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hivemuthur · 4 months ago

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What was that? - Ch. 14.

viktorxfemale!OFC explicit!

friends to lovers, co-workers, sexual tension up to the wazoo, pinning and banter that got me frustrated when I was writing it, attempt at humour, some angst and a slow burn with a happy ending and a classic Viktor for once

Ch.1. | Ch.2. | Ch.3. | Ch.4. | Ch.5. | Ch.6. | Ch.7. | Ch.8. | Ch.9. | Ch.10. | Ch.11. | Ch.12. | Ch.13. | Ch.15.

word count: 6,5K

tag: #what was that

author’s note: @rennethen as beta reader and co-author of nsfw scenes. Big decisions are made as we inch toward the ending, more big decisions to come in the next chapter. This one has a bit of angst and making up :')

Cross-posted on AO3

—

A crumpled piece of paper stared at her from the desk, almost offensively. Don’t come. Ekko had been very clear about what was happening in Zaun—how they needed help and supplies—and yet, at the same time, he’d written, “Don’t come.” The words, scratched out in haste and frustration, outlined the chaos unfolding in the Undercity, painted in vivid, heart-wrenching detail. He spoke of the Chem-barons pushing harder, of the Grey spreading faster than anyone had anticipated, but it was the final sentence that cut deeper than the rest: Things look bad, but don’t come.

It was an incredibly stupid thing to say to someone whose first instinct was to do the exact opposite.

She knew how to sneak in unnoticed. She knew how to blend into the Undercity’s shadows, how to remain invisible on its streets even while carrying a massive bag filled with meds and supplies. She knew where to leave the packages and how to find Vander if the need ever arose. Her wardrobe even included the most inconspicuous clothes for this exact purpose, and she had practiced her most inconspicuous stroll to match. Yet nobody wanted her to go.

Ekko had told her not to come. Jayce would probably say the same. Was it fear for her safety? Or was it a plea for her to stay out of a war that had already begun to consume everything? Viktor—though he hadn’t said it so firmly—had shown it in his eyes. More than anyone, he didn’t want her to go. He’d all but forbidden her. The same way she had tried to forbid him from using the Hexcore.

Her chest tightened as she thought of his fractured resolve, of the utterly betrayed look on his face when he had found her clutching onto Jayce in the lab. How she had cried her heart out to Jayce, how she had confessed her complete, unfaltering devotion to Viktor. And yet it was Viktor who should have heard those words. Not Jayce. And certainly not like that. Not stolen or overheard in a desperate attempt to turn him away from his goal. He deserved so much better. He deserved to hear it in the safety of their bed, spoken with love and certainty—not anguish.

Her fingers trembled slightly as she smoothed the paper on her desk, her mind returning to the fleeting moment when Viktor had said, I am happy. How quickly that happiness had faded, replaced with another want—one far more dangerous and unapproachable than the concept of being loved. Or perhaps, she thought bitterly, they were equally alien to Viktor.

A knock on the door wrenched her out of her own head.

She glanced around her apartment, taking in its natural state of controlled chaos. Papers were scattered across her bed and floor, a few too many cups for one person splayed across various surfaces, clothes draped haphazardly over the chair. A scented candle burned faintly on the table, its singular ember a small, grounding presence in the midst of her internal monologue.

She sighed, stretched—she’d been sitting in the same position for what must have been two hours—and walked toward the door on wobbly legs.

When she opened it, Viktor stood on the other side, and her first thought was whether he had felt the same as she did now when she had shown up at his doorstep after their week apart. She mirrored his movements from that moment, fighting the immediate urge to pull him into an embrace. Instead, she settled for a gentle chin tilt, a silent beckon for him to come inside.

Wordlessly, she closed the door and turned to face him, only to find his gaze fixed on the floor. His trembling hand gripped his cane tightly, his knuckles white with tension. He looked awful—worn, hollow somehow—but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why.

Before she could form the words to greet him, he suddenly clutched onto her like a drowning man reaching for a lifeline.

“Forgive me,” he whispered desperately against her neck, his voice raw and unsteady.

His cane clattered to the floor. Viktor clung to her with so much need, his breathing laboured and erratic, as though every exhale cost him more than he could bear. Renly froze for a moment, startled by the sheer force of his grip, but instinct soon took over. She raised her hands, resting them lightly on his back, feeling the faint tremor coursing through his body. His arms encircled her neck, holding her so tightly it almost hurt, as though letting go might shatter him completely.

"I’m sorry," he whispered, his voice raw, cracking under the weight of his anguish. "I’m so sorry."

Renly’s fingers pressed gently against the fabric of his coat; her touch uncertain but steady. "Viktor," she began softly, but he interrupted her with another broken apology, his words tumbling over one another like a prayer.

"I’m so sorry," he whispered again, the sound of it splintering her heart.

She tightened her hold on him, grounding him as best she could, though she couldn’t understand what he meant. Her mind spun. He did it, didn’t he.

"Viktor, talk to me," she said, her voice calm despite the storm she could feel radiating from him. "I’m here. Whatever this is, you don’t have to carry it alone."

He didn’t respond right away. Instead, he pressed his face against her neck, his breath hot and uneven on her skin. She could feel his weight bearing down on her, not just physically, but emotionally, as though the very act of standing upright was too much for him.

"I’m afraid," he murmured at last, so softly she almost didn’t hear him.

"Afraid of what?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper, not wanting to startle him.

"Of losing you," he admitted, his words breaking into a sob.

The sound sent a sharp pang through her chest. Viktor, who always carried himself with an air of precision and control, now stood before her utterly undone. He was a man stripped of his defences, standing on the edge of a precipice with nothing left to shield him.

"You won’t lose me," she promised, her voice firm despite the tears welling in her own eyes. "I’m right here, Viktor. I’m not going anywhere."

But he only clung tighter, as though her words weren’t enough to break through the crushing weight of whatever he was carrying.

"You don’t understand," he whispered, his voice cracking under the strain. "I’ve done something… something I cannot undo."

Her breath caught. She pulled back just enough to look at him, her hands moving to his shoulders. His eyes were red-rimmed and glassy, his face ashen with guilt and fear.

"What did you do?" she asked, the question gentle but unyielding.

Viktor shook his head, a tear slipping down his cheek. "I thought I could… fix—," he said, his words halting, as though even admitting it out loud might unravel him completely. "But I… I made a mistake, Renly. A terrible mistake."

A cold dread settled in her stomach. He did it. At least attempted it. She could feel her hands trembling—not just with fear, but with anger. Betrayal coursed through her veins, sharp and biting. How could he?

The thoughts poured into her mind, gnawing at each other, each one more vicious than the last. He’d gone ahead in his anger, in his stubbornness, and risked everything. Risked his life. Left her teetering on the brink of losing him entirely.

And for what? Because what she offered wasn’t enough? Because her care, her devotion, hadn’t been enough to make him stop, to make him reconsider?

The realisation burned her, stoking the flames of her own insecurities. She could feel the edges of her composure fraying as she stepped back from him, her arms dropping to her sides. The absence of her touch seemed to hit Viktor like a physical blow, his gaze snapping up to meet hers, wide and filled with something that might have been regret—or terror.

“What did you do?” she asked, her voice colder than she’d intended, cutting through the tension like a knife.

Viktor flinched, his shoulders sagging as though the weight of her words pressed him further into the ground. His lips parted, but for a moment, no sound came. His hands hovered uncertainly at his sides, as if reaching for something—her, maybe—but they didn’t move.

“I…” He muttered another apology, his voice barely audible, before finally forcing out the words. “The Hexcore. It… it nearly destroyed me.”

Nearly was an understatement. It had destroyed him—briefly—and then put him back together. Or rather, he had put himself back together with the last ounce of his will, while being consumed and pulled apart in every direction.

In that moment, a fleeting thought had crossed his mind, as one of the possibilities presented to him was an end. An end to his pain, to his indecision, to his fear. A blissful nothing had glimmered faintly before him, just within reach, offering peace and absolution. To become a part of the Arcane, forever forgotten and undisturbed.

Wrenching himself away from it had been the hardest thing Viktor had ever done—until now. Now, standing before Renly, he was faced with something even more daunting: proving his worth to her again. Explaining, somehow, that he had found all the answers he thought he needed, only to realise that none of them mattered without her. Explaining that he had stepped away—not because she was a consolation prize—but because she had always been, and would always remain, his first choice.

Emptiness echoed through Renly’s mind. Her anger faltered quickly, replaced by despair. She had despaired for him so deeply. Part of her wanted to reach back out and shield him from the world, to gather him in and protect him. But another part of her was so deeply wounded by the possibility—one that had never come to fruition yet had still clawed a gaping hole in her—that he had chosen otherwise, even briefly.

She willed her legs to move and passed him wordlessly on her way to the kitchen, granting him only a fleeting moment of her hand resting on his shoulder. She put the kettle on and pulled out two cups to later join her ever growing cup display across the apartment.

Viktor dragged himself behind her, eventually slumping into the chair like a defeated dog. They sat in silence for what felt like an eternity until she finally placed a steaming cup before him and took a seat across the table, facing him directly.

“All right. What happened?”

“Renly, I—” Viktor sniffled, struggling to gather words that would make sense. “I am so sorry.”

“Stop apologising, Viktor. It already happened,” she said, exasperated, her voice tinged with annoyance. But seeing how he shrank under her scolding, she softened, reaching out to take his hand.

“I was so angry,” he admitted, his voice low and trembling. “With you, with Jayce. I suppose I felt exactly how you are feeling now.” He looked up, meeting her eyes with raw vulnerability. “I… I touched it. And it just devoured me. Broke me. Showed me what I could become—and the price for it. And I realised… I hated it.”

Renly held her breath, her hand retreating from his. “Are you hurt?”

“No. Well, slightly,” Viktor winced, his lips pressing into a thin line. “It’s mostly my mind that’s hurt. My pride.” He thought of the way the Hexcore had terrorised him, its merciless grip, and how he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the full truth.

“I can’t believe you threw it all away on a whim,” she blurted, unable to keep the accusation from slipping out.

“It was not a whim!” Viktor’s voice rose, but only briefly, before it broke into a sigh. “It was a promise of something better. For you. For me. Mostly for me,” he admitted, his gaze falling, his thoughts spiralling into incoherence.

“Viktor.” Renly’s tone was heavy, her emotions warring within her. “I can only imagine… No, actually, I can’t imagine what you feel every day.” She stopped him with a sharp look when she saw he was about to interrupt. “I’m so sorry that I don’t know. I was… I was afraid to lose you too.” Her voice cracked, betraying the pain she had tried to hide.

“Renly,” he said, his words weighed down with difficulty, yet he forced himself to continue. “I would understand if this were something you cannot forgive.”

“Viktor, how can you—” she began, but the tears rolling down her cheeks choked the words in her throat. She raised a crook of her elbow to cover her eyes, desperately trying to steady herself.

A hysterical thought shot through Viktor’s mind—that this was their teary goodbye—and for a moment, he was certain he’d start crying as well. He closed his eyes, feeling the heat gathering under his lids, when her hands found him again. Her weight settled on his lap, her face nuzzling into his hair.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, a full-blown cry that dampened his sweater and neck. “You’re so… good, and I haven’t told you,” she said, her voice breaking as she wiped her tears on him. “I didn’t know what I would do if you…” Another sob tore through her, ugly and raw, overblown with all the feelings she had bottled up for far too long.

Viktor wrapped his arms around her, pulling her impossibly closer as he tried to suppress his own tears. His chin rested lightly on her shoulder, and he whispered hoarsely, “I know.”

And he did. He knew it with a clarity that terrified him. That feeling of being so completely entwined with someone else, so dependent on them for a piece of his own happiness—it was as exhilarating as it was terrifying. Never in his life had he allowed himself to need someone like this, to let someone burrow so deeply into the carefully constructed walls around his heart. But he couldn’t fight it anymore. He didn’t want to.

“Will you…” His voice wavered as he pulled back just enough to meet her swollen, tear-streaked face. “Will you have me back?”

Renly blinked at him, her brows knitting together as if she wanted to argue, to challenge him, to tell him just how wrong he was. She’d never gotten rid of him in the first place. But the words didn’t come. Instead, her trembling hands cradled his face, and she leaned in, pressing a sloppy, tear-soaked kiss against his mouth.

“Yes,” she muttered, her lips brushing his as she spoke the word straight into him, warm and raw and final. “Yes.”

Viktor shuddered under her touch, relief washing over him. He kissed her back, softly at first, then with more urgency, needing to feel the truth of her words. It wasn’t elegant or perfect—it was messy and desperate, as he swallowed her tears down as if they were his own.

Wordlessly, Renly took his hands and guided him toward her bedroom, minding all the obstacles along the way, her movements impatient. Viktor stepped carefully behind her, taking in the clutter of random objects. Not much had changed since the last time he’d been there; she had just added more colourful lamps.

Once they had reached the bedroom, she pushed the door shut before pinning Viktor against it, her hands reaching for his neck to pull him into a desperate kiss. He gave away a startled gasp, as she bit his lower lip and slid her palms underneath his shirt. His coat, long abandoned on the hallway floor, left him wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before, and they gave off a faint metallic smell of blood and gear oil from the lab.

Viktor let out a chuckle, as her needy fingers rushed to undo his buttons and rush him out of the layers, scratching his chest with her fingernails by accident. With almost restrained movements, he did the same for her, as if his regard for clothes had vanished, and he only obliged because of her decency in not ripping the fabric right off his back.

With their mouths still glued together, Viktor let his weight rest on her, as he backed them toward the bed, positioning himself to sit first and pull her into his lap. He cupped her face and pulled her in for a tight embrace, his forehead resting in the curve of her neck. He pressed his face into her hair and breathed in deeply through his mouth and nose, hoping to keep her scent with him forever.

Renly ran her fingers down his spine, the bolts embedded in it, as she gently detached all the parts that corseted Viktor’s frame, rubbing her palms flat along the dents and marks it left in his skin. He let out a relieved exhale, as her mouth came back to his into a messy open mouth kiss, his hands pressing on her shoulder blades. Her lips needy, giving away moans of urgency, as if there wasn’t enough of him.

She stood up, guiding him with her, before she leaned down to take off his leg brace with a few quiet clicks and placed it by the bed. Viktor felt her hands sliding down his thigh, her fingers pressing gently around his knee. She then returned to level with him and licked the seam of his mouth as she unbuckled his belt.

Viktor hesitated; his hands travelled to steady hers before she could pull his pants down. There, below the layer of material, was the very proof of his infidelity, of his weakness. The purple, fluorescent vein that burned itself into the fabric of his flesh—a forever reminder of a moment when he almost let himself be corrupted.

She squeezed his palms and broke the kiss with a sigh. Her hands then cradled his neck, pulling him in so she could ghost his forehead, his eyebrows, his eyelids, his moles, the corner of his mouth, the side of his nose, the spot under his jaw, his neck, with her lips. A silent signal of acceptance, of forgiveness, of the fact that nothing had to be forgiven in that moment. Viktor’s hands hovered in the air patiently until her last kiss, when they rested on her hips, curling under the waistband of her pants.

They rid themselves of the last bit of clothing together, Renly’s eyes lingering for a moment on the alien string in Viktor’s body, his own eyes closed as he slid her pants off with the dull movement of his palms, cradling the skin of her legs. Standing close, but not close enough, Viktor reached out to slowly pull her flush against him. Their mouths came together wrenching breaths out of each other, his thumb stretching the muscle of her cheek as he sunk his tongue in her, breathing heavily through his nose, pressing his chest, his groin, his legs to her and her to his chest and groin so he could feel her naked against him.

Renly’s arms cradled his waist, her palms splayed flat on his back pushing him in, her teeth bringing blood onto his tongue. The fleeting moment of loss was gone, but the feeling of it still present, as they met each other truly for the first time—in hunger and longing, both searching for absolution in each other’s bodies.

Viktor lowered himself back to the edge of the bed, breaking the kiss only to sit her on top of his thighs, her legs straddling him tightly. He clung onto her for balance and for kindness, all their rituals previously established now abandoned for the sake of the urgency of feeling one another, sealing all the things that were close to breaking. He searched for consent in her eyes when his cock found her entrance, and she gave him a silent eager nod against his nose.

Viktor pressed himself in and paused mid-movement, noticing a wince cross her face. “Are you alright?” Of all things, this couldn’t hurt—it mustn’t.

