – and for Kiwi to brief everyone on an alternate version of the lyrics he’d like them to try – Hayal carefully sets the camera on an old workbench that she herself would not dare sit on, squats down, and burrows her hands in the pockets of her parka. The shack is cold as hell and her back hurts from standing – something that she, come to think of it, hasn’t done a lot in the recent past.

“Ready?” Kiwi asks into the room. Hayal picks the camera back up and aims. After three nods from his bandmates – and one from Hayal – Kiwi begins to pluck the intro from his guitar strings.

Since Oskar’s the only vocalist but all members of Divine Discontent have tried their hands at songwriting, they’ve made it a habit to establish a personal signature by giving the intro of a song to whoever wrote the bulk of it. This means, to his mild distress, that two thirds of Divine Discontent’s songs start with Kiwi’s guitar.

Upside down, but I try standing my ground/ An hour, a decade, to speak out loud are the first lines Oskar sings, his voice the cue for the other instruments to kick in. The plan is to record two versions, one with a spoken bridge to the last chorus, and one without. As last time, however, the second instance of And now I’m glad I wasted my childhood/ Because now if I wanted to I could/ Live twice as fast and skip all the dull parts is the farthest they’ve come before Kiwi stops playing the guitar to rub his hands over his face and groan. One after the other, the instruments fall away.

Hayal stops recording.

“What now?” asks Tien.

“I can’t deal with the – it’s still –” Kiwi gestures, as he tends to, in shapes that make no sense to anyone but him. “Ew.”

Tien sighs, twice as long as someone would normally sigh.

“No worries,” says Oskar. “How about five everyone?”

“Ten,” says Kiwi.

“Even better.” Oskar pulls a bag of loose tobacco from his pocket and taps it onto a sheet of rolling paper.

“Uh-huh. I see you,” says Kiwi. He leans his guitar against the wall and wipes at his forehead.

Oskar gives him a grin, already heading towards the door. “Voice maintenance. What can I do?”

A clang of sheet metal announces the door dropping shut. Mona stretches, shakes her arms, stands up, and stretches again. Hayal and Tien stand idly.

“So, how is it?” asks Mona slowly. She cracks her fingers, first cupping her right hand with her left, then her left hand with her right.

Tien grimaces at the sound. “How is what,” she asks.

“Hayal’s here so you can have a conversation, right?” Her eyes dart from Tien to Hayal.

“Ten minutes might just be enough for a conversation,” Kiwi says, “and I have a feeling the break might stretch a little.”

Mona nods thoughtfully. “Might just stretch a bit.”

“I’m never telling you anything ever again.” Slowly, Tien turns to Hayal, her lips approaching a smile. “Wanna go and have a conversation?”

Hayal follows Tien out into the yard, leaving behind Kiwi and Mona’s discussion about whether ‘live twice as fast’ is pretentious or not, past Oskar who gives them a thumbs-up and is met with an affectionate middle finger.

They find themselves stopping and standing behind the workshop; the yellow motion sensor light drowns out the blue hour and Hayal can see the air she breathes. She leans against the sheet metal wall, her hands in her pockets. Tien stands in front of her, her hands in her pockets as well.

No one says a thing.

“’Suuup,” says Hayal, as blatantly embarrassing as possible – ‘cause if you do it intentionally you can’t do it accidentally.

“Yeah, shit.” Tien says. “I forgot what I wanted to say.”

Hayal debates whether she should grin at Tien. She’d like to.

“Alright, it’s back. Be prepared.”

“Preparing.”

Tien brings up her hands, thumbs in line with her fingers, and jolts them back down in a parallel motion. “I saw you on Wednesday,” she says.

Hayal nods.

“And it kinda pulled the rug out from under my feet how much I –” she stops and squints at the air, “– miss… your presence? In my life?”

Hayal blinks. “Holy shit.”

“Look, listen,” there’s a lopsided grin on Tien’s face, “as sappy as it is, gotta let it out.”

“Okay,” Hayal says. “Okay, okay. Okay. Let me think.” She breathes in, out. “I miss your presence, too. I really do. I mean, you’re pretty much the coolest person I know.”

Tien smiles. She says: “How are you doing right now?”

“Mentally?”

“Yeah.”

Hayal chews at the inside of her cheek. “Okay. I’d like to say I’m doing okay. I’m a bit behind on commissions which is, you know, stressful, but – I’m doing okay.”

Tien’s smile more and more turns into a diagonal line.

“What about you?” Hayal asks, something she hadn’t done enough in the past. “How are you?”

“Been better,” says Tien. “Worse, too. Spent a lot of time at my mom’s house lately, that’s as close to vacation as I’m gonna get.”

“Cool,” Hayal says. She smiles. There’s so much more she wants to say, but more could lead to more still.

