#obviously him being all hey look all my lies worked and my plan succeeded

[yilingbee]

there is something fishy about nampheung, she looked scared shitless the entire time, that is not a woman who has lost her memory, that is a woman trying very hard not to step out of line and fall victim to korn's wrath

[heliads]

The Lookout (Part One)

Your brother, Stiles Stilinski, has a feeling that newcomer Theo Raeken only means trouble for the McCall pack. When he sends you to spy on the werewolf, you’re not sure what to expect.

masterlist / part two

You sigh irritably. The school day is over, it’s the weekend, the last thing you want to do is listen to your older brother yammer on about his classmate-related fears. However, Stiles Stilinski has rarely cared about what you did or did not want to do when it came to his werewolf-safety lectures, and so he continues on speaking. This time, the topic of this discussion is one Theo Raeken; namely, the fact that the guy is obviously a supervillain. At least according to Stiles.

“Look, you can’t tell me it’s not suspicious. Werewolves don’t just show up in Beacon Hills without something to prove. Besides, the guy even walks and talks evil.” You push open the doors to the school with a sigh. “I think he’s fine. You’re just being paranoid.” Stiles lets out an irritated huff. “Usually, the paranoid people in movies end up being right. You should listen to me. I could be right about this.”

You give him a look. “Or you could be wrong, and we’ll just be running away from someone who could be a potential ally for no good reason. Honestly, I think you’re just overreacting.” Stiles stares at you, utter bewilderment crossing his face. “You know what, I think I know what it is.” He stabs a finger in your general direction, suddenly decisive. “You think he’s hot. That’s what it is. You don’t want to listen to me because you think he’s hot and you don’t want to consider him a bad guy.”

You turn to him with a look of utter shock. “Excuse me?” Stiles gestures loosely with his hand as the two of you continue walking through the school parking lot. “You keep staring at him, you smile when he talks, you don’t want to listen when I tell you he’s obviously a bad guy. It’s simple- you think he’s hot.” You let out a snort of laughter. “You stare at him more than I do, Stiles. Besides, if we’re talking about staring then we need to talk about Lydia. You can’t keep your eyes off of her. Honestly, it’s kind of cute.”

Stiles swats your shoulder. “We’re not talking about Lydia. We’re talking about Theo.” You flash your brother a smile as you reach his beloved Jeep, opening the door to slide inside the passenger’s seat. “I think you’re being ridiculous. And, even if I did happen to think he’s hot, it wouldn’t matter. You’re still insane.” Stiles lets out a squawk of protest as he enters the car as well. 

The two of you are so involved in your argument that you don’t notice the brown-haired boy pausing by the door of his truck. He turns when he hears his name tossed around by you and your brother, but a small smile rises unbidden to his lips when he hears your laughter. The boy hesitates a second longer, and then the bubble of your conversation is drowned out by the sound of the Jeep’s engine starting up. The boy’s grin slides away as if he’s suddenly remembered himself, although he does cut one last glance your way, eyes lingering on your easy smile.

You know something is about to happen when Scott, Lydia, Kira, and Malia all show up to your house. You raise an eyebrow at your brother when they all file into your kitchen. Your father is coincidentally absent, although you’re sure Stiles timed this to happen when he was out on a shift as sheriff. “I’m sure I’d like to know what this is all about. I usually get told about pack meetings, but now I’m getting a little worried.”

Stiles folds his hands together. “I didn’t tell anyone that there was a pack meeting until just now because I wanted to make sure we wouldn’t have anyone joining in.” Malia cuts in. “By ‘anyone’, he means Theo. The whole point of this is about Theo.” You grin. “I had a feeling it would somehow tie to him.” Stiles looks miffed. “He’s a threat, okay? And by the end of this, I’ll be able to prove it.” You watch him with a quizzical eye. “What does that mean?”

Stiles leans forward across the table. “I want you to go spy on Theo. You’re going to go pretend to be his friend and everything, and you’re going to find out what he’s hiding from us.” You mirror his stance in front of the table. “If you’re right and Theo’s such a bad guy, why would he tell me anything? This plan makes no sense.” Scott steps forward. “That’s why we need you to convince him to let down his guard. Theo assumes Stiles is on to him, right? If he thinks he can steer you away from Stiles, you might be able to trick him into giving up some information.”

You consider this. “You really think I can be a spy for the pack? You actually think this is going to work?” Stiles reaches across the table to clap you on the shoulder. “I know it’s going to work. He won’t suspect a thing.” You sigh. “I wish I had your confidence. I’m fairly sure he’s going to see through this the first time I try to talk to him.”

You have no idea why Stiles thinks this is going to work. It’s a terrible plan, and the chances of it succeeding are slim to none. That being said, you have never backed down from a challenge, especially not from your brother, and so you’re certainly not about to start now. You form a plan: simple, but probably effective. When leaving school the next day, you have an argument with Stiles, coincidentally in front of Theo’s truck. You allow the werewolf to see you walk away angrily from your brother, and allow yourself a small smile when you see his truck come to a stop as you’re walking furiously down the sidewalk.

You look over when you hear a shout from Theo’s direction. “You need a lift?” You pretend to look hesitant, and then suddenly decisive, as if not wanting to trust Theo and then remembering that Stiles (who you’re supposed to hate) doesn’t like Theo. You walk over, sliding into the passenger’s seat. Theo raises an eyebrow when you close the truck door a little louder than normal. “You want to tell me what happened?” You just sigh, staring out over the road ahead of you. “I hate my brother.”

Theo chuckles as he drives away from the sidewalk, continuing on down the road. “What, has he finally gotten to you too?” You heave an exasperated sigh. “He won’t let me do anything. He keeps repeating this same excuse that he wants to ‘protect me from all the supernaturals’ but he won’t let me prove myself. He’s not even that much older than me, and I can handle myself.” Theo smirks. “If he can’t see that, he’s an idiot.” You grumble to yourself. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

Theo ends up driving you back to your house, coming to a stop in your driveway. You turn to him. “Thanks for the ride. I didn’t really like the idea of having to walk all the way back here.” Theo offers you a cool grin. “Hey, no problem. If you ever want to get away from all this, my door is always open.” You smile quietly in spite of yourself. “Thanks. I might take you up on that.” You wave goodbye, jumping down out of the truck and walking to the door. You’re pleasantly surprised to note that Theo doesn’t leave until he sees you go in, making sure that you’ll be alright. You didn’t expect this to go so well this quickly, but you’re not about to complain.

Stiles arrives at your house a short while after you, and he bounds excitedly over to you. “So, how’d it go? Does he trust you unconditionally?” You laugh. “Isn’t Theo supposed to be a sinister, heartless supervillain? No, he doesn’t trust me.” Stiles holds up a finger to prove his point. “Yet. He doesn’t trust you yet. You can do this.” You groan, shaking your head as you try to hold back a grin. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The next morning, you make sure to keep up the pretense of pretending to hate your brother. Theo actually makes it surprisingly easy to continue with the act- you’ve barely walked outside to eat your lunch when he’s already calling you over to sit next to him. You slide onto the bench, a few tables down from Stiles and his friends. Theo shrugs at your raised eyebrow. “Hey, you were glaring at Stiles so I assumed you still weren’t over the argument. I figured you might want somewhere else to eat.”

You grin. “And you want to make him mad because you know he doesn’t trust you?” Theo returns your twisting smile. “I’m not going to pretend like that didn’t cross my mind. I mean, if you don’t like him why should I?” You call up a look of utter indignation. “He’s just being so annoying! He doesn’t trust me to do anything. Stiles isn’t even that much older than me but he’s already trying to be a helicopter parent.” This is exactly what Theo wants to hear, and you know it. Theo leans forward, a conspiratorial grin on his face. “Then what do you say we ditch him? I’m willing to bet that there’s more to Beacon Hills than the limits of Scott’s pack.”

Stiles warned you about Theo’s manipulation tactics, the way he tries to sway everyone to his side. You can’t deny that he’s good at it- if it weren’t for the fact that the little dispute between you and Stiles was completely fabricated you’d almost believe that Theo truly wants to help you. This being said, you can spot Theo’s lies reaching out to you and so you wrap them around yourself, calling up your lies to combat his. Two can play at this game.

You flash him a smile. “Sounds perfect. Meet me after school?” Theo nods. “We can take my truck.” Across the tables, Stiles finally glances up and sees you. The look of bitter annoyance on his face upon seeing you with Theo isn’t hard to fake, although it still makes you and Theo laugh. This might be more fun than you had first envisioned.

How do you convince an apparently betraying conman and serial liar to trust you? It’s surprisingly easy with Theo, actually. You end up spending more and more time together- drives to and from school turn into impromptu road trips, you meet up at his house or the school or the middle of the woods. You’re not sure you’ve ever laughed so much with anyone before, and it’s getting harder and harder to remember that you’re supposed to be spying on this guy, not actually becoming friends.

That being said, you have been able to uncover some information. Something is definitely up about Theo’s parents, outside of the signature dilemma uncovered by Stiles. You’ve seen the way Theo’s parents watch him when his back is turned, the way fear suddenly crops up in their eyes. They almost act like he’s a stranger, someone to be afraid of. You’re not sure why, but you find yourself making excuses to head away from them. Stiles would probably want you to stick around, try and figure out any more clues, but it’s so unnerving that you want to avoid his parents instead.

Also, there’s something not quite right about Theo’s story. You’ve heard him mention it a couple of times now- he was out skateboarding late at night, an alpha attacked, he was turned into a werewolf just like Liam and the rest. Yet Theo doesn’t own a skateboard, hasn’t for a while. In fact, you had casually asked him a question about skateboarding and he had completely drawn a blank. It makes no sense, which means that something is definitely wrong with his story. And if Theo is lying about how he became a werewolf, then he’s probably lying about why he came to Beacon Hills, which means that you and your friends might be in more danger than you had thought.

Even with all of this, though, you’re still not sure that you want to leave Theo’s side. When you told Stiles and the others about everything you’d uncovered about Theo, they’d been worried. Scott had pulled you aside, asking if you wanted to stay so close to Theo. If he was as dangerous as you think, you might be at risk if you continued hanging out with him away from the pack. Stiles, too, seems less certain of his foolproof plan for you to spy on the werewolf and mentioned that you might want to step away. Every time they ask, though, you make up excuses. There might be more to find out. It’ll be good to have someone get close to him, just in case. No matter what, though, you know one thing: you don’t think you could leave Theo if you tried.

These thoughts keep burning into the back of your mind, but you manage to push them aside for today. It’s a beautiful night, the sun having finally set and the colors of the dusk washed away into an all-encompassing inky black. The stars are spangled across the horizon, and a laugh is burning deep in your throat as you race Theo through the woods of the Beacon Hills Preserve. You technically shouldn’t be here this late at night, you know that, but for some reason, you can’t entirely force yourself to leave. You’re with Theo, he’ll make sure nothing happens to you.

Your feet pound on the packed earth, ducking under low-hanging branches and around fallen tree stumps. You think you’re alone, and then a pair of arms wrap around your waist and force you to a stop. A laugh bubbles out of you before you can help it, and you swat at Theo’s arms, although he doesn’t let go. “You ass, I thought you were farther behind me.” Theo’s voice is close to your ear, his face only inches from yours. “I’m a werewolf, remember? I could outrun you any day.”

You roll your eyes, although this just makes the smirk on Theo’s face broaden. “It’s mean, that’s what it is. Maybe I’m trying to finally be alone, you don’t know that.” Theo just chuckles, the sound deep in his chest and making you shiver. “If I believed that, I would have stopped running.” There’s a silence now, a silence that hangs over the two of you like a cloak. You realize where you are, where his hands still encircle your waist and his storm-grey eyes are still locked on yours. There’s a second of hesitation, and then he leans down and kisses you.

If you were smart, you would break away. If you were smart, you would realize that Theo Raeken is only doing this to get to you and to get to your pack, that he is more dangerous than you could know. Your best option is to leave, to stop before you get your heart involved. But that’s already happened, hasn’t it? Despite your best efforts, despite everything you know about Theo, you can’t help but kiss him back, wrapping your arms around his shoulders and letting him wash away everything you can remember about the world.

Maybe you’re not supposed to be falling for Theo. You’re not sure that you ever had a choice.

[dadsbongos]

I never realized how much I needed antag reader until I read them on your blog (which I love btw you're so good it's insane) I'm really curious of what pre-game antag reader was like, so could I request for pre-game antag reader before remnants of despair and how she interacts with her fellow classmates and Hajime (reserve course Hajime needs a hug). Thanks!!

i love this :)))) thank you so much for asking this nonny

Request for: Hajime Hinata (and the class ig but we all know who the focus is on this series) Warnings: god complex, antag reader tings (bullying) ~~~

Headcanons:

🐇Honestly I feel like it’d be more interesting if this was for V3 but this is still epic 🐇I think she’s still kind of an asshole but not so much as she is in-game 🐇Definitely a cocky person too 🐇Just like really teasing and annoying like Hiyoko but with a God complex 🐇”God, Mikan, we get it, you tripped. What else is new, bitch?” 🐇I feel like in-game she would help Nagito plan his bs just for funsies 🐇Pregame she’d probably do anything she could to keep Nagito around cuz he literally worships her and the others 🐇So he’s her widdle servant who she sometimes makes get her things from vending machines and talk to people she doesn’t want to 🐇Open about her talent cuz she sees it as incredible and better-than-the-others 🐇Unlike in-game where she lied about it and hid it for fun 🐇Actually though? She probably has actual friends in pregame 🐇And probably even somewhat befriended Hajime with Chiaki 🐇Just can’t stand people like Hajime who have NO confidence (even Nagito to an extent), she thinks it’s kinda annoying lmao 🐇^Says the bitch who’ll cry if you point out she said something wrong

Stories: 

“Lady (Y/n),” Nagito grinned, extending his hand and offering her a can of soda, “I got way too many on accident, would you like one? Even though my dirty hands have already soiled it.”

Already taking the can from her classmate, (Y/n) quirked a brow at him, “Did you clear out the machine, again?”

“Aha,” he awkwardly chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck, “Lucky me, I suppose.”

“Quite,” the girl kicked her feet up and onto her desk, “Unfortunate for everyone else then.”

“It is,” Nagito nodded glumly, settling back into his seat beside her, “Such refreshing beverages shouldn’t have been wasted on me.”

“God, I swear, you and Hajime both need to have more confidence,” grumbling, (Y/n) rolled her eyes and set the can down on her desk, “I like when you dote on me and all - because I deserve it, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Nagito nodded.

“Obviously, but you need to believe in yourself more, you’re a human being and you deserve love,” she shrugged, “Even Reserve Course students and they’re- “

“Useless to hope?”

“Exactly,” (Y/n) giggled, patting Nagito’s shoulder, “You get it.”

“You touched me… scum like me was- “

“Shush.”

“Right, sorry.”

~~

“It’s just… a lot of work…” Hajime huffed, running a hand through his hair, “Not to bother you two with my problems, I’m sure being in the Main Course is more difficult.”

“Not really,” Chiaki mumbled, face practically buried in her handheld with (Y/n) resting her head on the gamer’s shoulder, “I kinda wish it was harder. The main classes are optional and the only required class segment is when we’re honing our talents. It’s kinda boring.”

“Speak for yourself,” (Y/n) closed her eyes, kicking a leg up and over the other to a cross and patting down her skirt, “As the Ultimate Copycat, I have countless abilities to hone in such a short time frame,” her lips crept up into a sick smirk, “But, of course, I manage it all. Naturally.”

Hajime sighed, “As much as I’d love to debate you on that, I’m sure it’s true. Even though all you really do is steal other people’s talents…”

“Excuse you?!” in an instant, (Y/n) shot up from the bench and into a stand in front of Hajime, brows furrowed and hand reaching at his uniform tie, tugging it harshly, “I can do whatever I want at the Ultimate level! I’m practically the best person here!”

“Then who’s the best?” Hajime scoffed, grabbing the girl’s hand and attempting to pry her fingers off his tie, to no avail.

She gripped it harder, tugging again, “Me but in senior year when I’ve only gotten better at my mastered talents, and don’t you forget it, Reserve Course dog.”

“C’mon, (Y/n),” Chiaki spoke between the couple’s fighting, “He’s your friend, don’t be mean.”

“She’s mean to everyone…” Hajime finally succeeded at pulling the girl’s fingers off of his tie, shoving at her hands, “Even her so-called friends.”

“Hey, I’m inspiring, aren’t I? You wanna be like me? Or at least as close as you possibly could to someone as wonderful as me, yeah?”

“No, you just make me sad that God allowed such a big ego in such a tiny heart.”

“Ego’s the brain, dipshit.”

Chiaki sighed quietly, shaking her head and refocusing on her game, knowing it’d be another few hours until they even came close to settling the argument.

~~

“Miss Sonia and Miss (Y/n) - together? I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” Kazuichi felt his body heat up at his own observation.

“He’s staring again, isn’t he?” Sonia placed her chin in the palm of her hand.

(Y/n) nodded, also settling her chin in the palm of her head, “Do you want me to say something to the bastard?”

“No, no,” the blond princess shook her head, “I’m afraid that saying something would only worsen his fixation.”

“How disappointing… say, you’re close with Tanaka, correct?” at the other girl’s nod, she continued, “Maybe you should introduce us sometime. He could teach me a thing or two of his ‘dark arts’; a spell to curse Kazuichi’s eyes into flames if he so much as looks at us.”

“My, (Y/n), that’s wonderfully dark, how did you come up with that?”

“Book Nagito wanted me to read, speaking of which, if you ever need suggestions you should go to him. He’s an excellent reader with incredible tastes.”

Sonia nodded, “I will certainly keep that in mind, then!”

“They’re so cute when they talk to each other, don’t you think?” Kazuichi held his chest over where his heart beat into his ribs.

“No, you’re fucking gross,” Fuyuhiko waved off, “Don’t talk to me.”

~~

“Hajime, you’re clueless.”

“Huh?!”

“You’re clueless if you think you need an Ultimate to be Chiaki’s friend, she adores you the way you are.”

“It’s not just Chiaki… it’s you too, (Y/n)...”

“What?”

“You’re always talking about how you’re so amazing and that Ultimate talents are necessary to be so great, it’s- I just- I want to be someone you and Chiaki can be proud to be around!”

“Hajime…”

Silence. And then, the floodgates broke open.

“Hajime, you don’t need an Ultimate to be someone I’m proud to be around. You’re intelligent, which is more than I can say for most people. You’re kind and caring when you want to be and it shows in who you are. You’re unabashedly yourself and that’s what makes you worthy of being my friend. Sure, Main Course students are objectively better than Reserve Course but you know why exceptions exist, right? It’s for you and others like you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re incredible.”

“But not to your level…?”

“No, but don’t feel bad, nobody’s at my level.”

[taeyongdoyoung]

summary: the forest is your only escape from the everyday troubles with your family until you find danger lurking behind the trees. or rather, danger finds you. your fateful encounter with the vampire ravn leaves you wishing for a different life. you strike an unexpected deal with the stranger that will soon turn into something more…

pairing: vampire! human ravn x reader

side characters: seoho, xion, non-binary oc named robin inspired by the wonderful @byccn 💜

genre: vampire!au, romance, humour, FLUFF

warnings: i don’t think there are any?? just sweet tooth-rotting fluff, some biting, a few shakespeare references, some swear words and a lot of cheesy lines, i mean, they’re eating pizza in italy and it’s valentine’s day soo...

word count: 2.3k

author’s note: the final chapter of twilight has arrived, i just want to thank you all so much for embarking on this journey with me, for reading it and for leaving your comments, it truly feels like the end of an era but i hope everyone enjoyed reading my story as much as i enjoyed writing it, i don’t know what else to say other than “parting is such sweet sorrow” 🥺🥺💞💞

part one 🌙 part two 🌙 part three 🌙 part four 🌙 part five 🌙 part six  🌙 part seven 🌙 part eight 🌙 part nine 🌙 part ten🌙 part eleven  🌙part twelve

You felt like you were dreaming but no matter how many times you pinched yourself, you didn’t wake up, because this was reality. Ravn was safe and sleeping soundly, his arms wrapped around you. And he was so warm you’d have a difficult time getting used to it. But it didn’t matter, because you loved him for him and that was all that mattered. You ran a gentle hand through his dark hair. He was still so beautiful, still so soft, still your Ravn. And despite the fact that he, too, was mortal now, you had the strange feeling you had all the time in the world. And in a way, it was true. You were so far away from any dangers that this newfound sense of freedom seemed eternal.

“Are you watching me sleep?” Ravn murmured curiously.

You attempted to withdraw your hand, but his reflexes were still fast enough to catch you.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he opened his eyes and smiled at you fondly.

“I just can’t believe this. You’re alive,” you pointed out.

Ravn chuckled.

“Me neither. I’ve wished for this for so long that now when it actually happened it seems unreal.”

“Well, no use questioning it, let’s just enjoy ourselves,” you quickly kissed his lips and intended to get out of bed to brush your teeth, but Ravn stopped you by holding onto your hand and pulling you close.

“Where do you think you’re going?” He kissed you once more, this time more deeply and not willing to let go.

“Mmm, Ravn, darling…” you tried to argue.

“Stay a bit longer,” he pleaded sweetly.

“You’re impossible to resist,” you laughed and started kissing his neck, occasionally biting him gently, which amused him immensely.

“Oh, no, I’ve corrupted you entirely,” Ravn wailed.

You rolled your eyes and pressed your hands against his cheeks.

“I love you,” you said seriously.

“I would not wish any companion in the world but you,” Ravn replied and your eyes filled with happy tears.

“My favourite Shakespeare nerd,” you stroked his chin.

“Am I not the only Shakespeare nerd you know?” he challenged.

“Well, he will never admit it, but Seoho is secretly as much of a Shakespeare enthusiast as we are,” you joked.

“But you like me more, right?” he had to make sure.

“Of course, silly, is this even a question?”

“Let’s get up and annoy him about it, then!” Ravn suggested excitedly.

“Unbelievable,” you giggled and sneaked out of his arms. “Bathroom’s mine first!”

Ravn hurriedly chased you but to your complete amazement, you beat him to it. Now that he was human, too, it was all fair and square.

“Come on, sweetheart, let me in!” Ravn complained, knocking on the door.

You smirked triumphantly as you were putting toothpaste on your new brush.

“What will I get out of this?” you bargained, suddenly remembering one of your initial encounters. It felt like a century ago.

“More kisses? My undying affection? Anything you wish, I just really need to…”

You quickly opened the door upon hearing the desperation in his voice. He was only human, after all, the thought making you laugh.

“Thank you!” Ravn rushed inside. He was obviously on a mission.

A couple of minutes later, you were both out of the bathroom and dressing up for the day.

“Being a human is so hard,” he complained. “So many needs.”

“Come on, you’ve been human before,” you reminded him.

“How do you deal with all this?” Ravn asked, overwhelmed by everything new.

“It’s just life, I guess,” you shrugged. “Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough. And I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

“Unless when you lock me out of the bathroom,” he teased you.

“A mistake I won’t repeat again,” you chuckled. “We’ll have to share.”

“I can live with that,” he winked. “For the rest of my life.”

These were words you’d never expected to hear and yet, they’d somehow turned into the much needed reality.

🌙🌙🌙

“Now that Ravn’s human, you won’t say stuff like ‘all humans are trash’, will you, Seoho?” you joked over breakfast as you were spreading jam over a slice of bread.

“Unfortunately, I’ve been forced to change my mindset,” Seoho groaned and added under his breath. “Ugh, humans.”

“Hey, I heard that!” Ravn scolded him.

“I thought your super hearing was gone?” Seoho asked awkwardly.

“It is, but I can still hear shit,” he punched his friend playfully.

“Fine, fine, I’ll try not to be a dick.”

“Thank you very much,” you said. “I’m thinking of checking out the local bookshops today. Ravn, do you want to come with?”

“You know it,” he gave you a high five.

“Seoho, do you want to join us?” you offered politely, because after all, if it hadn’t been for Seoho’s magical abilities, you probably wouldn’t be here, in Verona, alive.

“So I can watch you lick each other’s faces between the bookshelves? I’ll pass,” Seoho scoffed.

“Hey, if it makes you uncomfortable, we’ll stop doing it in front of you,” you promised.

“Nah, it’s fine. I have other plans, anyways.”

“You do?” Ravn eyed him suspiciously.

“I’m not telling you anything,” Seoho finished his juice, got up from the table and grabbed his jacket. “Have fun, nerds!”

Before you could register where he was going, Seoho had teleported himself out of the room.

“Okay, that was weird,” you pointed out.

“Definitely. We’ll grill him for more information when he comes back,” Ravn vowed. “But for now, let’s finish our human breakfast and explore the town.”

“It would be my honour,” you smiled.

🌙🌙🌙

Seoho’s POV

Was I being too obvious? I knew that sooner or later I’d have to inform Ravn and Y/N what this was about, but I didn’t want to jinx it. After all, there wasn’t much to tell. Not yet, at least. The truth was that yesterday when I’d gone to buy pizza and pancakes for my friends, I’d seen someone that grabbed my attention rightaway. They had beautiful short hair, a vibrant smile and they were selling ice-cream. At the time, I couldn’t muster up the courage to talk to them, even though I was usually confident and carefree. There was something special about this person. And despite my previous distrust of humans, I realized I could no longer be so prejudiced about them. My best friend was now human and his girlfriend had proved me wrong countless times. Maybe it was because I was in a new town, where no one knew me. Maybe it was because after almost losing Ravn, I had realized that life was too short and precious and I had to make each day count. I don’t know what exactly came over me but when I lied to my friends about having plans, I decided I want to see the person selling ice-cream again. And this time, I would talk to them.

Luckily, I was good at finding my way around. I quickly remembered where the pizza place was and that the ice-cream stand was right around the corner. I felt a bit nervous, but I knew that I had nothing to lose, so I approached it. They were there. The minute I saw their smile I forgot everything that I had planned I would say. How I wanted to play it cool and tell them I really like their style and their hair and…Before I could open my mouth, they’d spotted me and spoke first.

“Hi, would you like to order some ice-cream?” were the cheerful first words they said to me.

“Um, hi, yeah, what would you recommend?” I asked.

“My personal favourite is chocolate,” they replied.

“Alright, then, I’ll have that.”

“Sure thing,” they smiled and started scooping up a ball of chocolate ice-cream as I placed the money on the table. Now was my chance to say something dumb or remain silent and regret it forever. Or I could just come back again tomorrow. I wouldn’t do that, right?

🌙🌙🌙

I was a fool. I did come back again the following day. And the day after. I came back to that ice-cream place every day for two whole weeks, without succeeding to say much to the person I was obviously crushing on, other than the usual small talk surrounding the process of buying ice-cream. I tried all the different flavours until one day the unimaginable happened.

“I’ll see you again tomorrow,” I murmured instead of goodbye.

“Actually, I won’t be here tomorrow,” they responded sadly. “You see, this was just a summer job for me and I’m going back to college so I won’t have time to work.”

“Oh, I see,” I replied dumbly. “Well, in that case…”

“Can I get your number?” they beat me to it. “Or at least your name?”

Internally, I was screaming with joy. Externally, I attempted to maintain a perfectly composed expression.

“Seoho,” I said, already writing down my phone number on a napkin. “And yours?”

“Robin,” they chuckled. “Wow, you’re so old-fashioned, you could have just typed it in.”

I shrugged and handed them the silly napkin.

“Better not lose it,” I warned them.

“No worries, I’ll treasure it forever.”

“Well, technically, the ink will probably wear off with time…”

“Wow, way to kill the mood,” Robin laughed and I could swear, I would never get tired of that beautiful sound.

“Sorry,” I looked down apologetically.

“I can’t help but wonder what took you so long?” they further amazed me with such a straightforward question.

“Um, I’m shy?”

“Me too, but it had to be done,” Robin winked.

In that moment, I had already made up my mind. Maybe humans weren’t so bad after all…

🌙🌙🌙

One year later

You were sitting next to your fiancé, holding hands under the table at a pizza restaurant because you didn’t want your engagement rings to show. You intended to surprise your friends Seoho and Robin and had kept it a secret for a while. A week had passed since Ravn proposed to you. He had booked plane tickets to Paris for a weekend getaway and what you thought was simply a short vacation turned into the best moment of your life. Forever the romantic, Ravn had completely amazed you with the unexpected question. An evening walk alongside the Seine River and under the city lights, French music playing all around…You had been so overwhelmed by positive emotions that you burst into tears before managing to respond. Ravn had gotten worried that he’d upset you and you’d somehow succeeded in letting him know you were happy crying and that of course you’d marry him. It felt like a dream come true.

As you were waiting for your friends to arrive, you and Ravn exchanged a knowing look.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Born ready,” you replied, completely certain of your feelings for him.

He squeezed your hand in support and soon after, your friends showed up.

“Hi, darling,” you hugged Robin tightly. “Seoho.”

“We have news,” Ravn announced directly.

“Can it wait?” Seoho inquired. “We kinda have a surprise that’s waiting outside.”

“Oh? You got us a puppy?” you asked, guessing wrongly.

“Nah, it’s not a puppy,” Seoho chuckled. “Much better, actually.”

“Come on, tell us already!” Ravn insisted.

“Okay, stay here, I’ll get the surprise rightaway. Robin, keep them occupied.”

Robin rolled their eyes.

“So bossy,” they complained affectionately after Seoho was out of earshot. “Anyways, how have you two been?”

“Splendid,” you squealed. “We can’t wait to tell you the big news, but apparently Seoho’s going to steal our thunder.”

“Yeah, so rude of him,” Ravn joked.

“Oh, trust me, it’ll be worth it,” Robin promised, already aware of who was standing outside.

“It better be,” you laughed.

As soon as you’d said that, Seoho returned, holding a young-looking guy you’d never seen before under his arm. The first thing you noticed was his pale skin that looked so out of place next to Seoho’s flushed cheeks. And your limited experience led you to the conclusion that this was probably a vampire.

“X-xion,” Ravn stammered in shock and quickly rushed to get up and hug his friend he hadn’t seen in way too long, completely forgetting about the secret you were supposed to hide under the table.

“It’s been a while,” Xion replied. “Sorry for showing up unannounced…but I wanted to see you.”

“Of course, it’s not a problem,” Ravn reassured him. “This is Y/N, my…fiancée,” he introduced you, dropping the other big surprise for the evening.

