#the way tom's voice breaks as he says he has things to do [what things. will i find out later.] and the deal and!!

[gregoftom]

pretty sure i’ve seen romance movies with scenes like this

[fatesundress]

⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless. 

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end. 

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —” 

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

[mrsdarkandyandere7]

Regret

Pairing: DarkTom Riddle x (female) Reader

▶ This is a yandere/dark work and it may contain triggering content so please READ THE WARNINGS before. Do not read if minor.

More at Masterlist

SUMMARY: Lying is a flaw that Tom doesn’t appreciate.

WARNINGS: Toxic relationship.

AN: Please, reblog and give me feedback.

Dedicating this to @insectgf cause she's Tom's no.1 fan 😋

--

You nervously wring your hands as you peer around, eyes searching for movement near the dimly lit dungeon entrance.

The way to the Slytherin Common Room.

You've been waiting for just over half an hour, anxiety building up and infesting your thoughts while you hold vigil in hopes of finding Tom.

You should have never behaved like that. An act of pure stupidity and recklessness, that’s what it was.

Going to Hogsmeade in the company of a few girls of your dorm.

It was a rare occasion, something you never did before, and you had only relented after much begging and convincing from the girls. A dumb decision – one that led to a dreadful aftermath.

You should’ve known better. All of your joyful chatter and laughter at The Three Broomsticks immediately ceasing once you spotted the distinct lean figure of Tom seated in a distant table, surrounded by his friends, his brown-eyes fixed on you.

No surprise or shock in his gaze, only cold anger irradiating from his handsome features.

Something almost comprehensible given how you had explicitly told him you’d be spending all afternoon in your dorm, offering the poor excuse of a headache.  

And now here you are. Scared, shaking like a leaf, waiting for the chance to apologize and beg for forgiveness.  

You're so pathetic.

The time drags by, and you lose track, feeling as if you’ve been waiting for an eternity. But your efforts pay off when the door opens, revealing Tom.

Your heart leaps at the sight and fear clouds your mind when he offers you nothing but a quick murderous scowl that immediately turns into one of composed indifference before walking away past you, barely acknowledging your presence.

You gulp, hurrying after him as he walks with long strides through the empty corridors.

“Tom?”

“Tom…please.”

The boy ignores your numerous calls, but you keep your hasty pace even when it has you short breathed as Tom quickly charges through the stairways and halls.

“Tom, just listen to me.”

“And why should I listen to anything you spew out of that filthy mouth of yours?" his snarl scares you as he suddenly turns. "It appears that lies and deception is all I can expect from you.”

You wince, barely opening your lips before Tom walks away, choosing to stare blankly at a wall.

The confusion in your mind dissipates as a large door materializes on the door and only then you realize that you’ve reached the 7th floor.

The Room of Requirement.

You hesitate for a moment but proceed to follow Tom as he opens the door with a loud bang. Your existence remains ignored and you take a few small steps inside the room, unsure of how to bring Tom’s attention.

“Tom?”

For a moment, the possibility of Tom disregarding you again was present, and you fearfully awaited as the seconds went by without a proper reaction from Tom.

He inhaled sharply, fingers tightening before he relaxed.

But when he finally turned to face you, you almost wished he hadn’t.

The venom that darkened his face had your heart faltering, his eyes narrowing into thin slits that held nothing but anger and frustration. He almost looked like a snake.

You felt yourself turning smaller at the sight, suddenly unsure of how to speak.

“I-“

“Trust is a rather curious thing.” he says with his voice oddly serene, “An invisible yet very powerful bond, one that defines the nature of one’s relationship. That’s how I perceive it.”

“So, tell me. How many times?”

You look at him, confused.

“Tom-“

“How many times did you break my trust?” he repeats himself, brows contorting with annoyance, “How many times did you sneak behind my back to meet up with those filthy mudbloods?”

“I- Only this time.” you tearfully admit, lowering your gaze to the floor as Tom angrily hisses something in that strange snake language of his. “I swear, Tom. I-I’m so sorry.”

“Just this once? And why should I believe your unreliable words? You seem to be very determined in breaking my trust, so tell me why should I consider any of what you say to be true?”

Your lips shake when you bring yourself to look at Tom, tears burning in your eyes.

“But, …” a minuscule sob cuts you off, much to Tom’s irritation, “it is true. It was only this once, Tom, I swear on my life! I never lied to you before, I promise.”

“I’m so sorry, Tom, I really am!”

The intent with which he examines your pitiful face sets you on edge, heart plummeting against your ribs as you don’t dare to say a word.

“Prove it.”

“Prove wha-“

“Prove me that you won’t repeat this act of disloyalty. Assure me how sorry you are.” the way his eyes glint with a new cruel motivation has a shudder running down your body, aware that nothing good will come out of his proposition.

“Perform the Cruciatus Curse. On yourself.” his lips curl at your bewilderment, clearly enjoying taunting you.

This time, the tears overflow and slide down on your face pitifully and you look at Tom, silently begging him with your eyes.

But there’s no empathy in his face. Only a vile purpose.

“Go on, do it.” he takes a step forward, his tone borderline threatening despite how lightly he speaks. “You can either punish yourself or I’ll do it for you.”

“Because I assure you that in the end, you will suffer.”

[kisses4kaia]

in my feelings - tommy shelby

summary; you hate tommy shelby. tommy shelby hates you. from the way he walks to the way he talks, you hate him. and from the same things, he hates you, too. infinitely. imagine your dread when you are put in a position where you are forced to gain thomas’ help.

warnings; smut, angst, enemies to lovers, angry sex, rough sex, piv, and all around dirty fucking filthhhh, oh yeah and a shit tom of cursing☺️

a/n; angsty enemy’s to lovers with tommy shelby?? me thinks yes

PART TWO OUT NOW -

as your father tells you that he has to sell the farm you grew up on, the soil that held so many memories, the land that raised you to be the woman you are today, your heart broke into a million pieces.

because, see, without the land, there would be no places for your horses or other beloved animals to go, meaning you would have to sell them, too.

when the tears began taking a seemingly permanent residency in your eyes, he pulls you into a hug. “no, no, there has to be another way!”

and as the tears stained your fathers coat, he spoke. “there is one thing,”

and that is exactly how you got here. sat across from your mortal enemy since your schoolgirl days, tommy shelby, in his office.

he had that stupid, smug, annoyingly hot, smirk on his face.

“so, you’re telling me, that you need to marry me,” he practically laughed in your face.

“i don’t need to marry you, the farm does. if we get married, then a portion of your income goes to my family. and then, after saving enough, if everything goes right, we can get divorced and we never have to speak again.” you explained.

he nodded. “okay. say i do accept this outrageous proposal, what’s in it for me?”

you figured he may ask that. “my late mothers brother is the chief of police in birmingham. i can make a few calls, get them on your payroll, only without the pay.”

“but i am paying, aren’t i?” he furrowed his eyebrows and nodded once, making a statement more than a question.

he’s a smart man, so you figured he may say that, too. and here came the most humiliating part.

with a sigh, you spoke. “as my husband, you can… have me whenever you want,” you memorized what you were going to say earlier when it came to this, and only spoke from that script.

your voice was low, static, the humiliation of having any emotion in your voice would be too unbearable.

you honestly couldn’t believe the words coming out of your mouth and apparently, neither could tommy.

you weren’t so bothered by the prospect of fucking thomas, as much as you hated to admit it. it was just knowing that he would definitely hold it over you to the worlds end.

“you’re so desperate to save this farm, that you would let me fuck you whenever i want, however i want? if i pay you? you do realize that’s the definition of whoring?” he was genuinely amused at your proposition.

you scoffed, in disbelief kf his immaturity. “yes, i do realize, thomas. and yes, i really am desperate,”

he seemed to be in thought for a moment before speaking. “and what makes you think i want to fuck you? you’re really so narcissistic?”

you genuinely laughed at this. “you’re one to talk about narcissistic. and you’ll fuck just about anything that moves, i can’t imagine i’d be much of an exception,”

thomas chuckled lowly at this, his face seemingly challenging you. you wouldn’t let yourself be bullied, so you straightened your posture and finally asked. “so?” your voice was flat, almost disinterested.

he stared at your face for a few moments, like he was trying to break past your stoned demeanor.

“alright. we have a deal.” he confirmed. you nodded, fighting back happy tears.

as he held his hand out to shake, you glanced at it once with a silent decline.

“what, you’re ok with letting me fuck you like a whore whenever i want but you don’t want to shake my hand?” he stood, and because you wouldn’t let him have power over you- ironically enough- you stood, too.

“i didn’t realize you were so sensitive, shelby,” you spoke up.

“and i didn’t realize you were so headstrong, shelby,” he enunciated the last word, letting the epiphany set in for you.

oh god, you were going to be a shelby. for at least a few months, you were going to be a shelby.

you tried to make peace with the fact, but the it was just gnawing at you that all of this was plain unfair.

nonetheless, you shook his hand.

—

“what’s she doing here?” arthur’s thick accent sounded throughout the room.

tommy decided it’d be best for you to be there when he informed his family of the arrangement.

“well, brother. that is because she is my soon-to-be wife,” he cut straight to the chase and your eyes widened at his directness

polly nearly spat out her tea, john bursted out laughing, and the whole room was generally in an uproar.

ada, too, was puzzled, but quickly sedated the energy in the room with a loud “shut the fuck up and listen to the man!”

you were sat on a chair next to thomas’ standing body, not speaking.