With her boot Tien flattens the frozen grass before she looks back up at Hayal. “When I said I miss your presence – I don’t know if that’s weird – I’m not saying that we need to be together again. I mean, not that that’s impossible…”

“Do you want to be back together?”

“Don’t know. You?”

“Don’t know.”

A beat of silence.

“When I say I miss you,” says Tien. “What I mean is I miss you. I miss talking to you and seeing you and sitting in cafés talking for hours about whatever shit is on our minds, you feel?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“And,” says Tien. “We don’t need to get back together. We don’t need to be together to be together, right?”

“So, you’re asking a year later if we wanna stay friends?” Hayal asks.

“I guess, yeah. Because I wanna spend time with you and I like you.”

“I like you and want to spend time with you, too.”

“Cool.”

“Cool.” As is her first reflex when a conversation flattens, Hayal reaches for the phone in her pocket and finds two new emails. She stuffs it back quickly. “Do you feel like sitting in a café and talking for hours about whatever in the near future? I feel like I need to get out more.”

“Sure,” Tien says, and that feels nice.

There’s a mechanical buzzing in the air and just when Hayal glances up to the motion sensor lamp, Tien pulls her own phone from her jacket. Her face lights up as she checks the screen. “Oh shit, I need to look at that real quick.”

She turns away from Hayal, hunched over her phone and reads with wide open eyes. Hayal resists the urge to look over her shoulder.

Tien keeps standing there, frozen like that even after the light of her screen stops illuminating her face.

“What happened?”

Tien turns around with a grin on her face that seems to get wider by the second. “Let’s go back inside.” She takes Hayal’s hand and draws her back towards the front of the workshop. “There’s news.”

***

Kiwi stands between Oskar and Mona, huddled around Tien’s phone screen as she holds it up to them, arm fully stretched. The brightness is turned all the way up and makes Kiwi squint. What glares back at them is an email correspondence. Subject: “A question” sent by Tien Thanh Le, “Re: A question” answered by Michael Grünberg, Event Manager. Kiwi’s still frozen solid as Oskar high-fives Tien’s free hand. Mona gapes, switching back and forth between looking at Tien and looking at the phone. “You need to give me a pinkie promise that this is not a prank.”

“Read it again, if you have to.” Tien grins, ear to ear. “No prank. It’s real, black on white.”

Mona gasps. In lieu of her own hands being enough, she clutches Tien’s hands to her chest and bounces up and down, squealing in delight. (Tien neither bounces or squeals with her – can’t risk her hard-ass punk cred.)

Kiwi stands there stock-still, fingers frozen in the middle of reaching for the phone, which has since traveled from Tien to Oskar and from Oskar to Hayal. “Wait. No, wait. What? What? What is this?”

“It’s exactly what it looks like,” Tien says. Kiwi can’t recall the last time he’s seen her so giddy. “The opening act at Tristan’s dropped out, so we’re up.”

“Tristan’s?”

“It’s a bar.”

“Opening act?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Us?”

“Opening act.” Tien nods. “Us. You can repeat the rest of the sentence as well if that’s what it takes.”

“You’re kidding, right? You’re joking.”

“Dead serious,” says Tien.

Kiwi takes a step back, a step to the side, and one to the other. Cranes his neck to look at Oskar. At Mona. Hayal, too. No one else seems as alarmed as he is. He opens and closes his mouth like a fish. “When did this–” He gets the phone from Hayal. He reads over the email again. Looks up, looks down. Up again. “Who is this, even?”

“Tristan’s event manager. I’ve been scouting for places we might have a chance in,” says Tien, her voice aims for calm and confident, specifically cause Kiwi is neither. “I’ve been sending emails and requests for a while now.”

“And, and,” says Kiwi, “and you didn’t say anything? Anything at all?”

“I may have forgotten to mention it.”

“You can’t just sign us up for a concert!” Each of Kiwi’s sentences comes out a different pitch than the one before. “We can’t even get through the entirety of ‘Now’!”

“It’s not a concert,” Oskar chimes in. “Makes you think too big and intimidating. It’s a small gig at a niche club, that’s all. It’s LGBT-friendly, too. Mona’s been there before.”

“They have pretty decent non-alcoholic options,” supplies Mona.

Kiwi turns around to Oskar, mouth forming a couple of soundless shapes before finding his voice. “Were you in on this?”

“I was in on this.”

Kiwi turns to Mona. She gives him an apologetic smile.

“No.”

“I wasn’t at first, if that helps.”

Kiwi takes another step back, unable to close his mouth, and gestures helplessly at all three of his bandmates. “What the fuck?”

Hayal, sucking air in through her teeth, withdraws to fiddle with the camera.

“Why am I–” Kiwi swallows down a voice crack, potentially several. “Why am I the only one who didn’t know about this?”

“It’s not like we all actively conspired against you. Tien just told me at some point,” Oskar says, “Mona figured her out eventually.”

