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five-rivers · 1 month

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Season of the Skies

I started playing a game called Sky: Children of the Light recently, and although this isn't a crossover, it's definitely inspired by the vibes of that. It's a cute game!

Also, based on the feedback I got on AO3, there seems to be a significant overlap between the Phandom and Sky: Cotl players? Is that the case?

Reality had broken a month ago, and Danny was having the time of his life.

He leaped lightly from rooftop to treetop and back again, gravity a dreamy afterthought. The tiles and bark were rough beneath his bare feet, but not so rough he regretted not wearing shoes. His impacts shook loose pollen, glitter, and a few stray petals, but did the trees no harm. On the roofs he was silent, and no one came out to yell at him, but the window glass chimed with flashes of light.

The colors around him were bright and soft. Easy to look at, easy to fall into. The sky above was marbled with dawn-colored clouds and stars caught among distant nebulae. Light and color were some of the first things to break, and Danny wasn't sorry to see light pollution go. Most Everything glowed, now, and stargazing would have been terrible if eyes still worked the same way.

At his next jump, this one taking him up a good ten feet, the feather-soft edge of the shawl he was wearing flared out behind him, brushing his arms. The shawl was huge on him. An old project of his great-grandmother's, it had been made with the typical Fenton girth in mind. Honestly, it fit him more like a cape than a shawl, but he liked it that way.

He landed safely and straightened the cape. His dad’s needlepoint hobby had been inherited from her, so the dark blue fabric was covered in fine embroidery, lace, and tiny glass beads in shades of clear, pale blue, and white. Great Grandma Fenton hadn't been into ghosts the same way the current Fentons were, but she'd been into something, so the patterns were strange. Icicles, snowflakes, stars, clouds, and trees competed with lightning, runes and sigils, and strange, spirit-like creatures.

“Hey!” shouted someone from the street below. “Hey, Fentwerp! What the hell do you think you're doing?”

Ah. Dash. Charming. Danny leaned over the edge of the roof. “What does it look like I'm doing?” he asked agreeably.

“Getting your dumb nerd self killed is what it looks like,” said Dash, glowering up at Danny, his face turning red.

There. See. That's what Danny didn't understand. No one else seemed willing to experiment with how the world was now. They were all operating under the old rules, or, worse, looking for ways to fix things, as if the new world wasn't better than the old.

Sure, it had been scary the first few days. The suddenness. The uncertainty. The way systems they had relied on for so long had stuttered or failed outright. Danny knew people had been hurt, that, in some places, they were still getting hurt. He had been one of those people, having been in the hospital when the change rippled through the world, a result of an equipment malfunction in his parents’ lab.

Maybe his opinion would be different if he was still getting hurt. But as it was… why would he ever want to go back to how things were? Why would he want to leave this world, where the colors were soft and bright, and the light sang? Why would he want to leave this world where the air itself seemed to bear him up? Where the possibilities seemed limitless?

There was so much more potential for good, with the world as it was than as it had been. So much less potential for harm. This was a more finished version of the world. All the rough edges were gone, and filled with wonder. He could feel it.

“Get down here!” demanded Dash, when Danny didn't respond.

“No,” said Danny.

“Get down here or else.”

“Or else what?” asked Danny, genuinely curious. Dash couldn't get up here. No one else could, as far as Danny knew. They hadn't taken the time to work out the new rules for gravity.

Dash clenched his hands into fists, then stooped to grab a fairly large rock. Danny, seeing no reason to just let Dash throw it at him, left.

“Hey!” shouted Dash. “Hey! Freakton! Get back here!”

Names like that were a lot less distressing when the people using them had no power to hurt you.

Danny continued on his path upwards, touching on higher and higher buildings. It was tough to get the proper amount of momentum to make some of his jumps, especially since he'd stopped to talk to Dash, but he managed to make all of them, and soon he was standing on top of the tallest building in Amity Park.

In the center of the roof was a small tree, a sapling. It hadn't been there the first time Danny had made it up here, and it had grown rapidly since then. Next time he came, it'd probably be taller than he was.

For now, though, Danny knelt to check the roots where they grew through a widening crack in the building's roof. He'd warned the people in the building (he had warned everyone in buildings that had suddenly found themselves with roof trees), but he hadn't heard that anyone had done anything about it, and the roof trees felt friendly to him, so he hadn't pushed the issue. From the descriptions and pictures Sam had given him, this one seemed healthy enough.

He pulled a bottle from his backpack and gave the tree a generous sprinkle. Then he stood up, gave the crown of leaves an affectionate ruffle, and made his way to the edge of the roof.

The city spread out in all directions below him, vibrant and changing. Towards the edges of town, some buildings had lifted off their foundations, becoming floating islands. Across the viridian, iridescent forest to the north, he could see blue-bright-gray flashes of Lake Eerie. Fentonworks was easily visible off to the west, silver dishes and spires chased with green halos. The parks bloomed with flowers both alien and familiar, vines trailing up into the air, trees growing explosively fast. A breeze from behind turned his attention south, and he saw high clouds letting down shimmering curtains of rain.

It wasn’t like Amity Park had been drab and horrible before, but why would anyone want to go back?

He looked away, back down at the street far below him. Steeling himself, he grasped the edges of the shawl, he spread his arms wide.

“Time to lift off,” he said, quietly. “T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two–” Where he would have said one, he instead inhaled deeply. Where he would have said zero, he jumped.

For a heart-stopping moment, he wondered if he’d made a terrible mistake, if he’d made an error in his calculations, if reality had chosen that moment to reassert itself and he was about to drop like a rock.

The moment passed quickly. He was flying. Or, at least, gliding.

He laughed, and flapped his ‘wings.’ The shawl snapped behind him and gave him a small amount of lift.

He was doing it. He was doing it.

And now that he was doing it, it felt as natural as breathing. All that planning, all those calculations, all that running, climbing, and jumping–

He could fly.

Oh, maybe it wasn’t as impressive as it would have been in the old world, where gravity was a cruel mistress. But it was still flight, unpowered, human flight, and no one he knew of had done this before.

He laughed, and banked to the side, flying in spirals. He wasn’t brave enough to try a loop, yet, but he would, eventually, when he learned more about this.

His spirals took him over the park, the school, the mall, even the Nasty Burger. But he was losing altitude, his arms were getting tired, and he knew that if he got too close to the ground, gravity would get him again. Not to the point of hurting him at all, but he didn’t want to land just anywhere after all this work.

He tipped his wings westward, and started gliding home, pumping his ‘wings’ as infrequently as he could get away with. He didn’t quite make it all the way back to his front door, but he got close, just a few houses down the street. He rubbed his shoulders. That was going to leave him sore. He’d have to work out and practice more if he wanted to fly any real distance. He'd also need a way to take off that didn’t involve climbing the tallest building in town.

The front door of Fentonworks slammed open, revealing a pale Jack and a furiously pink Maddie.

“Daniel James Fenton! What do you think you're doing?”

Danny looked down at his bare feet, then back up at his parents. “Walking?”

Maddie sucked a breath in between her teeth. “Inside,” she said

Danny hurried to obey, taking the steps up to the door two at a time and squeezing past her and Jack to get into the house. Maddie closed the door behind him.

“So, um,” said Danny, shuffling from foot to foot. “What, um. I thought you guys were going to be working all day today?”

“On the Ops Center,” said Jack. “Not in the la– Not downstairs.”

Danny made note of the near-slip but didn’t comment on it. He was already in trouble. He didn’t need to remind them that the lab didn’t exactly exist anymore and make their mood worse.

“Oh,” he said. “What were you–?”

“Never mind what we were doing. What were you doing? What were you thinking, jumping off a building like that? You could have died?”

“Or been seriously hurt!”

“But I wasn’t! I’m fine. I planned it all out, and it worked.”

“And it shouldn’t have!” shouted Jack and Maddie at the same time.

Danny blinked up at them. “What?”

Jack explained. “We’ve been tracking the changes to gravity, too, Danny. We’ve been measuring it, measuring all the changes, to see what those darn ghosts did.”

Danny held back a sigh. There still wasn’t any sign that ghosts had done this, or even that ghosts existed.

“Gravity might have changed a bit,” continued Jack, “but not enough to keep a human being airborne like that.”

“There are whole buildings floating,” said Danny. “I’m a lot smaller than a building.”

“The rules seem to be different for different masses, as well as different altitudes,” said Maddie, making a face.

“Yeah! It’s really exciting. We’re trying to measure the ectoplasm levels– It has to be related, but we haven’t been able to detect any yet– Those ghosts are tricky, son–”

“Well, yeah. But the rules are also different for things that are alive.”

“Really?” asked Jack, leaning close.

“Uh, yes? Otherwise I wouldn’t have done, um. That. I tested it.”

“You tested it? Did you write it down?”

Danny nodded, cautiously. Jack swept him off his feet. “Our boy has been doing science, Mads!”

“He’s been jumping off of buildings!”

“Putting his research to practical use!”

“He’s been jumping off buildings without being peer reviewed!”

“Oh, yeah, son, you should have had someone check your work.”

“You never get peer reviewed,” said Danny, scowling.

“That’s different,” said Maddie, quickly.

“If anyone else believed in ghosts, you’d be sure we would be!”

Hanging limp in Jack’s arms, Danny grumbled.

“Danny,” said Maddie.

“Yes?” he mumbled.

“No more testing theories without checking in with us first. Safety first. You should know this by now.”

Danny hunched his shoulders and tried not to think too hard about his scars. They weren’t very visible, and the doctors had said that they’d fade away, probably entirely, eventually, but they were still there now, if you knew where to look.

A month ago, reality had broken.

A few days before that, Danny had almost died. Lab accident. It turned out that his parents thought portals to other dimensions which may or may not exist needed a lot of electricity and chemicals to function. Danny had been curious. He’d wanted to explore, to investigate. He’d stepped on a loose wire that had led to a capacitor. He’d been horribly electrocuted, and then exposed to a chemical cocktail. Sam and Tucker, who had been in the lab with him, had called for an ambulance, and he’d been brought to the hospital.

At least, that’s what he was told, later. He hadn’t woken up until he’d been in the hospital for a few days. Of course, when he had woken up, he did so because a bunch of the medicines going into him had started to do weird things while reality restructured itself, and that had been… incredibly unpleasant. Everyone had been grateful that only a very few things - like whatever Danny had been on to take care of the chemicals he’d picked up in the lab - had acted like that.

Later, Jazz had told Danny that for a brief period of time between the accident and reality breaking, Jack and Maddie had sworn off ghost hunting. Presumably forever. But once the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology started to rebel and twist, they’d taken it back. Well, to be fair, apparently they didn’t take it back until the lab disappeared. And the Fenton Stockades.

Although, to be fair in the other direction, it was more a case of everyone’s basements disappearing and being replaced by weird misty caverns than ghosts specifically targeting his parents. It was a whole thing.

(Personally, Danny was glad to see them go, although it had sounded like Sam was mourning hers.)

“Danny,” said Maddie, “tell us that you understand.”

“I understand. I don’t test theories without you,” said Danny, grudgingly. “Not even about cool things like flying.”

Maddie scowled. Jack beamed.

“Great!” shouted Jack. He whirled Danny around again. “Let’s go see your data! Where is it?”

“Upstairs,” mumbled Danny. “I’ve got a notebook.”

“A notebook, Mads!”

Maddie sighed. “Alright, let’s see the notebook.”

#danny phantom #fic

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corazondebeskar-reads · 3 months

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ain't no rest for the wicked - chapter four

ain't no rest for the wicked series

four: no telling what tomorrow holds

series masterlist | prev chapter | final chapter

Tess Servopoulos x f!reader x Joel Miller

words: 5.9k

summary: Joel and Tess pay you surprise visits after work.

warnings: dark-ish Joel and Tess, smuggler!Joel, smuggler!Tess, boston QZ, QZ life, poorly negotiated d/s-style dynamics, poor communication, enthusiastic consent, oral sex (m & f receiving), p in v, degradation, stalking, threesome, light rope bondage, light choking with a belt, paddling, punishment, aftercare, strap-on, anal sex, rimming, light angst, orgasm denial, hurt/comfort, light description of a wound, flashbacks to outbreak day (reader), double penetration

This is the penultimate chapter.

also on ao3

dividers by @saradika-graphics

You don’t get any warning the next time. It’s not more than a week later, and when you step out into the dying sun, Joel’s waiting outside your office building.

You’re pissed, because when he croons, “Where you goin’, sunflower?” from behind you, your heart shoots about sixty feet into the sky.

“Cheese and fucking Christ, Joel!” You’re clutching your chest, but you can’t even pretend to be mad for more than a minute.

Not the way he’s smirking, something bright behind his gorgeous eyes. He looks fucking beautiful like this, bathed in amber, dark coat against the snow.

“I can just leave by myself,” he says.

But you break and smile. Goddamnit. It isn’t just your cunt that’s happy to see him.

Though it very much is. You’re a little concerned about icicles forming, the way you’re abruptly dripping at the prospect of an evening with them.

He can read it all over you. Of course he can. He shakes his head and pushes away from the wall, not bothering to swallow down the smug curl of his lips.

“They been treatin’ you alright?” He asks as you make the walk across town.

“Who, work? Yeah, I mean. A job’s a job.” You shrug.

He’s looking at you like he thinks he’s some kinda human lie detector.

“Nobody’s bothering me, I promise,” you say, rolling your eyes.

His jaw ticks. You don’t realize how close he’s leaned until he’s murmuring into your ear. “Watch the attitude, little girl.”

You swallow hard. He leans back, but you’re acutely aware now, that he’s stayed close the whole time. There’s not five feet between you as you scramble to follow. No, he’s been near enough that your shoulders occasionally brush.

Thinking about it makes your stomach feel a lot like your very first (and only) cellphone. It had slipped from your pocket into the lake up north when you crossed from the dock to the little motorboat, and you just watched as it sank slowly. By the time you thrust your hand below the surface to save it, it was too late, and the water you displaced pushed it deeper into the darkness.

Your daddy had been mad beyond words, not that it stopped him from lecturing, and while you sat there peering over the edge, it lit up with a call from your best friend, even underwater. It rang over and over and over until your dad started the boat, and the motor buried it in a puff of kicked-up sand.

She had been calling from back home, where you’d be in about six hours. You figured you’d stop by her dorm and see what her latest fuckboy from the neighboring floor had done now.

By the time your dad pulled up to campus, though, the world was half over. He didn’t let you out of the car, your brother holding you back while your daddy peeled away from the curb and the bodies.

He was gone by midnight.

When you blink back to the grimy streets of Boston, you can’t remember what you were thinking about before. Joel’s still looking at you, brow furrowed.

“Where’d you go?” he says.

“Oh, uh. I dunno. Just got lost in my head,” you try to smile and shrug. Silly you, as always, drifting off in the clouds.

He doesn’t buy it, but he doesn’t push it.

When you get to the apartment, you’re startled to find Tess in an apron. As far as you know, Joel’s been the only one cooking when you came over. She spares you a kiss before she turns back to chopping carrots.

You kind of want to drop to your knees right there in the kitchen, watching her tuck back a loose strand of hair while brandishing a knife.