“HOLY SHIT,” Robin exclaimed, finally noticing the rings. “Congratulations!”

Seoho didn’t seem shocked at all, the magical bastard had probably read your thoughts a long time ago.

“T-thanks,” you murmured nervously. “And it’s really nice to meet you, Xion. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

He shook your hand awkwardly and smiled.

“So, what brings you here?” Ravn asked his friend.

“Well, Seoho mentioned about…you know…how Y/N and you…and how you’re no longer…you know.”

“It’s okay, Xion,” Robin chuckled. “Seoho told me everything about the supernatural world, you don’t need to speak in riddles.”

The vampire scratched the back of his head bashfully.

“And like, I was wondering if it was possible for this miracle to happen to me, too. So I came to ask for advice.”

“You want to be human, too?” Ravn inquired. “Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”

You gave your fiancé and Xion an encouraging smile.

“There’s nothing I’d like more,” he confessed openly.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, it’s not like I was planning for this to happen.”

“Anything can be helpful,” Xion pleaded. “Just tell me the whole story. How you met Y/N. How you fell in love. Don’t leave anything out.”

“It’s gonna be a long night,” you teased.

“Well, it all started at twilight…”

The end

[backtobackbakubabe]

I’m Gonna Make This Place Your Home (Part 9)

Bakugo X Reader

Runaway reader finds a home with Bakugo. But will trouble follow?

Words: 4550

*****************************************************************************************************

“What do you mean she lied to you?” Ora gave Bakugo a baffled look.

Bakugo gripped his head in an attempt to keep calm, “I mean she fucking lied to me... You yourself said Puppeteer would never let her give up their location. She was acting weird, she said she loved me... but it sounded more like she was saying goodbye...” He picked up the bedside lamp and threw it at the wall before he threw his head in his hands and growled.

Moments later Kirishima was kicking the door in and rushing in. He had expected to see some kind of fight going on but instead all he saw was his best friend currently losing his sanity.

Kirishima knelt next to the bed and placed his hand on Bakugos shoulder, “We will get her back. I promise.

Bakugo’s hand reached up and found Kirishima’s. “I saw her... I saw her and I asked her where she was... but I don’t know if I believe her. It looks like we’re going to need to split up after all.

********************************************************

Puppeteer waisted no time snapping his fingers and having his goons drag you from your bed. “I thought we could trust each other Y/n. You have no idea how much it saddens me to do this... but naughty girls must be punished.”

You struggled against their hold, doing your best to dig your heels in. “What... what are you going to do to me?”

Puppeteer flashed a cruel smirk at you, “Well it seems you swallowed something you shouldn't have and well, we really need to retrieve it as soon as possible. Dont worry we have some of the best doctors here.”

Your eyes widened as you began to panic. “No! NO! Please! I told him it was the other tracker! He thinks this one was randomly tossed from the helicopter!”

Puppeteer chuckled, “Oh but I think we both know he’s a lot smarter than that isn't he? Hmm yes I think no matter what they will be dividing their forces to check both locations... but I think he will be coming to this one. I saw the look on his face in your little dream. He looked devastated, because he knew you had deceived him.”

You had to think quickly. Under no circumstances could you let them put you under anesthesia. Puppeteer’s threat of making you a vegetable still rang in your ears. If they put you to sleep there would be a chance you would never wake up again...

Bakugo in the short time you lived together had taught you some basic self defense and combat skills. But now as you wracked your brain you were finding it hard to remember any of it. Fuck. If he doesn’t kill me for lying to him then he’ll definitely beat my ass for this... Come on think! Your eyes darted around for anything useful as they dragged you down hall after hall. You probably should have paid closer attention to where you were going but you were in full panic mode and you need to calm your shit down.

You could see that up ahead there was a plank in the floor that was slightly higher than the rest. It might not be the best plan but it was the only one you had.

You knew Puppeteer’s quirk had a time limit but you couldn’t remember the last time he had touched you. He had just used your quirk only a little while ago so the chances were pretty high that he could still control your quirk. Maybe though, if you did it fast enough you could use it just long enough to get away.

You started to truly drag your feet and let yourself go limp right as your foot caught the lip of the raised plank. It jerked you from the goons grasp as you crashed to the floor.  You tried to use your quirk to take the goons sight away but you didn’t wait to see if it worked. You scrambled to your feet and sprinted in the opposite direction. This is where is would have been handy to have paid attention to where you were going.

“Hey what the fuck?!” You could hear scuffling behind you as turned a corner.

“Well what are you doing? Go after her you fucking idiots!” screamed Puppeteer. You assumed that you had succeeded in taking away their sight for however long it took to get away but you didn’t want to assume it was permanent. Bakugo had once told you something about assuming ... something about being an ass... You tried to be as quiet as possible as you slipped into empty room. All you needed to do was hide until Bakugo got here. If Puppeteer was right then he shouldn't be too long. Right?

******************************

“Ok so let me get this straight she told you she was with the tracker that was still moving and so that means you want to go to coordinates of the tracker that isn’t moving?” Kirishima rubbed the back of his neck while he tried to figure out the plan. “And you want the rest of us to track the other tracker... the one she said was her..? But you don’t think it is her. Do I have that right?”

Bakugo nodded as he clipped on the rest of his costume. “I’m going in alone. If I have to blow the whole fucking place up I will and I’m not bringing ya’ll down with me. Puppeteer can control anyones quirk that he touches. I’m not giving him any extra pieces to his stupid fucking game. I need to do this alone.” He took a deep sigh and ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “Last time I saw him he could have made me kill you if he had wanted to and I wouldn't have been able to stop it. That’s not happening. I’m taking you out of the equation.”

He walked over and did something Kirishima wasn’t expecting. Bakugo gripped him in a tight hug, “And if by chance my instincts are wrong and she is where she said she is...I don’t trust anyone other than you to bring her home.”

Kirishima closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I got you man. I’ll do everything I can to get her back. But please... please dont do anything stupid. And the SECOND you confirm she’s there please let me know. I know you think you need to do this alone, but I would never be able to live with myself if something happened to you.”

Ora waited for their little bromance moment to end before she approached Bakugo and nudged him. “Hey... you realize I’m going with you right? Like there’s no chance in hell you’re going alone. I haven't seen my sister in almost twenty years. Puppeteer has ruined my entire life and hers. I’m going to make that fucker pay.”

Bakugo narrowed his eyes at her. Recognizing the same stubborn gleam in her eyes that he had seen in yours time and time again, he immediately knew he wasn’t going to win this argument. “Dont make me regret this.”

Ora straightened her posture to square him off, “Dont make me regret letting you try it your way first. We either kill Puppeteer today, or we do it my way and we go back in time and kill him before any of this shit even happens.”

Bakugo nodded, “Lets hope it doesn't come to that. Its not that I dont trust you... but you said yourself you've never used your quirk like that before. It’s a huge risk. But that being said, its worth taking if it gets the job done.”

Ora stuck her hand out to shake his, “Let’s fucking do this.”

********************************

It had to have been over an hour now. There’s no way Puppeteer’s quirk was still working on you. You could potentially walk out of the house. You were terrified though. Your quirk only works on a few people at a time. If you ran into a large group of people you were screwed. You couldn’t sit here forever though. You had to do something. You were not some helpless damsel. You had broken out once and you could do it again.

Your biggest concern right now was sound. Sure you could make them see whatever. You would just edit yourself out of what they see, but you couldn’t do anything about the sound.

You slowly opened the door leading back out into the hallway. At first you didnt see anyone so you tip toed out. Your first step was followed by a quiet moan from the wood beneath your foot. You froze as your heart leapt into your thought. You had to remind yourself to stay calm and keep your breathing in check. The last thing you needed was to give yourself away by being a mouth breathing idiot.

When you were sure no one was coming for you, you slowly reached down and took your shoes off. You cradled them in your hands as you started your painfully slow walk down the hallway.

You had made so much progress but none at the same time. You made at least six turns by now but you still had no idea where you were or how to get the fuck out. This place really needed a fucking map. Your legs growing fatigued from the strain of taking slow and careful steps. You felt like you had been walking forever when you finally ran into another person. This had to be a good sign right? With limited people here Puppeteer would put them close to the exits right? To keep you in and more importantly keep Bakugo out.

There were only three of them. You could handle that. They were quietly muttering amongst themselves. Every so often one of their radios would sound off as one of their comrades would reach out for an update. “No sign here. She has to still be on the premises though. None of the doors or windows have been opened. We would have heard the alarm go off.” Shit... of course theres a fucking alarm system.

You got a bit closer before you threw one of your shoes as hard as you could down the hallway. It made a loud noise as it knocked what looked to be like a rather expensive painting off the wall.

“What the fuck was that?” Two of the goons left to investigate the noise while the third stayed put and radioed to the others. “We have some commotion on the second floor, West wing, Hallway C.”

How fucking big was this place?

Puppeteers voice came out loud through the speaker of the radio. “I’m coming and I’m going to do this myself you fucking idiots. How hard is it to catch one fucking girl. You’ve been at this for hours now!”

You could see the goon roll his eyes, obviously annoyed with his boss. You had no sympathy for him though. He chose this life. You could see a tazer hanging from his belt. Of course Puppeteer wouldn't want you killed so they would have to use non-lethals. If you could just quickly...

You lunged for the taser and ripped it from his belt. His eyes went wide for a second as a put two and two together. He didn’t try and fight it, he just yelled to his friends, “SHE’S HERE!”

You tazed him before he could do anything else and sprinted towards a set of stairs. The man had said you were on the second floor which meant you needed to go down to get out.

You practically jumped down the stairs, skipping as many as you could. Your intensity got the best of you though because as soon as you saw the door that lead to the first floor you flung it open. And guess what was on the other side? Fucking Puppeteer. His head whipped in the direction of the door that you just slammed open like a dumbass. His eyes narrowed and his lips turned up in an evil smirk, “Ah Y/N darling. Nice of you to finally join us.”

Your heart was pounding and you just kept reminding yourself that he couldnt see you. You started to sidestep away from the door and to what looked like a library. You could feel yourself sweating from the exertion of using your quirk for so long. It was rare that you ever used it for more than a few minutes at a time and even then it wasn’t very often.

You threw your other shoe in the opposite direction you wanted to go while simultaneously taking away his vision completely. You expected him to get angry, to yell. But what he did was much worse and stopped you in your tracks. He started laughing. “You think I dont have any tricks up my sleeve? I have a man here who's quirk is a super strong sense of smell. Once he’s leaned someone smell he can track them from miles away...” Your blood ran cold. “And Y/N... if his nose is correct, which it always is... your only a few feet away...NOW!”

Out of nowhere you were being grabbed from behind. How the hell had you not seen him sneaking up on you. “I got her! Now what?!”

Puppeteer snarled in frustration, “Bring her to me! I need to touch her so I can stop her from using her quirk!”

You struggled against him. This was not how this was going to end. You worked so hard to get this far. You were going to fucking leave if it was the last thing you did.

Your elbow caught the man in the jaw and his grip slacked just enough for you slip away temporarily. “Bitch hit me!”

Puppeteer screamed in anger, “Of course she did! I told you she wouldn’t come easily now go and get her! Sniff her out!”

You had only made it a few yards when you were being thrown to the floor. His sense of smell lead him right to you. You turned around and with all the strength you had left kicked him in the face, breaking his nose. Blood splattered everywhere and the man fell forward on top of you pinning you to the ground. “You fucking broke my nose!”

Puppeteer ran over to you, “Hold her down! Backup is coming!” He reached out and touched you and it was all over.

Tears sprung to your eyes as you made eye contact with the disgusting man who stopped you from using your quirk. “Please! I’ll behave! I’ll do anything! Please don't kill me.”

Puppeteer backed away as some of his goons filed into the room and surrounded you. “Oh sweet Y/n. I’m not going to kill you. I need you alive so I can utilize your quirk... But like I said before that doesn't mean I need you awake.”

Just like that you were being yanked over someones shoulder. You hit their back and screamed at the top of you lungs. You sent a silent prayer out that Bakugo would get here before its too late.

Your throat was raw by the time you were slammed onto a very hard and uncomfortable bed. With tears in your eyes you continued to beg the people who were currently strapping you down to let you go.

Puppeteer came and sat down in a chair next to you. “My dear you waist your breath. They only listen to me. I’m sorry it has to be this way but you left me no choice. We need to get that tracker out of your stomach and we cant have you helping that boyfriend of yours who is sure to rampage through here soon enough.” He reached out and took your hand. You would have pulled away but your hand was strapped down. “I’m not heartless though so I will at least give you the courtesy of letting you know what will become of you once we put under.”

He stood up and began to pace the room like the villain always did in the movies you had watched with Bakugo. “We will put you under anesthesia and cut you open and take out the tracker. Then once you’re all stitched up we will administer a drug that renders you basically brain dead. It’ll keep you in an endless sleep that you will never wake up from. But you’ll have just enough brain activity left so I can use your quirk when I need it. You will only be aware when I want you to be and you will only be able to use your quirk when I want you to. It’s not much of a life... but alas you brought this upon yourself.”

Your face was soaked with tears now and you couldnt stop the sobs that wracked your body. Your whole body was shaking now. This was it. There was no coming back from this. You’ll never get to say goodbye to Bakugo. Puppeteer signaled for the doctor to proceed. The doctor came closer to you with a needle and you heart began to race. You looked him in the eye and quieter than you had been all day, you whispered, “Please....”

The doctor schooled his features before bringing the needle to your arm, “You might feel a light pi-”

Then the most glorious noise you had ever heard sounded. The alarm was gong off. You were here so that must mean that someone broke in... “BAKUGO!!!!!!”

Puppeteer threw a glass against the wall before he ran his fingers through his hair. “Looks like we can skip the surgery and just go straight to the brain dead vegetable phase.”

The doctor sputtered a bit, “Sir I don’t have the necessary equipment for that here. I would have to move her upstairs.”

Puppeteer threw the door open, “Well why are you still here? Fucking move her! I’ll take care of her brat of a boyfriend....”

**********************************

He wasnt going to be subtle. He was charging in guns blazing and taking out every single person who got in his way. The more people he took out the less pawns at Puppeteers disposal. He blasted the front door right off of its hinges. Immediately an alarm started blaring. Because that wasnt annoying at all.

He ran down the first hallway and saw a man sitting on the floor with blood all over his shirt. “OI! Who the FUCK are you? And where is Y/N?!”

The man spat blood on to the floor next to him, “I can smell her on you.. that cunt you call your girlfriend broke my fucking nose!”

Bakugo took a calm step towards him before taking him by the hair and slamming his face into the ground, “And I will break your fucking face if you dont tell me where she is!”

The man pointed down the hallway. They took her down that hallway. After that I dont know this house is a fucking maze man!”

Bakugo slammed his head into the ground again, “You can fucking do better than that!”

His face now covered in blood, “Two lefts then a right and straight to the end of the hall...”

Bakugo smirked before standing up and giving the man a swift kick to the head, knocking him out. He looked to Ora next to him who didnt seem phased at all by his display of violence. “Let’s go.”

She nodded, “You're going to have to do most of the heavy lifting here. I dont want to waist any energy. If we have to go with Plan B it’s going to take everything I have.”

Bakugo stalked forward into the hallway, “Works for me. I’d prefer for you to stay out of the blast zone anyways.”

Bakugo can only describe what happened next as a rampage of epic proportions. No one stood a chance. He fired first and didnt even bother to ask questions after. He left a trail of burnt and broken people in his wake and he didnt feel even an ounce of remorse. He knew this wasnt healthy. The amount of anger that was pushing him right now. But he also knew he couldnt afford to let go of that anger, because once he did all that was left was fear. Fear of failure, fear of losing her, fear of the unknown.

He finally reached his destination after following the mans directions exactly, but the room was empty. There was a hospital bed with leather straps on it and a lot of blood smeared on the sheets. He just prayed it wasn't yours.

Ora yelled from the hallway, “Bakugo! Hurry he's here!”

He left the room and came face to face with Puppeteer. The disgusting man had the nerve to smile at him, “It seems you’ve put a real dent in my security. No matter there's more where that came from.” He looked over to Ora and his smile grew, “And would you look at that you’ve brought me a present. Who would have thought the secret to getting my crown jewels back was Ground Zero. So nice of you to personally deliver them both.”

Bakugo sent a huge explosion towards him but he dove into a nearby hallway just in time. “WHERE IS SHE?”

Puppeteer stayed hidden around the corner, “The longer you fight me the less time you’ll have to say goodbye to her. Soon enough there won’t be anything left to say goodbye to!”

Bakugo sent another blast his way, letting all his anger, his rage, his fear leak into it. But all he got in return was a chuckle, “Is that all you got boy?”

He was about to blast him again when he heard someone running up behind him. Without turning to look he asked Ora, “Who is it?”

With a little relief in her voice, “It’s Kirishima! They must have realized you were right about the other coordinates!”

Kirisima stepped up next to Bakugo, “Hey man go find her... we’ll take it from here.”

Bakugo looked between the corner Puppeteer was hiding behind and Ora. He wanted to personally make the man suffer, but he would leave that to Ora. She deserved that much. He settled on Ora, “Make him fucking pay...”

She nodded, “You already know I will. Now hurry!”

Bakugo took off, that guy was right.. this place really was a fucking maze. He was running around kicking every single door in. Calling out for you. He didnt care who heard him. He’d cut them down just like he did the rest of them.

He sprinted around a corner and there you were. You were simply standing there. Calmly waiting for him as he approached. His hands found purchase on either side of your face as he wiped the silent tears that now slid down your face. “You found me....”

He leaned his forehead against your, “Of course I did.. I told you I’d protect you.”

You smiled as you ran your fingers through his hair, “We need to go.” You took his hand and led him down the hallways to a set of stairs.

When you started to go up he pulled back, “Where are you going?”

More silent tears slid down your face, “I need to show you something before we go.”

Bakugo gave you a concerted look, “Y/n we really need to get you out of here! Puppeteer is still on the loose.”

You nodded, “I understand but this is really important.”

You led him up the stairs, down a few halls and to a room. You opened the door to a room and led him inside. The bed looked like a hospital bed but it was empty. There was a weird beeping noise but he couldnt find where it was coming from. “Y/N what is going on? What was so important that you needed to show me?”

You didnt answer him, but instead you reached up on your tip toes and gave him a passionate kiss. “I love you Bakugo. I love you so much. You taught me what it was like to truly live life, trust wholly, and love deeply and I am so thankful for that...”

“Y/N why are you talking like that? I love you too but you already know that... you’re making me nervous...”

You gave him a sad smile, “It’s getting harder to focus so I need to do this quickly. Bakugo.... Puppeteer did something to me... I’m not really alive anymore.”

Bakugo grew cold as his hands clutched you, “What the fuck do you mean you're not alive? You’re standing right in front of me. I can see you, I can feel you!”

You wiped a tear from your cheek, “My body is still alive, my heart is till pumping... but that’s all he needed to use my quirk... My brain... its shutting down as we speak. You're not really holding me... I’m just in your head...”

Bakugo fell to his knees as his heart began to pound in his eyes, “NO! IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO END THIS WAY!”

You sat down next to him and pulled him to your chest and let him sob. “It’s going to be okay. You’re going to make it through this. I need you to do that for me do you understand? You can’t give up. You have to promise me.”

Bakugo picked his head up and saw that stubborn expression in your eyes that he had seen in Ora’s earlier that day. “You have an older sister... she's here. She came to help free you...”

You pushed your hand through his hair, “It would have been nice to meet her, but right now all I care about is you.” You kissed his forehead, “I’m losing my grip Bakugo... I know its a lot to ask but can you stay with me...”

It was his turn hold you while he kissed your head over and over again. He rocked you back and forth, “You can’t leave me. Please!”

You held back your tears as you cupped his cheek, “Remember when you were teaching me to ride the bike? And you said you would never let go. Not until I was ready... We’ll I’m telling you, you need to let go... it’s time.” You gave him one last kiss, “I love you.”

When Bakugo opened his eyes you weren't there anymore. He looked up and he saw you strapped to the bed, hooked up to a monitor. Your heart was still beating. You were still alive... but you were gone.

He was completely numb as he gently began undoing the straps and he took your hand in his. This was his fault.

He didnt think it could get any worse but then Ora stepped up next to him. He hadn't even heard her come in.

She had been there for quite some time and it didnt take her long to figure out what had happened. She put a hand on his shoulder, “He got away.... looks like its time for Plan B.... Do you think you’re ready?”

Bakugo took a deep breath and wiped his cheeks, “Let’s go kill the fucking son of a bitch...”

*****************************************************************************************************

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[turning-dreams-into-chaos]

Going Mad

*Not my Gif*

Request: Can you do a cute Young Remus x Reader for me? I don’t care what it’s about I just love your Remus fics!

Requested by: Anonymous

Post Date: 7-22-19

Paring: Remus Lupin x Reader

Word Count: 2.2k

A/N: so I screwed up the title and so if you already reblogged this before I fixed it, you know, it’s just going to be under ‘Going Crazy’, anyone else ever do that? 😂

~Prompt List~

~Master List~

Requests are closed, Tags are open

The whispers of your friends pulled your attention immediately as you entered the great hall. James, Sirius, and Remus were all hunched over the table, Remus looked to be as red as a tomato before he saw you, the whispers ceasing as you planted a seat next to him, your best friend.

“What was that?” You asked, eying him and the other marauders who just shrugged and ate their breakfast. You turned to face Remus who, still as red as you’ve ever seen, just wrapped his arm around your shoulders.

“Just some thing about Transfiguration, you know, about the essay we have to write.” He said as you groaned, putting your head down on the table. Remus just laughed as you picked your head back up, enjoying the lovely sound coming from him. It always seemed to make you happy when ever he laughed or smiled and you couldn’t help but join in.

“Seriously, you had to spoil my mood. You couldn’t have just shrugged like these dimwits?” You received two groans and half arguments as you shot them a prove-me-wrong look, to which James and Sirius both gave up, snickering to each other that you had a point. You turned to Remus a big smile on your face before seeing him already smiling down at you. You held his gaze before he looked away, coughing before your eyes widened realizing the situation. Sirius shot you a smirk, raising his brow as you kicked him under the table. Sirius was the only one who knew about you fancying Remus, he promised he would never say anything but keeps encouraging you to tell Remus. But what you didn’t know was Remus was in the same situation, but instead of Sirius telling him to tell you, it’s all three of his best friends.

“Hey, where’s Peter?” James rolled his eyes before pointing down the table to where Peter was trying to flirt with some Gryffindor girls. You laughed as Remus nudged you, glaring down at you with a playful grin plastered across his face.

“Oh let him have his fun.” He argued as Sirius barked out a laugh.

“Oh come on Moony, you can’t seriously think Peter’s having fun getting rejected.”

“Pads, that’s not nice. Give the guy a break.”

“Y/N, he practiced flirting with you and you laughed in his face.” You bit your lip and your eyes went wide as Remus spilled the drink he was chugging in laughter.

“Pads! You promised that was between us!” You yelled as Remus moved in his spot to face you.

“You let Peter practice flirting on you?!” He whispered as you put your head in his chest, wrapping one arm around his waist as the other fell in front of your face. Remus was quick to put one hand around your waist to hold you as the other fell onto his mouth, hiding the smile he had at your closeness. Curse his crush.

“Rem, it was awful! I mean I get that he’s one of your best friends, but the boy has got no moves!” You whined, half laughing still as Remus’ chest vibrated underneath you.

“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad, but no more keeping secrets from me.” He said as you sat up, glaring at him before continuing eating.

Even though you focused on eating you didn’t miss the comment Sirius made under his breath, saying Remus was one to talk before Remus’ jaw clenched. You sucked in a breath, not saying anything as you continued to eat your breakfast. You began to think back on when you entered the room, how the whispers suddenly stopped when Remus saw you. You couldn’t help the feeling in your stomach as you looked up at Remus, taking in his profile as your thoughts continued to rant in your brain. You tried to push the thoughts away as you remembered the perfect distraction.

“I forgot I was supposed to study with Lils, see you guys later?” You asked, getting up as they all nodded their heads. You clenched your fists as Sirius thought you were out of earshot, leaning over to whisper to Moony.

“You need to bloody tell her!”

“No!” Remus practically yells as you tried not to turn around and your heart sunk. So he was keeping secrets from you. That went against your entire friendship the past 6 years. You made a rule when you were just 11 years old that you would never keep the secrets. The first time Remus felt like he would lose your friendship was a year later when he told you about being a werewolf. Of course you told him you were by his side no matter what and you wouldn’t let this come between you two. That was when Remus knew he made the right choice in telling you because you kept your word and 6 years later remained the most important person to him. As for you, your developing crush on the boy was the only thing you’d ever kept from him, and you honestly had no plans on telling him that anytime soon.

You walked into the common room, finding the red head right away. You took the seat next to her as she looked up at you, furrowing her brows.

“What’s got you in a mood?”

You scoffed before crossing your arms, sinking into the couch more. “I’m not in a mood.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. And Sirius is gonna stop sleeping with half the school.” She mocked as you rolled your eyes.

“Ok. First off, that could happen. And second, if you must know, I think Remus is hiding something from me.” You confessed, putting your elbows on your knees as you fell forward. Lily was quick to comfort you, rubbing a hand on your back as you smiled to her. “Thanks Lils. I just- I don’t know what to do. I want him to talk to me but I just, I guess I just want him to talk to me first. What if it’s important?”

“Why don’t you just tell him you fancy him already.” Your jaw fell open, unsure how to continue this conversation, but luckily you didn’t have to as the boy himself walked in, followed by the whispers of his three best friends which once again stop as they see you. You lock eyes with Remus before he looks away, slightly blushing as you look at a lily.

“See, he’s keeping a secret from me.” She nodded before Peter and James sat down on the couches next to you two, Remus taking the seat directly next to you as Sirius sat in the arm chair across from you.

“What are you boys up too this morning?” Lily asked, mainly pointed to James as he smiled to her.

“Well, since you asked, we’re going to take a little dip in the lake in a few minutes and you, my lilyflower are walked to join us.” He cooed as she laughed not giving him a reply before Sirius ruined their moment.

“And Y/N, you know if you’re feeling like it, feel free to join as well. You know, throw on a bikini, have some fun.” You scoffed at Sirius’ obviously fake flirting. You knew he saw you as a sister and you saw him as a brother, and you never understood why he insisted on these pointless attempts. For Sirius it was easy. He loved to see Moony so worked up every time Sirius made you blush with his words.

“Thanks for the offer Black, but I think I’ll pass.” You whispered as Sirius shrugged.

“Worth a shot.

“Was it mate?” James played along as they all stood up, heading up to their dorms before coming back down a few minutes later with their swim trunks. You couldn’t help watching Remus out of the corner of your eye as he left, looking back at you as you pretended that you weren’t looking. You tried to focus on the work in front of you but your mind kept drifting back to Remus whispering and soon you broke your quill in anger.

“You know what? I’m gonna talk to him.” You declare standing up before Lily grabbed your wrist.

“Are you sure you want to do that Y/N?” She questions making sure you were ok as you nodded your head, heading out the door in the same steps the boy had taken before. You found yourself looking at the lake in no time, staring a head as you finish off the final stretch. They stood in the water, deep enough for the water to float by their waists before Peter saw you, waving as the others turned around to you. The first thing you noticed was how it got quiet when they turned around, meaning they were whispering once again and you huffed in annoyance. The second thing you noticed was how James, Sirius, and Peter all slowly stepped back from Remus and your eyes met. No one said anything so you took it upon yourself.

“Can we talk?” Your voice was quiet but strong, showing that you were going to get your way no matter what. Remus held his breath, having just promised his friends that the next time you two talked he would tell you he liked you, but he was not ready for it right now.

“Could we uh- could we uh talk l-later? It’s kind of hot out and I don’t really want to get out of the water.” He lied hoping you would buy it as your jaw dropped practically to the ground. He thought he succeeded until you started to remove your shoes and socks. “What are you doing?”

“If you don’t want to get out of the water, then I’m coming in.” And with that you slowly began walking in, regretting it instantly as the water caused your legs to freeze but you pushed through it. You were almost there before the ground beneath you seemed to work against you and you slipped, going completely under. Remus was quick to grab you, hoisting you back onto your feet as you met his concerned eyes. But you ignored them, needing to get your words out before he made it hard. “Rem, you’re supposed to be my best friend and- and- and I feel like you’re keeping secrets from me! I feel like I’m going mad!”

He shook his head, grabbing one of your hands in his as your other game up to push the fallen hairs out of your face. “Love, trust me you’re not going mad. You’re right, I have kept a secret from you because I wasn’t sure how you were going to react to it.”

“Rem, you know you can tell me anything.”

Remus looked at you, fully taking in your appearance right now as you both stood waist deep in the lake. Your hair was slicked back from the wetness, the sun shining against the droplets of water falling from your hairline, down your face and onto your neck. Your E/C eyes opened wide, gloss coated it so nicely that they glimmered against your skin. Your shirt was soaked, pressed up to you as you shivered slightly. Remus knew in this moment he didn’t just fancy you.

“I’m in love with you.”

You weren’t sure if your eyes could’ve gotten wider, but if they could you were convinced they did. “W-What?” You stammered out before Remus’ hands were on your cheeks, lips hitting yours before you could’ve even breathe. You weren’t sure when you did but soon you were kissing back. Your fingers trailed softly over his sides, meeting his shirtless figure as the kiss deepened. Your hold tightened as his hand moved to the back of your neck and you had to pull away to breathe. He released a shaky breath as you both stared at each other, unsure of what to do.

“I’m in love with you.” He repeated this time whispering before you leaned up to meet his slow movements. You never expected that to be his secret, but you really weren’t complaining as you never wanted this to stop.

“Rem.” You mumbled as you pulled away. He got confused fast, concerned he’d done something wrong or you didn’t want this. You reached up to push his hair back, your fingers lingering on the nape of his neck. “If it wasn’t obvious, I’m in love with you too.”

His smile nearly tripled as he leaned down again for another kiss. The cheers of the boys sounded around you as they all splashed you with water, causing you to pull apart and laugh. Remus quickly enveloped you in his arms as you wrapped yours around him and he tried to protect you from the water being tossed onto you two. The warmness radiating off of his body soothed you as you leant up to peck him on the cheek. You pushed him into the water, but at the last second he grabbed your hand pulling you with him. Lily had came down to join you all a little while later and that’s basically how you spent the rest of your day, playing in the water with your best friends and the love of your life.

