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mypoisonedvine · 10 months

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𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖉𝖘𝖕𝖔𝖙𝖘 | professor!jonathan crane x batgirl!reader

𝖘𝖚𝖒𝖒𝖆𝖗𝖞 | it can be difficult, living a double life: spending your days as a scholarship student at gotham university, and your nights as batgirl, the legendary heroine, fighting alongside batman and robin. though it proves to take a toll on you mentally and physically, flunked term papers and missed lectures will be the least of your problems when you encounter the scarecrow somewhere in the shadowy alleyways of gotham...

𝖜𝖔𝖗𝖉 𝖈𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖙 | 7k

𝖜𝖆𝖗𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖌𝖘 | NONCON SMUT (18+ only; violent/rough sex, use of fear toxin, degradation, semi-public sex/exhibitionism, bondage), professor/student dynamic (therefore implied age gap), some angst and depiction of ptsd/aftermath, reader is dating robin/tim drake

“And so,” Professor Crane continued, looking towards the class from the board, chalk in hand, "this triggers the fear response, and all that comes with it. You're probably familiar with the symptoms of fear: heart rate increase, cold sweat, overall heightened arousal."

A few giggles could be heard at that, and he rolled his eyes.

"Not that sort of arousal, necessarily," he frowned.

Everyone else just brushed off the childish humor of the moment, but you narrowed your eyes, getting a sense that the word necessarily was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

He returned to his lecture, drawing lines in chalk over his crude diagram of the human brain, explaining how each area of the brain contributed to fear and the fight-or-flight response. As he spoke, you re-read the handout he’d given today— and you chewed on your lip absent-mindedly as you reviewed the bibliography.

"Dr. Crane?" you raised your hand, interrupting his lecture mid-sentence. "I had a question about some of the studies you reference here."

"Yes?" he returned, turning to face you with a slightly confused expression.

"Well you cite a paper out of Berkeley from 2002, to support the conclusion that exposure therapy is the best response to aggressive phobias— however, if you actually read the paper—"

"I read the paper, Miss," he interrupted sternly.

"Then, if you actually understood the paper," you continued, a few students gasping and laughing softly at your insubordination, "then you would see that the conclusions indicate the perceived decrease in fear response comes at the expense of long-term stability. Don't you think that negates any positive implications?"

The silence in the room was tense: everyone was waiting for how he would respond to your critique. Instead, he just smiled at you slightly. "I think you may have more context for how research is conducted, and reevaluate your conclusions, when you get a chance to organize your own research— in about a decade."

"Actually, Professor, I'll be leading my own experiment this quarter," you corrected, just as he was about to turn away from you and keep lecturing. "I'm the recipient of the Wayne Enterprises Collegiate Scholarship— which pays for my education here and also comes with a fifty thousand dollar research grant."

“Ah,” he said, bitterness dripping from his tone as he set his hands on the desk and leaned forward a bit. “May I ask what topic you hope to explore with your research?”

“Crime,” you explained, “and criminal behavior.”

“Hm,” he nodded, frowning slightly in an impressed sort of way, taking his weight off the desk. “And it doesn’t bother you that you’re here studying psychology?”

You lowered your brow, confused by his question. “I’m sorry?”

“Criminology is a subfield of sociology, which is related to but distinct from psychology,” he explained.

“Would you recommend that I switch majors, Doctor?” you asked simply.

“Well, it’s no secret that you’ve set the curve on our last two exams,” Dr. Crane smiled, tilting his head slightly. “So, no— I think I’d rather keep you here.”

You straightened up slightly, taken aback by his wording.

“Plus, while you’re still in my department,” he continued, “I have a better chance of talking some sense into you.”

With that, he returned to teaching, and you noticed how the other students were watching you before you sighed and tried to listen to the rest of class.

You caught up with him on a long stretch of hallway, just as he stepped up to his office door. “Professor!” you got his attention, and he turned to you with a slightly smug look as he held his hands together.

“Ah, yes,” he greeted, “I see you’re here to apologize for how you spoke to me in class today?”

You knew he didn’t actually expect that, he knew better after having you under him for the last two quarters— um, so to speak. “Just as soon as you do,” you offered with a smirk in return, shifting your weight on your hip.

That was what moved your button-down slightly, and his eyes drifted down to your neck— when they did, confusion and concern suddenly painted his expression. “My,” he gasped a little, pulling on the collar of your shirt with one finger to expose a healing scrape on your chest; his fingertip brushed over your skin and the golden chain of your necklace, and you jumped away slightly. “How’d you get that?”

“It’s nothing—” you blurted out, blinking quickly, “I tripped, on campus, actually.”

“That wonky step up to the Commons?” he assumed. “I’ve filed two complaints about that loose brick…”

“Yes,” you agreed quickly, smiling. “Yeah, I wasn’t looking where I was going, and I didn’t catch myself well while holding my books—”

“Hm,” he nodded back, “that’s a shame. A girl as smart as you, forgetting the Commons building doesn’t have brick steps— or steps at all, in fact.”

You swallowed thickly, glancing away.

“You sure were eager for an explanation, though,” he smiled. “How’d you really get such a nasty scrape? It does look like concrete, but I’m guessing it didn’t happen on campus—”

“It’s no matter,” you assured.

“It wasn’t that boyfriend of yours, was it?” he pressed. “Mr. Drake, as I recall?”

“Wha— no!” you gasped.

“He’s not your boyfriend?”

“Well, he is,” you explained, “but he didn’t—”

“You know you can tell me anything, right?” Crane offered, lowering his voice slightly.

“Of course,” you sighed, “but there’s nothing to tell. Things are fine with Tim, I promise.”

“He shared your interest in criminal studies, didn’t he?” Professor Crane recalled. “Clearly, he didn’t share your scholarly aptitude, though, seeing as he’s dropped out.”

“H-he was smart enough,” you justified, “he left because of stress.”

“Ah,” the Professor nodded, “and he doesn’t take that stress out on you at all?”

“C’mon, Professor, Tim’s a good person,” you promised.

“I’m inclined to agree,” Crane replied, “but it’s the ones that act the kindest that have the most to hide, isn’t it?”

You knew there was another meaning to that statement, but there were so many possibilities that you couldn’t settle on one.

“You understand that if I suspect anything, I’m required to alert our student wellness services,” he reminded you. “They’ll have a counselor reach out to you—”

“Listen, Dr. Crane— I didn’t come here to speak to you about my personal life,” you reminded him, “I wanted to ask you about my performance in the class so far, in your opinion.”

He paused before sighing in relent. “I’m a little concerned, actually,” he admitted, “about your most recent paper.”

He pulled it from the folder under his arm and handed it back to you— covered in red ink. You blinked at him, biting your lip in confusion. “I thought these wouldn’t be returned until—”

“I worked on yours first,” he explained quickly, even though that explanation only brought more questions than answers. “It’s still very strong, but it’s not what I expect from you at this point. It feels rushed.”

Rushed— yeah, I remember this one. I wrote it all the night it was due because I spent the three days before recovering from that fight with Falcone’s thugs at the docks—

“I’ll let you rewrite it,” he offered, “if you can get it back to me before I return the rest of your classmates’ work.”

You laughed a little, looking at the paper in front of you, and Crane knitted his brows together. “You know, Professor, sometimes I can’t tell if I’m your favorite student, or your most hated.”

He smiled a little, glancing down briefly at the floor in a sort of self-effacing way. “I don’t have favorites,” he assured, unconvincingly. “You’re not my best student, or my worst— you’re an entirely different kind of student. You’re nothing like those other… juvenile, moronic co-eds looking in the exact wrong place for an easy A.”

Your eyes widened a little, seeing the way he let a little irritation— disdain, really— paint his tone. He snarled a bit as he spoke, his nostrils flaring; like he was holding it back, how much resentment he really had for your classmates.

As quickly as it came, he seemed to shake it off, and then he smiled again… but it was tight, and forced, you could see that just as easily. “You challenge me,” he finished quickly. “I appreciate that as much as I detest it.”

You smiled back, somewhat genuinely despite the icky feeling that suddenly wiggled in your stomach. “I suppose I feel the same way,” you admitted.

He opened his mouth, hesitating slightly, before tilting his head the other way and starting over. “Could you come into my office for a minute?” he asked suddenly, a strange glimmer in his eyes behind the thin silver glasses. “I’d like to show you my latest work— I think you’ll find it quite intriguing…”

He reached into his pocket, pulling out a ring of keys and started to unlock his office door, and you didn’t feel too excellent about it.

Just then, a group of students walked by, and you heard them talking amongst each other as one looked at a text message on her phone. “Oh my god,” one said as she explained to those around her, “my friend’s at the bank right now— she said someone’s holding up the place…”

“What?” another student asked, and you tilted your head a bit to hear them better.

“Yeah, the one on Main and 57th? The police aren’t there yet— she said they have guns…”

Your heart started to race. Sounds like a job for Batgirl.

Crane was in his own world, though, about to open the door. “Maybe I can even convince you to change some of your conclusions about the study of fear,” he posited.

You stepped back, motivated to leave just as much by a strange suspicion of Professor Crane as the opportunity to stop the nearby bank robbery. “I-I have to go,” you said, before you’d thought of a good excuse— and that hadn’t gone well for you last time, but hopefully he wasn’t going to quiz you on campus architecture again to trip you up.

He looked confused, a little sad even, as he turned to you again. “This won’t take long,” he promised, “I’d just like to show you—”

“Sorry,” you blurted out as you kept backing up, “I gotta… you know, um… buy tampons.”

Hoping something that awkward would get him to stop asking questions, you turned on your heel and darted off down the hall, looking for the best way off campus and to a secluded spot where you could pull your Batgirl get-up out of the false compartment in your bag and get to work.

“I don’t like you going out there alone,” Bruce said flatly, not looking up from his hands clasped in his lap.

“Wow, really?” you rolled your eyes, feigning surprise. “News to me.”

“You’re too young, and it’s dangerous,” he continued anyway.

“Doing all the greatest hits tonight, huh?” you smirked. “Next you’ll say you need to keep up your identity better, study hard so no one suspects you and then finish it off with don’t touch the Batmobile.”

He sighed and shook his head. “You can touch it, you just can’t drive it.”

“Right,” you agreed flatly, sighing as you adjusted in your spot on the couch. You’d taken up shop here in the Wayne Manor private library: something about your interaction with Professor Crane yesterday made you want to study off-campus for the afternoon…

You knew Bruce had a point about working alone— you didn’t really want to be alone, you were certainly safer when you had Batman by your side. The problem was that you were too safe… Bruce protected you so well that he hindered you; you’d accused him of wanting you to just stay behind and patch him up after fights rather than actually helping. He denied it, obviously, but actions speak louder than words— and there was such a difference in the way he treated you and Robin was obvious.

In fact, that itself had driven a wedge between you and your boyfriend— one of many reasons Bruce had implored you both not to get involved in that way, but it was sort of unavoidable. You can only do such high intensity, high pressure work alongside someone for so long before the tension is too much to bear…

Then again, that very tension that made your relationship with Tim threatened to break it, and you knew that— you felt that, even now, as he looked at you with a sympathetic sort of stare. You cleared your throat and focused on your book again.

“Please don’t go out without us again,” Tim asked— softer, sweeter, lacking that father-figure-sternness Bruce was always trying to muster.

“I think the people in that bank are pretty happy that I did,” you replied with a snarky smile.

“We were on our way—” Bruce began.

“It was a one man job!” you insisted.

“There were seven men on that heist team— and two more parked outside,” Bruce explained, getting more frustrated as this discussion continued. “It doesn’t matter. We work as a team.”

“Except when you go out alone,” you reminded him.

“I’ve been doing this longer,” he explained, standing up, “I’ve been doing it better, and I’ve been doing it on my own since you were still in high school.”

“Then why did you take me in?” you returned sharply, knitting your brows together in confusion and frustration. “Why did you train me, why did you bring me here and tell me the truth?”

“Because I saw your potential,” he answered as he began to walk away, “not because you’re ready to save the whole fucking world by yourself.”

You shook your head in frustration— almost disbelief, except of course he would do this— as Bruce shut the door behind him. Conversation didn’t go his way, he just left— that was normal. Ironic, for a man who interrogated criminals on the street almost daily.

“He’s right,” Tim informed you after a pregnant pause, and you glared at him.

“Would you excuse me? I have to study,” you explained sharply as you motioned to the textbooks and notepads laid out on the table, as you’d had them before you were interrupted by these two, “because apparently the best thing Batgirl can do is not be Batgirl.”

“Hey,” Tim sighed, “he doesn’t mean it like that… he just wants you to keep focusing on your studies, that’s all.”

“I just think it’s funny—” you began.

“I bet it’s not gonna be very funny,” Tim noticed with a frown.

“— that Bruce thinks it’s so important that I keep my grades up so nobody knows what I’m doing at night— so nobody knows that I’m not getting any goddamn sleep— but you got to drop out and that apparently wasn’t going to make anybody suspicious?” you noticed. “You know, I had a professor ask me about you today— wondering what was up with you leaving so suddenly. Why is nobody worried about that?”

“We worry about you because we care about you,” he explained.

You tossed your books aside, standing up to face Tim properly. “That’s bullshit,” you spat.

“You think I don’t care about you, seriously?” he asked.

“I know you care about me, but you don’t respect me,” you explained, “neither of you do. You two go off and do what you want, you’d rather me be your nurse than actually be out there— when you know damn well that you need me!”

“I need you,” Tim promised, “in so many ways. That’s why I can’t let anything happen to you—”

“Well, things need to happen to me sometimes! Isn’t that what life is, things happening to you?!” you laughed exasperatedly. “I mean, shit, why do I go to school at all? Why don’t you guys just lock me at the top of Wayne Tower and I’ll never ever leave and you can just climb up my hair when you wanna come visit!”

“Christ,” Tim groaned, “you are so fucking ridiculous sometimes— what are you trying to prove? Why do you need to be out there every night beating up bad guys, whether Bruce tells you to or not?”