“you two are getting married? you two? has hell frozen over? can pigs now fly?” john joked, but was serious in his disbelief. and he was right to. it wasn’t a secret that…

it all started in year nine. tommy was a 10th year and obnoxiously ‘cool’. he would hang out with the secondary school boys, sleep with their sisters, and torture anyone who’d let him, and most people did.

he was smart, but so were you, and you would not let him.

you were the only 9th year at the top of a predominantly year 10 class, tommy being a close second.

see, the shelby boy wasn’t used to anybody being better than him in any sense, but you made him get used to it.

he couldn’t stand you. from your way-too-short plaid skirts, to the way your hand would shoot up at every question asked.

he hated how he couldn’t tear his eyes away from you in class when you had your hair tied up in a pretty ponytail, gnawing on the eraser of your pencil, your eyebrows twisting in confusion when you couldn’t figure out an answer on a test.

just looking so innocent.

and most of all, he hated the nights he spent with his hand wrapped around his aching cock, whispering your name to himself like a prayer until he came hot strings of cum all over his heavy chest.

tommy rolled his eyes at his family’s immaturity. “it’s an arrangement. she needs money, and her uncle is the chief of police. we can take the coppers off our payroll,”

he left out a small detail but you weren’t complaining.

“after a few months, we’ll get a divorce and we can forget we ever crossed paths.” you spoke for the first time in the meeting.

the transaction seemed simple enough to most people in the room, and they all seemed to accept it.

“anyone have a problem with it? speak now or forever hold your peace,” he called out to the room, waiting for a potential objection.

and one never came. “alright, family meeting adjourned,” tommy waved everyone out of the room.

—

the weeks leading up to the wedding felt like they went on forever.

polly dragged you by your wrist to what seemed like a million different modistes and boutiques, dress shops and spas.

it was exhausting, but in bad there is good.

ada became your closest friend. she was the only person who knew about the other condition to you and tommy’s matrimony.

you were friends even as schoolgirls, despite you and thomas’ disdain for each other.

and now she was your best friend, and you felt inclined to make her your maid of honor.

the hours before the wedding were the worst of it. at least six women were in the room at all time, scrutinizing you to the moon and to saturn. they studied and judged every crevice and line on your face and body.

after being poked and prodded at for forever, it was finally time to walk down the aisle and see your soon-to-be husband.

you were in an over the top, yet elegant gown, the purest color of white you’d ever seen, with a sheer veil covering your face.

you did look quite beautiful, you thought as you looked in the mirror. but you couldn’t help but begin to cry.

you cried because you thought the day you’d see yourself in white would be under much different circumstances. you wanted to marry someone you loved, and for that someone to love you, too. and lord knows, thomas shelby did not love you.

even despite your own feelings for him.

ada came up from behind you in the floor mirror and rested her head upon your shoulder. “you look beautiful,” she spoke, noticing, yet disregarding your tears.

“thank you,” you sniffled. “it will all be okay. i spoke to tommy, he’ll treat you well, i promise,”

her words provided some much needed console to you. “thank you, addy. i wouldn’t have made it had you not been with me. thank you, and love you,” you turned to look at her face.

she just smiled and hugged you. “in less than an hour, we’ll officially be sisters. that should prove some motivation to get your ass down that aisle!” she exclaimed, already tugging on your arm to leave the room and enter the chapel.

you laughed and allowed her to pull you away, long since forgotten your woe.

—

“with the power invested in me, i now pronounce you man and wife. you may now kiss the bride!” the priest announced, signaling for you and tommy to get off of your knees and kiss.

as you both rose to your feet, thomas brought his face to yours in a seemingly disinterested kiss, it almost seemed practiced.

it caught you off guard, and caused a deep sadness in your belly, but you shut it down as ada, polly, esme, and all of the female shelby’s came to congratulate you.

you and your new husband were dragged outside to the car, destined for tommy’s estate, where festivities would begin.

the drive was short, and your patience was thinning, as you just wanted this all to be over.

you knew you were in for a long night as people began flooding into your new home.

and like every shelby-hosted event ever, an all-out rager-like party commenced.

thomas would not speak to you. unless, of course, somebody who was none the wiser to your contract would mention how in-love the two of you seemed. then he could not stop smiling at you, holding your waist tight, even sometimes kissing you.

you had never wanted to die more.

you must have drunk atleast eight glasses of champagne by the end of the night, just trying to get through it.

and that is how you spent the rest of the evening. you got through the first dance, you got through the kind old women talking about what an attractive couple you both made, and you got through seeing tommy flirt with other women at his own fucking wedding.

and at last, it finally came time for the party to end. you practically shoved people out of your door, ready to sleep in your no-doubtedly own bedroom.

you knew it was an arrangement, it was a tale as old as time, and yet you still couldn’t help but feel disappointed. nothing went the way you wanted, nothing. and at the end, all you had to show for it was a farm. it was actually kind of hilarious.

a maid hurriedly showed you where you’d be sleeping, and as you walked into the room, you realized it was indeed thomas’, with the way papers were stern all over the desk and the whiskey on the tray beside the bed.

she was gone before you could turn and ask any questions.

you groaned and sat down on the settee across the room from the bed, your dress making it impossible to see your feet as you tried to remove your heels.

your hair was next, pulling the many pins out of the intricate hairstyle.

you were almost out of this nightmare of a dress, before your zipper got stuck. “fuck,” you groaned.

“couldn’t wait for me before you started undressing?” your heard thomas’ deep voice from the door. he was teasing you, obviously, but you really weren’t in the mood for it.

“thomas, i’m tired. you try spending 8 hours in a dress of this size, then see if you want to tease me for trying to get out of it as soon as i can,” you quickly snapped back, and also quickly getting frustrated with the zipper.

he seemed to understand that you were not be messed with at the moment, so all he did was approach you, turn you around by your shoulders, and tug the zipper down until the dress pooled at your feet.

you hurriedly stepped out of it and sighed, feeling like the weight of the world was off of your shoulders.

“thank you, thomas,” you said contently, rubbing your shoulders, not realizing your compromising position.

you were half naked, only covered by your meticulously created and tailored white lingerie, and knee-high white socks.

apparently, thomas’ eyes could not force themselves to your face, because even as you realized his gawking and called him out for being so materialistic, he wasn’t seeming to follow what you were saying.

instead, all he did was walk over to you, place his hands on your waist like his life depended on it, and kissed you deeply, the kind of kissed you yearned for at the alter.

you almost got lost in it, before all the horrible memories of this past night came flooding in. you quickly pushed him away and slapped him right across his perfect cheekbones.

“fuck was that for?” he’s asked as if he was taken aback, yet made no effort to move away from you.

you scoffed with a laugh, but nothing was funny. “you know, i would be surprised had i not known you,”

“what are you talking about?” he seemed as though he was getting mad at you being mad, which you caught and fueled your anger further.

you got up in his face, sticking your finger in his chest and spoke condescendingly to him.

“you know, you could at least wait until after the fucking wedding to start to begin practically sticking your dick in every woman you see!”

“we never agreed on loyalty! that wasn’t part of our arrangement!” his voice began to increase in volume as well.

you glued your eyes to his piercingly blue ones and leaned closer to him. “i hate you, thomas shelby.” you whispered, yet your tone was anything but gentle.

“yeah? well, you can bet i hate you more,” he stood straighter, his height forcing to you look up at him.

the two of you stood there, waiting to see who would break eye contact first. he did, looking down at your lips, but just as quickly, he was right back onto your eyes.

“fuck it,” his thick accent almost growled, grabbing your face and smashing his lips unto yours.

this one was different from the one earlier. that one was a feigned love, a lust. this one was angry, hateful, and sultry.

oh, how you hated him, however his aggression intrigued you, making you kiss back even harder, forcing your tongue into his mouth.

your lips stayed connected as tommy walked you back to his desk.

your tongues fought for dominance and only disconnected for air. he fumbled with his belt before sliding off his jacket and removing his shirt.

he roughly pulled down your panties and unclipped your bra with one hand.

“jump,” he muttered into your mouth. you do so and he catches you, preceding to sit you on the desktop.

tommy runs his middle finger down your slit, collecting the embarrassing amount of wetness from you.

he chucked lowly before gripping your hips and lining his cock up with your entrance. “hate me, huh? i don’t think this cunt quite agrees with you,” he teased, but you were quick to rebuttal.

“i don’t think your dick agrees with your supposed hatred for me, either,” and you were right, his cock was painfully hard.

he suddenly decides he’s tired of teasing and pushes his full cock into you, bottoming out when he feels his tip prod at your gummy wall.

a choked gasp was emitted from you, and it sounded like heaven to thomas. he groaned as he pulled out almost all the way, then slammed into you again.

his speed is relentless, showing no mercy for your unprepared pussy. as much as you wanted to, you couldn’t deny how good it felt.

you wrapped you legs around his hips and tangled your hands in his hair before whispering in his ear, “i fucking hate you, hate you so fucking much,”

his growls were animalistic as his thrusts became more determined. “fuck you,” tommy gritted, right before a long since held in moan fell from his lips.

as much as you hated to admit it, you found your orgasm building in your stomach, the heat becoming unbearable.

“oh, shit, i’m gonna cum, oh my god,” you moaned loudly, your pussy tightening around him.

your release came to you in a hot white flash, your back arching impossibly more, your chest pressing against his, and you were on the very edge of the desk now.

a string of curse words and moans flowed from your lips like chords from a song tommy never wanted to end.

you whined at the sensitivity of your cunt, tommy not ever slowing down. “sh, sh, shhh. i know, i know, doll. i’m almost there, just hold on a little longer,”

soon, his hips met yours in one final, deep, long, thrust as he released bands of warm hot cum into you.

“fuck me, y/n,” he let out an exasperated laugh as he pulled out of you, watching the both of yours ecstasy pour from your abused hole.

“i believe i just did, thomas.”