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[louistomlinsoncouk]

He became a bona-fide teen pop superstar as part of One Direction, then suffered unthinkable personal loss. Louis Tomlinson talks to Guy Kelly about fame, family and what comes next.

Louis Tomlinson took part in an online video recently, in which he was tasked with answering the internet’s most-searched questions about him. It was fairly tame, as you might expect of a pop quiz thrown at a pop star. ‘How do you pronounce Louis Tomlinson?’ the first read. There’s an interesting answer to that, actually, but we’ll come to it. ‘How old is Louis Tomlinson?’ was the second. He’s 28. And then came the third. ‘How is Louis Tomlinson?’

In the video, the man himself looks a little bewildered, dismissing the query as ‘random’ before moving on. But underneath, in the YouTube comments – one of the few nooks of the internet where love and goodwill still thrives – a fan repeated it. ‘“How is Louis Tomlinson,”’ they wrote, ‘the only question that matters.’ More than 7,000 people ‘liked’ it.

Given all Tomlinson’s been through in the past four years, it seems reasonable to ask. In 2016, the band he’d been in man and boy, One Direction, went on an indefinite hiatus after six years. Since being welded together by Simon Cowell on The X Factor in 2010, ‘1D’ had enjoyed perhaps the most stratospheric rise in music (five platinum albums, four world tours) since The Beatles. It hadn’t been Tomlinson’s decision to break up the band, and he wasn’t – still isn’t – particularly happy about it.

In December of that year, his beloved mother, Johannah Deakin, died a few months after being diagnosed with leukaemia. She was 43. Tomlinson pressed on with his nascent solo career, but unimaginable tragedy struck again. In March 2019, his 18-year-old half-sister, Félicité, was found unconscious at her flat in London and couldn’t be revived. An inquest later found she had died of an accidental drug overdose. Again, he buckled down, looked after his remaining siblings, and committed himself to finishing his debut album.

Settling down with Tomlinson in the corner of a west London photo studio, then, it seems as good a place as any to start: how is he?

‘I’m good, mate, I’m feeling good,’ he says, spreading his arms across a sofa. After wearing a series of high-end outfits for our photo shoot (‘I never feel super-comfortable on shoots; I’ve got one f—king pose – moody’), he’s in a black ’90s-inspired collared jumper, black trousers and black trainers.

He pushes his fringe to one side. The Doncaster accent, which softened in his 1D days, is back to pure, unfettered South Yorks. It’s all ‘in t’band’, ‘I didn’t know owt’, and swearing like a navvy. He’s honest, funny, and if his feet were planted any more firmly on the ground he’d be unable to walk.

I tell him about the YouTube comment, which seems to reflect the genuine care his fans have for him.

‘Ah, yeah I know, they’re considerate, they are. We’ve got a special, interesting bond. They’ve grown up with me – and I’ve been through some personal stuff and they’ve always been there for me.’

Tomlinson’s album, Walls, has been a long time coming. Immediately after One Direction split, he released a couple of singles – dance-y pop collaborations – which were fine, but not what he wanted to make. Halfway through writing Walls he realised, ‘If I’m chasing radio with every song I write, I’m not going to be doing this job for very long.’

So he relaxed, and the result is a mix of strong, melody-driven pop of the kind One Direction mastered, and what Tomlinson is really into, namely guitar-driven indie and Britpop. Some songs for the fans; some nodding to the future.

‘It’s a five-album plan. There’s bits where I’ve been almost selfish, and bits where I’ve been respectful to the fan base and what they love listening to,’ he says. ‘Then the next will be a step closer to the stuff I want to make. But I’ve got to earn my stripes.’

The dominant theme, I say, appears to be resilience. On the single Don’t Let It Break Your Heart, he advises, ‘Even when it hurts like hell / Oh, whatever tears you apart / Don’t let it break your heart.’ On the rousing title track (which features a writing credit for Noel Gallagher, who gave his blessing for a chorus strikingly similar to an Oasis tune), he sings, ‘These high walls that broke my soul / I watched all come falling down.’

It could be to do with grief, professional struggles, or his relationship. He nods.

‘Yeah, I write very autobiographically and had so much going on in my head, but in the struggle I’m trying to paint the message that you’re always left with a choice: to see the glass half-full or half-empty. It’s showing there’s hope.’

Some songwriters have found grief productive, others paralysing. Tomlinson was the former. One track on Walls is the previously released Two of Us, a beautiful, simple song written about his mum (‘You’ll never know how much I miss you / The day that they took you, I wish it was me instead’).

‘What’s amazing about this job is that regardless of the situation, you get something positive at the end of it. That’s obviously an emotionally heavy song for me, but fans have come up to me in floods of tears and talked about how it’s helped in their own tragedy. It’s incredible. From the dark, you can give hope.’

For the first three years of his life, Tomlinson was raised alone by Johannah, who split from his father, Troy Austin, when he was a baby. They lived above a launderette in Doncaster, where his mother worked multiple jobs, principally as a midwife, before she married Mark Tomlinson, a van salesman who became Louis’s stepfather. The three moved into a two-up, two-down, which was soon filled with half-sisters: Lottie, now 21, Félicité, then twins Daisy and Phoebe, now 16.

‘It was mad. They’re manic, young girls…’ he says. ‘Mum and Mark had a decent income but they couldn’t spread it around [a family of] seven. At times things were really good, you’d get 20 quid in a birthday card, but others were really difficult. I remember the electricity meter – you’d get five quid on the house as an emergency when you couldn’t top it up. Sometimes it’d be a gamble when it’d run out…’

Tomlinson wasn’t particularly academic – ‘though I’m not daft or owt’ – but loved school. There, he joined a band at 16 and found he was OK at singing, so he applied to audition for The X Factor. He failed, twice, but succeeded on the third try, in 2010, performing a fairly terrible (he admits it) version of Plain White T’s Hey There Delilah.

A few months later, at the ‘bootcamp’ stage, Cowell had the idea of creating a band comprised of Tomlinson and four other solo boys: Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Liam Payne. They were to be called One Direction. Tomlinson, who’d been intimidated by the standard of other vocalists in the competition, ‘bit their hand off’ at the offer. ‘I was like, “This is my ticket.”’

The show came just after his second run at the first year of his A levels. He’d failed the first time, with UUE in psychology, PE and English, which his mum had ‘absolutely ripped [his] head off’ for. The second time he’d gone one better, UEE. So he lied, telling her he got a smattering of Ds, and came up with a plan.

‘I waited until after the X Factor final, when we were all sat around drinking champagne, and told her, “By the way, I bulls—tted you on those results. I failed again, but hopefully we’ll be all right now…”’ he laughs. ‘She was fine. I picked my moment well.’

One Direction came third in the final, losing to runner-up Rebecca Ferguson and winner Matt Cardle, a former painter-decorator who now performs in the West End. But it was always felt that the group would go furthest, not least because Cowell was such a supporter (all the other boys have now left his record label, Syco, but because ‘loyalty is the biggest thing’ for Tomlinson, he’s stayed).

Eighteen when the group started, Tomlinson was the oldest member (the others were 16 and 17), ‘just allowed to drink, just allowed to drive’, but suddenly everything in his life was controlled.

‘You’re ready to be reckless and stupid, but then I was in the band and couldn’t ever act like that, especially not publicly,’ he says. They went on their first headline concert tour in 2011, and soon had fans surrounding their hotels overnight, wherever in the world they went. Naturally, they embraced partying.

‘There was a good 18 months where I was going out all the time. The press love to write about that as if it’s this chaotic thing, and at times it was, but it’s also an escape. Once you have a couple of drinks down you in a club, you’re just someone in the club, part of everyone else, and not everyone is looking at you.’

Even when he was away, he kept in contact with his mum by phone – or in person, when she could join him – as much as possible. The two were impossibly close: she had access to his emails; he told her when he lost his virginity; she knew about his finances.

‘One thing I’ve learnt since losing her is that any decision, even if I knew the answer, I’d call her,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise how reliant I’d become on her. That was the hardest thing for me, understanding that living life after meant making decisions on my own. I thought I’d always have a sounding board. There was a different level of credibility with my mum, because I idolised her.’

Styles has recently joked that One Direction were ‘grown in test tubes’ by Cowell, but Tomlinson insists that part of their appeal lay in the fact that they all had their own personalities and talents, which weren’t forced on them. Still, it took him years to know where he fitted. Styles was cool, a heart-throb. Malik was moody and mysterious. Horan was cute and Irish. Payne was whatever Payne was. But Tomlinson wasn’t sure.

‘You’ve got to be dead cocky in Doncaster to survive – it’s either that or be picked on. So I used to walk around with a chip on my shoulder. But I’d always been the funny guy, centre of attention, so I never struggled to make mates,’ he says. ‘It was weird suddenly being in a situation where one or two members are constantly in a better position. It took me a while to understand my strengths. I was the oldest and it wasn’t until the third album when I made it my mission to write the most.’

He succeeded: Tomlinson’s writing credit appears on 39 of the 96 songs One Direction recorded, four more than Payne and dozens more than the rest. But it was intense. There were times when he considered quitting the band, if only to allow him to escape the attention, but he likens that to children running away from home. ‘By the time you get halfway down the street you regret it and go back…’

‘Directioners’ were ‘fanatical’ about the boys, to a frequently absurd degree. And not every encounter was surreally funny. The year after the hiatus began, in 2017, Tomlinson and Calder were involved in a scuffle with paparazzi and fans at the airport in LA. Fists possibly flew, and Tomlinson was arrested, only for no further action to be taken. The fans now are still loyal, still ardent, but they’ve matured with him.

What kept him grounded, as the money rolled in (I have heard that each of the boys amassed a £40 million fortune from the band, and that collectively they still earn around £38,000 a week from royalties, merchandise and so on) and the fans bayed, was keeping friends from Doncaster around. When I arrived at today’s photo shoot, Tomlinson was busy doing his singular pose at one end of the room, while at the other, near the free pastries, a young redheaded bloke in a tracksuit lurked, scrolling through his phone.

He introduced himself as Oli, Tomlinson’s ‘mate from Donny’, who has spent the better part of a decade travelling the world with his pop-star friend, and seems to operate as a walking comfort blanket. They live together when Tomlinson’s in LA.

They also live together when he’s in London. I imagine there’s space for house guests wherever he is, though: it has been reported that he put his Hollywood Hills mansion on the market last year for $6.995 million, and the previous year valued another property in California at $13.999 million, after apparently renting it out for $40,000 per month.

‘I’m hoping to do a bit of work with Louis’s tour manager this year,’ Oli says, cheerfully. I later discover he’s so ever-present with Tomlinson that he even has his own fan accounts on social media.

‘I remember bringing a mate out for our first US tour. He called from his hotel with his mind blown by being able to pick up a phone and they’d just bring you food,’ Tomlinson says. ‘I go back to Donny and hear heavy s—t – struggles with jobs, money, family, health. That humbles me, and gives me a better emotional intelligence.’

He reckons ‘eight out of 10 people have an ulterior motive’ when they meet him. Luckily he can tell if someone’s a pre-fame friend. His name is pronounced ‘Loo-ee’, but he wasn’t keen on it as a child, so had mates, like Oli, pronounce it ‘Lewis’, which they still do. Unfortunately Cowell guessed at ‘Loo-ee’ on The X Factor, so that was that for the stage name.

By 2015, some members of One Direction felt an itch to break off – or just have a break – and try their own thing. Malik had gone in March, and while a full split seemed inevitable, Tomlinson was still caught off-guard.

‘I was f—king fuming at first. We were working really hard – people [namely, Payne] have said overworked, but we weren’t overworked, that’s just what happens when you’re a band that size, though I understand. I thought I’d mentally prepared myself for a break, but it hit me hard.’

He was finally feeling comfortable in the band, and hadn’t thought about a solo career.

‘About a week after, I sat there thinking, “Strike while the iron’s hot,” but I wasn’t ready. I was bitter and angry, I didn’t know why we couldn’t just carry on. But now, even though I don’t fully understand everyone’s individual reasons, I respect them.’

They’re ostensibly all still mates, despite going in radically different musical directions, though some are closer than others. Tomlinson seems to mention Horan with most affection, and the pair performed at the same event in Mexico in November, titillating 1D fans by sound-checking together with one of the band’s old songs.

If it was up to you, I ask, would the group still be going? He considers this for a moment.

‘It if was up to me, yeah. I’d maybe have said, “Let’s have a year off.” But yeah, probably. I’m sure there’s a better analogy out there but it’s a bit like [shutting down] Coca-Cola. You don’t say, “Right, let’s hang the boots up on that,” because it’s a massive thing.’

Afterwards he muddled around for a bit, including releasing those early singles – one of which he performed on The X Factor, rigid with grief, just days after his mum’s death. Then he returned to the show last year as a judge, alongside Cowell, Robbie Williams and Williams’s wife, Ayda Field.

Did he get on with Robbie? He smiles, arching an eyebrow. ‘Why do you ask?’ Well, he came out of a boy band, went solo…

‘Oh, yeah, he was all right. He’s a good man, we were just different from each other. Certain moments I thought, “F—king hell, Robbie, just sit down for five minutes, I’ve got something to say.” I love his missus though, Ayda, she’s sound.’

Tomlinson liked mentoring, and during our conversation it becomes clear he’s fuelled by responsibility. He was the oldest sibling in his house, and although Mark Tomlinson and Johannah’s second husband (after divorcing Mark in 2011, she married Dan Deakin in 2014; they had twins Ernest and Doris) are still around, he became a paternal figure after she died. He’s particularly involved in the lives of Daisy and Phoebe, to whom he’s ‘a kind of second parent’.

‘Without being too soppy, I like looking after people, it’s cool. At the moment I’m stressing trying to convince Daisy and Phoebe to go to sixth form. They’ve been to private school near Donny, and it’s proper expensive. I’m paying for it thinking they’re staying on, but now they don’t want to go. I told them education is important. I’m like, “You’re 16, you haven’t got a f—king idea what the real world is,”’ he says.

‘What’s difficult about those two is they’ve only known the 1D craziness. They’ve grown up in this elitist way, which is very different from my upbringing and Lottie’s, and the values my mum taught us.’

He gives a ‘kids, eh?’ sigh. ‘Consistency is the big thing. I’m trying to get better at being in their heads enough so they think, “I wonder if Louis thinks this is a good idea?”’

Lottie lives in Hackney, east London. When she was a teenager, Tomlinson got her a job assisting One Direction’s make-up artist, and within a few years she’d become a ridiculously popular Instagrammer (currently with 3.4 million followers, still 10 million shy of Louis). Her big brother told her Instagram’s fine, but she must ‘become a proper businesswoman’ in case the bubble bursts. In 2018 she launched Tanologist, a successful fake-tan brand.

‘I’m so proud of her. She’s just been in Australia, where she’s stocked in Melbourne’s version of Boots!’ Tomlinson says, beaming.

Félicité, known to the family as Fizz, was also a budding Instagrammer. After her death last March, a post-mortem revealed ‘toxic’ levels of anti-anxiety and pain medications, as well as cocaine, in her blood. Six months later, an inquest heard that she had visited her GP in August 2018 and ‘gave a history of recreational drug use… on a consistent basis since the death of her mother’. She had taken overdoses and been admitted to a rehabilitation clinic.

Tomlinson hesitates to say anything was ‘easier’, comparing the deaths of Félicité and his mum, as ‘both felt very individual, and hit me with a big impact… but I think dealing with the family, how I can be there for them, that was a lot easier the second time because the first time I was grieving and didn’t know what to say. As time went on I grew to understand what to say to my sisters.’

Prioritising the feelings of your sisters in the immediate aftermath is understandable, I say, but I wonder if anyone took care of you. He looks surprised.

‘No, but friends and family, my best mate… I feel their support but I get most out of doing stuff for other people. I don’t say that to sound like a good guy, it’s genuinely what gives me strength.’

Did you ever consider grief therapy?

‘Nah, a lot of people recommended it but I’m a little bit old-fashioned when it comes to therapy. I’m sure it’s incredible, but I thought I’d be all right, and I have been till now.’ One of his many tattoos consists of the words ‘It Is What It Is’ across his chest. ‘I know the things I’ve been upset about in my life are s—t, but I can’t change them, so you have to make the best of what you’ve got.’

Tomlinson gives his own big smile. Our time’s nearly up, and he’d like a cigarette. After all you’ve been through, I tell him, people would have understood if you’d called it a day. You could have lived off royalties, enjoyed a quiet life.

‘Definitely, definitely. But do you know what? It didn’t cross my mind once. I somehow have an inability to worry, and just get on with things,’ he says, shrugging. ‘It’s definitely made me stronger. I’ve gone through every emotion, and I’m just f—king excited now.’

I think we have an answer. How is Louis Tomlinson? Hopefully, he’ll be just fine.

Walls is released on 31 January

[elceeu2morrow]

By Guy Kelly 17 JANUARY 2020 • 8:00PM

He became a bona-fide teen pop superstar as part of One Direction, then suffered unthinkable personal loss. Louis Tomlinson talks to Guy Kelly about fame, family and what comes next.

Louis Tomlinson took part in an online video recently, in which he was tasked with answering the internet’s most-searched questions about him. It was fairly tame, as you might expect of a pop quiz thrown at a pop star. ‘How do you pronounce Louis Tomlinson?’ the first read. There’s an interesting answer to that, actually, but we’ll come to it. ‘How old is Louis Tomlinson?’ was the second. He’s 28. And then came the third. ‘How is Louis Tomlinson?’

In the video, the man himself looks a little bewildered, dismissing the query as ‘random’ before moving on. But underneath, in the YouTube comments – one of the few nooks of the internet where love and goodwill still thrives – a fan repeated it. ‘“How is Louis Tomlinson,”’ they wrote, ‘the only question that matters.’ More than 7,000 people ‘liked’ it.

Given all Tomlinson’s been through in the past four years, it seems reasonable to ask. In 2016, the band he’d been in man and boy, One Direction, went on an indefinite hiatus after six years. Since being welded together by Simon Cowell on The X Factor in 2010, ‘1D’ had enjoyed perhaps the most stratospheric rise in music (five platinum albums, four world tours) since The Beatles. It hadn’t been Tomlinson’s decision to break up the band, and he wasn’t – still isn’t – particularly happy about it.

[complete article below the cut]

In December of that year, his beloved mother, Johannah Deakin, died a few months after being diagnosed with leukaemia. She was 43. Tomlinson pressed on with his nascent solo career, but unimaginable tragedy struck again. In March 2019, his 18-year-old half-sister, Félicité, was found unconscious at her flat in London and couldn’t be revived. An inquest later found she had died of an accidental drug overdose. Again, he buckled down, looked after his remaining siblings, and committed himself to finishing his debut album.

Settling down with Tomlinson in the corner of a west London photo studio, then, it seems as good a place as any to start: how is he?

‘I’m good, mate, I’m feeling good,’ he says, spreading his arms across a sofa. After wearing a series of high-end outfits for our photo shoot (‘I never feel super-comfortable on shoots; I’ve got one f—king pose – moody’), he’s in a black ’90s-inspired collared jumper, black trousers and black trainers.

He pushes his fringe to one side. The Doncaster accent, which softened in his 1D days, is back to pure, unfettered South Yorks. It’s all ‘in t’band’, ‘I didn’t know owt’, and swearing like a navvy. He’s honest, funny, and if his feet were planted any more firmly on the ground he’d be unable to walk.

I tell him about the YouTube comment, which seems to reflect the genuine care his fans have for him.

‘Ah, yeah I know, they’re considerate, they are. We’ve got a special, interesting bond. They’ve grown up with me – and I’ve been through some personal stuff and they’ve always been there for me.’

Tomlinson’s album, Walls, has been a long time coming. Immediately after One Direction split, he released a couple of singles – dance-y pop collaborations – which were fine, but not what he wanted to make. Halfway through writing Walls he realised, ‘If I’m chasing radio with every song I write, I’m not going to be doing this job for very long.’

So he relaxed, and the result is a mix of strong, melody-driven pop of the kind One Direction mastered, and what Tomlinson is really into, namely guitar-driven indie and Britpop. Some songs for the fans; some nodding to the future.

‘It’s a five-album plan. There’s bits where I’ve been almost selfish, and bits where I’ve been respectful to the fan base and what they love listening to,’ he says. ‘Then the next will be a step closer to the stuff I want to make. But I’ve got to earn my stripes.’

The dominant theme, I say, appears to be resilience. On the single Don’t Let It Break Your Heart, he advises, ‘Even when it hurts like hell / Oh, whatever tears you apart / Don’t let it break your heart.’ On the rousing title track (which features a writing credit for Noel Gallagher, who gave his blessing for a chorus strikingly similar to an Oasis tune), he sings, ‘These high walls that broke my soul / I watched all come falling down.’

It could be to do with grief, professional struggles, or his relationship – he’s happily with his girlfriend, 27-year-old fashion blogger Eleanor Calder, but they’ve been on and off over the years. He nods.

‘Yeah, I write very autobiographically and had so much going on in my head, but in the struggle I’m trying to paint the message that you’re always left with a choice: to see the glass half-full or half-empty. It’s showing there’s hope.’

Some songwriters have found grief productive, others paralysing. Tomlinson was the former. One track on Walls is the previously released Two of Us, a beautiful, simple song written about his mum (‘You’ll never know how much I miss you / The day that they took you, I wish it was me instead’).

‘What’s amazing about this job is that regardless of the situation, you get something positive at the end of it. That’s obviously an emotionally heavy song for me, but fans have come up to me in floods of tears and talked about how it’s helped in their own tragedy. It’s incredible. From the dark, you can give hope.’

For the first three years of his life, Tomlinson was raised alone by Johannah, who split from his father, Troy Austin, when he was a baby. They lived above a launderette in Doncaster, where his mother worked multiple jobs, principally as a midwife, before she married Mark Tomlinson, a van salesman who became Louis’s stepfather. The three moved into a two-up, two-down, which was soon filled with half-sisters: Lottie, now 21, Félicité, then twins Daisy and Phoebe, now 16.

‘It was mad. They’re manic, young girls…’ he says. ‘Mum and Mark had a decent income but they couldn’t spread it around [a family of] seven. At times things were really good, you’d get 20 quid in a birthday card, but others were really difficult. I remember the electricity meter – you’d get five quid on the house as an emergency when you couldn’t top it up. Sometimes it’d be a gamble when it’d run out…’

Tomlinson wasn’t particularly academic – ‘though I’m not daft or owt’ – but loved school. There, he joined a band at 16 and found he was OK at singing, so he applied to audition for The X Factor. He failed, twice, but succeeded on the third try, in 2010, performing a fairly terrible (he admits it) version of Plain White T’s Hey There Delilah.

A few months later, at the ‘bootcamp’ stage, Cowell had the idea of creating a band comprised of Tomlinson and four other solo boys: Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Liam Payne. They were to be called One Direction. Tomlinson, who’d been intimidated by the standard of other vocalists in the competition, ‘bit their hand off’ at the offer. ‘I was like, “This is my ticket.”’

The show came just after his second run at the first year of his A levels. He’d failed the first time, with UUE in psychology, PE and English, which his mum had ‘absolutely ripped [his] head off’ for. The second time he’d gone one better, UEE. So he lied, telling her he got a smattering of Ds, and came up with a plan.

‘I waited until after the X Factor final, when we were all sat around drinking champagne, and told her, “By the way, I bulls—tted you on those results. I failed again, but hopefully we’ll be all right now…”’ he laughs. ‘She was fine. I picked my moment well.’

One Direction came third in the final, losing to runner-up Rebecca Ferguson and winner Matt Cardle, a former painter-decorator who now performs in the West End. But it was always felt that the group would go furthest, not least because Cowell was such a supporter (all the other boys have now left his record label, Syco, but because ‘loyalty is the biggest thing’ for Tomlinson, he’s stayed).

Eighteen when the group started, Tomlinson was the oldest member (the others were 16 and 17), ‘just allowed to drink, just allowed to drive’, but suddenly everything in his life was controlled.

‘You’re ready to be reckless and stupid, but then I was in the band and couldn’t ever act like that, especially not publicly,’ he says. They went on their first headline concert tour in 2011, and soon had fans surrounding their hotels overnight, wherever in the world they went. Naturally, they embraced partying.

‘There was a good 18 months where I was going out all the time. The press love to write about that as if it’s this chaotic thing, and at times it was, but it’s also an escape. Once you have a couple of drinks down you in a club, you’re just someone in the club, part of everyone else, and not everyone is looking at you.’

Even when he was away, he kept in contact with his mum by phone – or in person, when she could join him – as much as possible. The two were impossibly close: she had access to his emails; he told her when he lost his virginity; she knew about his finances.

‘One thing I’ve learnt since losing her is that any decision, even if I knew the answer, I’d call her,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realise how reliant I’d become on her. That was the hardest thing for me, understanding that living life after meant making decisions on my own. I thought I’d always have a sounding board. There was a different level of credibility with my mum, because I idolised her.’

Styles has recently joked that One Direction were ‘grown in test tubes’ by Cowell, but Tomlinson insists that part of their appeal lay in the fact that they all had their own personalities and talents, which weren’t forced on them. Still, it took him years to know where he fitted. Styles was cool, a heart-throb. Malik was moody and mysterious. Horan was cute and Irish. Payne was whatever Payne was. But Tomlinson wasn’t sure.

‘You’ve got to be dead cocky in Doncaster to survive – it’s either that or be picked on. So I used to walk around with a chip on my shoulder. But I’d always been the funny guy, centre of attention, so I never struggled to make mates,’ he says. ‘It was weird suddenly being in a situation where one or two members are constantly in a better position. It took me a while to understand my strengths. I was the oldest and it wasn’t until the third album when I made it my mission to write the most.’

He succeeded: Tomlinson’s writing credit appears on 39 of the 96 songs One Direction recorded, four more than Payne and dozens more than the rest. But it was intense. There were times when he considered quitting the band, if only to allow him to escape the attention, but he likens that to children running away from home. ‘By the time you get halfway down the street you regret it and go back…’

‘Directioners’ were ‘fanatical’ about the boys, to a frequently absurd degree. And not every encounter was surreally funny. The year after the hiatus began, in 2017, Tomlinson and Calder were involved in a scuffle with paparazzi and fans at the airport in LA. Fists possibly flew, and Tomlinson was arrested, only for no further action to be taken. The fans now are still loyal, still ardent, but they’ve matured with him.

What kept him grounded, as the money rolled in (I have heard that each of the boys amassed a £40 million fortune from the band, and that collectively they still earn around £38,000 a week from royalties, merchandise and so on) and the fans bayed, was keeping friends from Doncaster around. When I arrived at today’s photo shoot, Tomlinson was busy doing his singular pose at one end of the room, while at the other, near the free pastries, a young redheaded bloke in a tracksuit lurked, scrolling through his phone.

He introduced himself as Oli, Tomlinson’s ‘mate from Donny’, who has spent the better part of a decade travelling the world with his pop-star friend, and seems to operate as a walking comfort blanket. They live together when Tomlinson’s in LA, where he has a three-year-old son, Freddie, from a short relationship with stylist Briana Jungwirth.

They also live together when he’s in London, along with Calder, to whom it was recently reported that Tomlinson is engaged (his representatives denied the rumour). I imagine there’s space for house guests wherever he is, though: it has been reported that he put his Hollywood Hills mansion on the market last year for $6.995 million, and the previous year valued another property in California at $13.999 million, after apparently renting it out for $40,000 per month.

‘I’m hoping to do a bit of work with Louis’s tour manager this year,’ Oli says, cheerfully. I later discover he’s so ever-present with Tomlinson that he even has his own fan accounts on social media.

‘I remember bringing a mate out for our first US tour. He called from his hotel with his mind blown by being able to pick up a phone and they’d just bring you food,’ Tomlinson says. ‘I go back to Donny and hear heavy s—t – struggles with jobs, money, family, health. That humbles me, and gives me a better emotional intelligence.’

He reckons ‘eight out of 10 people have an ulterior motive’ when they meet him. Luckily he can tell if someone’s a pre-fame friend. His name is pronounced ‘Loo-ee’, but he wasn’t keen on it as a child, so had mates, like Oli, pronounce it ‘Lewis’, which they still do. Unfortunately Cowell guessed at ‘Loo-ee’ on The X Factor, so that was that for the stage name.

By 2015, some members of One Direction felt an itch to break off – or just have a break – and try their own thing. Malik had gone in March, and while a full split seemed inevitable, Tomlinson was still caught off-guard.

‘I was f—king fuming at first. We were working really hard – people [namely, Payne] have said overworked, but we weren’t overworked, that’s just what happens when you’re a band that size, though I understand. I thought I’d mentally prepared myself for a break, but it hit me hard.’

He was finally feeling comfortable in the band, and hadn’t thought about a solo career.

‘About a week after, I sat there thinking, “Strike while the iron’s hot,” but I wasn’t ready. I was bitter and angry, I didn’t know why we couldn’t just carry on. But now, even though I don’t fully understand everyone’s individual reasons, I respect them.’

They’re ostensibly all still mates, despite going in radically different musical directions, though some are closer than others. Tomlinson seems to mention Horan with most affection, and the pair performed at the same event in Mexico in November, titillating 1D fans by sound-checking together with one of the band’s old songs.

If it was up to you, I ask, would the group still be going? He considers this for a moment.

‘It if was up to me, yeah. I’d maybe have said, “Let’s have a year off.” But yeah, probably. I’m sure there’s a better analogy out there but it’s a bit like [shutting down] Coca-Cola. You don’t say, “Right, let’s hang the boots up on that,” because it’s a massive thing.’

Afterwards he muddled around for a bit, including releasing those early singles – one of which he performed on The X Factor, rigid with grief, just days after his mum’s death. Then he returned to the show last year as a judge, alongside Cowell, Robbie Williams and Williams’s wife, Ayda Field.

Did he get on with Robbie? He smiles, arching an eyebrow. ‘Why do you ask?’ Well, he came out of a boy band, went solo…

‘Oh, yeah, he was all right. He’s a good man, we were just different from each other. Certain moments I thought, “F—king hell, Robbie, just sit down for five minutes, I’ve got something to say.” I love his missus though, Ayda, she’s sound.’

Tomlinson liked mentoring, and during our conversation it becomes clear he’s fuelled by responsibility. He was the oldest sibling in his house, and although Mark Tomlinson and Johannah’s second husband (after divorcing Mark in 2011, she married Dan Deakin in 2014; they had twins Ernest and Doris) are still around, he became a paternal figure after she died. He’s particularly involved in the lives of Daisy and Phoebe, to whom he’s ‘a kind of second parent’.