Instead of answering that, you simply accused: “He obviously likes you better than me.”

“Is that really what this is about? You want Bruce to like you?!” Tim scoffed. “Are you that shallow?”

“I want him to trust me!” you clarified. “I want him to understand what I’m capable of!”

“You know what you’re capable of,” he replied, grabbing your shoulders. “I know. Is that not enough?”

You let out a long breath, looking down at the floor.

“I love you,” Tim sighed— but it didn’t sound very sweet when he said it like that, it sounded sad.

“I love you too,” you replied instinctively, but it felt oddly hollow leaving your lips.

“Please,” he breathed as he pressed his forehead to yours, “please stay safe. You’re stronger than me, you can take a lot more than I can.”

You were about to ask him what he meant by that, since you both knew he was physically stronger and more resilient than you, walking away from fights that could’ve put you in a stretcher. But before you could ask, he spoke again.

“My heart can only take so much.”

But that only proved your point, though you didn’t tell him out loud: that what him and Bruce wanted you to do had nothing to do with your strength, and everything to do with their weakness.

In your defense, you took the night off.

But the next night, you had to get out there— Bruce and Tim told you to stay behind so Batman and Robin could go save the day, and you? You were holding down the fort, keeping the couch warm. What a fucking waste; there was more evil in this city than two men could purge— there was more for you to do. As tempting as it was to meet them at the rendezvous location they’d figured out and try to help clear out the gangsters there buying an illegal weapons shipment, you knew that would just lead to the same fight again. This time, the plan was to go out, kick some criminal ass, come back, and leave Bruce none the wiser.

You scanned police radios patiently, waiting for just the right thing— small enough to fix on your own, big enough to matter. You wished, sometimes, that you had less to choose from…

Units respond, units respond — 10-79 reported at West Main and 88th.

Bomb threat. That felt manageable, and you were pretty handy with defusal in case that threat had any credibility. You turned off the radio and stood up, looking down over the city from your vantage point on a highrise fire escape. It was beautiful, in its grimy Gotham way: a light rainfall coated everything in a fuzzy static like old film; it made the concrete reflect the neon lights a little clearer, the whole skyline sort of slick and steamy.

Running and jumping to the next roof, you made a path to your destination and navigated the city unseen, like any good Bat-person would.

You were nearly there when you stopped on a roof above an abandoned manufacturing plant— well, that’s the thing, it wasn’t as abandoned as you thought. There was a glass sunroof, and even though it was dark and rainy, the light inside brought your attention to a group of men inside. Not to profile or anything, but 4 bald guys with guns standing around is usually a good sign that someone’s up to no good…

Trying to get a better look at what was going on inside, you carefully lifted one of the glass panels and slipped inside, sneaking around the metal scaffolding as the sound of the rain was muffled and replaced with distance, echoing voices.

You crouched in the rafters, watching with narrowed eyes as the group of men faced against a figure you couldn’t make out with the shadows and pillars in the way.

“So, are we good for this deal, or what?” the leader of the group asked.

A modulated, deeper voice answered: “This is half of what we agreed.”

“My team had some… road bumps, trying to bring this to you,” the man explained, stepping forward slightly. “We lost some of the compound. This is what we’re offering, take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it,” the shadowy figure agreed. “How much for what’s left?”

“The same price we discussed.”

“For half the amount? How does that work?”

“It’s a flat rate,” the smuggler— that’s what he must have been, right?— explained with a smug smirk. “In fact, I should charge you more— call it hazard pay, for what my men had to go through to get this here.”

“I see,” the deeper voice replied. “How about this: I kill all of you, and take it.”

Your eyes widened; isn’t this guy alone? He’s sure got some balls…

The group of men paused before beginning to laugh. “You?” the leader repeated. “This skinny guy in the suit is gonna kill all of us?”

“I can do worse than that— I’ll make you beg for me to kill you.”

Feeling the tension of this discussion reach its breaking point, you realized you needed to intervene now: leaning over to make sure you had the right spot under you, you took the grappling hook off of your belt and pointed it down.

Firing it with a metallic whooshing sort of sound, the device grabbed one of the men and yanked him up into the shadows of the ceiling with you. Everyone on the ground looked up in shock and fear, pointing their guns aimlessly into the darkness. Before he could even really react to what had just occurred, you dropped the man back down— onto one of his friends, of course, which incapacitated them both but saved him from a much worse fate than if he’d landed on that concrete warehouse floor.

“What the fuck?” the leader of the group yelled as he tried to fire indiscriminately up at you— but you were already running along the steel beam, following one of the men as he tried to make a dash for the exit.

A blast from your long-distance taser gun brought him to the ground instantly, and as the last one left searched for the source of your attacks, you jumped down to the ground just behind him, landing in a crouched position. As soon as he’d turned around to face you, you’d grabbed a loose metal pipe from nearby and hit him over the head with an oddly-satisfying bong noise.

You knew the other man was still somewhere in the dark nearby, and you called out for him: “Whoever you are, stop hiding in the shadows: that’s kinda my thing,” you informed him.

He stepped forward in the cool, gray light: a man in a torn and tattered suit, with a burlap mask that had massive stitches like scars. Batman had just warned you about this guy, what was his name again?

"My," he purred with pleasant shock, his voice clearly deepened electronically by something in that sack on his head. "If it isn't Batgirl. Nice outfit, very… shiny."

"Yours looks pretty rough," you noticed.

He shrugged. "It does the job."

You smiled back, remembering finally who you were dealing with. "Not with me. I'm not scared of you, Scarecrow."

"You will be," he promised.

You swung first, a roundhouse kick right at his head, but he ducked and came back up at you— he tried to grab you but you slipped away.

Instead of going after you again, he ran— grabbed one of the suitcases off of the palette nearby, whatever this ‘shipment’ was, and bolted for the door into the alleyway. You almost laughed, impressed that he thought he could outrun you, but then again this was the guy who threatened to kill four armed men straight to their face.

You chased him right out the door, but as you dashed into the alley behind the manufacturing plant— the one that faced the northern street— you learned a moment too late that he hadn’t run at all, but was waiting for you there.

He sprayed something in your face, and you coughed as a cloud of vapor filled your lungs. You assumed it was pepper spray at first, but it didn't burn— actually, it smelled a little sweet, sort of herbal. But the effects were almost instantaneous, the pounding in your chest and the sinking feeling in your gut, the world spinning around you.

The fear response: heart rate increase, cold sweat, overall heightened arousal.

Instantly you felt old memories rushing in— awful, horrifying ones, and even worse than you remembered them. For a moment, there was fear with no real object, just the feeling… until he grabbed your face and forced you to look at him, at the wicked mask that seemed impossibly close— that seemed like it could swallow you whole. You screamed, trying to turn away or shut your eyes or something, but nothing assuaged the terror.

"Please," you sobbed. "Make it stop! Please!"

“Nothing can stop it now,” his voice returned— even rougher and darker than before, the deep bass of it making you shiver. “This is who you are. Give in to the fear.”

If nothing else, he had a point that fighting it wasn’t proving very useful— but giving in meant letting the world collapse in on you, letting the darkness pull you back… the darkness you’d fought so hard to make into an ally was becoming your enemy again.

He grabbed your mask and tugged it away; even overwhelmed with primal terror, enough logic remained for you to reach up and try to cover your face.

But he simply grabbed your hands and shoved them away. You heard a laugh behind that horrible mask, just before he suddenly took it off.

The toxin changed his face, too— his smile was wider and his teeth sharper, his eyes totally black— and you couldn't recognize him at first. Only when he addressed you by name did you finally put it together; "Professor Crane?" you realized with a horrified gasp.

"I imagine you haven't finished rewriting that paper yet?"

"Oh god," you sobbed, "you— you're— how can you do this?"

You struggled against him again, but he held you back effortlessly. “I said I liked you because you’re a challenge,” he remembered with a laugh. “But out here, you’re no challenge at all. Just a stupid little girl in a mask.”

He slapped you hard across the face, making you stumble even more as you lost your balance, colliding with the damp black asphalt.

He descended onto you, turning you on your back when you tried to hide your face in your arm as an escape from the terrifying visions. “I’ve been waiting for a chance to put you in your place,” he admitted with a growl as he started to pull your armored clothes off of you roughly. “You act a little too fearless for my liking… good to know it’s all an act.”

You cried, shaking and flailing beneath him, but you couldn’t actually put up a fight like this— the darkness throbbed around you, shadows reaching out to pull you into their abyss. “Please,” you begged again, “no! Stop, please!”

You weren’t even sure yourself if you were talking to him or to the hallucinated, anthropomorphized energy in the dark, but neither stopped. He struggled at times to get your clothes off, they weren’t exactly designed to come off quickly but you shuddered violently from the cool night air when your chest was exposed. You heard a deep growl from him, and you whimpered loudly as his hands ran over your skin. “What are you so scared of?” he asked, sounding amused— but in your mind, those hands were claws that could shred you to pieces at any moment, and you breathed so fast that your chest just spasmed and quaked. “I think you’ve been needing this for a while…”

He roughly turned you onto your stomach, face down against the street, and started to tug down your pants. You were too scared to even beg him to stop, to try to bargain or reason with him— you just shuddered and cried, hiding your face and hoping for relief from the dread.

He smacked you on your bare ass, once it was exposed, and chuckled to himself at your whine in response. The next thing you heard was the sound of a belt opening, a zipper unzipped…

Was it the toxin that made you afraid he would rip you in half, when he pressed his erection against your thigh? Or was that just common sense?

You grimaced when you heard him spit into his hand, but it fell into a whining cry as he pushed his tip against your opening. With your pants only down to your knees, you couldn’t even spread your legs at all, making you feel even more like there was no chance he could fit. The sick, anxious fear felt a little different now— maybe not as strong, but mostly just something new… something deeper and subtler and heavier. It wasn’t visions of monsters or memories of suffering, it was just this inevitable violation and the sureness that you were completely helpless.

He pushed his hips forward sharply, making you scream out and instantly reach back to try to grab his hips and push them away. He ignored it and kept going forward with a low groan. “Mm, you can take it,” he promised gruffly. “Fucking take it.”

You cried as he put a hand on your shoulders, keeping you pressed down painfully into the ground, as he slid the rest of the way in.

It stung, it stretched you in an awful way and went far too deep… but you were wet, you could feel it. Overall heightened arousal… not that sort of arousal, necessarily. He obviously noticed as well, growling a bit. “You like this, hm?” he accused.

“N-no,” you managed to slur, but it was hard to even breathe with his weight pressing you down. You pushed back harder against his thighs through his undone trousers, but he growled and grab your hand to pin it down above your head. He brought the other up beside it, and quickly pulled his belt out from the loops to tie around your wrists. “Professor,” you pleaded under your breath, feeling your warm tears mix with the cold rain on the ground.

But he was already inside you, it was too late for that— and with your hands conveniently out of the way, he breathed heavy as he started to pull back and shove back in.

There was no build-up after that, he just fucked you as hard and fast as he wanted with no regard for how you cried and struggled under him. He grabbed your hair and forced your head back awkwardly as you sobbed.

“Say my name,” he ordered, apparently irritated by the title of ‘Professor’ — but you didn’t know for sure if he wanted to be addressed as Jonathan or Scarecrow, and you feared the consequences if you chose incorrectly.

Still, you blurted out the first thing that came to mind: “J-Jonathan,” you spat out hoarsely, and he grinned happily before dropping you back onto the ground. You struggled against the belt around your wrists— not actually expecting to get out of it, and not having any plan if you did, just mainly out of instinct. All it did was dig the sharp edge of the leather into your skin, making you cry harder.

It rocked you back and forth on the ground, those rough thrusts— the friction inside you was hot and fast, and each time he slammed all the way in, you heard the clapping of skin on skin and felt his tip ram against the deepest places inside you. You didn’t even realize it was possible to be bruised inside like that, but you knew you would be by the end of this.

He didn’t slow down, really, but he changed his rhythm slightly and found an angle to go even just a bit deeper into you, until you whined pathetically with every pump into you. It seemed like the toxin was wearing off, in that you weren’t seeing things anymore, but there was still obviously a sick feeling in your stomach, and an unreliable beating in your chest, and a deep throbbing in your ears.

“You’re getting even wetter,” he noticed with a low chuckle, and you whimpered as you hoped not to have to acknowledge that. “Fucking soaking me— poor girl, I don’t think you can help it…”

At least it made this hurt a little less, but no amount of wetness could prevent him from holding your hips painfully tight and fucking you so forcefully it seemed hateful. You whined loudly with every movement, fingers curling into shaky fists even when it was useless with his belt restraining you.

When you turned your face to the side, you saw figures at the other end of the alley— not hallucinations, nothing scary, just passersby on the street— and you reached out for them instinctively as hope flooded your chest. Blinking the tears from your eyes, you could see them clearer: a man and woman, older, well-dressed. “P-please,” you croaked out in a broken voice, “please, help me— call the police—”

They heard you, and they turned and looked at you, only to grimace and turn away; the man pulled his date closer, shuffling her away with him as they kept walking. You whimpered pathetically, and Crane laughed above you. “That’s Gotham for you,” he mused. “No one wants to get involved. These are the people Batgirl wants to save?”

They weren’t the only ones who saw, either; later, a small crowd of young men in bandanas and baggy pants passed by— some of them looked young enough to still be in high school. You prayed to anything that would listen that they would move along without noticing, but one of them saw and pointed at you two with a scoffing laugh. Feeling as if you could throw up, you shut your eyes tight and heard the chorus of jeers as they realized what they were seeing. They laughed and hollered; what the fuck, dude! and ohh shit and hey, she’s pretty hot declared in juvenile voices between raunchy chuckles. You saw flashes of light when you blinked your eyes— were they taking pictures of this with their phones? You wondered if Jonathan would be forced to stop them, if he was concerned about evidence, but he didn’t react at all… he didn’t even slow down.

Once they’d gotten an eyeful and the sight had lost its shock, they wandered away— you could still hear their voices echoing around the buildings for a moment until it all faded in with the ambient sounds of the city: sirens, horns, footsteps, and that perpetual Gotham drizzle.

