#should i make a tag for the false gods au the same way i did with | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bemylord · 3 years

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ᴛʜᴇ ꜰʀᴀɢʀᴀɴᴄᴇ ɪꜱ ɪɴᴛᴏxɪᴄᴀᴛɪɴɢ

↳ synopsis: because of the intoxicating smell, megumi's heat comes early, as if by chance - the pills are out and he should please himself. when he just starts to relax, he feels someone else's hands on his hips.

↳ theme: au + omegaverse.

↳ warnings: aged up, unprotected sex, non-canonical behavior, marking, oral, toy [dildo], true couple [?], gagging, spank [once], anal, first time, heat. + sukuna being soft.

↳ word counter: 2.9k

↳ level description: i have bestowed curses the unusual phenomenon of being able to conceal a scent. also, to emit a scent when the owner of the body wants to. i have endowed omegas and alphas with various features, for example: omega [not everyone] could purr, plus the alpha fangs for the tag.

the heat practically had come out of sudden - megumi hates those days when he's a weak, pliable omega and he has no alpha. such a destitute, defenseless little boy who is so desperate to please himself.

'when you're in the heat, better not leave the house. alphas can sense heathens omegas.' his teacher, gojou satoru, have warned him in the first grade when he had started to smell like an omega. he accepted his destiny quickly by being surrounded by alphas - yuuji, gojou, nanami, and that mocking king which is the alpha, although for years of being the king of curses he had learned to harbor a scent within himself, radiating only during battles.

not that megumi was interested in the king, just he has never smell his fragrance. does the curse have one? never mind, sukuna will never gonna be the one whom megumi will think in the heat.

yuuji always reminds his friend he or sukuna won't touch him in the heat. they're just being friends, however, is hard for megumi to disobeying his friend, over a voice. the husky and low voice of alpha can shut the omega without an eye contact - damnable omega essence.

megumi once purred when yuuji complimented his outfit, the gorgeous linen white shirt and black pants, the simple, but it was the effective one. itadori restrained sukuna for letting out the dirty joke about how malleable the omega was, by emitting a kind of snarl.

'sorry, megumi-san, i needed to calm down sukuna.'

damnable omega essence.

fushiguro megumi is nineteen and he had two heats: the first one he had after three months of turning eighteen. the heat was so exhausted - he forgot to buy pills, laying on the bed with the dripping hole.

for thesecond heat, he bought the dildo to please himself, yet didn't use the toy due to the reason he wasn't certain if he should. but the pill to loosen the heat has softened the hazy mind and the smell has gone down a bit.

but for today's abrupt appearance his smell he wasn't ready: he was training with yuuji, using some techniques and learning new ones with help of the teacher, the overwhelming heat caught him off guard when he could smell the unknowing fragrance - cognac. some alpha made him feel a false heat.

'i-i'm sorry, sensei, c-can i leave?'

the matured man holds back his scent and voice, pointing to the door as a sign he may leave the room. silly coincidence. as fast as he can, megumi had run to his room, locked the door for the sake of authenticity. he was run out of pills but leaving the room is too dangerous for him, if he had at least a mark from his alpha it wouldn't less dangerous.

the heat practically had come out of sudden - that weird and unusual scent, he had never smell anything stronger than that fragrance: as embarrassing as it may be, it's overwhelming, filling megumi's clarity of mind with the thought that he might be filled with the owner of the scent.

the thought to grab the toy had come suddenly, when the heat is starting to raise the temperature of the body, feeling as his hole starts to drip, becoming a mess. the period was supposed to start in a week, not earlier.

whom belonged that scent? a new student?

the toy has practically the same color as his hair, the medium length - at least he thinks it's the medium. the glans of his cock have a pink-peached color, as omegas should, their dick is much smaller than alpha's, on this basis, it perfectly fits in his palm as he masturbated a couple of times in the heat.

megumi doesn't like to jerk his cock a lot: better say, he isn't interested in doing it. he released himself when the heat is potent on the mind, hazy him to the point when he unconsciously jerks his oozing dick, cumming pretty much immediately.

few seconds of stroking the base as the liquid ends up on the sheet - it's enough for him for a couple of hours before it happens again. unwittingly, he put one finger in the oozing hole, almost jumped on the bed as he felt the light pain in the ass.

now, the tip of the toy in the hole as megumi gives himself a minute to adjust, he hisses as continuing the dildo goes deeper into the hole, stretching hardly pristine walls, not counting a finger. the omega squints, through the sore happy he's stretching himself prior to feel the real dick. he put all dick to the balls, hardly standing on his knees.

megumi attempts to focus on the thought is someone's else dick, imagining the random alpha, the random face as he fucks himself. he pulled out the dildo to the head, inching slowly to the base, getting used to the size.

‘gumi was on the knees on the bed, his chest being practically buried on the sheet as his ass on the air, suppressing intermittent moans with a pillow, as he squeezes the dildo when he feels as heat is getting intense.

the hairline is coated with drops of sweet as he pulled out the toy, he grips his jaw as being empty without a source of at least some pleasure. it's wrong, it's embarassed but the worst - 'gumi can't handle the feeling of fullness.

as he reaches for the toy, he feels someone’s hands on his hips. he turned his head, seeing sukuna behind him.

'sukuna?!' he screamed the name, tries to cover his naked body with his hands. 'get out immediately!'

the curse laughs, stopping the sorcerer from squirming by holding his hips, keeping the oozing ass in the air. the omega is trying to cover the hole, trying to coping with the smell of his heat, trying not to be the obedient for him.

'you smell so good in your heat, 'gumi-gumi, come on, i know you want my dick in your ass.'

'you ain't an alpha, suk-'

before he could finish the thought, he smelled that fragrance again - the cognac. the stupefying, intoxicating aroma of the mind. the virgin mind is hazed, dazzed by the hell alpha - not him. anyone but not him.

'for years i've learned how to harbor a scent, boy.'

sukuna spreaded the butt cheeks apart a little bit to ogle as how the omega's period made his hole to be moist. megumi tighten the sheet into the whitened fists, endeavoring to think about something else, something about the sorcerer things: killing the curse, no. not now when the king of curses, being the bloody alpha, staring at his untouched body.

's-sukuna..'

megumi's voice is broken, has lost the breath, puffing when sukuna is circling around the hole with one finger. sukuna has spreaded the aroma one more time, staring at the red omega's face as he's trying to struggle with his wishes. megumi is clenching his fists, striving to dodge his claws, crawling, barely crawling forward towards cushions. a pitiful travesty, as sad it is.

sukuna did a tsk, returning the boy in the previous position, yet spanked his butt as a warning sign. 'gumi shrunked at the slight pain but feel as the king instantly rubbing the place he has hitted.

the omega turns head to see sukuna, meeting his gaze immediately looking over his body: the tattoed body is seemed to become bigger since the last encounter. although, it's because of self-inflicted, as sukuna uses his friend's body. but it seems like he's bigger.

'megumi, suck my cock properly, first, and maybe i’ll lick your dripping hole.'

'no way, i wo-'

the king didn't let megumi to end the sentences, flipping omega's body on his back, bringing his body closer as he faces with sukuna's dick. megumi is overly horny to say no, and, how could he deny if a thick, dripping cock is in front of his face?

'when i'm reborn into my initial physique,' sukuna caresses megumi's cheeks. 'i'll surprise you, 'gumi.'

megumi watches as the precum rests on the glans, gasping at the excitement has came over him. with a hesitant movements, he wrapped one palm around the base, feeling the hot, thick cock, wondering if it will fit in his mouth.

as the alpha's dick was a few millimeters from megumi's lips, the last one raised his head, staring into the frantic and anticipatory gaze. omega open the mouth a bit as the head has touched his lips, not entering the glans inside yet lick the precum, tasting the liquid.

he kisses the top, checking the durability of the king, put the dick in the wet mouth, circling the outlining of the head with a tongue. sukuna chuckles watching as megumi making clumsy motions with his hand on the cock, moving his head forward to meet his pubis with a nose.

'god, boy, you suck the toy? so inept, but trying to oblige.'

the omega furrows as if not the member, he would contradict sukuna, responding he isn't trying to oblige him, yet gathering experience.

'you're disgusting, sukuna.'

'but i don't see you pushing me away.'

megumi didn't see fit to reply to the caustic expression, taking the cock in the mouth, sucking it property, maybe, the king will do the promise. it's humiliating - the one who needs to be exorced is not fucking his mouth, makes fists of his shaggy hair, thrusting the head deeper on the sizeable cock.

the omega doesn't pushing him away for the one reason - he's in heat, after all. he's horny and pliable of that. just one night - one. damn. it. night.

'relax your throat, baby boy.'

the name he named megumi, he pronounced somehow mildly, as he tries to do so. the tip with every thrust is touching megumi's throat, forcing fushiguro's eyes fill with tears as the head grazes the uvula.

'such a good cock sucker you are, gumi.' sukuna stares as the tears falling directly onto reddened cheeks, noticing his hard cock that hasn't been touched yet. 'stroke your dick.'

the commanding sukuna's tone didn't let a chance to megumi to say no: he reached one palm to his pink cock, making a fast strokes, anticipating to cum soon.

'wanna cum? my baby wanna cum yet? no, gumi, you can't.' megumi put his hands on sukuna's, forcing him to release his fists and movements.

'sukuna,' said omega when he put the dick out of his drooling mouth: his saliva runs down his chin, although he does nothing to remove it. 'i want something more, sukuna.'

he pressed a thank-you kiss on the top, as a token of appreciation.

'want is it? pick right words.'

he turned his body for sukuna, so the tattoed one will see how messy he has become.

'lick my hole, king. please, i need it.'

later, he will hate himself for his pathetic, miserable act, but right now he needs his tongue. just as pathetic. he hates being so pliable and soft underneath sukuna's pads, again, does nothing to stop him. hates to purr like a cat as the king caresses his butt, touching with one finger his hole.

sukuna kisses the area around the mess as his ears hearing a docile purr as he kisses the hole. he licks the excretion track, running the tongue over the hole which cause the owner of the body gasps, gulping greedily at the air.

sukuna is amazed megumi called him a king, not a dickhead, to which he affectionately licks his trickling hole. the kind rubbing gumi's hips, attempting not to hurt the boy's delicate skin with claws. he tries his best of spreading the love which is foreign to him.

sukuna pulled away from the hole, kissed it one more, before press a finger on the oozing clutter. megumi's shivered, as felt curse's long finger inside him, feeling as sukuna moving slow but deep, letting him to adjust at the new feeling.

the curse smoothly expands the walls and all megumi can think about it's how he's obedient allows the satan in a new guise fucks his ass, allows sukuna to touch him.

'i'm gonna add one finger.'

gumi practically closed his legs by the astounding pleasure sukuna puts him: it's so comfortable, warm, and good. he squeeezed fingers, shutting his eyes, adjusting to accept his future cock.

as megumi once started to rock his body against sukuna's fingers, he pulled them out, spat on his palm to stroke the dick repeatedly.

'lie on your back, megumi.' fushiguro did as he was told, feeling the sheet underneath his back, watching solely into sukuna's eyes: malice and aggresive sigh flew away as sort of careful eyes are watching at his directly. 'you can kiss me, little boy.'

if he can, he'd jump off the bed at the name sukuna has given him, cups the curse's face in his small palms, pulling him towards in a love, tender, romantic kiss as if they were lovebirds.

megumi purred when his lover take an initiative by pulling a tongue into his mouth, playing with the tongue of the boy, feeling the residue of his cock on the omega's muscle. he warned him he'll go inside by throwing on his broad shoulder his legs, distracting himself from the kiss.

the king has entered the tip as megumi clenched the glans, yet released, becoming accustomed to being full. megumi tugged on the alpha's biceps, drawing on the inked skin fuzzy patterns.

'good boy, megumi. you're taking my cock so well, that i'm starting to think to make an exclusion and do a knot inside you.'

the omega clinched the dick, gasps as he heard the last words.

'not now, at least. when i'll take over this little world.'

the walls of the anus pleasantly embrace the foreign body, squeezing and caressing, making the king even more arrogant - he accelerates his pace, driving his cock inside. megumi shuddered as the tip of his cock reached his prostate.

'did i hit that spot, little boy?'

no strength to nod, only to clench his forearms, moaning precipitously. sukuna stares at the little boy more than he should: his forehead is covered with sweat, his cheeks are red hot and sukuna can't deny but kisses his lips, hitting with every thrust a lump of nerves whilst fushiguro gives himself to his partner, being on the verge of - the sweet moment is about to come.

'you're swallowing me, kitten.'

'sukuna, please, i'm gonna.. soon.. mm~'

megumi arches the back and as he almost grabbed his cock to pour out his sperm, sukuna's hand intercepted the small, towards to his hand, cock making quick movements.

sukuna also felt as the little boy cum by milking his balls, narrowing the walls to an outrage that the alpha has to come out with a growl, biting his neck to the blood, leaving a mark, but not mixing fragrances.

both with their breath hitched, trying to recover, losing themselves in each other's arms. as for megumi, he was overwhemled with an orgasm for a couple of hours whilst sukuna could fuck and fuck even the knot until he'll make a heir.

'you should leave, sukuna. what if itadori will.. you know.. he's alpha too.'

'he won't dare to touch my omega. no one in the world will never hurt you.'

'don't say if you don't mean it.'

he smack his lips against omega's, wiping megumi's drops of sweet, kissed the forehead pulling away.

'after all, i'm - the one who started your heat.'

* * *

after a week of such nocturnal encounters, megumi returned to class again. itadori remembered nothing, [thanks to sukuna, the scratches and hickeys were disappearing].

after classes on the second day of studying, satoru asked him to stay after the training.

'megumi-kun, are you okay? don't think anything of it, i'm asking about..'

'i'm well, if.. yes, i'm fine, sensei, thank you.' megumi interrupted his teacher, answering before he could finish. 'i think i'm gonna rest in my room, sensei.'

'he won't dare to touch my omega, right? did he fuck you good, gumi-gumi? that's your name?'

megumi uttered a low mooing, wanted to answer but couldn't: his eyes widened in a fear, inhaling the scent of a teacher.

'he didn't tell you about me? not that i was spying on you, just.. your smell..'

gojo walks closer to his student, approaching his face towards fushiguro.

'he was good, right? i'm just curious, who will fuck you better in your next heat?'

(─‿‿─)♡

it's is a little smaller than i expected, but the sequel will obviously be bigger. if you'll like it.

↳ main game menu.

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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Hi! I’m still not really over the last episode (and that happy montage in the end i-) and I’m feel confused about what’s part of the episode was fake. I mean the end totally is. But all Chuck scene was superweird too. And sometimes i think that it should be Cas instead of Lucifer and Jack felt him. I mean... confused! How do you feel about that?

Okay so here’s the thing -- this is a multifaceted episode--

BuckLeming, while often herded efficiently by Dabb, can muddy up the textual waters, leave gaps, and things unexplained.

However, that doesn’t account for Showalter’s choices in direction. Dutch shots out the ASS which are typically used to evoke that something is "wrong." Lots of panoramas, tracking shots, zooms and blurs in ways that simply are-not-standard for SPN. Extreme aerial shots.

One might even think “maybe it’s Chuck looking in on them!” but then you realize the same overhead view zoomed out on *Chuck* even and panned out to the horizon again.

One of the early mega-zooms literally zoomed out to The World, even. I’m just gonna gesture people to my tag on that and let them think on that, much less the empty world orbiting on the news or whatever the hell else.

There were *several* Cas-baits, yes. Yes, that was intentional from our actual authors.

But when it comes down to “fake episode”, here’s where we were at.

15.17-19 run immediately concurrently. At the end of 17, Chuck says this was his ending.

Now, the Winchesters largely derailed that ending, so Chuck was writing new material.

But Chuck is also seeking death.

He wrote a suicide note in 11. He wrote the story that would end in him and Amara being eradicated. And whatever influence he was exerting forcefully with Michael and Lucifer to bop the story around was all in the interest of seeing his book. One might think “to keep the Winchesters from killing him”, but he was desperate to see what his ending WAS, to know it and experience it and scream after them.

The dour taking of “no one cares” right after “I care(d)” about humanity is its own highlight going on. But wait, there’s MORE.

When Dabb dropped his pre-episode thing, we started talking before the episode.

So I mean, I think what we were *mostly* witnessing is the pen being ripped away.

But this is that emptiness that lingers even with Chuck generally resolved. They’re still kinda on the pages. The book is presented as shut, and the next steps are not taken. Development stops, if not drops.

This entire thing is so meta my damn head hurts.

Summarily: Is it just like, some weird AU that’s gonna go away? Not so much. Is it an incomplete portion of the story told from a skew? Absolutely. And is there still someone watching over them? T’would seem so. The whole World, even. Beyond Chuck.

Now the point at which we start blocking off issues of “eugenie writes like she’s 3″ is where we ask about things like “god power” or whatever else being thrown in the mix along with eugenie’s ki ball special effects that are literally always unique to her episodes, even if other people have to add the SFX.

So while it was a good bit of masterful work to do it via buckleming for this style of bump, it still inevitably has its flaws because... buckleming. But... Showalter was there. And one thing to note is almost every single scene entrance had some sort of major pan or zoom effect. That’s not typical for him.

The entire thing is designed to evoke, directorially:

One style: crooked shots, unlevel, unbalanced, uneasy feeling.

Second style: Over-under; some force is watching them on high, while others have a sort of brechtian absurdity, which seats it like a play on an elevated stage.

We are the audience, looking up at figures half the episode; but a second audience is looking in from “on high” and out over the world. As if perhaps even from the heavens.

Third style: CSI Miami, basically? Parts of this episode were sectioned off to be like a procedural crime drama in its cinematography and flashbacks. Which is ironic, because Dean loathes procedural dramas, but at the same time some of this fandom demands a procedural monster show instead of a family drama show.

Sam and Dean barely have any lines in the episode *until* we hit Crime Drama Time. Then suddenly, they reveal all of their case work. Despite Dean’s hatred of crime dramas, this is honestly when I feel like the brothers kicked in their own pen.

Let’s play a game-- the winchesters are aware they can write their own story. So they start telling the story they think people want to hear, or maybe just fill in the gaps from when Chuck gets dropped on his ass. Maybe Dean’s the one writing about how many times god punched them in the face whereas Sam is breaking down the crime scene investigation front. Another, where it feels like we’re loosely circling the war table as others lightly wander too.

But everything before that is the first and second style, and even after that, the overview-angle remains. The uneasiness is gone but there is an emptiness otherwise. But we are no longer spectators from beneath the stage, but staring into them.

I still very much expect everyone to “die” one more time and several specifics to choose to walk back into life at the end of it.

Is it a *complete* false narrative? No. We’re not just gonna turn around and be like “oh that whole ep didn’t happen.” But the writer lost his pen and got jacked at one point, while we also observed the stage from a series of angles as different audiences.

Riddle me this: Why show the World? “Because it’s empty and just them!” okay but there’s a lot of ways to show that which actually gets that point a whole lot better across than “here, here’s a planet that still looks lit up”--yes I know electricity is still running until stuff runs out but essentially speaking, the end of the episode shows us the kind of dramatic shots that could be used for that.

CASey just poofed in the World in the TV, seems legit.

Let’s see these overhead angles again, knowing it isn’t just Chuck.

This sort of overview is known for causing a “dollhouse effect” that derealizes the episode and makes them seem, well, like toys. Which is interesting. Because Chuck isn’t the only one watching them on high.

Cool, this is fine.

Either way, the entire episode is DESIGNED to cause some major uncanny valley. There’s a lot of parts that simply *haven’t been told or filled in.* It’s almost like evasive maneuvering, half the content just never made it to print, and what did wasn’t in its best draft. There may be battling authors, or a transition of authorship. But the thing is: this is not the complete story.

There is an entire missing section about Sam and Dean even finding out that Jack is a power siphon which they hadn’t witnessed yet much less arranged an entire plan.

Even Chuck’s episodes are generally told from the general POVs of the Winchesters, but this was absolutely not.

Matthew 28: 18: And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Put a pin in that one.

Unless CHUCK IS WRITING HIS OWN FAKE DRAMATIC END, the overhead view, however, IS NOT CHUCK PERSPECTIVE.

-- Regardless, the metaness of “fish in a toilet bowl BRL plot” stacked into this makes it very difficult to accurately decipher the lines, especially with only one watch so far--just skimming back through right now to grab a few things I remember.

Some parts are plot salad buckleming.

Some parts are us as forced spectators of a stage play.

some parts are shifting authorship

Some parts are the heavens looking out over the earth it loves.

------

It almost feels as if, within enclosed spaces, unsteadiness and stageplay, we have Chuck’s POV.

But by the end it ceases to have any relevance, as he is no longer the author, and instead, we have the Presence of Being overseeing them, letting the Winchesters argue for their own proverbial pen in their own storytellings between here and there.

ALTERNATE PROPOSAL:

it is all one point of view. All of it. Pretend you’re someone’s eyes on a situation, you just happen to be in the sky half the time, and the uncanny valley is pulling forward the concept of being a presence that simply isn’t *there.* For example we're looking extremely closely at passed out dean but the camera turns and raises to level with Sam before Dean gets up. Our viewership lens is rising to meet Sam.

The camera stays in motion to fill a role or slot of a viewer. At first it’s haunting and ominous, but at other times, it’s simply part of the room, when it isn’t hovering from on high. Rather than speaking of empty space, we are viewing The World through that empty space, as if it were a Being.

Just a few more eye catching shots.

But whoever or whatever frames the end, even without Chuck--like the story is still turning on the pages, roughly.

The montage at the end feels like the Swan Song one, more or less, but there’s no narrator, no chuck.

The writer, the writer we know at least, is Absent.

Men are writing their own Stories.

But they aren’t alone.

I know how you see yourself. Angry and dark like your father. You think that’s what you are. But you are the most loving man in the whole world. That is who you are.

Someone does care. Even if right now, Sam and Dean don’t feel like anyone does.

...Because of you. I cared. For you, for Sam, for Jack, for the Whole World.

I cared.

“That’s not who I am.”

I am.

I speak therefore I am.