‘Without being too soppy, I like looking after people, it’s cool. At the moment I’m stressing trying to convince Daisy and Phoebe to go to sixth form. They’ve been to private school near Donny, and it’s proper expensive. I’m paying for it thinking they’re staying on, but now they don’t want to go. I told them education is important. I’m like, “You’re 16, you haven’t got a f—king idea what the real world is,”’ he says.

‘What’s difficult about those two is they’ve only known the 1D craziness. They’ve grown up in this elitist way, which is very different from my upbringing and Lottie’s, and the values my mum taught us.’

He gives a ‘kids, eh?’ sigh. ‘Consistency is the big thing. I’m trying to get better at being in their heads enough so they think, “I wonder if Louis thinks this is a good idea?”’

Lottie lives in Hackney, east London. When she was a teenager, Tomlinson got her a job assisting One Direction’s make-up artist, and within a few years she’d become a ridiculously popular Instagrammer (currently with 3.4 million followers, still 10 million shy of Louis). Her big brother told her Instagram’s fine, but she must ‘become a proper businesswoman’ in case the bubble bursts. In 2018 she launched Tanologist, a successful fake-tan brand.

‘I’m so proud of her. She’s just been in Australia, where she’s stocked in Melbourne’s version of Boots!’ Tomlinson says, beaming.

Félicité, known to the family as Fizz, was also a budding Instagrammer. After her death last March, a post-mortem revealed ‘toxic’ levels of anti-anxiety and pain medications, as well as cocaine, in her blood. Six months later, an inquest heard that she had visited her GP in August 2018 and ‘gave a history of recreational drug use… on a consistent basis since the death of her mother’. She had taken overdoses and been admitted to a rehabilitation clinic.

Tomlinson hesitates to say anything was ‘easier’, comparing the deaths of Félicité and his mum, as ‘both felt very individual, and hit me with a big impact… but I think dealing with the family, how I can be there for them, that was a lot easier the second time because the first time I was grieving and didn’t know what to say. As time went on I grew to understand what to say to my sisters.’

Prioritising the feelings of your sisters in the immediate aftermath is understandable, I say, but I wonder if anyone took care of you. He looks surprised.

‘No, but friends and family, my best mate, my girlfriend, my son… I feel their support but I get most out of doing stuff for other people. I don’t say that to sound like a good guy, it’s genuinely what gives me strength.’

Did you ever consider grief therapy?

‘Nah, a lot of people recommended it but I’m a little bit old-fashioned when it comes to therapy. I’m sure it’s incredible, but I thought I’d be all right, and I have been till now.’ One of his many tattoos consists of the words ‘It Is What It Is’ across his chest. ‘I know the things I’ve been upset about in my life are s—t, but I can’t change them, so you have to make the best of what you’ve got.’

What he’s got is an album to launch, a world tour to prep for and, immediately, a flight to catch. He and Oli are off to see Freddie. ‘When I’m working I definitely don’t see him enough,’ Tomlinson says, ‘but he looks just like me, which is cool. I’m excited to see his big smile.’

Tomlinson gives his own big smile. Our time’s nearly up, and he’d like a cigarette. After all you’ve been through, I tell him, people would have understood if you’d called it a day. You could have lived off royalties, enjoyed a quiet life with Calder, Freddie, your sisters.

‘Definitely, definitely. But do you know what? It didn’t cross my mind once. I somehow have an inability to worry, and just get on with things,’ he says, shrugging. ‘It’s definitely made me stronger. I’ve gone through every emotion, and I’m just f—king excited now.’

I think we have an answer. How is Louis Tomlinson? Hopefully, he’ll be just fine.

Walls is released on 31 January

[mcwriting]

starstruck (2)

Heyyyyyy so I stuck to my word lol.

I’m basically unable to function after seeing far from home this evening but also it was so good. I teared up when tom did and my mom made fun of me but its okay because his acting was awesome! Highly recommend y’all see it (even tho ik you probably will if you haven’t already lol)

Ps this is my first time linking one post to another so please lmk if it doesn’t work, but if it’s not, you’ll always be able to access this through my starstruck tag!

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

Fandom: Tommo Holland

Ship: Tom Holland x Reader eventually

Setting: LA

Word Count: 1386 (lol it’s shorter this time srry)

Warnings: i actually don’t think there’s any here, but lmk if there should be

Rating: K+ still

Background: part 2 of my DCOM inspired fic

B/f/n: your best friend’s name

                             __________________________________

Previously on starstruck...

The faint remains of his cologne wafted to your nose and you couldn’t help but breathe it in. You relaxed further into his grip and stayed comfortable until you heard a buzz on the table next to you.

You decided to ignore it until it happened two more times. Finally, you decided to wiggle out of Tom’s grip and succeeded without waking him. You picked up the cell and noticed it was 10 a.m. and all three texts were from b/f/n

Hey I’m coming over

I’ll bring ice cream since you said you weren’t doing too hot yesterday 

I’m on my way

“No. No, no, nonoNO,” you exclaimed, getting louder and louder, causing Tom to sleepily ask,

“Could you keep it down, darling?” 

“No, I can’t ‘keep it down,’ Thomas, because b/f/n is ON HER WAY HERE!”

“What!?” 

He sat up fully awake.

“We have to get you out of here without her seeing, and she’s probably gonna be here in like 5 minutes.”

Tom rushed to get up and find his keys that were in the pocket of his discarded jacket while you hurried to brush your hair and take a makeup wipe to your face.

You clambered down the stairs and hurried Tom through the kitchen and into the laundry room when you heard the doorbell ring, and when you didn’t answer in apt time, it began ringing like crazy.

Panic stuck your chest and you looked at Tom.

“Open the garage and leave in 5 minutes, then text me so I can close it.” You commanded, beginning to walk towards the entryway.

“Wait, wait,” he grabbed your arm, “I don’t have your number!”

You scrawled it down on a sticky note and ran, hoping he would get out safely and quickly. You opened the door to find b/f/n holding two pints of ice cream, raspberry sorbet for you and coffee ice cream for herself.

“My gosh what took you so long? I about started searching for the spare key with all these goods melting.”

You were about to reply when the door between the garage and utility room shut loudly. 

“Uh, who was that?” she asked, knowing your parents were at work.

“Oh, uh, a friend from dance. We’re working on a piece together and we decided to talk about it last night since I hurt my head,” you lied.

B/f/n furrowed her brows for a second before letting it go and coming inside to set up your typical movie day in the living room. Meanwhile, you headed back to the kitchen to grab spoons and check your phone, where a new number had sent a message. 

I’m out so you’re good to close the door. Thanks again for the great night ;)

You smiled and sent back 

That makes it sound soooo much worse than what really happened haha. You made it out without suspicion too :)

You decided to put his number in as a contact, disguising him as “Clara Twinkletoes” after a joke made late into the previous night, then headed to the living room.

                             __________________________________

After finishing one movie and your separate ice creams, you both decided to take a break and were looking at your phones.

“Hey, I know you hate talking about Tom Holland,” you gave a side-eyed glance to the bringing up of his name, “but guess what? He liked my picture last night! I just remembered to tell you!” 

B/f/n held up her phone to show you the notification, then went back to staring at it excitedly. 

“That’s actually really cool. I’m happy for you,” you expressed, leaving out the fact that you had asked Tom to like it when you were talking about the post at 1 a.m.

A few minutes later, b/f/n breathed out a soft “woah.”

You looked at her in confusion.

“Y/n, look at this girl Tom was photographed with yesterday, she looks like your twin!”

Dread filled your stomach as you stared at the picture of you and Tom in his black Audi A8, that stupid ballet skirt wrapping your head.

“Yeah, maybe if I took ride alongs with celebrities and wore nineteen fifties headscarves,” you quipped, “you only think that girl looks like me because you want it to be me, b/f/n.”

“Hmm, I guess…” she trailed, taking back her phone to continue scrolling through Instagram.

Not long after, you got a text from Clara twinkletoes.

Have you seen the picture??? I’m getting tagged and you are too

Like… everyone thinks that girl is you

Psh as if. We can talk about it later, I’m busy with my gal pal

Fine. Also, I was wondering if you wanted to go with me to the beach tomorrow? I wanna talk about all this in person

Hmm. Maybe. Probably not ;) 

“Hey, b/f/n?” You asked tentatively.

“Yeah?”

“Is it cool if you don’t spend the night tonight? I need to go to dance early tomorrow since I took the day off and I’ve also got this head injury so…” 

it wasn’t a complete lie. You did have a head injury and your plan was to go to dance at some point, but you decided to leave out the part where you might actually go hang out with hot shot Holland.

“Oh, uh yeah, sure. My sister is coming into town this week so it’s probably for the best, you know how my mom is about cleaning the house and stuff,” she said, obviously trying to hide her disappointment.

Around 4 pm, she got up to leave. You had watched two more movies and eaten plenty more snacks throughout the afternoon. 

“I guess I’ll see you later, y/n. Hope you’re feeling better tomorrow,” she smiled. 

You returned the gesture and gave her a hug, then watched from the doorstep as she mounted her bike and rode off to her house only a few neighborhoods away, you feeling queasy about lying so much.

                            __________________________________

You headed upstairs after a light dinner and some TV. It was only about 8 o’clock, but the combination of a head injury, late night, and slight emotional distress (from lying to b/f/n) made you feel exhausted, not to mention you would be waking early the next day. 

You changed into sweats and flopped into bed, checking your social media for a little bit to wind down. 

Your snapchat was just pictures from friends, only a couple of them joking to you about the whole Tom Holland situation (but of course none of them knew the truth)

Twitter and Instagram, however, were a different story. After the premiere, you had chosen to turn off notifications and were especially happy to know it was the right choice. 

On Twitter, fan accounts and other people were replying to a joking tweet you had made days before the premiere in reply to b/f/n where you said “Why be friends with that tom holland guy when you could hang out with your superior best friend hmmmm?? He’s lame compared to me lolol” 

People were going nuts about it, divided over whether you were just messing around or if you really didn’t like him. Most of them chose the former, though you knew you had meant the latter. Other people were tweeting about you separately and debating about that picture from the day before.

You almost deleted your Twitter in a rash decision but realized how suspicious that could look and instead closed it and moved to instagram.

It too was overflowing with tags and comments and follows and likes. Your stomach churned as you realized how big this was becoming. Finally you made the choice to meet Tom tomorrow, even if it risked being caught again. You sent him a single text to let it be known:

Alright twinkletoes. Let’s go to the beach.

You figured you could reply to whatever he sent in the morning and put your phone on do not disturb before plugging it in and checking the alarm.

You snuggled into the sheets and buried your head into a pillow. A sweet and musky scent drifted into your nose and you took a deep breath. 

Tom’s cologne

You sat up, sniffing around the sheets, pillows, and covers, realizing he had left his scent everywhere. 

“I need to wash these sheets tomorrow” you breathed to yourself in an annoyed tone. 

With that you laid back down, glad that b/f/n wasn’t there to ask whose scent was all over your bed. Though you tried to convince yourself that you wanted the smell gone, had anyone been watching, they couldn’t deny the way you sunk into the bed and the faint smile that made its way to your lips as you drifted into slumber.

                            __________________________________

A/N: there’s chapter 2!! Hope you guys enjoy. I don’t think I’ll post 3 until this weekend but who even knows haha. Love y’all and am so happy to have your support!

Tag List: @marvel-lously

[wingsoffireaus]

MorrowMind AU

Yup this is a weird one that hit me out of the blue. The plot bunny bit much harder than expected and quite frankly I would love to see more random pairings like this in the fandom.

And honestly, I love these guys. Sure they’re terrible but at the same time, I can’t help liking them. Mastermind even has a fanfiction or two that added some nuance to the character that I’ve decided to take inspiration from. Plus when you take a step back and look at it they’re doing terrible, and I mean TERRIBLE things for the ‘right’ reasons. To save their tribe from extinction. Is it okay? Nope. But hey. If I can like Darkstalker than I am allowed to like these guys too.

So be aware that this AU will be delving into these characters and trying to add a more sympathetic side to the story. As well as making them slightly softer than in canon. I do try and always keep a basis for characters in AU’s but these two did need to be toned down a little bit to be fair they were a little one dimensional in canon. I mean they were written well! But all we got was a very one-sided view. A valid one-sided view but one-sided nonetheless. Not to say there wasn’t something else but I definitely took liberties. I also added other AU elements that I wanted to explore. Thanks, everyone and please enjoy my craziness.

Morrowseer and Mastermind end up spending more time together after Queen Battlewinner’s encounter with the Icewing.

At first, Morrowseer is more than a little annoyed with the scientist and only interacts with him whenever necessary.

Which increases as time goes on.

Morrowseer is surprised when he slowly finds himself not minding Masterminds company and eventually even begins to seek it out. Sharing his food with him and showing interest in some of his studies besides the cure for Battlewinner.

Mastermind is surprised and delighted that someone else besides his good friend Farsight is showing interest in his work.

Eventually, both dragons admit to themselves that they have feelings for one another.

Morrowseer is the one who makes the first move but being Morrowseer his request for a date is more of a demand than anything else. Luckily for him, Mastermind surprisingly recognizes it for what it is and tells him that ‘scientifically’ his request would be better received if he put more of a romantic flair into it.

Morrowseer growls and leaves and for a moment Mastermind is worried that he had scared him off but Morrowseer comes back with a new scroll he had picked up on one of his journeys on the mainland that he had thought Mastermind would be interested in. Before asking again. This time much softer.

Mastermind melts and agrees.

It’s a strange courtship. Romance amongst the Nightwings has pretty much become nonexistent the only concern is to always have enough dragonets to keep the tribe going.

Battlewinner has little care over the strange coupling as long as it doesn’t affect their future plans.

A couple of years go by and the Dragonet Prophecy is written and delivered.

Morrowseer and Mastermind decide that they would like a dragonet of their own to raise.

Mastermind immediately knows who he wants to ask to be a surrogate. His dear old friend Farsight. Farsight agrees but insists that it has to be Mastermind who sires the egg. She and Morrowseer don’t exactly see eye to eye.

Morrowseer agrees but only because Farsight already had a dragonet, Feirceteeth, who already seemed strong even though she had only hatched a month before. And to him, he doesn’t mind who actually sires or lays the egg as long as they’re the ones who raise the hatchling.

They try but one is only conceived after a year. This means that their future dragonet is in the running for being the ‘wings of the night’ for the prophecy which more than concerns Morrowseer but Mastermind points out that they’re not the only ones who had an egg at the time. And the likelihood of it being theirs that is chosen is slim. Not as slim as they’d like but slim nonetheless.

A year goes by and sadly it is indeed their egg that will hatch on the brightest night.

Both of them are heartbroken but they still do as their queen demands.

However, after they take the egg to the talons of peace (Mastermind demanded to come.) they both decide to stay at the very least for the hatching.

Neither is impressed by the guardians and both become more and more concerned for their son or daughter.

Morrowseer is furious when he discovers a Rainwing egg in place of a Skywing egg and is half tempted to smash her egg right then and there.

But with his own egg clutched nearby by Mastermind he finds that he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead of glaring angrily at the egg but leaving it alone.

When it’s time for the eggs to hatch Mastermind expresses his desire for their egg to hatch under the light of the moons. And old scroll he had found mentioned an old tradition of bringing Nightwing eggs to hatch beneath the moons. Which simply wasn’t possible on their island with the seemingly eternal cloud cover.

He is more than a little delighted to find what would become the study cave where all three moons are shining through a hole in the ceiling.

Mastermind is fascinated when the Mudwing hatches first and immediately goes to help the others hatch and he has to slam his foot down on Kestrels tail when she goes to intervene.

He explains what the dragonet is doing and states that though he had read about it he had never been able to study it in practice.

He then pointedly asks how the guardians planned on raising the dragonets if they didn’t have even a basic understanding of the different tribes.

He stops speaking when he notices something strange with his egg. It had turned silver. He’s too focused on his own egg to notice that the Sandwings egg had also lightened in shade.

A black dragonet breaks through the shell of his egg and squints into the moonlight. His new bigwings is quick to greet his new sib helping him to finish breaking the eggshell and grooming his scales free of the fluid he was bathed in. Then turning to the other eggs that were hatching.

The newly hatched dragonet peers around curiously. Unbeknownst to all of the older dragons he is searching their minds. Then he focuses on the only other two black dragons in the cave. Those were his parents.

Morrowseer practically melts when his son's eyes focus on his for the first time.

The dragonet toddles over to the two older Nightwings and is quickly scooped up by Mastermind who quickly looks him over to make sure that he is healthy.

Besides the two strange teardrop scales next to the corner of each eye he looks more or less like a regular hatching. If a bit small.

Morrowseer stands awkwardly yet proudly next to his mate and son.

The dragonet holds out his talons towards his other father and Mastermind passes him over with little hesitation.

For the first time, the guardians begin to realize what the relationship between the two and decide that it would be best to remain silent while the rest of the eggs hatch. The little bigwing proudly helping each one.

When they are all finally hatched the spell over the three Nightwings is broken and they watch on as the guardians begin to name each one.

Clay, Tsunami, Glory and Sunny. The last one was decided with a slight almost guilty shuffle of Dune’s talons.

Almost as one the guardians all turn to the Nightwings.

Mastermind and Morrowseer smile down at their dragonet who chirps cutely up at them.

Starflight. His name was Starflight.

As the years go by the two Nightwings continue to visit their son.

This helps with the neglect from the guardians but only by so much.

Mastermind isn’t able to visit as much as Morrowseer but he always makes an effort and is the one who is willing to teach all of the dragonets about their tribes. Except for Glory at this point, the Nightwings know very little about the Rainwings since they hadn’t really begun preparing for that assault yet.

Starflight and Sunny know from an early age that the prophecy isn’t real. But they also know that there is a reason for it and one that Starflight’s parents believe in wholeheartedly.

Morrowseer and Mastermind slowly become more and more fond of all the dragonets and begin to feel guilty in using them for the Nightwing plot but they know that the fate of the tribe lies with them succeeding.

A year or so before the events of canon and before the Nightwings begin capturing the Rainwings Starflight has a vision of his father, Mastermind, experimenting on Rainwings without any remorse.

The next time he sees his father he begs him not to do it. That it would lead to his destruction.

Mastermind is understandably freaked out and talks with Morrowseer and together they confront their son about it.

Starflight is hesitant to explain his abilities but eventually caves when he realizes the future would be all the better for it. He is very careful to keep Sunny’s own abilities out of it of course.

They are obviously in shock and in awe of their son’s abilities.

Mastermind theorizes about it possibly caused by being born away from the volcano or if it was possibly even the moonlight.

Starflight says he thinks that actually is what it was. His first memory drinking in the moon's powers as his own.

While they are in awe of their son they are also fearful and both of them decide that no matter what Queen Battlewinner or any other Nightwing could be allowed to know about his abilities.

They are afraid to ask about the prophecy but Starflight beats him to the punch. Admitting that he had known about it for years now. But he didn’t fully understand what the purpose of it was.

Morrowseer reluctantly explains about the volcano and Starflight catches helpful glimpses of it in their minds.

He is also horrified and quite possibly traumatized by it all.

Now he feels conflicted. He knows what his tribe is going through is awful but what they had planned to do to the Rainwings was also awful.

For the next little while, he remains conflicted and can’t bring himself to tell the rest of his friends what he had learned. Except for Sunny of course. Who is also traumatized by what he had seen in their heads?

But Sunny tells him that they have to come clean to the other dragonets about the Nightwings plans.

The others are understandably upset by this, they had known about the prophecy being fake but they had all believed that the Nightwings had had nobler intentions with the lie. Perhaps believing it would set events in motion for an end to the war?

But instead, it was all a plot to take over new land.

This is upsetting because the dragonets themselves all like Morrowseer and Mastermind since whenever they were around they were treated MUCH better by the guardians.

Starflight himself is conflicted. And as time goes by he always wonders what he should do. Help his parents and tribe? Or the family he had found in his friends.

On the flip side. Starflights vision of captured Rainwings has come true and Mastermind is confronted by the sight of a Nightwing with his face half-melted and a terrified Rainwing queen.

He has his orders and when he shows hesitation Queen Battlewinner is sure to remind him what is at stake and that she had been kindly allowing them to help raise Starflight and continue their affair. As long as they didn’t allow their attachments to make them grow weak.

So Mastermind experiments. He is much kinder here though. Treating the Rainwings as well as he possibly can under the circumstances and making sure that fruit is collected for the Rainwings. Not ideal. And it would be admittedly easier if he focused only on experiments but he keeps seeing Glory in their faces and Starflights horrified face when he begged him not to hurt the Rainwings.

So he does the best he can. And can only hope that it’s enough for his tribe and the makeshift family he has made with Morrowseer.

He can’t wait for the day that it’s all over.

And that’s it for now. Again, I know I have a very unpopular opinion when it comes to these two. And people are totally valid in not liking them. But what can I say? I find them very interesting and there’s a lot of potential for them. I see them as villains of circumstance instead of villains to the core. But to be honest we don’t know nearly enough about them to really make judgments on how they got to the way they are.

Honestly, the only reason this AU exists is me Jokingly saying “I ship it” when we first saw their interactions with one another. I knew that if the fandom was bigger and had a larger fanfiction crowd their absolutely would be joking fanfiction for these two.

But then I wanted Starflight to exist and it blew WAAAY  out of proportion. Like this thing is still going, I mean I straight up wrote the scene where the dragonets hatched and I plan on posting it sooner or later after some editing and polishing. These old guys have become a serious guilty pleasure for me and I hope at least a couple of you will find it at least funny enough to give it a chance because honestly, I’m not going to stop. I’m going to keep working on it and have fun with the concept because that’s kind of the point of this blog. Haha

And YES I totally just inserted prophet and seer Starflight (and Sunny. ) You’re welcome. Convoluted? Maybe. Do I care? No. Not really.  Yes, I am a troll.

II did mention this before but  I am going to take a bit of time off and work on some things on the side. I’m going to try and get a bulk of AU’s done so if I have conflicting schedules I can still get them posted. And I also want to just try my hand at writing again. So hopefully you guys can be patient with me while I’m working on this.

Stay awesome guys!

~Tri

[hayjeon]

Cut Me Open (ft. Yoongi) Part 01 [M]

→ marriedcouple!au, surgeon!au spin-off from CardioPalps → 15k words, rated for sex, possible triggers (talk of divorce/miscarriage/family issues), and medical jargon that took me 5ever to research 

→ part 1 | part 2 coming soon

A/N: So the second part is definitely on its way. It just ended up being way too long together to make it a full fic. But please, don’t think that this is how it ends! Stay tuned for the second part! 

Love. 

Neuroscience and Biology like to tell us that it’s a side-effect of a release of a hormone called Dopamine and oxytocin, the same two hormones released when the guy living under the bridge snorts up another line of coke, and when the horribly suffering and screaming woman holds the human she just pushed out of her vagina for the first time in her arms. 

Doctors like to ignore it, ignore the religious and hippie suggestions that “love can conquer anything,” because we, like many other medical professions, believe in science. 

We don’t believe those superstitions that if a man is diagnosed with a tumor but learns to love his life and fights for it, he is magically healed of his fatal diagnosis. No, we smile and nod at the patient and his family, congratulate him, and then turn around and walk away because we know that it was the chemo therapy and the gamma rays we shined into his thoracic cavity that destroyed all the stomach cancer cells along with his hair follicles. But what the patients don’t know won’t kill them. 

But, aside from love, a reason why the medical field has the third highest divorce rates in the world, is because we doctors are professional line-drawers. 

We draw lines for a living. Not the plastic surgeon, sharpie-a-line-over-your-boob kind of line, but a physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental line. Theres always the line, the one that lies between a living patient and a dead patient. There’s always the line that you mustn’t cross with the people on your surgical table, the difference between a bleeding aorta nicked by the slip of the hand weilding the scalpel and a healthy one. There’s the lines you must draw with your co-workers, the ones who you don’t dare call your friends because then everyone would know that you too don’t have friends outside the workplace. 

And then, there’s the line you draw with those who you love. Whether or not they’re sitting on your table, brain flap open for you to probe, you must draw lines. You can’t operate on someone who’s close or related to you. You can’t offer to waive fees for someone who you once respected back in high school. You can’t be in relationships with your patients, friendly or sexual. 

And you definitely shouldn’t be married to your partner, and co-leader of your department, who currently despises your guts as much as you hate performing rectal exams this far into your career. 

You wished you knew that when you agreed to this job five years ago. 

You park your car and briskly speed walk into the doors of the hospital at 7am sharp. 

Immediately, four people run up to you: Suho, your trusty secretary and friend; Gina, your head nurse; Namjoon, your clumsiest but most hardworking intern; and Jungkook, your most annoying friend, also the head of the Cardio department. 

Suho talks first. “Good morning Doctor. I just updated the board on your surgeries today, and told Chief about the updates you gave me last night on the patient with pneumonia. I also prepared your paperwork for you to sign off of regarding the updates and purchases for the neurosurgery department. I’ll come by later to pick those up.” 

You give him a nod and lower your voice as you step up into the elevator, signaling the others to take the next one that dings open as soon as your doors close. “Any updates on Yoongi’s side?” 

Suho blinks and sighs. “He...he’s hired a lawyer to take care of it. Her name is Ahn Hani, she’s supposedly one of the best in the country.” 

You groan, slumping against the railing. “Is she better than mine? Than Solji?” 

Suho nods grimly. “Unfortunately, when I looked up the statistics, Solji had suceeded in 244 cases. Hani, well, succeeded in 245. Also...I found that she’s also one of the lawyers who helped Dr. Min with his...lawsuit a year ago.” 

You roll your eyes as the elevator dings and opens. “Ah, of course, he had to involve that again. Okay, well, thank you. Please also send me some more information about the merger with the East wing nurses, I want to look more into that before the next head meeting.” 

Suho nods and walks away. Jeongguk beats Gina by jogging up to you. “Hey Y/N! Did you see what I sent you last night?” 

You roll your eyes, walking down the hall towards your office. “Yes, Jungkook, it was stupid. I’m not going to attend any event as Yoongi’s plus one, much less your baby shower. Wouldn’t you want your first baby shower to be one of peace? I don’t think you want me and Yoongi there.” 

He groans. “Please, can you guys just please put your differences aside and just come? She would really like for you to be there, I mean, you were her first resident overseer after all, she’d really be happy to see you there.” 

You huff, “As much as I love your wife, I’m saying this because I love her. She doesn’t want me there, unless you plan on uninviting Yoongi. AND--” You hold up a finger to him, when he tries interrupting you. “I know you won’t budge because Yoongi was your resident when you were an intern here, blah blah blah. So, I’ll be the bigger one here, and send you and your beautiful wife a wonderful gift basket of all the highest quality baby products there is, and spare you two from having to witness one of our fights again.” 

He sighs, and lets you walk by, as Gina scurries up to you and receives your instructions on the surgery you two were going to perform in an hour. Namjoon just hovers around and waits as he listens in on all the medical jargon. You ask him to scrub into the upcoming surgery, and he happily obliges, dropping his pens on his way out your office door. 

Jungkook hovers a bit more, looking a bit disappointed in you, but you shake your head to let him know that you have no intentions of making it to his baby shower, and close the door behind you. “I’m sorry Jungkook,” you sigh, and he nods, giving you your space. 

This was your day, work starts as soon as you walk in, a buttload of problems concerning your department, your surgeries, your subferiors, and the worst one of all, your husband. 

You sigh and change into your coat before making your way down to the meeting room, and taking your seat in the plush leather seating across from all the other men in the hospital helping run their respective department. Jungkook, filling in for both himself and his wife on maternity leave, sits a couple seats down from you, representing the cardiovascular department. Jimin is seated across the mahogany table, staring down at his notes for his upcoming surgery for his Pediatrics devision. Taehyung and his fellow are seated in the corner, discussing their Neonatal surgery division. Jin is playing some stupid game, sitting behind his “Head of Dermatology and Plastic Surgery” plaque, and the owner of the hospital, Dr. Bang waits impatiently as the rest of the department heads file in one by one. 

Suho has faithfully placed your favorite tea, chamomile, on its place and organized your meeting notes in alphabetical order right in front of you. As you flip through the contracts and articles, you bend over to get a closer look when suddenly someone slaps down a thick packet of papers over the ones you were reading. 

Frowning, you look up to see your mortal enemy. 

“What the hell?” You hiss, keeping your voice low. A quick glance at the papers he slapped in front of you was an alimony agreement. You flip through and realize that he was asking for a clean cut, no separation of property, or money. 

He takes a sip of his coffee, not sparing you a glance. “Sign it, and give it to Suho by the end of the week. You make the same amount of money that I do, you’ll be fine.” 

You roll your eyes. “Yeah right, I see what you’re doing. The house is under your name. I want the house.” 

He scoffs, facing you with a glare. “Seriously? I paid the down payment.” 

“We had a joint account! I paid the rent!” You hiss, ready to fight some more about this. 

“Alright, ladies and gentlemen, shall we start this meeting?” Dr. Bang interrupts, clearing his throat. He takes a quick glance around the room to make sure of full attendance before he begins to drone about the updates regarding hospital politics. 

You and Yoongi decide to pocket the conversation, and you shuffle your papers around, placing the alimony agreement underneath your other documents. 

“I’ve scheduled this meeting because we’ve run into a few issues regarding communication within the East Surgery ward,” Chief Bang continues, frowning at the lot of you, “I’ve heard...that there were a couple of issues regarding our efficiency and the cycling of surgeries, am I correct? Dr. Park, do you mind sharing a bit?” 

Jimin’s head pops up, and he looks around bewildered. “Uh, no sir, my department is doing fine. We’ve updated our system to the new program you introduced a month ago, instead of using our beepers, and although it took some time to get used to it, I think everyone is adjusting accordingly.” 

“Dr. Kim Taehyung, you too?” 

Taehyung gives a quick nod, and so do a few more doctors. 

“Mr. and Mrs. Min?” 

You cringe at the combination of your names. Most of the other people in the hospital besides your close friends didn’t really know, but Dr. Bang certainly was aware of the state your marriage was in. He wasn’t so...supportive of the divorce, obviously. 