“I can feel it,” he whispered to you suddenly, “it keeps squeezing me. Such a needy fucking cunt.”

You didn’t know if the ‘cunt’ was referring to your anatomy or to you as a person, and either option made your throat a little dry— but dryness was the least of your problems between your legs, in fact you were pretty sure you were dripping now, you could feel how slippery and sticky you’d become. Your thighs were coated, it was even running down over your swelling and neglected clit.

He lowered himself a bit, resting his arms beside your head and breathing close to your ear. He even brushed some of your hair out of the way with his hand, wanting to get a better look at your face, and you shut your eyes.

Increasingly loud groans and sighs above you made you realize what was about to happen, just as much as the throbbing feeling inside you.

“F-fuck,” he let out in a scratchy voice. “Fuck!”

You whimpered yourself just as you heard him choke out a sort of high-pitched, shaky moan, and his thrusts went from erratic and desperate to slower and uneven. He twitched inside you, and you felt the flood of heat in impossible contrast to the cold ground under you.

“God…” he groaned, his hand on your shoulder tightening and digging a little too deep into your skin. Then he laughed a little as he finally came to a stop— breathless, light, almost making him sound impressed. With you or himself, it’s hard to say; it sounded like a laugh of relief.

A lump formed in your throat as you considered what you were supposed to do now— he’d just come inside you, raw, and it made your stomach sink (but it made your walls clench unexpectedly, too). As he carefully pulled out, you whimpered at the way it reawakened the sting of his first entrance— especially when he first pushed inside. He sighed heavily when he finally got himself out of you completely, and then his hands— hot, a little clammy, and strong— came into view to free your aching wrists from his belt.

He stood up over you, and you heard him readjust his trousers before zipping them up and putting back on his belt. “Was it good for you?” he asked with a quiet, but smug, chuckle.

Bringing your hands nearer to press against the ground, you tried to lift yourself up on shaking arms. When your torso was only a few inches off the pavement, Jonathan put his polished shoe on your back between your shoulder blades and pushed you back down. You whimpered as he looked down at you, tilting his head while he admired your helpless form.

“Stay down,” he ordered.

Finally taking his foot off of you, he picked his mask up from the ground, sighing as he shook some of the raindrops off of it and put it back on.

“Well,” he began with a sigh, his voice modulated by the sack over his head again, “I’ll see you in class. I look forward to seeing what you do with that paper.”

You didn’t watch him leave; you just heard the warehouse door shut again. Your eyes were looking blankly forward, blinking away stinging tears, looking at the way the neon lights of the buildings across the street reflected in the puddles on the ground.

You jolted, much more than necessary, when someone knocked on the bathroom door; it made the water in your bath ripple, though the fluffy white surface of the bubbles was hardly disturbed. “Can I come in?” you heard Bruce’s voice.

“Yeah,” you answered, but he stopped when he opened the door.

“You’re not decent,” he noticed, turning away.

“There’s bubbles everywhere, you can’t see anything,” you sighed, and he stepped the rest of the way in. A pause that both of you pretended wasn’t awkward occurred.

“Tim told me that you came back roughed up,” he said eventually.

You said nothing.

“I told you not to—” he began.

“I know.”

He sighed; you kept staring forward at the white tile wall in front of you. "What happened?" he asked simply.

“I know Tim told you already— two guys, probably Falcone’s— they went at me in a tunnel by the Southside,” you explained with a sigh. “I was just following a stolen van, I didn’t know who took it— I would’ve called you if I knew. I just wanted something I could handle on my own.”

You knew the story didn’t add up; Falcone’s men would’ve probably given you a black eye, maybe a broken nose, and bruises on your stomach from kicks and punches. Instead what you had were concrete scrapes on your cheek, fingerprint-sized bruises on your hips and thighs, and thin abrasions all around your wrists. Not to mention the jitters and auditory hallucinations from working Crane’s toxin out of your system— his voice, still in your ear: just a stupid little girl in a mask. You’d stopped looking over your shoulder by now, but your heart still raced every time.

You knew the story didn’t add up, but you knew it didn’t matter, because Bruce was going to buy it. He wasn’t ready to imagine the truth yet. This time, when you heard Crane’s voice, it wasn’t a hallucination but a memory: you sure were eager for an explanation.

Bruce nodded and began to walk out of the bathroom. “Alright,” he said. “Rest up.”

You scoffed to yourself as he left quietly— for a detective, he still had a few blindspots. Surely, we all do.

Left alone in the bathroom again, you were surrounded by silence once more. In silence, it was easier to hear his voice in your ear. Just a stupid little girl in a mask.

The shrill sound of your cell phone startled you, and you awkwardly leaned out of the tub just far enough to grab it off of the pile of towels you'd left it on.

"Hello?" you answered, irritation obvious in your tone.

“Hello, ma’am, this is Tracy from the Gotham University Student Wellness Center,” the sweet, lilting voice came from the other end of the line. “We recently received notice of concern that you may be experiencing domestic violence. We’d love for you to come into our office to discuss this and receive complementary counseling, when’s a good time that we could—?”

You hung up and tossed the phone away, sinking down into the water.

#cillian murphy smut #cillian murphy fic #cillian murphy x reader #scarecrow smut #scarecrow x reader #jonathan crane x reader #jonathan crane smut #jonathan crane dark fic

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missmeinyourbones · 4 months

Text

AURORA BOREALIS GREEN

cw: non sorcerer au, college au, enemies to lovers (?) neighbors to lovers, miscommunication trope if you squint (I AM SORRY), reader e to as she/her once, reader wears heels, some light sexual content (dry humping nation rise)

wc: 10k+

There's something wrong with your upstairs neighbors.

You've never met them, not face to face at least, but between the times you've hit your ceiling with the end of your broom and the audacity they have to continue to be as rowdy as they are, something isn't right with them. You're sure of it.

And you're not naive to the fact that your apartment building is filled with young people, either currently in college or just freshly graduated. You're no prude to the dulled sound of late-night party playlists or squeaky bed frames muffled by plaster.

But your neighbors aren't guilty of these typical noise complaints. No, they're borderline much worse.

The majority of their crimes take place in the day, believe it or not, which makes it all the more frustrating when you actually have shit to do. When it's not boyish yells of victory and frustration, it's footsteps that sound like a herd of elephants (how many people can live in an apartment floor plan for two?). They're relentless upstairs neighbors to have, and though you couldn't pick their faces out of a crowd if you tried, you're sure their lack of etiquette spans across other areas of their lives.

The tiny clock at the top of your computer blinks a mocking 11:38 AM as you try to study through the sounds of excited stomping and rowdy gibberish.

You don't know what makes today so different, whether it's the burnt coffee beans you can taste lingering in your usual order from the cafe across the street or the organic chemistry study guide practically laughing at you as you review your hieroglyphic notes for tomorrow's test.

Whatever is in the water has you feeling braver than usual, and instead of reaching for the conveniently placed broom in the corner of your kitchen, you find yourself stomping your way down the hall and up the staircase.

The sixth floor is identical to the fifth — you don't know why it wouldn't be, but you've never put much thought into it — so it's no surprise that your feet find no trouble in naturally bringing you to a door equivalent to yours just a floor below.

Your knuckles wrap against the wood with three unfriendly knocks, and the joyous buzzing from inside the apartment instantly comes to a lull. You think you hear panicked whispers from the other side, almost as if the culprits are debating on answering or not. You take their choice away when you knock three more times.

After a moment, you hear the clicking of the lock and the fiddling of the doorknob. You take a deep breath to ground yourself, put on your best customer service voice, and prepare to calmly tell these entitled frat boys to shut the fuck up when—

You're ironically met with the prettiest green eyes you think you've ever seen.

A tall brunette stands before you, about your age, and wearing a look that's both confused and embarrassed. Your eyes quickly flicker across his face in the span of mere seconds, logical thoughts going out the window and now replaced with amazement at how stupidly attractive he is.

Though you knocked on his door, he speaks first.

"Hi...?" He clears his throat, looking behind you in the hallway, almost as if you have the wrong room.

His confusion annoys you, and you suddenly remember why you're here in the first place.

"Look, I really don't wanna be a bitch," you sigh, rubbing the bridge of your nose, "but what could you possibly be doing in this apartment that sounds like an actual full-out brawl on a Wednesday morning?"

Obliviously handsome neighbor's face goes a bit pink and his jaw slacks as he stutters, looking for either a shitty excuse or a polite explanation of the truth.

He opens the door a bit more, gesturing to the living room behind him. You spare a glance to where another guilty suspect stares back at you with big brown eyes and a smirk. There's some video game paused on the screen, ridden with animated blood and a scoped weapon's perspective.

Your attention is brought back to the one holding the door when he mumbles, "I think it's our game."

A bit dumbfounded at his lame answer, you blankly stare at him.

"Your... game?"

Brown Eyes yells from the couch, "Call of Duty!"

As if on instinct, Green Eyes closes the door a bit, shielding you from his roommate and shaking his head in exasperation. He clears his throat awkwardly, "Sorry, are you—?"

You're suddenly hyperaware of the fact that you've been staring at how long his fucking eyelashes are. He's anything but sore on the eyes, but again, you try to remind yourself that he and his roommate make your life difficult at least five out of seven days of the week.

"I live below you," you huff behind a swallow, "and you really don't make it easy."

He nods dumbly, finally realizing the connection behind your visit. "Oh, right."

You scoff and nod your head. For someone as pretty as him, he's a bit thick in the head.

Biting your cheek, you begin to walk away from the door without completely ending the conversation. As you're turning to leave, he hears you call out from down the corridor.

"If you could just — not play video games like eleven-year-old boys," your tone is filled with annoyance, "that'd be great."

You don't need to turn around to know that the stranger at the door is apologetic and nodding in compliance. Before he can fully shut the door, you hear a quip from his counterpart on the couch.

"She told you, bro."

As the door shuts, you hear the muffled hiss from the other. "You're the one making noise, dipshi—"

…..

Your threatening conversation must have worked to some degree, because it's been almost two days without any sort of annoyance from your upstairs neighbors. You think you almost take it for granted, the way you can study without headphones and enjoy a movie in the living room rather than in your bed with the speaker on high.

The walk back from your class is usually about twenty minutes, but it's closer to fifteen today as you're quicker when it comes to getting out of the cold.

Your chemistry test went alright — maybe not your best work but okay enough that you passed. And that's all you care about as you make your way back to your apartment, intending to crash in your bed and not move for the next few hours.

The winter air leaves a chill up your spine as you swipe into your building and press the elevator button. Your nose runs a bit from the cold as it sits against your knit scarf. Bag on your arm and half-consumed coffee, you can't wait to enjoy a day or two without thinking about covalent bonds and isomers.

You close your eyes and release a sigh as the elevator door begins to close, but before it gets the chance to do so successfully, quick footsteps and a hand jammed between the closing space prompt the doors to reopen.

Not really paying attention to the stranger joining your 30-second elevator ride, you simply step to the side to make more room for them.

It's not until they make eye contact with you that you realize it's your neighbor, the same one you'd borderline terrorized a few days ago for being irritating.

He's out of breath from catching the lift last minute, lungs still adjusting from the crisp air from outside. His jacket is zipped all the way up to his collar and his hair pokes out in spiky tuffs from beneath his hat.

He mumbles out a weak "sorry" before his eyes find the floor and the rickety door shuts, leaving the two of you alone in the suddenly very small space.

You'd cuss beneath your breath if you weren't close enough for him to hear it.

What's the acceptable thing to do in this scenario? You mentally weigh out your options. Sit in an awkward silence? Introduce yourself as if your encounter never even happened? Address the fact that you banged on his door a few days ago and insulted him as a first impression?

You choose the silence. If anything, you silently pray that behind your winter apparel and the lack of eye contact, he doesn't even recognize you.

But that thought goes to shit when you see that he's already pressed the fifth-floor button for you.

You swear the ride to your floor has never been this slow. Seconds feel like hours as you watch the digital number rise like paint drying on a wall. The elevator almost laughs at you as it stops on the third floor and opens itself to find no one there; you curse whoever decided to press the button before changing their mind and taking the stairs.

After what seems like forever, your floor finally flashes on the pixelated screen, and as you feel the elevator come to a stop—

The doors don't open.

You think it's just your dramatic prolonged sense of time until it's been about ten seconds and still, nothing. Just the two of you in a stopped elevator with doors that won't unlock.

You've never been one to believe in karma, but you can't help but think this is the universe punishing you for standing up for yourself. You are quite literally on your floor, a mere sliding door away from the embarrassing situation you got yourself in, but still, nothing happens.

He presses the button meant to prompt open the doors a few times with slight force.

"It does this, sometimes," he weakly coughs out in an attempt to make conversation. "It's uh—a shitty building."

You try pressing the button for yourself, "It's never done this for me."

Green Eyes sighs, slouching against his side of the wall and letting his head fall to rest on his shoulder, "Consider yourself lucky."

You huff, giving up on the button and turning to face him.

Your eyes didn't deceive you the first time you saw him — he is just as pretty as you'd initially thought. Not a great conversationalist, but nice to look at. He avoids eye contact until you speak up.

"It's happened to you before?" you gesture to the doors that won't open.

He catches your eye before nodding defeatedly, "This is the fourth time."

You can't help but bitterly laugh at the situation you're in.

"Maybe it's just you, then," you joke, looking up at the digital five mocking you in the corner.

Though you don't catch it, his eyes soften a bit as they fall on you. The corner of his mouth slightly quirks up when he chimes, "Could be."

You let yourself count another ten seconds before tossing your hands by your sides in aggravation and sighing, "So, what now? Hit the help button or—"

And like a blessing, or maybe a curse, you can't decide, the elevator chimes, signaling its arrival. The doors open swiftly as if there was nothing wrong with them in the first place, revealing your destination floor to you.