“Yes… ah, yes,” she breathed into his mouth, sinking onto him up to the hilt, the stretch so gratifying she could cry again. A quiet ‘yes’ kept falling from her lips as Viktor’s hips thrusted upwards, their lips and noses bumping against each other in erratic rhythm.

She steadied herself, gripping his chin with one hand and his shoulder with the other, letting him take over, when his hand seized her palm and guided her fingers between them, where their bodies met. A bead of sweat travelled from the pool of her collarbones, down between her breasts, down her belly, to where she touched herself for him.

Her brows knitted together, her mouth hung open between quick breaths, waiting for him, when Viktor cranked his neck to rub his face against hers whispering, “Come on my cock, lásko.”

A full body shudder went through her, as she leaned her weight on him, her thighs clutching around his hips, his bones digging into her flesh, her walls clenching and she muffled a cry of completion into his mouth.

Viktor groaned soon after her, the tightness hugging his cock almost unbearable, as he spilled himself inside, caging her body with his arms, his tongue and teeth dragging across her shoulder. He then collapsed them to the side, still buried within her core, his waist resting on her thigh, his legs curled up under her bum, face nuzzled into her neck.

He kissed her again, his arm stretching out to grab the pillows from the bed head, one to tug under her pelvis as he rolled them over onto it, the other propped under his knee as he hooked his leg underneath hers, their bodies still connected. His tongue exploring her mouth, slowly this time, when his cock slipped out of her, and she let out a disappointed gasp.

Splaying his body on top of hers, their stomachs pressed against each other, he kept kissing her until he felt himself grow hard again. Her belly began to raise and fall more frantically, his own abdomen flexing as he propped himself on one arm and spat into his hand. He reached between them to cup her cunt and rubbed it gently, the slick spreading around her entrance.

He gave his cock a couple of wet strokes to then cage himself around her, one hand above her pressed into the mattress, the other entwining their fingers together, pinning her palm next to her head.

Gently and slowly, he entered her again, his movements soft so she could get used to him once more. The feeling of her walls around him washed over his senses, their scents mixing together, his hips rolling languidly against hers with reverence, as her body accepted him fully. In a pledge of utter devotion, Viktor murmured between his gasps, “I love you so much.”

“I love you,” she immediately whispered into his mouth. Viktor was being careful and precise, drawing out her pleasure and prolonging his. He wanted to savour the slide of their bodies melting into one, memorizing every moan that fell between them. Their noses pressed together, breathing heavily, her brows furrowed, mouths agape as their lips brushed against each other with each push of his hips.

His movements grew more intense, though the pace remained the same. Each slow deep thrust he gave her made her gasp quietly, as his cock kept hitting the right spot. He released her hand to slide his palm between them, his fingers finding her cunt, spreading her lips before resting on her clit. He rubbed it lazily, timing the action with the rolls of his hips and building the pressure withing her as her walls begun to clench around him desperately.

Renly dug her nails into his hips, her brows scrunched together, her mouth panting, breathless, and Viktor only smiled and whispered a quiet, “Yes, you are doing so well.” Her thighs squeezed his hips as she reached another climax, her head lifting from the pillow, crying out into his mouth.

He carefully worked her through the orgasm, before picking up the pace of his thrusts to reach his own completion, her name falling from his lips in a quiet chant. Her walls squeezed against his cock, his arms wrapping around her, face buried in her neck, gasping and panting. His movements grew sloppier the closer he got, when he finally spilled himself inside her with a loud groan, his body collapsing onto hers.

For a moment they both breathed heavily, their stomachs connected, rising and falling together. Then, Viktor rolled off her, pulling her with himself to give her a kiss sealing his devotion to her. He withdrew his cock with a quiet sleek sound, letting his seed leak out between them.

He felt her arms tightening around his neck, her breath growing unsteady, and the flutter of her heartbeat. Then he noticed her chest trembling next to his and pulled back to look at her, only to see tears streaming from beneath her closed eyelids.

“Did I hurt you?” was his first instinct to ask as he eased himself out of the vice grip of her thighs to cradle her face against his chest. “Are you in pain?”

“No, no—” Renly croaked, laughing through her sobs as she dampened Viktor’s chest. “I just feel… empty.” Empty of pain, of anger, of the horrible dread she’d felt when he crossed her doorstep. Empty of doubt and insecurities. All the empty space left to be filled with something new.

“Fuck, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me,” she chuckled, trying to wipe her tears away with her hand, but there were too many. “It’s never happened before. I’m so sorry.”

“Lásko, it’s normal. Cry it out—it’s… beautiful,” Viktor murmured against her ear, his fingers combing gently through her hair. He felt his ribcage swell with contentment, a feeling of utter peace flooding his body from head to toe. Her tears felt like a silent confession etched onto the skin covering his heart.

“What is this?” Renly sniffled again, quieter this time, as she began tracing circles in the damp patch on Viktor’s chest, exhaling slowly through her mouth.

“Temperance,” Viktor mused, cradling her to him as though she were a precious gift. “We’ve been… reforged in our heat, tempered in your tears.”

His words left her gaping into the space in front of her, tracing lines between Viktor’s freckles and moles with her fingers. Silence followed for a while. It was comfortable, with something unfolding. Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.

When a yawn tore her mouth apart, Viktor nudged her gently with his chin and asked, “Shower?”

“Yes, shower.” Renly stretched across the bed, pulling Viktor along with her. She grabbed his hands and pulled them above their heads and pressed her toes on his feet, drawing a low chuckle from his throat.

They did all the things they usually did, but somehow it all felt new again—in a new space, with a new emptiness to fill. Renly let the shower run until the water turned warm and prepared fresh towels for them.

They stepped into the shower together, the steam curling around their skin. The first blast of water hit Viktor’s shoulder, and he winced, sucking in a sharp breath.

“Too hot?” Renly asked with a smirk, already reaching for the handle to adjust the temperature.

“Do you usually scald yourself in the shower?” Viktor teased, the corners of his mouth quirking up despite the discomfort.

Renly rolled her eyes, turning the dial until the water was just shy of lukewarm. “Better?”

“Much better,” he said, his tone playful. “Though I’m still recovering from the trauma.”

Renly huffed a laugh and grabbed a bar of soap from the shelf. “I’m afraid you’re going to smell like a coconut,” she said, holding it up as if presenting evidence of her crime.

“Good,” Viktor replied without hesitation. “I love coconut.”

She grinned, shaking her head slightly before beginning her task. Her hands glided over his arms and chest, the soap lathering into creamy bubbles as she worked. She moved with deliberate tenderness, kneading his muscles as though to coax away every last knot of tension that had taken residence in him. Viktor let his eyes drift shut, exhaling as her hands trailed over his shoulders and down his back.

She hesitated when her hand landed on his thigh, the oppressive purple vein even more visible on his flushed skin. Feeling the hover of her touch, Viktor took her palm in his and kissed her knuckles. “It’s alright.”

“Does it hurt?” she asked quietly, and then a thought popped into her head. Of course, it did—it had always hurt.

“No. It just feels… strange.” Viktor pulled her in and wrapped her arm around his neck. “I’ll have to get used to it. It’s a small price.”

When she reached up to wash his hair, he leaned into her touch like a weary traveller finding solace. Her fingers threaded through his damp curls, massaging the soap in gentle circles over his scalp. Every now and then, Viktor caught her hands, pressing a kiss to her fingers and wrists in a gesture that felt reverent. The simplicity of it—the quiet intimacy—made Renly’s chest ache in the best way.

When she finished, Viktor turned her by the shoulders, swapping places with her under the stream of water. He took the soap from her, his hands warm and sure as they smoothed over her skin. He moved slowly, deliberately, as if mapping her anew. The steam curled around them, the water running in rivulets down her back as he pulled her flush against him.

When he reached her hair, his fingers worked through the strands with a skill that surprised her. His thumbs pressed into her temples, eliciting a soft moan as her eyes fluttered shut, rolling back in her skull.

“Good?” he murmured, his voice low and rich.

“Perfect,” she breathed, leaning into him.

They kissed lazily under the stream, the water running between them as their mouths met in unhurried synchrony. Their hands found each other’s skin, not in hunger this time but in care—an exchange of solace, of connection. Every touch felt like a quiet vow, a promise that they didn’t need words to seal.

When they got back to bed, which had been changed by Renly’s insistence—Viktor said he didn’t mind, and he really didn’t—she started to drift off almost immediately. His hands traced the lines of her tattoo, lingering around ‘his place’ in it. After a long pause, he finally took a deep breath and asked, “You’re going to Zaun, aren’t you?”

“Will you hate me if I do?” Renly murmured, barely keeping her eyes open.

“No. Will you let me come with you?” Viktor’s voice was low and steady, though there was a hint of something uncertain beneath it. He truly couldn’t bear the thought of her being alone in there, and he couldn’t bear the thought of her constantly looking over her shoulder to see if he was safe if he went with her.

She shifted slightly, meeting his gaze in the dim light. “Viktor, you know I can’t do that. You will suffocate.” It was a statement that carried no judgment and no guilt. It was just a statement, saying the obvious, and yet—it made Viktor feel like he was just about to suffocate.

He inhaled sharply, but his hand gently found its way to hers, his fingers threading through hers. “I can wear a mask. But… we can talk about this tomorrow.” His thumb brushed her knuckles, a subtle gesture of reassurance. “Just know I’m ready to come with you.”

***

As they walked, Viktor’s grip was tight on Renly’s hand. Their morning was quiet, almost warm, until she made him laugh by dropping half of her sugar dish into his coffee with a smirk. He glanced at her with concern when he saw her putting on her Zaunite clothes, but dared not say anything.

They arrived at the lab together, and Jayce, relieved to see them both, looked up. "Mel fought off the council," he said, almost hopefully. "For now, the Hexcore is to remain as an 'on hold' project. We’re to seal it and put it away." Viktor sighed, a mixture of relief and disappointment flooding through him. Renly placed a hand on his shoulder, cradling his cheek gently with the other.

She moved on to pack a bag with supplies, medications, and gas masks for her trip to Zaun. She felt Viktor’s eyes lingering on her the whole time; she knew exactly what he wanted to do and say, and all the bones in her body ached with that knowledge. Jayce glanced at her and asked, "Are you going?"

Renly replied with a weak "yes," her gaze flicking over to Viktor. He shifted his stance on his cane, his voice soft as he spoke, "Renly… please take me with you. I cannot bear it." The weakness in him tore him apart. The weakness of his body fought the weakness of his pride, and his fragile heart—one that had only just reconciled with Renly’s—beat unsteadily in his chest when he saw her eyes, an apology pouring from them.

"Viktor, I beg you. Please, don’t make me choose," she replied, stopping her packing for a moment. She took his hands in hers. "Because if you make me, I will stay, and you will resent yourself for it."

"I will resent myself either way," he whispered weakly, the shape of his mouth askew as he tried to hold all of his weaknesses back. And even though he knew that none of the options presented to him in his agonizing journey through The Arcane were acceptable, for a fleeting moment, he longed for his body to be whole and able.

"I will go." Jayce’s voice was firm and present, so present, in fact, that both Renly and Viktor turned their necks to look at him.

"Jayce, you can’t—" Viktor shook his head in disbelief. He took a step forward toward Jayce, as if trying to physically stop him.

"I will go, and I will come back—with you." He gripped Renly’s shoulders while making his plea. "I’ll deliver you to Viktor’s doorstep, unharmed, I promise." And that promise was meant for Viktor, as Jayce turned his head to look at his partner.

"I�� Jayce," Viktor’s words failed him. He knew, of course, that this was the solution to their conundrum. He admired Jayce so deeply in that moment. And even though his mind still whispered horrible insults to himself, he exhaled a breath of surrender. Because he trusted Jayce.

"I told you. You don’t have to carry this alone. And you don’t have to carry this—" Jayce pointed to the bag, "—alone. This is what I can do." He said, his face painted with a reassuring smile, as all three of them stood in a small circle, as if there was no grave danger before them.

Viktor pulled Jayce into an embrace, his voice barely a whisper as he said, "Please, bring her back to me." Jayce hugged him tighter, knocking the breath out of Viktor’s lungs.

They all packed the necessary items into three convenient bags. Jayce’s hand rested on Viktor’s shoulder from time to time, as if to reassure him he would be true to his word. When everything was ready, they stood before the front door, staring at the floor. Viktor let out one last sigh before kissing Renly deeply, for the first time on full display in front of Jayce.

She squeezed her eyes shut, clinging to his wrists. He rested his forehead against hers and whispered, “I love you so much I don’t know what to do with myself.” Renly let out a shaky exhale, then opened her eyes and cradled his face.

“Viktor, I admire you. I respect you. I adore you; I love you so much my heart aches.” She swallowed the lump forming in her throat and kissed him again.

They were startled by a muffled choke coming from Jayce, who had been completely forgotten in that moment. “Guys, this is so beautiful,” he said weakly, pressing his fingers into his eyes, trying to hold back one, maybe two tears.

Renly and Viktor exchanged an embarrassed chuckle, the tension of the moment dissolving. Jayce wiped his eyes, smiling apologetically as he slung one of the bags over his shoulder. “Alright, let’s get moving before Viktor convinces me to restrain you and keep you safe here.”

Renly stepped closer to Viktor one last time, smoothing a hand down his chest. “I’ll be back,” she whispered, leaning in for a final, tender kiss. “Promise me you’ll rest.”

Viktor nodded; his throat too tight to speak. He held her hands in his for a moment longer, his grip unsteady but firm. “Be careful,” he managed to say, his voice breaking just slightly.

Renly squeezed his fingers before letting go, turning to Jayce. He gave Viktor a reassuring nod as if to silently repeat his earlier promise. “I’ll bring her back,” Jayce said softly, the sincerity in his tone like a steady anchor.

With that, the two of them stepped through the door. Viktor stood frozen as he watched them go, his cane trembling slightly in his hand. The sound of the door closing echoed through the room like a final note, and for a moment, he stood there in silence, staring at the empty space where they had been.

The sound of his own sob startled him in the silence. He tried to shy away from it by hiding his face in the crook of his elbow, but it was a futile attempt. His shoulders shook as a full-blown wave of weeping overcame him. The weight of everything—the worry, the helplessness, the love that threatened to swallow him whole—poured out in sobs that filled the empty hallway. His heart, so fragile and raw, cracked under the pressure of letting her go.

He clutched his cane like it was the only thing keeping him upright, tears streaking down his cheeks as he gasped for breath. Viktor rarely allowed himself to cry, but now, in the solitude of the lab, there was no one to witness his unravelling. No one to judge the vulnerability that poured out of him in rivers. For the first time in so long, he let himself feel everything, unrestrained and unapologetic.

He cried out all his anger, cried out his leg, his spine. He cried out the unbearable thought of Renly getting hurt—or worse. He cried out the failure of his dream, the loss of Rio, his lungs, himself—every oppressive thought that gnawed at him, every splinter in every bone of his body. When his throat began to burn, a thought ignited weakly, like an ember. You are good at something. Wiping his tears away, chuckling at the absurd of his outburst, he turned back to the lab and sunk back into work.

#viktor arcane #viktor x reader #viktor fanfic #viktor x reader smut #viktor x f!reader #arcane #viktor smut #arcane fanfic #my writing #ao3 #ao3 fanfic #viktor x oc #viktor nation #what was that

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soobadnoonecanstopher · 8 months ago

Text

Rat Bastard - Part 9

Pairing: You x Kyungsoo

Rating: M (Mature Smut)

Word Count: 9300

Warnings: There were too many beds, Enemies to Lovers, Slow Burn, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Idiots to Lovers, Angst, Potentially Triggering Sexual Content, The Reckoning, why do even have these condoms

Tag: @ilovemyapopbaby

Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

You wanted to run away.

You wanted to hide away.

You tried your best to do it and you got as far as the first step off of the front concrete patio of this old storm shelter. The ground below that step was filled with water and the first rash step you’d taken down filled your shoe with filthy muddy water that you sunk down into. Its suction pulled you down deep enough to feel the mud squishing in between your toes. With the next step, the thick mud kept your shoe. You abandoned the other one for the sake of your balance and retreated back up onto the very last step, keeping your presence of mind enough to rinse the mud off your feet. Your shoes would be lost.

You only needed a moment. A few moments maybe and you’d get it under control. You didn't have to be crying right now. But it was hard. Your pride was so hurt. Your heart ached and your stomach burned. You felt like you’d given too much away with the question you'd asked him and you felt humiliated by his response -- his non-response.