“We’re fine,” you clench your teeth, signaling for Dr. Bang to move on, and he obliges. Your shoulders deflate and Yoongi leans over to hiss at you, “What the hell, he knows?” 

You roll your eyes at him. “Of course he knows, he knows everything.” 

Yoongi slumps in his seat, throwing his hands up subtly. “Well there you go again, not even letting me know.” 

Ignoring him, you sit through the rest of the presentation regarding new communications, and the chief introduces a new program and a team of IT workers who’ll be handling the new system. They file in through the door, introducing themselves, and then place individual laptops in front of each of you to demonstrate the program. It was a new alert system, voice activated so that with a simple command and without having to touch your phones, all the doctors could send messages to each other, departments, schedule Operation Rooms, and call nurses. Everyone nods thoughtfully as the head of the program, Jaehyun, steps up to the podium and finishes his powerpoint. You watch thoughtfully at the new program. 

A tap on your shoulder distracts you and you turn to see Suho leaning over to whisper in your ear, “Chief Bang wants to meet with you in his office.” 

“Now?” You frown, and Suho nods, gesturing towards the door. Sighing, you stand and watch as Yoongi doesn’t even give you a side-long glance as he fixates boredly on the presentation. You walk over to the lavish glass office. 

“Chief, you wanted to see me?” You ask, lingering by the doorway. 

“Ah, y/n,” he says, smiling, “Take a seat.” You oblige, getting comfortable on the leather chairs across from him on his desk. 

“Y/n...” he trails off, thoughtfully frowning at his desk, “You and Yoongi...you...have you guys...?” The question lingers in the air and you understand what he wants to ask. 

“Ah...uh, well, today Yoongi gave me alimony papers.” You shrug, twiddling your thumbs. “He wants a clean split.” 

The chief nods thoughtfully. “Are you going to sign?” 

You sigh, rubbing your temples. “I don’t know Chief, I really don’t know.” 

He leans back in his chair. “You know...y/n, it’s been what, 10 years since you’ve been working at this hospital? I met you fresh out of med school as a wide-eyed intern and watched you two fall in love and I even officiated your wedding two years after that. And I trust you two...” He trails off, and you let him finish. 

“It’s time for me to retire, y/n.” He says, and your eyes widen as you lean up. “What? A-are you serious?” You stammer, frowning at him. 

The Chief was a general surgeon, who specialized in Cardiothoracic surgery, and worked his way 20 years up to this position as the Chief of Surgery. You’d watched him age during your own stay here, and he was one of the reasons why you didn’t just up and leave to the other hospitals offering you and Yoongi a hefty salary to transfer. This hospital...it was your home. 

“Yes,” he sighs, rubbing his eyes. “I’m having issues with my vision these days and my wife, she’s...she’s getting a bit lonely, now that the children are off and married, and she’s demanding more of my time. She wants a divorce, you see, and if I don’t take time off now, then I might lose my marriage.” 

“Oh, Chief, I’m so sorry.” You offer, but he waves it off. “No, no, it’s not something to be sorry about. It was my fault...this hospital and surgery wing, I built it with my blood and sweat, and in the meantime I forgot what was really important.” 

He leans forward in his chair, grasping one of your hands. “Which is why I don’t condone this decision, y/n. I’ve watched you two, and you’re still in the stage where you can save this marriage. Me...well I’m 20 years too late. You and Yoongi though, I can still see it. I want to try to convince you just one more time.” 

You sigh. “Chief, what do you want us to do? We...we tried so much. We purposely began taking one more day off per week to make up for the lost time, and even that fell through because we’re always being called in to work. We tried to get pregnant, and we were so overworked and stressed out that it was just putting even more strain on the marriage. Hell, we even took up surgeries together, and that ended up in a disaster when we accidentally mis-diagnosed our patient.” 

You lean back, apologetically removing your hand from his. “I’m sorry Chief, but we were in love almost 10 years ago, when we were in our twenties and fresh out of med school and ready to take on the world. Now...we’ve been working ourselves to the bone for 8 years and leading this division together for 3 within those 8. We’ve...we’ve tried enough.” 

He sighs. “Well, the reason I brought you in here was I was hoping you’d offer to try. I want you two to take my position as Chief of Surgery.” 

Your eyes widen again, and your mouth falls open. “Ch-chief of Surgery? Are you serious? N-no Chief, you can’t retire like that and just leave us here.” 

“Well, I can’t make both of you Chief if you guys are going to get divorced. It’s not professional.” He raises his brows at you and you nod. 

“You two have been here the longest out of all of the department heads, and there isn’t one more person I trust more than you guys to be able to continue what I’ve done here at this hospital. I’ve made my decision to leave, and now I want you to promise me that you will try one more time.” 

“Try? Try what?” You whisper, already knowing the answer. 

“I want you and Yoongi to try and save your marriage, just one more time. Please don’t give up just yet.” He urges, and your heart sinks, as you spin the ring on your fourth finger. 

Was it even possible?

Your romance with Yoongi started out 10 years ago when you walked into Seoul National Hospital, wide-eyed and excited to start your first day as an intern. A group of you had stumbled in with fast-paced hearts and flushed cheeks as you giggled and waited for your resident to come in and give you assignments.

Your locker was placed right next to Yoongi’s locker B6 and B7. You’d greeted him politely when he walked in with a sleepy face, and he’d given you a half-hearted smile and no words as he shuffled over to his locker and began shimmying on his scrubs. Surprised at the cold response, you frowned and slammed your locker shut as you lingered by the doorway instead. 

“Alright, interns, scum-of-the-hospital-earth and from now on labeled 1 through 17, let’s get a move on,” Dr. Do Kyungsoo had snapped as soon as he walked in. 

“You’re from now one named 1, 2, 3...” He goes around snapping and pointing at each intern with a menacing pen tip. You become number 8 and Yoongi happens to be number 12. 

“Alright,” he says, frowning at his clipboard. “There are three rules you must follow before I assign you to your individual residents. One, you move when I move.” He leaves the on-call room, and everyone lingers behind, glancing at each other and wondering what the hell happened. 

His head pops back in, as he yells, “That means now!” Everyone jumps to action and lockers slam shut and scrub elastics are tied tight as everyone jogs out the door to match Dr. Do’s long strides. 

“Two,” he snaps, leading you all to a room with sad-looking bunk beds and cots. “Sleep when you can, where you can. This on-call room is your responsibility and the hospital won’t be taking care of it too often, so make sure you are fully clean as you can be with it. Don’t” he hisses, turning back and pointing his menacing pen at all of you, “Don’t even try to do the nasty in here. I’ll have you arrested for federal public indecency and then I’ll personally neuter both of you.” 

Everyone stares at him in horror, as he drops the menacing look again for a neutral one, and continues on. “Let’s go.” 

“Three,” he says, walking around a corner to a group of doctors waiting near the Nurse desk and turning with them towards the 17 of you, “don’t try to kiss up.” He glares at one particular girl who’d been trailing after his heels and asking him stupid question. “We already hate you and consider you the scum of the hospital, and no ass-kissing will change that. Save a life first, and you’ll slowly work your way up from scum to a sort of algae.” 

You’re lingering at the back of the group as one girl leans over and cringes at you. “I hear he’s called triple D, for Dr. Demon Do, because he’s tiny but is an absolute horror to work with.” 

You shudder as he begins reading off the assignments, listening carefully for your name. Each resident that’s standing by him at the desk, who you remember as Dr. Byun Baekhyun, Dr. Kim Jongdae, and Dr. Park Chanyeol, stands there with their coffee cups and smiling a lot more nicely that Dr. Do was acting earlier. 

Unfortunately, as Dr. Do rattles off your numbers at random, you don’t hear him call 8. All other three residents walk off with their interns trailing after them, and you, number 12, 9, and number 3 are left terrified as Dr. Do turns to the rest of you. 

He sighs, observing your wide eyes. “I’m sure most of you have heard that I’m called the 3D or the triple D here, because I terrorize everyone. It’s true,” he acknowledges casually, to your horror. “But, after I’m finished with all of you, you will be the best interns this hospital has ever seen. So just make sure to keep up. First assignment, we’re gonna go save a life in the ER.” 

He walks off with a flourish, and the four of you just warily eye each other as you all pick up into a jog towards the ER. 

“Number 8, go grab me some sutures for Patient Mr. Jeong in bed 4, now!” Kyungsoo yells, and you immediately spring into action, grabbing a tray, a needle, gauze, and surgical thread and wheel a chair over to the cot. 

A patient there is lying down with a grimace as a huge gash on his leg is being cleaned by a nurse. “I can take it from here,” you assure her, and she gives you a sweet smile as she hands the gauze and alcohol pad to you. That was when you first met Gina, your current and trusty surgical nurse. You loved her to bits. 

Sitting down, you scoot up and begin cleaning the wound. “Alright Mr. Jeong, I’m gonna be cleaning and dressing your wound today, alright? Later, a nurse will come by with some antibiotics that you need to take orally. You said you got caught on a nail at your work?” 

The patient nods painfully, croaking, “Yeah, I was trying to run over to get an order on time, and snagged my leg on this huge ragged nail that was sticking out of one of the walls. It was my damn fault. I’m such a klutz.” 

You smile, and after administering some anesthesia to the area, begin to pinch the skin together and begin suturing. You’d practiced so much at home with some sausages and pig skin, that doing this was normal practice for you. 

“Are you an intern here?” He asks, trying not to think about his wound. 

You nod, smiling. “It’s actually my first day.” 

He grins, “Ever see anything like this?” 

“Yes,” you laugh, “cuts and bruises are a common thing in the ER. You’re in good hands.” 

Cringing, he murmurs, “I feel a little nauseous. Is that normal?”

You finish the stitch, cutting it and starting a new one. “Yes sir, the anesthesia is probably flowing through your system, and you’re probably a little dehydrated as well. We’ll start an IV drip once I’m finished.” 

He nods, his eyes closed and frowning painfully. “I-Is it a little hot in here?” 

“Hey,” one of your fellow interns walks up and hovers over your shoulder. It was the guy you first said hi to. “Uh, did you take a look at his charts yet? Dr. Do asked me to give these to you.” 

“My hands are a bit preoccupied right now,” you say as you focus on cutting the thread. “If you’re not busy, can you read them out for me?” 

He grumbles, “I am.” But opens the file anyway and begins scanning the contents. “Mr. Jeong SaeHyun-ssi, 56 year male, came in for a cut on the upper thigh, and received stitches. What’s taking you so long?” 

You roll your eyes. “Can you just read the charts?” 

He gives you a dirty look and keeps reading. “Uh...wait...WBC count is off the roof,” he mumbles, glancing at your patient. 

“Oh shit, y/n!” He stops you as your patient immediately goes rigid and begins choking, his breaths rugged and loud as his back bows off the table. Yoongi drops the papers and immediately runs over to the other side and holds down the man as he spasms. “Fuck, it’s the tetanus!” 

You also drop your needle and tray and rush to the man’s side to hold his arm down. “What?! No! He already had an antibiotic shot and is scheduled for another dose!” 

Yoongi grunts as the man begins flailing his limbs, shaking the cot side to side, “Well, seems like that shot was a little too late!” 

“Nurse?! Please, help me hold him down!” You yell, and let go of his arm and exchange it with the nurse who anchors him to the bed, while you reach down and feel his abdomen. It’s rock hard, not from the muscles, but from the shock. “Oh my god, he was talking about nausea and fever. He’s having a seizure! Code Blue! Someone page Dr. Do right now!” 

One of the nurses who’s come by to help, frantically helps keeps the man’s legs down. “Dr. Do just scrubbed in for a surgery. We can’t reach him!” 

You panic, “Oh my god, if Mr. Jeong doesn’t get the attention he needs his airways will freeze and he’ll die of oxygen starvation.”

“Y/N! Focus!” Yoongi yells, as the monitor begins beeping like crazy, “It’s started, you’ve got to perform a tracheostomy on him or he’ll die!” The nurse reads out, “His BP is dropping by the second, Doctor.” 

“H-holy sh-shit,” you run a hand through your hair, biting your lip, “I’ve only read about it in textbooks, it’s a m-major surgical procedure and we haven’t gotten a chance to t-train, or to w-watch, I can’t--I don’t know--” 

“Y/N! You can do this! The only one in this ER who can do it right is you. Hurry!” He orders the nurse, “Bring a tracheostomy kit! Pump 100mg Phenobarbital and 2 milligrams Lorazepham.” 

“The Lorazepham isn’t working, and the Pheno isn’t working fast enough. We have to do the tracheostomy first, Doctor, or he’ll die of oxygen starvation.” Gina tells you, frantically trying to stop her muscle spasms. 

“Here,” a nurse runs up with the kit, and hands it to you. Your hands shake with it, and you stare up at Yoongi, who’s now manually pumping air into the man’s mouth, gives you a nod. 

“You want to make an incision vertically, about two fingers long, one inch above the collarbone,” He instructs, staring at you with a steely look. 

You nod, and lean in, measuring about two fingers up from the man’s neck base, and press in, cringing when immediately blood begins to flow out. Nurses rush to press gauze against the blood and Gina swoops in to cauterize the bleeding veins. 

“Alright, good, cut through the fatty tissue and the muscle wall, and then you’ll see a white-ish cartilage-like material, that’s the---” 

“Thyroid,” you cut him off, nodding as you keep cutting. “Got it.” The nurses clamp the tissue to the side. 

Yoongi nods, maintaining his pumping. “Good, now all you gotta do is make a smaller incision, no more than a couple of centimeters to allow the tube in, laterally. Avoid the trachial bones.” 

You nod, making the incision cleanly, and immediately you’re met with a whoosh of air. You scramble to grab the tube and place the outer cannula through the hole, and then seal it with the round cuff to secure it in place. And immediately, the patient draws in a huge breath of air, and the beeping begins to slow. 

“BP is stabilizing.” The nurse reads, patting you on your back. “You did it, Doctor.” 

You collapse onto the chair, breathing heavily, as the nurses surround the patient, closing up the wound and delivering the patient’s final doses of medication. 

Yoongi hands off the plastic bag valve to a nurse, and steps around the cot to stand in front of you. You’re staring off somewhere into space, and he just watches you calmly. “Are you--” 

“What the hell is going on here?!” Doctor Do storms into the ER, dressed in scrubs and removing his surgical cap. He glances over Yoongi’s shoulder to see the patient lying on the cot with a tube sticking out of his neck. “What the fuck?” he observes the procedure, and glares back at the both of you. 

“He was having seizures, and his airways were muscle-locked because of the Tetanus. We had no other choice, Dr. Do.” Yoongi says, and you just stare up at the both of them in a haze. 

“Why didn’t anyone check his charts?” Kyungsoo hisses, flipping through the pages. “Who was responsible for checking them?”

You stand, about to take responsibility when Yoongi steps in. “It was me, Doctor Do. I was supposed to bring them to y/n when you asked me but I saw her doing sutures already and helped out a patient with their Penicillin dose before I went to go get the charts. I’m sorry.” 

“No!” You frown, pushing Yoongi aside and bowing to Dr. Do, “It was me. I was too excited to be doing my first actual stitches that I forgot to read the test results after his chart. I saw all the signs, the rigid abdomen, the heated skin, and the light nausea, but I just attributed it to a first-time reaction to the anesthesia...I’m so so sorry...” You blink away tears as you meet Dr. Do’s angry gaze again.” 

He sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Look, I don’t have time to be standing here and trying to figure out who did it. A doctor must always check the background of the patient before doing any procedure, alright? Now both of you, get scrubbed.” He turns and begins ordering a surgery. 

“Uh,” you scramble up to him, “Dr. Do? What do you mean? You assigned us to the ER for the entire day.” 

He frowns at the both of you lingering by the bed. “Didn’t you hear what I said? Get scrubbed, this patients gonna have to get surgery for the infection, doesn’t he? Since he’s your patient, you get to scrub in.” 

You and intern #12 meet eachother’s eyes, mouths dropping open at the opportunity. Dr. Do begins walking briskly towards the OR and you two both scuttle after him, a skip in your steps. “Y/n,” Dr. Do comments, “Good job at the tracheostomy. It looked good.” 

You blush as the three of you step into the sterile room and begin dressing. “I’m going to go check on my patient I just helped do a tumor removal on, the both of you stay here and help the nurses prep the patient. Watch, and observe what they do.” 

He exits the room, and the both of you let out your breaths as you begin pulling on your protective gear. You see intern #12 struggling with the strings on the back of his scrub shirt. 

“Here,” you breathe out, stepping up, “Let me help.” 

He doesn’t say anything and just peers at you as he turns and hands you the strings. You tie them for him, going down his back with the other strings. “Thank you,” you whisper, “That guy wouldn’t have lived if it weren’t for your encouragement and guiding.” 

He nods, and solemnly turns around, gesturing to tie your strings for you too. “It’s fine,” he says, from behind you, and you can feel the tug of the strings. “You did good, intern 8.” 

“Y/N,” you say, and hold out a hand, and he takes it. “Yoongi.” He says, and hands you a mask to put on. You smile at him and he gives you a sort of small smile before he puts his mask on. 

“Hurry the fuck up! After this, you guys get to pay for making a stupid mistake by doing rectal exams all night!” Kyungsoo calls from inside. 

You both exhale and take a moment before stepping into the OR. 

That was how you met Min Yoongi.

Falling in love with him, well, that wasn’t hard. 

After that first time where he’d literally coached you through your first procedure as an intern, the two of you were a whirlwind, working together like a well-oiled machine. You completed each other’s sentences, pointed out each other’s mistakes, quizzed each other and were the top duo of the entire intern program within the hospital for the next year as interns.

“Yoongi and y/n,” the other residents and interns called you two, “the dynamic doctor duo, the second gen of triple D’s,” they’d laugh as you two scrubbed in on surgeries together, answered resident questions together, and even got the top marks on the intern test together. You two were unbeatable. 

And naturally, you became residents at Seoul National, and the years following that were years of excitement and big changes. You’d both followed in Kyungsoo’s footsteps to choose neurosurgery as your specialties, and just like he’d predicted, were the best damn interns the hospital had seen, and had followed on to become the best damn residents the hospital had seen. 

“Bipolar forceps,” Yoongi grunts as Jongdae, one of the promoted attending Doctors, watches the both of you perform a tumor removal with a hawk eye. The nurse gives him the forceps and he flips open the circular bone flap of the skull you had drilled. 

“Exposing the dura. Scalpel,” you request, the tool was handed to you and you lean in, making a tiny incision on the thick flap of skin that protects the brain, and Yoongi swoops in with the bipolar cautery, burning closed any bleeding veins that might distract you. “Suction,” he says softly, and the nurse sucks away any extra brain tissue that’s revealed as you take scissors and gently cut away a flap of the dura. 

“There’s the tumor,” you murmur, pointing at the white mass a few centimeters down from the skull. Yoongi leans in again with his forceps, burning away any open veins and you move alongside him across the patient, sucking and cutting away any unnecessary brain tissue and exposing the circumference of the tumor. 

Yoongi continues to cauterize the veins and the tissue, holding it taught as you cut away at the non-bleeding tissue of the tumor. And together, you both snip away at the pale white tissue, working seamlessly as a team, without Jongdae needing to step in to help. “A little bleeding there,” you point at a section and Yoongi steps into immediately cauterize the area, carefully sucking away any excess blood to clear his field of vision while you continue to cut away the rest of the tumor’s tissue. 

Finally, after agonizing minutes, the final cut is made, and no excess trauma or bleeding is shown, and everyone in the surgical ward breathes a sigh of relief as you smile and drop the tumor into the metal plate. “Finished. Reattach the bone flap,” Yoongi nods and replaces the removed dura with some material and then replaces the bone flap and drills in the metal plates that keep it intact. You then follow up with stapling together the skin of the head back, right where it should be. Once the final staple is completed, Jongdae nods at the both of you and motions for the nurses, “Please finish up here.” 

“Good job guys,” he breathes as he walks out of the ward and begins removing his protective scrubs. “That was...pretty seamless, didn’t expect any less of the both of you.” 

You smile and nudge Yoongi who just stoically nods at Jongdae’s compliments. Kyungsoo comes in with a little smile, nodding at the both of you. “Heard you performed a tumor removal all on your own. Good job you two.” He gives you a quick thumbs up and the both of you grin back as you receive yet another compliment from the devil. 

You two were attached by the hip, and after an entire six months of shy smiles and inside jokes, he finally asked you nonchalantly if you’d ever want to grab dinner together. 

“But Yoongi!” You mock him, laughing as you can visibly see him die a little on the inside at the thought of actually asking you out on a date, “We’ve gotten dinner together so many times before!” Clasping your hands in front of your heart in exaggerated mockery, you snicker at him as he rolls his eyes, toeing at something on the hospital floor. 

“I mean,” he grumbles, hands shoved into his white coat pockets, “Like something to actually count as dinner, not cup ramen shoved down our throats in a matter of minutes in the on-call room. Dress nicely, all that stuff.” 

You laugh, sauntering past him. “Alrighty then, pick me up at 6?” 

He nods without even looking at you, and you laugh again. 

That night, he’d showed up reluctantly with a bouquet of purple Irises, and you’d received them happily as you let him into your apartment. “Mmm,” you take a big whiff of the flowers and place them in a vase. “You remembered?” 

He grumbles, “Yeah, you said they were really pretty that one time our patient’s mom brought them in for her son.” You smile at him, and smooth down your dress as you pull on your heels. “Ready?” 

He finally looks at you, looking down at your black dress that accentuated your curves, and your nude heels. Your makeup was light, and natural, and your hair done nicely, different from the bun you always had when you were working at the hospital. “You...you look good,” he says lowly, and his eyes rake over your figure, and you have a thought to just ditch the nice dinner and jump him right then and there. After months of incessant flirting and sensual glances, you could eat him up right then. He was dressed in a nice suit, trading in the boring blue scrubs you always saw him in for a nice gray pair of slacks and black dress shirt, and a matching gray jacket to top it off. His black hair was tousled nicely, effortlessly, and he looked so good. 

But you swallow it down and smile prettily, whispering a quiet, “Why thank you,” and let him lead you to his car. 

You had always assumed that Yoongi was the type of guy to take you to a nice steak and wine dinner and call it quits, but actually he knew exactly what kind of person you were when he pulls up to the date night. 

“Sushi?” You frown as you step out of the car. “I didn’t know you like sushi.” 

He helps close the door after you and leads you into the expensive looking restaurant. “I have a friend who works here,” he grins gummily, “and he agreed to let us choose our own sushi, and get this--we get to cut our own and play with the knives.” 

You smile wickedly as you scramble after him. “Min Yoongi you know me so well.” 

After a night of yummy sushi and learning expensive sushi cuts from Yoongi’s friend, you leave the restaurant full and sated, a little tipsy off of the expensive sake he ordered you both. 

“How do you afford all of this with a resident salary?” You ask, frowning as he signs the receipt. 

He chuckles, “Uh, I get a little help here and there.” 

You joke, “Don’t tell me you’re a heir or something.” 

He just laughs it off and leads you outside, to where his car waits. He drives you two to another place, and you laugh as he pulls in. “Classic,” you giggle, as he parks next to the Bodies exhibit that’s been touring the area for a while now. It was an anatomical exhibit with preserved bodies, fetuses, eyeballs, the likes. He just grins at you, “You’re a workaholic, and you love bodies. Couldn’t think of something more fun to do on our first date.” 

He tucks his coat over your bare shoulders as you two walk into the exhibit and you lean into him as you both peruse the aisles of jars and showrooms. 

“Why haven’t we done this sooner?” You whisper at him, and he turns to look at you with a look so dark and earnest, that your knees begin to shake a little. Halfway through the exhibit, you stopped looking at the preserved body parts and more at him, wondering where and how the hell Yoongi had dropped into your life to become the man you’ve always dreamed of. A little aloof and grumpy, yes, but he was a great friend, partner, and cared a lot more than he let on. 

If he’d taken you to a traditional dinner, your hopes would’ve been crushed. And if he’d driven you after to a musical symphony concert, or a regular movie, like other dates have done in the past, you would’ve been disappointed that he didn’t know you better. But this first date was the day you knew you wanted to marry Min Yoongi.                                           

He stares at you for a long time before whispering back, “I wanted to make sure,” he says lowly, and reaches over to grip your hand. “It was a bit scary at first.”

“What was?”

“How alike we are.” He fiddles with your fingers, turning your smaller hands in his and gnawing on his lip. “How well we fit.” 

You step forward, gripping his hand. “Yoongi,” you murmur, even though you two are far away from the other visitors at the exhibition. “Let’s go home. Please.” You stare up into his eyes and bite your lower lip subtly, and it takes him just a moment before he’s gripping your hand and heading straight for the exit to his car. 

You can’t keep your hands off of him, giggling as he grips your upper thigh from the driver’s seat and you retaliate by leaning over and nibbling on his ear and tonguing his jawline as he presses on the gas to get home. “Don’t s-stop,” he murmurs. You two run up the stairs, laughing and grabbing butts and whatever skin you can before he’s punching the code in and throwing his apartment door open. You don’t even get a chance to admire the size and beauty of his place. 

He barely gets the door closed before you throw off the jacket around your shoulders and pounce on him, and he presses you against the door, tongue searching your mouth earnestly and swiping across your lips desperately as moans and ragged breaths are released into the darkness of his studio. He groans at your taste, and you moan loudly as his hands rake lasciviously over your breasts and stomach. 

His tongue works wonders against your swollen lips, drawing out moans and licking boldly into your mouth as you suck on his lower lip.  

He quickly works the zipper of your dress down as you unbutton his black dress shirt, not even bothering to slide it down his shoulders in your desperation, but just roaming your hands wide across his white milky torso, scrapping your nails lightly as he tongues against your exposed neck and collarbone. “Hurry!” you ask him, quickly removing your straps and letting the dress slither down your body and pool at your feet. You step out of them and jump as Yoongi catches you, pulling your thighs tight against his hips as he walks you blindly towards his bedroom. 

He drops you onto his mattress and you laugh as he grins at you and quickly undoes his pants and climbs over you, starting to kiss you at your bellybutton and tickling you as he climbs up your body. Reaching behind and unclasping your bra, his gaze grows darker as he stares down at your naked torso. 

“So beautiful,” he mutters, cradling them in between his hands and fluttering kisses all over them and tonguing at your heightened nerves until you’re breathing heavy and stuttering his name, your core clenching around nothing and the wetness making you uncomfortable. “Yoongi,” you moan, grabbing at his boxers, “please, I need you...” 

He understands quickly and obliges, looming over you on his elbows and distracting you with a kiss as he removes your underwear and swipes a finger up your folds to feel your wetness. You’re panting and moaning incoherent things, desperate for the feeling of him in you, for him to touch you, to kiss you. The pressure he puts against your clit with the swipes isn’t good enough, and you mewl for him to hurry.

“Fuck,” he breathes, groaning as he settles between your thighs, “You’re so wet. How long have you been waiting for this?” 

“Too long to remember,” you whine, hiking your thighs up over his hips and anchoring him to you. He groans and your voice hitches in your throat when he finally slides into you, fitting into you like a glove. Your jaw hangs open on his shoulder and your hands are gripping whatever you can grab, the hair at the base of his neck, the bicep that’s pressed against your cheek. 

“Holy shit,” you croak, throwing your head back at the pleasure. It’s dark and you can’t see him but his groans huskily tickling your ear let you know he’s going as crazy as you are. He presses in and out, slowly taking his time and rocking his hips against you in a way that stimulates your clit, rolling his hips against you when he sheathes in and then pressing on his downstroke when he moves out. You retaliate by leaning up and mouthing at his neck and his collarbone, sucking hickey’s into the pale unmarked skin like your life depended on it. 

You remember that night you were almost moved to tears how he loved you, held your body like fine china, kissing and drawing moans and sweet promises from your lips like he couldn’t live without them. He’d moaned your name and muffled his moans when he came by kissing you hard, nibbling lightly at your lower lip as his hand came to tangle in your hand and his hips stuttered. 

He’d murmured “God I can do this for the rest of my life,” against your lips before he fell asleep, and you’d watched him fall asleep, smoothing back the black locks of his hair behind his ear. 

He was beautiful, in a way that you’d never expected yourself to be attracted to. His skin was absolutely pale and milkish, so clean and white that you wanted to spend the rest of your life running your lips and fingers and tongue over them and marking him as yours and learning everything about every inch of his body. 

He had smaller eyes, that crinkled when he smiled, but were dark and held so many promises and loyalty in them. His eyelashes that framed them were as dark as his hair and his eyebrows, so black and thick that you couldn’t resist running your hands through them as he dreamed. 

Although a bit on the skinnier side, Yoongi’s body was beautiful as well. The arm thrown over your waist was still thick and had definition, and his torso well built and broad enough to make you feel like you could sleep on his chest forever. Which you did, at least that night.

And the next morning, he’d woken up to you prancing around in his black dress shirt, making breakfast with a sweet little smile. That’s how it all started, as cheesy as it sounds.

Dating in the workplace, was difficult, at the least. But it helped that you worked in the same hospital, and your schedules were more or less the same, being able to enjoy your days off together at home, or even just sleeping together on the same bed in the on-call room whenever you were both available. 

It wasn’t forbidden for residents to date each other, as long as the relationship didn’t deteriorate performance. And in you and Yoongi’s case, your performance soared together, conquering complicated surgeries and hundreds of patient care issues together as a pair. You both weren’t too romantic elsewhere, and it was your own personal enjoyment to be able to finish eachother’s sentences and complete the most difficult surgeries without a hiccup. 

Getting married with Yoongi was the easiest part of your relationship. Saying yes was so, so easy. 

He’d been thinking about it since the first night you shared together, and two years into your relationship and three into your friendship, he invites you nervously over to his place and cooks you an amazing dinner with wine and candles and the works, and gets on his knees, proclaiming his undying love for you. 

He wasn’t good with words, but it was moments like these that he saved whatever sappiness he could muster up with his skinny little body for all at once. 

“I think...” he begins, watching the way your eyes widen at the sight of him on one knee. “I think a lot. And it’s sometimes hard for me to just feel emotions and stuff. I wasn’t raised like that, and I never really had an experience that forced me to do anything otherwise. But you...y/n, you...you make me feel. You make me excited to see you, you make my heart race when you perform your famous whipping stitch,” he laughs as he reaches up to cup your face and wipe away a tear with his thumb, “and you make me never want to live anyway else, besides the way I’m living right now, here with you.” 

“Will you marry me?” 