You whip your head to your upstairs neighbor, confused and almost asking for his permission to exit the elevator. You don't know why you do so, and you don't know why you only depart after he nods his head and waves his hand for you to continue.

Next time you leave your apartment, you find yourself taking the stairs to be safe.

…..

Your peaceful living is unsurprisingly short-lived. After a few enjoyable days, you'd given your neighbors too much credit as they now return to their usual noisiness. You find yourself rapping on their door once again.

This time, Brown Eyes answers.

Even before opening his mouth, he's instantly friendlier than his counterpart based on body language alone, completely opening the door all the way wide and leaning against the frame in his palm.

He's taller than you, but not as tall as the former who greeted you last time. With light rose-colored hair, he's all smiles and giggles. You'd think he were high if you could smell anything on him.

Oh, he's also shirtless.

"Hey, it's our friend again," he smiles at you before craning his neck backward, and you can make an educated guess on who exactly he's talking to.

You're quick to steer clear, "We aren't friends."

He laughs at your words, completely unfazed by the unwelcoming attitude. He casually sips on an energy drink that looks borderline lethal when he asks, "Were we being loud? You comin' to yell at us again?"

His lack of care for the situation surprisingly doesn't rub you the wrong way. Inconvenient? Yes, but not necessarily malicious, from what you can tell.

"I wouldn't be here for any other reason."

"Sorry," he sheepishly rubs the back of his neck. "We don't really have inside voices around here."

You can't help but roll your eyes at the childish excuse. "You should find some."

"Will do," he nods like a child being reprimanded in class, "sorry again."

He salutes you with a metal can in his left hand. Before you can turn your back to him and towards the elevator, you hear the same voice call out to you.

"Hey—!"

You stop midstride, slowly turning around to face the door again. He stands in the same position, leaning against the door frame as he points out the obvious.

"We didn't get your name last time."

You blink at him a few times, not caring enough to connect the dots and extend the nicety, but the friendly one persists. He places a palm on his (bare) chest as he gestures to himself, "I'm Itadori."

You nod with raised brows, "And I'm calling our landlord if you piss me off again."

You hear a soft chuckle from the inside of the apartment. The two of you turn at the sound of the noise, where Green Eyes hides his smile behind the strings of his sweatshirt and quickly returns his attention to his phone.

Itadori, apparently, looks back at you and nods to his friend, "That's Fushiguro."

You breathe out your own name and quickly make your way back towards your apartment. On the ride down to your floor, you find yourself repeating the name — Fushiguro. It tastes weird on your lips, and you hate the way you don't hate it.

..…

His name is Megumi.

You learn this when a letter shows up at your door addressed to a Fushiguro Megumi. Mail mix-ups are common in the apartment complex, but you can't help but laugh at the coincidence - his name but your apartment number clearly displayed in black ink.

You examine the piece of paper closely. The cream-colored envelope covered in poorly drawn hearts and tacky puppy stickers placed randomly across its front found itself wedged into your door's mailbox. Flipping it over, the return address is a mere surname of Gojo underlined with a smiley face.

A love letter, you realize. You're not sure why the shift in narrative suddenly fills your stomach with an uneasy weight of disappointment.

You're going out anyways, you tell yourself as you slip on your scarf and shimmy into your shoes. Between stopping at the grocery store for a few small things and dropping off overdue assignments at your professor's office, it's not like you're going out of your way to return the letter to its intended recipient. You're doing the right thing, being a good samaritan, your mind repeats.

The single flight up the stairs is easy enough and a good excuse for exercise. Approaching the door that mimics your own floor below, the same one you've already visited two times too many, you feel weirdly nervous. Just slide it beneath his door and call it a day.

As you bend to slip the paper beneath the door, it swings open.

You quickly stand up straight and back away from the opening, as the shadow in your peripheral startles from your presence and does the same.

"Shit, sorry—"

Looking up, you lock eyes with the one and only whose letter lies in your hand. Fuck.

He hesitates a bit when he realizes it's you, doing a double take and immediately assuming he's in trouble again.

"We—" Megumi, you now know him to be, turns his back to you, quickly surveying his empty apartment to show you, "aren't playing? Yuuji's not even home, so—”

You're not sure why you're the slightest bit hurt by his more than reasonable accusation. The only two times you've been at his door were to reprimand him, so of course he's not wrong to assume this time was no different. Still, it has you feeling guilty as you dryly swallow and raise your arm.

"I was sticking this under your door," you sigh, handing him the ridiculous-looking envelope. "Got sent to my place accidentally."

His eyes flicker to your extended hand, and when he sees the writing on the envelope between your fingers, his body instantly goes hot with embarrassment.

"Of course it did," he groans beneath his breath, almost annoyed.

A bit abruptly, he grabs the letter from you and places his hand behind his back, telling himself that if it's out of sight, you'll forget it ever happened entirely.

His uneasiness and slight frustration have you taking a small step back as he snatches the envelope. He senses your hesitation and immediately mourns how he acted out of instinct, sighing and slowly moving the letter from behind him to rest by his side.

He softens and clears his scratchy throat, something you've come to notice he does a lot. "Thanks."

Feeling a bit brave, you raise your eyebrows, amused at his odd behavior. Your words are taunting yet friendly when you nod to the note at his arm.

"You should probably tell your girlfriend that you're in #603, not #503."

Megumi's face is often stoic and downturned, aside from a slight pull of a smile that can rarely be seen on occasion. But at these words, you watch in regret as Megumi's expression mimics one of disgust mixed with pure mortification.

"Oh, this—" his eyes fall to the envelope he thinks might be the cause of his death, "this isn't from a girlfriend. It's actually a lot worse than that."

"Worse?" you push.

"It's... from a family friend," he weakly reveals. "Kinda like a dad, I guess."

You find yourself smiling at the meek yet sweet confession, nodding along and biting back a good-hearted laugh at his timidness.

"Right, I just assumed with the hearts and the cute stickers that—" you trail off, gesturing to the letter that clearly presents itself as something else.

He laughs a bit humorlessly and itches the back of his neck shyly.

"That would make a lot more sense and be a lot less humiliating, yeah."

You take a moment to take in his shyness. He's harmless, you decide at that very moment. You make a mental note to remind yourself to weigh the sides of the subject at hand.

Cons: awkward, obvlvious, bad neighbor, a tad unfriendly at times

Pros: annoyingly attractive, nice enough in actual conversation, respectful in passing, girlfriend-less

You shake those points from your head, taking a breath and slowly moving towards the elevator. "It could've been worse. The stickers could've been puppies and kittens," you tease.

You expect that to be all, because that's all it should be, right? An awkward yet friendly coincidence between two strangers who got off on the wrong foot. You're locked in on entering the elevator when you hear his voice from behind you.

"Sorry—" he shortly blurts out.

You turn, expecting him to elaborate on the outburst. The look on his face almost reads as if he wasn't planning to until seeing your reaction, where he explains, "That we're loud sometimes. I really do try to tell Yuuji to shut up, but he's just... a lot."

You don't know why your heart swells at the apology.

"It's fine," you nod softly. Turning your back, you call out to him as you enter the elevator. "You've actually been pretty tolerable this week, but don't let that go to your head."

As the elevator closes, you see Megumi smile before returning inside and closing his door. This time, you don't stop the thoughts that flow through your head.

Pro: cute

.….

You suppose it was only a matter of time before the tables you'd set managed to turn on you, but you just didn't expect it so soon. Because the next time you run into your neighbors, it's them knocking on your door for a change.

The sharp winter wind shakes the sides of your building with rage — the kind that results in creaky panels and systems outages in certain sectors of your building.

After waking to take a shower early this morning and being greeted with piercing cold water that refused to warm up, no matter how long you ran the faucet, you knew today would be a long one.

Clad in layers of fuzzy socks and bulky hoodies, you rise from the couch to answer the banging outside. After opening the door to see who's on the other side, it takes less than a second for the visitor to make himself at home.

"You out of hot water, too?" Yuuji casually brushes past you, walking into your home and stopping in the center of the living room. He looks around the space in awe — as if his own place just a singular level above doesn't mimic the exact same floor plan.

Still in the hallway but keeping an eye on his friend's questionable behavior, Megumi waits in the hallway. He's on the phone with someone, his cell wedged between his elbow and ear. When he begins asking about the building's backup generator, you mentally thank him for being the only proactive one here.

You sigh and turn to Yuuji, who's admiring your wall art and the fact that you have an actual television stand, "I'm out of heat in general."

"Damn," he blurts out without a thought, "that sucks."

You overhear Megumi wrapping up his conversation in the background when your lips are pulled downward in confusion.

"Are you guys not?"

"Oh no, we are," Yuuji continues admiring your apartment with a child-like curiosity, "but we have a space heater that's doing the job for now. How are you so good at decorating?"

You ignore his question, turning to Megumi who now stands on the threshold of your doorway. He makes a face, one of tight lips and sympathy, almost as if he's wordlessly apologizing for both the unfortunate scenario and his roommate's lack of social etiquette.

You further wrap yourself in your own little warmth, crossing your arms inwards. "That's actually really smart of you guys," you manage to croak out.

"You can come up and chill if you want," Yuuji mindlessly offers, eyes scanning over the magnets on your fridge. He can't stop himself from fiddling with a cherry-shaped one that holds up a baby picture of you from kindergarten.

The shock on your face must be obvious because you swear you hear Megumi swallow a chuckle at your reaction.

"You came down here… to ask me to chill?" Your voice octaves up towards the end, almost as if repeating the offer will reveal itself to be a track or joke.

While Yuuji nods eagerly, you can hear Megumi muttering from behind the neckline of his sweatshirt.

"Sue us for extending a neighborly olive branch."

As Yuuji continues to outwardly snoop around your kitchen, his eyes land on your oven-top clock and he whines.

"I actually have class in twenty and need to catch the shuttle to campus, but you're welcome to not freeze to death with Fushiguro, if you want."

You check your phone, confirming the time when you question, "Didn't the last shuttle of the hour leave already?"

You watch the gears turn in Itadori's mind for a second before he smacks a palm to his head, quickly brushing past you and out the door.

"Fuck me, see you guys later then—" he hurries, the only sound following him being the swishing of his winter coat and clunky booted footsteps jostling down the stairs.

And with Megumi still standing in your doorway and the sound of the main staircase gate slamming behind Yuuji's path, you could hear a pin drop between the two of you if it weren't for the howling wind outside (which you find yourself suddenly grateful for rather than loathing it).

Megumi shifts his weight on the balls of his feet as he stands. He clears his throat in a way he hopes is subtle.

"You can still come up," he gestures to the hallway with a nod of his head, before cautiously adding, "if you want."

Instinctively, you feel your body curl further in on itself. Megumi must notice it too, as his eyes quickly flicker to your raw hands tucked beneath your arms.

"It's not that bad in here," you weakly dismiss.

He deadpans, "I can almost see your breath."

A sigh leaves your chilled body and you look up at Megumi. Now it's your turn to silently communicate with him — eyebrows raising and wavering between your options, you chew on your cheek in thought.

"You don't have to," he softly adds, hands burrowing themselves in the pocket of his hoodie. "Just wanted to see if you needed anything, I guess."

"What did the landlord say?" your words are muffled from your teeth in your cheek.

Megumi's eyes light up a bit before they find his scuffed Converse again.

"He's sending his guys over, but it's gonna take an hour, at least."

After another minute that feels like twenty, you softly speak up.

"…Do you really have a space heater?"

As he fights off a smile, Megumi gently nods.

.….

You'll admit, the apartment looks better than you'd imagined. Not that your standards weren't too high to begin with, but you're pleasantly surprised.

Megumi unlocks the front door, gesturing for you to enter as he slowly closes it behind him, shivering a bit from the draft weaving through the hallway.

It's clean, relatively. The design of the rooms and open areas are identical to your layout below, but between the decor (or lack thereof) and the overhanging presence of the space, it feels so different.

Their television, the one you know to be responsible for their rowdiness, balances on what looks to be a bedside table. Far too small for the proportions of the TV but just enough to carry the width of the screen's base, it looks silly but does the job.

"You can just…" Megumi waves his hand to the living room, awkwardly trailing off as he insists. "Sit. Wherever you want."

Your seating choices include a felt futon in scrappy condition, two lopsided beanbags, and a busted recliner. You take your chances with the futon.

Surveying the apartment, it's not terrible — truthfully, you'd been expecting worse from college guys. You give them props; aside from a few half-drank plastic water bottles and withering plants on their window sill, there's nothing that outwardly goes against any health violations or suitable living standards. No empty beer cans or pizza boxes, no trashy flags or posters hung on the walls. It's decent.

And the space heater working overtime in the corner outlet is a major plus. Feeling the angle of its warmth blasting on your legs, you exhale at the heat and rub your fuzzy slippers together on instinct.

"Do you want anything?" Megumi stands a few feet away, nervous for someone in the comfort of his own home, "Water or a drink, or something?"

It's sweet how respectful he's being — you think back to whoever sent him that letter, imagining they raised him right.

You shake your head curtly, "I don't take drinks from strange men."

His face drops instantly.

"Oh—right," he swallows harshly, fumbling with his sparse words. "I didn't mean it like that or anything, but that makes sense. I just meant—”

The stoic expression you were attempting to upkeep fails and you can't fight off the smile that pulls at your cheeks. Exhaling a laugh and looking over at him, you apologize, "I'm just kidding, Megumi."

He feels his stomach instantly solidify like cement at your words — Megumi. He doesn't recall you ever referring to him by any name, let alone his first. He feels a wandering heat itching up his neck when he coughs up a chuckle.

He shakes his head, sitting on the opposite end of the futon and leaving the middle cushion between the two of you unoccupied.

"Fuck off," he scratches his jaw to busy his shaky hands. In doing so, you catch a glimpse of a few silver rings wrapping around his knuckles.

As the warmth of the space heater (solely the space heater, you remind yourself) gradually dissolves the chill that's been stuck up your spine for the last few hours, you slightly settle further into your seat.

"So this is the scene of the crime, huh?" you motion to the gaming console propped up on the floor beside the makeshift television stand.