#supernatural #spn #15.19 #meta #my meta #the world #world #absence #being #polol

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momowho34 · 3 years

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Time for another naruto au post that so long and complicated it might aswell be a fic in and of itself. Why am I like this :,) Naruto au where Itachi runs away from the village with Sasuke in tow and doesn’t leave him behind. Also Itachi is a little older then a teenager because it makes more sense. Buckle up this is a long one.

Itachi refuses to kill his family and runs to warn them but when he gets there everybody’s dead except for Sasuke, (who witnessed the whole thiNG OOPSY-) so he takes him and runs for their lives.

Itachi joins the akatsuki but uhhhhh now there’s a four year old tagging along and Itachi’s too scary for anybody to mention it.

Imagine the fluff and angst potential with the akatsuki oooooof there’s so much omg

At first they all think it’s super annoying but within like two days they would all gladly die for this kid. Seriously they were pretty sure their hearts were made of stone at this point but apparently not.

Kisame is surprisingly really good with kids, partly because he appears fairly calm on the outside without being too standoffish so Sasuke likes him best. Also Kisame could happily play peek-a-boo for the rest of his life he likes the small things

Kakazu is awful with kids but sasuke likes him anyway and he hates it (not really) Hidan.... really doesn’t know what to do. He’s never cared about another person in his life, okay? He kind of wants to kill the small child but he knows Itachi would steal his fucking knee caps and bury him at the bottom of the ocean so he doesn’t even mention it ever

Sasori is the mom when Itachi isn’t around. They would all feed him candy until he fucking died if Sasori didn’t stop that. Sasori is also the one to go “oh my GOD Deidara you can’t dare him to climb that mountain he could fall and hit his head no I don’t care about that deidaRA HE IS SEVEN YEARS OLD ITACHI IS GOING TO KILL YOU WHEN HE GETS HOME MARK MY WORDS—“

Tobi likes to blame all of his mistakes on Sasuke as a joke. Also they all teach Sasuke bits of their fighting styles so he becomes even more formidable and all of them are kind of freaked out by how quickly he masters their techniques

When he’s too young to tag along on missions he has to stay with Konan and Pain. He really values Konan because she’s really the only one of them who treats him like a person instead of a stupid child that needs protection.

“He costs too much,” Kakazu says. “He shouldn’t be here, what about how much it costs for him to stay with us” all while consistently finding room in the budget to get the kid anything and everything even though he’s fairly low maintenance to take care of

When Itachi arrives, everybody tries to disregard the rumors paired with Sasuke being there. Because of Itachi’s overall demeanor and Sasuke’s refusal to talk about it, they assume that he killed his family but didn’t kill his little brother for some reason

...And then Sasuke starts having nightmares. Like loud, screaming and crying in the middle of the night nightmares. Every time it happens, Itachi wakes up, calm and collected, and holds him until he falls asleep again. They all start having doubts about Itachi really killing his family.

Itachi doesn’t really hold a grudge against Konoha, but he didn’t see the whole family die like Sasuke did. Sasuke wants revenge, and he’s dead set on it.

Okay yeah but what abt the actual plot and stuff??? Don’t worry I’m there.

So a while later after that during Naruto’s three year journey (which he still takes with Jiraiya because he needs training to fight Orochimaru who is still a big threat btw) he meets this weird black haired kid staying at the same hotel he is.

Turns out they’ve both got caretakers who are absent (Jiraiya’s at a brothel somewhere and Kisame and Itachi are off killing some guy) which sucks so they bond over that and compare abilities and beat the shit out of eachother a little and develop a mini rival complex all of that but then

“Wow you’re so cool! You fight just like a ninja! You should come back with me!” Naruto laughs one day. Sasuke asks “Back to where?” And Naruto’s like “back to the leaf village of course! I’m a leaf village ninja, I’m out here training with my sensei! I forgot that I left my headband in the room, I can show it to you.” But Sasuke just gets really pale and runs off and Naruto doesn’t see him for the rest of the trip.

He thought he’d never see him again but then Sasuke gets separated from the Akatsuki members reeeaaaallly far away from their base and Konoha. As he’s trying to figure out what to do, a certain ninja crew happens to be in town. Naruto is like “omfg I know this kid!!!!!!!! Hey Sasuke!!!!! Hey Sasukeeeee!!!!!”

Sasuke is like o-o but then he starts to consider his options. If anybody figures out about his sharingan, he’s straight up fucked. His eyes are gone, he probably gets murdered. Naruto is like “what r u doing here????” And sasuke spins a fairly convincing story

He’s like “oh yeah and I know my way around this place so I can help you out could I maybe seek asylum in your village maybe??? I could be helpful” just so he can head in the general direction of Konoha and hopefully get closer to his base along the way.

So Kakashi begrudgingly agrees and Sasuke tries not to burn alive because he’s in the general proximity of leaf soldiers that he fucking hates and he will not grow attached to any of them at all no siree, not at all, no way!

Sasuke begins to grow close to them, of course. Sai and Sasuke do goth shenanigans and he fights with Naruto and tries to get Sakura to leave him alone (what is up with her why is she being so weird?)

Oh bonus angst: Tobi used to talk in his sleep sometimes, and at some point Sasuke drops “those who break the rules are scum, but those who leave their friends behind are worse then scum” casually and Kakashi almost has a full blown panic attack.

This is when he first realizes something is seriously up with this kid; and his first name sounds... familiar. His suspicions are just suspicions until they run into Orochimaru. Now Orochimaru could just out Sasuke as akatsuki, instead he plays with his feelings a little bit. He keeps saying things like “how does it feel to fight on the same side as your enemies for once?” And “have you forgotten already?” They defeat him without Sasuke revealing his sharingan but the jig is up in Kakashi’s mind.

Kakashi doesn’t quite connect the dots; but he’s almost there. Whoever this kid is, they’re coming back to the village for sure. It’s the safest thing to do. Meanwhile the Akatsuki are freaking out. Itachi is unhinged and almost grieving, they have no idea where Sasuke could be. The team is out in full force; including Tobi

And you know, Obito doesn’t care. He shouldn’t care, nothing matters in this false reality. It just doesn’t. Tobi might have given a shit about Sasuke, but Tobi isn’t real. He’s just a front, Tobi doesn’t exist. So why is he looking so hard for this stupid kid that he shouldn’t give a shit about? Obito convinces himself it’s just a front, it’s just part of Tobi’s act, but it’s not. What’s happening to him? Why is starting to feel things now, so deep into the plan?

Annnnnndddd that’s as far as I got with it lmao. That’s still pretty fucking far tho

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joonessence · 3 years

Text

The cough drop // jjk

summary: Jungkook enchants you from the second he catches your eyes from the stage of the small venue. You already know you’re gonna be falling in too deep.

wc: 2,427

tags: jk fluff i guess idk what to call this, band au

notes: this is way longer than i meant for it to be but it was so fun to write, also let me know if i should make it into a series??? possibly?? part 2 is here!

You had gone to a show with your friends for some unknown band. You’re sitting at a high table with your head supported by your hand; you’d had a long day at work and just wanted to go home. You stared at your untouched drink that had been set there by your friends earlier that night thinking of exactly which pyjamas you were going to change into when you got home; you couldn’t wait. Looking up, someone was already staring at you, eyes partially shielded by his drenched hair. He’s overwhelming from the second you meet eyes.

Your breath caught unexpectedly in your throat causing you to choke and cough. You feel your cheeks burning as you try to regulate your breathing. Once you find your natural state again, you glance up to see him still staring at you but his lips are curled up in a smirk.

You try to carry on as usual for the rest of the night until it’s acceptable for you to excuse yourself to go home but you feel his eyes on you. You turn to look at him again only to discover that he’s walking in your direction, holding something in his hand. In under a second you decide to act indifferent towards him, already expecting him to pester you. When he reaches you, he taps your shoulder and holds out his hand.

“Here, you looked like you needed this earlier.” His words sound sweet but the sly smile on his face betrays him; it’s not what you were expecting.

You look down in his hand to find a cough drop. Inside, you want to laugh but you can’t give him the satisfaction. You look up with your best blank stare.

“Do you just carry these around so that you have a reason to talk to unsuspecting girls?”

The stranger laughs so loudly at that, throwing his head back and grabbing onto your table to steady himself. When he calms down, he opens the wrapper to the cough drop and pops it into his mouth.

“No, but that was funny! I keep them for after we get off stage and my throat is scratchy,” he says with the cough drop pushed against his cheek. “What’s your name?”

You’re quiet as you try to analyze him, searching for his true intention behind talking to you. When you’re silent for a beat too long, he continues.

“I’m Jungkook, my band is the one that was playing earlier.” He looks smug, like he’s trying to impress you.

“That’s nice, Jungkook, but if you’ll excuse me I’ll be getting back to my friends now.” You say it like you mean it, but you don’t really mean it. You meet his eyes and he throws his head back again as if you’ve just said the world’s funniest joke.

“Babe, I’ve been looking at you for a while; you’re not even interested in talking to them. I thought I’d come here and offer you my companionship.” He’s still smiling and his eyes are twinkling, you can feel yourself sinking deeper into his charm.

“What makes you think I want the companionship of a stranger,” you point at him, almost poking him in the chest, then move your hand to refer to the other people sitting at your table, “over my friends?”

“Well, by the way you lost your breath when I looked at you earlier, I’d hazard a guess that you wanna talk to me.” He looks so pleased when your cheeks flame up.

“I’ll have you know that I’m getting over a cold and THAT is why I was coughing,” you say hoping he doesn’t see through your lie.

He laughs and puts his hands up, in mock defeat while reaching for something from his back pocket. He pulls out a pen and leans over to the table to scribble something on the wrapper of the cough drop.

“Well, when you decide you want to talk to me, here’s my number,” Jungkook states while sliding the wrapper over to you.

“If. If I decide to talk to you,” you correct.

He smiles softly and shakes his head, you almost mistake it as an endeared action but you know your eyes must be deceiving you.

“Okay, if you decide to talk to me, there it is,” Jungkook says as he’s walking backwards to get back to his table, still looking at you.

You let out a shaky breath, glad that you’re by yourself again. Only, you think to yourself, he wasn’t as bad as you thought he’d be. You know you’ll decide to text him later but what he doesn’t know yet won’t kill him. You finally excuse yourself from your friends, eager to get home and on your drive back you can’t get Jungkook out of your head. His sparkling eyes, the piercings that line his ears, the tattoos he has on display. His image and his words are engraved in your brain.

You throw your keys onto the coffee table when you get back to your apartment and head to your room. You look at the wrapper with Jungkook’s number written on it. Trying to convince yourself that you have no idea why you took it is futile, you know exactly why you did. Against all logic, you take your phone and type a message to him.

[you]: DONT take this as me deciding to talk to you

[you]: i was just wondering if you could tell your tall buff band member that i liked his voice

You laugh to yourself for a second before worrying he won’t get that you aren’t serious. You set your phone down and try to push down the regret that’s spreading throughout your body. Your phone dings and you reach for it immediately.

[coughkook]: oooh :( my wounded feelings i’ll never recover

[coughkook]: i won't be tell anyone anything

[coughkook]: but

[coughkook]: you can come to our next gig and maybe i’ll let you talk to him

You roll your eyes at his last message. “Let you talk to him,” you scoff and look at your phone when it dings again.

[coughkook]: it’s next friday at 8 i’ll send the address

You don’t respond after he sends it, wanting to keep Jungkook on his toes. Truthfully, you’ve already decided to go and are drafting up an excuse to cancel the plans you had with your friends.

You don’t talk to Jungkook for the next five days, until you show up to the address he sent you. You take a seat halfway between the stage and the door and look around to find Jungkook on stage with his band members. He’s talking to the buff member you mentioned to him last week, the one you thought was cute but not nearly as enchanting as Jungkook. He spots you and leaps down the stairs of the stage, god he’s so cute.

“You came,” he says with a big, too bright smile compared to the dark atmosphere of the small venue. “We go on in like, ten minutes; I hope you’re ready to be blown away.”

You scoff and roll your eyes. Jungkook needs his ego taken down a notch or two but you still find him captivating.

“Yeah, yeah just go warm up,” you say with false annoyance and send him a small grin.

He runs back to the stage and gives you a thumbs up and that same blinding smile. Your head shakes involuntarily but in your head, you know you’re locked in for good. When the lights to the venue dim even more, you sit up straight to capture every moment of Jungkook while he’s performing. You’re not ready for the next 45 minutes you experience. Jungkook’s voice is so beautiful and so full of every emotion you can think of. You can’t look away even if you tried to. Is it the stage lights or is he actually glowing? His presence overpowers everything. The way he moves with a purpose on the stage, his hand pushing his hair out of his face every so often, his eyes locking with yours. You won’t forget any of it.

When Jungkook and his band are done, he looks to you and holds up his index finger to let you know he’ll be back in a moment. You’re thankful, you feel like you need an infinite amount of time to wrap your head around what happened enough for you to speak coherent sentences. Jungkook walks around the side of the stage and practically floats to you. As he gets closer to your table he points to a full glass of water you had ordered for him earlier with a smile and shoots his eyebrows up, as if to ask if it was for him. You motion for him to go ahead and he downs the whole glass in one go. Endearingly shaking your head at him has become second nature to you by now. He slams the glass down on the table and clears his throat.

“Well?” he asks, expectantly.

“Well what?” you reply knowing what he’s asking for but playing dumb anyway.

“Well what did you think?” you’re silent so he continues, “Of us? Of me?”

“Oh that! Yeah, it was good, I guess.” It was more than good but you don’t want to inflate his already too large ego.

“Just ‘good’? You were on the edge of your seat the whole time! You basically fell out of the chair!” he says, exasperatedly. He narrows his eyes at you, “I see right through you, you know.”

“Yeah, whatever,” you say and hop off your chair. You push his shoulder to direct him to the table where his band members are. “Aren’t you gonna introduce me anyway?”

He groans but leads you there where he introduces you to them. It’s obvious that they’re more like friends than bandmates. There’s four in the band with him, Namjoon, Hoseok, Jimin, and Seokjin, and two friends Yoongi and Taehyung. You decide within a few minutes you like them all a lot.

“So you met Kookie at our last gig, right?” Namjoon asks. He’s the buff one.

“Ah, yeah. He bothered me until I gave in and messaged him, didn’t you ‘Kookie’? ” you joke and turn your head to see him roll his eyes and huff.

“Sounds like him, when are you gonna stop bothering strangers?” Hoseok directs to Jungkook.

“I can’t believe you guys are actually falling for this! I had her swooning for me the second she saw me,” Jungkook retaliates.

You wish what he said wasn’t true but you know it is. And seeing him with his friends doesn’t help the growing feelings in your chest. You spend the rest of the night talking with them and learning every embarrassing piece of information you can about Jungkook, you’ll use it all later. Way too often do you lose yourself in staring at Jungkook. He’s too alluring for his own good. When the night comes to an end, Jungkook offers you a ride home. Normally, you wouldn’t accept but you couldn’t refuse the way he begged you to go with him. In the car, Jungkook complains about how you spent too much time talking to his friends rather than him.

“Wait… did you think I was there for you?” You cover your mouth in faux embarrassment to accompany your act.

Jungkook’s head turns towards you. He’s got his mouth open in shock and he’s trying to come up with words when you take pity on him.

“I’m just kidding, Jungkook. Of course I went for you. You were really good,” you flush pink as you say it but not as pink as Jungkook flushes when he hears it.

“Thank you,” he mumbles and you laugh out loud.

The rest of the ride is spent with you teasing him for getting jealous and him teasing you back for getting so caught up in watching him. Neither of you deny it because you both know you can’t. Jungkook rolls to a stop in front of your apartment building and looks at you.

“I’ll message you when I get home, okay?”

You nod and let out a breathy “okay.” You thank him and tell him goodnight and walk up the stairs to the lobby of the building. You turn to look at him and he gives you a confused look.

“Why aren’t you going in yet?” he shouts.

You laugh loudly. “I wanna watch you drive away!”

He makes a face and you giggle.

“Get back in your car, Kookie.” You shoo him with your hand.

He laughs to himself and it's his turn to shake his head at you but he listens to your instructions anyway. You watch him drive off until you can’t. You can’t think straight so much that you might as well levitate up to your apartment. Jungkook makes you dizzy. You’re not even sure how you changed out of your clothes and got into bed with less than half a brain left. You don’t wait long for Jungkook’s message.

[coughkook]: i’m home :)

[coughkook]: thanks for coming <3

You smile to yourself and respond wasting no time.

[you]: thanks for inviting me! :)

[coughkook]: come to our next one?

[coughkook]: if you can

[coughkook]: the boys liked you, thought you were funny. they want you to come again

You roll your eyes at Jungkook’s ego again.

[you]: hmm the boys or you?

[coughkook]: the boys AND me want you to come again

Your heart beats faster in your chest. You weren’t expecting Jungkook to be so honest, so quickly. You definitely would go again, definitely will go again, actually.

[you]: oooh you like me so much

[you]: i’ll come

[coughkook]: ugh

[coughkook]: yes but i know you like me too so we’re even

[you]: hm

[you]: that’s fine with me

[coughkook]: good

[coughkook]:i’ll text you in the morning, goodnight <3

[you]: goodnight kookie

You assume he won’t see it until morning but you send him another message anyway but you’re surprised to see that he responds immediately. Wasn’t he supposed to be asleep or could he not sleep because he was replaying every moment he had with you, the same way you were doing with him.

[you]: i wasn’t sick

[coughkook]: i know LOL you thought i was pretty didn’t you?

[you]: ugh yes but i know you think i’m pretty too so we’re even

Your face burns at Jungkook’s last message of the night.

[coughkook]: yeah but even if we weren’t even i would still think you’re the prettiest girl i’ve seen

#jjk #jeon jungkook #bts jungkook #jungkook #jungkook fluff #jjk fluff #jungkook fic #bts jungkook x reader #jungkook x reader #bts fic #jeon jungkook x reader

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marshmallowprotection · 3 years

Note

Oh gosh, that post about Saeyoung and his characterization made me want to clap! I once had an argument with one fan who was bashing on him for... 'loving his brother more than he loves us'??? That literally made me feel weirded out. Like, damn. And yeah, a lot of people make him seem more cruel, than he is in canon. I think there's a similar problem with Suit! Like, yeah, he was acting aggressive and harmful - that's undeniable. But... he never really directly hurt us? It's more bark than bite. Well, maybe except for that bite and pushing us on the floor, but in fanon it's always way more extreme than that. I read a few fics where he literally tortures mc and enjoys it, and... it always felt so wrong to me. And I love dark scenarios! I have a few aus myself, but there's always some outside force, that makes them act this way. Like, I can imagine him isolating us or locking us in the room. But I literally cannot imagine him, for example, tying us up and hurting us directly. I genuinely don't believe he's capable of that... Maybe it's just my interpretation of him, I don't really know.

But yeah, I've seen a lot of people in my native fandom, who hate Choi bros, cause they... care for each other?? It's so confusing to me, as a huge Saeyoung fan. Like, his love for his family always made me appreciate him more, why would it push someone away? Of course he should put Saeran first - he's in a cult for Gods sake! It did made me feel a bit upset at the time, when in the Secret Endings we barely got any interaction with him, but it wouldn't feel the same otherwise. I first fell in love with Saeran during the Secret Endings, cause I related to him so much at the time. I just remember crying my eyes out reading his inner thoughts. I think that's why Unknown and SE Saeran are my favourites, haha. And all of that wouldn't be possible if the story was only focusing on our romance with Saeyoung!

So yeah, sorry for the rant, but I just wanted to express my opinion on the matter. I think false characterization is a pretty annoying problem in all fandoms. And that's just Saeyoung and Suit! We could discuss literally every single character in mysme here lmao

Sorry for my huge essay btw I really should be sleeping right now, but I read that post and just couldn't resist ahaha

It's always something, y'know?

Yes, they're angry and bitter, but it hurts to see people think that's all there is to their character. I don't know how many times I've had to go and explain to people that Suit Saeran is afraid. He believes anger is a sword and a shield, if he cries first, they can't make him cry.

It's not a healthy mentality and it hurts him greatly, and he knows that even if his malice was meant for him, you suffered. He apologizes and you're there to say, "I know, I forgive you, and I hope to stay by your side as you heal and become better for yourself."

Suit Saeran is able to say he fucked up. He wasn't right to do what he did and he pays for it. He may say that he likes seeing you cry and be upset, but he doesn't. He just can't admit vulnerability. He just saw Ray get basically torn limb from limb for loving somebody, of course, he's not okay right now.

He locks you in your room, but God, he'd never tie you up or physically beat you. I know why Cheritz added in the bite to that VN itself because it gets them paid for adding in those elements, but I don't care for that, myself. Because I can't see him lashing out in any physical way. Emotionally, yes, but not physically.

If you pay attention to what happens, the only time he touches you is the bite, when he pushes you against the ground, and maybe if you want to count when he nudged you against the wall? But, I think that last one was more him making you walk yourself into a corner.

And it's worse with Unknown because... God, it's so twisted up and it makes me sick. People should write whatever they want to write and enjoy that content, but if I had a dollar for every time I opened a story about Unknown and it turned into Torture Porn, I'd be rich and upset at the same time. Unknown and SE Saeran were also what pulled me in during 2016, so their characterizations mean a lot to me.

Unknown isn't like Ray or Suit Saeran. He doesn't care for you like those two do. You're his eyes. You're a tool. But, he still finds a sense of amusement in you. You're interesting to him. That's just... yeah, it's going to be a mess when you consider him in romance, but it doesn't need to be as grimdark as I've seen for years. I don't even wanna get into that because I'll just get upset. I just wish people tagged things properly because I get so disheartened looking for Unknown stuff and it's just. that.

And Saeyoung gets this rough, too. People will make him out to be the joker that he doesn't want to be. Yes, he loves to play pranks and have fun, but that's not all he is. Don't just lump him off as that one thing. Saeyoung did what he had to do for Saeran in the SE. I'm sorry that he closed himself off again. But what choice did he have at that moment?

Leave Saeran in the hospital to die? Because if he kept lashing out, he was going to get more attention and focus. Not even Jumin Han can protect Saeran from that. He can't. Saejoong would've found him and he would've been fucked royally. Saeyoung made a hard choice, take his brother from the hospital because if he didn't, Saeran would likely die. Yes, that was a bad choice because Saeran needs therapy and specialized care, but he had two options. Let Saeran die or try to help Saeran himself.