You’re crying ugly tears and getting your makeup all messed up, but you nod as you whisper, “Yes,” and let him slip on the beautiful big wedding ring and stand from the chair to meet him in a passionate kiss. 

That night, with your wedding ring the only thing you’re wearing, he proclaims his love to you through his actions, through his hands and his lips and his touches, whispering sweet nothings into your ear as you submit to the ecstasy of being completely and actually loved by someone so wholeheartedly. 

You felt at that moment, that you had conquered the world. You had a great job, an even better workplace, and the best fiancee you could ever ask for. He was your partner in crime, your trusted best friend, your husband-to-be. He was your everything. 

Planning the wedding...was easy. 

Both of you weren’t complicated, nor extravagant people. You simply chose a nice venue, chose steak as the dinner, a normal white wedding cake, a nice dress that complimented your figure, and you both had a great relationship with the Chief, so you asked him to officiate the wedding. Your friend took your pictures for you, and you were able to make your wedding playlist in 30 minutes in the waiting room right after a surgery. A couple of your fellow residents and childhood friends were the bridesmaids and thankfully, the ones without medical jobs that sucked out the life and time out of their days, were able to step in and plan the rest of the details of your wedding like the color of the silverware and the texture of the table covers.

No extra musical quartets to play your wedding song, no extravagant flowers besides the nice green ones decorating the tables and your bouquet, and your honeymoon was going to be a nice week-long trip in a tropical island, far far away where the both of you could just enjoy the moment together. 

Simple.  

You found and planned to buy a house, which is when you discovered that Min Yoongi came from a pretty well off family. It was a nice four bedroom place, with a big kitchen and an even bigger living room, and since the both of you were were always tired and busy, you made the finances to hire a maid and gardener to come every weekend and clean your house inside out. 

The only part was...his parents, weren’t easy. At all. 

His father was a strict businesswoman, with a degree in law and economics who’d started his own company from scratch and had built it up to be one of the biggest tech companies in the country. His mother, although not a working woman, was a daughter of another mogul who’d raised her with all the perfect etiquettes required of heiresses like her.  

Meeting her made you almost piss your pants, as you fiddled with your coat for the upteenth time that day, and Yoongi reaches over to grip your hand in a firm hold, leaning over and murmuring, “You look beautiful, don’t worry. She’s gonna love you.” 

That, to this day, was probably the biggest lie your husband ever told you. Well, in addition to the whole “til death do us part” lie he told you at the altar. But you’d go through a thousand of those lies if it meant you didn’t have to deal with his mother. 

She was a fierce-looking lady, with eyeliner sharper than you’d ever been able to master, and pearls hanging from her dainty neck that looked like they’d be shiny and strong enough for her to choke you with. She’d walked in with a piercing stare, giving you a once over at your new Givenchy dress and Chanel coat, and pursed her lips before taking a seat. Damn, an hour of preparing completely unappreciated in seconds, 3,000$ down the drain. 

Yoongi’s father was a bit more loveable, a tired old man who loved to take you camping and outdoorsy stuff that his mother refused to even talk about. You enjoyed fishing and hiking with him whenever you got the chance. But Yoongi’s mother...she was a whole different story. 

The moment she approved of your marriage, she took over. She planned another wedding, much bigger and more lavish than the first friends-and-family-only one you and Yoongi had originally planned for. She hired one of the most popular wedding planners to come in and re-do the entire thing, renting out a traditional huge church for the event and re-doing the entire sanctuary in draping colors of white and pale pink and gold. 

The wedding cake was taller than you, and the food was made by a Michelin star chef who had dozens of professional waiters and waitresses at his beck and call to deliver the plates going around. 

She invited almost four-hundred guests, all important men and women in Yoongi’s father’s business. Potential investors, politicians, local celebrities and moguls, the Board of Trustees, important managers and team leaders from the company, and even families that shared good relationships with her own. 

Immediately, your week was chock-full of scheduled facials, nail salon appointments, dress fittings, and meetings with the planner that your mother-in-law insisted on attending. 

The only thing she let you choose in the entire wedding was your underwear, which you insisted on not wearing the thong that would probably render you sterile for the rest of your life. 

But you gritted your teeth through it as she drove a whirlwind through your once-normal marriage, and you smiled through clenched teeth and did the whole six hours of greeting and nodding and waving alongside Yoongi. Little did your mother-in-law know that at the end of the night, you fucked Yoongi in her kitchen while she was out drinking with her friends. 

It was your dirty little secret.

Your once-normal house was sold quickly and she insisted on you two moving into a huge estate that was much closer to hers, and immediately hired the both of you a set of maids, gardeners, and cooks to make sure the “house was running properly” since you never “have time to do it anyway.” 

If it meant that she’d stay out of your house and not force the both of you to move in with her, you were satisfied. 

All you needed was Yoongi, and you had him through it all. He was the one who coaxed you not to panic when his mother forced you to do a chemical peel for your skin that made you want to die of pain, and assured you that it would all be over, and even offered to run away with you whenever you wanted, whenever you decided that doing this and putting up with his mother and her antics wasn’t worth it all. 

But it was, worth it all. He was worth it all. And so you insisted on just doing it. Your marriage and your happily ever after was worth all the hours and hours of scrubbing your skin clean and lasering your body hair off and squeezing into a corset for your wedding dress. 

You were determined to make sure your marriage with Yoongi was perfect.

Which was probably why when Dr. Do Kyungsoo decided to amicably transfer 5 years later from his promotion into attending status, and 3 years into your marriage with Yoongi, he chose the both of you to head the department in his place. You two were surgeons who worked well together, were happily married, with leadership skills and great relations with the Chief, and it also helped that the both of you together had incredibly high surgical success rates. 

It was a no-brainer, pun intended.

And so you step up, pack up your stuff and move into your own immaculate offices side-by-side, enjoy the perks of being the leaders of the neurosurgery department, with your own assistants and resting rooms, able to access even more surgeries and benefits. 

But also, simultaneously, 3 years into your marriage with Yoongi, was when the questions started. 

“When are you planning to have children?” 

“Are you guys thinking of expanding your family?” 

“Have you been taking those uterine enhancing vitamins I sent to your house last week?” Your mother-in-law would call you, and you’d wince, scrambling up to the fridge in your office to suck on the plastic pouch of useless Eastern medicine as you mumble, “Yes, mother. Everyday now.” 

She huffs over the phone. “Why can’t you get pregnant yet? Have you and Yoongi been trying, even?”

You sigh, “Uh, mother, I can assure you that Yoongi and I have been doing this together, and we will take it at our own pace. I promise you, I’m thinking about this rationally.” 

“Rationally doesn’t mean you agree to leading the department together with your husband. Rational means you, as a woman, let him lead and take a break so that you’re not always running around that hospital and making your uterus less elastic.” 

You don’t even bother explaining how wrong that was medically, because the uterus did not loose elasticity because you were working harder, as she continues to berate you for not taking the traditional role of a wife. 

It...it was complicated. You were raised in a family much different than Yoongi’s. Your parents were high school lovers, who’d married right after graduating college and started their family with your older brothers. After having you, and after 10 more years of marriage, they’d decided that it wasn’t worth it, and that the problems that continued to arise within your family weren’t solvable. 

So they divorced, shuttling you and your two brothers in between them for holidays, and you’d lived your life getting used to having two sets of clothes, two desks, two houses, and two bedrooms. You couldn’t complain, there were children out there with much worse circumstances than yours. But nonetheless, the brokenness of your parents marriage was probably why you were so desperate to prove to everyone that you weren’t like them. 

You wanted to be different. You saw how your mother had rotted at home, lonely and waiting for her surgeon husband to return home. He rarely called once he got promoted to Attending status, and was always late to family events. He always missed dinner, and you distinctly remember walking out into the living room late at night after peeing, and seeing your mother asleep at the dining table, a full meal laid out for him as she slept on the spot next to him. 

Staying at home, rotting away like that...it wasn’t your thing. You wanted to be great, you wanted to excel and prove how good you were, not only to yourself and your own family, but even to Yoongi’s mother. Because of your parents’ divorced status and not-on-the-wealthy-side financial state, she’d looked down at all of you when you first met her a while ago. 

But then Yoongi had graciously taken a moment with her the night after, explaining to her calmly how hard working you were, how you refused to let him help you with your debt, working tirelessly and passionately to support your parents and work off your debt and bills. Only then did she agree to the marriage. 

“...make sure that Yoongi is eating his vegetables. I know I hired you both a chef to make sure you both got your nutrients. He knows and I’m sure he’s doing a great job, but Y/n, a wife should be cooking for her husband from time to time. Go make him some chicken bone healthy soup, I hear its very good for the male body...” she continues to babble on as you see your office door handle twist open and Yoongi lingering in the doorway. 

You spin in your chair to look at him and he smiles apologetically at you.

“My mom?” He mouths, and you nod sadly. 

He walks over and leans against your desk, and you lean forward and press your forehead against his stomach, breathing in his scent. You stay like that for a moment, the smell of Yoongi’s skin calming you. Although the both of you used the same body wash and laundry detergent, there was still something so Yoongi about his smell. You could never replicate it, even though you sometimes secretly spritzed his cologne in your bedroom when you missed him a lot. Hoping that maybe his scent rubbed off on you in the process was all you could do. 

The phone is still pressed against your ear as you mumble out acknowledgements to his mother and he chuckles as he smooths your hair back with one hand. He lifts your head to lean down and deliver a deep kiss, one that makes your lashes flutter and your heart stop. 

You open your eyes to him staring down at you funny, and then a big grin stretches across his face as he holds the mute button down. “Hey,” he grins at you gummily, “let me sit on the chair.” He lets go of the button.

You frown and continue to talk to his mother as you oblige and get up out of the chair to perch against the edge of your desk while he gets comfortable. He grips the back of your head and pulls you down for another searing kiss, one that makes you smile and frown confusedly down at him. 

He just grins and presses the mute button again, “trust me,” he whispers, and begins to kiss at your jawline. 

You hold the phone away from your ear and out of earshot as you hiss, “Oh my god, Yoongi, no.” 

“The doors locked,” he murmurs as he stands up and curls over you against the table to grind his hips against yours. “Keep talking to her.” he says, and his eyes glint with mischevious intent as he continues to travel down your torso. One by one he undoes the little buttons on your blouse, kissing and licking at each new inch of skin that’s revealed. He doesn’t even bother taking off your bra, just hiking it up out of the way and immediately diving and tonguing at your nipples until your struggling to keep your harsh breathing under control and your practically dripping down your thighs. 

“Always so sensitive here,” he smirks, flicking a thumb over your sensitive nipple. 

His mother’s still droning on and on about how your gardener was the best, whatever awards he’s won and what she thinks he should do with your backyard....all while her son is currently getting comfortable in between your legs. 

He pulls up your pencil skirt and snaps the waistband of your panties against your hip, grinning up at you cheekily when he sees the dark spot that reveals your wetness to him. Without even pulling them off, he pushes the band aside and slides two fingers into you without warning, making you choke on whatever agreements you were babbling into the phone. 

“Yes, mother, I think so to---” you completely cut yourself off, literal seconds away from moaning out loud into the receiver. You immediately punch your finger into the mute button, glaring down at Yoongi. “What the fuck?” you hiss, staring at the weighted phone in your hand as you can hear the light crackling of her frantic voice on the other end. “Yoongi, oh my god, we’re gonna get caught.” 

“Not if you keep quiet,” he says, lightly kissing the skin above your bellybutton and continuing to languidly move his fingers within you, curling upwards to press against that spot that has you curling into him, gripping his hair for support, the phone still dangling in between your fingers. You keen, “Oh Yoongi,” you’re shuddering at the onslaught of such direct pressure and squeezing your eyes shut at the sensations. 

The transition from residents to Attendings had been busy, and you’d been coming home with Yoongi only to collapse onto your beds without any energy for anything else. You were starved. 

His mother’s voice crackles loud enough to draw you out of your haze. “Shit,” you mutter and turn off the mute, “Y-yes mother, s-sorry, I choked on some water there.” 

Her voice calms down as she hears you on the line again. “Oh Jesus, I thought you’d passed out or something. Don’t do that again, you’ll stress out your body and stress isn’t good for the baby. Anyway, what was I saying, oh yes. The gardener wants to install a fountain that’s made out of genuine Greek volcanic rock....” 

You tune her out as your head tips back and your eyes close to the feeling of Yoongi’s mouth close over your clit, hot and slick against the drenched fabric of your panties, and making you tremble at how quick he drives you to the edge. Your heeled feet are perched on the handles of your chair, and your clothes in a complete mess. The only thing you can focus on is making sure you mumble a “mhm,” for your mother-in-law to know you’re listening and anchoring Yoongi’s face against your core. 

He moves his tongue slowly, tracing patterns into your flesh, making you all hot from the inside out and making your thighs tremble with the exertion of trying not to buck into him. 

Clenching your jaw, you determine, is the best way of not letting any noises escape and you angle the receiver a bit away from your nose and mouth to make sure his mother doesn’t catch on the heavy breathing. 

Your breaths are labored and shuddery, trying to compensate for the overwhelming sensations Yoongi drives through your system, his hands cradling your hip and the other roughly palming your breast and raking down your body to curl into you once again and press right against the spot only he knows this way. His hair is twisted tight beneath your fingertips but it only spurs him on, and you can literally feel the smile that he grins into your core, as he becomes even more naughty at the nasty thought of you accidentally letting his name slip as a moan in a conversation with his own mother. 

But you manage to hold it in, cumming fiercely and silently, tears pricking your eyes as you curl into Yoongi’s mouth and your jaw hangs open in a silent scream as he tongues and laps at your wetness through it all. 

You’re still shaking and shuddering as you come down from it, and Yoongi waits, leaning back in your leather chair with a satisfied and triumphant grin, his lips shining slightly from your wetness, and you snap. 

“I-I’m sorry, mother, but I h-have to go. There’s an um, emergency p-procedure I have to perform! Right now! Sorry, I’ll call you later, so sorry, bye!” You ignore the frantic questions and slam the receiver down on the cart, and pounce on Yoongi, kissing him and roughly tugging at his hair and grunting in to the kiss to let him know how much you hated and loved him right now. 

“Fuck,” you mutter, tonguing at his lips that are still salty with your taste. “You’re so much nastier than when we first married.” 

He chuckles huskily against your lips. “Says the one who’s kissing me right after I ate you out.” 

You grin down at him. “Switch,” you command, and he obliges, and you put your clothing somewhat back in place before taking his seat and unbuckling his pants. He’s already hard, probably from eating you out and the excitement and thrill of doing so when you’re on the phone with his mother, and you sneer at that. 

You grip him at his base, squeezing tightly and slowly jerking him off. He bites his lip as he watches you, leaning against your desk. “You think you’re real cute huh?” You sneer, leaning forward to wrap your mouth around his tip and suck harshly, making him moan and buckle, his hands flying into the edge of the desk and in your hair. 

You detach, though, before he can get any further pleasure from it and stare up at him. “You know that if we got caught, it wouldn’t even be you in trouble, but me?” 

You reach over and grip his balls, playing with the weight in your hands and rubbing the space right where his cock meets the heavier skin. He groans, biting his lip and you smile wickedly when you feel him jump within your hands. “Fuck,” he groans, watching you with narrowed eyes. He knew he deserved it, and he was loving every bit of it. 

“Next time,” you lean forward and wrap your lips around him again, sucking harshly and then pulling away in a tease, “You’re gonna fuck me in her house, make sure that she knows it’s not me thats nasty, but its all you.” You finally oblige, leaning in and swallowing his length as far as you can, letting him settle heavily against the back of your tongue. You swallow around him and fight the urge to gag, your other hand coming to his base and stroking whatever else you can’t reach with your tongue and mouth. 

Yoongi’s completely at your dispense now, moaning and clenching his eyes shut as his breaths become labored and his hand becomes a bit too tight in the strands of your hair. But you ignore it, rubbing the texture of your tongue against the underside of his cock and moaning to send vibrations straight down his length. 

“Oh sh-shit,” he buckles, “T-too much, t-too fast y/n.” He cringes, but you keep going, bobbing your head back and forth and smoothing your tongue harshly against the spot right on the underside of his cock that makes his stomach muscles clench underneath your hands. 

He cums within seconds of doing that, groaning loudly and fisting his hands in your hair. You continue to stroke him through the orgasm, letting his cum drip down your tongue and you swallow loudly around him, making him buck forward from the extra stimulation. “Fuck,” he breathes out, grinning as you stand and wipe your lip, “That was hot.” 

You roll your eyes, walking over to your closet and stripping off your ruined undies. The offices were nice, and personal, but even better because you and Yoongi could get some actual work done together with the nice locks they provided on your doors. You kept a stash of clean laundry here just in case you needed them for surgeries and important meetings, but your underwear stash was getting suspiciously depleted faster. 

While you’re putting on a clean pair, he surveys the contents of your desk as he observes the packet of Uterine Vitamin Eastern medicine juice. He cringes as he turns over the packet and surveys the contents printed on the back, grimacing at the odd combination of multiple herbs and spices. 

“No wonder you tasted bitter when I kissed you,” he curls his lip in disgust, “what the hell is in this thing? Are you sure it’s not doing the complete opposite of enhancing your vagina?” 

You sigh, closing the closet door. “Imagine what it’s like to have your mother call me every night to remind me to take them.” Walking over, you slot yourself snugly in his arms. 

His voice vibrates in his chest, calming you as you press your cheek against it. “You know, just say the word, and I’ll tell her to stop. I can go tell her that I’m the one who has sperm issues or don’t want kids or something. She’ll stop and listen then.” 

You shake your head, closing your eyes as Yoongi’s chin comes down softly against the crown of your head. One more thing you loved about Yoongi, was that he was the perfect height for you to snuggle into his neck. “I don’t want you to lie to her.” 

His chuckle buzzes against your ear. “I mean, it’s true that we want to wait a little bit, right? With the department changes that are going on and all...it’s okay to wait a little isn’t it?” 

Resting your chin on his chest and peering up at him through tired lashes, you pout, sighing. “But if it happens, I guess it happens. I’m happy either way.” 

He leans down and pecks your lips. “Me too. I’m happy either way.” 

To think about where it all went wrong...well that’s not easy. 

You’d spent three amazing years alone with Yoongi, enjoying your time together as residents, then promoted to Attendings. And although the transition into becoming department heads together was anything but simple or easy, especially with Yoongi’s mother nagging and turning her nose up at your decision every chance she got, it was still bearable. 

But...maybe it had been the extra stuff in your lives that had driven you apart. 

Your google calendar looked like a kid had just drawn squares everywhere with different colors. Your schedule was a mess, not that Suho was anything but organized, he was great. But your schedule was chock-full of important meetings, orientations, interviews, and even hospital events that took up a lot of your time. All you wanted to do was go back to your surgeries with Yoongi, but naturally being a bit more organized and better with human beings than Yoongi was, you ended up taking a bit more of the official part of the job, while he was equally stressed out by the extra patient-meetings and demanding surgeries. 

You couldn’t complain about having to just attending meetings in person and greeting people and sipping champagne while Yoongi was having to deal with rude and stressed out patient families and even a lawsuit regarding one of the surgeries his patient claims could have been done better. Which, was ridiculous, because you and everyone in the entire country knew that Yoongi was one of the best specialists to deal with that patient’s tumor the way he did. 

And neither did he, even though he stumbled in half awake into your home at 3am in the morning with eye bags dragging down to his chin and equally so weak from not being able to eat or drink anything during his surgeries, collapsing onto the couch. 

But you still tried. You made sure that the both of you had Sunday’s off, no matter what, calling in favors from other departments to make sure that your positions were covered. 

Sundays...naturally became a routine. 

You both were up before 7am, just by habit. Yoongi would go into the kitchen and sip on some coffee silently while you went on your morning jog. By the time you got back, Yoongi was taking a nap, which is when you’d shower and get ready and leave the house together by 8:30 towards his parents’ place. 

From 8:30 to 9, you’d help his mother prepare an obnoxious breakfast, full of beautiful cooked eggs, perfect waffles, little salmon and cheese crackers, and even sometimes she whipped out the caviar. 

And together, you’d prepare for Yoongi and his father, who would just discuss a few things here and there while the women cooked. And then until 10, you and Yoongi would share coffee with his parents while his mother nagged you about children and his father would tell one of his fishing stories. 

By noon, you’d both be back home, and Yoongi would groan about how tired he was and collapse into sleep again, and you’d quietly read a book or clean until he woke up around 4, and you’d go watch a movie together. It didn’t matter what movie, but you both just sat there in the darkness watching whatever stupid indie film was popular that week in your local theatre. 

Since it was dark after the movie finished, you’d both make your way over to a small diner or something to grab a bite to eat. And then you’d curl up together infront of the tv or the fireplace and just silently cuddle. 

But at one point, the cuddling didn’t feel as warm anymore. 

Yoongi stopped bringing home flowers randomly. Instead his first words to you when he entered your office or when he came home would be something about the hospital. Sometimes, he was forced to even miss out on the precious Sunday times together because he was called in for an emergency procedure only he could do. Or you’d have to bail and reschedule your silent Sundays together in order to make it to an important hospital event. 

The sex...well it was just sex. 

You both tried changing it up here and there. But being married for three years...really had depleted a lot of your options of your boundaries and the things both of you were comfortable doing. The 15th time doing bondage and tying your hands to the bed just wasn’t as exciting as the first. Just...naturally. 

And that was probably where it went wrong. 

You accepted it, just acknowledged that things becoming like that were normal for any other couple. Great. But what your mistake was, you didn’t do anything about it. You didn’t dare ask him to attend marriage-counseling with you, in fear of disrupting the silence and peace you finally had obtained with his mother, and also, you had access to his calendar. It was impossible to do it together without his mother somehow finding out. She had his calendar too. 

Little by little, you stopped asking. You stopped pressing him to take time off for dates, to separate and designate some time for just the two of you, without having to worry or talk about work. You stopped telling him about your day. And instead, you began to resent the way he always somehow managed to turn a blind eye to the passive side-comments his mother gave you. 

It became a nuisance to hear that his partner in surgery was a beautiful new graduate who was all busty and fresh and innocent  and remarkably good at surgery, and conveniently, working right next to him. 

It also got busier. The hospital began a new TV program to raise public finds for the free clinic. The chief had brought up the idea, proposing a weekly talk-show-ish program where doctors and PA’s would sit at a panel and discuss important health issues and offer the best advice. Naturally, as one of the senior representatives of the neuro-department, and as a woman who was used to being on screens, you were asked to be on the show. 

As your life picked up faster than ever, you had totally missed that, somehow, the marriage you had dreamed of, and had protected with your life, was crumbling with every step you took in your polished Louboutins. 

And then, you took a test. Six weeks after your last pregnancy.

The two lines on the stick you peed on shined bright blue back at you, and you bit your lip as tears welled up in your eyes at the thought of finally starting a family with Yoongi. Almost four years of marriage, and you’d finally decided to stop taking the pills. You knew he wanted children, he’d always stare longingly at the children in the park or linger in the children’s toys section in the department stores. 

But it had finally happened. 

Telling him was glorious, he’d cried and kneeled and kissed your stomach until you were giggling and telling him to stop, and he was cooing promises of a family and eternal happiness and gratitude to you. 

Telling his mother...well...was pretty extraordinary. Once she knew, she gathered all family and friends, including...basically everyone at the hospital, and had announced at a brunch party that you and Yoongi were expecting. 

But nonetheless, it lead to a month of a happy marriage. Yoongi began delegating, switching his surgeries off to others to make sure that he was home to have dinner, often bringing home the same bouquets of flowers that you used to receive back when the both of you were interns. He began decorating, and even though you’d laughed and told him that it was still technically risky in the first trimester, had settled for buying a white crib and completely stocking the closet with unisex products, like shower products and carseats and diapers. 

The sex was better. Yoongi refused to do anything to you even a smidgen above vanilla, scared to do anything to the baby. 

“Yoongi,” you moan, head thrown back as he rocks his hips into you, “Spank me.” Begging had always been a secret little kink of Yoongi’s, but this time, he was adamant about not doing anything to stimulate “even any amount of pain for my wife.” 

“No,” he pants, holding his upper body above yours, careful not to drop his weight on you. “What if it hurts the baby?” 

You roll your eyes, throwing your legs around his back and pulling his hips close so they roll against your clit deliciously, and you curve your spine up into him so that your chests rub together. Moaning, you shake your head. “It...it’s okay.” You pant, and Yoongi finally finally relents....into doing doggy style. 

“Switchin’ it up,” he grins, sliding back into you with a moan, and you roll your eyes half from frustration and half from pleasure.

It was fun. It was four weeks of feeling glorious, four weeks of feeling like finally, you had your marriage back. Yoongi was back to his normal, chippy self, finally able to get some more sleep and not throwing himself into his work. Your own work schedule was now a bit more lenient, people understanding when you had to skip out on important meals or appointments because of morning sickness. Co-workers and other subordinates were gushing constantly with blushed cheeks at how jealous they were of your marriage, congratulating you with every chance you got. The mother-in-law had finally stopped hounding you, and instead showed her interest by constantly ordering catalogues to your home about baby products. It was still meddlesome, but it was definitely better than calling you every morning at 9 am to make sure you took your uterine enhancing vitamins. 

And those four weeks, you might have completely forgotten that your marriage had gone through a rough patch. No, a gaping hole and a horrible mess that you both had somehow just glazed over with the thoughts of a baby. You should’ve known that it was too good to be true. 

After a particularly hard day of meetings, you suddenly felt a sharp pain in your side, and wince as you stumble a bit. Suho is at your side, a worried look in his face. “Y/N,” he says, “are you okay?” 

Cringing, you take a breath before hesitating. Normally you would have dismissed it for a momentary cramp or a twinge from hunger. But this...you felt something was wrong. Your heart begins to beat faster as your breath becomes short. “S-Sehun,” you whisper, grabbing his arm for support. “I need Sehun, now!” 

You’re ushered into his office and Sehun comes to meet you halfway, a frown on his worried face. “Y/N,” he murmurs, “You don’t look well.” 

You’re crying, anticipating the worst. “I...” you pant, worriedly looking up at him. “I don’t feel good, I-I felt a sharp pain in my side, like a cramp, and all of a sudden...I-I don’t know S-sehun, please just check, I’d f-feel so much better if you would just ch-check...” 

“Okay, yes, of course,” he murmurs, urging you towards the table. 

You settle against the cushion, the papers rustling behind your back as you lay down and you hike up your blouse near your ribcage so that Sehun can smear the gel onto your abdomen as he turns on his Ultrasound. 

The next few moments seem to happen in slow motion. 

“Y/N...” he trails off, turning from the screen to you. His eyes are sad, his face fallen completely as you stare at him in horror. “It...it was embedded in your fallopian tube. If it had stayed there...” he breathes out at your stricken expression, “your tube would have torn open. Its a miracle that you miscarried it naturally.” 

You lay there for a moment, staring up at the blank white ceiling, the bright lights bruning into the back of your skull. And that day, you quietly cancel the rest of your schedules and trudge back home, dazedly walking into your place and seeing that Yoongi’s shoes are in the doorway. 

You pad into the house, hoping that he’d be waiting there with the news, or even if he didn’t know yet out of Sehun’s politeness, just waiting for you to fall into his arms. 

But when you walk into the bedroom, you see a lump of hair and a tired, limp Yoongi sleeping soundly. 

And the sight breaks the dam. You crumple onto the floor, shoulders racking at the sight, and you press your fist into your mouth as you attempt to silence the shudders and cries that pass your lips. The tears dribble down endlessly as you rock yourself back and forth, holding your abdomen close as you pray silent prayers and apologize, over and over and over. 

That night, you fall asleep on the bathroom floor, after hours and hours of just crying and staring at the dots of blood on your underwear.

Months later, all the sad smiles and apologies have stopped and you and Yoongi have lapsed completely back into the same routine. 

Wake up, eat, work, sleep. 

“So,” Wendy grins at the camera, flashing the audience a big smile, “Y/N,” she turns to you, “I think the rest of the panel and the audience have desperately wanted to know since the day you joined our show. What is your marriage like? I assume that being married to another successful surgeon isn’t easy. How do you and Dr. Min manage to make it work?” 

You smile nervously, curling a hair behind your ear. “Uh,” you chuckle, “I-I don’t really have any secrets.” 

Wendy laughs, just playing along to the script. “Oh, don’t tease us Y/N, we know you have a few tips! Please, c’mon, the female audience has been dying to know since your husband guested on the show with you.” 

You clear your throat, plastering on a smile. “Well...it may sound generic,” you begin, “but rule number one, never go to sleep angry.” 

Wrong. 

“Rule number two, always make time to have personal dates, and personal time together.” 

Wrong.

“And rule number three, always remember...never forget the way you fell in love.” 

Wrong.

Yoongi comes home that day, dark circles down to his mouth and not even bothered to have changed out of his dirty scrubs, the door slamming and locking shut behind him. He leans heavily against the doorway, eyes shut as he groans and kicks off his shoes. 

You’re in the living room, waiting for him, but he doesn’t even see and breezes past the area straight for the bedroom. 

You set down your tea and pad after him, watching him slowly undress as he walks, leaving the soiled scrubs behind him as he stumbles into the bedroom. He faceplants straight into your shared bed, naked except for his boxers. 

“Yoongi,” you whisper, tossing the scrubs into the laundry hamper. “We need to talk.” You grab a fresh set of boxers and a t-shirt for him to wear. Walking forward, you nudge his shoulder until he groans and sits up. 

“What.” he says tiredly, cranky as you hand him the clothes. 

Frowning, you cross your arms. “I know you’re tired but this is important.” 

He wipes his face with his hand, lingering and pressing down a bit on his eyes and temples before tiredly frowning up at you. “Go.” He breathes out, and you fight the urge to pick at his tone. 

“Today,” you whisper, taking the seat at the vanity across from the bed. “The show asked me about my marriage.” 

He just watches you, elbows on his knees as he clasps his hands infront of him. “Mhm.” He mutters.

 Swallowing, you cross your legs, blinking down at the grey of your sweats. “And...I lied.” 

Time seems to stop. You know he knows. Yoongi graduated at the top of his class. He was a genius, and was married to you long enough to have everything about your relationship engrained in his bones. He wasn’t stupid. 

“What...” he trails off, taking a moment to choose his words carefully. “What did you say?” 

You notice he doesn’t repeat the word “lie” again. 