There might be something deeply unwell about you, you suspect. But it seems like the kind of thought that hampers your quality of life, so you scrunch it up and toss it in your mental waste bin. It bounces off the rim.

Damn. You can’t even make a basket in your own mind.

Joel smirks at the way you already look a little dazed. “Don’t worry,” he murmurs in your ear. His thumbs hook into the belt loops at the front of your jeans, tugging you back so you can feel him press against your ass. “We’re gonna have dessert first tonight.”

Tess snorts. “Been workin’ on that one all day?”

“Shut up, like you didn’t tell me to go pick up something sweet.”

You think maybe you’re going to die from secondhand embarrassment. “Can’t believe I used to be scared of you guys,” you say, foolishly, “you’re just a couple of dorks.”

Tess shakes her head, lip twitching into a smirk. “Baby, you just going to let her disrespect you like that?”

Oh, shit. If you weren’t wet already, well.

“Do whatever you want with her while I finish this up,” she says to Joel, meeting his eyes over your head.

Her words are anesthesia. Your whole brain seems to fuck right off, and it’s like you’ve been a mermaid turned human, the way your legs don’t seem to work anymore.

He lets go and steps around before throwing you over his shoulder, taking the opportunity to slap your ass.

“M’sorry,” you say, clawing at the back of his shirt for stability. Not that you really think he’d drop you, but all in all, you’re a little off-kilter right now.

“You will be,” he says.

It should scare you, you think. Despite your joke, outside of this apartment, these are two terrifying individuals. Together? Well, your initial tornado siren instinct wasn’t far off.

Instead, you moan.

He shakes his head. “What am I gonna do with you, huh?”

“She said whatever you want.” You don’t have a clue where the boldness is coming from, but you think you like where it’s going.

“You got a mouth on you today. First thing is gonna be findin’ a better use for it.”

“Fuck,” you whisper.

He swings you down from his shoulder, and you sink straight down to your knees.

“Open,” he says, belt buckle jangling as he tugs it from the loops.

You open your mouth wide and stick your tongue out, but he doesn’t give you his cock yet. He grabs your jaw, fingers digging into your cheeks, and spits onto your waiting tongue.

You startle back a little but moan and swallow it, only for his hand to fly out and slap you.

“I didn’t say you could swallow that,” he growls.

“Sorry, sir,” you say, eyes wide and sorrowful.

He leans back down and spits again. You hold still, and he gives you a crooked grin. “Attagirl. Hold that for a minute.”

You whine until he brings the belt around your neck, sliding it through the hoop on the buckle and pulling it snugly around your neck. It’s not too tight, and the sight of the loose end wrapped around his fist almost does you in.

“Yeah, you like that,” he says, shaking his head. He leaves you waiting while he pulls out his cock.

You whimper when you see it, but he tugs on the belt to abort the sound and rests his cock on your tongue, thrusting so shallow that he’s barely inside the cavern of your mouth.

When it’s nice and coated with your saliva and his own, he pulls out and slaps it across your face.

The moan you let out would be humiliating if you had it in you to care. But you don’t, only concerned with getting his cock back in your mouth.

You give him your best pleading eyes, wide and sad, with your mouth still open.

“Aw,” he coos, dry and mocking, “are you not getting what you want?”

You shake your head.

“Brats don’t.” He rubs the leaking head of his cock over your upper lip, smearing precum in his wake.

You move instinctually to lick it, but he pinches your tongue between two unforgiving fingers.

“I don’t think so. You’re just going to sit still and be good. And quiet."

If you thought Tess’s words made your mind go blank earlier, then this made you think nothing. Literally nothing. The weight of his belt around your neck, the smell of him on your lip, and the rigidity of his commands are all you can handle. Like the shutdown of your old, chunky computer, your brain whirrs to a stop.

He pulls you forward by the belt, cutting off your air and leaving no room for resistance. Not that you’d have even dreamt of it. He slides in farther this time, the head just grazing against the back of your throat.

You keep your eyes and mouth open wide. The pressure on your throat eases up, not entirely, but enough to allow you air. He begins to gently thrust in and out, reaching deeper and deeper.

You whine, jaw aching for more.

He smirks. “What? You don’t like me usin’ your mouth to jerk off?”

Your cunt clenches, with nothing, nothing to comfort it. It’s strong enough that your head tips back a little, a raggedy gasp slipping around him.

“Did you just almost cum?” he asks, tugging a little on the belt.

“Uh-huh,” you try to say.

He whistles. “Damn. Don’t you dare, though.”

Easier said than done, but you manage to hold back. His cock sent sparks to your clit as he masturbated with your throat.

The door clicks softly shut as Tess comes in, apron abandoned in place of a shit-eating grin. “Havin’ fun, baby?” she asks Joel, wrapping her arms around his waist and taking in the scene.

“Y’should have a go, use her tongue,” he says. “Fuckin’ slut almost came from bein’ used as a cocksleeve.”

You moan and try to grab his thighs, but he just steps back, pulling his cock away. The whine you make is soaked with desperation and hurt feelings.

“Why don’t you tie her up, and I’ll have a turn,” Tess says. She comes close to you, a hand in your hair to tip your head back. “Same rules, sunflower. You just stay still and be good.”

You can’t do much more than blink up at her as Joel crouches behind you and tugs your arms back, binding your wrists together deftly. He moves to help Tess strip down, his movements gentle and devout. Her neatly folded clothes get set on the dresser, and he sits on the side of the bed to watch, cock drooling over his fist.

She makes use of your mouth, rubbing her cunt over your tongue. You’ve stretched it out as much as you can and your chest aches with the need to lick, to taste, to have anything more than they’re allowing. But the ache to be good for them is deeper and undeniable.

She grinds until her clit is pushed against you and rides your steady tongue until she cums. You don’t dare swallow what’s left in your mouth, remembering the scolding you got earlier.

“Good girl,” she croons, stroking your cheek. She steps back, and you jerk a little with the intense throb that seems to rattle your bones. You’re so close, and you know what’s about to happen.

You whine and give Joel sad eyes again, begging for mercy. He doesn’t grant it, but he does rub his dick through Tess’s slick where it sits on your tongue, groaning at the warmth and ease as his cock slides smoothly into your throat, pushing the taste of her with it.

Each thrust makes you whimper and plead, not that he can technically understand you, but the grin on his face makes you think he does perfectly.

“Damn, I wasn’t gonna let ya, but makin’ you cum untouched like this…” he muses out loud.

You hold back the plea, not wanting to dissuade him.

He cups your cheek, stroking his thumb up and down. “Nah.”

Your eyes are wide again, unable to stop the pout that turns your lips down around his cock.

“None o’ that,” he scolds, using his hand on your face to fuck into you. “You mouthed off. You can wait to cum on our cocks.”

You can’t help the way your head snaps to the side to look at Tess, where she’s leisurely sprawled on the bed. His next thrust was already in motion, and his cock jabs you below the ear.

He growls and yanks your face back to him, pushing inside while pulling on the belt. Your clit pulses with the beat of your heart, or maybe the beat of his cock. As if they’re any different right now.

“Yeah, you heard me,” he says. “And now that I think about it…” he trails off to look at Tess. Out of the corner of her eye, you can see a responding grin creep across her face.

She gets up from the bed and comes over to you. “Let me have another go, and you get it all out for me, baby,” she says to Joel.

He pulls out immediately, and you can hear him rustling through a drawer while she rides your tongue to a second orgasm.

“Look how sweet you’re being,” she says, bending to kiss your forehead. The praise settles somewhere in your ribs, a warm, wriggling thing.

The cock he’s picked out is smaller than the one he took last time and smaller than his own, but not by much. If you weren’t already drooling, saliva dripping down onto your tits and their carpet, you would be now.

She slips the harness on with practiced fingers, vibrator tucked snugly inside her, though she doesn’t turn it on yet. When she sets the plastic on your waiting tongue, you gasp, eyes fluttering shut.

Instead of fucking your face with it, she gives a jerk of her head to Joel. He comes around behind you and puts a hand on either side of your face, fucking your head back and forth on the cock.

“That’s it, baby,” she moans, reaching out to caress him. He presses his lips to her hand, and she pulls him in for a kiss. He doesn’t miss a beat the whole time, still using you as a fleshlight for her strap.

It’s not his roughness that brings tears to your eyes, though, or jealousy. He’s not expecting it when you break away, his firm hands guiding more than forcing.

“Please,” you beg. “Please let me touch you.” You squirm in the ropes, knocking a tear down your cheek. “Please fuck me, please something.”

Tess wipes the tear away. “Think she’s had enough?”

Joel grunts his agreement, grabbing you by the arms to help you to your feet. He hands a bottle of lube to Tess, who situates herself on the bed, one hand slickening up the cock.

He stands behind you and holds your jaw in one hand, so you watch her, not that you’d be looking anywhere else. His other hand slides down to your cunt, and he chuckles. “Y’ain’t even gonna need it,” he tells her. He pushes two fingers in with little struggle and starts working you open for her.

You writhe. It’s almost too much; it hurts a little. Somehow, you’re overstimulated, and this is the first time all day that anyone has actually touched you.

“I know,” he murmurs. “You’ve been so good. Let us both get in ya, and I’ll let you cum.”

He yanks his hand away, and you nearly sob. He unties your wrists and pulls his belt from your neck. “Go on,” he says, slapping your ass.

Tess grins at you as you climb up. She’s turned on the vibrator on her end and beckons you with open arms to crawl to her. You lean down, and she tugs you in for a kiss, her hands sliding to your hips to guide you down onto her strap.

“Can’t believe I haven’t fucked you yet,” she murmurs between kissing and nipping at your lips.

Your eyes roll back as you slide down, your pelvis angled just right so that when she bottoms out, you can grind your clit against her bush. She smirks but digs her fingers into your hips to stop you.

“Hold still and wait just a little bit longer,” she says.

Once you’re settled, Joel pushes you down by the shoulder to lay against Tess. It leaves you only partially seated, but you nuzzle into the nape of her neck, pressing kisses where you can reach.

It’s not a shock when his slicked-up fingers breach your asshole. You kind of assumed when he said they’d both be fucking you. He didn’t ask if you’ve done this before, though. He doesn’t really need to ask anymore.

You’re a little embarrassed that he’s got you pegged correctly as a slut. Before you came to Boston, you had fucked your way through the hard days, desperate to feel, well, anything.

But here, it had been harder. You made a point not to get to know anyone; it didn’t seem wise after everything fell apart before.

Then again, you think, they’re both experienced enough that they can hardly judge you for it.

You stop really thinking after that as Tess wraps her arms around you, gently thrusting up as Joel’s thick fingers work you open.

“Doing okay, sunflower?” she says.

You intend to respond, but Joel chooses that moment to stuff a second finger in you, and all that comes out is a broken, starving moan.

“Attagirl,” he says, rubbing his other hand over the dip of your spine.

When he finally deems you ready, he wastes no time.

“Oh god,” you pant as he pushes in with a strong, smooth stroke. “Oh fuck.”

They don’t really wait for you to get acclimated, not that you’re complaining. The back-and-forth rhythm is soothing, but you’re trembling, trying to keep it together.

True to his word, Joel slides his hand around and hovers his finger over your clit. “Whenever you’re ready,” he says. Blunt teeth nip at your neck as he presses firmly down, their thrusts jostling you and doing the work for him.

You cum immediately. It’s not a choice. You’d been barely holding on, and once he finally touches you, it’s like you break open. Vaguely, you’re aware of how loud you’re being, but he’s holding you tight and unrelenting. They both still and let you shake apart on their cocks, Joel’s dark chuckle against your neck as you fuck yourself through it.

You don’t think you fully come back to yourself the whole time they fuck you. You’re floating somewhere vaguely in the middle of the throng of bodies, lightheaded. Every pore feels electrified, each brush of their skin against yours drawing a gasp or cry. You know you cum again. Maybe you don’t ever really stop.

An endless wave of aftershocks, some orgasms in their own right, roll over you, and you just take it. Take them. Let them move and pinch and rub your body; just a soft vessel to soak up their attention.

When they’ve exhausted themselves and you, Joel spilling deep inside, he tugs you to the side to let Tess up. He lays behind you and tugs the sheet up as the sweat cools and leaves you shivering. His warm body presses against yours, an arm loose over your waist.

When Tess goes to leave the room, he sits up, but she’s not having it. “It’s my stew. Don’t even think about it.”

He grumbles, something you don’t catch as you fall asleep.

It feels like only a moment has passed when he shakes you awake. “Gotta sit up and eat somethin’,” he says. It’s gruff, as he always is, but there’s something that stirs you to seek him out. Instead of sitting up properly, you turn over to snuggle against his chest.

He huffs, shaking his head, but it doesn’t stop him from holding your head to him. He presses a kiss atop it before nudging you to sit up.

You can’t help the small, stupid smile that lingers. You’re too well-fucked, the pleasure still loosening your muscles and inhibitions.

Tess pushes a thick bowl of stew into your hands. You’re irritated at your own surprise. Why did you ever think it was going to be some normal canned Campbell’s shit? You literally saw her chopping fresh carrots.

It’s full of rice and tender meat, tomatoes, onion, and herbs. More than you can identify, but it’s so rich and hearty that you think you could die happy. All your senses are satisfied, and your stomach is full.

“Kill me now,” you sigh, leaning back against the pillows.

Joel and Tess exchange a look over you, but you don’t give a damn.

“Is something wrong?” she says.

“No,” you say, a soft smile settling as you close your eyes and nestle into their bed.

Joel shrugs, and they make the wise choice to ignore you while they finish eating. He wins the argument about who does the dishes, and you excuse yourself to the bathroom to clean yourself up while he handles them.

You only try to argue once against them walking you home. You’re pretty sure everyone is aware of how half-hearted it is.

Tess jumpscares you a couple of weeks later. Well, nearly. You’ve been on high alert since the Surprise Joel Incident, but your heart gets lodged in your throat at the sight of her.

It’s so incongruous that you stand there for a moment, just blinking stupidly, hand shielding your eyes from where the sun bounces off the freshly frozen snow.

“Hey, sunflower,” she says, and kisses your cheek, leaving you flushing hot enough to melt the drifts in your path.

“Hi,” you squeak.

She doesn’t hold your hand on the walk, but she sticks close and guides you through throngs of people with a palm burning at the dip of your spine.

When you let slip your worry—not that you aren’t just as happy to see her, but that the change makes you paranoid—she fesses up to Joel’s current predicament.

She warns you, this time. “I promise it won’t be like then. I’m not gonna put you in that position again.”

You’re comforted a little, but it’s still an upsetting prospect. You don’t want to see him get punished. And she won’t tell you what he did, but she does tell you she knows you’re going to understand her point.

“Lay down over the bed next to him, sunflower, just like that.”

You obey, quietly settling your top half on the mattress beside him. He keeps his face buried in the duvet while you squirm around, trying to figure out what to do with your arms.

His are bound behind him. Should you mimic it? You tuck them under you, lay them by your sides, and clutch at the sheets above your head. Tess comes in the room and snorts at your fidgeting.