“But you didn’t tell me?” Kiwi’s voice climbs the octaves and remains adamantly on the verge of a shriek. “None of you?”

Tien and Oskar exchange a few negotiating glances – a ‘you do it – no, you’ type deal – Mona investigates the wall with a tight mouth.

Oskar sighs, resigned to his fate. “We figured,” he says, “it would stress you out.”

“AND IT IS NOT DOING THAT RIGHT NOW?”

“Okay,” Oskar says. “Okay. Breathe, Kiwi.”

Kiwi, all red in the face, does not do that. “And it’s so soon, too! There’s no way we would have time to – Do we even have a set? Do we have enough songs?”

“We’ll do covers in between original ones,” says Tien. “I’ve thought about this.”

“You’ve thought about this!?” Kiwi whirls around, points at Tien, points at himself. “Maybe you should’ve thought about involving me in the decision-making process!”

Hayal murmurs to the camera: “He’s got a point.”

Kiwi clutches his feverish forehead, finally breathes, or at least forces his chest to rise and fall. “No,” he announces, “No, no, no. No bar. No gig. We’re not doing this.”

Tien, Oskar, and Mona look at each other and the temperature in the frigid shack drops further. On their faces, in order: Stoicism, patience, and uncertainty. What is not there is compromise.

“Okay, well,” says Kiwi. “I’m not doing this.”

He snatches his guitar from its resting place against the wall, its case from the floor, and squats down to get one into the other as fast as humanly possible.

“Kiwi, come on,” says someone – Oskar – but Kiwi shrugs it off in his rush to pick up his jacket, shoulder the guitar case, and make it to the door. There’s another bargaining “Kiwi!” before the metal door slams shut and the sound reverberates across the yard.

***

Kiwi speed-walks past the fences of afternoon suburbia. Part of his brain registers that he’s still wearing an outfit he put on under the assumption that he wasn’t gonna be alone in public, part of his brain registers that he’s freezing his ass off because he didn’t actually put the jacket on, but most of it is preoccupied with the fact that his bandmates collectively backstabbed him. That’s what they did, so he wasn’t wrong to storm off. No reason to feel bad about it. He doesn’t owe them to stay and listen to their excuses, he doesn’t owe them shit.

About halfway to the bus stop, hasty footsteps catch up with him. Kiwi considers walking faster, but that’d mean he’d end up sprinting and that’s just not attainable with a guitar case on your back. He turns around, sees Hayal, and is immediately stung by guilt.

“You’re really just gonna leave me like that?” Hayal pants. As soon as she comes to a stop, she braces her hands against her knees. “With my ex and two people I sort-of-know-but-not-super-well? That’s cold.”

“Sorry,” Kiwi catches his breath. “Really. I just – What?” He points his jacket back in the direction of the practice shed. “Did you hear this? Did you see this? Please tell me what I think happened actually happened and I didn’t just overreact.”

“You didn’t overreact. I think.”

“I can’t with this.” He takes a step towards Hayal then a step back. “I’m leaving. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to cut your time with Tien short. Sorry.”

“It’s okay, we said our pieces.”

“Yeah?” Kiwi’s already walking backwards down the sidewalk.

“Yeah.”

The two of them continue at a pace that allows Kiwi to hand Hayal the guitar case for a second to slip on his jacket. He’s still shaking his head when he drops onto the plastic bus shelter bench. Hayal sits down next to him and buries her hands in her parka.

“Should be here in like five minutes,” he says to the time display on his phone’s lock screen. With finally a second to rest, he leans his head back against the glass wall. And because it is a glass wall, Kiwi has no problem spotting Oskar jog down the street once he turns his head to the left.

“Careful, you’re in throwing range,” Kiwi says, back on his feet, his phone raised, as Oskar approaches the bus stop.

“I come in peace,” says Oskar, voice calm as a Sunday morning. He’s not wearing a jacket either. “Lower your weapon and hear me out.”

Kiwi doesn’t change his stance; his phone remains in the air.

“Look, Kiwi, we love you, but we need to put ourselves out there at some point and so far you’ve kept stalling and dodging every opportunity.”

“So you decide to just go behind my back? What kind of friends do that?”

“Not the most graceful maneuver for sure.” Oskar concedes. “But–”

“But? You’re really going to but me right now?”

“You don’t come out of your shell unless you get a little push.”

“Push,” says Kiwi. “That’s not a push, that’s betrayal.”

“You don’t come out of your shell unless you get a little betrayal, then.”

Kiwi jolts his arm back, ready to chuck.

Oskar raises his hands.

“So, Tristan’s, right. It’s small. It’s niche. Relatively non-threatening. That’s why Mona suggested it to Tien in the first place.” He tilts his head gently. “It’s a real place that actual people go to. YouTube’s not doing anything for us, so we have to take actual steps. This is an actual step. People would actually see us, hear us.”