It was a mess.

It was a horrible mess but they made due. I personally imagine them to be getting therapy after things settle and they're able to do what they need to do. God, just. Yeah. Fanon is going to happen and there isn't a lot anyone can do. This happens to every character and we're all just going to cry.

#natasha in space #ask #mod kait #character analysis

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forhereyesonlyyy · 3 years

Text

(iii) lean on me. // gfriend, cyn. // one-shot.

word count: 9.9k

author's note: and we're on part three! i literally did not mean for this to be so long and have so much stuff going on but i thought that certain questions would be left hanging if i didn’t write with detail 😓 anyway, this is the final part! it’s a bit lacking compared to the previous ones but nevertheless, i still enjoyed writing this and i truly hope that you guys liked reading it 😊 really sorry i dragged this on though,,,, i feel like i could have avoided certain scenes since they are pretty much pointless but i just really didn’t want to leave any loose ends 😓😓

tags (overall): high school au, fluff, slow burn, angst, enemies to friends to lovers.

tw (overall): violence, injury, bullying.

previous: (ii) lean on me.

With your arm finally healing and being free from the stupid cast, you were back in the game. And after your infamous falling-out with Yuju, which somehow every single student in the school was aware of, things were going back to what you considered was normal. Basically, things were the same as they were before Yuju came and made a mess in your already messy life. Everyone was scared of you again, you kept your distance with certain individuals, and teachers were on the lookout just in case you do something that might get you in trouble.

Although you were once again a top dog in the school, that didn’t mean that you were as tough as you were before.

Obviously the whole thing with Yuju affected you to the point where you actually wanted to come back to her and apologize, maybe hang out with her again but you didn’t see the point in that when she has made it clear that she does want something more than being friends, and you? Well, now you can answer truthfully that romance was simply something that didn’t ‘fit’ your lifestyle. It would explain the constant push-and-pull game you were having with yourself whenever Yuju made you feel something.

I think.

You have also stopped talking to Seokmin, for obvious reasons. You silently wished him luck on his journey to wooing Yuju, although it bothers you to think about your two best friends kissing and being sweet. But you would be happy.

Yuju deserves someone who can make her smile.

“Yuju deserves someone who can do more than that.”

Ah, yes. You always had to deal with one Jung Yerin every morning. You never tried to chase her off because even if you did, she would still spend every single second of her life to bother you.

“Yerin, babe, it’s been three months. Can we just forget about all of this?” SinB asks, leaning against the locker next to yours and shaking her head when Yerin refuses to back down from a lost battle.

“I can’t sleep because of this, Eunbi! I hate it when our friends fight.” Yerin complained. She’s been at it ever since you called it off with Yuju and she has shown no signs of stopping. You appreciated what she was trying to do but you wished that she would try to understand why you even stopped being friends with Yuju. Perhaps Yerin does understand but refuses to acknowledge it because she was so close to her ‘dream’.

Her dream of finally getting me a girlfriend… I can’t believe her sometimes.

“So do I but we have to respect (Y/N) and Yuju. Let’s not force our way into their business anymore, alright?” SinB says, hoping to finally push through her girlfriend’s stubbornness and calm her down. It works because Yerin doesn’t say anything else but melt into SinB’s arms, muttering something about how things are so unfair.

“If it’s meant to work out, then it’ll work out.” SinB said. You glared at her, but she only smirks. Oh, that stupid smirk. She was trying to provoke a reaction out of you, but you would never let Hwang SinB have her way.

You crossed your arms over your chest, “You know, I really don’t appreciate it whenever you guys talk as if I’m not right beside you.” You said. It was only seven-thirty in the morning. There was lots of time for you to scold your friends, and hopefully to relax in the library a little.

“Well, sometimes you act like you’re not with us whenever we’re hanging out together! Imagine how we feel.” Yerin countered. That was because you were trying to drive them off. Yerin and SinB are great friends, but you didn’t want them to get involved in your mess. You thought that giving them the cold shoulder and not uttering a single word to them would make them stop lurking around, but that proved to be false. Obviously.

“Maybe next time don’t hang out with me. It’ll be better for all of us.” You rebuked and started walking to the direction of the library without another word. There were students crowding the hallways, it was like everyone simultaneously decided to come to school at exactly seven-thirty. Well, at least you didn’t have to literally squeeze your way in and out of the hallway because the crowds part for you.

Suddenly, you feel an arm wrapping around your shoulders and you really were about to knock out whoever dared to touch you until you hear that annoying voice.

“You’re so cute when you act mean to us.” Yerin says as she and her girlfriend end up next to you again. I’m not getting out of this hell, aren’t I?

SinB nods, “Seriously! Continue being like that and we’ll have no choice but to fall in love with you.” She teased with a wink.

“You guys are into that?” You asked, genuinely curious.

“Hell yeah! One girlfriend is a dream come true enough on its own, imagine having two!” Yerin gushed. They had a point, but having Yerin and SinB as girlfriends… would be torture. They were already too much for you as friends! And so, you immediately chuck that bizarre idea out of your thoughts but somehow the couple knew that you thought about it and teased you.

You laughed at all their jokes, “Sorry. You guys are hot but neither of you are my type.” Yerin and SinB then started booing you following your confession, but you ignored them and entered the library. Surprisingly enough, they followed along. They earned a couple of shushes as soon as they stepped inside, making you stifle a laugh and immediately run for an aisle to hide your embarrassment.

While Yerin and SinB sat on a table to chat quietly amongst themselves, you scoured the shelves for something to read. You haven’t had a novel in your hands for three weeks, mostly because you just lost interest in reading since you could finally do other things with your arm finally being on top condition. And the other reason was because Seokmin is almost always in the library doing stuff.

You really didn’t want to come across him ever. You knew that he would ask questions and you didn’t know if you were in control of your emotions enough to not shut him down.

“This looks nice.” You muttered, staring down at a book that had a particularly interesting cover. After reading the synopsis, you head to the librarian’s desk to borrow the novel for a week, but you weren’t prepared to see Seokmin behind the computer that almost covered his whole face. The universe hates me.

It was too late to back out. You were literally the only person in line and it was obvious that you were going to the desk in the first place. Walking away would just be awkward. Other than Seokmin, there was another face at the desk that you longed to avoid at least after spring break, maybe forever too. The universe really hates me.

Yuju didn’t look surprised to see you at all. She was more… happy. It made you angry. After all the bullshit I pulled, she’s still like this.

“I’ll see you later, Seokmin.” Yuju said, patting the boy’s arm and walking away. You didn’t look at her as she went, but you felt her eyes on you before she completely disappeared from the library. What the hell? They’re talking now? They’re touching each other now? They’re— actually, good for them! Yeah… good for them.

“Are you going to be checking that out?” Seokmin asked. You blinked, suddenly remembering that you were here for a reason, and then you nodded, putting the novel down in front of Seokmin and letting him do his thing. Neither of you said a word to each other during that whole minute. You looked back at Yerin and SinB, only to find them staring at you and Seokmin blankly, waiting for something interesting to happen.

Whatever they’re hoping for, they won’t get it.

...Please don’t let them get it.

“She misses you, you know.”

Oh my God, he let them get it.

You braced yourself for a lengthy argument, “Seokmin, let’s not.” You said. You didn’t want to make a scene at such a peaceful place and disturb everyone’s tranquility, also you just didn’t want to talk to Seokmin about Yuju. One thing you would never be caught doing again is talking about someone behind their back!

“We should, it’s the healthy thing to do.” The boy insisted.

“Enough, Seokmin. It’s over, alright? Can I have that book now?” You asked.

Seokmin shakes his head, “Yuju cares so much about you, (Y/N)—”

“You don’t think I care about her?!” You snapped. You didn’t mean to. Something in you just broke, and then it was too late for you to stop yourself. Fortunately enough, classes were about to start, so pretty much every single student that was inside the room had begun to exit the library. Yerin and SinB were among those students, but they left solely because they wanted to give you and Seokmin some privacy.

Seokmin was unfazed. It was as if he was expecting you to lose your cool. Or he wanted to see you getting worked up. “If you did, you wouldn’t be so distant.” He said. His calm and reserved tone only added fuel to your fire. He doesn’t understand. Nobody understands.

“You’d never get it, Seokmin.” You muttered. All you wanted right now was to forget about all of this. Why can’t anybody see that? Even your two closest friends at the moment were pushing you to Yuju when you’ve expressed many times that you didn’t want anything to do with her anymore. Learn to take the fucking hint, everybody.

Seokmin clenched his jaw, and this was the first time you’ve ever seen him pissed. “Cut the crap, (Y/N). What the hell are you so afraid of? Why do you keep pushing people away? And don’t fucking tell me it’s because of your ‘reputation’ because I know, everybody knows, that Yuju doesn’t care about any of that. She just wants to be with you.”

I know that too.

“I don’t know what happened that day, but Yuju would’ve understood. Why would she ever leave? She loves you.” Seokmin continued. You weren’t exactly sure what was this boy’s motive, or why he was so passionate about this. Why was he fighting so hard? Did he think that he would actually crack through your thick skull and somehow persuade you to get back together with Yuju? Would you actually do it? I can’t fight this.

You glued your gaze to the carpeted floors of the library, suddenly deprived of energy. You were never good with fighting with words because everyone always finds a way to get under your skin. They always knew which words to use against you, and how could you fight people who were well-informed about your weaknesses? It was a losing battle.

“It was easier for me to lose her this way.” You said. Seokmin doesn’t say anything for a few seconds as he was trying to process your words in his head. While he was distracted, you snatched the novel from the desk but before you could leave, Seokmin looks at you with wide eyes and a half open mouth. He knows what you meant, and you couldn’t help but laugh bitterly.

“You love her.” Seokmin says rather breathlessly. You don’t say anything back. Instead, you huffed and made your way out of the library and it just hit you that you’d finally admitted it to someone, and to yourself. You never imagined that you would ever feel that way towards somebody. You always convinced yourself that you would never have the time for that. And since you weren’t exactly the sweetheart type, you thought that nobody would ever feel that way about you.

And then Yuju came into your life. Slowly, your heart changed and now you became this confused, irrational mess and it irritated you to no end. Because at least before Yuju came and rocked your world you had control of your thoughts, but now everything is just about her.

That damn beanpole.

“Are you alright?” SinB asked, putting her hand on your back. You nodded, offering your friends a weak smile. I don’t know.

Yerin loops her arm around yours, “Come on, let’s get to class.” She then started walking down the hallway. Not feeling like speaking anymore, you expressed your gratitude by leaning into Yerin a little bit and she responds by briefly putting her head down on your shoulder. If the two of them weren’t here, I wouldn’t have been able to move.

The walk to your first class was quiet, but it was comforting. It turns out that your school doesn’t always feel like hell. When the hallways are empty and silent, you could say that the place could feel… uplifting. For exactly one moment you weren’t thinking about Yuju, and that was a moment where you felt relaxed for the first time in a while.

“This is an intervention,” Just when I think that I’d be given a break, the Devil arrives. Not you, Eunha. I still like you. It turns out that you weren’t going to be left alone at all on this one fine day. First, the annoying couple you call your best friends. Second, the boy who managed to provoke you into yelling and finally, Kim Sojung. And Eunha, and Yewon. They’re like three peas in a pod. “For your information, I am not doing this willingly.” Sojung says, crossing her arms. That was obvious enough.

Yerin anxiously waits behind you, not knowing the right words to say at the moment.

“Good morning?” You fretted, scratching your head. There was five minutes before the second class started and usually, you would spend these precious minutes packing up and preparing for the incoming period but it seems like that routine will be broken today. Please do not let this go on for more than a few seconds.

Sojung closes your locker, “We need to talk about you and Yuju.” She said. Of course. You sigh deeply, everything is about her now. Just as you were about to speak, SinB happened to walk by and now you were convinced that things are just about to get messier. What’s next? Yuju comes too? Wait, I can’t jinx it. I take that back. Don’t make her come here.

“What the fuck? You guys are having a family meeting without me?” SinB mused, automatically running to her girlfriend’s embrace.

Sojung ignores the younger girl, completely shutting her out, “So, let me just say that I only went along with this idea because of Eunha and I like Yuju. But I don’t like you, and I don’t care what happens to you or what you’re feeling—”

“She does care, she just can’t admit it.” Yewon chimed in.

“Yewon, shush,” Sojung holds her index finger up to her younger sister’s face, and then she points at you. You stared back at her with a blank expression, you really just wanted to get to class. “You need to be aware of the things that Yuju has been doing ever since you broke up with her.” The tall girl said.

You furrowed your eyebrows, “I was never dating her—”

“Yeah, that’s not what I thought. I’m pretty sure you two would’ve kissed if you weren’t constantly surrounded by people,” Sojung snickered. She wasn’t… completely wrong. You never wanted to kiss Yuju, but if she ever made a move to kiss you, well, you wouldn’t stop her. Does that one time in the hallway count as her trying to kiss me? Would I have stopped her? Seeing the look of shyness on your face, Sojung smiles smugly, knowing that she has struck the right nerve. “Genius, that is what I am.” She bragged.

“I will punch you in the face.” You stated.

Eunha finally decides to come in between you and Sojung after realizing that letting her girlfriend handle this situation would be pointless, “Okay, let’s just have a healthy conversation for once.” She suggested with a smile.

You sighed and leaned into your locker, “What do you want?” You asked. The bell rings, but neither of you moved. Even Yerin, SinB, and Yewon who probably have no business being in here didn’t leave. You were happy about that though because then you wouldn’t have to deal with Sojung alone.

“Yuju… really wanted to know,” Eunha started. You shake your head, this again. You considered completely shutting everything out, but Eunha’s next words kept you listening. “She pretty much asked everybody that she thought knew about it. Me, Sojung, other people… and Jennie.”

Upon the mention of your old friend’s name, your mind goes haywire. Yuju? Talked to Jennie? About… about that?! “Why the fuck would she do that?” You asked with your voice wavering. Jennie was merciless to those she deemed unworthy of her attention. Pretty old school considering she’s just another student, but the difference between her and the others was that she was rich and she was the principal’s relative, somehow that automatically makes her someone who has a lot of power.

And if one holds power, they’re allowed to act however they want. That’s usually bad. Especially for the lesser powerful students. Students like Yuju.

“Because you didn’t tell her anything, doofus.” Sojung taunted.

“It was for her own good,” You ran your hand through your hair and sighed once again. “I didn’t… think she would do that. How does she even know about Jennie?” You uttered. Yewon avoids your gaze, Eunha shifts awkwardly on her spot, and Sojung just stares at… something. You follow the eldest’s gaze and your eyes landed on… Jung Yerin.

Yerin bit her lower lip and fidgeted with her shirt, “I only told Yuju what I know! That I guessed that (Y/N) got involved with Jennie at some point!” She confessed more to SinB who was the most confused out of everyone at the moment.

“Well, good job anyway. You successfully got the purest girl in the school on the leading lady’s radar. Nothing bad is going to happen.” Sojung says sarcastically.

Before Sojung and Yerin could argue, Yewon interrupts both of them. “Can you guys enlighten me though? I know Jennie is… kinda mean but why is this so bad? She wouldn’t do anything rash to someone she barely knows, right?” Yewon asked. Being a student who always minds her own business, Yewon doesn’t really pay attention to anything else other than her grades and whatever her sister gets herself into.

Sojung sternly glares at you as she talks to her sister, “Jennie and our good friend over here, and also a couple of certain other people, wanted to keep what happened that day a big secret so that the important ones don’t get in trouble with the principal.” The oldest explained. Well, Sojung, how do you know so much about this? I’m more surprised that the whole story hasn’t got out yet. It’s been months. Jennie’s grip on this school is insane.

“We’re not going to force you to tell us anything if it makes you uncomfortable, or if Jennie scares you, or if you just don’t wanna say a word about it at all but… since Yuju is involved now, we just want to know how bad it really was.” Eunha says gently, taking your hand in hers and reassuring you with a kind smile. You felt warm inside, you missed her being your friend.

You take a deep breath to calm your nerves. You preferred not pulling anyone else into your mess, even if it was Sojung who annoyed the hell out of you because they could get in real danger. But since Eunha was asking so nicely, and they do deserve some sort of explanation for their friend, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to tell them something. For Yuju’s sake.

“Well, you already know the guy got sent to a hospital,” You started, slowly pulling your hand from Eunha’s hold. All of the girls nod. Anyone who heard about the fight knew that much, but everything else was twisted that nobody was sure which story was the truth. It was exactly what Jennie wanted. “The thing is… that guy is Jennie’s close friend. Maybe boyfriend, or ex. I don’t fucking know, but he meant something to her and since he was the jackass that started it, Jennie didn’t want him to receive the short end of the stick.” You continued. You try your hardest to keep such grotesque images from that night out of your head for as long as you can.

The girls listen intently. You couldn’t tell what they were thinking. “If anyone with a big mouth were to ever find out about the truth… I’m not sure they would be safe.” You said. Thinking of Yuju being brutally pushed around the hallways by Jennie’s minions made your blood boil. Nobody deserves to be treated with such cruelty, especially Yuju who just wanted to understand you more.

This is my fault. I got her into this. I have to get her out.

Swallowing your own stubbornness, you made up your mind about what you could do to get Yuju out of this chaotic situation. It was probably the only way. “Has she been asking about this since… you know.” You muttered. Sojung nods, much to your dismay.

“Three months… I’m surprised she’s not dead,” You tried to joke. It landed poorly though. You shook your head, never the time for that kind of jest. “I’ll… tell her.” You confessed.

There was a moment of silence, and you weren’t sure if the girls heard you or not because they looked at you as if your words went inside one ear and out the other. What is so confusing about that? I thought it was pretty straightforward.

“Tell her you love her?” Yerin blurted out.

You blushed furiously, “The truth! What the fuck, Yerin!”

“Oh my God, you love her?” Sojung asked, covering her mouth. “This is so much better than I expected.” She exclaimed. If it wasn’t for her girlfriend, Sojung would’ve teased you to no end so once again, you were thankful for Eunha’s existence. SinB smiles fondly at you, finally feeling relieved now that you’ve succumbed to what your heart has been saying for so long.

You were relieved too, somewhat. Because now you’re not in a constant battle with yourself, but the problem is how you’re even going to talk to Yuju after this revelation.

That’s a problem to solve for some other time.

Just as lunch time started, you told Yerin and SinB that you would be doing something important that will keep you busy for the rest of the period. They didn’t say much about it and allowed you to go on your merry way, fortunately enough. With some courage and a pre-rehearsed speech, you entered the half-empty library. Just as you expected, Seokmin was quietly eating a sandwich on one of the tables, scrolling through social media on his phone.

Taking a deep breath and muttering some quick words of wisdom to yourself, you slowly approached Seokmin.

The boy slowly raises his head after sensing your presence, and you almost laughed at how shocked he looked to see you for the second time in one day.

“Hey.” You greeted.

Seokmin rushed to swallow his food, then he cleared his throat and nodded at you. “Hi.” He said.

“Can I sit here?” You asked, pulling out the chair across from him. Seokmin nodded again and you sat down, taking out your own sandwich and putting it down on the table, but doing nothing else. How do you even start talking to someone you avoided for no reason? Seokmin did not deserve to receive the cold shoulder from you because looking back at it again, he literally should not even be involved in your problem. It’s all because of…

Suddenly, it hit you. Nothing about this was Yuju’s fault. Nothing about everything you were going through was Yuju’s fault. All this time you’ve been blaming an innocent person for nothing when all of this wouldn’t have happened if you had just dealt with it the right way instead of running.

I have a lot to apologize for… but I’ll save it for when I actually see her again.

“I’ll make things right.” You say out of nowhere. That was meant to be a thought, damn it.

Seokmin keeps nodding, and he couldn’t help but smile at your promise. “I figured as much. You would never leave any loose ends.” He said.

“Oh? You know me now?” You teased, raising an eyebrow.

Seokmin’s smile just gets brighter, “Anyone with a pulse wouldn’t just let their loved one go without proper closure.” He replied.

Hearing someone refer to Yuju as your ‘loved one’ made your skin tingle and it doesn’t help that you were aware of your feelings for her now. Some part of you wants to be hopeful and end all of this with Yuju by your side, but then once again, fear strikes you. Would Yuju be really happy with you finally opening up to her? Isn’t it too late for that? Did she actually mean it earlier when she looked at you like you were everything she was hoping to see at that time?

And were you actually prepared for all of this?

“She never stopped talking about you,” Seokmin blurted. Something about the atmosphere was making you feel strange, so you awkwardly looked around before paying attention to your friend once again. “For a long time, the only thing that came out of her mouth was your name.” The boy continued, taking out the unwanted pickles in his sandwich. You tilt your head to the side, wondering why this was so awkward for you.

“It was borderline obsession but she was cute so I looked past that.” Seokmin admitted, sighing blissfully.

“Can we stop talking about her like she passed away? Like I’m pretty sure she’s eavesdropping on us right now.” You said, once again looking around you trying to find someone who was not even there.

Seokmin laughs, “What I meant to say was… you mean a lot to her, and I can assure you that all she wants right now is not even an apology, or an explanation, but a simple ‘hi’. Literally just look at her and she’ll be happy for the next few days.”

You couldn’t say anything to that, partly because most of what Seokmin said didn’t really stay in your brain. I should probably talk before it gets weird again.

“Are you… okay? With all of this?” You asked.

Seokmin puts his sandwich down, and he doesn’t respond. He was actually thinking hard about it while you sit there, anxiously waiting for his answer. You would willingly back off if Seokmin still has feelings for Yuju because all that matters to you at the moment was getting back on good terms with her.

I think.

As if Seokmin could tell what you were thinking, he addresses it. “There’s… really no point in holding on anymore.” He said with a sad smile.

“That’s not… true. She could fall for you after all of this.” You replied. It felt strange hearing yourself say that out loud.

Seokmin laughed again, then he started shaking his head. You couldn’t tell if he was sad or angry. Maybe both, but probably not. “No, no. That girl is completely in over her head for you.” And you knew that. You just didn’t want to find out just how much. Too much love will kill you or whatever. Also you get flustered really easily.