“Want some help with that?” She’s holding another length of rope, and you know it’s not a question.

“What’re you doin’ to her, Tess?” Joel grumbles, finally lifting his head. He doesn’t look at you, only at her.

Her hand cracks against his thigh before you realize she’s even moved close enough. “You wanna try that again?”

“Sorry, ma’am,” he mumbles, hiding back in the blanket.

“I can do whatever I want with her, right? She’s yours, and you’re mine. You know what that means, sunflower?”

You’re suddenly a little jealous of grapes, as you try to respond but only manage a squeaky whimper. Under the focus of the sun, they get to shrivel up and hide. Instead, you automatically turn to face her.

“Well?” She prompts, but she doesn’t wait for you to respond before tugging your arms behind your back and threading the rope around.

“It means I’m yours, too, ma’am.”

At your words, Joel is finally, finally looking at you, but unlike Tess, his attention scalds.

“That’s right.” She tugs at the rope to check the fit, and when she’s satisfied, she crouches down and spreads your cunt wide open.

You jerk a little as her cold fingers swipe between your folds. “She’s wet already, baby.”

You’re burning, one step closer to your new life dream of being a raisin, when you hear what is unmistakably Tess sucking her fingers clean of you. You moan and finally turn your head to seek out Joel.

He’s fuckin' sick and tired of you seeing him like this. But there’s a good part of him that knows he brought it on himself. If she thinks humiliating him in front of you is going to work, she’s probably right.

So far, though, you don’t seem to have lost any respect for him. When he finds your eyes, they’re soft and pleading. You don’t need to say a word; he knows you’re seeking the grasp of his firm hand.

“Hey, sweet girl,” he says.

You smile, but you don’t get to respond, distracted as Tess fists her hand in Joel’s hair and yanks back.

“You wanna tell her why you’re here like this instead of fucking her tight little cunt?”

Joel does not, but he’s not stupid. It wasn’t really a choice.

Tess tugs, sharp pain blossoming across his scalp, so he has to face you.

“I made a reckless decision.”

“And?” She prompts.

“And I nearly got shot.”

You suck in a breath but don’t look away. He, however, does—still facing you but eyes looking anywhere but.

“Nearly,” Tess scoffs. She tugs him to roll a little bit, and you see the bandage on his side, stained like rust.

“It grazed me. That’s nearly.”

She nudges him back into position but doesn’t let him turn away from you.

“Now you both get to see what happens when you do careless shit, baby. Don’t look away.” She pauses for a moment, taking something out of a dresser drawer. “And Joel?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Count for me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He wants to close his eyes to brace for the hit, but you’re looking a little nervous. “S’ok, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “I can take it.”

But when Tess swings the paddle down, it’s on you. They’ve never used it with you, you’re not any kind of prepared for the broad, heavy stroke. You cry out, something akin to a yelp and a gasp, jerking forward into the mattress.

“No,” Joel snarls, wriggling against the ropes.

Tess clicks her tongue. “Not what you’re supposed to be saying, baby. Let’s start over.”

You’re slightly more prepared when she hits you again. It’s not any softer but a little easier to bear.

“One,” he bites out.

She catches you by the hair when you subconsciously press your face into the bed. “You keep looking right at him, sunflower. He needs to see.”

He looks at you, brows cinched and eyes wide. His lips part, but the words don’t come out.

You nod, a small duck of your chin, and he closes his eyes for just a moment.

When he opens them, they’re lined with pain, his aching muscles taut as he grapples with guilt. He returns the nod.

She doesn’t go easy on you. No, you get exactly the punishment Joel would have gotten. By the time you’ve taken 25 (or, well, 26), you’re sobbing softly, squirming to try to alleviate the burn.

“See, baby?” Tess says, setting the paddle down and running her fingers over your hot, aching skin. “This is what happens when you’re reckless. Someone gets hurt.”

Of course. No lesson in the world could make Joel more careful with himself for his own sake.

She cuts his ropes first, and he’s on you immediately, tugging the knot so you’re freed and pulling you into his lap.

He holds you against him. “Oh, sweetheart,” he murmurs as you sob into his chest. “I’m so sorry.” He lets you cling to him while you cry, rubbing a soothing hand up and down your back. He steadies you in a way you can’t explain. So does Tess.

It takes you a long time to recognize that feeling as safety.

At some point, Tess hands him something out of your line of sight. He reaches around you to unscrew the lid from the tub, and you jolt when his fingers move to the raw skin on your ass, but whatever he rubs on it instantly cools the burn.

You let out a sigh, leaning lax against him.

“You okay?” Tess murmurs, a hand on your shoulder.

You blink up at her and nod. “M’okay.” You crane your neck to kiss her hand, and she smiles.

Her other hand threads into Joel’s hair, gently this time. She gives him a kiss there. “Learn your lesson?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, barely louder than a whisper, voice like a knife on toast.

“Good. You were both so good.”

It’s the final string for you, the snap of the last tether. You mumble what you think is a thank you, but it comes out undecipherable. She gets the idea anyway.

Everything is warm and heady, your limbs like silicone, but your mind like a sieve. You’re wet enough that Joel can feel the heat where your bare cunt lays across his bare lap.

He dips a finger in and strokes gently through your folds. “Gonna make you feel better,” he says, laying you down on the duvet. You keen, fingers reaching for him, but Tess catches them and kisses you, kneeling beside you on the mattress.

“Hang on,” she says as Joel gets to his knees on the carpet. “Lay down,” she tells him, gesturing to where he’s frozen.

He obeys, and she tugs you forward to the edge of the bed.

“Sit on his face, sunflower,” she says.

Joel groans and reaches his hands up to help you down, but you hesitate.

“I—” you start, but she sees right through you.

“If you haven’t figured it out by now, he likes eating pussy.”

“Fuckin' love it,” Joel says, fist clenching around his cock while he waits.

“I don’t wanna be ungrateful,” you say to the wall behind him.

“You wanna get fucked?” she says.

You nod.

“You can ride him first if you want. Or you can start on his face, and then we’ll switch.”

“No,” Joel says, and you both look at him.

“Get down here and give me your cunt, now.”

You look at Tess, and she shrugs.

Knowing you’ll still get his cock makes you care a lot less what order it comes in—you snort out loud at the pun—so you do as you’re told. He settles you down and doesn’t wait for Tess; he just starts licking you—almost too gently.

You don’t complain. It feels good, and you think he’s still apologizing.

Once Tess helps herself to his cock, she reaches for you and takes your face in the cradle of her palms, licking into your mouth.

It’s all slow and luxurious. Dangerously so. You and Tess are content to make out while she rides him, a gentle cant to her hips, and he holds you open with both hands to eat you out. He’s careful to avoid the irritated skin on your ass, prying at the inside of your thighs instead.

You don’t know how many times he takes you apart on his tongue, but when it crosses the line between just enough and a little too much, Tess lifts off his aching cock and taps you in to switch.

As nice as his mouth was, sinking down on his cock is fucking divine. Life changing. You could start a church.

Well, not quite, but anyway. The point is your cunt had been painfully empty, and now that it’s stuffed full, you think you might cry.

Instead, you go back to making out with Tess and groping her tits.

She lets him cum when she does, after you’ve both had your fill. She holds you down on him and rubs your clit so you all share an orgasm.

She stands up on trembling legs and tugs you to do the same, even though you really want to just collapse on the floor.

Joel’s moved to the bed when you come out of the bathroom, dozing in the slice of streetlight from the window. Tess is nowhere to be seen. You’re still feeling a little fuzzy and dazed, but you take your cue and slip out of the bedroom to get your things.

“Hey,” Tess’s voice cuts through your haze.

You stop where you stand, bag over one shoulder, leaning against the door with one boot tugged just past the toes.

“Do me a favor? Stay here tonight,” she says.

“What?” Your heart stutters. It’s never been an option before.

“Stay. I know I was harsh on ya. Both of ya.”

“I’m fine,” you lie. Your body betrays you, as always. Fuckin’ narc. Your hands are shaking and it rattles the zipper of your boot like an SOS.

She steps closer and cups your face in one hand.

Your eyes flutter shut, leaning into the warmth of her calloused palm.

“C’mon, sunflower. Let me look out for you. Please.”

“Okay,” you whisper, pressing your lips to her hand.

She pulls you in, and when her lips meet yours, you moan softly. It’s less from your cunt than from your aching chest. She pulls you close, tucking your head to her shoulder, and you snuggle in, arms tucked up around her back.

It ends all too soon.

“Be good and go cuddle up to him, alright? Keep my spot warm,” Tess says, patting your cheek.

You nod, brain fuzzed over with the siren song of sleep.

Joel startles when you slip back into the room.

“Is this okay?” you say.

He blinks up at you with sore eyes and nods, peeling back the duvet for you.

You strip down. No one had said to, but you don’t feel right being clothed when he isn’t.

When you’re pressed against his warm body, he wraps an arm around you, and you sigh in tandem.

When you wake, the room is silent save for the light breaths of your companions. Moonlight refracts off the fresh banks of snow and scatters through the blinds. The city holds its breath and waits for the sun.

You lie as quiet as the streets. At some point, despite her quip about warming her spot, Tess slipped into the bed behind Joel. Her arm is snug around his waist in the way that his is around yours.

The moment is not lost on you. These two predators in symbiosis, lax and peaceful. You’re ever the ensnared dinner guest. Their places here are natural, and you… you’re scared. Scared of the way your heart is fighting to escape its cage and lay itself on their plates.

You either have to let it, or you have to run.

Joel wakes when you try to extract yourself from the bed, but he relaxes his grasp when you whisper something about the bathroom. He kisses the nape of your neck and lets you free. It’s not a lie, really. You do use their bathroom, and then you turn the light off and wait until you think he’s fully asleep again before you slip out.

It’s a longer trek home, what with having to sneak around. You’ve never been out past curfew before, and you really, really do not want to know what lockup is like.

But you don’t see much of FEDRA, and before long, you’re nearly outside your apartment building.

It wasn’t FEDRA you should have been looking out for, though.

next chapter

*title from "Duality" by Bayside

pls feel free to tell me how you feel 😬

#tess x joel #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #joel miller smut #joel x tess #joel x reader #joel miller x reader x tess servopoulos #tess servopolous x joel miller #joel miller x tess servopoulos #tess servopoulos x f!reader #tess servopoulos x you #tess servopoulos x reader #tess x reader #the last of us fic #the last of us smut #fic: ain't no rest for the wicked

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idyllic-ghost · 6 months

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title: To Keep You Warm pairing: minghao x reader genre: fluff, romance warnings: mentions of food, mentions of sickness (cold) synopsis: You hadn't spent much time with Minghao yet, but you knew that this new relationship could become something that lasts. The true test presents itself when, after a wonderful date walking around in the chilly fall weather, you become sick. Minghao offers to help, without even mentioning that he might have caught a cold as well. wordcount: 3.7k taglist: @enhacolor @shuabby1994 @junhui-recs @dkakapizzaboy @just-here-to-read-01 @loviehan @userjunhuii @novalpha

a/n: very happy to be apart of this collab! this is the first out of two fics i will be posting for it, so look out for the next one soon!!

see the Fall-ing For You Collab here!!!

join my taglist

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

Surrounding you were walls of red and orange. Even the ground you walked on was covered in the autumnal colors. The sound of your feet walking down the laid-out path was dull, the soft ground barely making a sound as you stepped on it. The only thing you could hear was the wind soaring through the trees, and even that was muffled. You were in your own bubble while walking there, which is just what you had wanted. As soon as the leaves started changing colors, you had been craving to go out to the forest - see the beautiful seasonal change, smell the dewy grass, and be surrounded by nothing but nature. Minghao had answered your call. His hand was holding yours, his thumb slowly rubbing circles on the back of your palm, and your arms were swinging between you. Minghao’s hand was so warm and soft, that you were unsure of how you’d make yourself let go of it later. Your hand was warm… but the rest of you was freezing.

Minghao had been smart, he had looked at the weather report and wore light, but many, layers. You had looked at the sunny day, felt the air for a little bit through your window, and deduced that a thick sweater would be all you needed. You were deadly wrong. You had tried to focus on Minghao’s warm hand, but not even the butterflies in your stomach could make you forget how cold you were.

After shivering for a while, you came to a halt when Minghao suddenly stopped walking. Without a word, he let go of your hand to shrug off his jacket. You watched him with a wrinkle in your brow, trying to figure out what he was doing. He wrapped his coat around your frame, and you finally understood.

“You don’t have to…” you said but didn’t make much more of a protest against his kind act.

“Of course I do.” Minghao helped you get your arms into the sleeves of his coat. “There you go.”

He looked at you with a warm gaze and, even though the jacket helped a lot, it was enough to make you heat up again. After fixing the collar, he held out his hand for you to take again. You gladly accepted the offer, and the two of you started walking again.

“Won’t you be cold?” you asked.

“I’ll be alright, I have my scarf.” He proudly motioned to his scarf. “Besides, I was getting cold from just looking at you shivering. It’ll be much better for me like this.”

“If you say so.”

Minghao hummed and pulled you a little closer, your arms now touching from time to time as you walked

✦ .

While the walk in the forest had been idyllic, the journey back definitely wasn’t. As soon as you left the metro station, it started raining. People were lined up at the edge of the metro station, except for the lucky few who had brought umbrellas with them. Minghao squeezed your hand gently, gaining your attention.

“This isn’t stopping any time soon.” He sighed.

“Definitely not.”

“Should we run for it?”

“... sure.”

Minghao grabbed your hand even tighter, and the two of you ran through the streets. The rain was freezing cold, hitting your face like small icicles. Nevertheless, neither you nor Minghao stopped smiling and laughing because of that.

By the time you got home, you were drenched - leaving water stains all over the floor of the entrance of your apartment building. Your hand was still gripping his tightly, and you had no plans of letting go. The two of you walked in silence, still gaining back your strength from the bad weather, and made your way to the elevator. You didn’t have to tell Minghao which button to press, and the doors closed quickly thereafter. The elevator took you up the apartment complex, and as you were nearing your floor you settled in a bitter-sweet feeling.

“Do you want to dry off a bit at my place before you leave? Maybe wait until it’s stopped raining?” You looked straight at the doors of the elevator, not daring to look at the man beside you. “... I wouldn’t mind having you around for a while longer.”

“I don’t think I can.” He squeezed your hand and you could feel his eyes stare holes into your skin. “Even though I want to... I have an early day tomorrow.”

You knew that it was already starting to get dark outside, and you wished that time could move just a little bit slower.

“Next time?” You finally met his gaze, and it sent a jolt of fireworks to the pit of your stomach.

“Next time,” he promised.

The doors to the elevator opened, and Minghao walked you to the door. You still hadn’t let go of his hand, you didn’t even think to do it. After unlocking the door and opening it, you turned to him again. He was still smiling like he had before - warm and caring.

“I had a really nice time,” you said.

“So did I,” he answered.

It was quiet. You were just looking at each other. But it was okay to just stand in silence with him. He was like a safe space. Always welcoming and never judging. Much to your dismay, his grip on your hand loosened until only his fingertips held onto yours.