[lushaletta]

the lamb and her wolf / tom riddle

pairing: tom riddle x fem!reader

content: muggleborn!reader, tom is goin a lil mad

summary: have you fallen into the dark lord’s trap, or has he fallen into yours?

a/n: i wrote this at 4 in the morning so enjoy this stream of consciousness grumpy x sunshine esque tom riddle fanfiction or something.

⋆ ࣪.  ���⑅ ⋰˚ *.ﾟ .˳⁺⁎˚ ˚⁎⁺˳ . ༺ ˖࣪ ˖࣪ ∗

Tom is in a frenzy of sorts, he’s concluded.

Perhaps it is the sleepless nights and stressful days that cloud his weeks that are causing the weird feeling in his chest. Insomnia-induced hysteria.

There’s a flurry of thoughts swirling around his head recently. All with a common theme; you. The space in his brain that he typically reserved for Ancient Runes or Arithmancy was now composed of you, you, and only you.

It makes him sick to his stomach.

He’s unfocused. And he can’t be, because he’s supposed to be working on the secret that Salazar Slytherin hid in the deep crevices of Hogwarts some years ago.

His fingers tap on the book that he can’t seem to pay attention to as he tries to make sense of this. The disgusting, awful, pleasant fondness he feels for you. For a Muggleborn girl no less.

The only solution to his problem is to kill you. It wouldn’t be hard, he thinks. You’re small and meek and all too trusting of him. Like a lamb to the slaughter.

You are a symbol of everything he despises. Joy. Innocence. You are of the same kind as his worthless father. So why is it that he can’t bring himself to end you? To end your time together? He’s done it before. He’s done it plenty of times and without a second thought.

“Tom!” your horrible, beautiful voice cheers, snapping him out of his thoughts. Oh, great, he thinks. You plague his mind and now you bedevil his reality.

“Hello,” he says after a beat.

You ignore his bothered expression and smile. “I’ve brought snacks! You do like mince pie, don’t you?” He nods weakly. “Good, because my mam’s had some sent. She’s trying out a new recipe. Secret ingredient or something like that. I’m sure you haven’t eaten yet, with your inane study habits, I mean, do you ever have breaks?” You ramble on and he listens with fascination. How could you be talking to him so casually? So endearingly?

You’re far from done. “It doesn’t matter, though. You’ll have a break now. Go on, put your book away, would you?” He does as told. He’s not sure why. You take a seat at his table, fumbling with the paper bag you’ve brought. “Aha! Mince pie! One for each of us. Tell me if you like it, I’ll have Mam send some more. She’d be delighted.”

It’s at this point, where he’s chewing on warm minced pie and watching you do the same, nodding contentedly, that he wonders which life decisions he’d made led up to this. He’s the Dark Lord. A name that the world will soon fear. If all goes to plan, you’ll be reading in terror of all the vile things he’s done in the paper. You’ll be afraid of him, and he can’t help dread it. He dreads the thought of your heartbroken eyes as you realise what a wicked person you’d extended your kindness to.

It’s the frenzy again. What is he even thinking? He dreaded nothing. He looked at his plans with excitement.

“Tom? Hellooo,” you say, singsongingly. He didn’t even realise you’d been speaking. He glances up at you and imagines what you’d think of him once the truth comes out.

“Yes?”

“What do you think? About the pie, I mean.”

He clears his throat, fingers gripping the armrest of his seat. “Good. It’s good.” That draws another pretty smile out of you and he really hates the way it made him feel. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome! Also, Tommy,” He quirks his brow. The nickname was a slip of the tongue. You’d never used it and it made you nervous, but he didn’t seem to mind so much. “Are you busy later? I need some help with Transfiguration.”

He’s always busy. Well, he should be. He’s been slacking recently, too preoccupied with your freshly baked desserts and strawberry-smelling hair.

“I could make time for that,” he says decidedly.

Idiot. Idiot, idiot, idiot.

You’re immediately on your feet, giddy like how he’d imagine a child to be upon receiving candy. “Thank you! Oh, you’re a lifesaver, truly!” you say, and suddenly a kiss is planted on his cheek.

A full stop. His world pauses and spins on its axis. Your lips felt good. Bad.

What an evil, evil wolf he was.

[tkaulitzlvr]

OUT OF LOVE - T. KAULITZ

synopsis: once tom realises how much your relationship has lost the love within it because of the distance he has put between you both, it’s his job to make it up to you.

content: angst to smut.

a/n: my first post!! i hope you all enjoy!

lately, tom and i's relationship has hit a bump in the road. each conversation lit an already short fuse within the both of us, the smallest of words capable of creating an unnecessary yet very real dispute that would leave us silent for hours, and in the worst of cases not talking for days. but it wasn't just the things we said, it was whatever we didn't say, too. physical touch was usually a huge part of our relationship, but now, i couldn't remember the last time that i had properly kissed him. it had gotten to the point where we slept on different sides of the bed, refusing to lay in eachother's embrace as we usually would.

as each day dragged on, feeling like tom and i were moving further away from eachother, i failed to even remember how we ended up this way in the first place. we had a perfect relationship, filled with love and trust, those the foundation of what made us, us. everyone knew that we loved eachother, we were the 'it couple'. whilst we had small disputes just as every couple did, it had never reached this point - yet it showed no sign of stopping.

which is why it brought me no surprise that tom had already become irritated from my single question, asking him where he'd been after returning home late yet again, this becoming a habitual occurrence since the beginning of whatever our distance could be called.

"look, i was just out, okay? what is this a fucking interrogation?" tom fires out, frustration laced in his tone as he throws his keys on the table.

"im sorry for worrying about my boyfriend! i just wont give a shit next time, yeah?" i shoot back, confused on why he acts this way every time i start a simple conversation.

"yeah that'd be great, thanks." he mumbles sarcastically, scoffing and sinking into the sofa, flicking through the channels on the tv displayed infront of him.

"are you fucking kidding me tom?" i utter out, in complete disbelief of his childishness.

despite the clear anger in my voice, he stays silent, shaking his head slightly and continuing to look through the channels on the tv, this only fuelling my anger.

"can you listen to me for fucks sake?" my voice begins to raise as my patience is slowly wearing thin. i walk over to the tv, blocking his view and forcing him to look up at me, his eyes cold, an unrecognisable glare within them in place of the usual love that emits from them whenever our gazes meet. 

"what?" he sighs, rubbing his forehead with his thumb and pointer finger.

"i'd appreciate it if you fucking listened to me, just for one second! i'm tired of sitting here alone, every night, wondering where the fuck you are because you're my boyfriend but i know nothing about you! i never get a text, a call, nothing! instead you come home at god knows what time, and act as if i don't exist. fuck tom, you won't even cuddle me in bed anymore." my voice begins to trail off, tears beginning to cloud my vision, my tongue instinctively hitting the roof of my mouth to stop them from falling.

he stays silent, breaking his eyes away from mine and staring into his lap, his fingers playing with the material of his jeans.

"do you even love me anymore?" i ask, genuinely questioning if he feels the same way he did when we first met, the man that fell in love with me no longer in front of me.

"what? of course i fucking love you. what kind of question is that?" his head shoots upwards, his eyebrows threading together as if i have asked the most ridiculous question, though it was one nagging on my mind.

"really? it doesn't seem like it." i reply, shaking my head and biting my lip, the tears now spilling beyond my control.

"i'm going to bed." i mumble, not waiting for a response from tom as i head for our shared bedroom. the sheets feel cold as i allow them to envelop me, the warmth that i would feel from tom's embrace lost, leaving me empty. it is impossible to fall asleep, my body laid on its side facing away from the door and staring motionless at the wall, longing to be in his arms, safe and content, free of the gut-wrenching realisation that our relationship is not the same as it was.

the door slowly creaks open after a while, my eyes quickly flicking shut as i pretend to be asleep, not keen on the idea of speaking to tom, not whilst his mind is acting so irrationally, mine sensitive enough that any argument would break down my already crumbling walls. i hear the bed dip beside me, tom laying flat on his back, whilst i stay put, not daring to look at him, instead keeping my back to him. the distance between us speaks volumes, tension reaching an all time high.

after a few minutes, the bed creaks, indicating that tom is moving from his initial position. as he has done for the past nights, i expect him to shuffle to the edge of the bed, increasing our already far proximity and confirming the fact that he cannot bare the thought of being near me.

however, much to my disbelief, i feel an arm droop around my waist from behind, tom's hand gently touching my stomach as he tests the waters, clearly thinking that i am deep in sleep. deciding to stay still, my eyes remain closed, accepting this small act of affection, for it is all i have experienced in the past weeks. but, to my surprise, he doesn't stop there.

he moves closer, his chest now flush against my back, pulling me tighter into him as i feel his uncertain breathing against the nape of my neck. my breath instinctively hitches at his unexpected actions, alerting him of my consciousness.

"baby?" he whispers into the dark room, not moving as he awaits my response.

"hm?" i mutter, unsure of what to say, not intending to reveal the fact that i was in fact awake, my cover completely blown as i lay, small and vulnerable, beside him, his body against me for the first time in forever. the uncertainty of what his response will be creates a sickly feeling in my chest. he could want to fight, to let out the last of his anger from our unfinished argument. or, he could want to fix things, to be the boyfriend he used to be. and right now, my mind was going with the first option, assuming the worst and bracing myself for more of his harsh words.

"we need to talk." he speaks, his breath fanning against my neck with each word.

i knew that he was right, my heart aching slightly as the possibility of resolving whatever the fuck we have become finally starts to feel real, not just something that i have longed for.

refusing to face him, i slowly nod my head, awaiting his response, the sound of our steady breathing the only thing to be heard in the silent room.