You took a bite out of your sandwich, “Did you ever try with her?” You asked. Alright, maybe asking that was too much but I’m nosy.

“Yeah but… either she’s unbelievably slow or she wanted to let me down easily by constantly… friend-zoning me.” Seokmin said. You wince, ouch. It didn’t look like Seokmin was bothered with it. Actually, he looked like he was merry about it all. It was weird because one would think that he would be miserable, but that was not the case.

(Of course you’d never think of it, but Seokmin was more happy about the fact that his two precious friends are going to be okay.)

Seokmin smirks as you drink your water, “Hey, at least you’re going to get some.” His words nearly made you spit out your drink, but when he lightly kicked your ankle as a tease you spilled water on your uniform.

Rather than getting angry about your now soiled shirt, you attempt to clear the air. “I’m talking to her to stop her from getting devoured by our common enemy! Not to get in her pants, God.” Who in their right mind would even try to use Yuju’s innocence to their advantage? A part of you is starting to doubt Seokmin’s infatuation towards Yuju. Did he really like her?

“Right, right. You might wanna clean yourself up though.” Seokmin gestured to your clothes. Well, this is just great. I don’t have a spare shirt. I’m probably gonna have to borrow the ones they have at the office with the school’s catchphrase and mascot on it.

You stood up from your seat and as you headed towards the library doors, you muttered some curses and threats to literally everything out of annoyance. Seokmin smiles as he watches you go, finally content that the two of you were friends again.

“Don’t spread to my skirt, don’t spread to my skirt, don’t spread to my skirt…” You chanted while running towards the nearest restroom. You earned several looks from students who were passing by and you have never been more embarrassed. Why didn’t I think of covering myself up at least?! Darn you, Seokmin!

As you neared the closest restroom you could find in the area, you heard a couple of muffled voices coming from inside the restroom. You couldn’t decipher the words you were barely hearing, but when you reached the entrance of the restroom, you recognized one of the voices inside. You could never really not know who that voice belongs to.

Jennie.

You considered turning back, not wanting to see the girl and deal with her for who-knows-how-long, but her next words stopped you from walking away.

“...just because you and (Y/N) had fun for a little while.”

Immediately, you pushed the door open with way too much force than you intended and entered the restroom. Jennie wasn't the only person inside, obviously. Her friends were there too: Jisoo, Chaeyoung, and Lisa. But there was another girl in the bunch. Someone who looked just a little bit out of place. The girl who has been clouding your mind ever since the first time you saw her today. I was right.

“(Y/N)...” Yuju stands by the farthest sink in the place. It looked like the other four girls were cornering her, but you weren’t sure of what was happening or what happened prior to this moment. It took you all your might to get a hold of yourself, not wanting to jump the gun. If they did anything to her… if they touched even one fucking strand of hair on her head…

“How nice of you to join us. We were just talking about you,” Jennie says with a sly smile. You avoid Yuju’s stare by looking at Jennie. Cute as ever but what the fuck does she want? “I was wondering if you’d like to come over to my place sometime this week. We have a lot to do.”

Oh, you know exactly what that meant. Somebody found out? Was it Yuju? Is that why they’re all over her right now?

You were about to go along and get dragged away without saying a word to the girl you actually wanted to talk to, but something inside you screamed at you to not do that. Get this over with. Get this over with.

“No thanks.” You deadpanned. You slipped in between Lisa and Chaeyoung, muttering a small ‘excuse me’ as you made your way towards Yuju.

Jennie stops you from walking any further towards the other girl, “You’re really going to fight this?” She asked.

“I’m not your pet, Jennie. Nobody is,” You turned around to face her again with newfound confidence. I was never anyone’s pet. Why did I even let her threats control me? I’m (Y/N) for God’s sake! I don’t answer to anyone. Stupid. “And for the record, I think it’s pretty douchey to keep hiding it as if no one’s gonna find out about it in less than two weeks. Why try to stop the inevitable?” You asked.

Jennie clenches her fists, however, she doesn’t say anything. You had a point, and she wasn’t going to try and fight that.

“I suggest that you clear the rumors before it gets out of hand. Grow the hell up and take responsibility. Trust me, it’s good for you.” You glance at your right arm which has long healed and recovered to its glory. “I know it was for me. See you never, Jen.”

The sophisticated girl scoffed, “You’ve grown soft, (Y/N). You’ll never survive here.” She said. And with that, she and her friends left without saying anything else, but you couldn’t help but roll your eyes at her words. For fuck’s sake, we’re in high school! The worst you can do to someone is throw their textbook on the ocean and make them pay hundreds of dollars for it even though it wasn’t their fault.

Yuju fidgets with the ends of her sleeves, unsure of what to do now that she was alone with you. You were feeling the same. How do you even start talking to her? Maybe the best thing to do right now is see if they did anything to her. With that in mind, you cautiously took several steps towards the taller girl. Yuju had her head hung low, what’s wrong?

You raised your hand, but stopped halfway. Is this the right thing to do? Can I even do this? All of your doubts were washed away when your eyes met Yuju’s hopeful ones, and you continued your action. You carefully brushed Yuju’s hair away from her face, and you expected to see her perfect like always, but there was a cut on her cheek and it made you see red so quickly.

“Did they do this?” You asked, clenching your jaw. I knew they wouldn’t leave her without a scratch!

“No, they didn’t—”

“Then who did?” You cut her off.

“(Y/N)—” Again.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll find them and then I’ll—” This time, Yuju keeps you from talking by taking your hand and squeezing it tightly, snapping you out of your little cloud of rage. At least it calmed you down a little, and it totally distracted you from the fact that your soaked shirt was the reason you came in here in the first place.

��Do you… have a bandage with you?” Yuju asked. She didn’t move her hand. Good.

You nodded timidly, “I have some.” You replied. Since you get in fights way too often, your brother has advised you to keep several bandages inside your jacket and your backpack just in case you start bleeding. Now you were finally going to put them to use after a while.

While you fished through the inner pockets of your jacket, Yuju waits patiently, and then she finally notices that you were completely soaked with water. “What happened to you?” The tall girl asked. You hummed questioningly, not quite hearing what she said as you were busy and when you looked up, Yuju was completely dazed. Realizing that she had been staring rather inappropriately, Yuju’s face quite literally heats up. Is that how I look when I get flustered?

“I was eating lunch with Seokmin and… it’s a long story actually, don’t worry about it.” You said, waving your hand. Finally, you got a hold of several bandages and you handed them to Yuju with a proud smile on your face. Looking down at the colorful bandages, colorful and cute animal bandages, Yuju fails to prevent a giggle from coming out of her mouth.

You pouted, “What? Don’t you think they’re cute? Look at this it’s got an excited puppy hugging a sleepy puppy!” You exclaimed as you pointed at the tan colored one. Yuju could only nod, handing you back your favorite one and putting the others on her backpack for future uses. I hope there’s never a time where she has to use all of those.

“Yes, yes, you’re adorable. Could you put that on me, please?” Yuju asked, leaning her face closer to yours.

“I was talking about the dogs… but whatever.” You muttered. There was no point in arguing with Yuju about these kinds of things because if you learned from when you were still friends, you always end up as a blushing mess after every fight about cute things. How does she even do that? Maybe you’re really just that much of a softie.

Or, well, maybe it’s because of Yuju.

You held Yuju’s chin in your hand to keep her face steady, and you noticed that blood was starting to drip down from the cut. You wiped it off slowly, careful to not touch the wound and hurt Yuju. You stared at the taller girl’s (beautiful) face, familiarizing yourself with her features once again and this time, you didn’t exactly flinch when her eyes fluttered open all of a sudden.

As you stared down at your hand with Yuju’s blood on it, you were reminded of a similar scene months ago, although the situation was so, so much worse.

That’s when everything started to come back to you again. Flashing neon lights that were suddenly blinding, deafening bad music, and more than ten pairs of eyes watching you, judging you, horrified of you. And then finally, the heavy atmosphere that made it hard for you to breathe and nearly suffocated you before you finally ran out of the room, away from everyone’s watchful eyes… and the one unconscious body on the floor where you had just been standing.

“(Y/N), hey,” Yuju snaps you out of your train of horrible thoughts. She noticed how you reacted to her blood, she took it upon herself to wipe it off and get you back to reality. “I’ll do it.” She whispered, smiling and reaching for the bandage in your hand, but you pulled your hand back.

She has to know what I did, she has to hear it from me.

Somehow, Yuju caught on to what you were thinking. “I’m not… going to push you anymore. I know what happens when I do that.” Maybe she's psychic. She tries to take the bandage again, but you still pulled away and it made her sigh deeply.

You shake your head, “Not this time.” You said. Once again, you took her chin and tilted her face up. Goosebumps spread across your skin when Yuju rested one of her hands at your hip, and the way she stared at you made you sick to your stomach, in a good way. You raised the bandage close to Yuju’s face, and then you finally covered the wound, gently pressing the bandage so that it attaches to her soft skin.

Yuju doesn’t say anything for a while, and neither do you as you were trying to collect your thoughts. Maybe this wasn’t the ideal situation, since you always imagined that you would be telling her somewhere that was not a school restroom, but she’s here right now, willing to listen. She will always be willing to listen, but if you don’t tell her now, will you ever be able to?

That was a question that ran circles inside your brain for a while. It felt like you were taking forever thinking about it but of course, Yuju stayed patient, even going as far as to not say anything about the muffled sound of the bell ringing from the hallways. Sighing heavily, you pry her hand away from your hip and take a step back.

The more you thought about it, the more you came to terms with the fact that there was never going to be a perfect moment for something like this. And again, you were reminded that it really doesn’t matter if you don’t tell her now or not because she will find it out, especially after you’ve given Jennie a piece of your mind. You remind yourself that she has to hear the story from your perspective, and then leave her to think hard about and decide what to think of you after everything.

It’s a simple job… but with extreme risks.

Taking a deep breath, you decided to get it over with, as you always told yourself whenever you faced a big dilemma.

“A few weeks into the new school year, Jennie decided to throw a stupid party since we’re all in seniors and it might be the last time we can have fun,” Yuju’s head snaps up once you start talking. Then you find yourself chuckling at your words, she was right about that at least. “She invited a lot of her friends, and some other rich students in the school. There were also these older kids, I think they were in college. They got there much earlier than I did. By the time I joined the fun, pretty much everyone was buzzed.” You said. You remember being disgusted at how every corner of the room that day reeked of alcohol and sweat.

“I was roaming around in the kitchen, looking for something decent to eat when I noticed this one girl staring at me and you know I had to talk to her about that,” You continued. Yuju nodded, and you truly hoped that she wasn’t thinking about it the wrong way. She knows that I meant that I had to confront the girl, right? Because of my temper? Please tell me she knows that. “I thought she was judging me but it turns out she was just interested, and I was super bored so I decided to play along.” Then you looked at yourself in the mirror for a brief second, attempting to prepare yourself as the turning point of that whole situation replays in your head for the umpteenth time.

“One thing led to another and suddenly she was all over me. I didn’t mind it, she was pretty. But… some people still had problems with girls hooking up,” You clenched your fist at the memory. This is it. Come on, (Y/N). Yuju stands closer to you, offering her support and comfort with her presence, but this time it wasn’t working so well. Again, you were scared because you had a feeling that she won’t be so close to you anymore when you start talking again. Still, you push through it, having had enough of dragging it on. “There was this guy, um, he was wasted as hell and he was saying stuff. You know me, I get riled up easily but I had to remind myself that he was drunk. He didn’t know what kind of messed up bullshit he was saying, right? But then he started touching the girl I was with and when I tried to tell him to go away… he said that word.”

You didn’t have to look at Yuju to know that she understood what you were saying. The longer the moment replays in your head, the more you got confused as to why Jennie worked so hard to hide it in the first place. Who was that guy to her? She would’ve rather allowed me, her literal friend and schoolmate, to get hurt rather than disciplining that guy!

“I don’t know. I lost it. As soon as the word fell from his stupid mouth, I didn’t waste another second and decked him in the face. Then I did it again. And again, and again, and I didn’t stop until a couple of other kids pulled me away,” You release a shaky breath as the image of the older guy laying on the floor flashed in your head. You remember looking down at your hands covered in his blood, then the eyes, and everything else. Your chest started getting heavy as the weight of your actions started settling in. “I could’ve killed that guy.” You said with your voice quivering.

Slowly, Yuju takes both of your hands and pulls you into her. You allowed yourself to melt into her embrace, appreciating her warmth that managed to chase away some of the horrific feelings inside your chest. However, you were immediately reminded of the situation and you pulled away from the taller girl quickly.

You chuckled bitterly, “Scared of me yet?” You asked. It was meant to be a joke question, but you secretly hoped that she would answer honestly and seriously, even if the worst of your predictions about this discussion ends up being the outcome.

“A little,” Yuju admitted. Your heart squeezes within itself just a little bit and every breath you took was like a needle poking at it, making everything hurt just a tad bit more. “But you did that to protect yourself, and the girl. He was harassing her, plus he literally called you a slur.”

Are there any right words for you to say after that? Somehow it felt like the conversation was over, but the heaviness stayed in your chest and now Yuju’s presence only gave you anxiety rather than comfort. You nodded to yourself, suddenly remembering that you had a class to attend and totally forgetting about your shirt that has now dried after minutes of being left alone.

“Right…” You muttered. What are we supposed to do now?

“Does it feel lighter?” Yuju suddenly asks. You looked up at her, confused. She steps forward and puts her hand on your chest, where your heart was. “Right here.” She said. Oh.

“No,” You shook your head, taking her hand and letting it fall down to your side with yours. What was she going to do with that information? Did she really just want to know because she wanted to understand you better? Suddenly, you didn’t get Yuju’s motives, but that was something you felt like you had to think about while laying in your bed and staring at your boring empty ceiling. “I feel sick.”

Yuju hums, “You’ve been bottling all of that in a while. I wanted to… free you from it, but I thought I had to know every single thing before I try to do anything about it. I’m sorry if I… pressured you.” She says, laying her head low. Has she always known that something was bothering me? Is that why she got interested in the first place? A lot of questions filled your head and when you opened your mouth to ask her one, the door suddenly flew open and you remembered that yes, you were in a public space.

And that the two of you were at least half an hour late to your classes.

“Come on, let’s get out of here.” You said and dragged the taller girl out of the restroom before the student that entered noticed anything that was out of the blue. Yuju only lets you lead her through the hallways because you were holding her hand, and nothing makes her happier than seeing you being so close to her.

How do we even recover from any of this? I can’t just suddenly talk to her about my feelings after all the things I just dumped on her.

Wait.

That’s right. I do have feelings for her.

As you tread the empty hallways, you realized that you had no idea where you were even trying to go. Since you were late to your class, you didn’t feel like going anymore but as for Yuju… well, things might be different. You looked over your shoulder, only to see the taller girl looking at you like she hadn’t seen you in forever. Some part of that is true considering the amount of time you were apart from each other.

But a sly smirk makes its way onto your face because at some point, you knew that Yuju looked at you whenever you were in the same space, even if she made effort to avoid you too back then.

“Are you sure you’re fine wearing your uniform? That was wet, you know. You could get sick.” Yuju says with the utmost concern.

You nodded, “It’s alright. It’s dry now and I’m not—”

“Made of glass, yes. It’s a famous saying from you.” Yuju finishes your sentence, or more like she cuts you off, wearing a teasing smile.

You shoot her a playful glare, “You, Yerin and SinB… and probably Seokmin too. You all use my own words against me.” You said, letting out a dramatic long sigh of defeat. It does get tiring dealing with a couple of smartasses for friends, but you love them all the same. Speaking of Seokmin… I should probably get my stuff back. My poor sandwich is still in the library.

“I’m glad you guys are talking again.” Yuju mentions. You nodded, you felt the same. Although you didn’t imagine that the first time you and the boy have a proper conversation ends up with you spilling water all over your uniform but at the same time, it felt fitting that it would be like that.

“Did he ever ask you again?” You asked.

Yuju turns her head at you, utterly muddled, “Ask me out?” She repeated.

“Yeah. Remember when he approached you before lunch time? He was hoping to take you out on a date, did he ever do that again?” You were genuinely curious.

“No? I mean, I don’t think so. How would I know?” Yuju shrugs. It just dawned on you that she might’ve been oblivious of Seokmin’s feelings all along. You felt bad for your friend, but then again if you told him about it he would laugh with you.

“You are unbelievable, Yuju. You’re telling me that for three months you didn’t notice that he had a big crush on you?” You questioned her again.

“He did not! And why would I look at someone else when you’re around?” Yuju tries to flirt by winking at you. Yes, the charm worked but you weren’t going to let her get away with that.

“Stop changing the subject. He totally— wait, this isn’t the way to the library.” You said as you looked around at the familiar and yet unfamiliar surroundings. You were able to identify that you and Yuju had somehow landed in the science hallway of the building though. Yuju lets go of your hand and looks out the big windows, staring at the flowers down at the garden and letting herself be mesmerized by nature’s beauty, and totally ignoring the fact that the two of you had gotten lost while chatting.

This was where you first told her your name, and where you messed with her. Back then she was completely dazed at the flowers too, and you smiled at the familiarity of it all.

You crossed your arms over your chest, “You said you wouldn’t want to look at anything else while I’m around and yet you’ve forgotten about me. For flowers.” You joked.

Yuju hums, then she smiles but it wasn’t the kind of smile that made your heart flutter and filled your stomach with butterflies, it was a smile that told you that she was up to something. “Oh? So you admit that you don’t want me to look at anything else but you?” She asked, now walking towards you with that mischievous glint in her beautiful eyes. Fuck.

“H-How did you even make that connection?” You tried to avoid stuttering, but now Yuju was extremely close and somehow your feet got glued to the ground. Is this how she felt when I did it?!

“(Y/N),” Yuju’s tongue runs across her upper lip briefly, just like you did back then. You squint at her actions, finding her ridiculous while simultaneously feeling incredibly embarrassed at the thought of you probably looking stupid months ago. At least she looks nice doing it now. I was injured and it was my first day back from the hospital, I must’ve looked funny. “Would you like to talk about that?” The tall girl asked, her eyes darting from your flushed cheeks, to your nose, and then your lips.

You stifled a laugh, “Slow down. Save it for later, lovergirl.” You said, putting your hands on the other girl’s shoulders and gently pushing her back to create distance. One because you were close to combusting and two because you might’ve not been able to control yourself. The things you make me feel.

Yuju grins, “On that cute little coffee shop after school?” She asked, which you nodded your head to.

“Your treat.” You say with a smirk before turning around and walking back. This time, you were actually going to the library. Yuju jogs up beside you, still wearing a big smile on her face and she wraps her hand around yours.

“I don’t mind as long as it’s for you.”

“...”

“Oh my goodness, you let me finish!”

“Well, maybe we don’t always have to save the romantics for later.”

After screaming to your older brother a quick goodbye, you do your best to slip on your sneakers in record breaking time and run out of the house, not even bothering to tie up your shoelaces. If you even stop or slow down for half a second, you would miss your bus and it takes a whole hour for the next one to pass by your neighborhood and there was just something that was not right about arriving at school exactly on time. Maybe it was just you. It was probably just you.

As you sprint towards the bus stop, you noticed how cold it really was. It was weird considering how it was usually not always chilling whenever you went out on your usual routine. Did I not read the weather right? Oh, who am I kidding? The weather is always unpredictable.

When you arrived at your destination, you recognized a familiar face sitting at the bench quietly and when the girl spots you, she mirrors the same look of bewilderment as you walked closer to the bench. What is she doing here? And why so early in the morning?

“Yuna, babe,” After two weeks of dating, you realized that you didn't even know Yuju’s full name and she didn’t tell you because she thought that you knew. Apparently, her full real name was Choi Yuna, and even now that the two of you have been together for a month and a half, your girlfriend’s name still sounded as fresh and beautiful as it did when you first heard it. Hell, I can’t even believe she’s my girlfriend. Girlfriend! “What are you doing here?” You asked.

“Looks like somebody forgot that she will be riding the bus with her girlfriend to school this morning,” Yuju teased. You scratched your head, dumbfounded. Yeah, I did forget that. What the hell is wrong with me today? “And I think the real question is, what are you doing here? There’s at least a solid hour before you usually come out and catch the bus.” She said, pointing at her watch.

You furrowed your eyebrows, suddenly not knowing how time works. You pulled out your phone and your eyes almost fell out of their sockets when you confirmed that yes, your girlfriend was telling the truth. “Are you kidding me! I ran like hell to get here and I’m way too early!” You shouted and plopped down on the bench beside the taller girl.

Yuju coos when she sees you pout, “Aww, it’s okay, at least we get to spend more time together at the ass crack of dawn.” She said.

“Okay, but seriously, why are you here? Like, specifically right here at the bus stop?” You asked, ignoring your cheeks that were heating up. A month and a half and she still has this effect on you.

“I was actually on my way to your house to surprise you and all that but I got exhausted so I sat down here for a bit to rest. And then you came,” Yuju explained. Seeing the drained look on your face, she frowned. She then pulled you close, letting you rest your head on her shoulder while also holding her hand. Still gives me butterflies. “Did you even have breakfast?” Your girlfriend asks. She sighs when she feels you shake your head.

“Wanna walk to a bakery before the bus arrives?” Yuju smiles when you do, because nothing makes you feel better than eating bread at your favorite place with your favorite person.

“My treat this time, though.” You said as you stand up, pulling Yuju with you.

“Oh, you don’t have to.” Yuju said. The two of you started walking to your usual path to the nearest bakery shop. You’ve gone on countless dates in different places, but something about this particular bakery was special. The pastries were delicious of course and the short distance between it and your house was definitely a favor, but there was always something in the air whenever you and Yuju go there for a snack.

Ugh, I feel tingly thinking about it. But you loved it.

“Yes, I do,” You replied, momentarily stopping at your tracks. You have been thinking about it for a while. How you and Yuju got to where you are now, what it took for you and her to get here. But more specifically, this was about Yuju and how you are so genuinely thankful for her for being with you. “I realized that… you were the one that definitely got the worst end of this… whole thing between us. When we met, when we became friends, when we tried to sort things out about that thing, and pretty much every other stuff. I want to be good to you, like you’ve always been to me. And I know bread is nothing but I promise that there are greater things that I can do to make up for all the time you waited and dealt with me.” You confessed, running your thumb across the taller girl’s knuckles tenderly.