“I should leave,” he murmured, glancing down at your lips.

You leaned a little closer, and he took a little step forward - both of you closing the distance as much as you could without making any too hasty movements. Minghao’s hand finally let go of yours, but you were soon reconnected with his touch as he cupped your cheek. Your noses were touching, but he didn’t close the gap. Taking the last step, you leaned forward and pressed your lips to his. It was a short kiss, some might even say it was just a peck, but it left your entire body tingling. He wasn’t nervous or overly cautious at all, he just needed your permission. Minghao stole another kiss before stepping away. You put your hand on the door handle while he walked backward to the elevator.

“Text me when you get home,” you peeped, not knowing what else to say.

He looked amused by your flustered state but nodded and replied with an “alright” before walking into the elevator. As soon as you heard it go down, you leaped into your apartment and slammed your door shut with an outburst of giddiness. Dancing around the hallway, you suddenly come to the realization that you’re still wearing Minghao’s jacket. You take it off carefully, feeling the thick fabric beneath your fingers, and put it up on the hanger.

✦ .

You hadn’t been dating Minghao for very long, and you hadn’t been able to meet as often as you wanted to, but everything seemed to be going so well. He was the kind of guy you had been dreaming about… which is why you hadn’t been able to let yourself fall for him. You toyed with the idea of letting go of your emotional restrictions, but your past experiences wouldn’t let you. In your mind, you still had to be careful no matter how kind and loving Minghao was. Still, when you see his text show up on your home screen you can’t help that your heart skips a beat.

The next day you woke up with a stuffy nose, an explosive headache, and a dull ache in your entire body. Even turning to pick up your phone was a chore, but you had to call in sick somehow. You spent the morning in bed, only getting up to go to the bathroom and get something to eat. Everything was either too hot or too cold; you couldn’t find a good balance. So, of course, you ended up napping for most of the day.

The buzzing sound of your phone on your bedside table woke you up from your slumber. It had only been a few hours, but it felt like it had been several days since you first got sick. You looked at the caller ID and your eyes widened as you saw Minghao’s name. Clearing your throat the best you can before answering, you tried to make yourself sound like you weren’t sick.

“Hello?” you asked and cringed at how rough your voice was.

“Hi… are you okay?” The background noise of the city slightly muffled Minghao’s voice.

“I’m okay!” You tried to make it sound convincing, but you weren’t very successful.

“Are you sure? You sound like you have a cold.”

“I’m just fi-” Before you could finish your sentence, your body betrayed you by sneezing. “I’m fine…”

“Sure…” he said, “Listen, I was just calling to ask if I could stop by to grab my coat but I can grab some food for you. Maybe soup?”

“Oh, you don’t have to! I can hang your coat outside my door, you can pick it up without getting close to me.” The words were pouring out of your mouth. “You shouldn’t have to get sick because of me- I know that you’re busy-”

“I’m not busy right now. Text me what you want and I’ll get something for you, I’m on my way to a grocery store.”

“Thank you.” You let out a sigh. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you right now.”

“I’m just doing what anyone would do. I’ll see you soon, yeah?”

The knock on your door was expected, but still made you jump. You were standing right beside it, you hadn’t been able to sit still on the couch while waiting, but when he knocked you slowly counted to five in your head before opening it. There he was, in all his glory, dressed in sweats, a knitted cardigan, and his glasses sitting low on his nose - still managing to look put together, even when his hair had been ruffled by the wind. Minghao’s face lit up as he saw you, and he held up a plastic bag of goods. You welcomed him inside, taking the bag from him, and watched as he took off his shoes. When he stood up, his eyes were met with his coat.

“Ah, perfect,” he hummed. “I’m sorry for intruding on you like this.”

“It’s okay, you’re not in-” Your sentence was cut off by a cough forcing its way out of your throat.

Minghao’s eyes were filled with pity. He took the bag back from you and helped you over to the couch. Once you sat down, he covered you in a blanket and put his hand against your forehead. His hand was cold, and you leaned against it.

“You’re burning up.” He sighed and removed his hand from your forehead. “I’ll go prepare this soup for you, is that okay?”

“I can do it myself, Hao, I don’t want you to waste your time-”

“I think I’m spending my time very wisely,” he said, “But if you want me to leave I will, of course.”

“... I’d like you to stay.”

“Good.”

Once your heart had settled, and as you watched Minghao working in your kitchen, you noticed that he looked a little tired. Maybe he just had a rough day or didn’t sleep well last night, but you were worried for him. Just as you opened your mouth to ask him about it, he turned around to see you staring.

“Where do you keep your spoons?” he asked.

“That drawer right there.” You pointed. “The top one.”

He looked and let out a satisfied “Ah!” when he found it. You smiled and continued watching him cook, your worries slowly fading away.

✦ .

You and Minghao ate on opposite ends of the couch, a random movie playing in the background on the TV. Every so often, you’d sneak glances at him - and only get caught when he was already looking at you too. Then you’d smile at each other awkwardly and go back to watching the movie. There was comfort in sitting in each other’s presence but also a lingering tension that was impossible to deny. It had started raining again. In the quiet parts of the movie, you could hear the pitter-patter of the raindrops against your windows. The sun had gone down too, the only light now was coming from the TV. You looked down at your bowl, which only had a few scraps left, and put it away on the table. Minghao had already done so a while ago.

“Thank you,” you said quietly.

Minghao tore his gaze away from the screen to look at you, slightly confused. You motioned to the bowls and he brushed it off.

“It was nothing, I’m glad I could help.”

“Still. I’m happy you stopped by,” you said, “Otherwise I’d probably just eat cereal for dinner.”

He moved closer to you, slow enough for you to tell him not to, and put his arm around your shoulders. You shuffled even closer to him, despite a nagging voice in your head telling you that you shouldn’t be getting him sick, and Minghao put his head on your shoulders. When you put your head on top of his, you could feel him relax and put more of his weight against you. The movie came to an end, and the credits rolled, and suddenly the apartment was dark. Neither of you moved, you didn’t dare to. Your fingers crept towards his, and he met you halfway. Trying to navigate in the dark, you fumbled around with your hands before eventually intertwining them. Minghao squeezed your hand, and you squeezed his hand back. You could feel him smiling against your shoulder. But then he started shuffling around, trying to get up.

“Don’t go,” you whined. “You’re so warm…”

“If I stay here, I’ll never get up,” he said, “And I have to do the dishes.”

His head left your shoulder, but you refused to let go of his hand. Minghao turned to you, still smiling. You could barely see the outline of his features in the dark, even when you focused as hard as you could. He leaned his forehead against yours, and you let out a soft sigh at the warmth coming back to you.

“I’ll do the dishes,” you hummed. “Tomorrow.”

“You won’t be sick tomorrow?” he asked.

“No, you’ve cured me.”

Minghao let out a short laugh and moved to place a kiss on your forehead. You hesitantly let go of his hand and watched as he walked away to the kitchen. He turned on the light, creating a warm spotlight right above him. With the light surrounding him in this way, you thought he looked like an angel. And maybe he was. An angel sent just for you, to care for you and keep you warm.

You watched his back as he did the dishes. The way his shoulders moved, how he went from resting on one hip to the other, and how his hands, somehow, elegantly put the dishes on the rack. With the blanket wrapped tightly around your shoulders, you made your way over to the kitchen. Your arms wrapped around his midsection, and you put your head against his back. Listening to his breathing, you could tell that there was something wrong.

“Are you okay?” you asked.

“I’m good now that you’re here,” he joked with a flirty tone.

“No- I mean, are you sick? Your breathing…”

You were cut off by Minghao trying, but failing, to hide his cough. The pieces were falling together; his tired eyes, how warm he was, and now the cough.

“Oh no, I’m sorry- did I get you sick?” You let go of him and tried to get a look at his face by standing beside him.

“I was sick before I came here,” he explained but you weren’t listening.

“You shouldn’t be doing the dishes, let me take over, please. Here, you can have the blanket- why don’t you go sit down?” You tried to take off the blanket, but Minghao grabbed your wrists.

His hands were still wet, so he quickly let go of you. But he had managed to stop your racing thoughts. You pulled the blanket tighter around you again.

“Leave the dishes in the sink, please. I’ll take care of it later,” you murmured.

Minghao sniffled and put the leftover dishes away before drying off his hands. You smiled at him, silently thanking him for listening. Then, you grabbed his hand and brought him back to the couch, and gave him another blanket.

“I’ll go change my bedsheets, you can sleep there tonight. I’ll take the couch.” You went to leave, but he didn’t let go of your hand.

Instead, Minghao pulled you back down to sit on the couch with him. He looked shy, for once, and wouldn’t hold your gaze for very long.

“If you don’t find it uncomfortable… Could you sleep in the bed with me?” he asked.

He was playing with your fingers, looking down at what he was doing. You smiled and leaned forward to press a kiss to his forehead.

“Sure.”

After changing the bedsheets, you told Minghao to come join you in the bedroom. You didn’t have many clothes that he could borrow, but you found him a shirt that he could wear to sleep. It was dark again. The two of you were lying under the sheets, with at least another person’s worth of space between you. You were on your back, staring up at the ceiling, and you could only assume that Minghao was in the same position.

“I was tired all day, but now I can’t sleep,” you whispered.

“Me neither,” Minghao whispered back.

You shuffled around, trying to find a better position but you ended up giving up rather quickly. You could hear Minghao turning to lie on his side.

“Could I…” he mumbled, “Could I hold you?”

You nodded, but realized that he probably couldn’t see you, and whispered out “Okay”. Minghao shuffled towards you, and you met him halfway. It seemed to be a theme between the two of you - things were never out of balance. When his arms met your waist, and he pulled you to lay against his chest, you felt your muscles slacken and your mind went blank. Your arms wrapped around his midsection, and you tried to pull him even closer. Minghao let go of one of his arms from you, for just a second, to pull the covers up around both of you. Now that everything felt right, the two of you lay in silence. Neither of you could fall asleep still.

“Thanks for coming over today,” you whispered.

“I wanted to see you again…” he said and added, “The coat was just an excuse.”

“Good. I wanted to see you too.”

You lay in silence again. Minghao started drawing small patterns on your back with his fingers, and you nuzzled your face closer to his chest. He smelled faintly of roses, or something else floral, and of your detergent - but you knew that was just from your shirt. He smelled like comfort. And his body was so warm, which you now knew was partly because he was sick, and it was finally the perfect temperature for you. Minghao let out a soft sigh, bringing you out of your thoughts.

“I have a hard time sleeping when I’m sick,” he murmured, “But when we were on the couch before - when I was leaning my head on your shoulder - I almost fell asleep immediately.”

You hummed in response, already feeling drowsy.

“Are you asleep?” he asked, and you shook your head. “If this is what it’s like being sick with you, then I don’t think I mind it one bit.”

“Will you stay tomorrow?” you whispered.

“Of course.”

✦ .

You didn’t know when you had ended up passing out. Something about Minghao’s presence, and his running hands on your back, put you in a trance. When you woke up, you were still in the same position. The sheets were a little bit more wrinkled, and your hands might have been in different positions but you couldn’t tell. Minghao was still asleep, and his grip was loose around you. You managed to get up easily, but immediately regretted it. Your apartment was freezing, one of the downsides of fall. Tip-toeing over to the closest piece of clothing that you could wrap around your bare arms, you picked it up and immediately recognized it as Minghao’s cardigan. You looked over at the still sleeping man in your bed, and decided to steal it from him - just for a little while.

While you were still sick, you were feeling better than the day before. So, you decided to make breakfast as a thank you to Minghao for making dinner last night. It wasn’t fancy, but it was the thought that counted. When you brought it into the bedroom, balancing it carefully on a tray, you found Minghao already awake. He smiled as soon as he saw you, but had to turn away to cough as you put down the tray on your bedside table.

“Good morning,” you said.

“Good morning,” he answered in between coughs.

You gave him a glass of water, which he gladly accepted. While he was drinking, you put your hand on his forehead. You had about the same temperature, but you knew that you had a fever as well. Minghao groaned when you pulled your hand away, immediately trying to get closer to you again. You took the half-empty glass from his hand and put it on the tray. He had his head on your chest, breathing softly against your skin. Forgetting the breakfast, you made yourself comfortable in bed and tried to make him more comfortable. Minghao started fidgeting with the cardigan you were wearing.

“Is this mine?”

“... yes.”

He smiled and pressed a skin on your clavicle, silently accepting you stealing his clothes.

“You can wear it,” he said, “As long as you let me stay like this.”

#svthub #svthub.collab #svt #seventeen #svt fluff #seventeen fluff #kpop fanfiction #kpop fanfic #minghao fanfic #minghao scenarios #minghao seventeen #xu minghao #minghao #the8 #the8 fluff #svt the8 #the8 x reader

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atlafan · 4 months

Note

Wow that other prompt/blurb you did was so good and quick! What about a holiday blurb with softrry and friends to lovers theme during the holiday season mixed with a snow storm somehow haha

a/n: this was a cute prompt, thanks for sending it in!

Warning: fluff, smut-ish

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This can't be happening. Why right now? This is unbelievable! Of course Y/N's power went out right when she was about to pop brisket in the oven. It takes eight hours to bake because it needs to cook slowly. She's fucked, absolutely fucked. She just had to volunteer to make the main dish for her family's holiday celebration. On top of that, she volunteered to make two kugels, latkes, and bark. She's fucked.

She hates asking people for help, but when she sees her neighbor's lights are still on, she slips her boots onto her feet and heads outside. She nearly slips and falls since there's a sheet of ice underneath the snow that's coming down. Some of it blows back in her face because of the wind. By the time she gets down her own stoop and walks up her neighbor's, she just knows she's going to look like an icicle. She rings the bell a couple of times, and smiles softly when Harry's face appears in the small window the door has.

"Y/N, hi." He knuckles at his eye and yawns.

"I'm so sorry to bother you so early on a Saturday, but my power went out and I was just about to put my brisket in the oven, and now I'm fucked. And I don't feel safe driving to my mom's in this weather. I was wondering if it would be a terrible imposition if I cooked here. I can pay for any of the extra electric or gas or whatever I use."

Harry blinks at her and closes the door in her face. Rude. Harry's never rude to her. He's a very soft and sweet guy. He's a great neighbor. She wouldn't call them close friends, but they're friendly enough that they've hung out and shared a bottle of wine here and there. Just as she's about to start crying, the door opens back up and Harry's got his jacket and boots on.

"Let's go get your stuff." He smiles softly.

"Oh, thank you so much!" She throws her arms around him and gives him a squeeze. He just barely gets his arms around her waist by the time she's pulling away.

He follows her out and into her house. It takes several trips to get all of her things over to Harry's and into his kitchen. She keeps apologizing for needing to take over his kitchen, and she apologizes for the various smells of meat and oil that's about to consume his entire house. He assures her it's fine and offers to help cook.

Harry has a huge crush on Y/N. Ever since she moved in next door six months ago, she's made his heart race. She makes his palms sweat and his knees buckle and his dick hard.

Y/N has a crush on Harry too, but she's much less nervous around him. She figured if he liked her back he would have made a move at this point, so she doesn't let the crush consume her the way it consumes Harry.