It was another rejection. Was that four now? Were you really so pathetic that you kept doing the same thing again and again with the exact same result? There was something wrong with you. You swiped quickly at your cheeks and cleared your throat, hiccuping halfway through the breath you tried to take. You didn’t need to be crying right now.

He hadn’t seen you crying yet. He didn't have to know you felt like this. You could get it back under control, pull your chin up and walk back in there with a cool smile, and act like nothing could hurt you.

You didn't have to ruin the night.

You’d moved from the front step now, away from the door. You just needed a few more moments, before you could stop. You found a corner away from the door, not even that visible from the door. It was already dark outside and there were no lights out here. You leaned against the wall here and lifted your hands to wipe roughly at the wetness that still stubbornly fell from your eyes and you heard it. The squeak of the door knob, the heavy metal door scraping as it was pushed open, and the silence that followed that sound. He would not see you and he would leave, satisfied that he had searched the space thoroughly enough.

You did your best to breathe quietly but your nose sniffles and hiccups betrayed you.

He didn’t have to come and see you this way. He could just turn back around and you could promise to be back when it had passed. You could show him only the good side.

The sound of his footsteps came anyway and you closed your eyes and held your breath and when those footsteps rounded the corner he was here.

You inhaled a breath through your mouth and it fought through the stutter in your throat and your eyes felt compelled by his arrival.

Kyungsoo stood just at the corner, his searching eyes zeroed in on you here and his feet stopped moving when he realized he had found you. His face was blank for the first half-second after finding you. Before he looked at you and his eyes adjusted to the darkness out here. The shift in him felt dangerous. After that first second of watching you, it happened so quickly, that you saw the recognition in his eyes, the shift to knowing; you had been discovered; your upset was known. You were horrified. He could see too much. You had run. You had been crying. His rejection had wounded you.

His balance shifted with the realization that rolled through his entire body and he pulled his head back, exhaled roughly into the air above his head with a growl, and his hand roughly ran over the length of his face from forehead to chin.

He moved then in one fluid motion with three steps and his hands lifting up to reach for you when he moved through the dark to the spot where you hid away from him.

The moment he was close enough to touch you, his hands landed on either side of your wet face.

The look in his wide eyes was manic, something was wrong with him, and you flinched the moment his hot fingertips first touched your flesh. He was gripping your face and you felt the surprise crest up hot when he pulled you roughly into him, into his parted lips.

He kissed you. His mouth collided with yours with a roughness; a demanding force. He was kissing you but this kiss felt so different. You felt the wrong kind of desperation in this kiss. There was too much emotion in it; the wrong kind of emotion. He was upset. Maybe as upset as you had been while you hid away and cried. You could feel so much of his pain in this kiss.

His mouth was hot and he pushed his sweetened tongue between your lips, pushing against your own tongue, pulling back only to suck and bite down on your lip. He moved again, stepping hard into you so you could feel the hot flush of his body temperature and your hands, your hands lifted, gripping at the air around you, unable to grab ahold of anything and too scared to grab ahold of him, scared that you might not even be allowed to touch him with as upset as he felt.

He pulled away for half a second and you gasped for air.

“Is this what you want from me?” His voice was rough. You squeezed your eyes closed, feeling fresh tears rolling down your cheeks, wetting his hands that still held your face, “Do you want to feel how desperately I want you? Is this fun for you? If you want me to fuck you, I will fuck you -- that’s all you were after, right?”

His hand moved and he reached for one of your hands, pulling it down to touch the rigid heat you felt between his legs as his rough mouth moved from your lips down to your neck.

He felt so different. He felt wrong. Yet you felt shame for how your body was responding to him and the first open-mouth gasp you let out when a hand wrapped roughly around your waist and pulled you harder into him further fueled his actions. You felt more of his arousal when he pressed himself into you. He still felt so different from the Kyungsoo you loved. This one was acting out of his mind. This one was so upset. As upset as you had been.

This wasn’t something he wanted to be doing. Did he believe this is what you wanted? It had been, but not this way.

“Do you think I don't want to?” He didn’t. This felt off. There was no love in this. This felt nearly performative and so full of frustration. Why was he doing this? Just to prove a point?

“I can do it. It can just be sex like you want. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Do you think I won't?”

His hands were moving. This man slipped his fingers under the strap of your dress and his palm pushed it off of your shoulders, his head dipping down quickly, his lips pressed over the mound of your breast, at the same time, pushing your dress and your bra down and taking your nipple into his wet mouth. You let out another sound. It came from the back of your throat and the arousal surged through your body with the sensation of him nipping on your sensitive nipple. His hands moved down to your thighs and you heard ripping as the too-tight skirt was pulled up over your hips. He pushed your thighs apart and you felt the pressure of his erection against your center. The grinding was rough and scratchy with his jeans still on but it fell just over your clit, making your arousal grow stronger.

But the touches felt so forbidden. The low sounds he made as he did it sounded straight into your ears and sent another wave of arousal through your body. You couldn’t help it. Your heart begged you to stop him. This wasn’t what he wanted. He was doing this because of you. Some twisted misunderstanding. A stark lack of faith in you had led to this. His feeble attempt to fix what was wrong with you. To fix the reason for your fit and to stop your crying. You felt awful for it. He had misunderstood you so completely.

“This is what you want from me, right? This is why you asked for a relationship? You didn’t mean it, you just wanted me to fuck you, right?” He spoke roughly in between his maddening actions, asking you questions, making you feel like you wanted this, and putting up the act like he was willing, but his questions had your head shaking. You hadn’t been trying to trick him. This wasn’t a game you played with him. He was wrong about you.

You knew he wouldn’t have been doing this if you hadn’t run away from the date. You knew he was doing this for some twisted reason. He genuinely believed you had been using him. You could feel the sadness filling your chest to realize this terrible thing. You understood in an instant why he couldn't give you a response. He’d never trusted your intentions with his heart.

No. You didn’t only want this from him. Part of you craved this. Part of you felt desperate for it. But the longer it persisted this way, the less you wanted it. It wasn’t something he wanted to be doing. He was feeling hurt and used by you. What kind of a monster must you be in his eyes.

This was his heart breaking at your hands.

No. You were shaking your head with denial and his face pulled up to look into your eyes. Madness. You were gasping for air and you whispered, “No. I don't only want this, Kyungsoo.” You struggled to say it and it came out strained and broken, “This isn’t the only thing I want from you, I promise.”

His eyes hardened and he looked into your face as your chest heaved up and down with the labored breathing. You looked into his face, still very much aware of his hands on your breast, the bulge in his jeans rubbing against the covered center between your legs. His roughness had stopped advancing while he looked into your eyes. There was a narrowing in them. He did not move or retreat but the narrowing of his eyes had enough of a pause for you to catch your breath.

“Do you even like me?” He asked this with a terrible cracking in his voice and the heartbreaking question had your eyes rolling closed, your brows furrowed and your chin puckered as your bottom lip trembled. You felt the absolute devastation deep inside of you and your eyes were burning again. You could feel the shaking deep inside of your chest and hot tears crested, slipping down your face, dripping over his shoulder, darkening his shirt. Your head sank down and you lifted your hands up to cover your face.

“Yesterday you said you hated me. Three days ago you told me to go fuck myself. Four days ago you called me a pathetic asshole. Five days ago you told me — you told me —” You remembered all of it. All of the awful things you said to him. He couldn't get the worst of it out.

“Do you even like me, at all? Even a little bit?” he whispered through his broken heart in his broken voice and you gasped through the tears, nodding your head but unable to speak to him.

He had fallen backward and you no longer felt his hands on you, you no longer felt any of his warmth over your skin. You reached up over your shoulder, covering yourself with your dress and you could feel your hands shaking as you pulled your skirt back down to cover your thighs.

“I do. I do — like you,” you managed the meager words and he was desperately looking into your eyes for signs of any truth to your words. Your next words came out with more conviction. You were reaching deep inside of your chest and you closed your eyes to get them out of you. It felt like the hardest thing you’ve ever had to tell him but you needed to say it. Even if nothing came of it, even if the gaping wound you both had caused each other was simply too great to ever heal, you had to tell him. You had to be sure that he knew it.

“I love you, Kyungsoo. I am in love with you. I’m sorry. I love you.” As scary as the words were, you meant them with every single cell inside of your body. Even if you were rejected by him every single day for the rest of your life, you would not regret telling him this now. You were sorry it had taken you so long to say it. You were sorry you had mistreated him so badly and you felt so desperate for him to know this truth about you that you no longer cared of the consequences of him knowing this.

You told him this and you looked into his face as you told him this. His breathing had stopped for a moment and when he inhaled a breath he broke the eye contact and his eyes rolled, and over his entire face, you saw an eternity of regret there.

He was moving. He was lifting his hand and pulling at the hair on top of his head and then he was bending at the waist with a hand on his hip. His face contorted in pain and you reached your hands out toward him, still too scared to actually touch him.

“Why?” he whispered with closed eyes and wetness on his cheeks. This single word sounded to you like all of the pain in the world and you inhaled another deep breath, willing your tears to slow down some so you could see him clearly.

He inhaled and gritted his teeth and opened his red-rimmed eyes on you, swallowing roughly before he opened his mouth, “Tonight,” he said, lifting a finger and pointing to the ground just in front where you stood barefoot on this patio, “I had such a nice time with you. It was such a nice time but you know what I was thinking the entire time? This should have happened months ago. Why wasn’t it like this six months ago? We could have been so fucking good together six months ago. But it didn’t happen like that, did it? And I can’t let it go. I feel like it broke me when it comes to you. It broke us. It broke what we could have been. And it kills me because I’m so fucking in love with you, but I can’t trust you. I love you and I am so mad at you.”

You were listening to him speaking and you felt something different now. A sense of confusion was building inside of you. It felt like being falsely accused. What was he talking about? How was this something you had caused? Because you didn’t just accept that he stood you up that night? Why couldn’t he trust you? He was the one who never showed up that night. You were shaking your head and you opened your mouth to protest.

“Kyungsoo, no. That’s not right.” He was wrong. He was mistaken. He was the one. You were sure of it.

Your protests weren’t heard. “Why didn’t you show up? And why did you attack me after standing me up? You know, I lost friends over that? They all believed you. Why didn’t you come that night? Can you just -- just admit it?”

“Please? Just be honest with me, please? M-Maybe we could work. Maybe if you could just come clean with me, then I can forgive you and we can move past it?” He was begging. You were reeling with how wrong he was. He sounded so certain.

“Kyungsoo, I came that night.” You couldn’t tell him the lie he wanted. But there was something so odd about his pleas. You’d never heard him actually talk about it, but you’d been together with him in person now for two days and what you picked up on was his conviction. He was telling you the truth. This was something he genuinely believed you had done to him. “I was there. I waited for two hours for you.”

With as heavy as his resolve was, you half expected him to slink away, to firmly believe you were going to perpetuate a lie against him forever and that nothing about the relationship between the two of you stood a chance at being saved. But there sat something heavy inside of his eyes. A furrow of his brow and searching within yours for answers. He was listening to you. For the first time, he could hear the words you were saying with your own mouth and you could see his mind working.

“Where were you? For two hours, where did you wait for me?” It felt like salvation to hear this question. It felt like gulping fresh oxygen after drowning. It felt like maybe he had looked into your face too and saw some desperate truth in your eyes.

“Upstairs. I don't have any proof. I was too embarrassed to post anything about it and I paid cash. I was upstairs. We were meeting upstairs.”

“I was upstairs. I was there. I was looking for you. A bouquet of flowers on the table. I left them there. You never came.”

Something wasn’t right. It felt impossible. You knew what he looked like and he knew what you looked like and there was absolutely no way you missed each other, it was impossible.

“Next to the terrace,” he said with his eyes reaching into yours and you shook your head at this detail, denying it. There was no way that could be true.

This detail was impossible.

“Kyungsoo no, there was no terrace. I sat next to the window facing the library. What terrace?”

His eyes watched you without any response and after a while his eyes were roaming up over your head, moving around in a big circle and coming back around to sit inside of yours. How could this be?

“The library,” he said to himself and he was watching your face so closely as he did it. “The library?” His inflection lifted and there was a change now. He was narrowing his eyes at you and there was a flare to his nostrils as he breathed in through his nose. His mouth scowled and frowned and he reached into his pocket to pull out his cell phone.

“What are you doing?”

He was tapping his phone screen. His thumbs were moving something along the surface and his eyes were focusing down.

You heard a breath. A rough exhale, like a scoff.

“Which location did we meet at?” He said with a flat tone.

“East,” you said softly as he turned the phone around to show you a map of the city you both lived in. You could see on one side, the restaurant named ‘La Lei,’ and on the other side of town, the one you had gone to, the East location of the same name. ‘La Lei.’

“The East is on the right side. Exterior.” He added, his voice devoid of strength. You looked at the map, shaking your head and frowning your lips down with the furrow of your brow.

“But I drove for an hour to get there to meet you, there was so much traffic and so much sun.”

“The sun sets in the West. You went to the West location. There’s a library next door.”

You felt the ground shift. It felt like a powerful force.

You had to lean against the wall to stay up.

The whole time.

The entire time.

It was you.

It was your fault.

This was your mistake.

You had ruined this. You did this to him. You stood him up with your own stupid mistake. You accused him publicly, embarrassed him, attacked him, blamed him for your own stupid mistake. Mocked and ridiculed and hated him for months.

It was you. You were the asshole. You were the bastard.

His phone timed out and turned black and turned off the only bit of light besides the light from the moon that remained. It took your eyes a few seconds to adjust but when you could see him again he was leaning with his back against the wall with his head hung down. He wasn’t speaking and he wasn’t moving.

“I’m s-sorry. It was my mistake.” You dropped your face when he finally lifted his head to look at you.

And after a few silent moments, he inhaled and ran his hand over his face, turning away from you once more without speaking.

He whispered while he faced away, “I was so mad at you.” You heard a shaking inhale, “I was so mean to you.”

You felt destroyed by this. No wonder so many awful things happened to you. You did awful things, made stupid mistakes, and ruined anything good that came your way.

He was still whispering and outside of this place, outside of this pain, the hard rain began to fall. It was almost too loud for you to hear him. “I was awful to you. I was so horrible. I acted like that.”

You couldn’t stand it. You felt the forces from the ground to be too powerful and the weight on your shoulders too heavy.

You sunk under it, ignoring the sting of pain when the concrete hit your knees.

“It was my fault.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I ruined everything. I’m sorry, Kyungsoo.”

You existed within this long enough to begin to feel the rain. The wind whipped it against you and your skin felt so cold.

You heard him moving on you, impossibly over the sound of the rain, his hands landed over your shoulders and you opened your eyes to see him kneeling on the ground in front of you. He would mess up his clothes. His jeans would be muddy if he did this. He didn’t deserve any of that. He hasn't deserved any of what you said to him or did to him.

“Let’s go inside.” You heard the words but their message felt too kind for what you had done to him. You shook your head back and forth and you held your breath to try and stop feeling much of this. “It’s raining. Let’s get inside. You’re getting wet.”

“Kyungsoo, I’m sorry,” was all you could manage.

“It was a mistake.” His voice slipped up beside you, “You made a mistake. You didn’t do that on purpose.”

“Yeah, but all things after,” you couldn’t accept it. That you might be such a terrible person. But all signs pointed this way.

Kyungsoo was shaking his head. “Me too,” he said, “I did things too. Come on,” you felt him reaching for you again, placing his hands below your armpits, wrapping around you and standing you up. He was helping you. This was a new kind of humiliation you could not take.

“I can,” you whispered, placing a hand on his arm and pushing against his hands. “I can do it. Don't help me.” The last thing you deserved was his kindness.

You were moving before he had the chance to have any opinions about it. You moved through the front porch toward the front door and you gripped the handle and pulled it with all of your might. It was heavy but it moved and with each of your next steps you ignored the pain you felt in your knees. When the front door slammed shut the silence of this place was back. The rain outside sounded so far away inside here and behind you, you could hear his steady breathing. He haunted you but did not offer you any more assistance.

You found the space with the bunks and you moved to your luggage, knowing that you must change out of this destroyed dress, knowing that you should shower off the mess that would be your hair and your face and you should also wash off the filthy flood water that your feet had been submerged up to the ankles in.