Is this enough? Probably not. I put her through a lot, and I will give her all the love she’s given me. Maybe more.

Definitely more.

Yuju doesn’t say anything. At first, she stares at you for a long time because how can she even respond to that? (She felt a lot of things inside. So much that she felt like she was going to explode if she tries to speak.) But then she cups your face with her hands and slowly, she pulls you in for a kiss.

It was quick, but it was enough to get the message across.

I love you more, Choi Yuna.

“Lean on me, right?” You whisper as she pulls back. She looked like she was about to cry, but she smiles at you and blinks the tears away. (You smile back at her, and Yuju feels like she was going to melt into a puddle the longer she stared.)

“That was sweet… but I was going to tell you that I have coupons we could use instead—”

“Oh, just let me be romantic!”

#gfriend imagines #gfriend scenarios #gfriend reactions #gfriend oneshots #gfriend x reader #yuju x reader #yuju imagines #yuju reactions #yuju oneshots #gfriend yuju #girl group imagines #girl group scenarios #girl group reactions #girl group oneshots #girl group x reader

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amarimaryllis · 4 years

Text

The Sun’s Incarnation (Ushijima x Reader)

Pairing: Ushijima/Reader

Prompt/Summary: The love between the two of you was not meant for this lifetime. Alternatively, Ushijima is a demon slayer, and you’re the unlucky demon that fell in love with him.

Tags: Angst, Demon Slayer AU, Reincarnation AU

Note: I used she/her pronouns for the reader

Warnings: Angst, Death, Mild Violence

The shop was always empty in the dead hours of the night. You couldn’t blame the people for being absent during those hours. The cold air bites at the skin of those who dare walk out, and the moon barely gives any guiding light for those who dare stumble out in the dark. It was better for you that way. Having no customers to serve meant that you could just sit in one spot, and you’d still get paid. It also meant the hunger that swirled in your stomach would not tempt you to sink your teeth into the flesh of the unlucky soul that dared to cross the path of a starving demon.

It gets monotonous with the lack of life in the restaurant, but monotony is a grim reality that came with being immortal. You’ve grown accustomed to the emptiness that settles itself in the confines of your chest, and you’ve tried all that you can to fill that void, but nothing ever really worked. Maybe this was the price of power, but even then, no power on earth could rival the dreadful feeling of loneliness.

You’re disturbed from your thoughts when the door slides open, a tall figure appearing from the freezing darkness that hugged around the restaurant’s warm light. A gust of cold wind comes from the open door, and if you were human, you might’ve shivered from the autumn wind.

“Welcome to Sakanoshita.” You greet with a smile as you try to hide your annoyance. You guess that there were still humans out there who did not value their life, and this man was solid evidence of that. What kind of idiot would walk around in the cold in a town rumored to be infested with evil spirits?

Your question is answered when the door closes and the man turns to look at you,

“I seek shelter from the cold,” He states with an air of confidence that didn’t match his fatigued figure,” And a warm bowl of noodles, if it’s not too much to ask.”

You would’ve rolled your eyes and told him that restaurants usually were meant to serve food so asking for a bowl of noodles is not too much to ask as long as you pay, but the fear that clawed at your mind stopped you from doing so. His clothes were a dead giveaway of what he was. His maroon haori, his dark uniform, and the blade perched at his hip were enough to make you feel threatened. Only a demon slayer could awaken the instinctive fear that lies within you.“Would any noodle do?”

“As long as it’s warm.” The tall man replies as he sits on one of the tables, the one closest to your booth.

“It’ll probably take some time.” You warn even if you know that you could easily whip up some noodles in a short time. You were doing all that you can to rid yourself of the demon slayer’s presence.

“Take as much time as you need.” The man waves off your fraudulent worries before he relaxes into the chair that seems to be too small for his large frame. “I am in no rush.”

“I’ll go ahead then.” You smile tightly before going to the back to prepare some noodles.

You could feel your fear grow with each step you took away from the man’s presence. You had no qualms about having to defend yourself from him, should he attack, but there’s always that part of you that worries. It was also unnerving how he barely gave you a glance. The tired man seemed to be too absorbed in his fatigue to second-guess your true nature. Perhaps he knew what you were, and he was just toying with you, lulling you into a false state of comfort before he slashes his blade through your neck in one clean swipe.

He did not.

Once the man got his noodles that took you almost an eternity to prepare, he ate it up like it was his first meal in a long time before he stood up, paid for more than what the noodles cost, and disappeared into the shadows of the unforgiving night.

You pray it was the last time you encounter the mysterious slayer. Funny how faithless creatures call on the power of the very gods that have forsaken them when placed in danger’s way. You would think the power that coursed through your veins would set you in a high free of worries, unyielding and arrogant in facing any creature that dared breathe in your direction. However, you should’ve known that anyone who dares defy the power of the heavens will soon meet their match.

The gods reject your prayer, or maybe it never even reached them. The prayers of sinners remain flightless and bound to earth, whispered into the sky only for darkness and oblivion to consume it. Whichever it was, it didn’t matter because a week passed, and the mysterious slayer reappears.

You set a bowl of soup in front of the man and he thanks you. You acknowledge him with a nod before you walk back to your booth. This was the part you hated most: sitting on a chair and wondering if the man was going to figure out what you were. He seemed pretty dense for a man meant to kill such elusive creatures.

“Why do you only work at night?” The mysterious man asks before he takes a sip of water.

You could feel the fear in you growing stronger. Had he figured it out? “How are you so sure I only work at night?”

“I drop by here in the mornings.” The man looks at you, his gaze not giving away any of his thoughts. “I never see you.”

“Why? Are you looking for me?” You attempt to fluster the man, maybe that would shut him up and veer his thoughts away from suspecting you. “After all, you won’t really notice my absence if you don’t seek out my presence.”

“I am.” The man admits, and your attempts on flustering him seem to backfire because now you’re the one who’s flustered, but at the same time afraid, as strange as it sounds. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

You give him the same answer you give to those who get the opportunity to ask. “Working at night pays more, and I have to do less because of the lack of customers.”

You motion to the empty seats surrounding the two of you. “You’re the only one who dares to walk through the dark streets of a town rumored to be infested with evil spirits.”

“I am armed.” The man pats the sword on his hip. “And I’m sure it’s not the spirits that will harm people like you and me.”

“Oh?” At this point, you were playing with fire. However, the monotony of immortality is slowly eating away at the rational part of your brain. The desire to feel something more than just emptiness was leading you to dangerous roads that most likely ended in blood and death. “Then what exactly will harm people like you and me?”

“Demons.” The man replies without a pause, his once dull eyes seeming to glow with a raging inferno of hatred and bloodlust. “Foul creatures that prey on vulnerable humans like you.”

“You speak as if you are not human.” You reply with a stable voice, but it’s taking all of your efforts not to run away.

“I am human, but I am not as weak as one.” The man’s unwavering confidence seeps into his words, and you’re almost tempted to rip him into shreds just to extinguish that flame in his eyes. However, you could tell that he meant every word, and he could easily prove himself if you attack. “However, you are. You shouldn’t be working this late at night. It’s dangerous for a woman, especially one unarmed.”

“So what if I am a woman?” You scoff. “I can still put up a fight.”

“I am not questioning your abilities.” The man replies. “I’m sure you can put up a fight, but you shouldn’t have to if you just put yourself out of danger.”

“Why are you so concerned?” You can’t help but scoff at the man. You just wanted to get this shift over with.

“There are demons lurking in this town.” The man replies, stoic and unyielding. “And I’d like to keep the deaths as low as possible.”

“How brave of you.” You resist the urge to roll your eyes. “Demons are but a tale to keep children in line.”

“I beg to differ.” The man replies. “Should a demon come your way, you’ll know just how horrible they are.”

You can feel your anger grow at his words.

“However, I’ll make sure I kill that demon before it lays a hand on any of the people in this town.”

“Do what you please.” You shrug. “By the way, I never got your name.”

“Why do you need my name?” The man questions, a brow raised questioningly.

“I’m going to gossip with a few ladies here and there about a man who goes to restaurants at the dead of the night and believes in demons.” You reply, sarcasm dripping off of every word.

“Ushijima Wakatoshi.” For the first time, you see the man smile.

Over the course of a few days, Ushijima’s late night visits become more frequent which led to you becoming more and more comfortable in his presence. His presence had breathed a fire into the cold emptiness that lay within your body, and you found yourself seeking his presence out more and more with each day that passes. Your relationship with the slayer was a friendship of sorts, a few conversations tossed around here and there before Ushijima departed into the night. However, that relationship took a turn during your weakest night.

The emptiness in your chest was not part of the promises that the demon offered you in your wintry deathbed. You should’ve known from the start that the price of rising from the ashes meant that nothing in this world could make you feel that burn again. The demon’s promises were as cold as the snow stained with your blood, if not colder, but you had deluded yourself into thinking that the promise of being reborn would breathe a new fire into you. Being placed at the brink of death had a funny way of clouding a person’s judgement.

It was at the moment, in the outskirts of the dark forest near the town, that Ushijima found you, mourning the death of your humanity and reminiscing the moments that led to it. The feelings had been bottled up for too long, and now the fragile glass that held you together was shattering violently. You were a shaking mess, tears staining your cheeks, blood coating your knuckles as you punched at the ground to feel something other than the void that was once your soul. Even then, the pain that throbbed through your knuckles wasn’t enough.

Ushijima pries you away from the ground and he pulls you to his chest. He doesn’t ask you to speak. He doesn’t ask you to do anything. He just lets you sob into his chest, cradling you in his arms as he runs his fingers through your hair in an attempt to comfort you. He wishes he could calm the storm within you, swipe a hand to alleviate the raging winds of sadness that stirs within you, raise a finger to silence the deafening thunder of regret that crashes within your soul, but could not. The gods despised creatures like you, and Ushijima realizes this as he watches the wounds on your knuckles heal at a speed foreign to the body of a mortal. Ushijima pretends to not see it as he removes his haori and drapes it across your trembling figure.

Ushijima brings you home, your meek voice guiding him as he carries you through the town. You did not have it within you to fight. You did not have it in you to think twice about the offer of being brought back home to the comfort of your bed that you did not even need. When you get there, Ushijima sets you down gently on your futon before sitting across from you, an arm’s distance away.

“I’m sorry for the trouble.” You whisper as you lean against the wall and hug your legs to your chest in an attempt to feel safer. You grip at Ushijima’s haori, pulling it tighter around you. A small voice in your head tells you to wonder about how many of your kind have stained the fabric with their blood, but you push it away because in this moment, nothing made you feel safer than the very thing that was meant to be a danger to your existence.

“Don’t apologize.” Ushijima is as straightforward as ever, and you’re not sure if the tears in your eyes are altering your vision, but you swear there’s a tenderness in his eyes that makes the unbeating muscle in your chest flutter. “Do you… Want to talk about it?”

You shake your head. You knew that if you spoke now, you’d let it all out. Something about Ushijima made you want to tell the truth, whether it was trust or foolishness, you did not want to find out. It almost makes you feel bad as you’re reminded of what Ushijima does as you look at the sheathed blade by his side, but you knew that you would feel worse if you had to die at his hands. You didn’t want to see the disgust that would take over his face if he found out that you were one of the very creatures that he swore to destroy. “Can you… stay?”

“If it’s alright with you.” Ushijima replies coolly, but the light blush dusting his cheeks gave away his feelings towards your proposition.

Silence hangs between the two of you like the wisteria that grows on the mountain. Its presence was overwhelming, and it displeased you greatly. You glance at Ushijima for a brief second before you just give it all up. Courtesy be damned, you were lonely and fate was dangling an opportunity not to be right in front of you.

“Ushi—“ Your attempt to call out for Ushijima dies in your throat halfway through. It was pathetic. You thought you were done mourning what has been long dead, but for some reason, without a trigger, without a warning, you’re back suffering through the same feelings again. It wasn’t fair.

Ushijima immediately scoots over to you before he guides you to lie down on the futon. He holds you close to his chest, his arms wrapping around your waist as you sob into the juncture of his neck and shoulder. “Sleep, it’ll help.”

You didn’t know which deity had gazed upon you and thought you deserved a semblance of mercy, but that night, sleep washes over your body as you surrender yourself completely in the demon slayer’s arms.

Ushijima awakens before you do. The sun was still out of sight, and you were still fast asleep. As much as he wanted to stay with you, he had a mission to fulfill in the other town. At least, that’s what he tells himself as he shuts your curtains tight to make sure that neither sunlight nor moonlight will filter through your windows. He knew it was wrong, whatever it was he felt about you. Fondness? Sympathy? Affection? Love? Whatever it was, he knew that he couldn’t feel that way towards you. He had sworn to kill your kind after all. However, for some reason, he can’t seem to do it with you. His hand remains far away from his blade, and the usual urge that Ushijima had to swipe a demon’s head clean off their neck was absent.

What the hell made you any different?

Ushijima shakes his head, hoping that the thoughts in his head would loosen its grip on his consciousness and fall out into the air and fade into the dark. It doesn’t work, but it doesn’t stop Ushijima from trying as he walks out of your house and into the blanket of the cold morning.

The next time you see Ushijima, he is draped in casual fabrics. His demon slayer uniform is out of sight and the sword perched at his hip is nowhere to be seen. In his hands, however, was a bouquet of gardenias.

“There’s a festival later.” Ushijima says with a hint of uncertainty in his voice, and you’re almost tempted to tease him for the blush dusting his skin and for the lack of his usual air of unwavering confidence. “I would like to go there with you.”

It’s your turn to be flustered, an unfamiliar heat creeping through your cheeks as Ushijima stretches out the bouquet of flowers to you.

“Gardenias?” You gently grab the flowers from Ushijima’s grip before you give him a teasing smile. “Not my favorite, but they’re pretty.”

Ushijima smiles at your teasing. He has been around you enough to know your little quirks. “The woman at the shop told me they were fitting.”

You don’t understand what Ushijima means, but you don’t bother questioning it. “So, shall we?”

Ushijima smiles as he holds out an arm for you to take.

The music from the band rings all the way to the quiet part of town. Each note thrums in the air and you can almost feel your heart beating in time with the faint boom of the drums. The night is filled with life, and for the first time in your immortal lifetime, you are reminded of the long-forgotten beauty of the things that live under the sun. Ushijima, whether he knew or not, had given you a piece of the life that you have long turned your back on, and in that moment, as you sit beside Ushijima in the grassy landscape, you almost wish you could stay until the sun rises on you again.

“What are we, Ushijima-san?” You whisper out, not wanting to disturb the serenity of the night. You fear that if you spoke louder than a whisper, the shadows would awaken and devour the life that floated through the midnight sky.

“I seek out your company even when I am with others.” Ushijima replies as you both continue to observe the town from a distance, the slowly dwindling orange lights made it look like the embers of a dying fire. “And I can only hope you feel the same.”

Monotony can make even the most simple things feel like a momentous event. Simple words spoken by a simple man, nonetheless, they succeed in making your insides flutter with a felicity unknown to your immortal personage. “And if I do?”

“Then perhaps I would ask if I could kiss you.” Ushijima turns to look at you with an unfamiliar glint in his eyes, swirling like liquid pools of gold under the glimmer of the moonlight.

You attempt to swallow your nerves as you turn to gaze at Ushijima who sits beside you. Your voice still comes out soft and unstable, however, there’s an undeniable certainty in the words that leave your lips. “And if I allow you to?”

Ushijima brings his face closer to yours until your noses are a hair’s breadth away, his warm breath dancing on your lips as he moves to engulf your cheeks in his large calloused hands. “Then I would be the happiest man alive.”

His lips, his hands, his body, everything about Ushijima Wakatoshi is warm. The way his mouth moves against yours feels like the fire you have long forgotten when you decided to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. It dances through your interlocked lips, like a mortal breathing in the sun as he offers a graceful dance to the god of fire. It burns you, his touch, but it makes you feel alive. As Ushijima wraps his arms around your waist, and as he pulls you into his sturdy chest, you forget.

You forget that the fire he breathes into the empty shell of your body is the very same fire that is meant to snuff out whatever light is left within you.

The last time you see Ushijima Wakatoshi, it’s in the forest of the other town.

A brother in need had sent a letter to your domicile, seeking your presence in the mountains that he dwelled in. Oikawa Tooru was the one who showed you how to live after you were reborn. Your creator could not, and so the brunette was the one to fill that spot in. You owed Oikawa your life, and although it was life you used to regret living, it was a life that had brought you to Ushijima

Oikawa had been told that a group of demon slayers were sent to his mountain, and he sought your help. Apparently, the Sun Breather was one of the slayers they had sent. It was alarming to any demon, powerful or not, because every single one of you feared the sun, and to face the man who breathes its rays is even more horrifying. No one knew what he looked like. No demon ever crossed his path and lived to tell the tale.

Oikawa was afraid, and he sought your company.

This leads to your current situation, lingering in the trees with Oikawa across from you as you listened to the growing sound of footfalls against the snow. The moon is nowhere to be seen, and you can only hope that the shadows are enough to conceal you.

“Come out demon, you have nowhere to run.” The familiar voice makes you freeze in your position up in the trees. “There’s no use hiding when I’m going to kill you anyway--”

Oikawa dodges in time, and he hops to the next tree. Another slayer had attempted to kill him from the back.

You, however, are not as lucky as Oikawa is.

A slayer comes up from behind you and manages to slash through your arm. You fall onto the ground, bleeding profusely out into the cold snow, and it almost feels like you’re back at your deathbed.

You don’t lift your head, you didn’t want to see the look on Ushijima’s face when he confirms that it is actually you. You’ve tried so hard to conceal who you are in order to lengthen whatever time you had with the man, and you were not ready to lose him just yet.

“So you’re the Sun Breather.” Oikawa stands protectively over you. “I should have known.”

“Oikawa.” Ushijima nods in acknowledgement as the other slayers appear behind him, including the one who had slashed through your arm. “I never thought you would end up becoming one of them. You were a promising slayer after all.”

Oikawa laughs as he nudges at you with his foot, a silent plea for you to start running. “You brought quite a lot of slayers, I’m flattered.”

“And it seems you’ve brought a friend as well.” Ushijima turns to look at you, taking your figure in properly before he freezes. It couldn’t be, right? The owner of Sakanoshita said you were visiting a friend in another town. Ushijima clears his thoughts, and he hopes he is wrong. However, no matter how much he pretends not to see, he can’t deny the familiar figure. He had been around you enough to know you by the lingering traces of your presence.

“I’m giving you the chance to walk away, Sun Breather.” Oikawa hisses as he pulls you to stand up.

You cover your face with your hair, ignoring the world around you as you focused on mending the wound left by the slayer’s blade.

“Unfortunately, I cannot do the same for you.” Ushijima draws out his blade.

And with that, you and Oikawa break out into a run.

The snow is cold against your feet, you don’t feel it, but you remember the feeling very well. If there’s one thing from your past that you remember, it’s the feeling of the unforgiving cold that nips at your skin, eating away at your warmth until there’s nothing left in you but the raging winds of winter.

You can hear the footsteps, the crunch of the snow under the weight of the slayers that are sprinting to catch up with the two of you. There’s an undeniable fear clawing at your chest, devouring all rational thought and cultivating the demonic instincts that you wished you could destroy.

But alas, the consequence of power is beginning to catch up, and the gods have grown tired of your defiance. Death would not let you escape this time around. You have defied the heavens once, and those proud creatures would not let you disobey them again.

Oikawa stumbles as a slayer cuts him down, and he screams. He shouts at you to continue running, to not look back, and to save yourself from the fate that he knew he was about to suffer.

You can hear the sickly sound of the blade meeting skin, and you run. You run as fast as you can, as far as you can from the snowy mountain stained with the blood of the man you once called brother. Fear courses through your veins and you can only hope that none of them catch up to you.

And if ever they do, you pray that it wasn’t Ushijima to do so.

You are brutally reminded that the gods have no need for your prayers. They did not need the worship of a faithless creature. You trip over a branch concealed in the snow, and you’re sent rolling down a steep incline. The rocks dig into your body as you crash down into a snowy part of the mountain that overlooks the town. Crimson bleeds through the fabric that hugs your figure, and your blood stains the pristine snow.

You hear footstep as you lie defeated on the ground, and you shut your eyes as you surrender your fate to whichever slayer has found you. Redemption does not exist for beings like you. Only death can forgive you for defying it. There is no atonement for a sinner who does not accept their fate.

“Why are you giving up?”

You breathe out a chuckle. The gods really were cruel, of all that they could send to kill you, they sent the one that made you feel alive.

It was poetic, in a way. The man who breathed life into you would be the one to take it.

“It is my fate to die either way.” You mumble out as you trace the skies with your eyes, surrendering to its vastness. “Running away will only prolong my agony.”

“If someone else found you,” Ushijima kneels beside you, hand far away from the hilt of his blade. “Would you have given up this quick?”

“If someone else had found me,” You can feel a tear escape your eye. “I would’ve been long dead.”

“So you’re just going to die,” Ushijima lies down beside you, and you wonder if he can feel just how cold it was. You doubted that though, the man was practically an incarnation of the sun. Even the winter in your body died when brought close to his warmth. “Do you not care about what would happen to me?”

“You would not care.” You mumble out, your throat tightening and your head throbbing with the urge to sob. “I would’ve been just another demon dead.”

“But I would.” Ushijima sits up and brings you with him, gripping your arms as he looks into your eyes. This was the first time you’ve looked at him since the start of the chaos in this mountain. “I’ve always known. Ever since that time at the mountain, I knew.”

“Then why did you stay?” You could feel the tears flowing freely. You gripped at his haori, clenching your fingers tightly as your chest did. “Why didn’t you kill me? Why did you have to make me long for a life I cannot have? Why did you give me a taste of the sun when you knew it would kill me?”

Ushijima doesn’t speak as he wraps his arms around your sobbing form.

“Pathetic, don’t you think?” The laugh that escapes you is laced with bitterness. “I’m a fool for falling in love with someone I’m meant to resent.”