"I really appreciate this, Har." She says as she gets the over preheated. How come your power isn't out? You'd think the whole neighborhood would have been affected."

"I have a generator in the basement as a backup since I work from home. I need to be able to stay online to do my job."

"I should really invest in one of those. Do you know how long this snow storm is supposed to last? The street cleaners barely cleaned up the sidewalks from the last one."

"I think it's supposed to snow all day and into the night."

"Fuck. That means the plows will barely be out."

"When do you need to bring all this food to your family?"

"Not until tomorrow night. We're doing a combined Hanukkah and Christmas thing with all our in-laws and stuff. So, I'm not the only one making a fuck ton of food, but still."

"Well, I have snow tires on my car, so I can always give you a lift if you want."

"I couldn't ask you to do that."

"You're not asking." He takes a step towards her. "I'm offering. You can pay me in potato pancakes."

"That seems like a fair compensation to me." She smiles. "I strongly recommend closing your bedroom door."

"Why?"

"Because this brisket has to bake for eight hours, which means your entire house is going to smell like meat. Not to mention, once I get the oil going for the latkes...the place will smell like meat and fried potatoes. It can be kind of a lot."

"Right, I'll go close some doors. What else do you need to make?"

"Kugel, latkes, and bark. The brisket is already dressed and ready to go into the oven."

"Can I help make anything? I'm pretty good at peeling potatoes."

"You're already doing so much. I'm ruining your weekend."

"Y/N," he places his hands on her shoulders, "you aren't ruining my weekend, I promise. I like when we get to hang out. It's not like we haven't cooked together before. It'll be like when we made those homemade pizzas."

"Okay." She sighs with relief. "Then I'd love your help peeling potatoes."

Harry goes upstairs to close the bathroom and bedroom doors, then comes down and makes sure to close his office door as well. He comes back to the kitchen and smiles at Y/N fondly. She's got her apron on and she's mixing ingredient together into a mixing bowl. He washes his hands in the sink before putting his own apron on and grabbing his peeler.

"Wanna listen to some music?" He asks her.

"That would be great. Can we listen to holiday music?"

"Alexa, play my holiday mix on Spotify." Harry tells the Echo.

"Playing Harry's Holiday Mix on Spotify." The device responds.

"That's so cute, you have your own playlist." She teases him, bumping her hip to his.

"Laugh all you want, but some holiday songs are really fucking annoying. I prefer the old classics."

"I completely agree. I hate new songs by artists who are clearly just trying to make some extra money. I think Baby, It's Cold Outside is one of my favorites."

"It's one of my favorites too."

The two work in a comfortable silence, humming and whistling along to the songs that come in through the speaker. Having help is proving to take a lot of stress away from Y/N. Thanks to Harry, she's able to make the latkes in half the time it usually takes her. They clean all of the dishes up before Y/N takes out everything she wants to use for the bark.

"Okay, I've got dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate. Those will be the bases. I have marshmallows, graham crackers, candy canes, almonds, and mint extract."

"I'd also like to be paid in bark. I have a horrible sweet tooth."

"Done and done."

Making bark is like a dirty job. It's messy and sticky, and your hands always get covered in chocolate. Y/N explained it's easier to swirl the fixings in with her fingers.

"Do you have enough room in your freezer for all of this? We need to lay it flat."

"Yup, plenty of room." Harry opens the freezer door and helps Y/N had the bark, that's spread out on wax paper, inside.

"Ugh, my hands are a mess." She looks down at them, then takes a finger into her mouth to suck on. "God, I love chocolate."

"Yeah." Harry blushes, wishing he could suck on Y/N's fingers.

"Thank you so much for all your help. You're like my hero today."

"Oh, I was happy to help. It was fun cooking with you. Um...now that we're done and the kugels are still in the over with the meat, would you want to hang out and watch holiday movies?"

"That sounds great. I'd love to."

"Cool." He smiles.

Y/N gets cozy on Harry's sectional and snuggles up under one of his blankets as he queues up a movie. They decide on Home Alone. Harry sits by Y/N, but not too close. He doesn't want to make her uncomfortable.

"Come closer so we can share the blanket." She suggests. "You know, if you want. I mean, I'm sure you have other blankets, but-"

Harry's already moving and spreading the blanket over his legs. He puts an arm around Y/N's shoulders pulls her in closer to his side.

"Shh, the movie's starting." He smirks down at her.

The two stay cozy and giggle as they watch the movie.

"You're good at cuddling." She tells him randomly. "You're like a furnace, it's nice."

"Glad you think so." He swallows thickly. "Can I confess something to you?"

"Sure." She looks up at him.

"I've wanted to do this with you for a while..."

"What, watch Home Alone?"

"No, be this close to you, like, cuddle."

"Oh." Her cheeks flush. "Really?"

"Yeah. I...I don't want to make things weird between us because I like being your friend, but...I sort of like you more than that."

"You do?" She sits up a little more.

"It's totally fine if you don't like me as more-"

"Harry, shut up for a second." She smiles big at him. "I like you as more than a friend too."

Y/N wraps her arms around Harry's neck and tackles him down on the couch before kissing him. He kisses her back, smiling as he does so, making it a little hard to kiss. They both giggle and Y/N pulls back just a hair.

"Was that okay? I probably should have asked to kiss you first." She says.

"It was more than okay." His hands slide down to her hips. "You helped take the edge off. You make me so nervous."

"Aww." She pouts. "You're so cute." She leans in to kiss him again, giving his bottom lip a small suck. "Would you like to come with me tomorrow night? Like, come inside and enjoy the festivities?"

"I'd love to."

Y/N slots her mouth back over Harry's, and licks inside. Their tongues mold together, and they moan against one another. Y/N rolls her hips down, grinding against Harry's crotch.

"I should've known you liked me. You were so devious for wearing grey sweatpants around me."

"I didn't do anything on purpose." His hands slide down to her ass, giving her cheeks a squeeze.

"Mhm." She rolls her eyes playfully. She kisses on his neck and rubs herself against Harry again, this time getting a better feel of his erection. They move their hips in circles against one another.

"Y/N?"

"Yeah?"

"This is really fun, but we shouldn't move too fast...physically."

"Did you think I was going to let you take my pants off?" She laughs. "Baby, our clothes are staying on today. But...I wouldn't be mad if you made me come in my pants."

"I wouldn't be mad if you made me come in mine either."

#harry styles imagine #harry styles fic #harry styles smut #harry styles fluff #harry styles x reader #harry styles y/n #harry styles x y/n #harry styles fanfic #harry styles #harry styles blurb

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dynamimight · 3 months

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this one'll be titled, "swinter = katsuki"

how about one on the connections between katsuki and winter and you and summer and vice versa? the way that katsuki is all bright; eyes burning flames of stars and insurmountable fury, ready to take on anything. he works hard and works up a sweat and he likes that. his second wonder of the world is the summer heat: the first wonder is you.

you, with eyes that don't burn, but shine; twinkling in the cool gray light of the overcast sky. always relaxed, always calm, never jumping up for anything. katsuki thinks you're like snowfall: quiet and gorgeous, glittering through all walks of life. you move through space and time and change the very essence of it. everything slows when you're around, and before he knows it, you're everywhere: in the cracks of his summer streets, stretching icicle fingers through his hair, frosted over his glasses so he can only see you.

#started this one almost a month ago and i cant figure out what to add to it 🤷🏽‍♀️ i guess it was ready when i wrote it lolll #i was reading back anddd #i think sometimes an idea just needs to be a little thing yk #anyways #i love him if you couldn't tell #i said i would try to write more this year (college student trying to cement her writing voice tings)#bakugou fluff #bakugou x reader #katsuki x reader #katsuki drabble #bakugou katsuki x reader #'ki baby ♡

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astxrwar · 2 months

Text

drops of blood [3/4]

SYNOPSIS: Bucky Barnes has some wires crossed. He fixates on a barista at a coffee shop near his apartment, and tells himself it's fine as long as he keeps his distance. Except you keep making that distance smaller.

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 11k

CONTENT WARNINGS: masturbation in this one. stalking, exhibitionism. consensual-but-not-safe-or-sane vibes really starting to settle in. Weird psychological elements kinda. For easter eggs you can check my AO3 chapter notes; for additional content check my tag "fic; drops of blood". there is a playlist and it's got hozier and the songs are sooo mood.

Thanks for reading!

Read on AO3

[ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ]

It's been snowing, on and off, the last few days; the gutters on your apartment complex are ancient and decaying, and meltwater pools in the rusted divots along them. The runoff from the rooftop freezes overnight, forms these jagged, spindly icicles on the overhangs, like fingers reaching down towards the street below. You can hear them outside your bedroom, water sliding off the sharp pinpoint ends and hitting the ledge of the window, wearing divots into the brick.

The sound follows you to sleep, the steady drip-drip, drip-drip, drip-drip, staccato and rhythmic and spaced like a heartbeat. In your dream you wriggle out from the tangle of your covers and pad to the window and part the curtains. You look out at the dark night sky and watch the droplets as they fall, glittering flashes of light reflected in the beads of water from streetlamps or the headlights of passing cars somewhere on the street below.

When you look down to the windowsill, the water gathered there has turned color, glittering like rubies, like pomegranate seeds. Like blood, dark and rich and red.

“It’s called starfruit. Carambola, technically.”

It’s just the two of you, and it’s late, the sky black and the street nearly empty and the lights inside the coffee shop reflected back by the windows, the both of your reflections mirrored there. Barnes has been here since seven-thirty, but you’d been busy again, and you feel bad; he must have been horribly bored, just waiting that whole time. If he was, he doesn’t look it– he looks just as neutrally impassive as ever, leaned back in the chair, watching you dump the grocery bag out on the tabletop and pull another chair over to sit across from him.

The fruit is yellow and ridged and weird-shaped, and he prods at it with one hand; the left one, gloved. His mouth twitches.

“Dunno if you’ve ever seen a star,” he says, “But I’m pretty sure they don’t look like that.”

You flash him a smile, dragging the chair a little closer. Under the table– the cheap square of laminated plastic that suddenly feels far too small– your knee brushes against his, and he starts, jerks back a fraction of an inch and straightens, this sharp frisson of tension that reverberates out through his whole body like tremors from a stress fracture. His reflexes are much faster than yours, all of them, and he’s able to compose himself and carry on as if nothing happened before you can respond to whatever that was; he’s already leaning to draw his knife from his boot and setting it on the table by the time any of it has even registered in your brain.

Hyperreactive startle response, you reason; that’s not abnormal. He’s a veteran. Multiple times over. You’d spent a long time researching it, combat PTSD, wanting to know, wanting to have the information to be able to— meet him halfway, or something. You don’t know the details of his life these days, not outside of these slivers of time he spends with you, and you’d never ask, but a part of you still wonders how many other friends he has. How many other people he even talks to, besides you and his therapist. The thought makes something ache, in your chest, something soft and melancholy and a little bit painful; it does something else, too, makes you feel determined to not mess this up.

You figure right now, what would help the most is for you to not mention it. The way he’d– flinched, or startled, or something, jerked back from less than half a second of contact like you’d burned him.

Barnes lays out the starfruit lengthwise across one of those flimsy recycled paper napkins and aligns the knife to cut it right down the middle, which conveniently gives you something to say that’s entirely unrelated to whatever just happened.

“Hold on, wait,” you say quickly, “You’re doing it wrong.”

“Doing it wrong,” Barnes repeats, and maybe you imagine it, the way his shoulders relax. Like he’s relieved. He looks up from it, at you; his eyes crinkle up at the corners, just a little bit, humor glinting in the precise and magnetic blue of his irises, and something strange lights in your stomach in response. “What, because there’s a right way?”

“Yes,” you reply, with a teasing sort of cadence like, duh, obviously.

Whatever that feeling is, It buzzes in the pit of your stomach at the barest amount of warmth in his expression; something like adrenaline or anxiety or frayed nerves, only multiple times brighter. A sensation that’s not unfamiliar, not unrecognizable, either, and also not something you really want to think about or examine too closely, right now. Or— ever.

Barnes opens his mouth like he’s going to say something and then doesn’t. He closes it again, and he glances down and away from you, drums his fingers against the table. Taptaptaptap, taptaptaptap. When he looks at you again, the brightness that had been in his eyes before is gone, snuffed out like somebody’d blown out a candle, and whatever it’s been replaced with is something else entirely.

He sets the knife down. The handle clicks against the laminate and your pulse does something weird at the sound; stutters, maybe, or skips, or just stalls outright. He nudges it with the tip of his finger, at the base, makes it spin in a slow, juddering circle, until the blade is pointed towards him, and then he slides it across the table.

When your heartbeat picks up again, it’s too-fast, thudding quick and insistent in the hollow of your throat, like rabbit’s feet.

“Here,” he says. “You want to, this time? Since– since there’s a right way, and all.”

There’s a roughness to his voice, a strain that makes you think of last week, please do it, I just want you to be safe, makes you think of the blood by the dumpster in the back, how he’d looked when he’d come back inside, they were just drunks, it’s fine, it’s all fine, and that warmth inside of you dissipates.

(No, it doesn’t.)

“Sure, yeah,” you hear yourself say, warbly and far-away, like maybe somebody else is speaking. Somebody who isn’t you. But it’s your hand that reaches out to drag the edge of the napkin across the table, and it’s your hand that closes around the knife, too.

The handle is still warm. Something deep inside of you coils in on itself, in the pit of your stomach or the base of your spine or maybe lower, twists and tightens and pulses like a heartbeat. You think about his hand, being where yours is now, the way that he’d spun the knife a few weeks ago, how he handles it with this unnervingly practiced ease, this familiarity, like it’s something more than an object.

Like it’s an extension of his body.

(Again, you think about the blood.)

Carambolas are long, oval fruits with five- or six-point ridges; you cut it into slices the way you’d slice a banana, and the pieces fall over one another shaped like stars.

“Huh,” you hear Barnes say, and when he reaches for one, the glove probably in his pocket, you swallow around nothing at all, suddenly aware with startling clarity of how close his hand is to your own. How much bigger it is than your own. “Starfruit. No kidding.”

You wait for him to pull back before you move to take your own piece, his flinch replaying in the back of your mind, and something else there, too, that you determinedly continue to ignore. The skin on the carambola crunches between your teeth and the juice floods your mouth, sour-sweet and unfamiliar; you’re aware of it, the mechanical action of eating, the taste, but you’re not paying attention to that.

He hasn’t moved to take the knife back. It’s sitting on the table still, closer to you than it is to him. You don’t even really make the conscious decision to reach for it, you just do, dragging it closer to you and turning it lengthwise; up close, there are flaws that you couldn’t see from a distance, chips in the matte black coating of paint over the flat of the blade and the handle, divots worn into the edge from use.

(You wonder if he’s ever killed anyone with it.)

“How sharp is this thing?” you ask absently– idly– inanely, operating on some stupid and unthinking whim, the same impulse that has you reaching out and touching the tapered point of the knife with your thumb, pressing in, just a little, the skin indenting around it until–

Until something entirely predictable happens. Something that anyone with a modicum of common sense could have guessed at, that most people, you figure, probably would have known well enough to avoid, because most people, you think, possess a rational understanding of actions and consequences that would have kept them from doing what you’d just done.