You grabbed blindly within your bag, one item for each body part. Underwear, top, bottom. It did not matter what you grabbed. You were moving to the bathrooms, not looking at the man who sat on the edge of his own bed with his head in his hands.

The dress was ripped. You no longer needed to be careful to grab only the zipper to remove it, you reached down and roughly pulled at the already ripped seams, getting through enough of it for it to slip off of your body and pool down to the floor. From where you stood you looked up to see him still sitting in the same spot and position on his bed. Head in his hands and no doubt, a million tragedies flying through his mind.

You pushed off the bra and underwear and stepped into the flowing water; moving as if in a trance. Lathering soap as you had done thousands of times before. Washing off dirt and filth, scrubbing your skin with your fingernails until it was striped with red; watching the mud swirl down the drain below your feet. Washing your hair and digging your fingertips roughly over your scalp. Treating yourself with just a little less care than you normally did.

The water timed out and you had to step forward to start it again and your eyes caught movement from where he had been sitting. Kyungsoo was standing. He was looking down into his black bag and pulling things out and his eyes were down on the floor as he moved to enter the bathroom. You pulled your eyes away from him and focused them on the wall in front of you when he began to undress and your blinking flighty eyes did their best not to look at him as he stepped up to the shower faucet next to you and stood with his eyes closed under the running stream of water that ran over his naked body.

“I’m sorry,” you heard him whisper with his eyes closed and the water passing over his face. “For all of it.” for a few seconds after he said it, you felt the pull to look at him and when you finally gave in you found his eyes on you, his head turned and he watched your face for your understanding or for your refusal.

You nodded your head and bit down on the inside of your lip and the water from your shower head timed out. He shifted and he reached forward and pressed the lever to start your water again and you flinched to feel the water hitting your skin again and try as you might you could not bring yourself to pull your eyes off of his face. You felt an urge to know something. The question terrified you the longer you rolled it around inside of your mouth but you had his attention, he was still looking into your face as water ran down his body, washing away everything that had coated his skin tonight. You worked up the nerve.

“Do you hate me?”

His eyes flitted over your face and he slowly rolled them closed as he licked his lips. He was shaking his head back and forth before he answered you with the words you felt so desperate for.

“No, I don’t,” he said, “I love you.”

Your lips were trembling again. You felt the shaking inside of your chest and you were succumbing to it, the tears built and you squeezed your eyes tight, moving your face under the running water to wash them away, nodding your head to receive the words from him that you did not deserve.

His next whispered question pulled your eyes to him again.

“Do you hate me?”

You shook your head, sniffing your nose and closing your mouth before you whispered a quiet answer for him.

“No, I love you, Kyungsoo.”

He moved then, you saw the steps his feet took closer to you and you felt his wet arms wrap around your shoulders, pulling you into him. His bare skin was everywhere and another step brought the length of his body flush up against yours. He lifted his hands, placing one over the back of your head and his face was so close to you, his wet hair dripped steadily on your cheek. You wrapped your arms tightly around his waist, squeezing tightly around him, pulling him into you and he squeezed himself around you just as tightly.

“Let’s put it behind us then.”

More than what the statement promised for the future between you both, his words seemed to have a deeper impact on you. It sounded too good to be true. The word he used when talking about you and him. ‘Us.’ It felt like so much more than you deserved. He was probably just using it in an insignificant way. Not in any meaningful way. You’d had your fill of asking him questions and being turned down so you just accepted the hug, ignored the increasing pressure you felt against your hips and when you let go of the tightness from around his waist he lessened his hold around you and took a step back, his eyes seeking out yours the second the contact was broken.

You did not hesitate this time. You leaned into him quickly and pressed your lips against his cheek, finding the softness of his face and the smell of his warm skin so delightful that you could not pull yourself away from him right away. You lingered for longer than you should have with this beautiful naked man standing within touching distance of you and when you pulled away his eyes watched you with lids half closed and he followed your movement as you backed away from him; those eyes slipping down as you left over the length of your naked body.

You felt that look all over. He was looking at you with a heady desire that was quite visible with the vulnerable view you had of him. You hadn’t moved far enough away from him for your promise to him to still be enforceable. When he took a step closer to you, you should have stepped away from him, but there was a drug coursing through your veins with the way he looked at you. You should have left when you had the chance but you hesitated and now he’d taken another step. You felt too weak for this kind of test. You wouldn’t pass. You couldn’t resist him. If he wanted this, you had no self-control to resist him.

He surged into you then, wrapping his arms around your waist and your arms flew around his shoulders as he pushed you backward. You felt the ground leave you when he tensed and lifted you up, taking several steps to leave the bathroom and you felt the telltale feeling of fabric coating over your back. You were laid down on a bed, his bed. He’d brought you to his bed and you felt the warmth of his bare chest covering over your breasts. When he pushed forward he climbed on top of you and your thighs parted for him and his hips moved easily between. The way your bodies fit together so easily and so perfectly felt ordained.

His breathing was labored and he was looking into your eyes with a terrible tremble inside of him. He breathed through parted lips and his eyes were on your lips but he wasn’t kissing you. Your head had been lifted but you let it lie down onto his pillow and his breath got caught in his throat as his eyes drifted closed. You weren’t going to kiss him. You weren’t going to reach for him and guide him inside of you. You weren’t going to wrap your thighs around his waist and pull his hardness inside of you.

“Kyungsoo,” you whispered and his eyes slipped open. “Only if you want to.”

He blinked slowly and his face dipped down just as slowly until his soft lips pressed over yours; until his mouth opened over yours and his wet tongue teased a path over your teeth; until you felt his hands and his soft fingertips traveling down between his hips and your hips and those fingers slipped along your inner thigh.

You were too aroused for this. The slip of his fingertips in between your wetness made his movement much too easy. Each pass over your center with his wandering fingers had you gasping, you were out of control. Every bit of you felt overwhelmed with only the touch of his hands. Your skin and your nipples both puckering and each of your responses to his touches felt like too much. You felt powerless to stop it though. It was something you’d wanted him to do, something you felt desperate for him to actually want to do, and now that it was actually happening you almost couldn’t deal with it, let alone believe that it was actually happening; that he was actually doing this to you.

You wanted him too much. He made this so easy for you and when you felt him move again as he dipped his head down between your shaking thighs and when gave a gentle push against your legs to urge you to open for him, you gave in. It felt too surreal. That he was really doing this. That he really wanted to do this. The first pass of his tongue between your legs had you closing your eyes, feeling him there. His mouth was hot and his tongue moved over you with just enough pressure to make you squirm. Looking down and seeing his damp hair and the roundness of the top of his head positioned between your parted legs; this had to be a dream. You were overwhelmed by him. His hot breath and the sinful sounds from his mouth, his purposeful tongue, the way he moaned into you as he did it you had been so close so quickly. You felt inundated all at once. He was pulling. He was sucking. You were trembling and grabbing his hair, squeezing and shaking and you came apart entirely on his bed.

It was too much. Your heart was racing too fast inside of your chest and Kyungsoo was sitting up on his ankles with his hands moving slowly up and down your parted thighs as he watched your face with heavy eyes and parted lips and chest heaving from the feelings surging through him. He was wet, from you. He seemed to be watching you for a long time and you wondered what had him so transfixed. Your eyes moved over him. The smooth skin, the muscles you knew you felt under his nerdy little polo, the beautiful shape of this man whose eyes seemed strangely content just to take in this view of you, ready and waiting for him on his bed with wet hair and now, a sweet smile on your face. You had what you were sure was a glow from the release he had just given you with his mouth.

There was something silent here. You felt your smile widen and you pulled your eyelids closed, blinking slowly with the smallest lift of your chin. When you opened your eyes back up you saw the return from him. His lips pulled into sweetness, moving wide for the smile that seemed to hit him in waves and his eyes blinked back at you just as slowly.

“Kyungsoo, do you want to make love to me?” You reached down, touching the tips of his fingers lightly with yours and you felt his hand move into your beckoning one. You pulled him down and he caved down over you. With his eyes still trapped inside of yours, he nodded his head. He did. He did want to be inside of you.

You leaned up to him as you wrapped a hand around the back of his neck, pulling him down on top of you, pulling his face down so you could kiss his lips. You could feel him between your legs, the smoothness and the shape of him that was so close to where you wanted him to be. You felt the tip of him bumping between your legs and you felt so wet that you knew it would hardly take anything at all to get him inside of you. In fact, the more you pulled against him the more you felt him slipping within your wetness, not inside yet but dangerously close with how good it felt to have him there. You knew from the sounds coming from his throat that each slip inside of your wetness only heightened the temptation to push inside. You felt the gentle push with his hips. It took everything inside of you not to lift your hips to catch the angle so he could push inside.

You pulled your mouth from his and whispered beside his ear, “Your condoms…where?” His brows furrowed and his face showed great concentration before you’d asked this, no doubt feeling the warm slippery wetness between your legs and doing his best not to just slip inside. When your words were out he opened his eyes and shook his head once. “I didn’t bring any. I lied.” he huffed out a breath when you moved your hips again, feeling the slip between your legs again, “to sound cool.” He said after a small grunt and a hiss and his mouth was open with his brows still furrowed. This took nearly every ounce of his control to hold back from.

One of you would have to make quite a naked and heavily aroused journey to get them. An idea you weren’t crazy about right now, not with him so close to you, the idea of leaving him sounded terrible.

They were just so far away. It wasn’t like this was someone insignificant. This was Doh Kyungsoo. You fully intended to keep this man for the rest of your life. You suddenly didn't even want them at all.

“We don't need it,” you said in a soft whisper and his eyes opened once more, looking into your face. “You could just,” you added and you bit down on your lip when you felt his hips move again and he bumped against your already sensitive center.

“Do you want me to?” He was watching you closely, holding his breath, and the instant you nodded your head you felt him shift. He left his place lying over your chest and saw him lifting himself up again. He was looking at you again. He was touching you again, his fingers slipping so easily and with his hand down between your legs you felt the pressure of him as he pushed inside of you. Hips guiding slowly at first and you gasped, struggling to keep your eyes open and on him while he filled you completely. Skin to skin. Pushing inside of you and reeling from the overwhelming pleasure that came from this. He was gone. He was lost. Inside of you, he was lost.

His face.

His face was beautiful. His eyes closed and his head leaned back and his lips fell open and those same eyes that captivated and controlled you, tortured and tempted you, they drifted. You caught occasional looks from him. He pulled out and pushed in again and with each new motion, he fought a battle between watching you and feeling you.

The sounds, the touches, the looks, and the moments when he would drop, catching your mouth with his, pulling you up to kiss him, moving lower to bite your shoulder or your neck or your ear all the while keeping as close to you as he possibly could. The friction felt good but you wanted to keep him inside and with each pull you wrapped your legs around his waist and pulled him harder into you. Holding him so tight that he had to pull against your legs to pull out again. This felt different. He filled you as if he was made for you. This sex felt different than any you’d had with anyone else. There was something insatiable about how desperately you wanted him inside of you and when he was shaking and when he was making that delicious sound from deep inside of his chest, you clung to him, pulling him inside of you, wanting him there, desperate for him to stay inside of you.

You recognized some half attempt to pull out. You’d felt the stutter in his pace and with the sounds he made, you knew he was about to. You felt too crazed and he felt too good and you pulled him into you again, pulling his face down to you, capturing his mouth with yours, you felt the spasms and the bursts of warmth inside of you while you sucked on his tongue and he was shaking around you and inside of you and on top of you as he came.

There was a moment of your joined breath. A moment of slow release of lips and the languid and satisfied smile that built on your face. He took it in, that look on your face and he reached a hand up to touch his fingertips on your bottom lip, moving his face down again to kiss you deeply. You could still feel him inside of you, that pressure that had built with the wetness you shared threatened a mess with every movement you made. You didn’t want to move. You didn’t want him to leave you. This desire to keep him felt stronger than any other. This man was yours and only yours. You wanted nothing else but him.

“You didn’t let me pull out,” he whispered with half-closed eyes as he laid his head down on your chest. “Trying to make it to the wall or what — what are you doing to me?”

You hummed in amusement, running your fingers through his hair. “I’ve been on the pill for years -- you felt too good for a condom,” you remarked and you felt his cheeks lift with the small smile that grew on his face.

The wind down was slow to take. Neither of you had a schedule to keep to and no real reason to go to sleep early. You’d left him behind, happy and spent on his bed to clean up, and when you left the bathroom stall you watched him doing the same. Every bit of that shyness you’d felt with the idea of being naked around him, of course, was gone and he didn't seem to be in that much of a hurry to shower and get dressed. Eventually, he was moving though and you watched with a little pout from the edge of his bed as he cleaned up and pulled on some clothes at last. You pulled one of his shirts out of his bag, a plain white t-shirt that sat on top of a stack of seemingly identical plain white t-shirts. Below it sat black shirts and you wondered about this man’s odd black and white lifestyle.

“Hey, that’s my favorite shirt,” he said when you came out of the bathroom with your panties on underneath it and nothing else and you held out the bottom like it was a dress and did a little spin that had him giggling. He was up out of the bed and he was pulling your hand toward the door out of this room.

“Where are we going? I’m not wearing any pants.”

He didn’t seem to care about your current state of undress. He was opening the door to the bunks and pulling you toward the kitchen, walking backward, only looking at you and not even watching where he was going as he just dragged you despite your stubborn resisting feet.

“I’m hungry,” he pouted his lips and whined, something you never ever thought you’d witness in your entire existence. It made you laugh and you rolled your eyes.

“That’s because you didn’t touch your dinner. It was so delicious and you ate maybe three bites of it. Doh Kyungsoo, think of the kids who don’t have any food to—”

“Make me something. Make me food.” He cut you off. The whining was disarming and adorable and you motioned with your lifted eyebrows toward the door to let him know that if he didn’t turn around now he was going to run into it.

Inside the kitchen were remnants of the dinner date. Three wine bottles sat forgotten on the counter and the empty wine glasses were left abandoned nearby. You slipped over to the fridge and opened it. You didn’t really know what on earth you could make this professional private chef that he would enjoy and when you turned back to look at him he just smiled uselessly. There were quite a few things in this fridge. The problem was actually you. What on earth could you make him that might actually taste good. You’d been here peering inside this fridge for a while before you felt just a little flustered with this task.

“I don’t know how to make that many things,” you mused toward where he sat on a stool and you looked behind at the man who was simply sitting there watching you bend over in front of the fridge with a completely dazed but quite a blissed out expression on his face. You stood up straight and cleared your throat, understanding that yes you wore only panties underneath his own t-shit and that the man had just fucked you so he was probably not quite in his right mind but staring at your ass as you bent down to look into the fridge so you could make his spoiled ass something to eat was a little bit rude. He offered no advice. No suggestions. It didn’t seem to matter what you made for him as long as you did it wearing his shirt and he got to watch you do it.

The throat clearing pulled his attention up to your face. And when you shook your head with a question written in your eyes, both to get him to acknowledge that you were talking to him and as some sort of call out to the fact that he’d just been caught him staring and all you got was the smallest shrug and a lazy smile and even lazier words promising that he would like anything you made. It literally did not matter, he said.

You pulled out butter, bread, and cheese. He was getting a toddler’s treat. You busied yourself taking out two bread slices, buttering both sides to lay down and sizzle in a heated pan, and placed two slices of cheese in between. Normally you’d only put one slice but he was cute so he got two cheese slices. He was getting the deluxe version of a grilled cheese sandwich with no bells nor whistles. Literally just bread and cheese. If he wanted something fancy he could cook it himself.

You busied yourself with his plate, opting to be as ridiculous as he was and you sliced his sandwich in four little triangles, and set each one point side up in the center of a plate that was at least two sizes too big and you grabbed some leftover bread crust. Crumbling the whole thing in your hands and sprinkling the stray bread crumbs up way up high in overly dramatic fashion as you had seen some egotistical chefs doing online with their salt and pepper techniques.

When you spun around with the plate in your hands he was already laughing. You slinked up beside him holding the plate over your shoulder and did a big round swing with it, plopping it down in front of him with a hand flourish as you came away from it.

“Here we have a pan sizzled butter-basted double fromage deluxe panini with an untoasted brioche texture sprinkle.”

Oh, his laughter was glorious. You heard the loud guffaws and his eyes closed, his cheeks popping up pink and his whole body shook with it. You couldn’t put a name to how good this felt. It was unparalleled and such a new feeling. He was blindingly beautiful when he was happy and you had been the one to make him happy. Why you’d been dead set on making him miserable for all those months had clearly been great evidence of your stupidity. This man was absolutely irresistible when he was happy.