A chuckle rumbles through Ushijima’s chest and you wonder if he has gone mad. His grip tightens around you as he presses a kiss at the crown of your head. “Then I guess we are both fools.”

Hours pass and you are both silent, no one speaks, just having the other is enough. You listen to the beating of Ushijima’s heart, the sound lulling you into a state of calm that you haven’t felt in a while. For a moment, you both lose your identity. He is not the man who breathes the sun, and you are not the demon that brings death upon mankind. There was nothing in that moment that grounded you to the harsh reality of the world you lived in.

“Wakatoshi,” His name feels like a prayer as it falls from your lips. “I want to see the sun with you.”

You can feel Ushijima shaking. His breathing speeds up, and his heart starts beating faster. You can hear the sobs forming at his throat. “But… That would mean…”

You pull away from Ushijima’s chest and you move to cup his cheeks. “It’s okay.”

“I don’t want to lose you.” There are tears flowing down Ushijima’s cheeks as he leans into your touch. His heart mourns a death that hasn’t happened, and for a moment, you’re almost tempted to stay.

“They’ll kill you if you don’t kill me.” The smile on your face has an underlying tragedy underneath it. “And I don’t think you can raise your blade far enough.”

Ushijima’s eyes widen. “I could never raise--”

“I know.” You wipe the tears away with your thumbs. “So let me see the sun, okay? I’ve forgotten what it looks like.”

“Please,” Ushijima grips at your wrists. “Not like this.”

“One day, Wakatoshi.” You smile sadly. “A time will come where we can gaze upon the sun with no worries.”

“Please don’t do this.” Ushijima pleads with you, desperation evident in his words as he seeks to change the inevitable.

“There will be a lifetime for us, my love.” You run your fingers through his hair, you trace the features on his face, and you embed every inch of his face into your memory. “Maybe not today, but someday.”

You ease the wrinkles in between Ushijima’s furrowed brows. “Promise me you’ll find me?”

There is resignation in Ushijima’s eyes as he presses his forehead against yours. It is inevitable. The two of you can only make the most of what you are given, and you were not given much. “I would happily die a hundred deaths to reach the lifetime meant for you and I.”

You smile sadly. “Can I kiss you?”

“What if I say yes?” Ushijima thinks back to the festival as he gazes into your eyes.

You can feel a tear roll down your cheek. “Then I’d be the happiest woman alive.”

And as you kiss Ushijima, the skies begin to shift, the sun slowly rising in the horizon as dawn breaks in the distance. You never see the sun before you fade into the ashes you once escaped, but you didn’t have to. The only sun you needed held you in its arms, whispering confessions of love and promises of devotion.

Ushijima can only look at the rising sun with contempt. He hated how the very thing that gave him strength was what took away yours. He hated how you had to suffer. He hated how he had to fall in love with you in a world that would never accept it, but he relents.

The sun brings with it a hope so strong that it pulls Ushijima from his thoughts.

One day, he thinks to himself, the sun will shine on us again.

The sun is bright.

You were starting to think that hiking up a mountain during the summer was a bad idea. It’s not like you were the one who willingly brought yourself here. Oikawa was back from Argentina, and for some reason, the first thing he wanted to do was hike up a damned mountain. You don’t know where your brown-haired companion was, but you could care less. The view you got from this part of the mountain was a sight to behold.

The mountain overlooked the town. The skyscrapers looked like dots in the distance, and the city’s noise was unable to disturb the peace protected by the towering trees. As you breathe in the air and feel the sun kiss your skin, there’s an overwhelming sense of peace and recollection that floods through you.

Something about standing in that spot felt so familiar.

“Excuse me?”

You nearly trip off the edge at the sound of someone’s voice.

You turn to look at the culprit, ready to chew them out for almost sending you to your death. However, when you turn to look at the stranger, the words die at your throat.

You knew who he was, Ushijima Wakatoshi. One of the players in the Schweiden Adlers team. Someone Oikawa has always talked about with distaste.

However, you feel like you knew him more than just that. For some reason, as you look into his olive eyes, you feel like you’ve known him your entire life. And he probably felt the same because the next thing you know, the same words escape your mouths.

”Do I know you?”

A/N: Bringing back an old piece. I made this to explore a more poetic (?) writing style, and this was one of my practice fics before I wrote “All The World Drops Dead”. It’s also pretty angsty, and there’s barely any closure, but rest assured that I’ll probably be giving out fluffy fics soon cause angst is tiring HAHAGSGRHFHDJHSKS Also, I’ve posted this before (in my old acc) and I’m bringing it back cause this fic is dear to me. Anyway, I hope you guys liked this and thank you for reading 💖

#ushijima x reader #ushijima wakatoshi #haikyuu #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu imagines #genre.angst #tw death #tw mild violence

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frogsmulder · 3 years

Text

Maybe There’s Hope: chpt 1 Stop and Breathe

Starting from the final events of 09x20 The Truth, Mulder and Scully tackle their new reality as fugitives. When they finally settle into things, Scully finds out she is pregnant again. A canon divergent AU where I thought, what if Scully got pregnant whilst on the run instead of at the end of season 11?

4k words; rated t; tagging @today-in-fic; read on ao3

The long desert roads seemed to stretch light-years ahead, no scenery, no landmarks, just flat, arid land in all directions. The baked earth was cool in the grey hue of the early morning. Far out, somewhere along the horizon, the sun started to reach up its first fingers to claw at the dawn sky. Chasing those pale blues and purples, the day would soon bleed bright oranges and yellows and colour the earth below. Daybreak felt like an answer to a prayer; the dawn light lifted the oppressive, starless night sky and had cloaked them. Daybreak filled Mulder with a sense of liberty and overwhelming hope for a second chance as invigorating as the breeze outside. It was a miracle that they had made it this far. Mulder was beginning to think he had been executed after all and was caught in limbo, forever driving towards the end of the cold, dark sky. A lost soul wandering aimlessly as punishment for his crimes.

In his mind, he kept hearing the explosions ring through his hears and the flashes of flame in the rear-view mirror. Always in his peripheral, snapshots of the ruins hurtling his way took him by surprise. He glanced at them but as soon as he chased their sight, the apparitions disappeared.

His father was dead. The smoking son-of-a-bitch should have died a long time ago. Mulder tightened his grip on the staring wheel. Now He haunted his peripheral vision as well, the ghost of his smoke sickly uncurling in the back seats of the stolen car. His fathers, his sister, his mother, Emily, the Gunmen: all dead. How many did he have left to lose?

He swallowed thickly and looked over at Scully in the passenger seat, her head lolled to one side and her lips parted to utter the tiniest of snores. A tiny damp patch on her shoulder marked where she had drooled throughout the night– something she most adamantly didn't do. Caught in the first glowing rays of the sun, Mulder had never seen her so beautiful, frizzy hair and all. He placed a hand upon her knee, a poor substitute for all the embraces he wished to share with her.

Scully stirred from her light sleep, groaning and stretching like old wood as she straightened herself. Her blinks were laboriously heavy, weighed down by the stress of the last twenty-four hours. Mulder hadn't meant to wake her but didn't miss the opportunity to share the day with her. "Hey, Scully, look at the sunrise," he whispered.

She groggily hummed, appreciating the myriad of colours. Voice still thick with sleep, she asked, "Where are we?"

"Not sure," he answered, tapping the dial for the gas to see if the needle was lying.

Scully curled up as much as she could in the seat and turned to gaze out of the window, watching the little rocks and pebbles flew past in a blur along the roadside. "Where are we going?"

He glanced at her, then back towards the horizon racing as quickly away from them as they chased after it. "Don't know. But if we don't know, at least nobody else knows either." It was meant to make her smile, but all she did was frown. With no one and nothing around them, the faux safety of the nowhere between lands scared Scully. As if somehow it was a trap they were being lulled into; a false sense of security. She knew they needed to be wary at all hours, every ticking second of the day and every tock of the clock at night. She reminded herself there was no safe place to hide and no time to catch their breath. But it was all so exhausting.

"How long have you been driving?" She craned her neck to see the bags under his eyes. Mulder had pulled all-nighters before, and it wasn't like he was never subject to bouts of insomnia, but the restless worry was the worst thing. She could see it was eating him up from the inside, not fear for himself but for her, that she had chosen this life with him again. And now he could barely offer her an existence. She wanted to tell him that it didn't matter– she'd make the same decision twice, a thousand times, but that wouldn't allay the worry. Reality had punched him in the face and marked him with two shiners.

"Ten hours or so," he said as if it was still the first half an hour.

Scully sat up in her seat. "You should take a rest. Let me drive."

"No." Mulder shook his head with pursed lips and then chuckled. "You should sleep while you can. We both know me resting is pointless."

She smiled sorrowfully, looking at her hands rested in her lap. She sighed. "None of this feels real does it?"

Squeezing her knee, Mulder spoke honestly, as soft and as mellow as the sunlight on the horizon. "You are real to me right here and now. That's all I need to get through this."

But Scully didn't ask what this was and when it would be over. She only knew she was already counting down the days. But the end was intangible and far out of sight, and counting was hopeless when it felt like starting at infinity. The one thing Scully knew for certain was that an irrevocable change had already occurred and she blinked and she missed it. She had been fighting for them, pleading for them. Just her and Mulder: that was all she wanted. And then this shift they had taken on in the last couple of days– such a short time– and she was not sure she wanted it anymore. She was beginning to get that tangy taste in her mouth like she was mourning the past and who they used to be.

Scully took a deep breath. Willing the sting away from her eyes, she expelled the air caught in her lungs, imagining the ache in her body fused to the carbon dioxide molecules and expelled also. Focusing on the sunrise, she found beauty in its nature, reminding herself of the beauty of them; all the times he had made her giggle, made her cry, made her roll her eyes.

Mulder could see Scully thinking, the lost look in her eye more familiar to him than the back of his own hand. Her silence spoke louder than any response; it whispered to him exactly what was on her mind. He knew it because he felt it too. He gently took one of the hands from her lap and held it.

The touch made Scully gasp softly, breaking her from the melody of her thoughts. It was as if he had somehow heard them. Of course, he had; they might have changed but somethings always stayed the same. Scully realised she needed him close now more than ever if she was to stand a chance of surviving. Squeezing his hand, she let him in. She missed this telepathy of theirs; messages like electricity passed through their neurons and chemically encoded between the synapse of their touch. They operated on the same electromagnetic wavelength. She smiled and squeezed his hand again.

Mulder glanced back to the gas needle, edging steadily lower. "How much money did Walter manage to get for us?"

"I haven't counted, but it won't last long anyway."

Fortunately, Scully had had the sensibility to keep the cash on her person. It was all they had left aside the clothes on their backs. Their coats and the change of clothes that were hastily packed were still in the car that Monica and Doggett had driven away and they all knew it was too dangerous now to risk meeting up.

"The next motel we come across, we'll book in–"

She looked at him cautiously.

"– Just for the night. We won't stay long, just so we can sleep on a proper bed."

"So we can stop and catch our breath," she concluded, though doubtful, running her thumb over every hill and valley of his knuckles.

"So we can catch our breath," he agreed.

The hum of the tires picking up dust and the voice of the engine marked their silence. Their long, drawn-out breaths were comforting, yet the quiet was ominous, allowing thoughts to grow like tumours, hanging uneasily between them. They had each other but what if they weren't strong enough? Mulder would have said something– anything to break the tension, but all his thoughts were made of what-ifs, and voicing them, he feared, would make them real.

Scully curled up again, protecting herself against the miasma of the silence. Concentrating on the tide of Mulder's breathing, she found a calming rhythm, watching his chest rise and fall. Knowing he was there, she managed to find peace enough to steal an hour or so more sleep.

Over the horizon came a small, dark dot, growing in size and detail. Mulder leaned forward, squinting through the dust on the windscreen. As it came approached, he thanked Scully's God for gifting an oasis. The gas station looked beaten and worn down but promised life and provisions. He made the quick decision to stop and top up on gas, water, and something for breakfast. Looking at Scully one last time, he saw her sleeping; the quiver of her eyelashes somehow anxious even during sleep. He killed the engine and got out to check the store.

It was still: quieter than Scully remembered it being. Blinking tiredly, she picked the sleepy dust from her eyes and groaned. She gasped sharply, the sight of the empty seat next to her sending her heart aflutter. She grappled at her belt for the gun she no longer had. Cursing, she ran out of the car. The beat of her feet on the ground rivaled the pound of the war drum on her chest. "Mulder?" she called but was met with no reply. "Mulder!"

Mulder came quickly through the door, a finger pressed to his lips and a brown bag in his hand. "Shh, Scully," he whispered. "It's alright. I was just getting some gas."

It was then that Scully noticed the row of pumps they were parked next to. She looked away and licked the corner of her mouth, embarrassed that she had failed to correctly assess the situation before leaping to conclusions. It was so unlike her. She was frustrated she had let fatigue and worry manipulate her so easily. It had been less than two days.

"I could have got us caught," she breathed, shaking her head in disbelief. "How could I have been so stupid?"

"Hey, none of that now." Mulder rubbed her shoulder reassuringly. He guided her back towards the car, his palm at the small of her back like a steady rudder. "We're in the middle of nowhere, nobody is going to find us out here," he calmed her, even though his heart was still racing; the fright in her shouts had shot ice through his spine.

Scully slumped into her seat, the faux safety of no-man's-land nagging at her still. "Mulder, you know better than anybody they have eyes and ears everywhere."

"Let me do the worrying for once, Scully. This one's on me."

She shook her head– she wouldn't let him bare this on his own; they were in this together. It made a small smile creep across Mulder's lips and in return Scully's brow furrowed in confusion.

"How can either of us win when we are both so stubborn?" he laughed, and Scully chuckled too. "I spoke to the owner and he said that if we head southwest, sorta back along the trail, we will end up in Rosswell by nightfall. They'll have a motel–"

"And we can breathe," she nodded, then smirked. "You just wanted to see the UFO sight, didn't you?"

"Maybe," he sheepishly replied. "I got you some of that fat-free yogurt you like for breakfast. And some bagels. You should eat something; we didn't eat all day yesterday."

Scully hadn't noticed. The gnawing of worry in her stomach had sated any appetite she might have had. She still wasn't hungry now, but the doctor in her knew she had to eat something, however hard it was going to be.

Much of the day was spent watching the sun rise overhead and munching on bagels. Scully scolded Mulder when he dipped one of his into the yogurt she had barely touched and Mulder lectured Scully about eating enough. By the time the sun began to set, they had arrived in Roswell and found a motel to stay the night. Clouds were rolling in, covering the skies from the farthest corners, and the threat of rain could be smelt on the air.

Unlocking the door, they both stepped inside a minimal, but pleasant room. Scully clenched her hands around phantom luggage itching her palms. She had the urge to unpack everything into the dresser like she always did, like on their very first case together. She peered around the door to the ensuite, seeing rows of tiny bottles and an inviting robe hung elegantly, yet groaned.

"Mulder, we are going to have to go back out for toothbrushes."

"Oh, hang on..." He rummaged through the paper bag, producing two brushes and a tube of paste. "I picked some up earlier. Sorry, they might have some bagel crumbs on."

She took them with a grin, standing on her tiptoes to press a grateful kiss to his cheek. "You're a lifesaver."

Mulder watched her disappear into the bathroom, giving her some privacy and himself some time to think. He sat on the floor, watching the rain begin to fall and the wind pick up, whipping the trees outside. Gazing out of the window, he imagined the brewing storm an omen, but one of hope. All the good things that had happened to him had been christened by torrents of rain and swirls of wind and wisps of Scully stealing small pieces of his heart: their first assignment together; their first night spent together. The weather brought the ships to port and Scully to him. Beyond the clouds he pictured his sister in the starlight twinkling brightly. He hoped his mother was up there too, keeping a watch over them both.

Suddenly, he smelt the smoke, saw it plume from the chair in the corner. He gritted his teeth. Of all the people that could appear to him...

She's been up there for a long time, you know. I thought you would have figured it out sooner.

Mulder dug his fingernails into his palms, sure the pain would snap him awake.

She saw the world for what it truly was: there's no justice... there's no cruelty either. There's simply survival. In the end, she chose not to survive. She had a choice, Mulder, what do you get?

Maybe it was all in his head. If he tried hard enough, he could make the nightmare disappear.

What did your crusade reap you? The Truth? he chuckled. Was it the truth you wanted; expected? He leaned forward out of the shadow, his dead eyes gleaming in the light. Truth is not power, in fact, it's quite the opposite: truth makes you powerless. It's been quite the burden on me; perhaps that's why I smoke so many. He slyly smiled around a wreath of white cloud. You should try it.

In the end, we all lose. That's the beauty of survival: it's only ever a temporary thing. The date is set, son. Nothing, not even you, can change that.

Fury burning through him, Mulder lept up like a lit match to a gas lamp. "And what would you know?! What did you ever try to do about it?!"

He lunged for the man, desperate to squeeze the last, dying breaths from his corpse once and for all. But as he was about to lay his hands on his sickly throat, the son-of-a-bitch dissipated as thin as the smoke he breathed, elusive in death as he had been in life. It seemed fitting. Curling his fingers through nothing but cool air, Mulder slumped back in defeat. Biting his fingernail, he thought about the truth about who he was. It occurred to him that he was lost without purpose. Although he didn't feel it yet, he recognised the impending dawn of realisation and feared it. He threw his hand out in frustration.

The truth was he had failed.

He hadn't exposed the conspiracy or brought down its organisations. He hadn't found Samantha. He hadn't been a father to William. And he hadn't been there for Scully.

The trees shook their disapproval, condemning the guilty man.

Mulder rested his head back on the mattress like he was treading dangerous waters, but his arms were limp over his knees, merely reticent about his fate. Looking back across the room, he saw Scully walk in smelling sweetly of lavender soap and looking angelic in the pale, dilapidated light. She sat on the edge of the bed, gently running her fingers through his hair and watching the storm in unison. He moved into her touch, shifting to rest his cheek against her thigh. They sat like for a while in companionable silence, reassuring one another through their touches.

When Scully crawled up the bed to lie down, she expected him to follow. When he didn't she asked, "what are you thinking? Mulder?"

"I'm thinking... I'm a guilty man. I've failed in every respect. I deserve the harshest punishment for my crimes."

Hearing the echo, Scully was thrown back to the concrete cell when he first said those words. She could tell, then, there had been a hollow complacency to his tone. Now, she only heard a conviction in his voice. It terrified her. Scully had only just broken him free of where he was being tortured, she couldn't let it live on inside of him. So, she did what she always did: countered Mulder with any sane argument she could think of.

"You don't believe that."

He was sure that he had failed as he was sure of anything. If he told Scully that it was her he had failed, she would refuse to believe him and refuse to let him believe it too. But it was true. And he dared not mention all the ways he had failed their child. Mulder sighed. "I believe that I sat in a motel room like this with you when we first met, and I tried to convince you of the truth. And in that respect, I succeeded, but... in every other way..." He thought of William swaddled in his arms when he held him for the first time– only time. He swallowed the burgeoning lump in his throat. "I've failed."

"You don't believe that either."

"Mm," he disagreed. His jaw was set. Thoughts pounded in his chest but every time he chose something to say it died a whisper caught in his throat. He finally settled for something unimportant, yet still a truth neither of them could refute. "I've been chasing after monsters with a butterfly net." He took a breath and tried again "You heard the man– the date's set. I can't change that." I can't save us. I can't make the world a better place for our son, he didn't say.

Scully wanted to shout at him that this wasn't who he was, he didn't quit so easily, he always found something worth fighting for, but she knew if she did that she would lose him forever. Taking a steadying breath, she composed herself. Keeping her voice measured, she told him what she wanted to be true. "You wouldn't tell me. Not because you were afraid or broken... but because you didn't want to accept defeat."

"Well... I was afraid of what knowing would do to you. I was afraid that it would crush your spirit." He looked into her eyes and saw a pained, mirrored reflection. In some ways, he was glad Cancer-man had told her because he could never bring himself to trample her hope, not when things were already so dire. It would break his heart.

Mulder's gaze held her fast and was as deep and cutting as the love she felt. He looked young and small and innocent like he was clutching those cloth hearts. Even then he was undeterred, never willing to give up hope.

"Why would I accept defeat? Why would I accept it if you won't?" Scully needed him to keep fighting. If he didn't, she would surely give in. "Mulder, you say that you've failed, but you only fail if you give up. And I know you-- you can't give up... It's what I saw in you when we first met. It's why I followed you. Why I'd do it all over again."

"And look what it's gotten you," he murmured.

"And what has it gotten you? Not your sister. Nothing that you've set out for. But you won't give up, even now." She took his hand, gently squeezing, hoping their neurons would connect and renew their telepathy. "You've always said that you want to believe. But believe in what, Mulder? If this is the truth you've been looking for, then what is there left to believe in?"

He glanced at the chair still coiled in that foul aroma, thought of his sister living on as bright starlight, or else he had become the thing he feared: delusional, proving all the whispered rumours true. He suspected it was the trauma or remnants from his brain disease that caused the visions, but that's not what he wanted to believe.

"I believe that... the dead are not lost to us. That they speak to us as part of something greater than us– greater than any alien force." He thought of Byers, Langley, Frohike, even Krycek. "And if you and I are powerless now, I want to believe that if we listen to what's speaking, it can give us the power to save ourselves."

"Then we believe the same thing."

Taking her cross between his finger and thumb, Mulder examined it twinkling in the streetlight made shadowy by rain. He never considered himself a religious man, could never find any divine meaning to all the heartache he had suffered. Then life had brought him Scully with her science and her faith and her love. Maybe he could believe. His thumb traveled to her lips, marveling in the warmth of her; how alive they were. When she pressed the smallest of kisses to his digit, his world shattered with clarity. He joined her like a moth to a flame, helplessly wrapping himself around her like a life ring. She lay under the crook of his nose and he anchored them together with his knee over her hip.

"Maybe there's hope," he breathed.

Scully brushed her nose along his, nuzzling like she was nodding in agreement. The hand that Mulder had nestled in the hollow of her waist repeated the motion, climbing up the side of her ribs and abseiling down, friction warming the embers of their affection. Trailing his fingers higher, he followed the swoop of her hair behind her ear, tucking the locks into place. The edge of her jaw now held delicately beneath his fingertips, he looked to her eyes, the clear crystal blue pulling that familiar tug on his heartstrings. If it was possible, Scully shifted closer. She tilted her head, lips locking onto his once, chastely making herself known to him again. And then again, he searched her out to reply with his own tender kiss. Settling into one another's arms, their gazes fell upon the smile in each's eyes, finding an easy lull.