“Okay,” you say, watching the blood beading up along where the sharpened tip had cut into your skin. It’s just a little, no more than you’d get from a pin-prick or a paper cut, just enough to well up into a drop that grows until the surface tension breaks and it spills onto the flat of the blade, oozing sluggishly down the pad of your thumb. “Pretty sharp.”

You’re not going to wipe it off on the napkin, because there’s food on there, so you bring it to your mouth; the second your hand is clear of the knife, Barnes reaches for it, snatches it back, so quickly that it feels like both things happen at the same time, even though you know, rationally, that isn’t possible.

Barnes is staring at you.

“Sorry,” you blurt out reflexively, “Sorry, that was— pretty stupid of me, don’t know what I was expecting—“

“No,” he cuts you off, “No, you’re— it’s fine, you don’t need to apologize, I shouldn’t have—“ he stops and he stammers and then he cuts out into silence and his expression flickers through a whole bunch of things, some that you recognize and others that you don’t; he looks plaintive and stricken and ashamed and worried and scared and something else that you can’t find the words to describe. “Are you— you’re okay?”

“I— yeah, of course,” you reply, feeling again like there’s something you’re missing. Like whatever puzzle you’re constructing of James Buchanan Barnes—it has this hole, right in the center of it, a silhouette in the shape of whatever it is you’re unable to figure out, and like if you could just find it you might be able to fit everything together, and that it– that he– might finally make sense to you. “Not your fault, I was being— dumb. And look, see? It’s fine.”

You hold out your hand to him. He glances down at it for a fraction of a second and then looks back at you, eyes wavering and glassy and filled with that thing you can’t name.

All that’s left is a thin, red line where the knife had pressed in.

No blood.

You finish late, almost midnight.

It’s your own fault, you’d gotten distracted, neglected clearing out the pastry display case and cleaning the espresso machine and prepping the brewing stations for the next morning in favor of sitting with Barnes for— way too long. He’d left at eleven, on the dot, and you hadn’t asked him to wait because he’d already been there a while, spent most of it just waiting there for you as the steady tide of customers ebbed and flowed and ebbed again, always just busy enough to keep you occupied and unavailable. So when you strip off your apron and your uniform hat and shrug your coat on over your sweater and finally flick the lights off in the shop behind you, you expect to come out to— nothing. Nobody.

But he’s there, standing off to the side, hands in his pockets, expression flat and clear and calm. He makes eye contact with you and something tightens, his brow, maybe, just for a half-second, but then you smile just on instinct, stopping on the sidewalk a few feet away, and his expression, it– softens, again.

“You stayed,” you say aloud, aware of how pleased you must sound and wondering again, somewhere in the back of your mind, if that’s really how you should feel.

“Yeah,” he replies, glancing down at his feet, scuffing one foot against the concrete. “Yeah, sorry, I, ah—“

“No, I wasn’t– I’m glad,” you interject quickly, back turned from him as you lock the door behind you. “I just— I didn’t ask today because I knew I’d be out late, and I don’t want to— take up all of your time, I guess, I already feel like I made you waste so much of it just, like, sitting, so—“

When you turn back to him, he’s staring, the way he does sometimes— the way he does a lot, precise and unwavering and intense enough to make you feel like you’ve been pinned to the spot– and whatever you’d been saying dries up somewhere in the back of your throat.

“No,” Barnes says, takes all of an aborted half-step closer, and then he tears his eyes away, like he’d maybe realized and tried to correct it, the way that he’d been looking at you. “It’s— you’re not a waste of time,” he says, looking at the ground.

The warmth you can feel in your face, you decide, is because of the cold, and nothing else.

He tells you to lock up again, and you tell him that you will.

It’s the very first thing, after pulling the keys from the door, before you hang them up on the peg nearby or strip your coat or take off your shoes— you always flip the deadbolt, and the flimsier lock on the door handle. Force of habit, deeply ingrained.

The windows, though—

It’s the third floor, you reason. There’s a fire escape outside the one that looks in on your bedroom, but the ladder can only be released from the second-story landing, some fifteen feet in the air. You have nothing to worry about. And maybe that’s why you just never get around to it; the fact that the urgency’s not there. It’s not a part of your routine. You mean to do it, because he asks and because you’d said you would, but somewhere between stripping from your work clothes and washing off the smell of stale coffee after a long and annoying shift and padding into your bedroom with a towel wrapped around your chest and water still dripping from your hair and onto the floor—

You always end up forgetting.

You have those dreams again. A whole bunch of times.

The ones with the broken pavement, the darkened street, the heartbeat.

The blood.

His birthday is March 10th. He hasn’t told you this. You know, though. You’ll see him on the 8th, the Friday he always comes in, and that’s close enough, you figure. Probably better that way; with how he is, so closed off, you think he’ll probably want to spend the actual day alone.

There is an Etsy shop that makes pocket-knives. Fancy ones. Objectively cool-looking ones.You place the order at two in the morning Saturday night, operating on some half-awake impulse. It’s four inches long— street-legal— with this wood-paneled handle and a flat-grip hilt and three letters engraved on one side. JBB. You figured that was better, the initials; the interpretation being left up to him, whether it’s Buchanan or Bucky. It’s just a keepsake. Something you thought he might— like.

“What’d you get this time?” he asks, that brightness in his expression again; your heart is beating too fast, and you’re anxious and doubtful and feeling a little bit sick, spiraling and suddenly certain this was all a massive mistake. But it’s in your hand, in a reusable grocery bag, and you hadn’t even brought anything else to fall back on in case you ended up losing your nerve about it like you are right this second.

You pull out the chair across from him and sit down and drop the bag at your feet, awkwardly folding your hands on the table.

He stares at you.

You stare back.

The silence drags out for what must be only a few seconds but still somehow feels like so much longer, thick and oppressive and borderline uncomfortable.

You open your mouth to speak—

Whatever small amount of courage you’d managed to work up evaporates from you completely.

“Nothing,” you say, nudging the bag with your foot until it’s under your seat, “It’s, um— it’s nothing.”

Barnes stares at you some more, and then raises one incredulous eyebrow. “Okay, well, it’s definitely not nothing.”

“Yeah, or, I mean– no, it’s just— “ You grimace and shift in your chair, suddenly realizing how uncomfortable it is, flimsy and straight-backed and too hard. “I had an idea, but it was a bad one, and— just, nevermind. It’s really— it’s nothing.”

Barnes pulls a patently disbelieving face and leans back and straightens out until his legs are just a little bit past yours under the table, his heels angled against the tiled floor on either side of your calves. There’s still a lot of space between the two of you, he’s nowhere near close enough to be touching, but the awareness of it— his body almost bracketing your own, even if only a little— it lances right through the pit of your stomach, a bright shock of electricity that hums somewhere in your whole body, like it’s leached right into your blood.

Barnes is still staring at you.

“Just spill it, come on,” he says. “I’m not so old that I can’t tell when you’re full of shit.”

You swallow, half-nervous and half— something else.

(Something worse, maybe.)

“It’s your birthday this week,” you blurt out, so quickly that the words all sort of blur together into one continuous block of sound. “I remembered from– you know. History.”

You regret saying it before the words have even completely left your mouth, because something in his expression just– shatters.

“You didn’t—“ He sits up straight and shifts back and shuts his eyes, his brow pinching together in the middle. When he speaks again, it’s soft and small and remarkably plaintive. “You did, didn’t you? I can’t— you shouldn’t have— no. Just— no.“

Your mouth twists into this tight little frown.

“See, I knew it was a bad idea,” you say, aiming at sounding dismissive in some light-hearted and trivial way, and unsure how close you get to achieving that. “Don’t worry, I can just— I’ll return it. I should have asked, but I—well, I saw this thing online, and I thought of you, and I didn’t, you know, actually think, and—“

You’re trying, pretty hard, to not sound like you’re a lot of things—self-conscious, embarrassed, a little disappointed— but it’s clear you do a fucking terrible job at hiding all of that, because his eyes snap open and that furrow in his brow worries deeper and before you can even finish he’s leaned forwards again and cut you off completely.

“No, hey, it’s— it’s fine, you can still— if you want—” he starts, stumbling over the words, like he’s saying it faster than he can even think, “If you really want to, then I’ll— it’s okay.”

You’re not looking at him anymore, looking at the table instead, the places where the laminate is cracked and peeling along the edge closest to you. Whatever you feel right now is cold and slimy and awkward and bad, but you figure this is the time to suck it up and get the fuck over it. No gifts. That’s—fine. It’s a totally reasonable boundary, and you should have known better; you should have asked, you should have thought of it earlier so that you would have even been able to ask, but you didn’t. And it’s fine.

When you finally do look back at him, he’s doing that thing again, his eyes gone all wide and glossy and sad. “Just forget about it,” you reply, a lot more firmly than before, “Seriously, it’s fine, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, and I shouldn’t have—“

“No, it’s okay, really,” he interjects, with a strange urgency. “Really, all right? It’s– I— I just didn’t want you to feel like— like you have to. You’re— you already—“

Barnes cuts off mid-sentence, and falls silent like he’d decided whatever he was going to say wasn’t actually worth saying, after all. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, and then he laughs, this short, sharp, self-deprecating sound, and his mouth twitches at the corners, just a little. It’s not like a repressed smile, not really; it’s rueful and distant and a little too sad.

“It’s just—it’s been a really long time since anybody’s—“ he starts, trailing off, clearing his throat, like that might make his voice steadier. Less hoarse. “Since I’ve had a birthday. Guess I kinda forgot my manners. Last time I had to use ‘em was way back in 1942, so. Kind of— rusty.”

Something in your chest— it aches, like somebody’s stuck a hand in past your ribs and grabbed your heart in a fist and squeezed it.

“I’m sorry,” you blurt out. “I thought– I figured somebody would have– since you’ve been back, I didn’t know–”

“No– hey, c’mon, don’t be sorry,” he says quickly. He leans forwards a little bit more, rests his elbows on the table, arms folded over each other. “What do you have to be sorry for? It’s not– it’s not like it’s your fault.”

You manage a kind of watery approximation of a smile at that, and maybe you imagine it, the way that the tension around his eyes and his mouth eases, his expression going just a little bit softer.

(But maybe you don’t.)

“Kinda makes me wish I’d gone all out,” you say quietly, your mouth curling up further at the corners, despite itself. “Sheet cake and everything, you know? Candles. Balloons, even.”

Barnes makes another sound, another laugh, maybe, except not really. More like the kind of thing somebody does as a placeholder, instead of something else. Maybe something worse. “I definitely don’t deserve all that,” he says, with this kind of lightness that feels— feigned. Performative.

And all of this, you think, with this soft sad sinking feeling; all of it suddenly starts to make a lot more sense.

“It doesn’t work that way,” you tell him, before you can think better of it. You’re looking down at your hands, and your voice comes out small, but steady. Certain. “People don’t— deserve anything from anyone, not really. I just— I wanted to do something nice for you.”

You still don’t look up. Whatever might be in his expression right now— you think if you looked at him, if you saw it, you might lose your nerve again. “If— if that’s okay, I mean,” you add, after a while, painfully aware of his silence.

“Yeah,” he says finally, so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “That’s— it’s okay.”

When you do finally glance up at him, his eyes are wavering and glassy and strangely delicate, like a sheen of ice frozen over window panes. The way he’s looking at you; he’s never looked at you like that before. You don’t think anybody’s ever looked at you like that before, soft and fond and fragile and like you might be able to break him wide open, if you tried. If you wanted to.

(And maybe you do want that. Just to get inside, just to see, you think, in some part of your brain buried so deep you can almost pretend you don’t think it at all. You’d do it gently, put him back together after, piece by vulnerable piece, and maybe you want to do that, too.)

You reach for the bag under the table and take out the box inside, wrapped up neat in brightly-colored paper, the cheesy kind they sell at the dollar store, with a pattern of multicolored balloons and ribbons and HAPPY BIRTHDAYs written in this big, overdramatic font plastered all over it.

“Here,” you say, kind of timidly, sliding it across the table.

Barnes stares at it for a long time. He blinks, and clears his throat, and then finally reaches for the package, pulling it closer to the edge.

“You put a bow on it,” he observes, nonplussed, pressing down on the glinting silver loops of folded plastic with his index finger until they flatten against the box.

The corners of your mouth twitch up, just a little. “I did,” you reply, watching as he peels the square of adhesive-lined cardboard off from where it’s affixed to the wrapping paper, mumbling something under his breath that sounds a lot like what the fuck as he examines it; it occurs to you that they’d probably actually tied bows by hand, way back in the 40s, and that this might be his first time encountering one of the shitty little mass-produced stick-on ones that you can get at the dollar store.

It’s kind of funny. And then it’s also kind of sad.

He sets it on the table and spins the package until he finds the edge with the tape and pulls that free, working it open that careful way that you’ve seen old people do, when they’re trying not to tear the paper, and that, too, is absurd and endearing and has you pressing down on the beginnings of a soft smile. “Just rip it, I don’t care, it’s going in the garbage anyways.”

“Oh, yeah,” Barnes mumbles, and then tears right through it. “Old habit.”

With the wrapping paper gone, there’s just the actual box the knife came in, made of dark, varnished wood, spartan and simple. It props up, with this mechanism on the inside, doubles as a display case; you’d fooled around with it when it had arrived in the mail.

He flips open the lid and his breath catches.

You shift, nervously, in your seat, careful to not lean closer or brush his calves with your shoes, just trying to fidget enough to dispel whatever apprehensive wave of tension has washed over you at the face he’s making, the worry lines folding deeper and his brow furrowing in again.

He pulls the folded knife free of the case with his fingers, so carefully, like he thinks he might break it just by touching it at all, and turns it over in his palm.

“It has— those are my initials,” he says, blankly.

You clear your throat and duck your head and look at the table again. “Yeah, um— the guy I bought it from, he does custom engravings, too, and it was free, so.”

Barnes pulls down on the release mechanism with his index finger and the knife flicks open with a soft click. He hasn’t looked at you, and you’re not sure if that’s good or bad.

“It’s, like. Damascus steel?” you continue, painfully awkward, painfully aware of how awkward you’re being and somehow also unable to do anything to stop yourself, “It’s this weird thing where they take two steel alloys and they fold them together a whole bunch of times, and that’s how they make it, that’s why it— looks like that.”

He makes this sound, holding it in his left hand so he can touch the flat of the blade with the tips of his fingers, running them across like he thinks he might be able to feel ridges, or something, evidence that the two contrasting shades of metal are actually distinct and separate parts, but there’s nothing. It’s smooth. You’d done the same thing yourself, just to see; you can’t feel the individual alloys at all, can’t even tell where one ends and another begins anymore. It’s all just one piece, complete and inseparable. Whole.

“How much did this cost?” he says, his voice wavering.

You pick at the spot on your side of the table where the laminate is peeling, working a fingernail under the edge and pulling it up more. “Only two dollars,” you say, keeping your own voice as light as you can make it, hoping with a mounting sense of unease that you haven’t upset him. That it wasn’t as terrible of an idea as your brain is telling you it was. “In— you know. 1940s money.”