“I think,” says Kiwi, “I’m gonna throw up.”

“Look–”

“No.”

“This whole thing was definitely sneaky and lowkey unfair–”

“Highkey unfair.”

“–and highkey unfair, but two weeks from now, when we’ve had our gig, and we’re standing on a little stage and a couple of people are cheering because they liked what we did, then it’s gonna be okay. Promise.”

“Well! Look!” Kiwi gestures very intensely at nothing in particular. “Two weeks from now! I’ll be neck-deep in my history didactics exam!”

“On a Saturday?”

Kiwi opens his mouth and closes it a couple of times. “Monday. But I need that weekend to cram.”

“You’ve still got two weeks.”

“And there are still two more exams and an essay! I’m busy!”

“Tien didn’t know that it was gonna be so soon when she messaged that event manager guy. I’m pretty sure she didn’t even expect a reply. But here we are. We have that chance now, even though it’s shitty how we got there.”

“I don’t know how to tell you that you should’ve considered this before organizing a gig without the whole band’s knowledge.”

“I mean I didn’t really organize anything–”

“Plural you.”

“Right.” Oskar takes a breath, decelerates the conversation. “Look, I’m sorry.”

Kiwi watches him, waits. “But?”

“No but. I am sorry.”

Kiwi crosses his arms.

“Is this really only about your exams, though?”

“Well, no, there’s also the whole ‘I’m super fucking mad’ aspect and–” He resets himself, takes a breath, then overenunciates every word. “I’m just not going to embarrass myself like this.”

Oskar furrows his brow.

“I don’t know if that’s a concept that you can grasp, though. Embarrassment.”

“Sure is. That’s why we didn’t tell you.”

“I’m going to throw up.” Kiwi steps back and leans against the shelter wall. “And what’s more, I’ll throw up directly, specifically, on you.”

“Boys,” says Hayal.

Kiwi and Oskar turn their heads.

She points at the corner of the street that’s currently being rounded by a familiar bus with a familiar number on display.

“Thank god.” Kiwi picks up his guitar and fishes for his ticket, which turns out to be redundant when the driver opens the doors in the back as well. One person gets off. Hayal gets on, waits.

“Alright,” says Oskar, hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. “Call me when you’re ready to talk.”

“You’ll need to find someone else for the gig.” For a moment, Kiwi lingers with one foot still on the pavement. “I really, genuinely, have exams. I can’t.”

“Don’t worry about it right now.” Oskar raises his voice to reach past the closing doors. “The 26th is still two weeks and a day away. You’ve got time!”

Kiwi doesn’t respond. Air hisses as the bus lifts its sideways tilt back up and the engine shakes the floor below him. He watches Oskar turn around and saunter back towards his grandparents’ house, hands still in his pockets, before the bus turns out of the street and he loses sight.

“Kiwi,” says Hayal. She nods towards a free seat to her right and Kiwi plops down next to her.

He hoists his backpack onto his lap and starts rummaging through it. “Is it okay if I-”

“Sure.”

Kiwi pulls his headphones over his ears. For the rest of the bus ride, he closes his eyes and listens to the music.

#real jobs #being indie means no one can tell me not to post 20% of my novel on social media #its also on my website but yknow ease of access

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bigalockwood · 2 months

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Hey Lia 💜,

I'm really curious about "Now that we don't talk"!!

Hey Sophia!!

Now That We Don't Talk is based on the song and covers the party scene from s2 (the one where they meet for the first time after Christmas break) as well as some more from Simon's POV. It's quite angsty and sad, and it's been sitting almost finished in my drafts for months now, but I never seem to find time to finish it. One day maybe?

"Somehow, Simon’s world had stopped turning the last few weeks, but Wille’s must’ve kept moving with double speed.

He’d grown and matured in a way Simon hadn’t. Part of it was definitely the hair, he decided; it made Wille’s face look sharper, older, and he had gotten over his nervous tic of running his hand through it, too. Maybe that was it: the way Wille carried himself, straight-backed, more confident, less afraid to draw attention. There was a new determination to him that Simon hadn’t expected. It was such a stark contrast to how Simon had felt over Christmas break. He hadn’t grown. He’d shrunk. Only now did he realize how much he’d curled into himself in the last few weeks, how much he’d tried to appear smaller, to disappear, afraid of what others would think when they saw him."

#sillylittleflower #lias letters #wip tag #now that we don't talk

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saturnzskyzz · 10 months

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Hi! I love your fics and I was wondering if I could request you a prompt with ler!Seokjin and lee!Yoongi from BTS. Basically in their rookie days when the members are just getting to know each other and some of the members think Yoongi is scary, so they mention it to Seokjin who says something like Yoongi’s just a big softie. a few days later they hear Yoongi’s (cute!!) laughter for the first time and go see what’s up and find Seokjin tickling him and they all think Yoongi’s really cute and maybe have them join in if you want. Sorry if this is long, lol. It’s also okay if you don’t want to write it!! Have a good day!