"i'm so sorry baby." he speaks, slowly and sincerely, his hand that is draped over my stomach beginning to slowly caress the bare skin there, comforting me in the best way. tears begin to silently roll down my cheeks as i struggle to find the right words to say.

he takes my silence as a chance to continue. "what happened to us my love, hm?" he begins, sighing slowly and increasing his hold on me, the pet name causing my heart to swell, making me realise how much i truly missed his affection, wether it be verbal or physical - i just craved him.

short sniffles emit from my mouth, giving away my weakness faster than i would have preferred. tom quickly picks up on this, finally turning me to face him, our eyes meeting, his immediately softening once he takes in my state - eyes bloodshot, tears staining my cheeks, mouth curved into a frown.

"oh baby..." he trails off, taking his hand and beginning to wipe my tears away one by one, the other gently stroking my hair. i melt into his touch, allowing him to comfort me silently. "i can't carry on like this, i just- i need to be with you again, not just in a relationship with you, i want to actually feel close to you again."

he pours his heart out, all whilst wiping any loose tears that fell from my eyes, which never left his, the love in them beginning to flood back as i can slowly recognise the man i fell in love with.

"do you really think that i don't love you anymore?" he asks, guilt evident in his tone as he feels nothing but anger for making me doubt how he felt about me.

i try to find the right words, swallowing nervously. "you didn't want to be anywhere near me tom. i can't even remember the last time you told me that you loved me." uttering those words made me realise how bad things had really gotten. tom would tell me he loved me at every chance he got, never failing to remind me of how he felt. but looking back, those three words felt so foreign that my mind couldn't even remember when he had last uttered them. and the realisation hit him just as hard as it did me.

"oh meine liebe...i'm so sorry." he starts, now slowly kissing away each tear that stained my tinted cheeks, holding my face gently in his hands. "i love you. i love you so so much. never ever forget that, okay?"

i nod my head, swallowing the lump in my throat away. "i love you too."

a slight smile appears on his face, my hand reaching to his head as i pull it closer, playing with the loose braids there. tom takes advantage of our nearing proximity, grabbing my face and gently connecting his lips with mine. for the first time in days, our lips touched, immediately moulding together as if they had never been apart. he smiles into the kiss, moving his hands to my lower back, pulling me closer to him and embracing me, our lips never parting. the desire, the passion in which our lips collided reaffirming our love without the need for words, my body and soul slips further into his touch, reminding me just how much i missed intimate moments like this with him.

he slowly pulls away for air, his lips, now pink and swollen, flush against mine, foreheads touching. "i promise baby, that i'll never give up on us, no matter how hard it gets. i'll never stop loving you, ever."

deciding that actions speak louder than words, i reconnect our lips once more, with much more desire and hunger than the previous one. he picks up on this need, reciprocating it and pressing his lips so hard onto mine that my breathing becomes muffled and there is no option of pulling away - but in this moment, parting from him doesn't even cross my mind. his hand moves to my thigh, placing it over his and kneading the flesh roughly as we lay facing each other, a small whimper escaping my mouth at his actions. our lips fail to part, making up for the lost kisses that we had so desperately yearned for.

lust soon takes over the innocence, my need for him growing by the second as our kisses become harsher, his tongue entering my mouth, mine gladly reciprocating. "i love you." he whispers breathlessly against my lips, pulling away slowly and studying my face. his thumb tugs at my lip, his eyes never leaving mine as he drags it down the now plump skin at an agonisingly slow pace, until he releases my bottom lip, it quickly bouncing back into place, his thumb now slightly wet with my saliva.

"you're so beautiful." he whispers, caressing my cheeks, taking in every inch of me as if this is the first time he has seen me.

"i need you tom." i mutter, looking into his eyes with a glint of desperation, longing to feel him again, our distance meaning it has been so long since we have kissed like we just did, let alone fuck.

within seconds, his lips are back on mine, his body moving in one swift motion on top of me without breaking the kiss, hands clutching mine, mirroring the hunger i feel.

"then i'm all yours." he mutters against my lips, reattaching them and entering his tongue as i gladly accept, moaning slightly into the kiss, a small smirk appearing on his lips in response.

he pulls away, looking into my eyes before reaching for the hem of my t-shirt and whispering "can i?"

i slowly nod my head, the soft fabric being pulled off my body and somewhere on the floor, both tom and i too needy to care where. his eyes scan my body, a hint of adoration within his eyes, his hands reaching for my small lace bra, undoing the back and tossing it aside. he pauses, gazing down at me, drinking in my features, everything exposed to him. despite the look of awe on his face, insecurity takes over, and my hands instinctively cover my breasts, breaking eye contact from him.

tom quickly takes his hands, placing them over mine and moving them away so that he could see me once again. "don't cover yourself, you're so beautiful."

i hesitantly nod my head, moving to remove tom's shirt, his chiselled abs and torso now on display. refusing to break eye contact, my hand slowly runs down the skin, feeling every bump, every muscle there, his breathing hitching as i do so. it has been so long since i had felt his bare skin against mine that it almost didn't feel real, my being lost in pleasure despite us not taking anything further yet.

i soon become impatient, pulling his face downwards and kissing him once more, his hands reaching for my panties and slowly pulling them down, soon removing his boxers, leaving us completely naked.

he pulls away, staring into my eyes and positioning himself at my entrance. "are you sure my love?" he asks, searching my expression for any sense of doubt, hating the idea of forcing me to do anything.

"yes...just fuck me, please." i breathe out, craving the feeling i have missed so much.

he smiles slightly, before slowly sliding in, groaning as he does so, my walls clenching around him, not used to his size as it has been so long since we have last done this. once he is fully inside, he stops. "you okay baby? does it hurt?"

"no...move tom." i reply, and he slowly begins thrusting in and out of me at a steady pace, whines emitting from my mouth as my eyes squeeze shut. his head finds the crook of my neck, groaning into it and beginning to kiss the skin, sucking lightly and leaving marks whilst speeding up his pace.

"oh my god." he mutters into the skin, his hands running up and down my waist until they find a stable hold on my hips, thrusting easier whilst his thumbs caress me, slightly digging in, however the slight pain only fuels my fire, moans now escaping from my mouth.

"oh tom..." i trail off, hands raking down his back, pulling him downwards so our bodies our flush against each other, desperate to feel any part of him, to be closer, despite him literally being inside me.

"i love you so much." he groans out, taking my legs and wrapping them around his waist.

he continues to thrust in and out of me, his tip hitting my g-spot, and i cry out. "oh god, right there tom..."

"here baby?" he taunts, hitting the spot again, causing my eyes to roll to the back of my head. he abuses that spot, my stomach beginning to tighten as the familiar feeling soon takes over.

i clench around him, feeling my release creep closer and closer. "fuck schatz, do that again." he breathes out, and i tighten my walls again, a choked moan escaping his mouth.

"i'm close." he manages to let out, speeding up his pace and capturing my lips into a kiss, moaning into my mouth. i struggle to kiss back, holding back sounds of pleasure each time he thrusts in and out, the sound of my heavy breathing muffled in the kiss.

"tom...i'm gonna, oh my god!" i cry out against his lips, feeling my release wash over me, eyes rolling to the back of my head as i swear i see stars.

"oh fuckkk..." tom drags out, throwing his head back, jaw slack as he follows, my release triggering his own, the feeling of his cum coating my walls emitting another small whine from my mouth.

he moves slowly, thrusting in and out whilst he rides out our highs before collapsing on top of me, sweat coating his forehead. his head rests in my neck, breathing uneven and heavy, planting gentle kisses on the bare skin. i struggle to catch my own breath, my fingers running through his hair, body trembling as the adrenaline slowly wears off.

"i love you so much my love. i'm sorry for everything, i promise i'll never treat you like that again." he says, planting a single kiss on my shoulder.

"i love you too." i reply, tom lifting his head upwards and meeting my lips in a soft kiss, pulling away and wrapping his arms around my waist.

"goodnight meine liebe." he whispers, placing the covers over the both of us as i snuggle closer, resting my head on his bare chest as he slowly strokes my hair, falling asleep in each other's embrace.

requests are open! keep sending them in!!

[worldofheroes]

Say That Again

tom cruise x fem!actress!reader

summary: during an interview, simon calls you out about your multi-lingual abilities, making you say something embarrassing. tom finds it absolutely attractive and can’t stop thinking about you talking in that tone of voice to him.

warnings: 18+, no plot, language, friends with benefits, protected sex

wc: 1.3k

a/n: based on a request by @rveyjules! I took a couple creative liberties, I hope you don’t mind! this has absolutely no plot, so don't go looking for a storyline lol

“Please welcome Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, and Y/N Y/L/N!”

The crowd erupts into cheers and whistles. It takes well over a minute for everyone to calm down. 

“I’m so glad you’re here tonight!” Jimmy exclaims. 

“It’s great to be here,” Tom smiles. 

“So, we have newcomer Y/N Y/L/N to the Mission team. Y/N, what has it been like working alongside these amazing actors?” Jimmy asks. 

“Oh, starting with me,” you blush. “It’s been fantastic. Everyone has been so kind and patient. I’m sure Henry can agree with me on this, but it was a little nerve-wracking coming into a series like Mission with such an established story and characters.”

Henry nods. “The crew has been so welcoming. A big part of it is that Tom really likes to get everyone together even when we’re not filming to form those bonds that you see on the screen.”

“I think that’s what keeps this franchise going is those character bonds we see,” Jimmy says. “Now, does any of that change with filming in different countries?”

“I try really hard to ‘normalize’ Mission as much as I can,” Tom says. “We spend a few weeks here, a few weeks there… It's a crazy schedule. I try to set it up to where we can take breaks and just have fun outside of work.”

“You film in so many countries, is there ever a struggle with the language barrier?” Jimmy asks. 