Megumi amuses an exhale through his nose and nods along, "Yeah. I mean, you've kinda seen it from the hallway before."

"Yeah, but this is the real thing, first-person point of view. It's just missing me downstairs hitting the ceiling with my broom twenty times."

The next few minutes are stolen by a whole lot of small talk that holds no weight. Beginning to panic at how the hell you're gonna make it through this entire hour with little to talk about, your eyes fall on the television once more.

"So," you curl into the futon. "Show me something worth screaming over."

Without warning, Megumi chokes on his own saliva as he swallows.

"Huh?"

"A game," you quickly correct, not realizing how your words sounded and nodding to the television before you. "I meant, show me a game that justifies how loud you two get."

The game is fine, nothing revolutionary but admit that you could see how it could be entertaining for some. A standard battle royal concept, Megumi hands you his second controller and walks you through the instructions on how to play.

You mimic the way his fingers hold the controller, how they flex and bend to hit certain buttons for special uses. Throughout the tutorial of trial and error, the two of you naturally close the gap of the middle cushion, now much closer as you copy his movements and use his hands for reference. He even goes as far as reaching over to point out certain buttons to you, skimming your fingers hesitantly as he pulls away.

It's safe to say you don't win, don't even come close, but he's a good sport all the same. He laughs when you're hit by enemies and revives you with little to no mocking. He whispers an encouraging "there you go" whenever you manage to land a hit on someone, followed by an "I got you" when he's covering for your character. It's fun — you freeze a bit when you realize that you like spending time with him, even doing the very thing that caused this entire debacle in the first place.

You don't realize how much time has passed until Megumi's phone vibrates from the coffee table. His eyes quickly glance over the unsaved number, almost as if recognizes the contact and is debating on answering or not.

Your eyes narrow teasingly when you taunt, "You gonna take that?"

Snapped out of his thoughts, Megumi nods, swipes his screen, and holds his phone to his ear.

"Hello?"

The conversation is short, maybe thirty seconds in total. Though you can't make out any specific words, you can hear the rumbling of another deep voice on the other end of the call. Megumi listens half-heartedly, nodding along and chiming in here and there to acknowledge the caller.

"Hey, yeah. That was me. Right, okay. Okay, nice. Thanks, appreciate it."

The call ends and Megumi puts his phone down on the coffee table once more. You swear you can hear a small sense of disappointment in his voice when he breathes.

"That was the maintenance guy," he breathes softly. "Heat's back on."

You feel your own body getting sour with misfortune. Why are you so bitter about the thought of going back downstairs to your own apartment?

Nodding at his words, you slowly stand and do your best to sound relieved. "Thank god," you joke, "I was beginning to think I might have to sleep on this gross futon."

Megumi sneers, rolling his eyes and rising to walk you to the door. Before you step into the hallway, you turn to face him.

"Thanks," your tone is spineless, one he's unable to recognize from you before you elaborate, "for letting me leech off of your heat."

"No problem," he shoots you a genuine look. "Consider it reparations for all of the times we've annoyed you."

"All of the times?" you shoot him a harmless glare.

Unlike most who cower and scowl at your sarcastic quips, Megumi seems to bloom beneath your daggered attempts at pushing him away.

"Fine," he exaggerates a groan, "maybe not all. But it's a start, right?"

A start. The insinuation tickles all air out of your lungs like a feather. Though you pretend to be annoyed and kiss your teeth at his words, you nod all the same.

Leaving his door, Megumi seems lighter than he did when you first entered.

"Sorry you just kinda watched me play video games for almost two hours," he calls out to you as you depart, hands returning to his pockets.

"Don't be," you honestly tell him as your head cranes back to look at him. "It was nice to be up here for reasons other than wanting to strangle you."

.….

A day and a half later when the universe has realigned itself and it's you knocking on their door again, they half expect you to be followed by your stuffy landlord holding an eviction notice.

Much to their surprise, you're alone, rather skittish — and holding a tupperware container of… cookies?

It's Megumi who opens the door initially, but Yuuji is quick to squeeze his way into the opening at the sight of your familiar face and mysterious delivery in hand.

"Ooooooh, what are these?" he inquires, unashamed as he pokes his nose into your space in an attempt to get a better look at the baked goods.

Pulling a bit away from his antics, you swallow back any potential wisecracks.

"Thank you for being neighborly and not letting me die of hypothermia cookies," you keep your voice neutral.

"Are they poisoned?" Megumi pipes in.

You shoot him a scowl, one he's learned is innocent enough, and his eyes crinkle in amusement.

"Shit, can't remember if I added vanilla or vitriol?" your head cocks to the side in faux thought.

Your eyes flicker to him as he chews on his cheek in a half-assed attempt to cover up his entertainment at your quickness.

Yuuji, focused on nothing but having a minimum of five cookies for good measure, snatches the container from your hands and carries it to the kitchen counter.

He's already opening the dish and helping himself as he chews, "I don't even know what that is, so I'm gonna take my chances."

Megumi gives a quick thank you for the cookies, and Yuuji chimes in behind a satiated mouth and crumby lips. You brush off their graces, reminding them it's just you returning the favor for the heating situation.

Just as you're about to see yourself out of their entryway, you hear an authentic offer from the kitchen.

"Hey," Yuuji wipes his lips with the back of his hand, and something about it feels oddly youthful to you, "wanna come over this weekend?"

You look at the two of them for a moment, waiting to see if there's a punchline to come, before carefully treading, "Why?"

"We're havin' some friends over," Yuuji reveals casually before going to take another large bite, "and I guess you're funny enough to hang out with us."

The hesitation in your response must be more apparent than you think because he's quick to chuckle and elaborate on the offer.

"It's not an orgy," he teases at your stiffness before grabbing at another cookie and shrugging. "We get take out, chill, drink a little, kick ass in Mario Kart."

You nod as you listen to his words. He's kind, they both are, and you know the offer to be a genuine one. Still, the situation makes your stomach ache with uncertainty at the thought of mingling with strangers for the sake of your mere — acquaintances? Neighbors? Friends?

"As fun as that sounds," you breathe, clearly trying but failing to convince them of your apologetic tone, "I don't really wanna intrude on you and your friends.

"It's not intruding if you're invited," Megumi interjects for the first time in the conversation.

Looking at where he stands against the counter, his eyes are on you. They're careful, but hopeful in a gentle kind of way. He wants you to say yes — but he'd rather swallow a knife than his own pride and admit it himself.

Your words are unconvincing when you sigh, "Not really in the hangout mood. Next time, okay?"

The two men deflate a bit, one more dramatic and obvious than the other, but they nod at your rejection. Wiping his hands off on his shorts, Yuuji walks you to the door, thanking you again for the sweets and joking about you getting home safe on your long journey back downstairs.

You can't help but giggle at his theatrics, insisting that, "If you need me this weekend, I'll be rotting away on my couch with a bottle of wine and a week's worth of Love Island to catch up on."

Yuuji laughs wholeheartedly, "Your loss, see ya."

Megumi weakly waves as his best friend swings the door shut. Once closed, Yuuji turns to him with a cheeky smile he knows can mean nothing good.

Megumi grimaces at his enthusiasm, "What?"

Yuuji nods to the door, a toothy grin spreading across his face. "Think I'm gonna ask her out."

Megumi's quick to react poorly.

"What?" he borderline knocks over the water bottle next to him on the counter. He catches it, embarrassed by his obvious care for the situation as he tries to cover it up with a nonchalant scoff, "Why?"

Yuuji stares at him for a minute in disbelief before stating what he believes to be the obvious.

"'Cause she's hot and yells at us all the time?"

Megumi scoffs in distaste again. He fiddles with the rings on his right hand, pretending to be careless about a situation he's anything but careful about.

Sensing his roommate's off response, Itadori's quick to add. "Unless you wanna call dibs before I do?"

"Dibs?" Megumi groans.

"Yeah, like claiming—"

"I know what dibs means," he interrupts before Yuuji can dig his own grave any further. He slumps into the palm of his hand as his elbow rests atop the kitchen counter, "I just think that's shitty."

Yuuji, knowing Megumi well enough to sense that he's hit a sour spot, nods and backs off. He joins him at the counter again, oblivious as he grabs another cookie to chomp on. With cautious eyes and a mouth filled with chocolate, he speaks up.

"…So you don't wanna call dibs?"

.….

It's Saturday, almost Sunday, according to the cat clock on your wall.

You'd kept your word. Beneath a few blankets and practically one with your couch cushions, you're spending your weekend doing exactly what you'd anticipated.

The television continues to play the stream of episodes you're catching up on. With your second glass of red in hand, you tune in and out of the segments when the good parts catch your attention. It feels good to relax, to do nothing and to be nothing behind tipsy and fatigued eyes.

A sudden knock on your door puts a minor wedge in your plans. Sitting up with a groan, you whimper beneath your breath but move to answer it regardless.

Maybe you forgot to tip your delivery driver when he dropped off your takeout a few hours ago and he's back for revenge. Maybe it's your drunk friends, showing up to ruin your night and attempting to persuade you to join them on their foolish escapades. Maybe it's someone with the wrong address.

Locking eyes with the visitor at your door, it's Megumi. Maybe you're drunker than you thought.

His delicate eyes match yours when he scarcely smiles, "Hi."

Your eyes go to the items in his hands — a few beer bottles, a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels, and a deck of cards.

Giggling to yourself, you stare at him, "I think you got off a floor too early."

Megumi laughs, and when you're able to get a good look at him, you can tell he's a bit tipsy, too. His shoulders aren't as tense as they usually are, he's still broad, but a lot looser now. His eyes are glossed over with a haze you're sure yours mimic. He scratches his nose awkwardly before opening his mouth.

"I—" he cuts himself off, eyes darting to the items in his arms before returning to you, "wanted to see you."

"Me?" you're unable to stop yourself from nearly gawking.

He laughs again, not obnoxiously but easy and natural. "Yes, you. Does someone else live here?"

"Don't you have plans with your friends?" you question, still not letting him inside.

"They're upstairs," he nods, "and no, I'm not here to force you to come up."

At his words, he can see your visible relief. Opening the door fully and letting him come inside, you relish in reassurance, "Good, I really didn't wanna be fake nice right now."

A smile pulls at the corners of his mouth as he sets his belongings on your coffee table. "Fake nice?" he prompts.

"I mean, not that it's fake, it's just like—customer servicey. Y'know? Being kind to people in a way that's not ingenuine but—"

"Exhausting?" he finishes for you, and he's weirdly more talkative with a bit of alcohol in his veins. "Yeah, I feel that."

You sprawl onto your couch and he takes the seat next to you but refrains from leaning back as far. He watches you graze on your glass of wine, your legs crossed childishly as you gaze up at him.

"Are you like that with me?" he puts on a brave face. "Fake nice?"

He releases a breath he didn't even know he was holding when you shake your head. After a hearty sip from your drink, you talk dramatically with your hands.

"Am I even real nice to you? I've kinda been a bitch since the day I banged on your door."

Megumi shakes his head as he laughs, which in return allows you to do the same. He relaxes a bit further into the warmth of your cushions, lolling his head to look at you as he opens himself a beer.

"I don't think so," he shrugs. "You're not wrong for complaining about us being understandably annoying."

Things lighten up as time passes. The night gets a bit blurry but it's fun, carefree. The two of you sit on your tiny couch, passing a bag of pretzels back and forth, and playing stupid card games that bring out your competitive sides and don't have real rules.

Minutes bleed into hours and you're not sure what time it is when it's late enough for Megumi to start yawning. Enjoying a comfortable silence between the two of you, his voice is temperate when he asks.

"Why didn't you want to hang out with us?"

He almost seems mournful, and a part of you feels guilty as his eyes blink heavily down on you. You exhale, readjusting your legs and throwing your head back.

"Seemed like a friend group thing," is what eventually crawls up from your throat. "Felt weird being the only one who didn't know everyone, y'know?"

He considers before nodding in agreement. "Yeah, I guess. But I would've been with you."

His stare feels sharp, like he can see right through your facade and into parts of you you've buried deep a long time ago. You hate it and love it, want to drown yourself in it and voluntarily inhale until your own demise.

Unable to hold his stare, you look into your almost empty glass, swishing around the bleeding wine and ice that remains at the bottom.

"Well, you're here with me now, anyway."

Megumi continues to admire you without words. Pointing an accusatory finger back at him, you nudge his leg with your foot. "So, why aren't you up there?"

"Cause you didn't show up," he doesn't hesitate to respond. Almost as if he regrets his eagerness but still stands by the sentiment, he clears his throat before adding, "Was weirdly hoping you would, but—"

He doesn't finish his sentence, trailing off with a lame shrug.

His eyes look greener when they're a bit more watery. Fuck it.

Slowly, maintaining eye contact with him the entire time to assess his reactions, you move to crawl into his lap. You sense a difference in his breathing pattern, but other than that, he makes no move to pull away from you. He lets you carefully straddle his legs before getting comfortable atop him, when he places his hands on the plush between your hips and thighs.

Leaning in, giving him any chance to reject you, stop you, hate you, you continue to keep his eye as your lips just barely brush against his. He does the same, refusing to look away from you as if he'll never get this opportunity again. As if he wants to take a picture and relish it forever.

"Stop me," you bite through a hushed whisper, daring him to put an end to this before it begins.

His breath is lulled against your own when he whispers, "No."

You kiss him, and he kisses you back. It starts simple, like you're learning all about one another's creases and folds. Between shaky inhales and nervous hands, you lean into one another's touch, savoring every taste and sound you can manage.

Megumi feels brave, and on one particular gasp from you, he prudently skims his tongue across your lower lip before slipping it inside. Rubbing against your own with a fervent need, you open your jaw further for him to have whatever he wants. Between your increased breathing, soft moans, and greedy hands, the two of you slowly become messy and desperate for one another.

Hips wantonly moving against his thighs, he flexes instinctually as you begin to grind yourself down on him. He meets your movements, half hard as he presses into you, both of you whimpering at the new-found friction. The two of you reduce to whiney teenagers, practically swallowing one another whole and dry-humping fully clothed before you open your eyes to look at him.