Barnes makes some sound that’s probably supposed to be a laugh, but it’s thick and rough and hoarse and doesn’t really sound anything like one. “You said when you saw this,” he begins, turning it over again in his palm, still just staring at it. “You thought of– me?”

“Yeah,” you reply, eyes still cast down. “I— yeah, I thought you might— like it.”

(That’s not a lie. Not really. It’s just not the whole truth, either.)

“Oh.” Barnes closes his eyes for a second. He swallows thickly, gives one jerky and abrupt nod before he opens them again and says, his voice shaking more than you’ve ever heard, “I do, I— I really—this is— thank you.”

And just like that— all of your worry is gone, melted away like frost in the sunlight, and you’re smiling at him before you can even think to stop it, not sure if you would have been able to, anyways.

“Good,” you say, “I’m really glad,” like maybe if you say it with enough insistence he might actually believe that you mean it; that it’s not about pity or obligation or any of that. You’d really just wanted this, nothing else. To do something nice for him.

He gives you another one of those looks again, soft and fond and impossibly grateful.

You hesitate, just for a second, before you add, “Happy birthday, Barnes.”

Almost as soon as you say it, his eyes break from yours so abruptly that it takes you by surprise, feels like it physically jolts and forcibly recalibrates your whole nervous system.

There’s a long, strange, fraught pause.

You’re suddenly aware of how close you are, both of you leaned in with your elbows on this tiny little coffee table that’s a grand total of two feet across, and something inside of you feels like it ignites at the realization. His legs are stretched out underneath it again, longer than yours, larger, too, so you can fit easily in whatever space is left there, even with them straightened and taking up way more than half of it, and you’re aware of that, too, whatever had come alive in your belly burning a little brighter in response.

In the soft orange light from the overhead fixture, as close as you’ve ever been to him, you can see flecks of silver glinting in the stubble along the sharp edge of his jaw; the angular planes of his face and the blunt curves of his cheekbones and worry lines setting in on his forehead. It’s not his birthday yet, it’s still two days away, and you find yourself wondering how old he’ll be.

Thirty-seven, you think, completely arbitrarily; though you’re not going to tell him that.

“Would you do something for me,” he blurts out; it’s a question, but it’s not really phrased like one, comes out pitched low and flat and monotone. His eyes are closed and his expression tense again, like he’s forcing himself to say it.

“Yeah,” you reply, automatic, unthinking, “Yeah, whatever you need, what’s up?”

What he does in response to that could technically be called a smile, based just on description alone, but in reality looks nothing like one at all; the upturn of his mouth too sharp and his eyes too cold and the sum of it deeply self-deprecating. More like a grimace, you think.

The silence stretches. Charged. Expectant. He’s staring at you again, and you’re thinking more stupid things about the color of his eyes, his irises that bright and blinding shade of blue, and you’re not paying attention as much as you should be.

“Can you—” he clears his throat. Looks away. “I want you to call me Bucky.”

You blink at him for a moment, uncomprehending. And then your stomach does this weird and physiologically impossible fluttering jittery thing and your pulse speeds up or slows down or maybe misses a beat entirely. Maybe misses several.

“Oh, I– okay,” is all you say, momentarily too stunned to manage much more than that. Suddenly your tongue feels thick in your mouth, clumsy and uncooperative, like you’ve just somehow managed to forget how to move it with the dexterity required to actually form syllables and say them aloud, and it takes way too long to snap the fuck out of it and stammer through all of three words in a voice that sounds way too soft and way too shy to actually belong to you, “Happy birthday, Bucky.”

Something flickers in his eyes, too fast for you to examine in detail, and then—

He smiles. Really smiles, small and soft and entirely too fleeting, the kind that reaches his eyes and transforms his whole face and softens his expression into something open and honest and so fundamentally different than the way you’re used to seeing him that it almost feels wrong to be seeing it at all. Like you’ve been sucker-punched, or something. Like you’re staring, wide-eyed, into the sun.

For a second, he looks— happy. But just like with anything else you’ve ever seen from him, it’s only a second, and then it’s gone.

“Listen, ah, next week,” Barnes— Bucky— says, stopping at your apartment building; he’s not looking at you, looking at the ground, head ducked down, one hand rubbing at the back of his neck, “How about— maybe I could bring something. Y’know, for— for a change.”

You’re standing on the first step of the staircase up to the lobby door; you think it must put you almost at head-height, compared to him, but it’s hard to tell. He’ll let you sit across from him, at that one little table, but he always stands so far away.

“Yeah,” you say, looking back at him; you’re maybe still kind of running on the high of before, the thought that you might have done something that made him happy, even if just for a second, and you blame that and the fact that it’s nearly midnight for why even something as small as that has you smiling, bright and wide and embarrassingly genuine. “Yeah, that’d be– I’d like that.”

“And don’t forget to lock your—“

“I know, I know,” you cut him off, fighting back the mostly good-natured urge to roll your eyes. “I will.”

He looks uncomfortable, maybe uneasy, but it’s brief and fleeting and less important than the number of other things you’re still thinking about.

You stand there for a long, lingering moment, just looking at him.

He stares right back at you, expression unreadable.

Finally, he clears his throat. Looks away.

When he says goodnight, he says your name, too, and a frisson of— something, it shivers right down the length of your spine at the sound of it.

“Goodnight, Bucky,” you say back, a part of you kind of hoping that you’ll get another smile from him, even just a split second of one.

A flicker of something soft and satisfied flashes across his face, but it doesn’t last, and he doesn’t smile again.

It’s all because of that, you’ll think later, having woken up for no reason at some ridiculous hour Saturday night and found yourself unable to fall back asleep, staring at your bedroom ceiling in the dark.

You’d been thinking about him, because it’s past midnight, technically Sunday. Technically his birthday. And you keep thinking about that smile, all of a split second of one; some stupid part of you had been strangely captivated by it, the way that you’d almost been able to see that twenty-eight-year-old guy from Brooklyn way back when, the ghost of him still in his mannerisms, sometimes, but never as clearly visible as it had been right then. Maybe it was the contrast, the superimposition of that younger, happier, safer self over the face of somebody who wasn’t really any of those things anymore— but you’d been reminded, painfully, of a fact that you’d been doing a great job at ignoring, until now.

The fact that he’s— handsome. That you had, at one point, found him attractive. The crush was brief and surface-level and fleeting, the dead Sergeant James Barnes functioning as a suitably unobtainable receptacle for what was, at the time, your tenuous grasp on the concept of attraction in general. You had realized pretty quickly as you’d gotten older that your type, the kind of people you’re actually interested in, the kind you would actively pursue in real life, are not anything like he was; sweet and charming and boyish and—

And young, a particularly hedonistic voice in your head supplies unhelpfully.

But Barnes— Bucky, your brain corrects, which is also unhelpful and has your stomach doing another one of those weird little flips— he’s not any of those things, anymore. He’s older than he’d been then, by an amount that is not-insignificant, and he’s thorny and standoffish and intense and even a little bit scary, sometimes. That childhood crush had been on a guy who was essentially fictional, a memorialized facsimile of a real person, and that had felt safe, idealized and superficial and well beyond your reach. Whatever your little relationship with Bucky is now— whatever it’s turning into— it’s not like that at all. Sergeant Barnes was some long-dead historical relic, but Bucky is alive, he’s a real human being, someone that you know.

It’s strange to think about, and your mind drifts there, next; the fact that you actually know what he looks like, not just in frozen split-seconds from photographs, but in person, up close. You’ve seen him with a five o'clock shadow and with scruffy days-old stubble and you know that he sometimes nicks himself shaving; you know what he looks like when he’s well-rested and when he’s dead tired with bruise-dark bags under his eyes, you’ve seen him with hair all messed up by the wind and chapped lips when there’d been that cold spell back in February and the air had been freezing and bone-dry for weeks. You know that he takes up way too much space when he’s relaxed, slouches in his chair and stretches his legs out as far as they’ll go, and you know that he’s taller than you, larger, too, that his chest is broad and his shoulders are broader and sometimes when he sits leaned forward his leather jacket bunches up around the tops of his biceps like the sleeves are just shy of being a little bit too small, and you know that his right hand— the only one you’ve ever seen without the gloves on— is tanned and calloused and a lot fucking bigger than yours, that it looks like it might be just a little bit rough, if he were to touch you—

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” you mumble, out loud, feeling your face burn with some awful and deeply embarrassing warmth; you try to just roll over onto your side and smush your face into your pillow and will yourself back to sleep, to not fucking think— whatever the fuck you were even thinking. But it’s two in the morning, that horrible hour when nothing seems real and your impulse control is languishing somewhere hopelessly out of reach, and you’re barely half-awake and verging on delirious and as much as you try to think of anything else— literally, literally anything else— the thoughts just seem to sharpen, defiant. Like some part of your brain that you can’t access or control is all the more interested in bringing these things to mind, now that you’re working so hard to ignore them.

Like the fact that you know he runs hot; if he were to touch you his hand would be rough and it would be warm and it would be able to cover such a large span of your body, effortlessly, without even trying. And the other one— you know that it’s metal, even though you’ve never seen it, and that horrible part of your brain suggests that that one might be cool and smooth and if he were to touch you it might make goosebumps spill down the backs of your arms from the chill, from the contrast; he could span your whole ribcage with both of them, your brain supplies traitorously. Could probably close his palm right around the bones of your wrist, maybe even both at once, could cover the whole soft sensitive stretch of the insides of your thighs, could fit one, easily, around your throat—

You make another sound, a wavering and ashamed and deeply self-reproachful one, but it’s really fucking late and you’re really fucking tired and your brain is doing that stupid thing where it decides to hyperfixate on something specifically because you don’t want to think about it, and you rationalize, with a dull pang of guilt, that you might as well just— get it over with. Give up and give in and then get some fucking sleep and be entirely back to normal tomorrow and never have to think about or address any of it ever again.

You shift again, onto your back, and you squirm your way deeper under the coverlet until it’s up around your shoulders and shove your underwear down with the heel of your palm and you ignore the visceral stab of something like shame if shame had fucking teeth that burns in your belly at just how wet you already are, your fingers slipping and sliding and sticky and rubbing light little circles over your clit.

You stop trying to fight that part of your brain that’s insisting on thinking about it.

His reflexes, they’re so much faster than your own, so inhumanly fast that it sometimes feels supernatural; the things he could do to you, you think, helplessly, how strong he is, how he could probably move your whole body like you weigh nothing at all, how he could keep you from moving, and it wouldn’t even be hard. You think about the shadow of perpetual stubble on his cheeks and jaw and how it might feel, coarse and prickly and rasping against the corners of your mouth or the spot where your neck meets the slope of your shoulder or the sensitive insides of your thighs, and then you think about the sound he sometimes makes, the sharp little exhale of breath, an almost-laugh, imagining it in a wildly different context–

Some kind of awful traitorous little whine of a noise almost escapes, the pressure building behind your voice box, but you crush it into silence instead, pressing the flat of your forearm across your mouth, the muscles in your thighs already starting to twitch and tighten and that pressure in your belly rising way too fucking fast.

You think about his face twisting up and going tense and his eyes screwed shut so tight the little muscles around them tremble with the effort, and you think about the all of a handful of times you’ve ever heard his voice shake. Heard it crack. You think of his fingers winding in your hair and his hand tightening into a fist and how the muscles and tendons there would bunch and flex and the skin stretched across his knuckles would turn pale and taut and bloodless, his expression going finally, blissfully fucking slack, images your brain conjures with a terrifying degree of accuracy because you’ve seen all of this from him already. You know what it looks like, in person, up close, you know what he looks like and what he sounds like and you even know the smell of what must be his aftershave or maybe his cologne, warm and woodsy and a little bit sweet, and it’s so easy to take those memories and separate the details out and rearrange them into something else, a horribly vivid fantasy.

You think about standing on the first step of your apartment complex and looking at him and how he’d said your name.

It takes you by surprise, when you come, how easily you do, quick and sweet and warm and shamefully satisfying, a shockwave of heat that ripples out through all of your limbs and shivers down your spine and pulses in the fibers of your muscles, constricting your breathing and forcing your heels to dig divots into the mattress and your thighs to close up around your hand and a single muffled shuddering sound to finally break the silence you’d imposed on your vocal cords and escape from your open mouth.

Outside your window, the fire escape creaks, like maybe there’d been a sharp gust of wind through the alley where the apartment complex dumpsters are lined. That’s the first thing that registers, as your body relaxes and your breathing steadies and slows and your brain reorients around things that are— real. The sound of swaying metal. Your darkened bedroom. The faint sheen of sweat you can feel starting in the dips of your collarbones. The haze of perpetual city light leaking in from outside, a dim, slanted rectangle of it cutting across the floor under the window, your curtains not quite drawn all the way shut. Exhaustion hits like a fucking freight train; your eyelids are heavy and your pulse is slowing and your limbs feel warm and weighed down like molten lead and your brain is, thankfully, finally, silent.

You hear it again, right before you drift off; the creaking outside. And maybe there’s a shadow, one that cuts across that block of gray-blue light on the floor, as quick and as sure as a knife— but maybe there isn’t. Maybe you’re already asleep. Already dreaming.

This time, you’re down on the street again, walking from the other direction. Not like you’re coming home from work, but maybe the grocery store or a friend’s or the park that overlooks the East River, or something. From this way, you can see your bedroom window; you can see the fire escape, too, a spindly, narrow set of iron staircases affixed to the side, painted black by the landlord a few months back to disguise how it’s all rusted to shit. It’s wrong, though, the whole thing is twisted and mangled like a broken spine— like somebody had torn it straight off the building in places, grabbed some part and pulled until the railing bent and the stairs warped and the brackets ripped right out from where they’d been cemented into the wall.

When you wake up the next morning, it’s deceptively easy to make yourself believe you had just gone to bed at midnight and stayed asleep straight through until your alarm had gone off.

That all of it had just been part of that strange, surreal dream.

Passionfruit is another South American native, about the size of a kiwi, maybe a little smaller; the rind on the outside is this mottled kind of purple color, and the edible insides are soft and jelly-like and weird-looking.

“I had to go all the way to Whole Foods on Houston just to find something new,” Bucky’s telling you– complaining, from the sound of it, but from his face and the curve of his mouth you can tell he doesn’t really mind– dragging a plastic spoon around the edge of the peel. He’d brought two, split the first one in half with the knife you’d bought him for his birthday, and you’d grinned like an idiot, seeing it. “Took a train and everything. Wasted a whole hour.”

“Yeah, well, ” He’s not wearing the glove, not on his right; he usually doesn’t, anymore. You’re trying not to look at his hands, trying to make eye contact like you normally do, trying to even remember how much eye contact you normally make, trying to stop thinking about the tiny little two-foot table or his legs on either side of your own underneath it or the way that he’s staring at you. “There’s only so many fruits out there.”

You take a spoonful of passionfruit out of your half, focus on that. It’s less sweet than it looks; more tart, not exactly citrusy, but close. He’s still watching you, which isn’t unusual, but it’s making you feel weird, jittery and off-balance and unseasonably warm for mid-March.