“I think all of us are at least conversational in a lot of languages,” Simon says. “Some are better than others…”

Everyone laughs. 

“But like, Y/n here is almost fluent in Japanese, which I love,” Simon says. 

“Really?” Tom turns so he can face you. 

“Thanks Simon,” you say playfully, hitting his shoulder. 

“She is! It’s crazy,” Rebecca says. 

“Can you say something for us?” Jimmy asks. 

“Um… Ohayō, ogenki desu ka?” 

“And what does that mean?” Jimmy asks. 

“Just a simple, ‘hi, how are you?’,” you smile. 

“I believe there’s something with the word ara-ara,” Simon laughs. 

“Simon, no!” You laugh. 

“Ara-ara?” Jimmy asks. 

“It’s kind of a meme,” you explain. “But you have to say it right.”

“How so?” Jimmy asks. 

You clear your throat, and then as seductively as you can without embarrassing yourself too much… “Ara-ara.”

Everyone laughs and Tom just about chokes on his water, making everyone laugh harder. 

“That was… something,” Tom remarks. 

“Simon, I hate you,” you say, laughing. 

The interview quickly gets back on the topic of Mission, and wraps up shortly after. 

The group makes their way back to their dressing rooms to change back into “street clothes”. 

There’s a knock on your door. You open it to see Tom standing in the hallway. 

“Hey,” you say.

“Hey,” he says, not making eye contact. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“Can I come in?”

“Um, sure,” you say, moving so Tom can enter. You close the door. 

“I didn’t know you could talk like that,” Tom says in a low voice. 

“What do you mean?” you ask playfully. 

Tom tries to hold back a moan. “You sounded so hot… I can’t stop thinking about doing things to you.”

You raise an eyebrow. “You’re not being very professional.”

“Fuck being professional,” he growls, moving towards you. 

“Tom,” you breathe. “Not here.”

Tom reaches out and grabs your arm. He gives it a squeeze and then lets go. 

“You’re right. Not here.” Tom sighs. “Come to my hotel room.”

You nod. “I can do that,” you whisper. 

“Quickly.”

You nod. Tom quickly exits your dressing room, and you hurriedly finish changing so you can get to the hotel. 

You get to the hotel, and you’re standing outside Tom’s room. 

You take a breath and then knock. He opens the door instantly, pulling you in. 

“Tom,” you whisper. 

“I’ve always had a thing for you,” he says softly, brushing hair out of your face. “And the way you said that word…”

“Oh, you like it when I talk like that?” you ask seductively, lightly moving your fingertips up his arms. 

Tom closes his eyes. “You have no idea.”

“Mm… I can talk to you like this,” you say with your hands moving to his chest. 

“Please,” he says in a strained voice, resting his forehead against yours. 

“Do you need to fuck me?” you ask him. 

The two of you have agreed to a friends with benefits relationship, neither one of you quite ready to commit to anything, but needing something more than just friendship. And when the two of you met, you both really hit it off. 

“Yes,” he whispers. 

You start to unbutton his shirt, breathing a little heavier now. 

Tom’s hands find the buttons to your shorts, undoing them and pulling them off. You finish unbuttoning his shirt and slide it off his body. 

“Sweetheart,” he breathes, pulling your shirt off.

You unclasp your bra and let it fall to the floor. 

Tom moans, unable to hold back. 

You work at his pants, pulling them down. 

“Go ahead and fuck me,” you whisper, palming at his groin. 

Tom picks up his pants, pulling his wallet out, then a condom. 

You can’t help the giggle that escapes you. “You always have one on you?”

Tom nods. “I can never guess when you’ll do this to me.”

A moan escapes you. “Fuck, you’re hot.”

Tom walks you backwards to the bed. You fall backwards on it, and he crawls on top of you. 

He starts kissing your jaw, down your neck, down your body. 

“Tom,” you whisper. 

He looks up at you, putting his fingers in his mouth, coating them with saliva. Your hips involuntarily buck, knowing what’s about to happen. 

Tom’s fingers dive into your folds, making you yelp. He circles your clit, making you squirm. 

A finger is inserted into you. 

“Tom,” you moan. 

He takes his other hand and presses down on your lower abdomen, and you can feel his finger petting your walls. 

“More,” you beg. 

Tom smiles, inserting another finger. 

You put a hand on his, the one that’s working in you. 

“I was thinking something… thicker,” you say softly. 

“Fuck,” Tom groans. “Okay.”

He removes his fingers, then his boxers. He strokes himself a couple times before ripping the condom wrapper open. 

You watch him closely as he rolls the condom down his shaft. 

“Tom,” you plead in a whisper. 

“I’m right here,” he replies, starting to push into you. 

“Shit,” you moan. 

“I’m right here,” he repeats, bottoming out against you. 

He slowly thrusts against you, grunting in pleasure. 

“Agh, sweetheart,” he mumbles, laying down on you, wrapping his arms around you. 

“Faster,” you whisper. 

Tom grunts in reply, his hips moving faster and faster. 

“Tom…” you almost cry in pleasure. 

“Come for me, baby girl,” he whispers. 

Your fingernails dig into his back as you let go, cumming on his hard cock. 

Soon, Tom finishes as well. He sighs, letting down all his weight on you. 

You grunt with the added weight. “Fuck.”

Tom sits up and pulls out of you. He discards the condom and lays back down on the bed, pulling you onto his chest. 

“Tom,” you exhale. 

“You didn’t have to talk like that at the interview,” he whispers. 

“Mm, but now I know what it does to you.”

“I think we should change our status. Have a real relationship.”

“What?”

“I’m falling for you, y/n.”

“Tom.”

“We can keep it a secret for a while. Test it out. No pressure or anything for either one.”

You look up at Tom. 

“I care about you so much,” Tom says softly. 

You nod. “I think we could give it a try.”

Tom smiles softly and kisses your head. 

“No pressure,” he repeats. 

“No pressure,” you agree.

[tomscumdump]

LOVE LOVE UR WRITING could I please get a fic of 2010 Tom smut of where he’s like a teacher and the reader is in college? Love your writing 🤭

A/n: of course enjoy!! <3 TOOK ME AGES TO WRITE always wanted a teacher Tom smut I can’t lie.

Nothing to say now? ★

2010 era!!

reader is 19!!

warnings:smut swearing reader is rebellious (at the start) angst?

MDNI!!

You were a rebellious parents kicked you out at a young age partying every night staying at your friends houses, with the some money you saved up you started college because you wanted a career at least to get you somewhere. But it wasn’t going so well you couldn’t care about grades, you talked back with teachers always having the last word. Getting into fights you almost had to leave college but you just shrugged it off.

It was a new day and you walked into music class but there was not your usual teacher. He had deep brown dark eyes had black braids over his shoulders and a bandana his lip piercing shimmering in the light, “So who’s this asshole?” You said while walking over to your desk. “This asshole is your new music teacher for the semester call me Mr. Kaulitz or Tom you choose” He said not wasting any time. (I’d call him that any day.)

After a while you started to get pretty bored so you decided to go out get some fresh air maybe light a cigarette? you walked up out of your seat, just to leave the classroom “And where do you think you’re going?” he spoke while writing the last thing on the whiteboard.

You rolled your eyes and turned around meeting his sharp gaze “Um getting some fresh air isn’t it obvious” crossing your arms together leaning against the doorframe, “you didn’t ask to lea-“ he got interrupted “Yeah yeah kiss my ass” you left the room not caring what was gonna happen.

You were probably gonna get another talk with the principal or whatever but did you care? Not at all you were sick of college and wanted to leave as quick as you could but still wanting to achieve something, 10 minutes or so later you came back the class was silent.

You sat back down in your seat eventually Tom came over his tall figure towering over the desk. “So you wanna tell me why you left class without my permission” he spoke calm but firm “Because I wanted fresh air this class is boring anyways.”

Your voice was raised a bit cause you were getting sick of him pushing you, this went on for a few minutes you were starting to get really pissed off, and so was Tom “Fuck sake can you stop getting up all in my business you aren’t my parents!!.” You yelled out not breaking eye contact.

Tom’s facial features was now tense he leaned down and whispered “Look sweetheart I’m getting sick of this are you gonna shut that pretty mouth of yours or do I have to shut it for you?” His voice was rough you were dead silent you didn’t know how to react no one has said that to you ever. He leaned back up looking down at you his eyes were filled with some sort of emotion you couldn’t describe?

-time skip

After a while class was finally over thank god you were packing your stuff up about to leave Tom stopped you. “Sorry you’re gonna have to stay for a while” he spoke his gaze directly on you looking you up and down you groaned and tried leaving pushing past him.

That was no use Tom grabbed you and pushed you against the wall “Are you always this fucking problematic in every class” He spat out You were quiet, you were hitting him trying to get out of his grasp but he already had a tight grip on your waist.

His other hand lifted your chin up to meet his eyes, you felt like you were about to collapse Tom’s gaze was mesmerising he smirked his tongue grazed over his lip piercing, next minute Toms lips crashed with yours his cold metal piercing pressing against your mouth which got you even more weak his lips were soft but very rough at the same time. His hands snaked their way down to your sides having a firm grip you whined giving his tongue access. (I didn’t know what to say. 🙏)

Your tongue was battling his trying to gain dominance Tom won of course no matter how much you wanted to stop you couldn’t it was too good, after a bit he pulled back your plump cherry red lips coated from his salvia. You couldn’t believe what just happened, But was Tom finished of teaching you a lesson? oh no.

“On the desk” He demanded you sat up on the desk he came over towering over you his hand rested on your thigh, while his lips travelled down your neck leaving some marks in their wake but not enough to be seen his hand moved up towards your inner thigh “May I?” Tom whispered his voice was so gentle so soothing (help my soul atp) you nodded his hand moved upwards till he reached your underwear, lightly using his thumb to press over your clothed clit.