Megumi, eyes shut and whimpering into your neck, is too good for this — deserves more than this. He's kind, respectful, funny (though you'd never tell him that to his face), and you're both drunk. It feels so fucking good, but it isn't right. It's not supposed to happen like this.

Slowing your movements, you pull back to see his face. Dazed, he opens his pretty green eyes to look up at you like you hold the stars and sun in your hands.

"We shouldn't," you pant, brushing your bangs back and catching your breath. "We should stop."

Megumi, confused and hurt, but instantly moving you off of his lap with a gentle hold, nods in agreement. "Right, right, we're — we're drunk," he whispers, almost ashamed of everything that just happened.

Before you can say anything, he's readjusting himself and standing up. A bit more sober than he was a few minutes ago, he's straightening himself out and making his way to your door.

"Sorry—" he keeps repeating himself, "I'm… I'm so sorry."

He's gone before you can reassure him that there's nothing to apologize for.

.....

You don't hear from him the next morning — or afternoon.

When night falls, you've given up that there's any hope of saving whatever it was the two of you had going.

Wanting to drown yourself in your own sorrows, you stare at the text from your friend before you and weigh your options.

Stay in, cry yourself to a babbling mess, and finish your show

Answer their text and agree to go to this party with them

Thinking back to last night and how badly you fucked that one up, you decide the first choice is off-limits. Hoping you don't regret your decision, it's not long before you're looking decent enough to lock your door behind you and start the commute to your friends.

The walk isn't terrible, being ten minutes to your friend's place and an additional fifteen to whoever's party you're attending. On the west side of campus, you can hear the muffled music and drunken squeals of the attendees from down the street.

The party itself is fine, nothing special. The lime seltzer in your hand is still half full when you stray away from your friends in search of the bathroom.

There's a line formed down the hallway of drunk girls laughing, couples swallowing one another's faces, and a single guy slumped against the wall in his own world. Taking a second glance at the end of the line, you recognize the lone drunk as Yuuji.

Gently tapping his shoulder, his eyes blink open and he's nearly crushing you to death when wrapping his arms around you in excitement. He lets his animation get the best of him, lifting you in the air and spinning you once before he realizes he can't handle another. Leaning on the wall to steady both you and him, you're smiling at his sloppy yet endearing enthusiasm.

"What are you doing here!?" he beams, swaying back and forth and reeking of cheap booze.

"My friends dragged me out of the house," you tease before noticing truly how incoherent he is. Your nose crinkles with worry, "You fucked up?"

He can barely stand up straight, eyes unable to focus in one spot for too long as he blearily looks at you before skimming his body against the wall again. He's talking in slow gibberish, something about having one too many and wanting to talk to this pretty girl from his linguistics lecture before she leaves.

"Hey," you gently grab his jaw to steady his gaze. "Did you come here alone?"

Yuuji doesn't answer, or rather he does but it's nonsensical and impossible to go off of. You sigh, quickly scanning the suddenly overwhelming crowd around you before grabbing his arm and speaking kindly, yet reflective of a mother.

"Let me take you back to our building, okay?" you prompt him to stand up straight and follow your lead. "I'm going back anyways, I'll walk with you."

Yuuji's eyes light up with excitement at the thought of a journey with his neighbor friend, and it's not long before he's dragging his feet over one another and using your hand as a guide to the door.

On your walk home, you ache for the comfort of your warm bed, the feeling of taking these god-forsaken heels off, and Megumi's forgiveness. You wonder if you'll see him when dropping off Yuuji at his door — you pathetically hope so.

However, Yuuji didn't show up to this party alone.

Megumi, who had been grabbing him a drink and caught a glimpse of you two, saw the entire thing without context — Yuuji's hands around your waist, you caressing his jaw, the two of you leaving abruptly together.

He downs both his and Yuuji's drinks with ease.

..…

Megumi wasn't home.

Disappointed but relieved to see Yuuji safe in the comfort of his apartment, you help him collapse on his couch.

Turning him on his side and making him drink at least two cups of water before throwing a blanket over him and leaving a note, you close the door behind you with a heavy heart.

A few minutes later, you're a bit more at ease. Feet now ridden of silly high heels and skin against the soft cotton of your bed, you find yourself flooded with thoughts of Megumi.

You wake up to a constant thud on your front door. Picking up your phone, it's almost two in the morning and you're not even sure you're not dreaming when you're feet carry you to the blistering noise of a fist on your door.

Swinging it open with half-closed eyes, you're more than prepared to fight a murder charge to get whoever the hell this is to leave you alone. But before you can curse them with everything in you, you realize it's Megumi.

"Hi," he whispers. It's a start contrast from the violent banging on your door he was responsible for two seconds ago, but you can't find it in yourself to care.

"Hi," you respond, suddenly more than awake and just as breathless. "You okay?"

"Are you sleeping with Yuuji?"

Your heart skips exactly two beats before you can accurately comprehend his question. It's then when you notice that he's drunk, disgustingly so. You're not sure how it wasn't the first thing you noticed - but looking at his green eyes again, you give yourself some grace.

"… What?" is all you can pathetically muster.

"Itadori," he slurs. His face is pale with hurt and the collar of his shirt is all wrinkled.

You can't help but roll your eyes, "Yeah, I know who Yuuji is, but why the hell are you asking me that?"

"Because you shouldn't be," he declares through a heavy tongue and spinning head. You think you hear his voice crack with emotion when he continues, "I don't want you to sleep with him."

You're sure you're still dreaming as you take in his words. Since the moment you knocked on the door one floor above you, sleeping with Yuuji has never crossed your mind. You've been far too busy focusing on thinking about the man in front of you, who's wasted beyond belief and accusing you of something that not only doesn't make sense but hurts a bit.

He fumbles on his words, swallowing dryly and spiraling.

"You shouldn't sleep with him just because he walks around shirtless and invites you to hang out with us."

Your eyebrows pull downwards with what Megumi knows is hurt. He can't stop himself from talking or spewing nonsensical things just because he can.

Your voice is shaky when you plea, "Megumi, what?"

"I mean—he's my best friend, he's great," he throws his hands up to surrender the truth. "But we played video games and—and we kissed. And you're always looking at me with those eyes and—"

"Megumi," your voice comes tired now, cold. "You're drunk."

"You left with him. And you were whispering in his ear and touching his arm." He frowns, feeling sick just thinking about it again. He shakes the nightmare from his head when repeating his prior question.

"Are you sleeping with him?" he asks again, more accusatory this time around.

He watches your eyes fill with water, but it's not long-lived before you're blinking away any sign of weakness and cementing your walls up again.

"If you didn't notice," you spit with venom, "your friend is drunk off of his ass. I walked him home since he could barely stand on his own."

As if you're speaking another language, Megumi dumbly gapes at your confession.

"You—what?"

You press with ice in your words, "Walked him home. He's passed out on your couch right now."

"Oh." Megumi hadn't returned to his apartment before coming to yours. He'd walked home from the shitty party with one destination in mind, immediately talking the elevator to the fifth floor and finding your familiar floor.

He feels stupid, nauseous with guilt, and god, does his head hurt. His heart hurts too when you scoff and cross your arms in defense.

"Wanna go back to the part where you were practically calling me a slut?"

He cringes, "No, no god no, that's not what I was trying to—"

You don't give him the luxury of explaining himself. Turning your back and slamming the door, you take away his chance of redemption.

You sound unrecognizable when you tell him, "Go to fucking bed, Fushiguro."

.….

The birds outside of your window remind you that it's Sunday, and the open book on your desk reminds you that not only do you have class tomorrow, but you have an assignment due before midnight.

Memories of last night's conversation — if you could even call it that — with Megumi make you feel queazy. Nothing happened in the way you'd wanted. It all just spiraled out of control, like water slipping through a cracked ceiling, you'd just watched it leak without remorse.

The continued chirping outside reminds you that it's quiet, something you should use to your advantage. A light in this mess of a pathetic story.

You'll study, you decide. You'll grab a quick coffee from the cafe across the street and get some actual work done. Something you should've done a long time ago, something you’d ignored that ended up with this this heartbreak.

Not even ten minutes later, you're decent enough to slide your shoes on and grab your house keys. Opening the door into the hallway, you're met with familiar eyes.

Megumi looks disheveled, sitting with his knees up against the wall of your hallway. At your abrupt opening of the front door, he's quick to stand up and dust his pants off from the grime of the hallway carpet. You notice he has a paper bouquet of pinks and blues in his hand and an exhausted frown on his face.

When he looks at you, he can almost feel the air leaving your lungs as your stomach drops.

The first words you say to him are softer than he expects, than he thinks he deserves, but still carried by a look of disapproval.

"Were you here all night?" your lip turns with disgust.

"No—" he spews too quickly. Seeing your expression that clearly reads disbelief, he slows himself down. Taking a deep breath, he repeats himself with a bit more certainty. "No, I've been here since like, seven maybe?"

"Why?"

His hand trembles in a way he hopes you have the respect to ignore as he moves to give you the bouquet. "Because I'm sorry," his voice is steady, like he's been practicing in the mirror.

Choosing to make him work for it, your eyes flicker to the flowers unimpressed before finding his face again.

"For?" you cruelly push him further.

But Megumi's determined to meet your forces just as equally. His voice gains confidence as he speaks clearly, "For panicking and assuming the worst last night. I was drunk, but that's not an excuse. It was a douchebag thing to do."

Admiring how your face softens at his apology but still carries creased lines of worry, Megumi half expects your response.

"And?"

This is the part he's a bit unprepared for.

"And for leaving that night," his volume dips with the confession, eyes wanting to find comfort in the floor so badly but refusing to leave your own as he tries and tries and tries to fix this, "I..."

His lips move before he can think twice about his words, "I thought it was what you wanted."

His confession cracks something inside of you, like nails digging crescents into raw skin. Slowly, you gesture for him to come inside. He hesitates but follows when you move towards the couch, the same couch you'd straddled him on two nights prior. It looks different in the daylight.

Megumi's careful with each step, as if he's walking on eggshells, when he slowly sits beside you on the couch. Placing the bouquet on your table, he moves as if you're a predator, as if he'll make one wrong move and you'll snap, lurching at him and sinking your talons into his neck. You hate how it makes you feel.

Your words surprise the both of you when they eventually come. "I'm sorry I reacted the way I did. I wanted you to stay I just—felt bad."

Felt bad? Megumi's mind goes numb at the realization. Felt bad for him? Like when you do a good deed to cancel out a bad one? Did you kiss him that night because you pitied him?

Before his mind runs itself further into the worst-case scenario, he's brought back to reality as you continue.

"We were drunk, and I didn't want that to be how it happened y'know?"

He starts at you blankly, "It?" He lamely asks.

This time, it's your voice that weakens with shame. He watches you fiddle with your fingers, the same ones he remembers feeling in his hair and on his skin. The ones he wants to feel again.

"Felt like I was coming onto you, and you deserved better than that," you eventually reveal softly, correcting yourself with certainty. "Deserve better than that."

And he feels stupid. God, does Megumi feel stupid. All this time, he'd been thinking you regretted the why of the situation, kissing him like you did. He'd never stopped to think about the fact of how you did it. Never thought you'd be so inclined to consider his wishes.

You think he regrets it, and that is the last thing he wants you to believe.

Taking a risk, Megumi lays a gentle palm on your thigh. He does so slowly, giving you a chance to revolt and bite his hand clean off the bone. You don't so he relaxes his hand.

It's not sexual, not desperate and needy like how it was the other night. It's calm. comforting. Another way for him to say I'm still here, aren't I?

"I'm not great with words," he starts, "but I was very much into it. I need you to know that. You didn't—do anything I didn't want."

Softly and ignoring the criticism from the voice in your head for once, you nod.

You recognize the familiar pull of his lips when he softly grins. "Think it's pretty obvious now, but in case it's not," he leans into this whole communicating thing, "I really like being around you."

He thinks his heart grows a size when you weakly smile back at him, "You like being around me?"

He shrugs, laughing at your sarcasm. "Around you, with you. I guess I just like you, really."

You raise your eyebrows, challenging his statement, "Are you still drunk?"

"Fuck no."

You hum shortly. "Hungover?"

"Disgustingly so," he grimaces at the reminder of how nauseous he is.

"Thinking clearly?"

"Never really around you, but clear as I can be."

It's soft and sweet, and this is how you wanted it to be. Naturally, as if you're both magnets being pulled to one another, Megumi is carefully guiding you into his lap as you're naturally making yourself at home in his hold.

The position almost exactly mimics the one you'd found yourself in on Friday night, but this time, it's different. It feels different — golden instead of red and light with a newfound meaning.

With gentle eyes and slight nods from each of you, you kiss once more. His mouth moves the same, eager yet graceful as he leans into you. No wandering hands or drunken hiccups, you feel one another smile into the kiss until it is all giggles and teeth.

"Y'know, if you wanted to ask me out," you pull away from him, accusatory with an underlying teasing, "you should've just asked like a normal person instead of accusing me of sleeping with your friend."

Megumi groans in embarrassment, hiding his face in your neck. You feel the heat of his cheeks when he sighs.

"Yeah, that wasn't my finest moment."

Kisses are stolen and silence is shared until he yawns you remember how awful he must still feel from drinking so much. Crawling off of his lap, you ignore the butterflies in your stomach whines he whines at the loss of your weight.

"Want anything?" you call out as you walk towards the kitchenette. "I have Advil and a bagel with your name on it."

Megumi hums at the thought, not confirming or denying the offer, as his eyes remain locked in on you in a blissful comfort.

Your voice becomes more distant as you turn the corner, "I'll even give you those eyes I know you like so much."

A muffled sound of humiliation can be heard from the couch, "God, please forget I said that."

Putting the bagel in the toaster and reaching up to the medicine cabinet, you laugh carelessly.

"Never."

…..