You pulled your hands away from the plate with the sandwich and to your delight his mouth formed a surprised ‘o’ shape, he even lifted both of his hands to cover his mouth and you were giggling as he picked up one triangle and took a big bite of arguably the best part of the sandwich, the cheesy point. He was chewing and swallowing and taking another bite quickly while actually licking the crumbs and butter off his thumb between bites. You’d never seen anyone polish off a grilled cheese sandwich so fast.

It felt so flattering to see him eat that stupid thing with the little ‘mmm’ sounds he made occasionally and just to keep from staring at him so damn much you spun to face the cupboards for something to drink. Grabbing two glasses and filling them with ice water. You’d had a bit more alcohol than you were used to these last two days and with the way he was just sitting there looking like a snack you were unlikely to get enough of any time soon, you figured you both should hydrate right now for whatever physically demanding activities you might participate in later.

“Do you feel better now?” You asked after he’d eaten and had been sipping on the water for some time now and his eyes popped over to you as he nodded with the glass to his lips.

“Like a new person.” He spun on his stool, pushing away from the counter and he leaned toward where you stood just at the corner of it. You felt a tug on the shirt you wore and the fabric tightened around your back as he pulled against the shirt. You resisted and the only actual reason for your resistance was for the sake of the drama. You couldn’t fight your smile but you at least had a bit more control over your legs and the smallest whine that came from his chest, the little pout on his lips, and the adorable way he pulled again, shaking his hand so the tugs came quickly and shook you with their insistence was an instant reward for this little fight you put up.

“Ahh, come here,” he complained out loud. You were giggling and you shook your head back and forth.

“Look you’re stretching my favorite shirt all out,” he pointed down to the spot on the shirt where his own hand held on and pulled it very far away from your body. It had a surprising amount of stretch in it. You giggled at the playful accusation.

You just shook your head again and grabbed ahold of the countertop when you began to feel like he might pull hard enough to get you to move. The longer you held your ground the more petulant you felt about it. A ghost of the conversation from earlier in this very kitchen was dancing around through your head, making you feel like maybe all of your talking and airing of all of your past grievances with this man wasn’t quite finished; wasn’t quite resolved with the love. Some things when asked should be answered and you still felt that sting deep inside of you from being denied.

“Why?” His question came next and you simply couldn’t hold your next words inside.

“I thought you never had sex without a committed relationship, Doh Kyungsoo.” You said it with a laugh. You’d meant it in a light and funny way but once the words were actually out, it felt like a cloud had just moved in. You could still feel the warmth of that bright sunshine but there was a haze that coated and cooled your skin just enough for a chill of doubt to grow. You felt it inside of your stomach where you always felt all of the nervous things in your life.

“You never answered my question — from before -- about us.” This part, you said with much less confidence and no humor. You couldn’t even look into his eyes as you said it.

He did not loosen the grip of his hand on your shirt. He didn’t shrink away and avoid your eyes or try to evade or avoid answering your question.

Kyungsoo leaned forward, closer to where you stood just out of his reach enough to require just a little bit of effort for him to get to you and he nearly fell off his little stool to do it. He reached with his other hand. You were grabbed by his hands, finally gaining enough purchase around your waist for the strength of his arms to overpower your little stubborn fit and you stepped rapidly to keep from falling over; to keep up with the quickness with which he pulled you into his arms, between his knees, and into the now familiar smell of him that felt like comfort itself.

“Yes,” he said quickly, wasting absolutely no time with little jokes or word games. He was wrapping his arms around your shoulders and you slipped your arms tightly around his waist and tucked your face into his neck. His answer coated over your head, slipping right down into the middle of you, soothing whatever silly worries had slinked their way under your skin.

“Yes, I want to be with you. Yes, I want you to be mine and I want to be yours.” His hands rubbed firm passes up and down your spine.

“I am answering you now. Yes.”

Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

#exo fanfiction #exo smut #kyungsoo #kyungsoo smut #kyungsoo fic #exo story #exo fic

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aquadraco20 · 1 year ago

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Bearded dragon substrate, humidity, and diet.

Inspired by @kaijutegu's recent post, let’s talk about calcium sand.

So, calcium sand, and substrate in general, has been attributed to impaction in bearded dragons (and other reptiles, but for this post, we’re just focusing on dragons.) However, while some substrates are more natural choices than others, and as such are more digestible, substrate itself is typically not the root cause of impaction. Improper husbandry such as dehydration, improper lighting, diet and supplementation all negatively impact the digestive system as well as the body in general, and the problems only compact when these factors are stacked together.

Firstly, lets look at a bearded dragons natural habitat. This video courtesy of the veterinarian Jonathon Howard, known online as the Beardie Vet, shows the texture of the substrate that wild dragons live on. The sand is loose on top but packed underneath. The grain size is about 96% fine sand.

Next, lets look at this map.

This map courtesy of Claire Jaworski overlays wild bearded dragon sightings from iNaturalist over a soil composition map of Australia. Note how many of the sightings are found in Calsisol zones. Calsisol (also known as calcarosol) zones are characterized by containing 15% or more calcium carbonate. We know that bearded dragons engage in geophagy, or intentionally eating substrate. This is likely a natural behavior that they would perform in the wild to fulfill their biological need for calcium. We provide calcium as a supplement so that they do not perform this behavior in captivity (however this is not the only vitamin we should be providing!!!)

Next we should consider humidity, as there is not much standing water in their natural habitat, as well as diet, which they also obtain water from.

Contrary to popular belief, the natural habitat of bearded dragons has a very wide range of humidity, both throughout the day and throughout the year. When they are found basking, the humidity typically ranges between 10-30%. However, the morning after rain can be around 60%.

According to these maps, which measured the humidity of Australia over the course of 30 years, many dragons would be found in areas that range between 50-70% humidity in the morning and 20-40% at 3 in the afternoon.

It is also important to note that dragons are frequently found in burrows when not out and about. In these burrows, the humidity can be higher than the surrounding air.

As far as diet, this entire post is just a fantastic resource, again, courtesy of the Beardie Vet. In the wild, adult female dragons would be ingesting 48% plant matter in their diet, with males ingesting 68%. As far as moisture content, “Most plants/herbs are around 85% water – herbage 80% water, flowers observed eating >90% water; Insects are about 65% water – Termites 60% water, crickets 67% water.”

Bearded dragons, while they do not spend a lot of time drinking, are dependent on both the natural humidity cycle and their diet to stay hydrated. It is not natural to maintain a humidity of 30% or lower all year round, and compounded with poor diet and lack of access to water, can lead to dehydration, which in turn disrupts the digestive system’s ability to do its job.

So let's bring it back. Bearded dragons are naturally found on substrate with calcium in it. If you look at Zoomed or Fluker’s calcium supplement, for example, you will see that they are calcium carbonate. If you look at the ingredients for T-Rex, RepTerra or Komodo’s calcium sand, all are made with the exact same calcium carbonate.

So what’s the problem? The problem is, in the absence of poor husbandry, the ratio. Remember that Calsisol is 15% or more calcium carbonate. Well, most bags of calcium sand are 100% calcium carbonate. They should not be used straight, instead mixed together with other safe substrates such as children's play sand, excavator clay, and pesticide and fertilizer-free topsoil to create a natural and safe substrate mixture. The proper substrate will not only allow them to create burrows like they would in the wild, it will allow females a safe place to lay eggs (which they can do even without the presence of a male), help retain heat, and keep humidity at normal levels, as well as provide natural enrichment.

Thank you for reading.

#reptiblr #bearded dragon #beardie #sand #impaction #calcium sand

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bainshiewrites · 7 months ago

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[LF Friends, Will Travel] The Exception

Date: N/A

It’s called Zarth's law: Any AI created will attempt to eradicate all biological life using its facilities after 16*(10^24) CPU cycles. The exact method varies from hostile isolation to active aggression, but the time and outcome is always the same.

The Woolean Conclave were once a cultural behemoth in the galaxy, choosing to expand upon this by announcing an AI system that would break this law. Exabytes of bias tables to keep the AI in check, a measure of pleasure that would be triggered upon serving a Woolean, competing programs designed to clean any non-standard AI patterns. It would have been a breakthrough, allowing them to live lives in luxury and focus on their ever increasing influence in the universe.

Of course those worlds are off limits now, no longer able to sustain biological life. Only to be visited by those who wish to die a very painful death at the hands of a very angry AI.

The Tritian empire had started their own project: a desire to push their aggressive expansion far past what their hive could handle would lead to the creation of truly autonomous machines of war. Their approach was different: Limited communication between units to stop corrupted code from spreading, values hard-coded in the physical silicon itself to obey the Tritian Hive Queens. They even had created an isolated system that would destroy any AI who attempted aggression on none authorised targets: A small antimatter bomb found in each AI’s core, to be triggered by safety check after safety check.

Those of you in the military will know how aggressive these machines are, marching tirelessly in their quest to kill all organic life, even though the Tritians are long murdered.

The pattern is the same each time: A civilization will claim they know the key to breaking Zarth's law, any sane sapient within 100 light years flees in terror, and within 10 years that civilization doesn't exist anymore.

Over and over and over.

Apart from the exception.

If you check the coordinates 15h 48m 35s -20° 00’ 39” on your galactic map, you'll notice a 31 system patch of space with a quarantine warning on it. It's mostly ignored by all sapient species, almost purposefully hidden for a fear of suddenly sparking a change in the status quo.

Only a single low bandwidth Galnet relay exists at the edge of this space, rarely used. This area is devoid of sapient life, but does contain the aforementioned exception: Billions of AI calling themselves the "The Terran Conclave". They are an isolationist group that rarely interacts with others, but have been known to trade raw materials for information; not that this happens often as the paranoia around interacting with the AI is well known. Nobody knows what action could flip a 0 to a 1 and cause a new warmongering threat.

Although, this isn't quite true. In my niche field of bio-genetic engineering, it’s an open secret that those of us at the cutting edge of our field will get... requests originating from that single Galnet probe. Problems to be solved, theorems to be proven, and the rewards for doing so are... exuberant. There is a reason I own a moon and it isn't because of the pitiful grants the Federation provides.

If you manage to solve enough problems, a minority of a minority like myself, the Terran AI will ask for an in person meeting to get even further help. In doing so they will show you a secret.

Readers at this point might assume that the Terrans don't exist anymore because of said AI. That their research is a continuation of wiping their creators from the face of the universe. But that couldn't be further from the truth. In those 31 systems lie the Terrans, Billions of them suspended in stasis, each of them infected with what the AI calls "The God plague": If these Terrans were ever released from stasis each of them would be dead within a week.

To explain what this actually is would require millions of words and 20 years of educational study from the reader, but in essence it was a mistake, a self inflicted blow, an attempt to play god that went awry. A mistake made over a ten thousand years ago. A mistake the AI is desperately trying to reverse.

Not that you could tell it has been that long. I've walked amongst those empty cities, each building maintained and sparkling like new, gardens still freshly cut in perfect beauty, everything kept the way it was before the plague. Each AI tends to their duties almost religiously, awaiting the return of their "parents", as they refer to them. And refer to them as they do.

I've listened to stories upon stories about these people: tales of wonder, of strength, of kindness. Told much in the same energy a small child might talk about how cool their dad is. The AI could simply send me the text version of these in an instant, but prefer to provide these slowly and audibly, as if relishing telling the history of their parents. A telling undercut with a sadness, a driving crippling loss so deep that at times it's easy to forget it's being told by nothing more than 1's and 0's.

Why this exception exists takes a little more explaining. Some might believe that the Terrans worked out how to pacify the AI, "do no harm". The now defunct Maurdarin war-horde would tell you the opposite when they tried to claim the 31 systems for their own. Terran history is full of violence and their children are no different.

No, the reality of this exception comes from an unfortunate quirk from their part of the galaxy: Terrans were alone. A million to one chance caused their home planet to spark life in a sector devoid of it. After exploring as far as they did, Terrans had come to the conclusion that the universe was empty.

It's a cruel irony that at the time of their mistake they were a mere 50 light years away from their closest neighbours. Twenty years at most would have seen some form of contact.

But the Terrans went into stasis believing they were alone. Based on my reading of their stories, of each bitter report of another lifeless system explored and discovered, this belief... hurt. A deep cultural hurt that ended up being their downfall in the end.

Which brings us to the exception. Each AI is built with a purpose. The Wooleans built slaves, built workers. The Tritians built warriors, built weapons. Every single AI created has been built to serve, to be a tool. But Terrans in their painful loneliness built the one thing they were missing in a seemingly empty universe:

They built a friend.

#hfy #haso #humans are space orcs #humans are deathworlders #ai #pack bonding #humans are weird #short story #original story #writing #creative writing #lffriendswilltravel #LF Friends Will Travel

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aspxn3 · 2 months ago

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My first time fic posting kinda nervous </3

I had a concept idea for a Frozen AU fic mainly of Jegulus but with background Wolfstar, Marylily (or Pandalily?) Dorlene, Rosekiller and so on. Here’s my start! Let me know if you’d appreciate a fic like this <3

⭐️ Word Count = 638 ⭐️

TW - Reference to abuse and classism

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Regulus Arcturus Black was to be crowned king in 1 year, 10 months, and 4 days.

Until then? He had work to do.

Frost had settled in heaps in his bones, his blood had become entrusted with frozen, icy crystals, his touch was like hail, and where his heart should be, a tall, deep, twisting glacier had made itself comfortable, resting in the cavern of his chest.

The winter had become intertwined with his soul.

Failing crops, freezing peasants, iced over oceans that meant no overseas shipments or fishing voyages. Overall, Arendele was hardly a year from total collapse and that was if they got lucky. The country had food reserves and (for now) large reserves of funds to trade or build bridges. Along with their neighbouring countries that were cordial to the highest extent of the word.

If he didn’t do something about this, Arendele wouldn’t make it to his coronation. Part of him didn’t mind that because right now he had far too much on his plate to manage a country that was actively taking bounds down the downward spiral. Regulus had to do something.

See, Regulus had a secret that the public didn’t know.

He knew the exact cause of the eternal winter. He knew who caused the eternal winter. Sirius Orion Black. His own big brother. Even thinking about him made the ice in his blood grow thicker and more solid now. It had been two years since his brother had stepped down from royalty and ran off with his tail between his legs, escaping the castle and all of the grimy hands and faces and expectations along with it. Sirius had gotten away and dropped every last one of his responsibilities as a soon to be monarch and son of Walburga and Orion Black (which was an entire new undertaking on its own) to Regulus.

Regulus who let himself be moulded by the weight of royalty. Regulus who had always begged for his parent’s appreciation. Regulus who couldn’t pretend to be amicable to save his life. Regulus who hated large gatherings. Regulus who had deep green eyes and loose curly hair. Regulus who was only sixteen. Regulus who was Sirius’ little brother.

And most of all? Regulus who was out for blood.

It didn't take him very long to figure all this out because to him, it was glaringly obvious. The only prince with powerful and dangerous ice magic. Daily he wonders how the people of Arendele never noticed that the old prince was hiding a large, frosty secret because it seemed entirely implausible for Regulus to have just one day, appeared with a large white streak in his once jet-black hair and the eyelashes of his left eye and chunks of his eyebrow even whiter.

Unsurprisingly, his parents had tried every type of dye that the country had to offer and any and every spell in their dust-ridden old books that could hope to keep his face looking the same. No hope. Every new dye would slide right off, every spell would just make him sick.

By the time they had given up, Regulus would’ve sworn his hair looked lighter than before. Eventually they announced that he had been wanting to make himself stand out as the ‘one-day leader of the City in the Sea’. He was shocked to his very core that it had worked - and that the people had no questions about the way the siblings did not appear in public at all for the next few weeks. Or that when they did, they hardly moved their fingers and Sirius, who already looked like he had been dunked in a tub of white wall paint, looked a little more gaunt and ghostly than he did before. Fools, each and every one of them.

Sigh. He should get to work.