“I told them we were perfect.” You whisper, eyes tearing up for the third time that day. 

You had finished up schedules quite quickly and had rushed home, excited and giddy that hopefully, today would be the day that would transform everything back to its rightful place. Yoongi’s schedule was clear and that would mean only one thing. 

From 6pm for an hour, you’d showered, shaving and exfoliating, and then had put on a mask while you styled your hair, and had taken utmost care to apply your makeup beautifully and choose the outfit that you’d never thought you’d be wearing again at this age. And then you’d waited. 

Sitting against the couch, you had waited, and waited, and waited, calling Yoongi to no avail. At 10pm, and the fourth hour of him not picking up nor responding, you’d given up. 

“Do you remember what today is?” You whisper, shoulders drooping with the effort. It was just so...hard. You couldn’t take it anymore. 

He doesn’t respond, and you answer him before he does. “Our anniversary. Yoongi, its our fourth year married...did...did you forget?” You ask him, eyes brimming with tears. 

His mouth falls open a little and that’s enough to answer your question that hangs in the air. “Oh Y/N,” he says lowly, eyes sadly looking up to you. “I-...I’m so sorry, there was an emergency Craniotomy and my phone was off the entire day and...” He sighs, head falling down. “I’m so sorry.” 

You notice that he doesn’t make the effort to stand up and walk over to you. 

And just like that, you realize that the few feet that stand between the bed and the vanity, and subsequently you and your husband, exemplifies the way you both grew apart. 

All the frustrations, the resentment, the hatred, the pent-up-anger comes up all at once. 

“I....I want a divorce, Yoongi.” 

[thorongil82]

Silver Rings for a Web of Love - Chapter 1

Summary: After having to deal with every little thing that could have gone wrong; the breaking of the Avengers in the Civil War, Rhodey's injuries, the coming of Thanos, The Infinity War, The Decimation, returning the fallen to the land of the living, and battling Secretary Ross and the United Nations over amending the Sokovia Accords, finally Tony Stark has earned time for a break. Finally the world seems to be peaceful enough for a wedding that he knows is long overdue. Finally, he can marry Pepper Potts and all the Avengers are invited. Though a certain Spiderling's life may not be quite the way he would like it to be. 

Yes, he may still be the masked hero of Queens that the majority of the public adores. Yes, he may be studying in NYU in engineering and chemistry. Yes, he may be sharing an apartment with his best friend, Ned Leeds. But, when it comes to a certain snarky, frizzy haired girl who'd been observing him since high school, things haven't gone quite as smoothly as his heart so desperately hopes it had. Maybe a couple of weeks away can change that …

Chapter: 1/?

Words: 3601

A/N: So, I kinda ended up having this idea while writing the next chapter for Every Waking Nightmare. And, because I was a little stagnant in working on that, I moved onto this to help keep some creative juices flowing. Just, some quick information: 

First, this is set both after Endgame and after Far From Home, though admittedly I don't know when FFH will be. But, as they still seem to be in high school there, this should definitely be afterwards. Secondly, even though it will have a lot of other characters and it is a Stark Wedding AU, this is much more a Spideychelle fic than anything else. Thirdly, this'll run in an AU where everyone returns after Endgame, regardless of if they were taken out by The Decimation or killed in the lead up to it. Characters that died before Infinity War, I'm still tossing up on. Fourthly, there may be some stuff later on that may require trigger warnings. If there are, I'll let you know beforehand. 

Finally, and I apologise for the long note to begin, I'm going to try something a bit new with this. My thought was to open each chapter with a quote relating to the theme, and a song/video that I listened to whilst writing the chapter out. Would be good to here your thoughts on it. Anyway, that's enough from me. Onwards!

As a quick note for the Tumblr readers, I’m posting this on both AO3 and Tumblr. Trying something new. As such, there may be slight edits to accompany the change, but otherwise things should stay the same. There’s a link on my blog to the AO3 version if you prefer that, because I still don’t know if the linking issue has been fixed yet or not. 

Chapter 1 - An Invitation Plus One

Song of the Chapter: Interstate Love Song - Stone Temple Pilots

"Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature Love says: 'I need you because I love you."

~ Erich Fromm

It wasn't every day that Peter got to travel to the Avengers compound. Sure, Mr. Stark had been trying to get more in contact with him, to make him a much more integral part of the team, but his classes at NYU would, at times, get in the way. Plus he could never abandon his duties to the people of New York. When he had first turned down joining the Avengers, he had wanted to keep close to the ground. Build up his experience. Look out for the little guy. Still try to live the life a kid like he was should have been able to.

Of course, a big purple alien decided to throw a big wrench in that plan. Or, rather, a giant spaceship. And a large golden gauntlet.

He knew he didn't have to go and help. But he had to. What else was he supposed to do? There was a giant spaceship shaped like a spinning donut in the sky. He had to make sure that his classmates didn't get hurt. And, obviously, the best thing his mind could come up with was to leap out of a moving bus with just his mask on and swing away after a distraction from Ned – he'll thank whatever deity he needs to for the fact that Ned was as surprised as he was – to go and stop the invaders. So, he got to reunite with and fight alongside Iron Man, meet a couple of wizards and a levitating cloak, and fight against and with a group of aliens. It could have been a power team. Maybe it should have been. Dr. Strange had looked into the future. He saw the one way that we could win. The plan was set. They had Thanos beaten. Mr. Stark was so close to taking off the gauntlet. He himself was so close. But the other human, Starlord, he had to go and lose control. It didn't make sense at the time. Everyone nearly died. Thanos nearly killed Mr. Stark. Strange gave up his stone. And then half the universe just disappeared. One by one they faded away. And, damn his senses, he felt it coming before it happened. It had felt horrible. Every fibre of his being screaming and tearing away, with nothing that he could do. Actually fading away caused no pain. Maybe it was because of how panicky he had been once he figured out what his instincts were howling at him. However, he still felt a lot of pain when it took hold. The fading, that wasn't it. The others that were dusted said that it just didn't feel like anything. They deduced that it was his healing factor working overtime to try and keep himself together. It had been so much that it nearly killed him a second time when the remaining Avengers succeeded in defeating Thanos and bringing everyone back to life. Mr. Strange magically transported The Guardians and them both back to Earth from Titan. Everything was finally over. The Avengers were, for the most part, back together again, with some new recruits; aliens, wizards, two humans that have travelled through the stars, and a high school student.

After the conflict, the public had, for the most part, rallied behind the Rouge Avengers, and the long fight to rectify the Accords fairly could carefully begin. The Rouge Avengers were pardoned, against the urges of Secretary Ross, and the others were invited to officially join the group. Everyone except Spider-Man, because everyone; the Avengers, the Rouges, the new recruits, and the few outside the superhero cohort still intricately involved, agreed that it would be a very bad idea for the world to find out his secret identity while he was still just a kid. So it was that Peter unofficially became an Avenger, and still is. The world still doesn't know who lies underneath the red-and-blue spandex, or whatever other suit is required for the job. And as far as everyone else knows, Peter Parker goes to the Avengers compound as Tony Stark's part-time assistant. Which isn't exactly a lie – he does do a fair amount of inventing and engineering for Stark Industries, alongside helping with some upgrades for Avengers gear. And, as far as he's aware, that is why he is being driven through the gates and up the driveway of the compound right now.

“You good, kid?” comes the voice of Happy Hogan from the driver's seat. Despite the years, he hasn't changed a lot from what Peter has seen. He still travels everywhere in a suit and hasn't observably aged. However, from his conversations and reports, Peter has noticed how he seems to have softened a little.

“Yeah. Why do you ask?”

“You're just … oddly quiet,” he answers as the car pulls up to the front of the complex.

“I'm just thinking about stuff. Things I can do during spring break,” Peter explains, lying through his teeth for the second part.

“Ah huh ...” Happy nods. For what it's worth to Peter, it doesn't seem like he's noticed the lie he told. Though, Happy was never one to wear his emotions on his sleeve, unless it was either stress or anger.

“I'm not carrying your bag, kid,” Happy says as he turns around, breaking Peter out of his train of thought. Looking around, he could see the car had stopped a while ago.

“Oh, uh … yeah, right,” Peter stammers, his hand quickly snaking to rub the back of his neck. “Thanks, Happy.”

Happy gives him a nod as the spiderling grabs the backpack beside him and slings it over his shoulder before dashing out of the vehicle. Striding out and climbing up the stairway, Peter arrives inside the sparkling clean foyer.

“Hello, Peter,” greeted the soothing feminine voice of F.R.I.D.A.Y. from above.

“Hey, Friday.”

“You're here early.”

“Yeah, Mr. Stark asked me to come in today instead of tomorrow,” Peter replied as he began walking through the complex.

“The boss has been alerted of your arrival. He's on his way down.”

“Thanks, Fri.”

Peter Parker continued his walk through the complex, passing multiple suits and artefacts from previous battles that were no longer in use; such as the dilapidated remains of several Iron Man suits including the battered and scarred mask of the first nanotech suit, a few pieces of weaponry out of War Machine's arsenal, Captain America's strike suit, sketches and designs of suits for several of the Avengers, and a jet-black hooded outfit and mask with blood orange and golden outlines, metallic gauntlets and a sleek katana that no one had bothered to tell the young Parker who it belonged to. It was while his gaze lingered on the more menacing outfit that the nearby elevator opened up, from within which Tony Stark strode out.

“Ah, there you are, kid,” the playboy billionaire says with a smile as he walks out of the elevator, snapping Peter out of his trance.

“Hey, Mr. Stark.”

“You know you can call me Tony, right?” he questions as he puts an arm round the young Parker and leads him into the elevator.

“Yeah,” Peter admits, shifting his weight from side to side as the elevator doors slide shut in front of them. “Force of habit.”

“Well, at least you were raised polite. School going alright? I've still got pull at MIT if you want to change-”

“It's fine, Mr. Sta- I mean, Tony,” the young adult catches himself, shaking his head slightly at his mistake. “No problems.”

“You sure?” Tony asks as he shifts his gaze down to his assistant.

“Yep. Work's all finished. Had an exam today. I'm pretty sure it went alright. Just got one more tomorrow and then-”

“Spring break, right?”

Peter nods.

“Ah, spring break, such fond memories … Lots of parties, plenty of girls …”

“Really?”

“Well I assume so,” Tony says with a shrug. “I was rich and a ladies man, but I also drank like a sailor. My memory isn't what it once was.”

“But you're one of the smartest people in the world!”

“Nah, everyone's starting to catch up,” Tony says, waving his hand as if to dismiss Peter's previous statement. “And a couple seem to be passing me by already – yourself included.”

“I wouldn't say that,” Peter chuckles embarrassingly, his hand snaking round his neck once again.

“So, you got any plans?”

“Uh, no … not really,” Peter replies as the elevator doors open, the billionaire and the spiderling walking through the shiny corridor towards Mr. Stark's personal laboratory.

“Really? Nothing? A good guy like you?”

Peter shakes his head.

“No parties? No girls? No heavy drinking?”

“No sir,” Peter answers, getting a grimace from the cocky philanthropist.

“That formality probably has something to do with it,” Tony mutters as they enter his lab.

Peter's face lights up as the room bursts into light, illuminating all the equipment, prototypes, particles, shiny metal and machinery thrown all over the place. He dashes over to the large pearl-white workbench in the centre of the room, his feet sliding along the polished floor as he comes to a stop. As soon as his hands press down on the work surface, the top dilutes to a dark cobalt-blue before sparking to life, an electric-blue hologram projecting upwards from the surface and shifting to form a large intricate design that appeared to be blueprints for a new type of Iron Man suit.

“So, what are we working on today, Mr- uh … Tony?” the young Parker inquires as his eyes dance with the light of the projection, remembering to catch himself on the name.

“First things first,” Tony interjects, sauntering slowly to the bench and waving a hand through the air, swiping the design back down into the table. He then reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out an envelope, handing it to Peter. “This is for you.”

Peter takes the envelope with an inquisitive look and opens it, pulling out a small folded page with a flowery pattern adorning the border. Unfolding it, he begins to read the words:

Mr. Peter Parker

You are cordially invited by

Tony Stark and Pepper Potts

to celebrate their union in holy matrimony. 

“W-Wait,” Peter exclaims, his eyes going wide. “This is for your wedding!”

“That's right,” Tony bluntly answers, shrugging his suit jacket off his shoulders before tossing it through the air, a coat hanger descending from the ceiling and catching it somewhat roughly before elevating back up into the roof.

“Bu- Wha- Why am I-” Peter stammers, his mind and mouth both currently being completely unable to form a simple sentence. His disbelieving laugh dies as he looks up at the smirking face of his mentor. “Th-This can't be right.”

“And why's that?”

“Well, I mean, why would I be invited?”

“Hmm, let's see here … Uh, you're part of the team, you help me out in here plenty of times, I have a certain amount of care for you that goes well beyond what most people could even dream of ...” Mr. Stark lists off, counting off each point on his fingers.

“That can't be … Is that true?”

“Don't interrupt me, I wasn't finished,” Tony says, holding up a hand. “Now, where was I?”

“The Care Bear Protocol,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. answers from above.

“Wait, Care Bear Protocol?!” Peter exclaims, eyes shooting towards Tony Stark.

“Unimportant details,” he responds, waving away the young Parker's many unspoken questions both figuratively and literally as one of his hands sails through the air in front of him.

“Oh god,” Peter groans, a hand flying up to hide his shame as his face quickly heats up in embarrassment.

“You're smart, respectable, polite,” Tony continues listing, as if the previous interruption hadn't happened, “Everyone on the team loves having you around, you brighten everyone's day, you're a hero to the people and you're probably the best out of all of us. So, yes, you're invited.”

Peter hesitantly looks back at the invitation, taking in the information.

“So, this is why you wanted me here today?”

“Yep. Pepper and I are leaving tomorrow after we finish up with some meetings.”

“The wedding's in a fortnight, though,” Peter observes, reading from the invitation and looking up with a puzzled expression.

“We could do with a break beforehand,” Tony explains, crossing his arms over the reactor in his chest. “Won't really have too much time for a honeymoon afterwards, so might as well get it over with beforehand with the team.”

Peter goes to open his mouth, but is cut off as Mr. Stark adds, “And yes, that includes you.”

“Cool! But … I've got an exam tomorrow. I can't just leave tomorrow.”

“Check the envelope.”

Peter takes another look inside the envelope and pulls out two plane tickets, boarding passes and small cards similar to the ID scanners that everyone uses in the newly re-bought and re-furnished Stark Tower. Looking at the plane tickets, Peter noted the departure time for 0800 hours on Saturday; the day after tomorrow.

“You're not the only one who can't get there straight away,” Tony explains. “Some are still getting there mid-week. I'd already checked in with NYU about when your exams were and planned around it.”

“Um … Mr. Stark?” Peter says, looking back up at his mentor.

“That name's not going to go away, is it?” Tony sighs, causing Peter's eyes to widen at his comment.

“Uh … probably not,” Peter answers guiltily.

“Don't worry, kid,” Tony says with a smile, bringing a smile to his student. “What is it?”

“Why are there two of all these?”

“Oh, well that's because everyone can bring someone along, and you've been put down for a 'plus one',” Mr. Stark clarifies.

“But I don't think I'll be able to bring anyone.”

“Really? No one?”

“Well, May's going to be away in Hawaii for another wedding, and Ned's going on a holiday with his family and his girlfriend.”

“What about that girl you hang around?”

“Michelle? No! Nonononono!” Peter frantically utters, vehemently shaking his head. “That would not be a good idea.”

“Why not?” Tony asks, eyebrows raising up in surprise. “I thought you guys were pretty close.”

“We are- were. It's … uh … It's not great …”

“What happened? You always use to spew your guts about every little thing about her. It got pretty annoying.”

“Um … you remember what happened in Europe?” Tony nods. “Well … we were kinda supposed to go on a date …”

“Wait, you were supposed to go on a date, or you were kinda going on a date?”

“We were going on a date … kinda.”

Tony sighs and shakes his head, but motions for the kid to continue.

“Well … we were going to be going to a carnival, but I was running a little late. On the way, one of Beck's goons tricked me and I ended up fighting Beck. By the time I had him webbed up, I was super late and she was so frustrated at me. She just screamed and shouted at me at the hotel and then didn't speak to me for the next three months.”

“Did you tell her why you missed it?” Tony asks. Peter drops his gaze to the floor and shakes his head, sinking into a nearby chair. Tony sighs and goes up to the youth, clapping a hand down on his fallen shoulder. “Well, that would have been a start. It could've helped her understand-”

“No! No, I … I can't tell her,” Peter states, his hands fumbling in the air in front of him. “I-I … I just can't.”

“Kid, all relationships are built on trust-”

“You don't understand: I can't tell her because she doesn't know I'm Spider-Man!” Peter declares, looking up at Tony Stark. “I … I never told her.”

“Why wouldn't you tell her?”

“I didn't want her to be hurt. I-If more people keep finding out who I am, then they'll be in danger. Vulture threatened to hurt everyone and Mysterio used his knowledge to distract me and lure me away.”

“We can take care of-”

“It's not the same. The Avengers can take care of each other. May, Ned, MJ … I-If someone like that comes after them …”

“It's alright, kid. Nothing's going to happen to them,” Tony assures as he crouches down in front of Peter, rubbing the younger man's legs as his eyes seem to stare off into space. His breathing quickens and becomes shorter as the panic starts to set in. “Hey, look at me. Peter.”

Peter slowly lifts his head to look at his mentor's eyes.

“Follow my breathing, okay?”

The young adult nods and follows as Tony starts with a normal paced breath, waiting for Peter's to drop down and meet it before carefully slowing it down until the young Parker had calmed down.

“All good, kid?”

Peter swallows and nods in response.

“Do you want my advice?”

Peter nods again.

“Okay. If you want to fix things between the two of you, my suggestion is that you tell her.”

“But I-”

“Don't interrupt,” Mr. Stark says abruptly, causing Peter to shut his mouth. “Do you still like her?”

“It's … It's complicated.”

“Kid, it's a yes or no question.”

“Well … Yes,” Peter admits, running a hand through his short curls. “But, it's not that easy.”

“Sure it is,” Stark responds with a shrug. “Three simple words: I am Spider-Man. Nice and short. Just like when I announced myself.”

“No, it's not,” Peter disputes. “I can't. I can't bring her into this world. If … If someone finds out, and she gets hurt … I just can't loose her again. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if she's hurt because of me.”

“You realise you're saying this to a guy who's about to get married, right?”

“I-I didn't mean-”

“Look, kid,” Tony interjects, clearing his throat, “I know how you feel. It took me years to work up the courage to ask Pepper to marry me. And even then, it kept getting put off because of all these people that think they're powerful enough to rule the world. Or the galaxy. Or … whatever. Point is, in that time I realised something. It wouldn't matter how she felt about me, or whether we were together or not. So long as I cared about her, she would be in danger. People kept targeting her to get to me. Didn't matter what stage our relationship was in. So, if I was the one that was keeping her in danger, then I would do whatever it takes to make sure she's safe.”

“Also,” he continues as Peter opens his mouth, “if you want to be happy in life, then your better off being with the people you love. It'll hurt you to keep them at a distance, and it can hurt them too if they don't know why you're pushing them away.”

“So, what should I do?”

“Try to patch things up. I'm assuming you guys are at least in a civil acquaintanceship?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Peter answers glumly. “There are times were it seems friendly, and times where it still seems like she hates my guts. Then again, she is pretty dry and standoff-ish to everyone anyway, so that might just be her being who she is.”

“Then ask her to come. Tell her you're Spider-Man and bring her along.”

“Just like that? Hi, just thought I'd let you know I'm Spider-Man. Do you want to come to a wedding? I can't do that!”

“Fine, pick your moment. But I still want you to invite her.”

“And how do I explain that we'll be staying with The Avengers?”

“Why wouldn't The Avengers be there?”

“It's not that. It's just … what perfectly normal reason would there be for me to be there?”

“Well, if she-”

“One that doesn't involve me telling her I'm Spider-Man,” Peter cuts off Tony Stark, resulting in a glare from his mentor.

“Eh, we'll get there when we get there.”

“That's not really the kind of answer I was looking for.”

“Well, you keep wanting to make it difficult.”

“This is not going to go well,” Peter groans and drops his head into his hands before running them through his hair.

Tony sighs and stands up, walking over to the bench. He taps a couple of times on the surface, causing the bench-top to flash blue, before pinching the air and dragging upwards, springing up the holographic blueprints from earlier.

“How about we have a look at this?” Tony suggests as he folds his arms over his chest, getting Peter to look back up at him. “It'll help get your mind off your troubles, and get your head in gear for your exams tomorrow.”

Peter pushes himself out of his chair and stands next to Mr. Stark.

“Sure, but … um … I already planned to go to May's afterwards for dinner. I said I'd be there by 7.”

“What time is it now, Fri?” Tony asks, his eyes focusing on the designs.

“2:13,” the AI answers from above.

“Ah, we've got plenty of time,” Mr. Stark says, unfolding one of his arms and resting it on Peter's shoulder. “Hell, we'll probably have this all finished well before then.”

His arms shoot out to the holograms and brush a couple of designs aside before focusing in on the reactor and energy couplets and bringing his hands out wide, zooming into the design.

“How about we focus here first?”

A/N: So, there we go. First one out of the way. A shorter chapter than what I typically write, but probably about right for an introduction. Things may get longer. 

I'd like to hear your thoughts on the chapter. Suggestions, criticisms, ideas, all of that is welcome. In particular, I don't necessarily have a complete idea for events that they will all do before the wedding, so if there's anything in particular you want to see, whether it be an event, a face-off, or a particular relationship development event, please feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do.

The next chapter will be uploaded as it's written. So, until then, adios.

[docsamurai]

Let’s Kill Hitler - Chapter 1

Don’t know how long this is going to be, but I got a rather fun idea at lunch today and by the time I made it home after work I knew I needed to turn it into at least a short story. There’ll probably be at least another couple of chapters, enjoy though.

For the 4th time in the last hour George checked his phone in a futile attempt to will a signal to appear from out of nowhere. Obviously he wasn’t going to find wifi in Cleveland in the 1920s but he still checked, mostly out of habit. George went back to doing situps in his cell, wracking his brain in a desperate attempt to find some way to fix all of this. The sergeant was leaning back in his chair, half asleep with his feet propped up on his desk. Without opening his eyes the sergeant groaned and shifted in his seat. “Keep it down in there chink.”

George sat on the thin, threadbare mattress and rubbed the bridge of his nose where he could feel a headache coming on. It had only been a day since he woke up hungover in the middle of the street over a hundred years in the past, but it felt like a lifetime. The door to the holding area swung open and bald man in a crisp black suit carrying a briefcase walked in startling the sergeant out of his nap. The frowning man looked around the station before finally locking eyes with the sergeant who was lurching to his feet. “Who in the hell-“

The bald man opened his jacket to show his badge before extending a hand towards the sergeant “Officer Donnely. Travis Coal, FBI. I’m here to collect Mr. Li who it appears you have in custody.” The sergeant looked at the FBI agent and down at the extended hand, not fully comprehending what was happening. Cautiously Sergeant Donnely finally took the offered hand and went to get the key to the holding cell. Donnely stopped in front of the cell, the key in his hand before a thought occurred to him and he turned back to Agent Coal. Before Donnely could say anything Agent Coal held up a hand and cut him off. “I’ve already filed the transfer paperwork, your captain signed off on it a moment ago. The sooner I have Mr. Li, the sooner I can let you get back to your… work.”

Donnely’s jaw flexed as his temper flared at the Agent’s implied insult but he sighed and let it go. Shrugging Donnely unlocked the cell door and slid it open with a heavy clank. The color drained from George’s face as he realized his day was going from bad to worse. Having to put up with racist police was bad enough, but now federal agents were getting involved and somehow they already knew his name. “I swear, I didn’t do anything. I’m just trying to get…” George’s voice trailed off as Agent Coal’s frown deepened and he brought out a pair of handcuffs. Sergeant Donnely trudged back to his desk and propped his feet up again as Agent Coal led George out of the station and into the back of a car waiting outside.

Travis Coal sighed and unlocked the handcuffs before climbing into the driver’s seat. The agent pulled a phone out of his inner jacket pocket and swiped through a few screens as he muttered under his breath. “For fucks sake George, did you have any kind of goddamn plan?” George sat wide eyed in the back seat stammering through his excuses before a realization finally clicked. “Wait, you’re from the future too?” Travis glanced meaningfully down at the phone in his hand and before giving George a withering glare. “What gave it away?” Travis sighed and scratched a patch of stubble on the back of his head. “Yes, moron, I’m from the future. I’m not with the FBI though I do work for the government, specifically the Bureau of Time Traveler Affairs.”

George gave Travis a blank stare and shrugged, Travis grunted in response and started the car. “Short version: it’s my job to come back and rescue idiots like you who get the bright idea to try and time travel and get stuck. I gotta say it’s usually only white guys that are dumb enough to do this.” Travis put the Chevy series FB in gear and pulled out into traffic. “We just need to get far enough out of town to open up a return portal without causing a commotion and then we can get back to our own time.”

George started to reach for his phone again out of habit before sheepishly sliding it back in his pocket and shifting in his seat. “Am I going to be in trouble?” Travis looked back at him and let his frown soften a bit. The guy was an idiot but he was in over his head and at least he wasn’t being a jackass about it. “A little bit. The time lab your friend worked for isn’t happy but nothing got broken so they’re not pressing charges. There’s some fines for misuse of a Time Portal and you’ll also need to cover the cost of the tests we’re going to have to run to make sure we didn’t pick up any diseases that are supposed to be dead but you’re not going to jail or anything.”

A long moment of silence passed as George fidgeted in the back seat before Travis finally pulled his phone out and opened a recording app. “We’ll have to take a statement anyway so we might as well do it now. Please state your name and date of birth for the record.” “George Li. August 2nd 2007” “We recorded a time portal between June 18th 2032 and June 18th 1923, is it correct that you went through that portal and went back to that timeline?” “Yes.” “The current local time is 18:00 on June 19th 1923 meaning you have been in the past for approximately 18 hours. Is that accurate?” “Yes.” “During that time did you make any significant alteration to the timeline? For instance, have you possibly impregnated anyone or killed anyone?” “…No.”

Travis glanced back at George and stopped the recording. “You paused there. If something happened I need to know about it. I don’t care what it was, I just need to know for the record.” George shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I was kinda drunk when I got here. I don’t remember hooking up, but it could have happened.” Travis cleared his throat. “Any deaths? Even accidental ones? Again, I just need to know for our records.” George shook his head. Travis nodded and resumed the recording. “In your own words, what was your purpose in time travelling?”

“So I was out with my friend Nick, the guy who worked at the time lab, and he was telling me about how they had a time machine. I didn’t believe him, but he kept telling me how they used it all the time for boring nerd crap like research. We had a few beers, then some shots, and he asked me if I wanted to use the time machine at the lab and go ‘do some wild west shit’. I told him that I always wanted to kill Hitler. Next thing I know I’m waking up a hundred years in the past with a hangover.”

Travis groaned and shook his head. “Of course you did. That’s all for now.” Travis tapped the button on his screen and turned off the recording. They drove in silence the rest of the way to the outskirts of town where they found an empty field. Travis parked the car and opened the back door to find George crying in the back. “Oh come on, that’s really unnecessary.” George sniffled and drew a shuddering breath. “Please man, I can’t go to prison! I just wanted to do something good and then I got drunk and next thing I know I’m stuck in a weird time and I don’t know where I am and my phone didn’t work and I didn’t know how to get home and-“

Travis raised his hands, cutting George off. “It’s fine, you’re not going to prison, I already told you that. Just calm down. Besides if we were going to lock up every person who went back in time to kill Hitler we’d have to build a much bigger jail.” George stopped hyperventilating and his brow furrowed as he thought about what Travis said. “Wait, so other people tried to kill Hitler too? How come no one got him?”

Travis pulled up his suit sleeve and started tapping buttons on a device on his wrist. “Tried and succeeded for the most part. Lots of people have done it. Hell I’ve done it. Killing Hitler is a common enough time travel situation we literally use it as part of basic training for Time Agents.” Travis looked up to see George standing dumbfounded with his head cocked to the side and his mouth hanging open. Travis sighed and smiled slightly at George. “Ah, so here’s the thing, time travel doesn’t work the way you think it does. It’s called Multiverse Theory. When you go back in time and change something, you’re not changing your own timeline. Let’s say you somehow made it all the way to Germany, found Hitler, killed him and then came back to your own time. In your original time nothing would have changed. Hitler would still be dead, just at the time he was supposed to be dead. The alternate reality you created when you travelled back in time would have a dead Hitler and then history would change from there, but only in that alternate reality.

George leaned against the hood of the car and looked off into the distance. “So it wouldn’t mean anything?” Travis shrugged “Nothing we do really means anything. There’s infinite realities out there so every choice we make, whether it’s big or small, what you have for lunch or whether or not you kill Hitler, there’s another reality out there where you made a different decision.” George’s shoulders slumped as he thought about what he just heard. “That’s big man.” Travis nodded and patted George on the shoulder. “I know, it’s a lot to take in. Personally I find it’s best to just focus on the now and be a good person.

Travis checked the map on his phone and hit one more button on the device on his wrist and a dark swirling portal opened in front of them. “Come on, let’s go home.” George continued to lean against the car, deep in thought. “Come on George, the portal is only going to be open for a few more minutes and if we don’t go now it’ll take hours for it to charge back up.”

George looked back at Travis, a strange look in his eye and a big grin on his face. “Hey, it’s Travis right? Can I call you T?” “I’d really rather you didn’t” “Cool, so hey bro, it doesn’t matter what we do here right? Like I could go kill Hitler and it wouldn’t change anything? And we can use that thing on your wrist to get us back home any time right?” Travis groaned and shook his head “Oh no, I see where this is going.” George jumped off the car and clapped his hands “C’mon bro, I’ve always wanted to kill Hitler. He’s Hitler! History’s greatest monster! And if we get in trouble we can just use your portal thing to escape. I promise I’ll go back as soon as we’re done and whatever fines I’ve gotta pay it’ll be worth it.”

The portal wavered for a moment, catching Travis’ eye. Travis looked into the swirling energies of time and sighed. “George, listen to me. We have no IDs, no food, no money, no weapons and we’re 4000 miles away from Germany. There’s infinite possibilities yeah, but I’d really rather not be in one of the ones where I die a hundred years and a thousand miles from home. Besides, what exactly would we gain from going through all the trouble of killing Hitler? It’s been done!”