“I’m gonna have to come up with a whole new gimmick pretty soon,” you say, just to fill the quiet. Just teasing. “Or else you’re gonna get bored of me.”

Bucky makes this flat and disbelieving sound in response, a scoff, dry and short and incredulous, like it’s really that bizarre, for you to even suggest it. Even as a joke.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, sarcasm evident, and then something else about the store, something he’d seen maybe for next week. But you’re not paying attention, just watching him, that warm thing in your belly again, the one that feels like some terrible and badly-kept secret.

The one that just keeps getting harder to ignore.

There really aren’t that many things left; you hadn’t been kidding about that.

Persimmons, most of which are imported from Japan. One of the men in my unit was Japanese, Bucky says, picking out the blood-red seeds with the point of his knife, From San Francisco, Jim Morita. He was a funny guy. Lychee, native to China, the first thing that he dislikes, people eat these things? tastes like— fancy soap, and then figs, something else he’d had back in the ‘40s, when they’d be in season down in California. Those you eat only after carefully inspecting the inside, telling him, you know wasps lay eggs in these things, right? And, no, he did not know that, and I didn’t really want to, either, but thanks, dunno if I’ll ever be able to eat ‘em again, that’s– gross.

“When I was maybe about nineteen,” he says after that, some rainy day in mid-April, the sky still not quite black even after eight, the pavement slick and dark and reflecting back shards of white and yellow from the streetlights turning on above it. “There was this wasp’s nest outside my bedroom window. Steve’d just moved in when his mom died, and he’s– well, he was– real allergic to bee stings, right?”

He pauses, finishes his coffee. The way the light is, right now, the blue twilight from outside and the artificially bright gold from the coffee shop— he looks—

You swallow, glance away.

“Anyway,” Bucky continues, setting the cup down, “Anyway, I was all worried he’d get stung by these things so bad he might really die, or somethin’, so I made him stay inside and went out with a whole three layers of clothes on, a slingshot, and a trash can. Still got stung seventeen times. Supposed to go on a date that weekend– she bailed on me, ‘cause my face was so swollen up.”

You lose the fight to not laugh somewhere long before he finishes; he gets as close to smiling as you’ve seen since his birthday, watching you fold into yourself, giggling.

“Oh, yeah?” he says, “What’s so funny, huh?”

You are, you want to tell him, you’re funny and I like you a lot and you’re probably my favorite part of this stupid fucking job.

“Nothing,” you say, ducking your head with a grin, “Nothing, just– you know people who are allergic to bee stings aren’t usually allergic to wasps, right?”

He blinks at you, and then makes some exasperated noise and leans back in his chair and throws up his hands, like he’s annoyed, except for the corners of his mouth twitching higher. “Yeah, well, how was I supposed to know that? It was the thirties, doll, not like there was the internet.”

And there it is again, like an echo, like maybe it’s really 1941 again and he hasn’t gone off to war yet and he’s just a few years older than you, some twenty-seven-year-old playboy from back before the Playboy magazine had even been founded. You’re strangely endeared by it, and then even more by the fact that he’s not that at all, that it’d come from the mouth of someone older and stranger, who’d been through hell and back in some haphazard approximation of a decade spread out over almost a whole century and come out of it still the same, in a lot of ways, and different, in a lot of them, too.

He’s so stunned by what he’s said it doesn’t even matter that his reflexes are faster than yours multiple times over; he’s still just staring at you, struck dumb and unspeaking and frozen like a deer in headlights, by the time your brain has processed what’d happened.

“I like hearing you talk about it,” you say, smiling softly, “Sometimes you get so caught up it’s like– watching somebody travel in time.”

Bucky seems to relax at the realization that you’re not going to be weird about it. You won’t– you’re not even going to think about it in any amount of detail. Right now you are going to put it in a little box inside your head where you put all of the things about him that you don’t think about anywhere except the privacy of your room, in your own bed, staring up at the ceiling fan blades spinning listless and slow in the dark of the evening or the gray light of pre-dawn.

“That’s really just a nice way of saying you sound like a fucking geriatric,” you add, sidestepping all of those thoughts with a practiced ease and hiding your smile behind your coffee cup. “I bet the old ladies would love you down at the bingo hall.”

He shoots you this rueful look, “Yeah,” he says, self-deprecating, “Yeah, they probably would.”

It’s not that you forget, not really, the two sides to the coin, just that you stop thinking so much about the other one. You just get used to the weird things, and they all kind of fade into the background– the staring and the subconscious fidgeting with the knife and the way that Bucky moves, sometimes, so fast and so precise that it’s unsettling.

The warning. Lock your door. Windows, too.

He always says it. It starts to feel normal. He’s just worried about you, your safety. Hypervigilance, again. He’s a little bit paranoid, and you don’t blame him for that— how could you. It’s not his fault.

And you do remember to lock your door. You always do, you always had, even before he’d started reminding you. You have a routine, to wind down after a closing shift and go straight to bed; you get home and lock your door and hang up your keys, take a shower and brush your teeth and gor right to bed.

By the time you get to your bedroom, you’ve always forgotten about it completely— that he’d said to lock your window, too.

It’s not like he says it the exact same way every time. Sometimes he says remember to lock everything, other times don’t forget to lock up, sometimes he says lock your door, windows, too, always a little different.

Which is why you almost don’t notice, when what he says one night is;

“Really do lock them, this time. Your windows.”

Something flashes in his expression as soon as he’s said it. A flicker of realization, sharp and volatile and impossibly fast, and then his whole face does something you’ve never seen before– it hardens, and it shuts off, and it goes cold.

Your heartbeat pitches up in your chest until it feels like it’s beating in the hollow of your throat, fluttering there like bird’s wings, and your breath catches. It’s only the smallest amount, so little that you can barely hear it, but you know— somehow— that he can. That he notices. That he can tell. Even though his expression stays utterly empty, frozen still and serene like the unbroken surface of a deep, depthless lake— you just know. It’s something in the pit of your stomach, or the base of your spine, or maybe neither of those places, maybe starting in your hindbrain, that base and unthinking instinct that can sense the presence of a threat even before the rational parts of your consciousness have registered it. Whatever it is, it’s flooding your body with adrenaline, like somebody had pulled a fire alarm in a multi-story building, the warning siren wailing and the emergency lights flashing and the inhabitants all scattering towards the exit signs.

Except, in this analogy, you’re not the people, you think. You’re more like the building; stationary, unable to run.

“Okay,” you say, slow and small and strangely calm, “You always say that. Why?”

A muscle in his jaw tenses, but he doesn’t say a word. Just stands there, silent, like a statue, his eyes flat and cold and devoid of anything at all.

You think of a lot of things you haven’t in a while. The knife and the blood and the Winter Soldier.

Inside of you, something twists— something that, you think, might be fear.

(Something that isn’t.)

Your mind is racing. Your thoughts— they’re scattered and fragmentary and moving so fast you can’t hold onto them, connected by some subconscious thread of understanding that you can’t see.

What you can see, though, is how Bucky’s still looking at you, his eyes vacant and empty and his expression so lifeless he looks catatonic; it’s not like he’s forced himself into some impassive and impenetrable detachment as much as it looks like he’s torn out everything inside and crushed it into nothing, ground it into the dirt, anything he might think or feel. Left this emptied-out imitation of himself, like a shell. Like a skeleton. Like that very first time, the husk of the pomegranate, the wilted, waxy skin, with all of the red stripped clean—and it startles you, how vehemently some part of you reacts to it. Thinks, a little desperately; no. Please don’t do that. Please come back.

“Bucky,” you say, on purpose, after he’s been silent for a long time, careful to keep your voice soft; he flinches, a brief, slight thing that’s almost imperceptible, a fissure splitting across whatever facade he’s put on. Something inside of you clings to it, evidence that he’s still even there at all, that he hasn’t shut himself off from you completely.

He makes this low sound, and he finally moves, just a little, shifts his weight and drags his palm down the lower half of his face.

“I just want to know that you’re– safe,” he manages, his voice carefully flat, not really admitting to anything, not explicitly, but this weightless trembling shock of adrenaline pierces right through your belly, anyways.“That’s– that’s all.”

You swallow. Your throat feels tight, your chest, too, like your muscles have all constricted, like your lungs can’t expand fully. You’re suddenly aware of the sound of your own breathing, aware that something must be off about it, that it’s coming too fast or too shallow or just somehow wrong, because it feels like you’re not getting enough air. And maybe that explains it, the way that you feel right now, dizzy and breathless and strangely numb, like your brain is just– shut off. Or, no, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s the opposite, maybe it’s working so fast you can’t make sense of any of it, all of your thoughts blurring out into this long indecipherable stretch of white noise.

Maybe, you think, distantly, maybe you’re just– overreacting. Maybe you’re being paranoid. Maybe you’re overworked and overtired and all of this is just a very long, very strange list of uncanny coincidences.

(But also— maybe not.)

“But I’m not, like–” your voice cracks, and you have to clear your throat, force yourself to focus on steadying it when you continue, “You don’t think I’m– in danger, or anything, right?

Bucky opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

“No,” he says, his voice something worse than hoarse, like it’d been ripped to shreds, like you’d carved the word right out of his mouth.

He looks like he might say something else, but you cut him off before he can. The way that he seems right now– you’re afraid that if he speaks again it might be something terribly final. I shouldn’t, he’d said, once, and meant it like he should go, and not come back. Meant it like goodbye.

“Okay,” you blurt out, before you can even think; because, you realize, you don’t want that, you do not want that at all, and that matters to you much more than whatever may or may not be happening right now. You don’t want him to leave and you don’t want things to change and you want everything to stay exactly the same as it’s been, and you would do anything– rationalize anything– to make sure of it, to have the assurance that he’s not going to just disappear, that you wouldn’t just wake up tomorrow to a world in which you'd never see him again. You’d do it in a heartbeat.

(You’ve done it already. Ignored things that, you think, maybe you shouldn’t have. Lots of them, that perpetual voice in the back of your head supplies– so, really, even if you are right, even if you’re not being paranoid, what’s one more?)

“Then it’s fine,” you tell him, forcing your voice to be as steady as you can make it. “It’s— I’ll lock it, I will, as soon as I get inside, and– and everything will be fine, okay? You won’t have to worry anymore.”

You glance down at your feet, the pavement, huscuffing your shoe against the sidewalk, toeing at a crushed, dirt-caked bottlecap wedged into a crack in the asphalt, just to give yourself an outlet for your nerves. Waiting for him to say— anything.

He doesn’t say a word.

“I gotta go to bed, it’s pretty late,” you say, after a while. You look back up at him. You wonder if he’d even taken his eyes off you at all. “I’ll—I’ll see you next week, though?”

His face twists up, just for a second, his brow raising, furrowing in, his eyes gone wide and round and stricken, before he seems to notice the shift in his expression and forces it to smoothen out again. “If— if you still do,” he says, “Then— I’ll— yeah.”

He starts saying something else, but you say, “I do,” before he’s even got the first syllable out.

He stares at you for a long moment before he responds, and it takes everything you have to hold his gaze, not to blink or flinch or look away.

Maybe you should, you think.

Maybe you should have been doing that the whole time.

At night, you replay everything, alone in your bedroom. In the absence of that nervous adrenaline you’d felt down on the street, it all kind of seems silly. Bucky knows you; he knows that you’re a terminal procrastinator and he knows that you’re always really tired after work and he knows that you never really took it seriously, the thing with the windows. It’s not so outlandish to think he’d just– guessed, and guessed right, and then felt bad about having anxiety, the way he, historically, feels bad about ever having any kind of visible emotion that’s considered less-than-palatable. And all of the things about his behavior that your brain had taken as evidence otherwise, it had been so subtle that you could barely be certain that there’d been anything there at all. He gives you so little to go off of, it’s like it renders your rational mind utterly useless, the scraps of information you feel like you have to fight to even get in the first place arranging themselves into absolutely nothing.

All you have, then, is your gut. Your instinct.

You glance over at the window. The curtain is open, and you can see the moon between the silhouettes of the buildings across the street, hanging pearlescent and full against the backdrop of the night, like the globe of an eye. Milky and opaque and sightless. Blind.

You really should lock it.

Yeah, you think, yeah, you probably should. But– just because you’d promised. Tomorrow you’ll do that, before you go to work, and then Bucky won’t have to worry anymore, and everything will be fine.

You tell yourself this, firmly, like that will make it true.

Everything will be fine.

In your dream, the eye of the moon in the window has a pupil, endless and blacker than the night sky, blown out so wide the iris around it is just this slender, paper-thin ring of color.

Blue.

You wake up in the middle of the night with a start, your blanket kicked down into a twisted heap at the foot of your bed, your bare legs and the stretch of your exposed stomach where your shirt had ridden up in your sleep staring back at you accusingly, every inch of your skin burning up and running hot like you’re fighting a fever. You’d fallen asleep without getting up to close the curtain, something you normally do in the spring and summer when the sun rises before you wake up; you tell yourself it’s just that you’re not in the habit yet, haven’t gotten used to needing to bother, because it’d been winter. But it’s the middle of the night and your body temperature feels like it’s skyrocketing and your pulse is so loud in your ears you can hear it, and when you try to lie to yourself it’s like your brain just won’t let you.

You’re shaking, you realize.

You’re not even a little bit cold.

You force yourself up out of bed on unsteady feet and you move to the window and you don’t lock it, you don’t even think to, but you do, shamefully, draw the curtains closed.

When you lay back flat in your bed you pull up your blanket, even though your skin is sticky and glinting with a faint sheen of sweat. You draw it up over your whole body, your head, too, and only when it’s covering you completely do you finally slip your fingers past the elastic of your underwear. The thoughts rush back again and you fall right into them, his name in your mouth; even if you can’t quite bring yourself to say it aloud, just holding the silent shape of it on your tongue and so close to your teeth, feels like this terrible, bloody secret—Bucky. Bucky. Bucky—

You come quickly, so quickly, well before the air starts to feel thin, but you still gasp for a breath when you throw off the blanket after, like you’d been suffocating. You force your lungs to expand out far past what feels natural, filling them until your chest starts to burn and then holding it for as long as you can.

You exhale, horribly unsteady, and draw in another, slower breath–

There’s a sound, from outside, like something scraping against brick, and your breathing— it catches, so hard you nearly choke on it.

You burrow deeper into your blanket, trembling, your whole body alight with adrenaline and your brain telling you that you’re being paranoid and something deeper telling you– or wishing, hoping, which is maybe even worse– that you’re not. That it’s–

You can’t bring yourself to think it, not even in the privacy of your own head, but you don’t even have to. Whatever brief and shallow feeling of satisfaction you’d felt– it’s already gone, like it’s evaporated, and that feverish, trembling warmth has flooded right back.

You think you might be afraid of Bucky Barnes. You’re pretty sure you should be.

(You know, though, deep down– you know you’re not.)

#bucky barnes x reader #fic; drops of blood #please tell me why this is going to finish at like 4 chapters/45k #HOWWWW!#it does not feel that long when I'm writing it

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