Hello Anon! I'm glad you like my fanfics as much as I love writing them for you all!!

・I find this prompt really adorable, so thank you for your request!!

・Sorry it took me so long to get to it, I just have so many ideas for fanfics like these, and yet my motivation is usually running on a down low, but hopefully you like this one!! I really enjoyed writing it :)))

I would also like to say that any further concepts, ideas, or pairings will be drabbles, which are short fanfics, due to the lack of me keeping up with longer projects that are currently sitting in my drafts.

Don't worry though! You can request a longer fanfic from me; just let me know with your idea or pairing so it doesn't accidentally turn up as a drabble!

·˚ ༘ 𖦆 ꒷₊˚ ꒦꒷꒷꒦ ⑅ ʚ ⤜ ⨳ ࣪• ☼ ⋒ ⚡︎ 𐚱 ⊹˚˖⁺ ⤾·˚ ༘ 𖦆 ꒷₊˚ ꒦꒷꒷꒦ ⑅ ʚ ⤜ ⨳ ࣪•

・Him? Scary? ・

Summary:

Yoongi appears to be scary and intimidating according to the rest of Seokjin's members, what better way to prove them wrong by bringing out Yoongi's soft side?

Warnings:

| negative comments | tickling |

This is not a ship fanfic

Enjoy!

·˚ ༘ 𖦆 ꒷₊˚ ꒦꒷꒷꒦ ⑅ ʚ ⤜ ⨳ ࣪• ☼ ⋒ ⚡︎ 𐚱 ⊹˚˖⁺ ⤾·˚ ༘ 𖦆 ꒷₊˚ ꒦꒷꒷꒦ ⑅ ʚ ⤜ ⨳ ࣪•

The members were having a hard time trying to get to know one another now that it's been a few weeks of practice for their next album. They were put right to work to making songs rather than them getting to know each other, so Seokjin came up with a game they could all play while they had a three day break from working.

Seokjin had everyone sit in a circle with hand made cards in the middle. The rules were that each player had to draw a card that displayed two questions; one for the player, and one for the person on the player's right. The player who then asks the person on their right a question, it would be that person's turn to draw a card. Easy right?

Well.. It was easy for Seokjin and Yoongi. The rest were a bit shy through out the game. But Taehyung and Jungkook? They were more so anxious than shy since they sat from either side of Yoongi, unfortunately for them.

Taehyung had to ask Yoongi a question since he was on his right, and then Yoongi would have to ask a question to Jungkook, who was on Yoongi's right.

They didn't mean any harm for acting the way that they were with him, he just seemed like a pretty scary and blunt person in general, unfortunately.

"Okay, uh... Yoongi.. What is your favorite color?" Taehyung asked carefully as to not make his voice quiet like all the other times he tried to ask him normally.

"My favorite color is black, although white is another color I fathom to take interest of." Yoongi said quickly, and honestly. He gave Taehyung a small smile, and reached for a card in the middle.

Taehyung thought of how sweet his smile was compared to how he actually felt about Yoongi's presence being right next to him. Nonetheless, he stayed silent and just took the smile.

"Okay.. The card asks what my favorite food is.. Uhmm.." Yoongi instinctively looked up at the ceiling to think of what his favorite food would be.

Everyone was looking at Yoongi intensively. They wondered if he would give up about a difficult question like the one he was given and storm off somewhere.. What a specific way to think about Yoongi's thought process, and yet they still hoped that he would answer and not do what they had initially thought.

"Oh! My favorite food would be Galbi(Korean barbecue) because it has meat in it, eheh." Yoongi chuckled at his answer. He looked back at everyone to realize how everyone was slightly leaning a bit forward to look at him.

Upon hearing this, they all went back in their comfortable sitting positions. They all looked at each other with confused looks with how carefree Yoongi was being than the usual blunt persona he put on when practicing.

"Uhum..okay then, uh.. Jungkook, the card asks where you would want to go if you could go anywhere in the world." Yoongi asked without further question on why everyone apart from Seokjin were acting kind of weird. He looked to his right, giving the Makenae a natural look than a heavy face.

"Uhm.. Let's see.." Jungkook somehow tensed up at this, but he thought of where he would want to go quickly as he assumed that if he took any longer, then he would waste Yoongi's time.

"It's okay to take your time on that one, that question is quite hard to answer for a lot of people." Yoongi tried to reassure.

"T-thank you-or, uhmm.. Yeah!" Jungkook stumbled on his wording, instantly regretting blurting out words.

"W-where I would go would be Los Angeles, m-maybe? The beaches over there are pretty nice." Jungkook said finally. He looked at Yoongi and gave him a smile of his own.