Scully witnessed the universe turn around in his beautiful mind. The flick of his eyes now quieter, softening from tiredness and tranquility, belayed newfound contentment. Staving off her own sleep, she saw his heavy eyelids droop and close, his breathing even out, and his form relax. She pulled him closer, buried herself in his comforting smell, watched over him– his protector.

The relentless pellets of rain struck percussion against the thin roof above them. Outside, the wind picked up in moaning gale. Inside, Scully breathed, sinking further into the hold of her partner and into the grips of sleep.

#my fic #Maybe there's hope #fox mulder #dana scully #msr #txf s9 #the truth #on the run #xf fanfic

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julemmaes · 4 years

Text

Just a little more

Cassian and Nesta Archeron modern au

This is plain smut without a plot, if you want a plot, there’s always part one right here waiting for you. You obviously don’t need the first part to read this cause I repeat, It’s legit just magical smut and that’s it. I tagged the ones who reblogged the first part, thinking they’d be interested in this too, if not, I’m really sorry and I’ll remove you from my Nessian (aCoTaR) tag list. Please be kind cause it’s the first time I try to write smut. Hope you like it and enjoy it. Always feel free to leave a comment and reblog;)

Word count: 2,749

Cassian slammed the door before leaning against it. Nesta's body crushed against his as their lips collided again.

Cassian's hands ran ravenously over the bare skin of her back and Nesta felt the heat between her thighs grow every time his tongue caressed her lips. She moaned in his mouth when he bit her lower lip. Nesta bent her head back giving full access to her neck.

Cassian began to leave a trail of kisses, licking her jaw before going down to her collarbone. He kissed her shoulder, sticking a finger under the strap of her dress which did little to cover his wife's slender body as he descended even more with his mouth. Nesta moaned when he wrapped his hand around her hips, pressing her even more against himself, making her feel how aroused he was. Cassian raised one knee between her legs and Nesta rubbed her center against his thigh, looking for any friction to relieve the discomfort there.

Cassian squeezed her waist, "Not so fast sweetheart," he whispered in her ear, sending shivers down her spine, "you have to be patient."

Nesta moaned again, clutching the other' s hair in her fists, when Cassian lowered himself just enough to be with his mouth at the level of her breasts. One hand remained to support her on her back, while the other brushed her left breast, passing his thumb just above her nipple. With the first stroke of his tongue on her aching nipple, Nesta felt her legs swing as she let go a scream when Cassian bit her breast.

She closed her eyes dropping her head behind when Cassian moved to the other breast, sucking on her still covered breast. "Cassian,"

Her hand dropped down along his muscular chest and when she reached the hem of his shirt to pull it off, Cassian took her wrist and stopped her. He pulled himself up, looking into her eyes and circled her face with his big hands, interrupting the contact. Hands that Nesta thought should have been in other places. "Yes, Nesta?"

She was breathing heavily and with one gesture she tried to move again, putting her hand under his shirt and touching his abs. His eyes darkened even more when she squeezed his hip and began to draw a line from his navel to his pecs. "Touch me," she ordered. Cassian grinned and lifted his leg up again, moving it so that it would rub exactly where she wanted it. Nesta closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.

"Always so bossy," he said in a hoarse voice, kissing her on the neck and rubbing his hands on her back, until he wrapped his ass, "maybe I should teach you how say please."

Her hand went down to his pants and when she pressed her hand against the obvious bulge on his front, Cassian held his breath, maintaining eye contact, forehead against forehead. "Or," she whispered on his lips, wrapping her fingers around his length. He groaned, "you should stop playing these games and get to work," she said in a tone that left no room for retort.

She put her hand on his shoulder and pushed him on his knees, somewhere between her and the door of their apartment.

She carried her hands behind her neck, while Cassian's hands came down and stroked her thighs and his fingers ran so close to where she wanted them. She untied the laces that held the upper part of the dress and when she let go of them, it gathered on her hips, leaving her naked.

Cassian smiled at her from below, starting to kiss her just below the waistband, running his tongue over the lace of her panties. Nesta moaned, moving to make Cassian understand that she wanted to take off her dress, but he shook his head. Chuckling, he winked at her and put his head under her skirt.

Nesta leaned with one hand against the door, the other placed on his shoulder, when she felt his tongue go around that bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs, without really touching it. The layer of lace was the only thing that separated them. When she felt his hand move from her thigh and go up, up, she held her breath, closing her eyes. "Cassian."

He ran a finger over her covered sex and Nesta moaned when he moved the lace to the side and slid a finger inside of her. A rush of pleasure shook her from head to toe and when he started to push it in and out, adding a second one, she brought a hand to her mouth, blocking any sound that tried to get out. That sweet torture continued for a few seconds and Nesta could feel his breath on her. Cassian curled his fingers, pressing against that special spot inside her and then took his fingers away, making her whimper for the lack of them. He helped her out of her panties, pulling his head out from under her skirt. He looked at her and his eyes shone with the same emotion that they had shone with the first time they kissed.

Nesta took both hands to his forearms, wanting to help him stand up, wanting to hurry, but he laughed, smirking. "Do you really think I'm done?" he moved his hands to her hips, tinkering with the zipper of the dress and then that was on the floor too. The only thing Nesta was wearing now was heels.

Cassian started kissing her again everywhere except where she needed it most, and when he lifted up one of her leg and placed it on his shoulder, Nesta was convinced that she could come just by looking at the sight. He came even closer and now she was standing completely naked and exposed in front of him, while he still had all his clothes on and Nesta couldn't even touch him.

Cassian slid his finger between her folds and made a guttural sound, staring at her eyes, "God, you're so wet."

Nesta was about to reply when Cassian swiped his tongue over her entrance, challenging her, before going up a little higher and circling around her clit, inserting two fingers deep inside her. She screamed so loud that she knew everyone on that floor would hear, but she didn't care. When after a few seconds he added a third finger, pumping them faster into her and increasing the pressure with his tongue, Nesta promised to pay him back for everything he was making her feel.

One of her hands went into his hair and tightened when she felt herself nearing the edge. She started pressing her hips against his mouth and Cassian just stroked that spot inside her a couple of times before the orgasm barrelled through her and her walls clenched around his fingers.She heard Cassian moaning against her and a jolt went through her whole body.

Nesta was shaking, too sensitive, but Cassian continued to take care of the little pearl between her legs. He pulled his fingers away from her and took her other leg too, turning so that Nesta was leaning against the door with her back and only came off a second before continuing to lick every drop of her first orgasm.

He licked her slit, pushing his tongue inside her, before flicking his tongue on her clit again, and again, and again, and Nesta shuddered against the door, clutching his head with her thighs, her mouth wide open in an expression of pure pleasure. It wasn't long before a second orgasm took over her. He swiped his tongue over her sex slightly, helping her to come down from the high, before he completely detached himself and stood up, holding her tight to keep her firm on her legs that seemed to give way at any moment.

Nesta managed to open her eyes and look at him from underneath her lashes as he pushed her against the door and kissed her. She tasted herself on his lips and moaned, making Cassian moan in turn.

He smiled at her, giving her a quick kiss.

He moved away a little, his hands always holding her, "Can you stand?" he asked with a sly smile on his lips, which gleamed with her juices.

Nesta gave him a hard look and pushed him gently, but she wasn't quite sure that if he let her go she would be able to stand upright. "Yes, idiot, it wasn't that good."

Cassian raised an eyebrow, snorting, "It didn't sound like you were complaining." He pulled her by the hand, towards the corridor, towards their room. "Maybe you need a second round-" he stopped, bringing a finger to his mouth, smiling, "sorry, my mistake, third round?" he murmured in a hoarse voice.

Nesta was tempted to accept, but she wanted to take care of him. So she continued with her little game. She smiled, pushing him into their bedroom, "I don't think I want to be disappointed again tonight," Cassian opened his eyes wide to the choice of words, mouthing a disappointed, falsely shocked, "but I'd like to show you how it's done.

When she was close enough to touch him, she reached out with one hand and brushed it over the edge of his pants. She unbuckled his belt and with a quick movement of her wrist made him turn around and pushed him towards the bed. Once inside the room she turned him back towards her and placed a slender finger on his chest, "Take it off." Cassian didn't make her say it twice. Nesta bent forward while he took off his shirt and untied her shoes so he could take them off. Her husband did the same thing, remaining with only his pants on, which tightened the obvious bulge.

Nesta looked at him for a few seconds, while Cassian, now sitting on the edge of the bed, leaned back on his elbows, enjoying what was about to happen.

"So? Are you going to admire me all night or are you going to show me how to do it?"

Taking one step toward the bed, she bent forward, leaning over him. She kissed him on the lips and Cassian pushed himself up, going against her, but only for a little while, because then she pushed him against the mattress and started kissing his chest, leaving a trail on his pecs, his abs. When she reached his pelvis she began to fidget with the zipper of his pants and once they were off, with his help, only the boxers remained to prevent her from finally giving him so much pleasure as he had just given her. She palmed him through the fabric and then left a kiss on the right thigh and then the left one, alternating between one leg and the other, until she was close to the hardest part of him. Throwing a quick glance at Cassian, she saw him as he held himself up with his arms crossed behind his head and his gaze was more ravenous than before.

Keeping her gaze fixed on him, she slipped one hand under the hem of his boxers and grabbed his length in a slow movement, starting to pump him gently. Cassian's head fell backwards and grunted when she touched the tip with her thumb, passing her finger over that sensitive part. Cassian's hips snapped up from the bed and Nesta got down on her knees between his legs, continuing to pump him, while with the other hand she helped herself get rid of the last garment.

Warmth began pooling in her core once again at the sight of his cock, so swollen and in need of her attention. When Nesta squeezed a little more, breathing on his head, Cassian cursed.

"Fuck, baby." gasped him, thrusting his hips up again. Nesta smiled before passing her tongue over him, starting from the base and reaching the tip, without touching it. Cassian cursed again, looking at her. She repeated the movement several times, until she felt him flinch and decided that he had suffered enough. She blew on the tip, taking it immediately afterwards in her mouth and passing her tongue repeatedly along the entire length, sucking on the tip.

She placed her lips on the head one last time, before burying it all the way down and taking it all in her mouth. His cock hit the back of her throat and Cassian moaned her name like a prayer. She sucked in her cheeks and while he writhed beneath her, she licked the tip again. "Nesta."

His hands ended up in her hair after a short while and began to give rhythm to Nesta's movements. Every time she gagged Cassian moaned.

She looked up at him when the movements started to get sloppy and he cut off to groan as Nesta cupped his balls. She started massaging them as she pulled herself completely off his length and licked every drop of pleasure from him.

"If- shit..." Cassian stopped when Nesta took him back to the hilt in one movement, "I'm going to cum, so unless you want to... fuck." Nesta pulled away again and Cassian looked her in the eyes. She took two fingers to her mouth as she raised. She sucked on them, carrying them between her legs.

She straddled his lap and Cassian's eyes closed slightly as her fingers began to massage her clit. One of his hands went next to hers and with an abrupt motion he slipped two fingers into her. Nesta gasped and moaned as he curled them repeatedly, beginning to move her hips to meet his movements.

"Just like that, fuck my hand baby." Cassian pulled himself up, kissing her as he continued to work her with his fingers. When she felt the third orgasm approaching, she took his wrist, stopping him, and made him lie down again. She took him in her hands and settled him at the entrance of her sex, he buried himself inside her so deeply that Nesta saw black for a few seconds from too much pleasure.

"Fuck, how can you be so perfect every time?" Nesta smiled at that and lowered herself over him, kissing his lips with love, moving her hips just a little.

They cried out together, mouth against mouth, when she started to ride him, helped by his hands on her hips. Nesta was holding on to his chest, she kept bouncing on him and when he carried a hand between her legs, flicking her clit, she felt the pressure increase deep in her stomach.

"I'm close." she managed to blow out, between each thrust.

With a shot of the hips, Cassian moved them together and, always remaining seethed inside of her, he made her lie on her back. Now he was in control. He began to thrust harder, deeper, faster. Nesta could no longer contain herself and when Cassian brought his hand on her clit again, she snapped. She clenched the muscles around him, while he kept pounding inside her. When even his moves got slower and Nesta was able to catch her breath, she pulled him against her and kissed him as if that was the only thing that mattered at that moment. She looked him in the eyes, caressing his cheeks and when he pushed himself inside her with a particularly strong thrust, standing still, she said "I love you".

Cassian grunted kissing her again, coming to the sound of those words. After two more strokes, he halted, remaining connected to her and crouching down on her.

Her legs wrapped around his hips and held him close to her body. Hips against hips.

Nesta felt his heart beating against her stomach.

Her walls involuntarily clenched around his length and Cassian moaned against her breast, "God I love you so fucking much."

Nesta laughed and Cassian looked at her.

She smiled at him and stroked his hair, moving a lock of hair from his eyes, "I think you've learned your lesson.

Cassian chuckled, sending shivers all over her body, "Oh yeah?" Nesta nodded, "So, could I prove how much I needed this lesson a little more, or do you think you can't resist?" he grinned, knowing full well that she was as tired as he was, but the way he asked the question, as if it were a challenge, would make her accept everything.

"Maybe just a little more."

And Cassian showed her again. And again. And again.

acotar taglist (if you want to be removed or added comment or send me an ask)

@tottenhamboys20 @sjm-things @kris10maas @awesomelena555 @sannelovesreading @queenamydien29

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cowboyx2 · 4 years

Text

Road Trip: Part Eight

Pairing: jemily and moreid

Summary: Emily has yet another crisis, this time a little more complicated.

Warning: swearing is all i think?

A/N: it’s been a minute since i’ve updated but here ya go!! damn only 2 more parts left :/

“Aaron, if you don’t pull into that damn motel over there..” Rossi and Hotch continued to bicker over when they should turn in for the night. “Fine. We’re only doing this because you insist we need to-“ JJ, finally fed up with their arguing cuts Hotch off. “That’s it, ok? Pull into that motel right now or I swear to god you will* regret it.” Hotch pulls over and they all clamored out of the van into the cold air.

“Morgan can you just grab my bag so we can go in already!” Penelope gestured to her white polka dotted bag sitting next to her feet. With many of eye rolls and some sighs they all made it into the smaller than they thought motel. If you weren’t one for noticing the small things then you would’ve missed it, quiet 50’s music played all throughout the lobby.

“How can I help you all?” A short women with eyes almost the same color as Emily’s sat at the check in bar. “Yes, how many rooms do you have available?” Hotch and the women named Tammy as her name tag stated discussed the price and the rooms. Meanwhile JJ had pulled Emily aside towards the withering couch.

“Look I know i’ve been kinda a bitch with the whole” The blonde hopelessly points to her lips. “but I um, I maybe might like you... a little bit.” While JJ continued to fidget with her hands and bags, Emily stood completely still. This was not happening right now, not next to a beat up old couch, not in a badly kept motel and not while she was half way to tears, not now. Emily was not a perfectionist, her mother would laugh her ass off at that. She half assed things all the time, that last case report? Yeah, she filled half of it out in colored marker, Hotch threw a fit over that. But she was not about to half ass this, not now, not with her.

“Oh, um I kinda thought you uh might of, a little bit.” She sputtered out some nonsense and promptly walk away to wherever she could hide out. Even while she practically jogged away her posture was stick straight, posture her nanny would of been proud of. This was not happening right now, the girl she dreamed of every day and night did not just say she liked her. JJ a beauty of love and what was Emily? A shell of a women full of ghosts

——

Spencer sat curled up with a book in hand as Morgan flipped through the channels on their shared tv. Neither of them had stopped smiling, it all seemed unreal. Reid still had to remind himself that this was infact not a dream. Not even a nightmare with a cruel trick waiting to let him fall deeper and deeper into a false reality, it was real. All was well until the banging started on their door started.

Please don’t let this be a nightmare..

Quietly Morgan got up not to disturb Reid from reading the same page over and over again. “Emily? What the hell are you-“ She pushed past him pointing at Spencer. No words came out but all was understood. With a quick frown at Derek he got up and pulling Prentiss with him.

At least it’s not a nightmare, not yet..

They stepped out onto the small patio back where it all began, this time there was someone else there. “Um, I’m sorry miss can we uh have the patio? My friend wants to uh..” He trails off as the same women from the front desk, Tammy, smiles. Her hard exterior fading into sympathy. “Oh don’t worry! I should probably get back to managing this place, anyways.”

As soon as she leaves Emily collapses onto the steps with a sigh. “God dammit, I can’t do anything fucking right!” Her dark hair had fallen over her face as she sat there silent again. Carefully Spencer sat down next to her unsure of what to do or why she was upset.

Reid’s hands tangle in his lap. “Um, what happened?” Emily picks herself up somewhat at the seemingly easy question. “Whats not* wrong? JJ FINALLY told me that she likes me yet I couldn’t even say anything.. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?!” Emily had buried her face into her hands out of embarrassment.

Next to her Reid chose his words carefully. “Well uh, maybe you worried you’ll ruin it? I uh don’t really think you can though, I mean you um really like her, right? I’m pretty sure that’s what matters...” Emily turns to face him, her tears have spilled over. Slowly she takes a breath and lets her head rest on his shoulder, that’s something she never thought she’d do. “Yeah, yeah.. why do you always have to be right?”

——

The clock ticks to 12am as Prentiss only then makes her way back to her and JJ’s shared room. Spencer had turned in earlier after her whole meltdown, she wasn’t going to keep him from Morgan any longer.

She turns the doorknob carefully and slowly as to not wake up anyone who might be sleeping. Emily still holds onto hope that JJ will still be awake and they can talk to the wee hours of the morning but of course she’s not. JJ’s back is turned from the door, her hair is strewn around her pillow. The small blanket is falling off of her, Emily can just make out some goosebumps on her shoulders. Prentiss makes her way over to her bed.

With melancholy feeling drifting through the air she pulls the dark blue blanket over JJ’s shoulders. Emily quickly gets ready for bed, finally she takes her spot on her bed next to who could’ve been’s. Maybe it’s strange or creepy but she just lays there watching JJ’s shoulders rise and fall from her breath. She looks so peaceful even if her face is hidden by the room’s lack of light. Even if she never gets to be with her, she’d be okay just watching her live and breathe.

A/N: AHHHHH!! dw guys we still have 2 more parts for them to figure it out! but uh yay? Also the this part featured @hellotamgerine , thank you for submitting a cameo! :))

Road Trip Au Taglist:

@catchingflames-with-plasticcups @xgoldentigerlilyx @ssaemxlyprentxss @ellyhotchner @alli1902 @thestrawberrygirl @davidrossiismydad @youaremyfiveever @bisexualprentiss @drpipecleaner @pretty-b0yy @cyn-00 @study-and-drink-tea @nobody13 @emotional-goblin @kaytlyngraygubler @hellotamgerine @anxious-alto @laiba-the-person

Permanent Taglist:

@hellotamgerine @ssaemxlyprentxss @scxrletbitch @reese-the-edgy-enby @pretty-b0yy @catchingflames-with-plasticcups @abit-criminalminds

#cm #emily prentiss #spencer reid #criminal minds #derek morgan #aaron hotchner #david rossi #jennifer jareau #emily prentiss x jennifer jareau #jennifer jareau x emily prentiss #penelope garcia #moreid #jemily #spencer reid x derek morgan #derek morgan x spencer reid #road trip au #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds fanfic

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scullydubois · 4 years

Text

Only the Light Ch. 14

As the new year beckons Scully to put her life back together, she and Mulder share a Valentine's 'anti-date' on the Hoover Building rooftop.

TW for brief discussion of disordered eating.

--------------

The new year struck Scully with a particular melancholy. 1994 was, to put it plainly, one of the worst--if not the worst--year of her life. Even without her disappearance, it would earn that title. Her father’s untimely passing and the brief but brutal closure of the X-Files wrenched the few good things left from her fingers. Factor in the four weeks in late summer that she has no memory nor knowledge of, and you’ll understand why Scully has taken to calling it her year on the dark side of the moon.

Of course, the aftershocks of her abduction are still felt every day. Flipping the calendar does nothing to remedy that. At her last appointment, Dr. Zapolsky noticed that Scully’s weight had decreased rather sharply from previous visits and made the point that “rapid weight loss can stop ovulation,” which Scully interpreted as kicking her while she was down. That’s not exactly fair, after all. Technically, her period stopped well before she decided to restrict herself.

It’s odd how it happened. Her weight was fine before her abduction; slender but within the healthy range for her height. Even when she was returned, it had only dropped a couple pounds, as if they fed her...as if they cared. She found that hard to believe. In the months afterward, she sought a physical representation of her mental anguish, and since she and food were never on the best terms to begin with, the choice was simple.

The other day, she had to punch an extra hole in all her belts to hold them steady on her hips. She knows the consequences of this; she’ll live them and accept it.

There has been some beneficial progress. Dr. Zapolsky started Scully on low-dose birth control around Thanksgiving, hoping that it would balance her hormones and regulate her periods. It has, in fact, brought back her cycle, something that Scully did not expect. She gave Melissa her leftover tampons in October. Now Melissa buys enough for the two of them and insists that Scully doesn’t owe her a dime. Scully is too grateful for this to speak about it.

Her downward spiral reached a snag when she realized that smoking would make her birth control ineffective, shortly after her and Mulder’s Christmas Eve smoke break. She ditched the cigarettes, mad at herself for taking a month to read the disclaimer (she’s a doctor for god’s sake, she should know better!), yet glad to have an out. Smoking was a habit she exercised because she could. It won’t hurt her anytime soon, and millions of others do it, so where’s the harm? That was her thinking. As soon as she had a reason to stop, she did, and it felt a bit like jumping from a runaway train just before it skids off the tracks.

So she is better, and she is worse. Which really means she is the same as she was. That is the conclusion she carries into 1995’s frosts and thaws.