Yuuji wakes up with a throbbing headache and an acidic burning in the back of his throat.

He groans, turning on his side before realizing that — he's not in his bed. With blurry vision and sweaty hands fumbling to survey the environment around him, he feels for his phone. The screen is far too bright and completely overridden of missed calls and texts, reading a mocking 2:14 PM when he groans.

When yelling Megumi's name a handful of times doesn't work (it usually does), he opens his Find My Friends app and tracks his roommate. Seeing his icon appear right next to his own while ironically hearing your echoing laughter ring from upstairs, he laughs.

Before he closes his eyes again and deals with a hangover from hell, he sends Megumi a text before tossing his phone across the room.

Ur welcome for not actually calling dibs.

#ive looked at this too long and need it out of my face #megumi fushiguro #megumi x reader #megumi x you #megumi fic #megumi fushiguro fic #jjk megumi #megumi fluff #megumi fushiguro fluff #megumi smut #megumi fushiguro smut

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sassysnowperson · 1 year

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How Not to Read Terry Pratchett's Discworld Novels

With the very exciting fantasy books poll bracket going on Discworld and how to read it is in the zeitgeist again. I figured I would take a crack at adding to this important topic with a guide drawn from my own chaotic mess of a reading journey:

Learn that Terry Pratchett is a fantasy author that several people whose reading taste you admire enjoy. He apparently blends comedy, good plotting, and a world that is both grounded and satirical and you're a big fan of all those things.

Fabulous! Decide to read some of his work.

Go to your local library. Love a good library. You're new to the area, so you're also exploring the library for the first time, too.

You have found Terry Pratchett! Points to you! Pull a book off the shelf at random. It's called The Dark Side of the Sun.

Start reading. Realize that this feels more like sci-fi than fantasy. Sigh in smug superiority about people who get the two confused.

Realize about halfway through that this is not, in fact, a Discworld book.

Nobody warned you the guy wrote other things!

It's still good, tho. Maybe a little rough but this was an older book and the author clearly has potential. Let's try again.

Review his works. The vast majority are Discworld. You are highly unlikely to grab another non-Discworld book. Go back to the Terry Pratchett section of the library.

Oh hey he wrote a book with Neil Gaiman! You've hears of that guy!

Grab Good Omens off the shelf.

Take it home, realize, much sooner, that this is also not a Discworld book. Still enjoy yourself thoroughly. You should read more of this Gaiman dude, too.

But okay. For real this time. Go back to the library and don't leave without *CONFIRMING* you have a Discworld book this time.

Grab a book. Look at the cover. Read the back Discworld! Ha HA! You've done it!

It's called Thud.

You are utterly gripped by a story of a man wrestling with himself, his growing child, the political tensions of a city and extremism that echoes reality beautifully while still being entirely true to itself. It's a story of responsibility and love and building communities and Fantasy Chess. You are driven nearly to tears by the sentence *WHERE IS MY COW?*

You emerge from the book fundamentally changed as a person, and finally understanding what all the fuss is about. You are now a Terry Pratchett reader for life.

You realize Thud was in the middle of a series. That was a part of another series. That explains why there was a feeling that you were supposed to know some of these people already.

You finally find one of those flowcharts and figure out a more sensible reading order.

I always sort of laugh when people ask where to start reading Discworld, because Thud would be first on absolutely nobody's sensible Terry Pratchett reading order. I'm still tempted to recommend it though!

(My actual advice: Going Postal if you love con men being stuck doing the right thing, Wee Free Men if you like YA and smart angry girls owning their own power, Guards! Guards! *and* Men at Arms if you like crime shows with heart and are okay giving earlier work a try (the quality gets better and better, but I think it needs at least two books to get you into it), and Monstrous Regiment if you like gender and queer feelings, anti-war books told in the middle of a war, and/or would prefer a stand alone novel...and, you know, Thud if you want a great read and don't mind some chaos.)

#terry Pratchett #discworld #the worst reading order #gnu terry Pratchett

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reasonsforhope · 3 months

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An illegal toxic dump site in Croatia, the theft of water from a major aquifer in southern Spain, illegal trading of ozone-depleting refrigerants in France: This is just a sampling of the environmental crimes that European countries are struggling to stop. The lack of accountability for these acts stems in part from the European Union’s legal code, which experts say is riddled with vague definitions and gaps in enforcement. That’s about to change.

Last week, EU lawmakers voted in a new directive that criminalizes cases of environmental damage “comparable to ecocide,” a term broadly defined as the severe, widespread, and long-term destruction of the natural world. Advocates called the move “revolutionary,” both because it sets strict penalties for violators, including up to a decade in jail, and because it marks the first time that an international body has created a legal pathway for the prosecution of ecocide.

“This decision marks the end of impunity for environmental criminals and could usher in a new age of environmental litigation in Europe,” wrote Marie Toussaint, a French lawyer and EU parliamentarian for the Greens/European Free Alliance group, on X...

The new directive uses the term “ecocide” in its preamble, but does not criminalize the act by laying out a legal definition (the most widely accepted definition of ecocide was developed by an international panel of experts in 2021). Instead, it works by providing a list of “qualified offenses,” or crimes that fall within its purview. These include pollution from ships, the introduction of invasive species, and ozone depletion...

The new law holds people liable for environmental destruction if they acted with knowledge of the damage their actions would cause. This aspect of the law is important, experts said, because it means that a permit is no longer enough for a company to avoid culpability.

“If new information shows that behavior is causing irreversible damage to health and nature – you will have to stop,” a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, Antonius Manders, told Euronews.

Advocates like Mehta hope that the EU’s move will have influence beyond Europe’s borders. The principal goal of the Stop Ecocide campaign is for the International Criminal Court to designate ecocide as the fifth international crime that it prosecutes, after crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and genocide. At the moment, environmental destruction can only be prosecuted as a war crime at the ICC, and limitations in the law make this extremely difficult to do...

Kate Mackintosh, the executive director of the Netherlands-based UCLA Law Promise Institute Europe, told Grist that the ICC is unlikely to adopt an ecocide law if other countries do not do so first.

“It’s not something you can just pull out of thin air,” she said, adding that any international legal doctrine has to have a precedent on the national level. “That’s the way states are going to accept it.”

The EU’s 27 member states will have two years to adapt the new legislation into their penal codes. Afterwards, their implementation must be reviewed and updated at least once every five years using a “risk-analysis based approach,” to account for advancements in experts’ understanding of what might constitute an environmental crime. Mehta said that despite its omission of some important offenses, the law sets an important example for other countries. Several days before the EU vote, Belgium adapted its criminal code to include the directive, making it the first country in Europe to recognize ecocide as a crime.

The ruling “shows leadership and compassion,” Mehta said. “It will establish a clear moral as well as legal ‘red line’, creating an essential steer for European industry leaders and policy-makers going forward.”

-via Grist, March 6, 2024

#climate change #climate crisis #climate catastrophe #climate action #eu #european union #icc #international criminal court #belgium #europe #environment #environmental law #environmental news #ecocide #good news #hope #hope posting

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zvaigzdelasas · 3 months

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The US is reported to have made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the start of the war in Gaza, but the deliveries escaped congressional oversight because each transaction was under the dollar amount requiring approval.

The Biden administration has [publicly] become increasingly critical of the conduct of Israeli military operations in Gaza and the failure to allow in meaningful amounts of humanitarian aid, with the death toll now over 30,000 and with famine looming. But it has kept up a quiet but substantial flow of munitions to help replace the tens of thousands of bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny coastal strip, making it one of the most intense bombing campaigns in military history.

The Washington Post reported that administration officials informed Congress of the 100 foreign military sales to Israel in a classified briefing. Few details are known of the sales, because keeping each one small meant their contents remained secret, but they are reported to have included precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid.

The White House spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, declined to comment on the report on Wednesday.[...]

“This doesn’t just seem like an attempt to avoid technical compliance with US arms export law, it’s an extremely troubling way to avoid transparency and accountability on a high-profile issue,” Ari Tolany, director of the security assistance monitor at the Centre for International Policy thinktank, said.

She added that, in exploiting the loophole, the Biden administration was following the steps of its predecessor.

“They’re very much borrowing from the Trump playbook to dodge congressional oversight,” Tolany said. The state department office of the inspector general found that between 2017 and 2019, the Trump administration had made 4,221 below-threshold arms transfers to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, worth an estimated total of $11.2bn.

The under-the-radar deliveries made by the Biden administration to Israel were additional to the three major military sales that were made public since the start of the war: $320m in precision bomb kits in November and 14,000 tank shells costing $106m and $147.5m of fuses and other components needed to make 155mm artillery shells in December. The December deliveries of tank and artillery shells also sidestepped congressional scrutiny because they were made under an emergency authority.[...]

“We continue to support Israel’s campaign to ensure that the attacks of 7 October cannot be repeated. We have provided military assistance to Israel because it is consistent with that goal,” Matthew Miller, the state department spokesperson, said. “We support Israel’s legitimate military campaign consistent with international humanitarian law.”

The state department has been vague about how much effort it is putting into assessing whether Israeli forces are committing war crimes. A process called Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance (CHIRG) was set up in September last year, before the Gaza war, to make assessments of the use made of US armaments, and Israel’s military operations are under review, but the process is slow and does not commit the administration to taking remedial action.

6 Mar 24

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kate04us · 2 months

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Major Crimes Review: 2x07 - Rules of Engagement

What appears to be a gang-related shooting at a gas station brings Jack Raydor into the Murder Room not as a husband with boundary issues but as a court-appointed attorney for a witness with parole violation problems. It starts as a win-win situation for both Captain and Mr. Raydor, but turns into a confrontation soon after. Meanwhile, Rusty is trying to get out of dinner with Kris’ parents.

The review for this episode can be found here >> 2×07 – Rules of Engagement

#sharon raydor #major crimes #major crimes review #mary mcdonnell

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decolonize-the-left · 5 months

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If you get your news from CNN, please know they've been compromised and do in fact aid Israel in the way they provide coverage.!!!!

Their coverage is curated specifically to garner sympathy for Israel and to provide plausibile deniability for their war crimes such as genocide. Links below the vid.

Additionally, the breach to freedom of press this implies should NOT be understated.

“‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the worker said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.” CNN maintains that the reason for the policy is to ensure its reporting on Israel and Palestine is “as precise and accurate as possible,” as one spokesperson said, claiming that the IDF’s censor has a “minimal” impact on the coverage. But CNN seems to be unique in maintaining this policy, unlike other major outlets, The Intercept wrote.

Further, the investigation found that CNN leaders have explicitly prescribed policies that favor Israel. In an email sent October 26, CNN’s News Standards and Practices sent staff an email directing them to refer to the ministry of health in Gaza as “Hamas-controlled” every time they reference the Palestinian death count — a widespread practice among major outlets, despite numerous human rights groups and war experts maintaining that the Gaza health ministry’s death tolls have historically been accurate and that public health experts have independently found no evidence that the ministry has inflated death counts.

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goodluckclove · 2 months

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You Don't Need an Agent! Publishers That Accept Unsolicited Submissions

I see a few people sayin that you definitely need an agent to get published traditionally. Guess what? That's not remotely true. While an agent can be a very useful tool in finding and negotiating with publishers, going without is not as large of a hurdle as people might make it out to be!

Below is a list of some of the traditional publishers that offer reading periods for agent-less manuscripts. There might be more! Try looking for yourself - I promise it's not that scary!

Albert Whitman & Company: for picture books, middle-grade, and young adult fiction

Hydra (Part of Random House): for mainly LitRPG

Kensington Publishing: for a range of fiction and nonfiction

NCM Publishing: for all genres of fiction (YA included) and nonfiction

Pants of Fire Press: for middle-grade, YA, and adult fiction

Tin House Books: very limited submission period, but a good avenue for fiction, literary fiction, and poetry written by underrepresented communities

Quirk Fiction: offers odd-genre rep for represented and unagented authors. Unsolicited submissions inbox is closed at the moment but this is the page that'll update when it's open, and they produced some pretty big books so I'd keep an eye on this

Persea Books: for lit fiction, creative nonfiction, YA novels, and books focusing on contemporary issues

Baen: considered one of the best known publishers of sci-fi and fantasy. They don't need a history of publication.

Chicago Review Press: only accepting nonfiction at the moment, but maybe someone here writes nonfiction

Acre: for poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Special interest in underrepresented authors. Submission period just passed but for next year!

Coffeehouse Press: for lit fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation. Reading period closed at time of posting, but keep an eye out

Ig: for queries on literary fiction and political/cultural nonfiction

Schaffner Press: for lit fiction, historical/crime fiction, or short fiction collections (cool)

Feminist Press: for international lit, hybrid memoirs, sci-fi and fantasy fiction especially from BIPOC, queer and trans voices

Evernight Publishing: for erotica. Royalties seem good and their response time is solid

Felony & Mayhem: for literary mystery fiction. Not currently looking for new work, but check back later

This is all what I could find in an hour. And it's not even everything, because I sifted out the expired links, the repeat genres (there are a lot of options for YA and children's authors), and I didn't even include a majority of smaller indie pubs where you can really do that weird shit.

A lot of them want you to query, but that's easy stuff once you figure it out. Lots of guides, and some even say how they want you to do it for them.

Not submitting to a Big 5 Trad Pub House does not make you any less of a writer. If you choose to work with any publishing house it can take a fair bit of weight off your shoulders in terms of design and distribution. You don't have to do it - I'm not - but if that's the way you want to go it's very, very, very possible.

Have a weirder manuscript that you don't think fits? Here's a list of 50 Indie Publishers looking for more experimental works to showcase and sell!

If Random House won't take your work - guess what? Maybe you're too cool for Random House.