"Ah! That's a good answer.. Los Angeles is a pretty place from what I've seen from photos!" Yoongi sparked up at that answer, causing everyone but Seokjin, who laughed at his bount of energy, to be confused by his burst of enlightenment so suddenly.

They played a few more rounds before Seokjin announced that he was getting tired. He had noticed how everyone but Yoongi looked pleased that the game was over. Not like he didn't notice anything that was off earlier, he always gave quick glances every now and then during the game when everyone would get all tensed up when it was Yoongi's turn.

"Uhm, on second thought.. Can I talk to you guys real quick?" Seokjin said while getting up. He walked over to the closest corner from in the studio, noticing that Yoongi had begun to walk over with the rest who tried to quickly walk away from Yoongi.

"Oh! Uh, Not you, Yoongi, you can go to your dorm.. I need to talk to everyone else though." Seokjin said, pointing at the door to emphasize his words. He saw how confused Yoongi's face had gotten, and without getting any response other than a shoulder shrug, the rapper left the studio room.

That's when Seokjin lowered his head a bit to look at everyone else who had to stay.

"Guys.. Are you all doing okay? You all looked like you guys let your anxiety win up until I called it quits on the game." with a worried look, the oldest started to fidget with his fingers with the thought that he must have done something wrong.

Namjoon walked up to Seokjin to get a better look at the oldest since he was standing in the back of everyone else.

"It's not the game that we were anxious about, if that's what you are thinking, hyung.. It was just that.. We all seem pretty nervous around Yoongi because of the aura he casts around the room when he's around.. I'm not really sure why, but we see him as a blunt person, to say the least.." Namjoon said, nervously glancing at Seokjin and then the wall behind the oldest.

'That's what they were anxious about?' Seokjin thought, chuckling at Namjoon's honesty, leaving the rest of the members confused. He walked up to Namjoon to put his hand on his shoulder. The leader of the group stopped himself from looking at the wall and looked up at Seokjin.

"Guys, I promise you, he's a really cool person to get to know! He's not this big bad guy you guys are forming in your head. If anything, he's just a bihig softy." Seokjin said with a chuckle. He then patted Namjoon's shoulder before taking his hand completely off of it, and started to slowly walk to the door that led out of the studio. "You guys get some rest, we are practicing tomorrow." Seokjin said, leaving the rest in the studio.

'Softy?' they all had the same thoughts. Yoongi? A softy? That can't be true.. Can it?

They all decided to leave that conversation at that, and they all left the studio to go in their dorms.

﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏

The next morning, Yoongi got up pretty early to make everyone some breakfast. He doesn't usually cook stuff for the members, but he couldn't brush off the thought of how yesterday went in the studio. He had assumed that everyone was pretty tense that day, so he considered making bacon and eggs for everyone.

While he was getting the right size of a pan for the bacon, he decided to cook the eggs first to make them scrambled instead of hard boiled.

After a few minutes, the second member to leave their dorm was Seokjin, who was surprised with himself for waking up in a timingly manner. Usually, Namjoon or even Yoongi would have to wake up the oldest for always sleeping in.

"You're up early for someone who usually favors being in bed." Yoongi said when he heard a door close, causing him to look in the direction of the sound to see Seokjin's tired face, with his hair sticking up and sideways. "Ahahand your hair! Hyhuhung, you need toho fix your hair!" Yoongi said, holding his stomach and the counter top for leverage to not fall out of balance.

Seokjin was barely paying attention due to being tired, but he silently ruffled his hair to "fix it," and walked into the kitchen to stand next to Yoongi who was infront of the eggs.

"What are you making? Is that scrambled eggs?" Seokjin said, squinting and leaning closer to the pan to see the consistency of what was on the pan, then he looked down at Yoongi who was recovering from laughing at Seokjin's hair.

"Ihihi'm, mhmhm. Ihi'm making bacon with eggs if you want some! I'm making it for everyone.." Yoongi said, clearing his throat to stop laughing. He thought of what else to say, given that he reminded himself of why he was cooking in the first place.

"That's sweet of you, Yoongi. What made you want to cook? Usually you force me to make things, or you wait for Hoseok to wake up." Seokjin said sweetly, giving a quick poke to Yoongi's side to tease.

This made Yoongi flinch and took a step sideways, away from Seokjin, covering his side on instinct.

"Dohon't do thahat.. Uhm, I kept thinking about yesterday.. I uhh, I thought they seemed really awkward with the studio's atmosphere when we played that card game.. N-not saying that they didn't like it!" Yoongi quickly held out his hands to emphasize his words.

"Uhm.. I over thought the situation, so I decided to cook for everyone in hopes that they aren't nervous again." Yoongi said quietly, going back to attend the eggs.

Seokjin realized how Yoongi's demeanor changed when speaking his thoughts. He began to worry for both Yoongi, and the rest of his members. 'If they all are going to think like this, than how can one get along with the other?' he had thought.