Your lips were pursed trying not to make a sound your hips grinded against his hand wanting him to do more “wait Schatz I’ll give you what you want soon” Tom murmured out leaving a kiss on your cheek. Slowly he removed your underwear letting it fall down to your ankles he was in a daze, your pretty pink cunt was glistening “So pretty” his voice tangled with lust.

Tom moved your legs apart giving him more access he kneeled down and dipped his head between your legs without any warning his tongue develd deep into your cunt, “Fuck Tom!” You arched your back squirming a bit his grip on your thighs was that hard they were bound to leave marks tomorrow.

He lapped back and forth between your folds going harder each time, his lips moved up to attack on your sensitive clit. He sucked harshly against your clit causing a loud moan to escape your lips your thighs were about to suffocate him but did he care? no.

Tom’s hand moved up to kneed your breast your nipple getting hard underneath his touch. He wouldn’t stop his attack his tongue felt great against your cunt, “You taste s’good schatz” he mumbled vibrating against your clit. You couldn’t answer moans were escaping your mouth your knot in your stomach was begging for release at this point.

“S-shit Tom I’m close” you whined out your legs starting to shake “cum for me liebe” with those words your orgasm rode out cumming all over his tongue. Tom groaned he lapped at your folds one last time collecting any remaining juices. He stood up and pressed a kiss to your lips you grimaced tasting yourself Tom pulled away, helping you get yourself back together.

You packed your things but then Tom asked “So now are you gonna listen to me during my lesson?” He asked slightly amused his tongue moving across his bottom lip you looked back at him smiling and shrugged “I’ll think about it.” But one thing was true you were now gonna enjoy your music class.

@bunniesthoughts @jadedchar @memzyyy @madzandmore

A/n:this was a lot but I did pretty good :) but I hope you guys enjoyed keep sending me requests cause there amazing I’ll try and post more mwah bye cuties <33

[themultifandomgal]

Tommy Shelby- Friends To Lovers

Here's another request. I absolutely loved this one and writing this request. I'm tempted to actually turn this into a little series or an actual book what do you think?

YN and Tommy have been friends for years, since before the war. YN was there to greet him when he got off the train. She was there for him when he had PTSD episodes. She was there for him the birth of his first child. She was by his side when he got married. And most importantly she has been by his side as he held his wife Grace pass away in his arms. She's now helping him raise his son Charlie. Since Grace died YN has noticed how low her best friend has been. Burying himself into his work. For Tommy it was his way of getting over the loss of the love of his life. That is until recently.

YN knocks on Tommys office door with Charlie balanced on her hip

"Come in" Tommy's rough voice calls through the door. YN opens it up with a smile on her face, normally Tommy wouldn't look up, but today he does. For Tommy something suddenly changes. Seeing YN with his son on her hip makes him smile, a smile YN hasn't seen on his face since the death of his late wife

"Tom I'm just taking Charlie for a walk. We won't be to long, an hour maybe"

"Why don't I join you?" Tommy places his pen down and takes off his glasses

"Are you sure? Haven't you got work to do?"

"Yes but a break can't hurt"

"Ok well I'll key Charlie ready" YN smiles once again and walks out of her best friends office. She puts Charlie's shoes on and coat before getting herself ready. Tommy doesn't take long to meet them at his front door.

Since that day Tommy became happier. He started smiling more, buying YN chocolates, making her laugh when she is supposed to be working. He started falling for her and she him. Everyone noticed this, especially YN. This was the old Tommy, the Tommy before the war, before Grace.

YN is just getting ready for bed when there's a pounding at her door

"Ok ok. I'm coming!" YN yells getting the keys to her front door. Opening it up YN seeing Tommy standing in front of her, blood dripping down his face "what the hell" she gasps "come in" Tommy stumbles in, a little drunk. YN guides Tommy to her bathroom where she keeps her first aid kit "sit down" she nods to the toilet. Tommy does as she says while YN gets a cloth and runs some warm water on it. She starts cleaning up his face, something she's done many times before in the past "what happened?"

"Got in a fight"

"No shit. Come on what was it over?"

"You" Tommy says with no hesitation. YN frowns removing the blood soaked cloth from his face

"Me?"

"Fuck YN the things they were saying about you. Fucking disgusting"

"Tommy" YN sighs throwing the cloth in the sink

"Your beautiful YN everyone can see that, but they were being disrespectful"

"I appreciate you defending me but you don't have to do that"

"Of course I do YN. I have to because, fuck" Tommy groans running his hands through his hair "fuck YN I love you. I think I have for a while now"

"What?" YN can't believe what she's hearing. The man she had started falling for just admired that he loves her

"I love you YN. I love you so much" Tommy takes YN's face in his hands

"Tom, your drunk"

"Not drunk enough to tell you my feelings"

"You can stop here tonight, sleep on the sofa and in the morning if you still feel the same way we can talk" YN removes Tommys hands from her face and leaves him in the bathroom to get him a blanket.

The following morning YN wakes up to the smell of toast and eggs, albeit they smell burnt, but smiling YN gets out of bed and wraps herself up in a dressing gown and heads downstairs to see Tommy Shelby stood in the kitchen smith a smile on his face

"I love you YN. You said last night if I still feel the same way we can talk. Well I love you" hearing this makes YN smile wide

"Tom, I love you too"

[seasonsbloom]

baby, let's play house. rooster (part 1)

part 2

pairing ; bradley bradshaw x female!reader

synopsis ; marriage of convenience. you got yourself in trouble. bradley has a bit of a savior complex. together, you come up with what could potentially be the worst idea in the longstanding and illustrious history of bad ideas.

wc ; 12.5k

warnings ; 18+ only, minors do NOT interact; angst; explicit language; explicit sexual content in later parts; pregnancy; mentions of infidelity; mentions of vomit; mentions of Tom Cruise; unhealthy family dynamics; one mention of suic*de but it's not a plot point; age gap

note: uhm... i blacked out. idk either. part 2 should be out eventually, which of course means that i haven't even started writing it yet. there will probably be several mistakes in here regarding the navy, etc. so i'm sorry about that i'm just dumb :-(

sol. sunderlust. crab. bestie... i love you forever, what would i ever do without you?

When you’re fourteen, sitting on a floral couch in one of the nondescript, army-commissioned houses you’ve been moving to every few months since you were old enough to remember, your mother turns on Cocktail with Tom Cruise, and you decide that, once you’re grown up, you’re going to be a bartender. You’re going to do just what Tom does - get a job in some dive, work your way up, learn the bottle slinging and the shot pouring and the flirting, and then you’re going to franchise the whole thing and take it national. It’s going to be just like TGI Fridays, except your drinks will actually be good instead of whatever watered-down punch they serve.

Of course, you’re fourteen, and you don’t even know what alcohol tastes like yet. Years later, you’re going to take a shot of Tequila at a bar, you’re going to splutter and cough and think you might choke, and it’ll leave you wondering if maybe you’ve made a mistake. But for now, you’ve got a dream, and you’ve got a plan, and not a smidge of doubt that you’ll make it all come true.

You’re going to do just as Tom Cruise does - minus the best friend’s suicide from the movie and the real-life Scientology thing and all that. But you’re going to be successful. You know it.

So this, then. This is not part of your plan at all.

Behind you, there’s a bang, and then the back door is ripped open. The buttery light of the bar spills in a rectangle across the beaten path, but it doesn’t reach your little corner. You hear the muffled thud of footsteps, a curse, followed by a shout of your name.

“Yeah?” you call back, hope you don’t sound like you’re balancing on the edge of a mental breakdown. Hope you don’t sound like you feel.

“Your shift’s about to start. I really need you in there cutting up some limes, please,” Jerry, your co-worker, says. Thank God he doesn’t walk over to investigate just what you’re doing huddled in the sand behind the bar.

“Okay,” you answer, voice a little wobbly, “I’ll be in in a sec.”

You wait until you hear the door shut behind Jerry, then you unfold yourself, get your shaky legs underneath your weight. You feel like somebody hit you over the head with one of those huge hammers they use to knock down walls. The nausea is back, too, something queasy and watery that shifts through your stomach.

Inside the bar, everything is like it always is. The chatter of the customers, the drawl of the music, the smell of beer, and the Ocean Breeze scented cleaner you use to wipe the floors. Far below it, the scent of the real ocean breeze drifting in through the opened windows. It seems wrong for the Hard Deck to be unchanged, unaltered, untouched when your own life has gone so completely off the rails.

You sneak in a quick, discreet bathroom break to swipe at the mascara smudged beneath your eyes, to dab at it with some damp toilet paper, to hope nobody will notice the obvious signs of tears still clinging to you. To stare at your reflection in the mirror for a moment, try not to think about that stupid test you buried at the bottom of the trashcan. You can taste your heartbeat in your mouth.

You don’t look any different - same nose, same hair, same eyes - but something has irrevocably shifted inside of you.

Behind the counter, you cut up the limes you promised Jerry. The scent clings to your fingers, the juice settles in the calluses. The steady sound as the knife meets the cutting board and the familiar motion of your hands help to ground you a little.

“Could we get a refill?”

You lift your head and then immediately lower it again, shoulders going up, turning to the side in an attempt to hide your face. If there are two people you don’t want to see tonight, then…

“Oh my god.” Natasha’s face pushes into your line of vision, her eyebrows crinkled, her mouth pursed. “Have you been crying?”

Waving her words of concern away with one hand, you grab for their empty glasses with the other.

“Allergies,” you lie. “I’ve got two on tap here, which one did you guys have? The German or the…”

“You don’t have allergies,” Bradley points out. You’d made it a point not to look at him, but now your gaze snaps in his direction. He stands with his eyes narrowed, with his hands on the polished wood of the bar top. Concern flutters across his face.