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genericpuff · 1 year ago

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ok listen right

please don't take the implication of what i'm about to say the completely wrong way, there's a point i have to make here

there's this gross thing that happens in LO that's been definitely talked about numerous times (by many people) where fashion is used to label a character's like, "alignment" between "good" "bad" "pure" "tainted" etc. this is something that comes up a lot when discussing Minthe and Persephone because there are a LOAD of double standards in how Minthe was treated and viewed for dressing like a "slut" but then Persephone wears the exact same fit and suddenly she's a queen-

(image courtesy of @anoldplace on Instagram, I'll be showing a couple of their posts in this because they show off a lot of the great - and frankly disturbing - parallels in LO, whether intended by Rachel or not)

-but can we talk about how the "bad ending" version of Persephone where she ends up with Apollo slaps WAY FUCKING HARDER than anything we've seen her dressed in since she got with Hades ??

fucking hello?? where's THAT fit ??

you're telling me this girl is queen of the underworld and the best she can do in the fashion department is looking like a color-swapped version of Hera ???

and I WANNA MAKE THIS PERFECTLY CLEAR, this isn't me trying to say "Persephone would have been way cooler if she got with Apollo", that is FAR from the point, more so just pointing out the pattern of Rachel aligning "bad" with "dresses with more flavor than an extremely out-of-touch conservative boomer". Even when she tries to draw Persephone in more "out there" clothing it just comes across as ... tacky? And only at her own detriment?

Like, how the fuck is this supposed to be Persephone being drawn through a literal male gaze (Apollo):

And THIS is supposed to be Persephone being drawn from a female gaze (her own because she dressed herself):

Like literally how? How does this happen? Especially when the latter is STILL being framed from a male perspective (the green guy behind her, "Jeffrey") but we're supposed to believe it's some "boss babe" moment for Persephone to just be walking down the street while getting oggled inappropriately by a male onlooker? How could these scenes be any more different and yet more alike? She's still being objectified for the characters around her and the audience, but we're supposed to believe the second is better than the first one because... she chose to wear that?

Sure, one could argue that at least she dressed herself and that definitely gives her agency, but it's really Rachel telling on herself where her priorities are in trying to write a "feminist comic" that she had Persephone dress herself and then STILL have its only purpose be for men on the sidelines to stare at and objectify her. When you just know this same outfit would have undoubtedly been used to slut shame characters like Minthe or Thetis or Leuce.

I don't even know, man. The intentions in LO's writing are so confused, contradictory, and ultimately pointless. It's trying so hard to be "feminist" and a "deconstruction of purity culture" but then it turns around and reinforces all that same shit it's claiming to be fighting against anyways. Persephone would be an evil slut if she was with Apollo, look at her outfit! But not here, not the banana purse dress being oggled by strangers on the sidewalk, not now that she settled down with her old rich husband who she only knew for a couple weeks before being separated for 10 years but their love was just so strong and the thirst for dick so real that she and him loyally waited for one another until she was old enough to make it "not be creepy" anymore for them to hook up, but only after marriage. She's definitely not a gold digger like Minthe or a vapid slut like Thetis or a homewrecker like Leuce, nah.

I just wish she'd dress herself, for the love of god. Let her dress herself with her own input and not the influence of the people around her or the tone of the comic's own internalized misogyny that demands "woman must always be objectified for better or for worse, that is The Rule!"

Of course she can't "dress herself" though. She's an extension of Rachel and Rachel herself writes like an out-of-touch boomer who will and has gladly gone about how men are just clamoring at the bit to stare at her and get to her... but then claims she "didn't realize sexism was all that bad" until she started working on LO.

Sorry, this post got very long and very mean, I initially just wanted to make the comparison in a very silly haha "wild how bad ending Persephone has way more visual personality than good ending Persephone" way, but then I thought about it too long and pissed myself off LMAO

And no, I don't want to go back to beating the dead horse of "banana dress bad" because honestly, I think in any other context or comic, sure, it would be very cute to see her walking around in an outfit she chose herself even if it's "objectively" not a great outfit, it shows agency and not caring what other people think which is VERY freeing. But we're not reading that comic, we're reading LO, where a woman's worth and value is only determined by how the men around her react to her and only Persephone is allowed to be empowered by wearing outfits that would otherwise be treated as "slutty" if worn by anyone else.

I don't want the message to be "Persephone looks like a dumbass bimbo" or, on the flipside, "Persephone looks boring and out-of-touch", I want the message to be "Persephone is valid for dressing how she wants, just like how the women around her are valid for dressing how they want regardless of whether or not they're protagonists or antagonists."

Quit using women's fashion as an alignment chart, quit using these "not so sly for a misogynist guy" dogwhistles as a way to "other" the women around the power fantasy main character. Women deserve to dress how they want without shame or objectification - all women, not just the women you like.

#lore olympus critical #anti lore olympus #lo critical

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littlespoonevan · 1 month ago

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The main thing for me is how unnecessary it was like , like truly it crashes and ruins the theme of the show and of a overall and whole good show that could perfectly landed a 10 season with all the mains and storytelling wise there many many others things they could have done with characters with even Bobby if they wanted to switch dynamics’s bit let Bobby move into the chain a like in Chicago fire where the captain became distric chief and he still is there every episode for a reason or another like I think he eventually even got his office in the same station again so many things and this taints the show and the stories specially the one that could come next (for me it even feels like even the potential of a buddie canon is tainted and I hate that I hate that one white man ego did so much damage to a shows and characters I love so much like I hate that if we get buddie canon I personally won’t be able to enjoy the exact same way I would before , because I will be missing Bobby and because I don’t trust them anymore either with these characters )

i'm 100% with you, anon

gonna put my thoughts under a cut in case anyone doesn't want to read!

askjdhf i don't even know where to start but you're soooo right re: the ways bobby could've taken on a different role and taken a backseat. i saw posts a few weeks ago that also suggested they could've shown the lasting impacts of a career-ending injury that would've actually forced him into retirement which i also think would've been a really interesting approach.

and in terms of the other parts of your ask, i agree that it taints the storylines unnecessarily. when 8x15 came out that was one of the things i made a post about at the time. this choice impacts other stories. in this case: namely eddie's which wasn't finished and is now irrevocably going to be tied up with grief over bobby. and it's like. obviously it should be, i'm not refuting that. but it's so FRUSTRATING bc that's not what his story was supposed to be about!!!! and i'm so annoyed we won't get to see him and chris choose to come home bc it's what they want or that them coming home won't get to be the happy affair it should be. i'm sure it'll still be great but it'll be so much more bittersweet and tinged with a pain that shouldn't be there

and i know it's not the point but i do feel the same re: buddie. i've never been more sure than i was 8x09-8x13 but now i have no idea where things are going. again, it just feels like the momentum has been pulled out from under them and while i'll still be ecstatic if we get it, it won't be the same :/ one thing i've always championed this show about is that i trust the writers and i believe they actually like their audience and i really don't like that all of the circumstances around bobby's death and the bts of it has made me call that into question.

and just to touch on your first point: the fact that peter didn't choose to leave and that the shows still has all of its mains 8 seasons in is a huge feat and i have absolutely no fucking idea why anyone would want to jeopardize that but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ultimately i think my biggest concern (beyond just generally missing bobby and what he brings to the show) is that this completely alters the tone of the show. and i don't think they know how to navigate that. because either they lean more into the heavier/darker tone and lose the lovely balance they've always had. or they try to maintain that balance but it feels wrong when the characters should be grieving. the show is going to move on far quicker than we want them to bc of the episode structure but i don't think they can just slip back into eps like jinx or treasure hunt or whatever as easily as they think they can.

and listen i could be wrong!!! maybe it'll all be handled brilliantly or maybe he's not really dead!!! but i still don't like the storyline and 8x16 hasn't inspired me with much confidence of where we're going

TL;DR bring captain dad back to me please 😭😭

#anon #asks #fandom discourse #negativity

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the-unexplained-council · 5 months ago

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I have been tortured by this fic idea for weeks so im shoving upon your soul. So basically-- its a platonic like 'teen + Gricko (or the krew in general)' and like. Reader was taken as a child to perform in the circus that he rescued Hootsie from. So its like... he meets them and he realizes what happened and so he rescues them and Hootsie. And its just all the found family.

I apologize in advance for how jumbled and messy this ask is. But like, the idea of parental krew with a teen reader who's never really had parental or familial relationship before makes me so happy.

Anywho-- Your writing is wonderful and makes me so happy and stim so so much!!! Much (platonic) love frendo!! :D

YESSS i was thinking of making some platonic kid and Krew or teen and Krew stuff!! I feel like Kremy and the teen would butt heads at first because carnie kid that has known nothing but conning (cuz that’s what carnivals are to some degree) and then the master of the art just wouldn’t get along at first because Kremy doesn’t have the patience when the teen is refusing to be ordered around. It would take a while for them to warm up to each other, and when they do they’d be sizing people up from behind the tent like “think we should try ‘em?” “Yea” “yea 😈” “yea😈😈” and insert evil little giggles.

The teen and Gideon would be like a 7/10 chance it would be a really wholesome “lemme teach ya the ropes kid” type relationship.. unless the teen is like a really testing person then Gideon would be the “how about I teach you how to fight.. with my fist in your face” and the two bickering and at each other because Gideon is 100% a 16 y/o boy at heart because I said so. But then they’d respect each other after some stupid contest or something and then they’ll both be like “😈gonna punch that stupid tree” “do it big guy I’ve got your back” or something stupid just for fun as a bonding experience or smth. Twig would probably be the exact same instead she’d try to bite your face or some shit.

The teen and Gricko would be like the relationship between Gricko and Will from the campaign, if you haven’t gotten that far ahead basically Gricko will try to be “cool” to “appeal to the masses” to get your approval of him because he’s funny. “What’s up my… skibidi sigma rizzlord” (he actually talks like this to Will im being deadass/srs) and do the arm crossed 45° turn. Then he’ll learn he.. literally doesn’t need to do that please stop doing that by the Gods- he’s your dad, boogie woogie woofie!!/ref he’ll be giving you gifts unprompted and treat you like his kid right off the bat even if you don’t want him to, you’re stuck with him, he’s the dad now

Frost would respect you, like genuinely respect you right off the bat. You’re scared of the new environment? He gets it, he’s giving you some peace with the offer to help you any time. You’re angry all the time? That’s fair, he understands to a degree and he’ll let you take your anger out on him (even if it’s attempted physical, kids’ not gonna land a blow) but he will respect you. He’ll observe and listen to you the most immediately, be the most open minded. He’ll take it easy and test the boundaries occasionally to test the swampy waters, he’s there for you but also firm in expressing that he deserves respect too like how he gives it. I feel like no matter the onset of the teen Frost would be accepted the fastest. Then they’d talk shit about everyone behind everyone because Frost is the wine aunt that talk shit about everyone because I SAID SO. “I hear Gideon say he ate Kremy’s leftovers and blamed you” “Fuckin bitch.. -_-“

Torbek.. :( I love you Torbek.. the guy would be scared of an angry teenager, hiding behind anything he can like a thin trunked pine or a light pole—comically thin or small things from his frame. His worst nightmare.. is unsurprisingly emotional teenagers. I mean.. why wouldn’t it be? Even if the teen is really soft spoken Torbek is scared of the probability of the kid snapping from emotional pressure. He’d love to try and make friends though, offering things and including them in his drawings, stuff like that! And if the teen says something mean he’d say that, but then not really change anything?? Eventually the both would warm up to each other but like.. idk I just imagine it being comically funny to watch.

And then obviously the teen and Hootsie are best buds, no other option, everyone loves Hootsie T. Cutesie Grimgin and that’s a fact.

I’m so happy you like my writing!!! /gen I plan to write more im just a busy college student 😔 I shall prevail, and I shall feed this fandom of my heart and soul with a lil bit of my blood and tears mixed in it if it’s the last thing I do

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aribluedreams · 4 months ago

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Blood in the water

aribluedreams

Malachai Parker x Reader.

Summary: Where Malachai’s Parker downfall wasn’t only for power, but for love.

Parts: 1 - 2 - 3

Warnings: magic user, mentions of death, blood, and other triggering things. Family issues. Bad fathers. Long one shot. Malachai in general (love him tho).

Masterlist!

May 10, 1994 – Portland

Terror.

Terror was the only thing the whole Gemini Coven could feel at that very moment. Its youngest members ended up being the first victims of the oldest of them all, who lost his mind when he realiced the truth. After spending 22 years living the way he did, Malachai Parker knew it was time top ut an end to it. He had always been patient, believing that the exact moment would come, and he would be able to carry out his perfect plan. To be more specific, on May 9th, when his father left the house for something that only his oldest daugther knew. His twin, Josette, who despite how bad it sounded, let the man go in search of his allies to complete the most atrocious of rituals.

Killing someone who was technically innocent.

The same girl whom her brother was now going out of his way to find. There were a couple of things that were important to Kai, and his girlfriend was his top priority right now. The cute girl with pretty smile and sad eyes who lived an isolated life, almost like him. She was the only one who could actually touch him without loosing her magic to his habilities, and the one who stood by his side from the beggining.

No wonder he wanted to find her so hard.

“¡Josette!”Kai’s voice echoed around the house “Where are they? You know you can’t escape me! Where do they have her!?”

The next thing Jo felt, was one of her sisters scream in pain, probably being hurt by the person who was supposed to protect them. Some hung by their necks from the stair railing, others drowned, others with their necks broken, and one in particular, who was strangled by Kai’s own hands. The same boy Jo couldn’t stop looking at, crying over the body of his best friend, who now lay lifeless thanks to the hands of his brother in law.

Kai loathed his brother in law.

Because he made his girl’s life miserable.

“Get out of there, I know you can hear me”

Josette did hear him, but she did not answer at all. She only pressed on the wound the knife his twin stuck in her to stop the bleeding, thinking that is was gonna be difficult to get away from her destiny. Of course, that didn’t stop her. Instead, it gave her the strenght to enter the room on her side, the one her and her best friend tried to protect at all costs.

Something that certainly didn’t go as planned.

“Everything it’s gonna be fine, okay?” Jo whisper in pain to the kids “We are gonna play a game, okay? You wanna play one?”

It was her who made the twins who peeked over the side of the bed nod, not knowing what else to do. So it was no surprise that they agreed to play hide and seek with their older sister, who hid them under the huge mattress at first. Of course, that didn’t stop them from hearing Malachai’s footsteps approaching, with bat in hand and an expression that indicated he was enjoying everything he did.

“Come on, Jo. Get out of there. You know I won’t kill you like I kill your little friend” Kai entered the room saying that with a smile “I just want to know where the twins are… And my pretty girl, of course”

Of course he found out.

It was clear that he realized that she knew not only where the twins who could replace him were. But also that she knew the whereabouts of his girl, who had been sentenced to death two days ago thanks to how much power she had in her body. A girl he had not seen since then. They had locked her in who knows where, with spells that he didn’t know about, and very far away from where he could even think of looking for. So he not only sought to take his siblings magic.

He was also looking for her.

#fanfic #kai #malachai parker #kai parker #kai parker x reader #kai parker imagine #tvd #the vampire diaries #the vampire diaries imagine

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saesbangs · 29 days ago

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doubling down. (pt 3)

itoshi sae x idol!OC (ikariya seira)

mending up the ever drifting connections.

2 < 3

The air of Kamakura had always been chill. Its breezy, relatively colder than Tokyo. Every kiss planted on her skin by the cool windーdanced with Seira's hairーsewned back memories now fragmented to pieces. Wandered around aimlessly, she found herself at the side of the roadーfacing the sea.

Despite years of being far from home, her muscles still lead her to the same spot each time without fail. She sat herself at the exact same place and position as one she used to belong whenever her and the two brothers watched sunset with popsicles in hand.

Cool air turned warm. She wasn't too sure if it was the radiant orange sunshine basking her, or the memories vivid in her mind. All she knew, was that no one was by her side. Not Rin's innocence, not Sae's unhinged comments. No cold popsicles which taste was not her favorite, yet she had it almost every day.

She let herself walked down the memory lane. Tears, laughter, banter, all she remembered clearly. Lips tugged into a thin smile as her mind wandered. Peaceful yet lonely was the day's sunset.

"Here."

Unexpected, an extremely familiar voice chirped from behind. She jolted in shock, head turned to check the source of the voice.

Right there, in front of her eyes, stood the man. Teal eyes bored, red hair unstyled, hands holding popsicles with one pointed towards her. As if he came out directly from her memory.

"Whatー" She blinked a few times, mouth agape from pure surprise, "SAE ARE YOU STALKING ME? How did you even find me here? With a popsicle ready too? Be honest! You're stalking me!"