"Yeah.. Thats why I called them over after the game ended.. I had suspicion that they were awkward yesterday.. They told me some of their concern's, but I'm not going to discuss that for your behalf. But they aren't going to think like this forever, Yoongi." Seokjin said, putting a hand on Yoongi's shoulder to try and comfort him the best that he could.

Yoongi didn't say anything now, he focused on the eggs so they wouldn't burn and become unedible. But he let that information slowly form into a big bubble in his brain to overtake any other thoughts he might have had.

"I reassured them though.. Although they think you're intimidating, they won't think that for long." Seokjin said, trying to reassure Yoongi the best that he could.

"Reassured them.. How, exactly?" Yoongi questioned, now curious as to what he told his members.

"Weeeeell, I told them that you are a cool person to get to know about.. Aaand I told them that you are a BIG softy!" Seokjin said with yet another poke to Yoongi's side, causing the younger to flinch again, having his arm that was attending the eggs to come down to protect his side.

"Noho way you said that to them, hyung!" Yoongi looked up at Seokjin with a small smile that he was desperately trying to hide.

"Yes way! How can I not hint to them that you are very sweet with people once you get to know them?" Seokjin gave Yoongi more pokes to get a reaction.. And to hear his laugh and see his smile.

Yoongi turned to face Seokjin now. He held up his hands as a form to defend himself from his hyung's attacking fingers.

"Stohop, Jin! Ihi'm literally cohoohking right nohow!" Yoongi said, stepping away from Seokjin.

That's when Seokjin reached over the stove to turn off the heat and placed the eggs on a non-heated ring.

"The eggs can wait. You however, need to cheer up." Seokjin quickly took both of Yoongi's hands and pulled him in for a hug, having the rapper's back against Seokjin's front.

"Noho! Seokjin, plehehease! Ihihi neEHEED- TOHohoho gehet back toho cooking!!" Yoongi all but screeched when Seokjin started to scribble away at his sides now instead of poking like before.

"You can get back to cooking once you've said it yourself that you're just a big softy who is sweet and caring to others." Seokjin argued, slowly pinching Yoongi's bottom ribs now to have his laugh go up an octave.

"AAH-! AHAahaha, Seokjihihin! StAHAahahaP, plehehease!!" Yoongi tilted his head down and tried to curl in on himself the best that he could. He pulled onto his hands that were against his own chest due to Seokjin keeping them there, but failed at getting any of them free.

"Quiet Yoongi~ You don't want to wake any of our sleepy members, do you?" Seokjin said, whispering into his ear that was painted with a deep shade of red.

Seokjin then pinched at his top ribs to see if Yoongi would actually stay quiet for his members. Knowing this would usually cause a big reaction, he was wanting to be evil that morning.

Yoongi squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head to try and get rid of the tickly sensations that were coursing through his body. He tried to stay as quiet as possible, but it was quite hard since Seokjin was attacking one of his worst spots, as well as his hands being held.

"Seheheokjihihin-! S-StohohoAHAahaha! Ohoho myhyhy gohohod!" Yoongi was desperately trying not to laugh out loud, but it was getting to the point where he couldn't take it much longer.

"What's it gonna be then?? Are you going to realize that they aren't going to view you as a scary dude for the rest of our lives, or are you wanting to wake them up and have me tell them why I'm tickling you half to death?" Seokjin explained, lowering his head down to look at Yoongi better.

Yoongi didn't say anything other than to laugh his lungs out by how bad his top ribs are when tickled. He nearly couldn't think straight because of how bad it was.

"Have it your way then." Seokjin said, digging his hand into Yoongi's under arm now, sending the younger to bulk up one of his legs. He completely lost his footing from slightly kicking, and took him and Seokjin down on the kitchen floor. Seokjin mainly took the fall for already knowing that was going to happen since it wasn't the first time he's had this reaction with Yoongi.

"NAHAHAahahaAHA! STAA-AHAahahaAha-! Ehehahah, mhmhEHEmhm." Yoongi used all of his strength to have one of his hands free, and decided to use his chance to cover his mouth to result any other loud laughter that came out of him.

"Awww, look at that, you can't admit something and yet you're caring enough to not wake the others up. How cute~" Seokjin said, surprised that he was able to get his hand free, but nonetheless thought it was cute by how dedicated he was to not wake the others.. But it was too late, unfortunately for Yoongi.

Jimin, Hoseok, Jungkook, Taehyung and Namjoon all came out of their rooms after exchanging texts trying to figure out who was laughing out in the kitchen. When they came out, they didn't see anything other than hearing sweet laughter coming from behind the kitchen counter.

When all of them shared glances, they silently agreed to check behind the counter. What they saw was the back of Seokjin with a head tilted down towards the floor.

They were all surprised as to seeing the one who was captured by Seokjin, laughing freely and adorably to all of them, was Yoongi himself.