There is one thing she is certain of, something that she hadn’t given much thought to until the one year anniversary of her father’s death. She needs her faith back. She’s always practiced in a cyclical pattern, her devoutness orbiting in and out like the moon around the Earth. Sometimes closer and brighter, sometimes farther away, sometimes nowhere to be found.

She has to believe it will come back; it always does. She was made in God’s image, and her father’s. This is both a blessing and a curse.

But no one can be God, and she can’t be her father either. His faith never wavered. If hers was the moon--fickle and subject to doubt--his was the sun, steady and warming everything around it. This was a quality she was envious of, and then guilty in her blasphemy. She has never managed to feel completely content inside the bounds of piety like he could. She’s constantly shaking the devil off her back, then repenting for it, then wondering if it were all worth it. What if...what if...what if...she isn’t fully persuaded in her beliefs, and she knows that this is the worst sin of all. Like Mulder though, she wants to believe, and shouldn’t that count for something?

Imperfection is allowed. Understood, even. Doubt is not as permissible. “He who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind,” the Bible says. Sometimes Scully takes that to mean she should walk into the ocean. Then she realizes that would be blasphemous too.

Some people believe without trying. Her father was one of those. Mulder too, in a different way. She used to think that she was too. Now she’s not so sure. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” How many times has she read that line? Has she ever lived up to it? She’s seen and still not believed. Certainly that means she’s going to Hell.

Or is she already there?...She wonders that sometimes. Maybe she didn’t make it back from the other side. Maybe the devil just wanted her to believe that she had, and so he’d constructed some kind of diorama of Scully’s life that would go wrong bit by bit, boiling her like a gradually heated bathtub. No resting in peace for the unbeliever.

She can’t imagine a worse punishment than all the potentially good things in her life getting dismantled beyond her control. She’d rather never experience them at all than know their joy then watch them fall apart. Missy would kill her if she heard this, but you can’t please everybody.

It is at this point that Scully embarks on her chosen method of religious self-flagellation: going through the Ten Commandments and determining whether she’s violated them. Count up your sins and God won’t have to; practically the tagline of the Catholic faith.

She thinks she does okay with the first few. She has no idols, she honors her mother and father, and Mulder knows not to call her on Sunday mornings. Of course, the part about not taking the Lord’s name in vain can be tricky, but she’s working on it.

Number five is where it gets dicey. Thou shalt not kill. She imagines that she wouldn’t, not on purpose, but the circumstances of her job worry her. God makes no exceptions for self-defense. And what if she were ever to be a true doctor? If she couldn’t save a patient, does that mean she killed them?

Her father was in the Navy. He never killed anyone.

Number six...well, she doesn’t mention that often. Few people know about Daniel. Missy is one. Scully harbors a genuine shame regarding that time in her life, not so much because of Daniel, but because she was complicit in hurting his wife and daughter. It was a young, foolish mistake that she never wants to make again.

She feels pretty good about number seven. The only thing she has ever stolen is one of Charlie’s matchbox cars when they were kids. She was uninterested in Missy’s hand-me-down Barbies and Raggedy Ann dolls. The boys’ toys were much cooler. She trusted the Lord enough to know that He wouldn’t hold something she did when she was seven against her. Besides, she gave it back when Charlie figured out it was missing. She just wishes he had let her play with him after that.

Number eight: thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. She considers honesty one of her best qualities. She sure hopes God does too. She’s not the most open person, but that’s different from lying…

Nine is a lost cause, considering six had been broken. This was her least favorite part of her family’s religion: the power it had to cause her shame about her own body, her own desires. She had her first crisis of faith over this at age 14. Missy comforted her with something she has never forgotten: “The original sin was the serpent’s deception, not Eve’s desire. Even God pins it on the woman.” She knew her sister could only say that because she didn’t truly believe and wasn’t trying to, but it had stuck with Scully through many moments when she needed it.

And finally, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. She supposes she did this with the matchbox cars when she was seven, but in literal terms that’s about it. Metaphorically, she does this all the time and struggles with why she feels so inadequate. Her sister’s confidence, Mulder’s tenacity, her father’s faith...The ideal Dana Scully would have all of these. The real one is a work in progress.

--------------------

So it goes that she finds herself prepping a case in the office on Valentine’s Day. Mulder’s scheduled to fly to Florida the next morning to investigate attacks in a community of circus performers. He’s convinced it’s the Fiji Mermaid, she’s convinced he needs to get his head checked; the usual. This is one comfort Scully can always rely on. No matter how utterly twisted her life gets, she will always think Mulder is crazy, and he will always go along with it.

The occasion of the day goes unmentioned until what Mulder lovingly refers to as “closing time,” which is not a specific time but rather the point that he finally gives up for the day, usually hastened by his partner’s prodding. Scully has learned the signs of his dwindling tenacity by now. She glances at the clock as he pulls his glasses off his head and tosses a sunflower seed in the wastebasket, pleasantly surprised that it reads only 5:15. He catches her checking, his eyes--amber today--meeting hers.

His lips curl in amusement. “You got a date or something?”

“No,” she blinks, feeling like a child caught taking a cookie from the jar. Her cheeks grow hot, threatening to make a scene. “I figured you did, since you’re finishing up so early.”

Mulder straightens his stack of papers, clinking them against the desk obnoxiously. “Think again, buckaroo.”

He’s taken to calling her that lately. Neither one of them is sure why, it just popped into his mind one day and stuck. It makes her feel like a heroine in some 70s Western shoot-out flick who wrangles all the bad guys and locks’em in the county jail. She’s thankful that someone can see her for what she could be rather than what she is. It helps her see that too.

He stuffs his papers in a manila folder, then rises from behind the desk and stoops toward the backpack he prefers to a briefcase. (She called him a kindergartener once because of it and he remarked that he’d ‘rather be a kindergartener than an adult.’ She couldn’t argue with that.) “Valentine’s Day isn’t really observed under the Fox Mulder calendar,” he says, unzipping the bag and putting the folder in. “Halloween and Thanksgiving, those are my holy days.”

“You worship at the shrine of the food pyramid,” Scully smirks.

“Yes indeed. Wait--” Scully’s gaze flicks to him, genuinely concerned. He dissolves her uncertainty with a boyish grin. “--does the food pyramid include candy?”

She rolls her eyes, but it’s not deeply felt. She misses these flat-lining comedic routines of his, usually at their best when they’re putzing through some tumble-weed town where the bathroom stalls at the gas station don’t lock. He loves being the funniest person in a ten-mile radius, and that’s not a satisfaction he can have in DC. She wonders if he tells these lame jokes to strangers now, or if they were just for her.

“Speaking of food,” he says, brushing a hand through his hair, “you wanna grab dinner?”

Scully’s forehead creases. “Like, in a restaurant?”

“I mean, I wasn’t gonna be that forward, but I guess we could take it to yours or mine...”

Scully laughs lightly, wrapping her arms around herself, fingers caressing her bony elbows. “We’ve already covered what day it is,” she demures. “Everyone having dinner is going to be on a date.”

“You’re right...the restaurant probably won’t let us in unless we make out in front of the hostess,” he deadpans.

“Not to mention that we don’t have any reservations…”

“Well, making out might remedy that, depending on the hostess.”

She gives him her ‘last straw’ look--crossed arms, arched eyebrow, stinging glare--and he raises his hands in surrender. “I’ll stick to slipping a twenty, then.”

Scully uncrosses her arms and slinks toward her purse rather languishly. “No restaurants, Mulder. It’s too much trouble on a holiday.”

“I sure hope you didn’t mistake my suggestion as an invitation to Mulder’s Downhome Country Kitchen, cause that place is not Michelin star rated.”

“I’m well aware. I’ve seen the menu.”

“Is Chateau de Scully open tonight?” he asks with an eyebrow raise that his partner couldn’t have missed if she tried--and she did.

“Well, the chef is celebrating Valentine’s Day with her girlfriend in Oregon, so you’d be waiting awhile for your meal.”

“There’s no back-up chef? I don’t know, someone who may need to feed herself while the chef is away?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t serve the public.”

“Ouch.”

He plucks their respective coats off the rack, folding his own over his arm and throwing his partner’s over her shoulders. She jumps just the tiniest bit--she probably thinks he didn’t notice, so he’ll pretend he didn’t--then slips her arms in the sleeves and pulls it on properly.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, avoiding eye contact.

After he’s put his own jacket on, he hoists up his backpack, fielding off his partner’s near swerve into laughter. She’s barely maintaining a straight face, and even if it’s at his expense, he loves it because unadulterated joy is something she deserves so much.

“You know what, I’ve got just the solution,” he says as he strolls out the doorway, flipping the light switch as he goes, leaving Scully scrambling in the dark.

“Hey!”

He hears her petulant voice, followed quickly by the laugh he was looking for. When she turns to him after locking the office door, her eyes are still shining from the momentary euphoria. He is so happy to know her.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this place is the Smithsonian of vending machines.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And I know a door to the rooftop that never gets locked.” He flashes her a sly look, his intentions pure despite himself.

“It’s 40 degrees outside,” she counters before he can even voice his proposal.

“Sure, but we can make some fresh coffee, and there’s gotta be blankets in that storage closet of ours.” Ours. Very few things are theirs. She wishes he would say it again.

As much as her instinct is to protest, she can’t quite muster the resolve to. I mean, it checks all the boxes. It’s not a restaurant, she’d only have to eat a snack from the vending machine, and she wouldn’t have to spend Valentine’s night alone, which is a sneaky sadness that had been pressing at the back of her mind.

“Fine,” she bluffs, as if it were a great inconvenience to her. She enjoys the cat-and-mouse game, what can she say? “You find the blankets, I’ll get the coffee.”

Mulder smiles, his lips edging over his teeth in an aesthetically pleasing way that makes Scully feel like he missed his calling as a male model. Of course, this smile isn’t posed. The constant in his life is his partner’s unpredictability. Everyone thinks she’s a stone-cold skeptic, but he knows she’s an uncertain believer, and there’s no one harder to pin down than that. Her yes to his Valentine plans may as well be an admission that Bigfoot exists.

“Let’s meet by the sixth floor stairwell, okay?” he prompts, laying a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

Flashes of Christmas Eve sabotage her thoughts--her mother’s kitchen, her untidy tipsiness, Mulder just trying to iron things out. He’d touched her, and she’d lashed out at him. Reaction formation, that was the term for the defense mechanism she’d used. He knew it, probably studied it extensively. Concealing an impulse by acting out its opposite.

Instead of mentioning this, she looks him in the eyes and says, “Okay, I’ll use the coffee machine on the sixth floor then,” as if his touch hadn’t brought forth both memory and desire.

“Great. See you there.” He pulls finger guns, and she thinks that maybe this is already her best Valentine’s Day yet.

----------------------

Five stories of stairs is a long way to go with two hot mugs of coffee. Scully had hoped there would be some styrofoam cups--something she could put a lid on--but the Bureau is stingy, so she had to go all the way back to the basement, grab their coffee mugs, take the elevator back to the sixth floor, brew some dark roast (to Mulder’s probable discontent), then hope that by some miracle, they could make it to the roof.

Ever the idealist, Mulder takes the challenge in stride. Though his arms are already bundled with some comforters he found tucked away in storage (he shudders to think how old they must be), he takes the handle of his mug, squeezing the blankets snug against his chest.

“Are you sure about this?” his partner asks with her usual uneven tone. “What if we get all the way up there and the door is locked?”

“We knock and get the snipers to open the door for us,” he answers matter-of-factly.

Scully’s eyebrows shoot up. “Snipers?”

“Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? There’s a longstanding rumor about snipers on the roof that I’d like to get to the bottom of.”

His demeanor is just loose enough to make Scully question whether he is in fact kidding. A conversational casualness permeates all of his sensational soliloquies because to him, the phenomena he’s discussing should be regarded as a fact of the world. If he ever launched into an indifferent lecture on the subject, she’d know he was bluffing.

Having never heard the rumor herself, she decides this is simply a figment of his overactive imagination. She’ll play along. “Well, if it’s anything like the talk of you being spooky, then it doesn’t look good for us…” she teases, her own smirk eliciting an identical one from her partner.

Masking his impatience by embodying the role of the gentleman, Mulder uses his free hand to prop open the stairwell door, ushering his partner through. The landing of each story has one stray light bulb, there for show more than anything. Most of them are either flickering or burned out, the agents discover as they inch their way up, one slowly taken step at a time. Step, pause for the coffee to settle, hope it doesn’t breach its container, step: that’s the process they adopt for approximately 100 steps in the cold Hoover stairwell. There are many ways to show love; Mulder bets that you wouldn’t find this in any lame self-help book.

“Do you think Romeo would have done this for Juliet?” he muses.

“Depends on what he was expecting once they made it to the top,” Scully quips, the edges of her lips turning up slightly.

Mulder nods, perpetually amused by her (too) infrequent jaunts into suggestive territory. “My man really got ahead of himself with the whole ‘dying for her’ schtick.”

“You’re one to talk.”

Mulder eyes her. “Actually, I think it was you who was going to die for me.”

“Not for you, because of you.” Her statement is neither packed with malice nor free of blame. “There’s a difference.”

She may as well have shot him at point blank range; then at least she could see the bleeding. She didn’t mean to be so blunt, but he gave her the perfect setup. Mulder cauterizes his own wound, disguising his pain as a joke. “Damn, I was finally moving past that!”

“At least one of us was,” she says, her voice fluttering, and he knows she’s just teasing, but god, what if she’s cauterizing her own hidden wounds?

They reach the door labelled ‘roof,’ and Mulder can’t decipher what happens first, him putting his hand on the door handle or her placing a chilly hand on his cheek. Playing it back in his head later on he won’t even be able to figure it out-- it cut time loose from its axes in such a way.

“Are you okay, Scully?” He’s not sure why this is the first question out of his mouth, but it is.

“I need a hand warmer,” she murmurs. “The coffee’s already cooling off.”

All the while, Mulder is acutely aware that her hand’s still on his cheek and she’s got him propped against the door, and what does she want him to do with that information?

Her thumb grazes his mole, and it becomes clear to him that there are two ways this scenario could go, and if she doesn’t want the second one it’s imperative that she stop rubbing rhythmic circles into his skin.

He clears his throat. “Do you want to...do you want me to check for snipers?” Her touch continues, uninterrupted.

“Is the door unlocked?” Her voice sounds airy and far away. She probably didn’t even hear his question.

He pushes on the handle, confirming their freedom. “Yes ma’am,” he answers, fear of a sort edging him into total politeness. He is twelve tiptoeing through the too empty halls of his house, again.

“Let’s have a picnic,” she says, still light and airy, as if that weren’t the plan the entire time. Then, she breaks into sudden laughter, pulling her hand away from Mulder’s cheek in her fit. “We forgot the food!”

She is back to normal now, his steadfast Scully with a side of joy.

Half of him mourning for the otherworldly Scully and the moment that could have been, he laughs too. “There may have been some lapses in planning.”

“We can make do, can’t we?” There’s a glimmer in her eyes that suggests the moment is not as far gone as he believed.

“Cold coffee sounds like an enduring Valentine’s tradition,” he affirms.

They choose not to dwell on words like “enduring” and “tradition,” entering the chill of the Hoover Building rooftop on Valentine’s night.

------------------

They’re not that far above the city really--the Hoover’s no NYC skyscraper--but their heads are in the clouds, that’s for sure. It’s not the typical dinner date complete with melted candles and overpriced dessert and overly attentive waiters, but as it turns out, they would both hate that. After all, this is not a date, it’s a casual hangout between two coworkers who don’t have dates on Valentine’s Day. If anything, it’s an anti-date. That’s what they tell themselves.

February’s unrelenting chill swirls around them, catching Scully’s hair in playful tantrums and turning the two of them into life-size paperweights atop the blankets. More sensible people may call the night a bust, but not the Prince of Halloweentown and his esteemed guest. This unconventional adventure is exactly what they bargained for.

Scully looks to Mulder, who’s holding his coffee like it’s a beer. She smiles. That is so him.

She exhales, and her breath spells itself out on the air. She tilts her face to the sky, as if the sun might suddenly rise and bask her in its heat. Mulder notices and fixes his attention there too, happy to have an excuse to look skyward. It’s his outlet, like hers is the sea her father dedicated his life to. His preferred escape method is to fly away; hers is to drift off.

He forces himself back into the moment, here, with her, and the expanse of the sky. “I once spent fifty bucks on one of those ‘name a star’ certificates, and I can’t even see it because of the goddamn light pollution.”

“I think that’s really more about the gesture than anything else,” Scully replies, trying to soothe him as if this were actually a pressing problem. “Unless you bought it for yourself...?”

Mulder chuckles. “No, no. It was for an old girlfriend.”

Scully raises her eyebrows in amusement. “Did you name it after her?”

“No, we named it the Rhine star.”

A puzzled look passes between them. It gives him a twinge of joy that his partner is not the encyclopedia she seems to be.

“After Joseph Banks Rhine, the founder of parapsychology,” he clarifies. “We were both fascinated by the field.”

“Oh.” She turns her face back toward the sky with the feeling of a kid who missed the winning word of the spelling bee. There are times when she is grateful she does not know everything, and times when she is not. Somehow, this is both.

“I’ve thought about buying another one and naming it after Samantha,” Mulder continues, “but it feels too much like a grave marker.”

“I’d consider it a lovely tribute,” Scully counters, used to doing so. “But I’m thirty and I own my own gravestone, so take that with a grain of salt.”

It’s true--once Dana was returned, her mother couldn’t bear to look at the gravestone she’d had engraved in memory of her missing daughter, so she gave it to Mulder, who saw no logical place for it to go except the woman whose name it bore. Margaret hadn’t wanted her to know that it existed, that they’d gotten so far as considering her gone. While it brought Mulder no joy to present it to his partner, it served as a reminder of the miracle her survival was, and in such bleak times, they had both needed that.

“It doesn’t scare me--the thought of dying,” Scully says to the stars. Mulder wonders if she meant for him to hear it. He wishes he hadn’t, but he’s met with the realization that she is trying to start a conversation when her eyes look into his.

He doesn’t know where to go with this, so he toes the line between deep and sarcastic. “I thought Catholics were all about that heaven and hell stuff.”

“Yes, but…” where is the line between truth and blasphemy, she wonders? Settling herself, she starts over. “I’ve lived both on Earth, so what have I got to fear?” She turns her glance to the blanket, as if shrinking out of the Lord’s sight. “Besides, sometimes I think I’m already there.”

“Heaven?”

“No, Hell.”

He should have known. He grips the edge of his blanket, wondering why his parents had prioritized the sex talk but never explained what to do in a situation like this. He has a psychology degree, sure, but he’s as much a psychologist as she’s a physicist.

“There are periods of life, I think, where everyone feels like that,” he says in the most earnest voice he can conjure. “It’s just that nobody ever talks about it.”

“Did you feel like that with Samantha?”

Leave it to Scully to turn a personal conversation back on him.

He bites his lip. “Yeah, yeah, I did. Still do, if I think about it too long.”

“How did you...move past it?” The lights of nearby buildings reflect off her blue eyes, galaxies to his black holes. He’d give anything to sluice the pain right from her heart.

He’ll rely on his words instead, despite knowing there are depths they cannot touch. “I, uh, I didn’t really move past it, I just moved. Kept moving, I guess. I found a place where I could make progress out of my pain. Here--the X-Files.”

Scully swallows hard, knocking back tears. "That’s the issue. I feel stuck. Just completely unable to go forward. There’s a current in my brain that keeps pushing me backward.”

Mulder lets out a deep breath, trying to take both their pain with it. “Have you considered seeing a therapist?” he asks delicately. “It sounds like you may have PTSD.”

“Over what?” she practically snaps. “I don’t remember a thing.”

“That doesn’t mean you have no memories. Regression hypnosis could help recover repressed or unconscious memories, so you could understand exactly what’s bothering you.”

“You think I haven’t heard this spiel from Melissa?”

“I bet Melissa doesn’t have first-hand experience with it.”

“No, she doesn’t,” she murmurs in the tone of an apology. She knew that he had it, she had listened to the tapes. How could she let it slip her mind? It is uncouth of her to look down on his chosen method of healing.

Mulder isn’t bothered. He continues, “It helped me. Both in recalling the details of the experience, and in having a recorded recollection of it. It helped me feel less...insane.”

“Mmm.” If he were just a bit closer, she’d reach out and touch his hand.

“If anything, I wish I did it earlier.”

Scully’s understanding of him sharpens, like an ophthalmologist flipping the lens, making her vision clearer. Her gaze probes him, mutual souls recognizing mutual pain.

“Hey.” He uses his extended wingspan to touch her shoulder with the care an older sibling would show holding their baby brother for the first time. She turns her head, their faces mere inches away from each other. His eyes are a dopey brown, his breath scented with coffee.

“Yes?” she says with a coquettish flitting of her eyelashes.

“You should come back out on the road. I could use someone to shoot down all my wild whims.”

She can’t help but smile, though she keeps her mouth closed. “Tired of telling jokes to strangers who don’t laugh, are you?”

He smirks. “Well, yeah, that too.” He leans back a bit, putting enough distance between them to keep the sparks in check. “Of course, if you’re not ready, there’s no pressure. I just think you could use the change of scenery and--you know--companionship.”

She nods, looks out into the night. He’s got the pulse of her problems and the salve that could soothe them. “You’re right.” How often does he get to hear those beautiful words come out of her mouth? “I need to get out of my cocoon, and I think I’m okay enough to do that now.”

“Yeah?” There’s a twinkle in his eyes, something like hope.

She laughs--catharsis manifest--and it’s like a sheen of light coming through a crack in her jagged surface. “Yeah, Mulder. I’ll make the arrangements with Skinner.”

He pumps his fists in the air. “Hallelujah!”

She hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her. Any stray thoughts she had of him being lonely she chalked up to her own delusions.

“Florida is probably a lost cause,” she notes, “but after that…”

He nods, pats her shoulder. “After that.”

To have her back meant something like freedom. The X-Files had never been anything without her. He had never been anything without her.

#oh to share a morbid conversation with your partner on a rooftop on valentines day #i struggled with this part but im quite happy with how it came out <3 #only the light fic #missy and scully fic #the x-files #txf #txf fanfic #fox mulder #dana scully #mine #thank you as always for reading and supporting

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