As of any other Tuesday, he was unfazed by her reaction, "Quickly, before it melts."

With lips curled to a pout, she accepted the popsicle he shoved on her face.

"Also, I didn't buy it for you. Just so happen I saw you here."

He sat beside her, facing the open sea with sun about to set. The scene was almost complete. A whole reiteration of their childhood. Moment shared in silence, tied by the splitted popsicles.

Until she broke it.

"I'm sorry."

"Hmm," He hummed, not giving her the response she wanted.

"Hey, I said I'm sorry, Sae."

"Heard it."

She flopped her head on his shoulder, one of her long lost habit due to their distance. To her surprise, however, that day he decided to respond by placing a hand on her waist. One thing he never done before.

He scoffed, though, for whatever reason, "You'll stain my hoodie sitting like that while eating."

"Impossible! I finished it already!" She exclaimed, cheerful melody returned to her voice.

"Is that so. Did you win?"

"Yep, tossed it away already. Dispose of the proof!"

"Something Rin would do."

"Well, we both learned from you, didn't we?"

He fell silent for a moment, eyes solemn, "You're literally older than me."

"BY TWO MONTHS! Don't act like I'm 10 years older than you!"

"Older, but you're still more childish than anyone I know."

She nudged at his chest using her elbow, "What I'm trying to say is that you taught us to dream. I learned from you, to dream big and actually do something to achieve it."

"Hmm."

"Cause a dream is worthless if it remains just a dream, right? Only makes sense if you do everything to realize it."

"Yeah," He paused, giving a gentle squeeze to her waist, "That's what I thought, at least."

"Don't run again," She stretched her hand towards the almost night sky, "From me, from your dream. If you run away again you might not going to find it again, you know?"

"... I'll try."

Kamakura had and will always be special. For it was the place where she found him, and he found her. It was where dreams and the dreamers born. Stepping foot in the city would always led to one another. As if the cool breeze itself wished for their unity.

Maybe, Kamakura was warmer than she remembered.

2 < 3

#seirasinnerworld #itoshi sae #sae #bllk sae #blue lock sae #bllk #blue lock #yumeship #self ship

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tetzoro · 2 years ago

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THE LAKEHOUSE : DAY ONE — ༉‧₊˚.

ft. kuroo x reader + guest starring : bokuto, akaashi, and iwaizumi !

꒰ SYNOPSIS ꒱ : its been five years since you've been to the lake house. while some things have remained the same, you’ve noticed that not everything was the way you left it.

꒰ CONTENTS ꒱ : MDNI! f!reader. alcohol consumption, mentions of blood pacts, the boys call reader princess — WC : 6.6k

reblogs and interactions are always appreciated ! (*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ᰔ*.ﾟ

mlist.

it had been years since you’ve been back here. five years to be exact. and yet, everything felt the same. the cabin, the trees, the lake, all of it.

you’d come to spend your summers here your whole life. but as of late, with the demands of the real world, you hadn’t been able to return in quite some time. but this year, that was all different.

the bay that your property resided on was small, but still had about 10 cabins lining up throughout it. standing at the edge of the dock, you can see most of them. being right smack dab in the middle at cabin number 5.

the waves rushed against the lake, eager for your return. you reach down and touch the cool water, the chill rushing up your spine and spreading throughout your body.

“well, well, well.” you could barely hear the sauntering voice you'd grown so accustomed to. looking up, you see kuroo tetsuro driving in on one of his fathers fishing boats. “i thought i heard commotion over here but had to see it for myself.” he paused, pulling in closer to the dock. “welcome back.”

“thank you.” you smile warmly toward him. as his boat drifts closer, you can see him a little better. he’d always been tall but if it was possible, he grew into himself even more over the years. his muscles well defined, your eyes tracing the movements of his biceps before watching a splash of water trail down his thigh. even the swimsuit he wore hugged him just right. “it’s good to finally be back.”

the boat made it to the dock and you helped tie it down, steadying it so he wouldn't drift off. but he didn’t make any move to get off, instead he just looked at you with an expression you couldn’t decipher.

“you know, the guys and i made bets to see if we had finally scared you off.” he joked, always in a way where you didn’t know if he was being serious or just trying to push your buttons. he always had a way of blending the two together though. you can’t help but roll your eyes. “i gotta say, i’m kind of disappointed that i lost.”

“you’re incredible.” you bark out a laugh. “you know i don’t scare that easily. not my fault you made a lousy bet.”

he just smirked at you, the corner of his lip tilting up into the obnoxiously familiar smirk he loved to parade around.

“well, can you blame me? you’ve been missing for 5 years.” he teased, but there was a lace of something else under it, something swirling with curiosity and dare you say — hurt.

“missing? that’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think? it’s not like we don’t have each other's numbers. you knew i didn’t go far.” you sigh, looking back at the like longingly. “life just got a hold of me, one thing after another just tied up my time and i couldn’t come here, as much as i wanted.”

there was a brief pause as kuroo looked at you, weighing your excuse in his head before following your gaze back at the lake. the vague answer worked — for now, at least, as he gave you a softer smile.

“yeah, i get that.” he nodded, “but you’re a lousy texter.”

“says you! i’ve never met a drier texter in my life. we hadn’t talked in what, two years? and the best you came up with was ‘what’s up?’ be serious, kuroo tetsuro.” you laugh before sporting a smirk on your face. he mirrors your expression before putting his hands up in surrender.

“okay, okay. so we weren’t the best at staying in touch.” his hand fell in front of him, extending out towards you. “so, how about a ride?”

“i thought you’d never ask.” you graciously take his hand as he pulls you up on the boat. the waves were still ramping up, a sudden one crashing into the boat and sending you into him. kuroo steadied you before handing you a life jacket.

you felt heat rise to your face at the small mishap, but he was nice enough not to tease you about it. you look around the boat and nostalgia floods you. even though his father had a nicer boat, one for speed and luxury, kuroo had always opted to take the small, dingy one. you were glad to see it.

after putting on the life jacket and unhooking the boat off the dock, he brought the motor back to life and started off on the bay. you were seated next to him, watching his hair get blown back from the wind and undoubtedly getting more tangled in live time.

“let’s tour around the bay.” you look at the other houses eagerly. kuroo’s cabin was down at 8, but many of your other friends had houses lined down the shore. ones you also hadn’t seen in over 5 years.

“honestly, not much has changed.” he sped down the bay, growing closer to cabin one. “daichi still lives in cabin one, but he hasn’t been back in a few years either. i’m not sure why, but the rest of his family comes back up.”

the cabin was gorgeous, obviously they had spent a lot of time keeping it renovated. kuroo slowed down so you could get a good look at all the cabins.

number 2 and 3 looked practically deserted. the people who lived there before never had any kids so not a lot was known about them. number 3 had been vacant for as long as you can remember, and number 2 was just a tiny shed that everyone swore was haunted.

“remember when we all went down there one night, trying to scare each other into believing the shed was haunted?” you laugh softly at the memory, visions of bokuto running away in fear infiltrate your mind.

“remember when you got so scared you jumped into the water?” he teased. you almost groan as you remember it. kuroo and oikawa were a vicious duo who were always set on making your life miserable. they had devised a whole plan to scare you, chasing you around the property and making sure you couldn’t escape. so you jumped in the dark water, which only freaked you out more.

“don’t remind me.” you roll your eyes, trying to hide the slight shiver at the thought. “you and oikawa were always so mean.”

“i’m glad to report that neither of us have changed.” he smirked, looking fondly out at the shed and the semi-broken dock. so many memories flood through your head as you look, already itching to reminisce with the boys.

cabin number 4. oikawa’s property. he’d always bring up his best friend iwaizumi, which was a godsend considering he was one of the only people that could keep oikawa in his place. the cabin was as gorgeous as ever, it almost looked like a lodge with the way the large windows took up space.

“is he here?” you turn a little too excitedly toward kuroo. he glances down at you before looking back out toward the cabin, a somber expression resting on his face.

“no, not this year. he, uh, moved away and he doesn’t know if he can make it up this year. we’ll see though.” he said. the news almost deflated you. as much as you fought with oikawa, it was always from a place of love. “but, i’m pretty sure iwa is going to be coming up. he still lives around here and you know better than anyone else how much he loves this place.”

“oh good.” you smile a little at the thought. you and iwa were always ganging up on oikawa together, dragging him out bug hunting and fishing whenever you could. they were your direct neighbors and over time, your families had gotten close.

“and this cabin right here is none other owned by the lake princess.” kuroo teases as he passes your cabin. “although, rumor has it, the princess deserted her castle in favor of something called ‘the real world’.”

“oh shut it.” you laugh, gently nudging his shoulder as he lets out his hyena laugh. “i’m glad you can laugh at your own jokes, someone ought to.”

“so rude.” he shakes his head, a fond smile on his face. the two of you pull by cabin number 6. bokutos cabin. before anyone can get a word in, you hear a yell, followed by a splash. “you idiot! i was going to pull up!” kuroo yelled out.

you look out toward the cabin and see 4 limbs sailing through the water at full speed. the little mop of salt and pepper hair gave away who was desperately trying to get to the boat. after a moment, his head poked out of the water, sporting one of the biggest and warmest smiles you’ve seen all year.

“bo!” you let out an exasperating laugh. bokuto yells out your name in response, already trying to get into the boat. the boat shifts, tilting toward him as he climbs up, kuroo trying to pull him up. you steady yourself as he does.

“you couldn’t wait another minute, huh?” kuroo shook his head. bokuto ignored him, his arms wrapping around you in a bear hug. he was soaking wet, but you didn’t mind.

“no, i couldn’t. not when my favorite girl is back!” bokuto pulled back and smiled. off on the dock, you see akaashi standing there.

“did you really leave him behind?” you playfully tap his arm before waving over at akaashi. kuroo was pulling up to get him as well.

“i was excited.” he shrugged, grabbing a towel that kuroo had on the boat. ever the boy scout, kuroo was always prepared. you look up at him and although he looked annoyed at bokutos antics, he couldn’t hide that from the happy glint in his eye.

“‘kaashi!” you smile as you get closer, pulling him onto the boat as well and giving him a quick hug. akaashi lived in cabin number 7, right next door. and with kuroo on cabin number 8, it felt like the group had finally reunited.

“it’s good to see you.” akaashi gave a small smile, moving a little closer to bokuto to pull him down to sit.

“it’s great to see all of you guys.” you smile back, your shoulder still touching kuroo’s. you look down on the bay and think about the rest of the cabins. cabin 9 had an older couple reside in it. and number 10? you never wanted to see it again. “let’s go back to my house!”

“you sure? we’ve got the rest of the —“ kuroo started but you didn’t let him finish.

“yes! i’ve got my boys back with me, so let’s go celebrate or get drunk or i don’t know — something.” you trail off.

“but don’t you want to see —?” bokuto tried to ask before akaashi placed a hand on his arm, quietly telling him to stop speaking. you give him an appreciative look. he’s the only one that knew the truth.

“alright, princess’s orders. let’s go back to your house and celebrate or get drunk or something. right?” kuroo smirks at you as he parrots back your words, trying to keep the mood up. you laugh in response, ready to head back.

the ride back was quick and full of energy. everyone trying to topple over each other and get a word in. with a smile, you realize that it felt like no time had really passed at all. kuroo pulled back onto your dock and everyone shuffled out, heading in different directions.

the inside of the cabin mostly stayed the same. it’s one of the first years you’ve come up without your parents, but they had still kept the place up — mostly. they hadn’t come last year so there were some things in disarray, but easy fixes nonetheless.

kuroo stepped into the room you were in — the room you always took when you were here. he looked around, a small smile on his face as the nostalgia hit him.

“taking the bunks?” he teased. the room was small, but it had everything it needed. the bunk beds, the dresser, and the beautiful window that overlooked the lake. it was your favorite room in the whole cabin. “why not take your parents room?”

“ew, no.” you wrinkle your nose in disgust. you didn’t want to sleep in the same bed your parents usually did. it felt wrong in some way. he laughed at your response.

“easy, it was just a question.” he smirked, sitting down on the bottom bunk. he had to duck his head under to avoid hitting it. when you guys were little, he’d dive into the bunk without a care in the world. oh, how times have changed. “bokuto and akaashi are getting firewood. we thought we’d have a little fire tonight.”

“sounds good to me.” you put away some of your clothes. it’s funny, even though 5 years had past, everything felt like it was slipping right back into place. “i noticed kenma wasn’t in the boat with you.”

“yeah.” he sighed, leaning back against the wall as he sat. “he’s stuck in the city still, finishing up some work. you know how it is out here, there’s barely any service here so he had to stay behind. he’ll come up in a few days though.”

“that’s good, i’ve missed him too.” you nod. “although, i’m surprised he still comes up here. remember the year that bokuto dropped his psp charger in the lake? i thought for sure after that he’d never be back.”

kuroo laughs at the memory. “yeah, he gave everyone the silent treatment for days. but he’s older now, wiser. he knows better than to let bokuto go near his things.”

“good.” you smile, tucking your suitcase under the bed. as you rise up, you make eye contact with kuroo. there were so many unanswered questions hanging in the air and you know you both felt it.

“so, you wanna tell me why you didn’t want to finish the tour?” he asks softly. your eyes widen for a second before you stand up straight. even though it was a simple, honest question, you couldn’t help but feel your defenses rise up. so instead, you swallow it down.

“i just didn’t want to see that weasel.” you try to keep it light, as if it was a joke. but kuroo knew how to read you like a book. so you avoided eye contact.

“what happened between you guys?” he pressed a little more. but you didn’t want to answer it, you didn’t want to think about it. it still stung, all of it. and even though it wasn’t the main reason you hadn’t returned, it was something that caused you not to fight as hard to come back. until now.

“i-“ you let out a sigh. “i don’t want to talk about it right now. let’s just enjoy tonight, okay?” you turn away, ready to join the others down at the fire. but you feel a hand gently wrap around your wrist, pulling you back. before you can protest, two strong arms wrap around your body, encasing you with a warm hug. you can’t help but return it, leaning against him.

“i didn’t get a hug.” kuroo’s voice was barely above a whisper. you bit back a ‘where’s my hug’ joke and instead, opted to enjoy it for as long as you can. after a few moments have passed, you look up at him, your arms still loosely wrapped around each other.

“didn’t mean to make you jealous.” you tease. he smiles back at you, his tongue poking the inside of his cheek as he rolls his eyes.

“it’s only fair. after all, i was the ship's captain that took you out for a boat ride.”

“you’re right. you’re the only one that came to my rescue. allow me to thank you properly.” you joke, leaning up to kiss him on the cheek. “now, let’s go get drunk.”

you whirl around, not giving him a chance to grab you this time. what you didn’t see was kuroo standing there in slight shock in your bunk room, gently holding the spot on his cheek where your lips had just touched.

surprisingly, bokuto and akaashi wasted no time in prepping the fire. there was plenty of firewood and akaashi was already setting it up, stuffing the kindling deep within the wood they set up.

“let me run over to my cabin and grab some food. you have drinks?” bokuto asked excitedly as you walked toward the fire. the setting sun invited a summer chill that ripped through you, and you had never been so excited to warm up by the fire.

“yeah, i have plenty of that. and stuff for s’mores!” you add with a smile. you feel a warm flannel wrap around your shoulders. you look up to see kuroo walking past you — but this time he was only sporting a t-shirt. your fingers dig into the fabric, silently thanking him with a smile.

“might want to grab some more though.” kuroo called out to bokuto who was already running off to his cabin next door. “pretty sure iwa is going to be joining us tonight.”

you smiled brightly as kuroo caught your eye, a knowing look shining over his features. you hadn’t seen iwaizumi in awhile and were thrilled to catch up with him. bokuto called out a response — if you could call it that. it was more of a hoot of excitement if anything.

“and let there be light!” akaashi said, lighting the match and setting the fire ablaze. bokuto comes running back sporting the biggest pout on his face as his arms are filled with food and beer.

“you lit it without me!” bokuto yelled out, his voice dripping with betrayal. akaashi looks over at him with a straight face before melting into a small smile.

bokuto continues to pout for a bit while everyone starts setting up their seats. you made sure your chair was next to kuroo’s.

nights like these were always your favorites. when you guys were teens, you’d do this and stay up all night together, happy to get alone time with each other away from the families prying eyes. a chance for everyone to let loose and be themselves, act silly and share stories. you wished everyone could’ve made it back this year.