After a moment of them staring, they heard Yoongi squeal when Seokjin switched from digging into his underarm, to going for the side of his neck.

"Seheheokjihihin, plehehease! Mehehercy! AHA-ahaha." Yoongi laughed into his hand. He begun to push his hand more against his mouth to keep himself from being loud, not knowing that the members were behind them.

The rapper then scrunched up his shoulders and tilted his head back-close to where Seokjin's hand was at on his neck.

The members stared in awe, watching all of it go down with out a sound with their own commentary. They wanted to keep their thoughts to themselves to watch the scene unfold adorably with no interruptions.

Unfortunately for Yoongi, Seokjin found a specific spot near the front of his neck and collarbone that had him shoot his hand that was covering his mouth, down to the attacking hand to try and get him off. Still having his head back, he allowed himself to smile and laugh freely now that he has already dug his grave from taking his hand off of his face.

That was when the rest of the members were able to see Yoongi's big gummy smile just enough. They all quietly awed even more so at how sweet and contagious his smile was to them. They began to have smiles of their own when seeing Yoongi finally being carefree.

Seokjin was right, Yoongi was just a big softy afterall.

"Seheheokjihihin, SEOKJIN! Stahahohop! Ohokahahay, ohohokahahy! Ihihi gehehet ijihit nahaahow-!" Yoongi cried out, desperately trying to pry Seokjin's hand off of him. He kicked out his legs just a bit to try and see if he could tip themselves over, but to no avail.

That was when Yoongi decided to open one of his eyes the best that he could, and was surprised to see the rest of his members watching the scene go down, seeing all of their smiles at once.

His face turned into a dark red, and quickly tilted his head down with a quiet whine, trying his best to cover his face while still swatting at Seokjin's hand.

Seokjin heard his whine, and decided to turn his head to look behind him to see the rest of his members. He smirked when seeing all of them.

"Hey guys! Don't worry about us, Yoongi hear also had thoughts about yesterday so I decided to cheer him up about it. What do you guys think?" Seokjin said, switching his attack back to scribbling at Yoongi's sides to make him giggle up a storm for the show.

"I mean.. It's just like you said, Hyung. He is just a big softy!" Hoseok broke their own little silence. He looked at the other members for validation for his answer, and every nodded in agreement.

"Well, what do you know?" Seokjin whispered in Yoongi's ear to prove his point from yesterday and earlier that morning.

"Seheheokjihihin- Plehehease stohohop! Thihihis ihis embahaharrassing!" Yoongi finally said after many giggles and suppressed squeals.

"What? It's not my fault that you are in a giggly mess." Seokjin said, earning muffled chuckled from the members.

"Wow Hyung, that's mean!" Jungkook said.

"Ihihit ihihis! AAH- NOHhoho!! Nohohoho mohohorehe!" Yoongi felt Seokjin go for his bottom ribs yet again. He twisted his body the best he could to lose the hand, but he forgot that Seokjin was still holding his other hand, and was unfortunately unable to get away.

Yoongi then tilted his head up again, and grabbed at Seokjin's attacking hand now to try and pry it off of him.

The members took in his smile again, seeing how sweet and adorable his smile really is. They've seen him smile before, yes, but they have never seen his gummy smile before until this very moment. And his giggles were probably the members favorite. Yoongi's laugh and giggles when tickled was never like how his usual laughs are when someone did or said something stupid. It was like sweet airy giggles that weren't too loud and high, but were also not too quiet and low. They truly favored this type of Yoongi, and it definitely has vanished the "scary" and "intimidating" stereotype out of their vocabulary.

﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏

Seokjin saw how tired Yoongi was getting from all the laughing and decided to call it quits, letting go of Yoongi so he can relax onto Seokjin.

"Ahaha, nehehver doho that ahagain, hyhuhung!" Yoongi said, regaining all the strength to get up finally.

"Yeah yeah, whatever. You never know the future, Yoongi." Seokjin said, pointing a finger in Yoongi's direction.

"Hold on, you've tickled Yoongi before?!" Jimin blurtedly asked, surprised.

"Well yeah! Of course I have. If I haven't, I don't think this would have happened." Seokjin said. He decided to get up from the floor, following with Yoongi as well. He had ignored the onslaught as to not get too embarrassed as he already was, and he went back to cooking the bacon and eggs that were neglected.

"You're lucky that these eggs haven't gone bad yet, Hyung. If they have, then you would've been the next to be on the floor, laughing." Yoongi threatened, causing everyone and even Seokjin to tense up.

"I'm making bacon and eggs for everyone, so if you don't want to be on the floor like I have, then you guys better sit at the table." Yoongi said, pointing at a nearby table, and gave a warning glare at everyone.

No one said a word and quickly sat at the table.

﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏

The rest of the members questioned Yoongi's nature. Him? Scary? Yeah, a little bit. But can he also be a carefree person who likes to laugh? Most definitely.

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