#writing community #writeblr #on writing #writers on tumblr #authors of tumblr #queer writers #poc writer #trans writers #ya author #writing tips #writing resources #writing inspiration #writers supporting writers

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luthienne · 6 months

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Since the founding of the state of Israel, the Zionist movement has positioned the domination and oppression of Palestinians and the colonization of Palestinian land as the answer to the very real question of Jewish safety. They have taken the very real pain and trauma that we as Jews carry and sharpened it into a deadly weapon. We desperately must understand that what is happening is not a cycle of violence. It is a system of violence. Everyone is caught in its teeth. It is the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years—with billions upon billions of dollars from the United States. Settler colonialism is a structure, a language, a culture, an ideology—an interlocking, totalizing, system of violence. It is a machine of war and dehumanization against Palestinians. It is this system that imperils the lives and safety of everyone. While the vast majority of the violence of the apartheid regime lands on Palestinians, there is no safety for Israelis in a system rooted in such dehumanization and oppression. In the words of Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer, “My great lesson from Auschwitz is: whoever wants to dehumanize any other must first be dehumanized himself. The oppressors are no longer really human, whatever uniform they wear.” The Israeli government has lost any semblance of humanity as they wage a genocide against the people living in Gaza. It is not Palestinians who have chosen the language of violence for this land. It is the Israeli government and the United States government that have created a state of violence. Palestinians have remained steadfast in seeking freedom against immeasurable violence. Tens of thousands of Palestinians protested in weekly grassroots nonviolent protests at Israel’s militarized border wall around Gaza during the Great March of Return in 2019, and the Israeli government sent military snipers to murder and maim hundreds of children, women, medics, and journalists. Palestinians launch boycott campaigns to win their rights, and the Israeli government opens an entire new ministry to combat the nonviolent movement. Palestinians work at human rights organizations to document the crimes against them, and they are called and treated as terrorists. Palestinians speak the language of freedom, and the Israeli government responds—every single time—with the language of violence. The United States government has united to fully support the Israeli war machine. Already the United States sends more than $3 billion in aid to Israel every year. Now Senator Lindsey Graham said, “I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.” Make no mistake: Israel isn’t defending itself, it is committing mass murder. Biden says, “We’ll make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of itself.” Make no mistake: Israel is waging genocide. My dear ones in Palestine are saying that they have never experienced such destruction in seventy-five years of occupation. My dear ones are saying there is not a moment to wait. Do not sit back while Israel carries out a genocide fully enabled by the United States. Bring your full body, your spirit, your communities, your humanity, to meet this moment, to call your representatives, to the streets. “Never again” means standing up for Palestinian people. “Never again” means this very moment.

— Stefanie Fox, A Jewish Plea: Stand Up to Israel’s Act of Genocide, as featured in Boston Review

#stefanie fox #a jewish plea: stand up to israel's act of genocide #boston review #words #essays #articles #links #on zionism #palestine #free palestine

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ahaura · 7 months

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Title & subtitle:

[Nov. 21] The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza: The piece was nearing publication when the journal decided against publishing it. You can read the article here.

Article text:

On Saturday, the board of the Harvard Law Review voted not to publish “The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine,” a piece by Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. The vote followed what an editor at the law reviewdescribed in an e-mail to Eghbariah as “an unprecedented decision” by the leadership of the Harvard Law Review to prevent the piece’s publication.

Eghbariah told The Nation that the piece, which was intended for the HLR Blog, had been solicited by two of the journal’s online editors. It would have been the first piece written by a Palestinian scholar for the law review. The piece went through several rounds of edits, but before it was set to be published, the president stepped in. “The discussion did not involve any substantive or technical aspects of your piece,” online editor Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, wrote Eghbariah in an e-mail shared with The Nation. “Rather, the discussion revolved around concerns about editors who might oppose or be offended by the piece, as well as concerns that the piece might provoke a reaction from members of the public who might in turn harass, dox, or otherwise attempt to intimidate our editors, staff, and HLR leadership.”

On Saturday, following several days of debate and a nearly six-hour meeting, the Harvard Law Review’s full editorial body came together to vote on whether to publish the article. Sixty-three percent voted against publication. In an e-mail to Egbariah, HLR President Apsara Iyer wrote, “While this decision may reflect several factors specific to individual editors, it was not brd on your identity or viewpoint.”

In a statement that was shared with The Nation, a group of 25 HLR editors expressed their concerns about the decision. “At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote. “The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way. “

When asked for comment, the leadership of the Harvard Law Review referred The Nation to a message posted on the journal’s website. “Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece…” the note began. ”Last week, the full body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular Blog piece that had been solicited by two editors. A substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.”

Today, The Nation is sharing the piece that the Harvard Law Review refused to run.

enocide is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is unfolding in Gaza. And yet, the inertia of legal academia, especially in the United States, has been chilling. Clearly, it is much easier to dissect the case law rather than navigate the reality of death. It is much easier to consider genocide in the past tense rather than contend with it in the present. Legal scholars tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent.

Some may claim that the invocation of genocide, especially in Gaza, is fraught. But does one have to wait for a genocide to be successfully completed to name it? This logic contributes to the politics of denial. When it comes to Gaza, there is a sense of moral hypocrisy that undergirds Western epistemological approaches, one which mutes the ability to name the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. But naming injustice is crucial to claiming justice. If the international community takes its crimes seriously, then the discussion about the unfolding genocide in Gaza is not a matter of mere semantics.

The UN Genocide Convention defines the crime of genocide as certain acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of a protected group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Numerous statements made by top Israeli politicians affirm their intentions. There is a forming consensus among leading scholars in the field of genocide studies that “these statements could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent,” as Omer Bartov, an authority in the field, writes. More importantly, genocide is the material reality of Palestinians in Gaza: an entrapped, displaced, starved, water-deprived population of 2.3 million facing massive bombardments and a carnage in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Over 11,000 people have already been killed. That is one person out of every 200 people in Gaza. Tens of thousands are injured, and over 45% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. The United Nations Secretary General said that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children,” but a cessation of the carnage—a ceasefire—remains elusive. Israel continues to blatantly violate international law: dropping white phosphorus from the sky, dispersing death in all directions, shedding blood, shelling neighborhoods, striking schools, hospitals, and universities, bombing churches and mosques, wiping out families, and ethnically cleansing an entire region in both callous and systemic manner. What do you call this?

The Center for Constitutional Rights issued a thorough, 44-page, factual and legal analysis, asserting that “there is a plausible and credible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.” Raz Segal, a historian of the Holocaust and genocide studies, calls the situation in Gaza “a textbook case of Genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.” The inaugural chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, notes that “Just the blockade of Gaza—just that—could be genocide under Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention, meaning they are creating conditions to destroy a group.” A group of over 800 academics and practitioners, including leading scholars in the fields of international law and genocide studies, warn of “a serious risk of genocide being committed in the Gaza Strip.” A group of seven UN Special Rapporteurs has alerted to the “risk of genocide against the Palestinian people” and reiterated that they “remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide.” Thirty-six UN experts now call the situation in Gaza “a genocide in the making.” How many other authorities should I cite? How many hyperlinks are enough?

And yet, leading law schools and legal scholars in the United States still fashion their silence as impartiality and their denial as nuance. Is genocide really the crime of all crimes if it is committed by Western allies against non-Western people?

This is the most important question that Palestine continues to pose to the international legal order. Palestine brings to legal analysis an unmasking force: It unveils and reminds us of the ongoing colonial condition that underpins Western legal institutions. In Palestine, there are two categories: mournable civilians and savage human-animals. Palestine helps us rediscover that these categories remain racialized along colonial lines in the 21st century: the first is reserved for Israelis, the latter for Palestinians. As Isaac Herzog, Israel’s supposed liberal President, asserts: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.”

Palestinians simply cannot be innocent. They are innately guilty; potential “terrorists” to be “neutralized” or, at best, “human shields” obliterated as “collateral damage”. There is no number of Palestinian bodies that can move Western governments and institutions to “unequivocally condemn” Israel, let alone act in the present tense. When contrasted with Jewish-Israeli life—the ultimate victims of European genocidal ideologies—Palestinians stand no chance at humanization. Palestinians are rendered the contemporary “savages” of the international legal order, and Palestine becomes the frontier where the West redraws its discourse of civility and strips its domination in the most material way. Palestine is where genocide can be performed as a fight of “the civilized world” against the “enemies of civilization itself.” Indeed, a fight between the “children of light” versus the “children of darkness.”

The genocidal war waged against the people of Gaza since Hamas’s excruciating October 7th attacks against Israelis—attacks which amount to war crimes—has been the deadliest manifestation of Israeli colonial policies against Palestinians in decades. Some have long ago analyzed Israeli policies in Palestine through the lens of genocide. While the term genocide may have its own limitations to describe the Palestinian past, the Palestinian present was clearly preceded by a “politicide”: the extermination of the Palestinian body politic in Palestine, namely, the systematic eradication of the Palestinian ability to maintain an organized political community as a group.

This process of erasure has spanned over a hundred years through a combination of massacres, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and the fragmentation of the remaining Palestinians into distinctive legal tiers with diverging material interests. Despite the partial success of this politicide—and the continued prevention of a political body that represents all Palestinians—the Palestinian political identity has endured. Across the besieged Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel’s 1948 territories, refugee camps, and diasporic communities, Palestinian nationalism lives.

What do we call this condition? How do we name this collective existence under a system of forced fragmentation and cruel domination? The human rights community has largely adopted a combination of occupation and apartheid to understand the situation in Palestine. Apartheid is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is committed in Palestine. And even though there is a consensus among the human rights community that Israel is perpetrating apartheid, the refusal of Western governments to come to terms with this material reality of Palestinians is revealing.

Once again, Palestine brings a special uncovering force to the discourse. It reveals how otherwise credible institutions, such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, are no longer to be trusted. It shows how facts become disputable in a Trumpist fashion by liberals such as President Biden. Palestine allows us to see the line that bifurcates the binaries (e.g. trusted/untrusted) as much as it underscores the collapse of dichotomies (e.g. democrat/republican or fact/claim). It is in this liminal space that Palestine exists and continues to defy the distinction itself. It is the exception that reveals the rule and the subtext that is, in fact, the text: Palestine is the most vivid manifestation of the colonial condition upheld in the 21st century.

hat do you call this ongoing colonial condition? Just as the Holocaust introduced the term “Genocide” into the global and legal consciousness, the South African experience brought “Apartheid” into the global and legal lexicon. It is due to the work and sacrifice of far too many lives that genocide and apartheid have globalized, transcending these historical calamities. These terms became legal frameworks, crimes enshrined in international law, with the hope that their recognition will prevent their repetition. But in the process of abstraction, globalization, and readaptation, something was lost. Is it the affinity between the particular experience and the universalized abstraction of the crime that makes Palestine resistant to existing definitions?

Scholars have increasingly turned to settler-colonialism as the lens through which we assess Palestine. Settler-colonialism is a structure of erasure where the settler displaces and replaces the native. And while settler-colonialism, genocide, and apartheid are clearly not mutually exclusive, their ability to capture the material reality of Palestinians remains elusive. South Africa is a particular case of settler-colonialism. So are Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada, Algeria, and more. The framework of settler colonialism is both useful and insufficient. It does not provide meaningful ways to understand the nuance between these different historical processes and does not necessitate a particular outcome. Some settler colonial cases have been incredibly normalized at the expense of a completed genocide. Others have led to radically different end solutions. Palestine both fulfills and defies the settler-colonial condition.

We must consider Palestine through the iterations of Palestinians. If the Holocaust is the paradigmatic case for the crime of genocide and South Africa for that of apartheid, then the crime against the Palestinian people must be called the Nakba.

The term Nakba, meaning “Catastrophe,” is often used to refer to the making of the State of Israel in Palestine, a process that entailed the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and destroying 531 Palestinian villages between 1947 to 1949. But the Nakba has never ceased; it is a structure not an event. Put shortly, the Nakba is ongoing.

In its most abstract form, the Nakba is a structure that serves to erase the group dynamic: the attempt to incapacitate the Palestinians from exercising their political will as a group. It is the continuous collusion of states and systems to exclude the Palestinians from materializing their right to self-determination. In its most material form, the Nakba is each Palestinian killed or injured, each Palestinian imprisoned or otherwise subjugated, and each Palestinian dispossessed or exiled.

The Nakba is both the material reality and the epistemic framework to understand the crimes committed against the Palestinian people. And these crimes—encapsulated in the framework of Nakba—are the result of the political ideology of Zionism, an ideology that originated in late nineteenth century Europe in response to the notions of nationalism, colonialism, and antisemitism.

As Edward Said reminds us, Zionism must be assessed from the standpoint of its victims, not its beneficiaries. Zionism can be simultaneously understood as a national movement for some Jews and a colonial project for Palestinians. The making of Israel in Palestine took the form of consolidating Jewish national life at the expense of shattering a Palestinian one. For those displaced, misplaced, bombed, and dispossessed, Zionism is never a story of Jewish emancipation; it is a story of Palestinian subjugation.

What is distinctive about the Nakba is that it has extended through the turn of the 21st century and evolved into a sophisticated system of domination that has fragmented and reorganized Palestinians into different legal categories, with each category subject to a distinctive type of violence. Fragmentation thus became the legal technology underlying the ongoing Nakba. The Nakba has encompassed both apartheid and genocidal violence in a way that makes it fulfill these legal definitions at various points in time while still evading their particular historical frames.

Palestinians have named and theorized the Nakba even in the face of persecution, erasure, and denial. This work has to continue in the legal domain. Gaza has reminded us that the Nakba is now. There are recurringthreats by Israeli politicians and other public figures to commit the crime of the Nakba, again. If Israeli politicians are admitting the Nakba in order to perpetuate it, the time has come for the world to also reckon with the Palestinian experience. The Nakba must globalize for it to end.

We must imagine that one day there will be a recognized crime of committing a Nakba, and a disapprobation of Zionism as an ideology brd on racial elimination. The road to get there remains long and challenging, but we do not have the privilege to relinquish any legal tools available to name the crimes against the Palestinian people in the present and attempt to stop them. The denial of the genocide in Gaza is rooted in the denial of the Nakba. And both must end, now.

#palestine #uspol #the nation #geopol #long post #the article is paywalled so here it is for ease of access #📁.zip

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