George grinned and practically bounced on the balls of his feet. “C’mon man. You’re all smart and shit, I’m sure between the two of us we can figure it out. Besides, It’ll be a fun story.” Travis tapped a button on his wrist and the portal closed. “You’re lucky you’re cute.” George’s grin got even wider and he rushed forward to give Travis a hug. “You’re the best bro!” Travis got back in the car and started the engine. “Alright, you win, let’s go kill Hitler.”

[fenton-bus]

I.

How To Lose Acquaintances And Discourage People

    All you really need to know is this:

Austin spills his Monster Energy drink on some Hawaiian-shirt wearing redhead in his Poli-Sci class and Trish ends up paying for it for the remainder of her natural life.

∞

A long shadow falls over her IPad screen.

  Despite the fact that she is a grownup-esque, adult-ish, totes mature person Trish honestly cannot help the rapid fluttering of her heart, the dizzy thrill of reckless hope at the possibility that today of all days, in this crummy corner of Daley’s surrounded by sad, dreamless randoms she’s managed to find her James Darcy or Edward Cullen. Bracing herself against her chair, Trish takes a breath, turns around.

 “Do you ever think about parallel dimensions?”

 JK, its Dez, decked out in a leopard print vest, polka dot pants combo that screams I’m a grown man.

 Trish wrinkles her nose. “What are you wearing?”

 He smiles, wide and warm before choosing a direction to stare into like a pirate ship captain gazing off into the horizon. Hands on hips, dignity forgotten.

 A solitary hair flip. “I woke up like this.”

 “Go back to sleep. It obviously didn’t work.”

 His mouth falls open in an all too real outrage, palms spread. Sensing the full twirl before it happens Trish holds up one hand.

 “Flawless.” Dez intones.

 The voice is more Batman than Beyoncé.

 “No.”

 “Bow down.”

 Trish winces. Grits her teeth. “We’ve been over this freckles, you’re not allowed to blaspheme Beyoncé Carter-Knowles.” It’s way too early in her life for this. "Please go put on different pants.”

 “I hear your criticism, Dez rocks back on the balls of his feet. And I’m going to go in another direction.”

 “The door?”

 “Nope.” There is the ear-punching scratching of chair legs being dragged across the wooden floor (and the subsequent staring of sad randoms without lives) and bam, pale, freckled, freakishly long limbs are stretching across the table to get at her pumpkin spice muffin, gargantuan Franken-feet are nudging her flats under the table, and Dez’s face, sparkling with a truly exhausting amount of joy like they haven’t seen each other in four years as opposed to four days is turned toward her like some giant, non-verbal invitation there aren’t enough versions of ‘I Renounce Thee Satan’ in the world to rsvp to. Trish grabs her iced caramel macchiato and hugs it to her chest protectively.

 “Go away.”

Dez eyes her IPad. “Dude, are you tweeting Quincy Jones again? He hasn’t responded to your last five tweets. He flips his hair again. (Trish does not growl) That last one had a pretty aggressive tone.”

“Carrot face, the girl says sweetly. I’m working.”

The doof actually smiles in this commiserating way, like he lives in a world where applying for internships and writing music reviews are in every way comparable to juggling or baking brownies or riding a unicycle down the Long Island Expressway or whatever he does with his free time. Trish rolls her eyes. Seven months ago she would’ve called Dez Wade a doof and moved on but now, his status is clear: he is high king of the doofs. The Eminent Supreme Doof. On his home planet, whole civilizations of lesser doofs have carved his image in stone and decorated the halls of his palace with his stupid, doofy portrait. The amount of sheer doofiness that is able to exist in one pale, stick figure of a body is Beyond.

 Sometimes, the fact that someone like Dez even exists, much less speaks to her on a daily basis is just…how? Or, it would be, if Trish thought about it for too long. At the moment, she’s up to letting it sit in her brain for a maximum of thirty seconds before she decides to go out and

 Anyway, Dez is saying “Cool,” like he’s worked before, and nodding and launching into a conversation he had with his cat this morning and she’s totally succeeding at not paying attention (on goes the IPad, hello Twitter) when he claps his hands real loud, real sudden, and shouts “Okay!”

The barista formerly carrying the iced mocha latte is currently frozen in place, watching it sail across the room. Staying on its given trajectory means it’ll collide with Wall Street Guy who chose today of all days to wear his best Brooks Brothers suit. But the dude is so busy having a deep convo with Bargain Basement 90s Era Will Smith (big ears, neon green windbreaker, dark purple fanny pack, currently singing the items on the specials board to himself) that he doesn’t notice the coffee he didn’t order until it’s sloshing around in what was previously his very natural looking hair piece. (Wall Street has been coming in and ordering black double espressos since midterms. Trish can’t believe she didn’t notice the rug.)

 Wall Street Guy’s yelp is drowned out by the actual scream of the woman at the table behind him, when his wet hair falls on top of her cinnamon bun.

 “My bad.” Dez mutters.

Trish manages to tear her eyes away from the beautiful train wreck long enough to give him her limited-edition, Side-Eye that had he actually been looking at her, would have given him the effect of feeling judged for all eternity.

Now Cammy the Barista is gazing off into the distance. Not like a pirate captain though, she looks legitimately horrified. Trish has seen that very specific brand of shock and terror on her co-workers faces whenever her bosses go on tangents about “trimming excess”. Trish knows that right this very moment, every tiny, seemingly trivial mistake Cammy’s ever made inside these walls is flashing through her head movie montage style. (the soundtrack? Her anguish) Every messed up order, every backed up afternoon rush,  every time she had to tell the long-haired, piercing-riddled, Ray-Bans wearing, tattooed,   painter from Brooklyn on his usual stop in during his morning bike ride no they didn’t have Amish-made, vegan cranberry pumpkin bread maybe he should try the vegan bakery on lower sixth and even though she got here at five and has already had three encounters that made her put quitting back on the table, and even though she has the same fifty-four word conversation with a dude who chooses to walk this earth with an un ironic rat tail every single morning since she woke up desperate enough to apply here, her voice is calm and polite and even a little regretful, like a tiny part of her feels bad about the fact that a major chain doesn’t carry Amish-made, vegan cranberry pumpkin bread-and then, after all of that Judgey McShower Please still finds enough inner tool bag necessary to take time out of his busy fixie bike tour of the lower east side to pluck one of the little white customer surveys from the pad next to the bucket of skull rings on the counter and fill it out, (resting his weight on the counter like the effort exerted by being a douche exhausts him) making passive aggressive scratching sounds with his pencil as he underlines the phrase “tone was needlessly aggressive” three times. 

 He hands it to her silently, hoists his bike on to his shoulder with one hand, and heads for the door. Trish hopes with all of her might that he rides through Hell’s Kitchen and falls into a construction hole.

As Cammy grapples with the very real possibility of being ‘terminated’ (she has school loans and a cat, and at some point, she kind of wanted to travel-or at least  see a view that wasn’t her elderly neighbors listening to Tony Benet and sucking face.) and Trish tears her eyes away from the ‘well I never’ bluster of  Wall Street Guys trembly rage, (if the vicious way he’s stabbing at his phone is any indication, this melt down is going to be epic) Dez manages to execute the ‘backing away slowly’ move while sitting down. He straightens his shoulders and fold his hands on the table like the last four minutes didn’t happen.

 According to Trish’s Creeper Manual, (545 Pgs., De La Rosa Publishing, $150.00 retail value, all funds go to The Trish De La Rosa foundation) sixty seconds without blinking is classified as a stare.

Trish stares back.

Dez starts humming The Jurassic Park theme.

 Her eyes are in very real danger of rolling out of her head and tumbling across this dirty floor.

 Thirty seconds. Forty-five.

 “Oh my God, what?”

 Dez starts. Smiles. “Oh, I was just wondering what I would look like if I had a carrot for a face.”

 “Do you own a mirror?” She says before she can stop herself.

 Inexplicably (no, she doesn’t want to know) the doof’s grin grows. “Would my face like transform into a carrot or would it just get really orange?”

 “Full on carrot. Trish nods. “Think werewolf but lamer.”

 “I could live with that. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting eaten unless I ran into people who really liked carrots. Ooh, maybe there’s some birth defect that causes people’s faces to turn out vegetable-y! Trish!” He slams his fist on the table, winces real hard, finds the strength to continue. "What if that’s my destiny, to gather all of the down-trodden vegta-people, looked down on, denied their rights simply for being full of folic acid.”

 His voice is rising like a Wonka-vator, gaze full of heroic things only he can see (thank god). She takes a long sip of her coffee, wonders what people lucky enough not to be her are doing right now.

 “Maybe that’s why I was put on this earth, to teach them to love themselves. We’ll live a life free of the judgment of you normies; we’ll build our own colony, with our own laws. He rubs his chin in thought. Maybe we’ll live in a pyramid.”

 “I will pack your bags.”

 “Thank you.”

 Trish leans over, smiling indulgently, pats his hands. “Anything for you buddy.”

 “Aww, His face changes. Wait-“

 “Hey, remember when I told you to scram?”  

 Dez nods, “Was that before or after we planned my future as the pop star impressionist Dezyonce?"

 Deep in the caverns of Trish’s temporal lobes, lies a specific set of neurons responsible for the chemical reaction to strong, talented women being besmirched by fools, thus she is just barely able to resist slapping him in the face with his own hand. Assault is assault after all, and she has the feeling anytime spent in police custody would just result in the gleeful taking of pre and post lock up selfies.

 “Listen Freckles, she intones, in the sweet tone that everyone but the idiot in front of her easily recognizes as the Trish DeLa Rosa, limited edition, “I Will Bury You, Then Innocently Read the Eulogy At Your Funeral With The Kind of Solemn Strength and Dignified Crying That Could Get Me An Oscar” timbre. I know some things-the concept of personal space, how much cologne is too much-are like, totally foreign to you, but if you pay attention, there are these tiny little things called indicators, that can tell you whether or not you’re going in the right direction.”

 He’s doing that rapt attention thing, looking at her with undivided, singular focus  like she’s reading him the bible or describing Zalian VII spoilers or giving him explicit instructions as to how to safely survive the on-coming zombie apocalypse. Trish thinks about this look approximately zero times a day, but if she did the quiet intensity of it, marred somewhat by the eagerness with which he leans over, as though it’s necessary to hear the pauses in her speech, would make the words gently elbowing each other for a prominent spot in her mouth feel incongruous.

 But it doesn’t.

 And they don’t.

 "For example, not only is the amount of Fantasy you’re wearing right now about four times the amount Britney would be caught dead in, but I think we can go ahead and classify it as a biohazard.” Trish straightens her back against her chair. "And it’s weird that you don’t already know this, but “go away” doesn’t mean “oh my god, come closer” in magical, confusing girl language. In general it usually means “go away”, in this specific case, she leans over making sure he’s looking directly into her eyes so there’s no goofy sitcom confusion about this later in the week, “it means the English language hasn’t created a precise set of words that would accurately describe how badly I want you to get out of your chair, and walk away right now.” 

 Trish squares her shoulders. “That’s an indicator.”

 She means for that to be punctuation, to go back to her tablet and if there is a God, maybe, just maybe hear the squeaking of a chair being pushed back and the shuffling of oversized P.F. Flyers, and every other sound of her morning being returned to her.

 But. Dez isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at the hand curled around the collar of his sweater. There is a hand curled around the collar of his sweater and his eyes are trained downward, so he can look at it without moving his head. But then he dips his chin a little, just a couple of inches and it’s hers. Her hand. Trish’s.

 “It’s Curious.”

 “What?”

 “I don’t um, I’m allergic to Fantasy so I only…” His voice tapers off, and Trish, Trish rips her hand away. 

 Dez looks at his hands, spread across the table, wiggles his fingers once, two times.

“So, um…yeah.” The squeaking of the chair legs being dragged across the floor is twice as loud, an unpleasant burst in her ears. The shuffling of worn, size twelve sneakers starts.

 Stops.

 “You want people to be afraid of you," His voice doesn’t tapper off, is calm and quiet and if it shakes only Dez knows for sure. But they aren’t. I know what that is, and no one, nobody’s afraid of you.”

Trish looks at the looping pink cursive of the specials board, Boca patties with bean sprouts, blue cheddar hummus, mushrooms and mozzarella on chibata.

 “People feel sorry for you.”

 Green onions and black bean sauce. Margarita pizza grilled cheese. Spinach and kale mini kiesh. God how many specials does this stupid place have?

 “Everyone feels sorry for you and they just act like they’re afraid, because that’s the politest way to do it. No one would ever say it to your face.”

 The thing Cammy puts above the door isn’t a legitimate bell,  it’s from some dumb door handle Christmas ornament reject thing her mom got her as a sort of homemade alarm system when she moved to Bushwick. Like something that sounds like a cat toy was gonna successfully warn her daughter about intruders. It doesn’t even work. The sound gets lost before it reaches the Beans of Columbia display.

 She sits for a minute. Her index finger brushing against her th-

She sits for a minute. Orders another caramel macchiato ‘cause her first one’s cold. She could heat it up but those coffee microwaves make everything taste weird. Her laptop emits a dissonant buzz that sounds like a choir of atonal bees.

 She doesn't move for a long time.

[sequoiann]

❧ y.jh | assassin!au

pairing; seventeen jeonghan x reader

genre; bulletpointed, assassin!jeonghan, fluff, mentions of blood

collab with; @kpop–fics

notes; @lunarjihoon here’s the assassin au for jeonghan !! i got noticed by you omg ///honored honored honored i luv you lots too bb !!!

jeonghan,,, 

the trickster of the team 

like, he could fool around with everybody  

and some people get annoyed sometimes like jEoNghAn be serious for once

but! 

the pros of jeonghan being a lying ass

he! is! experienced! as hell !!!

like he can tell who is lying lol

and can see through everyone’s telltales

like some members could be lying about,,, anything 

he WILL detect lies 

there was once

his team had accepted a new member who was really good at barehanded fighting

and they almost sent that new member for a major mission thingy bc he really wanted to do it ?? for some odd reason ??

but jeonghan just whacked that guy’s ass out of the team bc he found out that he was a spy from another rival’s team

and jeonghan instantly became recognized as an ace member of the team

ok so

one time

both you & jeonghan were dispatched to the same mission

and you are aware that you were going to have to go against him

since his bunch of men weren’t the most… secretive ones 

their security on their mission plans aren’t very well protected, you would say

that was the reason your boss sent you out tbh

your boss knew that you would be able to get the job done

so basically

you just,,,

snitched the documents while jeonghan was sneaking around and looking for the exact same ones you got HAHAHA

and he was about to freaking shoot you bc oh my god how dare you ???? go against ??? the almighty ????? yoon jeonghan ???? mE ????

but you were fast

like really fast

like really really really fast

that was your specialty

fast and swift and stealthy!!

you disappeared really quick with the documents and jeonghan later got blamed for not succeeding in the mission 

oops?

so jeonghan’s preeetty damn pissed @ you lmao

and ever since that plot-twisting, history-changing, tables-turning event

jeonghan became vvv determined to accomplish more missions to make up for the mistake 

it wasn’t really his fault but he was just

sO fiLLED wiTH vEnGeAnCE

so his boss was glad ofc

like ha i mean

jeonghan voluntarily completing tasks?

definitely not something that was common : )

and so, jeonghan was put on the mission to steal a blueprint that another company possessed 

by coincidence, you had to too

your company really needed those blueprints so off you go !!

it was not an easy start tho

you were still working with snipers from the damn stone age 

like,,, 

you were pretty sure the thing was about to fall apart 

you got so frustrated bc thispieceofshitwasmakingsomuchclankingnoises

you were pretty sure you looked ,,,,, kinda ,,,,,,, suspicious ,,,,,

so you dumped that shit aside 

you still had mini hand gun hidden on you so all’s safe yo

you entered the building disguised as a janitor 

you tied & locked the real janitor up in the storeroom aha

the collection of uniforms you have as an assassin was no joke tbh

but hey

who knew janitors could get in everywhere without being questioned

everyone just side glances you 

and at the corner of your eyes 

you saw another janitor 

and a million question marks just erupted from your confused head bc ????? i just locked you up ????? wha ???

you were afraid to get recognized so you quickly hid 

and apparently the other one hid too 

??

why would she

you stare at her for a while and you ,,, realize ,,,

!!!! IT’S A HIM NOT A HER

WHAT’S HAPPENING

THERE’S ONLY ONE JANITOR IN THE BUILDING??

ABORT MISSION ABORT MISSION

ok no that’s not happening

you’re y/n

the strong, independent woman

but you were still confused

but when that male janitor raised his head to look at you

!!!

“SHIT” 

and you literally flew to the office 

cause you realized you had competition

it was the same guy as before oh lorD why you do dis to me

jeonghan ran too, although he didn’t recognize you yet

and he ran obnoxiously loud.

like wtf jeonghan are you an assassin or a freaking rubbish truck

you were so scared you were gonna get caught before you got there

but you managed to get to the white, bulletproof glass office first and you slammed the damn door in his face and locked it

jeonghan knew it wouldn’t be of use to shoot the glass so he didn’t, and just disappeared elsewhere

you didn’t know where and didn’t have time to care

your janitor cap was over your head and covering your face well so good job, janitor costume!

a guard was in the room obviously ,,, and he was much bigger in size than you were

but no one would leave the blueprint alone

it’s safeguarded 24/7

so he punched you square in the face,,, even though you had tried to defend yourself 

you thought your nose caved in oh my god

you quickly retrieved yourself and pulled out your gun, shooting him twice in both his knees

he fell and groaned and screamed and blood was just everywhere

i mean, it was a common sight to you. 

he pulled out his walkie-talkie and mumbled a few unclear words of “the office, i need backup!” 

but you snatched the walkie-talkie out of his hands and stomped on it

and it lost connection

you quickly found the blueprints which were in a locked safe

and the guard had the key dangling from his pocket so 

you just,,,, took it 

and your face was throbbing from the punch tht you received and you were aware that you were bleeding

and just at this moment, jeonghan jumps in through the window

you clutch the file of blueprints and try to leave through where you came from

but jeonghan just pulls you back from your collar and when you jerked back,, yoUR CAP FELL

you come face to face with jeonghan before you could comprehend what just happened

and you two just stared at each other for a few seconds 

.

.

.

“IT’S YOU”

“NO IT’S NOT WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT” 

jeonghan literally grabs your arm and twISTS it professionally and you yelped & dropped the fuckin file bc IT HURTS BRO

he picks it up with his free hand while is other hand was still holding your hand in its half-twisted position

and you kick him in his stomach but he wasn’t really affected by it

but you manage to untwist your arm and twist HIS arm 

and you were pretty strong so you two just

fight.

like really.

and you won. 

you pulled a whole bookshelf down onto him and escaped

jeonghan was delayed so !!! 

but he alive don’t worry

but the next few weeks 

no matter which mission you had accepted or been tasked to do

from taking out the major of a city to stealing a jar of nutella 

he would be there 

competing to be faster 

like honey i’m not letting those two incidents juSt enD thErE

yes this man holds grudges

so! 

in the span of one month 

you had gotten used to his company 

everywhere you were, 

he’d be there. 

watching. 

and then attempting to fuckin’ murder you.

ok not really but ya’know.

but,,, 

this day, he wasn’t there 

and that made you subconsciously sad

you mentally chided yourself like

get yourself tgt, y/n. he’s your rival what are u doing 

but he really wasn’t there

he didn’t appear for the next 6 missions or so

and you got worried.

like genuinely worried. 

and you oddly started failing more missions that you did before like you couldn’t focus omgfdskjhl

you did better even with jeonghan competing with you wtf

you got scolded a lot by your team but that didn’t really matter to you.

so this once

you were on a usual mission in the middle of the night

AND YOU GOT BEATEN UP REAL BAD BY THE GUARDS

you would usually be able to handle that number but your limbs suddenly weren’t coordinating to fight back

and suddenly

this ,,, black hooded figure ,,,, just joined into the mess and the guards were all down a minute later.

you were sitting slouched on the floor, panting, bleeding. 

that hooded figure turned to you and pulled down his mask and pushed back his hood

jeonghan.

he was panting too, and when you saw him, you just,,,,

broke out in a smile.

he smiled too asdfghjkl

“did you miss me?” 

you rolled your eyes like pfft miss you? what nonsense

but deeeeeep down inside

like really deep down

you did

he knelt down in front of you and kind of just ,,, stared at you ,,, even though you were aware that you looked like a hot mess

“i thought you said you were good at fighting,” he chuckled, although internally he was upset to see you in such a state

you laughed. “i am.” 

he shakes his head and helps you up and you start questioning him

“where were you for the past 9 missions?” 

he smirked like 

“ hey you counted ”

but he doesn’t answer your question

mostly because he can’t 

bc he was assigned to kill you 

he just 

couldn’t bring himself to it 

that lead to him avoiding you

he wanted to keep up this little rivalry 

and honestly 

so did you 

but jeonghan got kicked out of his team bc of his “incompetence” 

basically, bc he kept letting you win

he would’ve been killed honestly 

but his brotherhood with his team was stronger than you’d think

so they trusted him to keep their society a secret and had let him off

and he ended up joining yours

so yes, everyone else can imagine what happened

you two became partners :”) 

and it was the best thing ever

you both just looked after each other and everything felt safer 

[misssophiachase]

More Than a Feeling

Thanks for your reviews last chapter. If you hadn't noticed I'm going with an 80s theme given the song titles (been watching too much Stranger Things obviously).

Synopsis: Six former teen actors find themselves thrown together ten years later for a Netflix reboot of their TV series. Given the way things were left, what's their rationale for coming back and can they get past their issues? 28 days of stifling Californian heat, copious amounts of tequila and enforced bonding rituals will make deep seated secrets emerge and change things forever.  PART ONE HERE 

Part 2: You Give Love a Bad Name

SC Village, Corona CA

"Paintball, really?" Klaus drawled, looking around the army themed battlefield complete with dusty paths, a bullet riddled helicopter, camouflage coloured tanks, green barrels and an abundance of black, mesh netting. "What are we? Five years-old?"

"I don't know; I think it's fun." Kol replied, offering his brother some war paint he'd managed to acquire, god knows how.

"That's because you have the mental age of a five year-old."

"Why do I suddenly feel like I've been transported back to our childhood complete with incessant squabbling but set in a Steven Spielberg film?" Their eldest brother asked dryly.

"You always did know how to ruin everyone's fun, Elijah," Kol shot back. "Why is he here again?"

"Because we were young and naïve and let mother convince us to go into acting as children."

"You were twenty-one when you agreed to do Roswell Elijah," Klaus offered. "Surely you're not still blaming mother for that decision."

"And even if you are big brother, you agreed to this reboot in the first place," Kol argued. "To be honest I'm still extremely curious about why you signed up given your animosity towards this show." Elijah attempted to interrupt before Kol continued. "And don't even try telling me that it was a financial decision, Mister Millionaire."

After the show, Elijah had used his earnings to invest in a number of capital ventures making him his first fortune in just over a year and then the millions flowed. Klaus had been curious himself about Elijah's reasoning but thought it better not to pry given the same questions could be thrown in his direction.

Klaus was the only original member of the cast who'd pursued his craft and gone on to decidedly better acting roles in the process. Both his agent and publicist had begged him not to do the reboot given they thought it would ruin the reputation he'd built in Hollywood the past ten years.

He could still remember Rebekah's shrill voice through his cell phone when he told her his decision all those months ago.

New York, NY – 9 months earlier

"You're going to do what now?"

"If you're planning on deafening me then you're well on your way to succeeding, Rebekah," he growled.

"You are Hollywood royalty Niklaus. You've made Scorsese, Cameron and Scott films, you've acted alongside De Niro and Nicholson, you've…"

"I don't really need a synopsis of my resume nor my IMDB account, little sister," he interrupted.

"My point is that this decision will ruin what you've worked so hard to achieve. Roswell was…"

"Quirky and received mixed reviews, yes. But it's where I got my start and what propelled me to where I am today even if you don't agree," he pressed. "Have you even bothered to look at the script?"

"Lucien may have showed it to me," she grumbled.

"And we all know how much you like to taunt my agent and disagree just for the sake of it," he replied tartly. "But the writing is…"

"Alright, it's good," she conceded, albeit gruffly.

"And last time I checked Kol and Elijah had both agreed to sign on for this project," he argued. "It would be pretty cruel even for you to deny your siblings employment."

"Kol just wants the limelight and some more mindless conquests, Elijah's reasons for this decision I'll never bloody know." Klaus had thought the same thing but decided it was best not to engage with his highly strung sister. "Are you sure there's no other reasons for wanting to do this?"

"What exactly are you getting at?"

"You know exactly what I'm getting at but it isn't a what but a who. Blonde, blue eyed about 5'8? Goes by the name of C…"

"Enough," he growled. "That was ten years ago and I have no interest whatsoever of revisiting that particular part of my life. The fact you would even doubt my professionalism is outrageous."

"I seem to recall a Shakespeare play about someone protesting too much," she murmured sarcastically. "You can't deny the history."

"That's exactly what it is, Rebekah, history." Before she could argue Klaus had disconnected the call.

"Really Kol, my motives are none of your damn business," Elijah scoffed, breaking Klaus from his memory. "You know we're not all narcissistic, attention whores like yourself."

"I resent that."

"You have to admit that you like your picture taken a little too much, little brother," Klaus chuckled.

"Great, it's just like old times, you two ganging up on your poor, defenceless little brother." Before either could respond they heard a snort, turning around curiously to find out where it originated from.

"Poor and defenceless," Bonnie said, her eyebrows furrowed. "Now that's an interesting take on your personality. I would have just stuck with narcissistic and left it there."

"Why am I not surprised, Bonnie? You always were my most vocal and worst critic."

"Okay children," Caroline intervened, making her presence known, along with Katherine. Klaus was trying to ignore just how adorable she looked in head to toe camouflage gear but it was extremely difficult. He could still remember tracing those delectable curves with his tongue all those years ago. "Let's break it up."

"That's rich coming from the girl who needs a referee from Niklaus whenever they're in the same bloody scene," Kol scoffed. Klaus couldn't miss how her eyes flickered towards his before attempting to unload on his brother.

"Well..."

"Oh my god, do you people ever stop?" Alaric interrupted, placing himself strategically between the two warring factions. "I deserve a pay rise for having to put up with your pretentious behaviour."

"But…"

"No buts, Katherine," he fumed. "For once I just want you all to shut up, can you do that for more than five seconds?" He didn't wait for them to reply and continued. "It's obvious there are some deep seated issues here and after two days of filming within this horrible nightmare I decided we needed to take some drastic action."

"But…"

"Kol," he growled. "Shut it. Yes, you may fancy yourself as actors and your ability to fake chemistry but the camera never lies. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with your precious asses and we need this reboot to look genuine and not like you want to kill each other every scene. So, I've decided you need to get that hatred out right now on this makeshift battlefield. Go your hardest because if I have to deal with your dramas on Monday morning I might just shoot you all myself."

They were all silent, unsure of how to respond to such a strong threat. "Oh, so now you're all going to stay silent? Unbelievable."

"It's dark out if you hadn't noticed, Ric," Caroline offered, gesturing towards the black sky and dimly lit course.

"Makes it all the more interesting, don't you think?"

"You really are evil."

"I have this weird feeling you are relishing in our discontent," Elijah muttered, agreeing with Katherine, which was usually unheard of.

"And you would be right," he replied. "So, it's time to pair up kids. Three teams, two on each side."

"It should be two teams, the girls versus the guys," Bonnie objected stubbornly.

"Only if you want to lose, darling," Kol teased. Katherine raised her paintball gun towards his smug face in defiance and maybe a touch of impatience, she never was one to put up with drama if it didn't involve her of course.

"Do I get extra points if I shoot his pathetic ass right now?" Alaric intervened before she could go through with her threat, lowering her dangerously pointed weapon.

"This is how we're going to do it, children," he instructed. "I took the opportunity of drawing some randomly selected names out of a hat earlier and that formed the basis of the team pairings tonight."

"Randomly selected?" Klaus asked just as Caroline spoke.

"Where the hell is said hat or the names?"

"I'm the Director of this production, so right now I have ultimate authority."

"Last time I checked we weren't on set but in this questionable neighbourhood," Katherine hissed. "You do realise Chino is right around the corner? Ew."

"I didn't realise we had our very own Summer Roberts in the group tonight," Elijah joked, earning a curious glance from the rest of the group. "What?"

"You know the OC?" Kol asked, his mouth agape.

"Yeah, I mean I took you for the stuffy news and finance channel kind of guy," Bonnie added.

"Forget the OC, I think I've been transported back to kindergarten," Alaric groaned. "So, without further ado. The pairings are; Bonnie and Kol."

"No."

"Klaus and Caroline."

"Never."

"Katherine and Elijah." Those two didn't seem pleased but also didn't object as strenuously but it was obvious the other headstrong four weren't budging.

"Randomly selected hey?"

"You know what? Fine! I'm so sick of your childish antics that I'll let you pick your own teams, how about that?" They all regarded each other wearily wondering who they would pick under duress.

"What if we don't want to pick anyone?" Kol asked.

"I'd say you're all bad sports and for the love of god just pick someone," he pleaded. They all looked at each other obviously weighing up the least worst option in the process. Klaus had initially wanted Caroline but being that close to her so soon was also too much to deal with this early on during filming.

He was paired with Bonnie but given their history, Klaus knew she was a damn good shot and her animosity towards Kol would mean she wouldn't stop until he was riddled with paint. They may have been related but Klaus would pay to see his cocky brother brought down in a blaze of glory.

"You okay, love?" He asked, looking at Caroline curiously during prep. She'd all been about the bravado but as they were about to venture onto the battlefield she seemed almost nervous. Klaus would have been too if he was paired with Elijah.

"What did I tell you about calling me that?" She answered shakily, her creamy skin seeming more pale than usual.

"Force of habit," he murmured, his blue eyes searching hers for some sign. She looked away immediately, any unresolved feelings between them lost.

"I just hope you're ready to surrender, Mikaelson." She was gone before he could come up with some sassy response, her taut ass wiggling in retreat as she left.

"Game on, Forbes," he sighed. As much as joked, Klaus couldn't have been happier to have her so close again. Even if she did hate him. He'd take what he could get.

On FF HERE