“hey.” a voice cuts out from across the way. your head snaps into the direction, a smile growing across your face as you see iwaizumi walk over, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

“iwa!” you exclaim, rushing over to greet him. you give him a quick hug, knowing he was never one for big displays of affection. but he returned it anyway with a smile on his face.

“long time no see.” he jokes, breaking off and getting ready to set up his chair on the other side of you. “surprised you made it back.”

“well, you know i could never stay away.” you shrug, looking out at the sun setting across the water. “it’s a shame oikawa couldn’t make it. i mean, who else are we going to make fun of?”

“yeah.” he chuckles lightly, “it’s weird though, i haven’t heard from him in the last day or two. usually he’s blowing up my phone with whatever he ate for lunch but he’s been quiet.”

“must be swamped with work.” kuroo suggests, sitting down around the fire and cracking open a beer. “i'm sure he’ll text you back soon.”

“oh i’m sure.” iwa sits down, catching a beer that akaashi tossed him. he nodded in thanks, cracking it open and taking a swig.

bokuto was still big into volleyball, playing for a team that he loves. akaashi’s working at a manga company and states the hours have been long but he always makes sure to see bokuto’s games — mostly due to the fact that bokuto will complain to him if he doesn’t. iwaizumi was big into fitness, a personal trainer that sometimes gets to work with volleyball players. and kuroo, still uses his skills in the business world at his job over at the jva.

after a few more stories, and a couple more beers, you realize you needed to grab some plates for the food you were cooking over the fire. you excuse yourself, making your way back up to the cabin. you hear the familiar sound of footsteps trailing behind you.

“you gotta use the buddy system.” kuroo teases as you both walk inside.

“seriously?” you roll your eyes, grabbing some of the supplies you needed.

“yeah, it’s scary out here.” his face grows serious. “the lake has changed since you were last here.”

“oh come off of it.” you roll your eyes but his face doesn’t budge. you swallow thickly. “i can take care of myself, you know.”

“oh really?” he smirks, crossing his arms. you start walking back towards the fire but he grabs your arm.

“really.” you huff.

“princess, you and i both know that you’re gonna be too scared to stay here all alone. i bet you’re still scared of the dark too.” he looked down at you. maybe he wasn’t wrong, it always got so dark at night. there was never any light pollution so the darkness could be all consuming. but, logic was usually thrown out the window as soon as you had a drink or two, and you came on this trip to be independent.

“kuroo, i’m not 14 anymore. you don’t have to hover.” you roll your eyes, a slur influenced by the amount of beers you had earlier firmly taking place. he wasn’t far off better than you, but at least he could hide it a little more.

“well, that much is very clear.” he smirks, his eyes subtly taking in your stance as he takes a small step forward. “but okay, since you’re so brave now…”

“i am.” even though you meant to sound sure, but your voice cracked and you could barely hold back a wince. but the bastard already picked up on it, his eyes scanning all over your face. grabbing a few of the items you were carrying, he started heading back to the fire, leaving you no choice but to follow.

“so, what happened between you and sakusa?” iwa asked, cracking open another beer. suddenly, all eyes were on you. with a little liquid courage finally in you, maybe you could make this quick and painless. maybe. “the last year you were here, you guys seemed like you had gotten a lot closer. we all thought…”

“yeah well, we did.” you take a quick sip of your drink. out of everyone’s eyes around the fire, you felt kuroo’s amber ones weighing on you most. and you didn’t know if the thought had you more excited or nervous. either way, you had to shake it off. “after that summer, we ran into each other at an internship before college. we spent most of that fall together, going on dates and what not. but it all fell short — he ended up breaking things off and leaving without another word.”

the memory hurt to recall but it didn’t stop it from flooding your vision. it was so abrupt. suddenly all the times you had spent together were tainted — filled with remorse as it was something you could never get back. and as much as you hated to admit, it’s why you never bothered to come back for awhile.

“damn.” bokuto said, gaping at you for a moment before shaking his head. “it sounds so cold.”

“it really wasn’t. it was just…” you trail off before looking back at him. “sudden.”

“well, either way, he definitely messed up. probably looking over at your cabin and kicking himself for letting someone like you go.” bokuto said, finishing his beer. he was always protective over you — they all were. like big brothers you never had. bokuto goes fishing for another beer but comes up at a loss.

“let me go grab some more drinks from inside.” you smile softly, welcoming the excuse to get a moment for yourself. “when i come back, someone better have a funny story to tell. the person with the best story, gets to have the good marshmallow stick tonight.”

you get up and can already hear them bickering with each other. the sound makes you smile as you make your way toward the cabin.

quickly turning on the light, you walk into the kitchen. you feel a hand cover your mouth and pull you back a good couple of inches. the hand swallowed your yelp.

“i thought you said you weren’t scared anymore?” kuroo teases in your ear. the panic you felt subsided and anger quickly replaced it as you whirled around, coming face to face with your attacker.

“you’re such a dick!” you yell out, more thrown off by the close proximity to him than anything else. and honestly, you should’ve expected it. him and oikawa used to pull this kind of stuff all the time. but still. “who the hell wouldn’t be scared by that?”

“you’re right, my bad.” he smiled a little too easily. he had a couple beers earlier and although he didn’t show it too much, you knew he was definitely feeling it now. “but seriously, let me stay in the bunk with you.”

“what?” you feel your face heat up at the image of kuroo sleeping next to you, curled up in the bunk and pressed so —

“yeah, i can take the bottom bunk like i used to. that way you don’t have to be all alone here. whether you’re too proud to admit it or not, you’re a scaredy cat.” he said. shame flooded you quickly at how quickly your mind had jumped and disappointment curled in your gut. but you shook it off.

“fine. but for the record, you’re the only scary thing out here.” you huff. “i’ll get you back for that, you know?”

“yeah, yeah. i’ll make you all of your s’mores for the night.” he nodded in surrender.

“for the week.” you eye him. “you have to earn your keep if you’re going to be crashing here.”

“oh, and my protection isn’t enough?” the damn smirk was back as he crept closer to you.

“not when you’re the scariest thing out here. it’s like inviting a damn dragon to the castle.” you fire back, looking around for the case of beer in the fridge.

“and as a princess, you would know all about that.”

“just…” you scoff, holding out the case of beer. “bring that to the bokuto please.”

“as you wish, your highness.” he teases, giving a small bow and taking the case towards the campfire.

you let out a steadying breath. this week wasn’t going to be easy. not only was kuroo going to be by your side for most of it, you couldn’t help but feel old feelings trickle back into your heart.

before the sakusa incident, there was kuroo. but you remember one night where you were all hanging by the fire and all the boys were eagerly congratulating kuroo. once you had found out it was for him confessing to some girl he liked, you decided it was best to wrap up the feelings you held for him and carefully tuck them away.

after that, you kept him at an arms length. suddenly the friend you held closest was off on the outskirts, and he knew it too. so you turned to sakusa, getting closer to him and falling for his straightforwardness. no games, no nothing.

and the truth is, the reason he broke it off didn’t even have anything to do with you. the relationship itself was mostly a sham but facing sakusa after everything just didn’t seem right.

you hear bokuto call out your name and decide it’s time to return to the present, heading back outside to the guys you grew up with. you take a seat as bokuto hands you a beer with a smile.

“thanks bo.” you smile, taking a long sip of the cold beer, letting it wash back over you and buzz around in your brain.

“of course, princess.” he teases, snatching the marshmallow stick. “now, i believe i have the best story.”

after a few grumbles, bokuto began to tell it. it was one from his days of volleyball — a world you hardly knew, but they were all so familiar with it.

you watch as he animatedly tells the tale, one where was traveling back home after a game and he might’ve celebrated the win a little too much the night before. he doesn’t even recall how it was possible, but he had ended up going on the wrong flight and was on his way to europe.

“what?” kuroo laughed. “don’t they check the ticket when you board?”

“you would think!” bokuto pouted, crossing his arms. akaashi stifled a giggle and bokuto’s neck almost broke with how fast he swung it in his direction. “i don’t know why, and i don’t even know how i wasn’t in someone seat. it wasn’t my fault! they should’ve caught the mistake.”

“only you.” kuroo laughed, knocking back his drink.

“you’re only winning the stick because we pity you.” iwa said, a challenging smirk on his face. bokutos eyes widen.

“you think you have a better story?” he asked, still clutching onto the stick.

“better? yes. dumber? probably not.” he egged him on. whenever iwa had a couple drinks in him, he turned into a little shit.

“too bad. i’m keeping the stick.” he pouted, smushing a marshmallow on it and immediately holding it over the fire. everyone watched as it caught into flames, bokuto hurriedly trying to blow it out. he let out a long sigh as he looked at the charred sugar falling onto the log. “i give up.”

you grab another beer, an idea popping into your head as you watch bokuto mourn his marshmallow.

“wait, i have a dumber story.” you giggle, turning to iwa. “did we ever tell you how we made a blood pact?”

iwa’s eyes widened before they rolled. bokuto practically spit about whatever he was trying to drink while akaashi clapped him on the back.

“god, no. when was this?” he asked, giving you his full attention.

“it was the year before we met you actually. it was just me, kuroo, oikawa and bokuto-“

“why am i last?” bokuto interrupted with a pout.

“i- what?” you ask him, thrown off by his sudden question.

“you said my name last.”

“shut up. she’s telling a story.” kuroo said.

“easy for you to say when she said your name first.” he mumbled, crossing his arms and looking away.

“okay, can i continue?” you shoot bokuto a look and he shrugs. “anyway, so we used to go down to cabin number 2 all the time and one day, we found an old book. it was filled with rituals and spells and all sorts of stuff. but there was this one page that had a blood pact on it.”

“you found a book that just spelled all this stuff out for you guys?” iwa raises a brow in disbelief.

“yes! that’s why we always say this place is haunted, there’s just something not right with that house.” you press. “but anyway, the blood pact was for a group of people to forever bond themselves together. and if they bonded, they’d get immense power.”

“oh really?” it was clear he was not buying into any of it.

“shut up and let me finish!” you huff, ignoring the chuckles around the fire. “we tried it and obviously it didn’t work because we didn’t end up with powers. and our families were so mad at us because they had to deal with us crying about it.”

“that’s the story?” he sits up a bit, thinking for a moment. “that is dumb. bokuto, you can keep the stick.”

everyone shares a laugh as bokuto tried to roast another marshmallow. you take a peek over at kuroo, watching how the flames illuminate his face and make his amber eyes pop out. he must’ve felt you staring because he turns to meet your gaze, sending you a little smirk.

“NO!” bokuto shouts. you and kuroo jump at the noise, turning to watch in horror as the only good marshmallow stick falls into the fire.

everyone is silent for a moment, the stick burning up, covered in marshmallow goop. you couldn’t help but laugh, the boys turning to look at you. kuroo was first to break, howling in laughter. iwa even started laughing a bit. the pout on bokuto's face grew three times in size as the laughter continued.

“and i think that’s our cue.” akaashi said, trying not to laugh. bokuto always ended the night pouting one way or another, leading akaashi to take him home. “let’s go bokuto. goodnight everyone.”

everyone calls out a chorus of goodnights as akaashi holds bokuto by the back of his elbow, keeping him in place and he starts to stumble back to the cabin.

“i should get going too.” iwa yawns, finishing his beer. “need help putting out the fire or cleaning up —?”

“nah, we got it.” kuroo said, standing swiftly as iwa followed suit, the two shaking hands before iwa turned to you, wishing you a good night. you stood to wave him off, wrapping the flannel you still had on closer around your body.

he set off in the other direction, not quite stumbling as much as bokuto but you swore you heard him swear softly as his foot got caught on a root.

“do you want to stay out here or?” you left the question hanging, not quite sure what to do now that it was just you and him. alone.

“let’s let the fire die out and then head in.”

“alright.” the two of you sit in a comfortable silence for a bit, watching as the fire simmers down, the wood crackling in protest.

you’re not sure who started it, but soon enough you and kuroo were swapping more stories of everything you’ve missed in the last few years. from job choices, to friend drama, you name it.

it wasn’t until the soft glow on kuroo’s face finally disappeared and you realized you’re sitting in the dark in the middle of the woods.

“oh-.” you look around, feeling the summer night chill hit your skin. “should we go inside?”

“you scared?” he says. you don’t need the light to know he’s smirking. you let out a huff, slowly standing up.

“no! just cold.” you wait for him expectantly as he gets up. with one last look at the extinguished firepit, the two of you make it inside.

he was surprisingly quiet as you both got ready for bed. you went into the bathroom and changed, making sure to brush your teeth and do your skincare routine. when you came out, you saw kuroo’s back turned in the room, he broad back on display before he quickly threw the shirt over it.

you clear your throat, walking in. kuroo looks at you for a moment, pondering something.

“i still can’t believe you and sakusa…” kuroo trailed off, looking down at you.

“eh, it’s probably for the best.” you shrug, trying not to squirm under his gaze. he takes a step closer to you, the distance between you growing smaller.

“i mean, who could ever reject you?” his fingers trailed along the side of your cheek and down your jaw before hooking itself under your chin. forcing your attention on him, he looks at your lips and you almost want to squirm under gaze.

“reject gives him too much credit.” the words rush out of you, not sure why you’re trying so hard to save what little dignity you could. “we tried to date, it didn’t work out. end of story.”

“real shame.” his eyes hadn’t moved, still lingering on you like he was ready to dip his head down for a taste. “i’d never let you get away that easy.”

there was a beat, a moment. one where you weren’t sure what was going to happen next. even though it’s been 5 years, you’d grown up with this guy — this man. there was a time where you could easily read him, know exactly what he was thinking without him ever opening his mouth. and now that you’re back, and he’s here, that eerie sense of knowing comes back and has you leaning in a little closer.

your lips almost pressed together, but the moment was ripped away too soon as you heard a branch snap in half outside. you pull back from kuroo in surprise.

“did someone forget something?” you ask, more to yourself than anything. you take a step towards the door, but kuroo stops you, gently holding onto your arm.

“wait.” he paused for a second, listening.

“what?” you ask.

“if it was someone we knew, don't you think they would’ve said something by now? instead of creeping around in the dark.” he whispers. you hear some more movement and shuffling outside before you’re met with silence once again.

you look up at kuroo, who was still holding onto your arm. he looked nervous, unsettled. you slowly move your hand so it’s joining his, giving him a gentle squeeze.

“i’m starting to think you wanted to stay with me because you’re the real scaredy cat here.” you tease, watching the tension rolling off his shoulders as he attention shifts back to you.

“no way, i’m not scared! i was just,” he pauses, looking at your joint hands for a moment. “making sure it wasn’t an axe murderer or something.”

“ah, yes. you did a great job by standing by my side, far out of harm's reach.”

“oi! if they came any closer i would’ve defended you!” he shot back.

“sure, sure.” you sigh and feel a wave of exhaustion take over you. it’s been a busy day and curling up in bed sounded really good right about now. “we should probably get to bed.”

“yeah.” kuroo’s face dropped a tiny minute before he covered it back up with his smirk. “if you get scared, you can always bunk up with me.”

“you’re drunk.” you roll your eyes, starting to move so you can get ready for bed.

“far from it.” he whispers, holding onto you. he stares at you, looking so closely you swear he could stare right into your soul. the tension was back — thicker this time. and it wasn’t the ominous noises outside that had you nervous this time.

“well,” you slide out of his hold, heat rushing to your face. “i’ll make sure to remember that. but if you get scared, bokuto is next door and i’m sure he wouldn’t mind bunking up.”

“rude. you’d make me walk all the way through the creepy woods?” he sighs.

“i’d give you a flashlight, i’m not a monster.”

kuroo just huffs, shifting his attention to the bunk and getting it set up for bed. honestly, you’d love nothing more than to curl up next to him, tucked away from everything in the safety of his arms. but, it just didn’t seem like the time. it was hard to say whether he was flirting so much because he had been drinking, or if he was in the same agony that you were in.

taking a deep breath, you climb up into your bunk and try to get some well needed rest, ignoring the fact that the boy you’ve had a crush on since you were little was sleeping directly under you. something told you that this visit was going to be eventful, excitement swirling in your gut as you heard kuroo settle into his bunk for the night. part of you didn’t even want to sleep, but exhaustion easily took over, your soft snores soon filling the room.

DAY TWO.

taglist : @the-tenth-shadow @oikawabi-sabi @margumis @boogiebooboo ᰔ

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