There’s something about Bradley Bradshaw. You like to think of it as a gravitational pull. Something with force, something that makes people look at him. Something that grounds them, too, though, gives them a tether. 

Ever since he first walked into this bar a little over a year ago, it’s like he’s become a fixture in your life, even if you only see him once or twice a week, even if it’s just a quick exchange of words over a countertop. Bradley Bradshaw makes for a good North Star.

He shrugs, and there’s something almost sheepish to it. “It was part of your list of reasons why you’re better than Hangman last month.”

You pause, still holding the glasses, and stare at him. He looks right back. 

“That’s beside the point,” Natasha pipes up. She’s balancing both her elbows on the bartop, pulling herself closer. “Why were you crying?”

That sort of shifts reality back into focus. What are you supposed to say? I let a guy who isn’t even really my boyfriend but also not really not my boyfriend knock me up, and now I have no idea what the fuck to do? To two people who are little more than glorified acquaintances?

You shrug and decide they look like they’d enjoy the new craft beer Penny got on tap. It has notes of vanilla and apple, and you’re not much of a beer person, but even you like it. Or at least you used to.

“It’s nothing,” you say, drawing the first glass. It ends up perfect - amber liquid topped with just the right amount of foam, the little bobbles popping as you push it across the counter toward Natasha. Your life might be a mess, but at least you still know how to draw a damn good glass of beer from the tap. “Don’t worry about it.”

Natasha’s eyes narrow, but then she lets it go. “You know I’ll beat a guy up for you, right?”

You don’t doubt it. If there’s anybody in this bar you wouldn’t want to cross, it’s Natasha, and not just because of whatever training the Navy put her through. You’re convinced she came into the world knowing how to take a guy out.

“Yeah,” you agree and are surprised to find you mean it. Realistically, you’re not particularly close to any of the pilots. You chit-chat sometimes, have had a few drunken conversations after everybody else has filtered out of the Hard Deck while wiping down tables or collecting shot glasses, but that’s not really enough to support a true friendship. Still. If you asked, you have no doubt Natasha would go to bat for you. “It’s okay, though. I’m fine. I’ll put this on your tab, yeah?”

She looks like she wants to say something else, but then decides to let it go. Sighs, “Okay.”

As Natasha pushes off the bar to rejoin her group of friends toward the back of the bar, Bradley takes a step closer instead. You make it a point not to look at him, but the yellow and white of his Hawaiian shirt flashes in your periphery despite your best efforts.

He places a large hand on the countertop, palm down, and you should be looking busy, but all you can do is stare as his fingers starfish across the wood.

“You can talk to me, yeah?” he asks, and his voice is soft enough that it almost disappears in the din of this Saturday night. “Whatever it is.”

You do look up then. Bradley has brown eyes, round and big and deep. There’s something about them that makes you want to trust him, trust his words, trust the sincerity. It almost makes you start crying again.

“Okay,” you whisper. “Thank you.”

Then somebody’s shouting an order at you, and you’re pushing a coaster under a sweating Cuba Libre, you’re pouring a Tequila shot, you’re looking for the maraschino cherries, you’re passing out salt shakers, and you don’t notice as he disappears and you don’t think about anything for a short, blissful, beautiful time.

+

Two months ago, you met Luke halfway through the door of a bar you’d seen on Instagram, something with low lights and neon signs and booths cushioned in lush, ruby velvet. They had this signature cocktail there, something with rum and gold foil and a lot of smoke that drifted up in sweet-smelling plumes.

Luke was charming and laughed a lot, and when he put his hand on your waist, when he looked at you, your heart skipped a beat or two. And still, the first thing you told Penny about at work the next day was the cocktail and not the guy.

You’re almost entirely sure you’re not in love with him, but you’re excited about the idea that maybe someday you could be. Luke is a nice guy. He works in finance somewhere in San Diego, takes you to expensive seafront restaurants, and once or twice, he even bought you expensive lingerie. Luke likes the same movies as you do, likes putting on Jazz music when you go down on him in his car, and that always manages to make you feel strangely sophisticated even with a dick in your mouth. He’s older, and he has a real, grown-up job, completely unlike you with your singles soaked in beer.

He’s a stead-fast, reliable guy. If you have to be in this situation with anyone, you figure it’s better to be in it with him than some twenty-something surfer dude who couldn’t even find the word responsible in a dictionary.

The anxiety has been gnawing at you since last night, has been chipping away your composure and your calm. Has reduced you into a jittery, terrified, chafing shell of your former self. All day you were fumbling - burning your hand on the heated water kettle in the morning, almost running a red light, cutting your finger deep enough it didn’t stop bleeding for a whole five minutes.

Earlier today, you took a last, desperate stand. Propelled by the sort of hope that exists against all better judgment, you went on a CVS run and returned with three more pregnancy tests. You left them back at your tiny apartment, right on the counter where you put them out in the first place, those three tiny, horrible, life-altering plus signs laughing right in your face.

And that was it then. Your fate decided. Your luck run out.

Since you were fourteen, sitting on that floral couch, the course of your life had seemed so clear to you. You’d been so sure of where you wanted to go, so sure of how to get there. And yeah, okay, maybe you used to think you’d get there sooner, but that’s never deterred you before. Slow and steady wins the race, that’s what you used to think.

Now, ten years later, everything is muddled. You can’t see an inch ahead in the fog of all this.

To add insult to injury, those tests were fucking expensive. The next time you check your bank account, you might start crying.

So you spent a good fifteen minutes curled up on your bathroom tiles, staring at your shower curtain, blinking away tears you never shed. You spent a good fifteen minutes trying to figure it out, trying to untangle it, trying to make sense of how you could fuck up so completely. 

And then you finally picked yourself up, massaged the grid pattern of the tiles off your cheek, and shot Luke a text asking if he was free tonight.

He drops by at the end of your shift.

“Hi, babe.” Luke grins as he slides into one of the bar stools. “You good?”

You nod, then pause. “Not really?”

You’re wiping down the bartop, dumping an ashtray you collected from the smoking zone outside into the trash. The Hard Deck is empty now, even the last stragglers filed out. Bob selected a song on the jukebox before he left, something slow and decidedly country. Your hands shake when you go to wet the rag again.

Luke frowns and leans across the bar to look at you closely. “What happened?”

“I have to tell you something,” you say and run the tap. The water hits the chrome of the sink with a splatter.

Luke raises an eyebrow, grins. “Illicit confession?”

Under any other circumstances, you would have laughed. But your stomach is coiled up in knots so tight you wonder if they’ll ever untangle again. Like the earphones you fish from the bottom of a purse.

You just so manage a half-hearted chuckle, a sad, pathetic little sound that has Luke’s eyebrow climbing even higher.

He pushes a brown paper bag across the counter. “I brought your favorite take-out… Would that cheer you up?”

Almost immediately, your stomach growls in answer. You’ve been so hungry the past few days that you can’t even manage to be embarrassed. “Mexican?” you ask, something like excitement in your voice for the first time in over 24 hours.

“Ah...” Luke bites his lower lip. “No, uhm… I got something from that one place we went to. The fusion kitchen?”

“Oh…” The excitement dampens immediately, and you force a smile. “Yeah, cool. Thanks.”

“Sorry… you did say you liked it when we went.”

He’s right. You did say that.

Luke likes experimental food, things like that cocktail with the gold foil. Things that look much better than they end up tasting. He takes pictures of them and posts them on his Instagram, and he always makes sure not to get your hand in, your purse, your foot. He doesn’t even follow you back, and you want to not care about trivial things like social media so very badly that you never ask him about it.

He looks genuinely apologetic, though, so you resolve to forgive him. You smile and say, “I did! This is great. Thanks, Luke.”

His satisfied smile puts you at ease.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”

It’s a bit like a bucket of ice water. The ease slips away as quickly as it came. You start wiping almost furiously at a stain on the bartop, then give up. Stare at your fingers gone wrinkly with the sudsy water. 

You open your mouth, and then you say, “I’m pregnant.”

It’s not what you meant to say. You meant to ease into this, make it sound… less final, somehow. As if that’s at all possible. As if that isn’t exactly what it is. Final.

You’re never going back from this, you realize suddenly. No matter what happens from here on out, there’s never going to be another moment where this hasn’t happened. Where you weren’t pregnant, where you didn’t mess it all up. The plan, the dream, the life.

Tears aren’t enough anymore. You’re going to run headfirst into the ocean and scream until the saltwater fills your lungs.

Luke laughs. You stare at him.

It takes a moment, but slowly he realizes that you’re not joking. That this is serious. The smile slides sideways off his face.

“Oh,” he says, and you can’t look at him anymore. So you let your eyes wander, down towards the lapels of his white dress shirt. He’s still wearing his suit and tie, and the realization that he’s come straight from the office touches you more than it should. At the same time, guilt settles in your stomach. You’re doing this to him, you’re altering his life, you…

The rational part of yourself scoffs, takes over the reins. It takes two to tango, you remind yourself. This is as much his fault as it is yours.

But that doesn’t get rid of the bitter taste in your mouth.

“Why…” Luke pauses. “Why are you telling me this?”

When you look up at his face again, his expression is carefully blank.

“Uh…”

“Shouldn’t you be telling the father?”

You blink. The cogs of your mind turn slowly like somebody slapped gum between them. “I am,” you say, wondering what the hell he’s on about.

“I’m not the father,” Luke says, very matter-of-factly. “You don’t need to lie about it.” 

“I’m not lying.” You’re too stunned to even be insulted by the insinuation.

“It’s alright.” He shrugs his shoulders, his expensive suit in the tacky, glossy fabric catching the light. “It’s not like we’re exclusive. I don’t mind if you slept with somebody else.”

“Not exclusive,” you repeat lamely. Maybe that part shouldn’t catch you as off guard as it does. You’ve never discussed it with him in as many words, never sat down to have the whole boyfriend/girlfriend talk, but you’ve been seeing each other semi-regularly for two months now, and you’d just sort of assumed…

“Sure.” Luke nods. “Don’t blame this one on me, then.”

Oh. Your heart clenches, and suddenly it feels like you can’t breathe.

“I didn’t sleep with anybody else,” you say, but your voice sounds far away.

Luke shrugs. “Well, it can’t be mine.”

You don’t even know what to say to this. You’re in desperate, burning need of a shot, and the realization that you can’t have one zaps through you like a pain.

“We always used a condom,” Luke is saying, and his words drift to you through a fog, through a mist, through a thicket of fear and anxiety and ice-cold panic. “I made damn sure of that.”

“It’s not….” You clear your throat. “They’re only like… 98 percent safe. Condoms, I mean.”

“What, so you’re saying we’re those two percent?”

He looks like he’s about to start laughing again, and suddenly you barely recognize him. You’ve always known that Luke wasn’t the love of your life, but that was fine. Love hadn’t been part of the plan anyway, that was for later, much later, after you’d gone international and gotten rich off Mojitos and Pina Coladas and the occasional Old Fashioned. But Luke had been… well, he’d been nice. Always. He’d been someone to laugh with, had been long walks on the beach, and quick tumbles in his backseat. He’d been fun and nice and…

And you’d been stupid enough to hope. Hope for more, hope for better, hope for something.

“I can’t have a baby with you,” he says. His voice rings with finality.

What are you supposed to say to that? With those three positive pregnancy tests back home on your bathroom counter. With the knowledge that you haven’t slept with anyone else.

“Well,” you whisper, and the words come out softer than you want them to, “you are.”

Luke is very quiet for a moment. He’s looking right at you, the blue eyes you used to think were open, inviting, now slitted and probing. Like a snake. 

“Jesus,” he says finally, draws back to run his fingers through his hair, a gesture of exasperation. His voice has lost some of its calm. “What do you want from me?”

You wonder if you look as dazed as you feel. “I don’t… I don’t want anything from you.”

That’s not true. You’d like him to hug you. You’d like him to tell you it’s going to be okay, even if that might be a lie. You’d like him to be nice to you.

Instead, Luke, who looks increasingly distressed, jerks his head and says, “If it’s a family you’re after… I can’t give you that.”

Everything has happened so quickly - the toppling of your plans, the chaos of your life. You haven’t really had time to think about how you want him to react. Not like this, though.

“Why not?” you ask and regret the question the moment it’s out of your mouth. You sound like a child - lost, confused.

Luke sighs. He rakes a palm over his face and shakes his head. When he finally looks at you again, there’s something almost guilty on his face. You can’t tear your eyes away, can’t help but feel your stomach plummeting down down down toward the ground. It’s like standing on the ledge of a skyscraper, feeling what the fall might be like even with both feet firmly planted.

“I can’t give you that,” he says, “because I already have a family.”

Beneath you, the ground seems to quiver.

“What?”

Luke pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, then reaches into his pocket and produces a shiny, golden wedding band. When he slips it back onto its original place on his finger, you watch the patch of pale skin, several shades lighter than the rest, disappear.

Your breath gets stuck somewhere in your chest.

“You’re… married?”

“Going on five years,” he says, and you think he sounds sad, but maybe that’s just your hope getting the better of you again.

You don’t know what to say. For a moment, you just stand there with the rag still in your hand, listening to the sad, sad voice of some wanna-be cowboy drawling from the speakers. Hear the phantom thud of the cues hitting pool balls. Turn your head to where the pilots were having fun earlier, back when things weren’t all jumbled up.

The whole world moves far, far away from you. Like something you watch on TV screens, something intangible, something fake. It’s not something that happens to people like you. It’s not something that happens to real people.

“It’s… you didn’t tell me that,” you say, and it’s like your voice echoes through a long, long tunnel, bounces off the walls like a tennis ball. “I didn’t know.”

And then you think back on it. Think of whispered phone calls in the dead of night, think of erratic work schedules, think of his insistence to come here instead of going to San Diego. Think of how little you know of his life, how firmly he kept you locked out of it.

Suddenly you’re not so sure if you didn’t know or if you just didn’t want to know. If you closed your eyes to what was right in front of you.

Guilt and anger and confusion flash through you in rapid succession. You feel sick to your stomach.

“I’ll give you money,” Luke says. It’s a peculiar thing - you see his mouth move before the words ever reach your ears, like a movie that’s gone out of sync with the audio.

“Money,” you repeat, very slowly. Or maybe not slowly at all. You just feel like you got stuck in molasses, like the whole world has been dipped in something sticky.

“Well. You’re getting rid of it.”

It’s not a question. He says it like it’s a fact, like it’s something that’s already been decided. Like it’s something you don’t get a say in.

You stiffen, fingers sinking into the wet rag. Soapy water drips over the lacquered wood of the bartop. 

“No,” you say. “No, I’m not.”

About five minutes ago, you hadn’t even made your mind up about it yet. Hadn’t decided whether to keep it or not. Had still been weighing the pros and cons in your mind, turning them over like a Rosetta Stone that might help you decipher the encrypted, tangled mess of your thoughts.  

And now that he’s said it, now that the option is right there in the open, suddenly you know that’s not the way you want it to happen.

“What,” Luke says, “you wanna have it?”

“Yes,” you answer, and you know it’s the truth.

Maybe it’s stupid. You’re twenty-four. You’re broke. You pick up shifts at a bar to pour tequila shots for other people. You live off the guys you flirt with long enough they decide you’re worth a tip. All those plans of grandeur, of franchises and cocktails and Park Avenue apartments, are dead-ends. You’ve been walking a cul-de-sac your whole life.

And still… something about it feels right to you. 

You’ve been thinking about the whole thing in theory - the theoretical truth of that test, the theoretical reaction of Luke, the theoretical existence of that baby, the theoretical impact on your life. But it’s not a theory. It’s real.

There’s a baby growing in you.

It’s the most terrifying thought of your life. You’ve never experienced something so wonderful. Even as the fear eats away at you, even as your stomach churns and your head spins, some part of you feels illuminated with light.

Luke laughs. “Babe… no offense, but that’s a horrible idea.”

You clench your teeth and grit out, “I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

He shrugs. “Well, you’re gonna get it. You really think you could raise a kid?”

“I don’t know,” you say, truthfully, and wonder where all this calm is coming from. “But I want to try.”

Luke stares at you as if you’re growing a spare set of ears right in front of him. Then he laughs again, shakes his head. You can’t see what’s so funny about any of this. 

“Babe,” he says, “this isn’t some new Cocktail recipe. This is an actual child you’re talking about.”

If you weren’t so goddamn tired, it would make you angry. Set fire to you like a fuse. But you’re drained, empty, hollow. You want to go home, want to curl up in bed, want to cry. You want to go back two weeks in time, back when you were still just a failing waitress with a big dream. Back before the responsibility of it all hunched you over.

“I’m doing it,” you say, and hope he understands the decision is final. Hope your voice is firm.

Luke exhales. A muscle in his jaw twitches as he grinds his teeth, as he turns half away from you.

Finally, after an eternity, he says, “I can’t be involved in this.”

For your part, you understand that decision is final too.

You nod, grab onto the bartop to keep yourself from toppling over. The ground beneath you is a gaping, beckoning abyss. It’s going to swallow you whole.

“Fine,” you whisper. “I’ll do it alone then.”

For a moment, Luke looks almost surprised. As if he was sure you’d fold eventually, see reason. Listen to him.

You wonder if that’s how it’s been before - him pushing and you giving in. Rearranging your life to fit his schedule, his plans, his wants. Shrinking yourself to make room for him. And you didn’t even notice.

You straighten your spine.

“For what it’s worth,” Luke says as he slides off his chair, “I’m sorry.”

And then he does what men do best: He leaves. Walks away from you and the baby growing inside of you. Walks away from the mess he made, the dream he shattered, without a care or a thought. Without looking back.

You watch his retreating form, watch the set of his shoulders, the spring in his step, watch as he bounds down the steps onto the gravel of the parking lot, watch as the shadows eventually blot out the sight of him.

Good riddance, you want to say, but you can’t even form words.

With your heart torn to shreds, with your fear clawing a bloody path up your throat, you sink down onto the floor, press a hand to your mouth, and you sob.

+

Twenty minutes later, Bradley Bradshaw finds you in the exact same position.

You know it’s been twenty minutes because you’re staring at the digital clock of the dishwasher, counting down the wash cycle. The neon red of the numbers blurs through the veil of your tears.

It’s like somebody’s cut your chest open. Scooped you clean like taking a spoon to a tub of ice cream. Behind your ribcage, you feel hollow in a way that aches down to your bones. That spiderwebs through your veins.

Bradley pauses in the doorway, silhouetted by the outdoor lighting you still haven’t turned off. Like this, with your vision blurred, he looks like a drawing of the Virgin Mary on one of those cheap, tacky candles. Descending on a flurry of clouds and light and doves. Only this Virgin Mary wears Hawaiian shirts, apparently. It almost makes you laugh.

He casts his eyes over the room, a slight furrow dipping between his brows. It takes you a moment to understand he hasn’t seen you yet, not with how you’re crouching by the crates of Corona.

Part of you wants to hide, wants to crawl under the jutting canopy of the bar. Wants to pretend you’re not here, fold yourself into a tiny pocket square of a person until he leaves again.

“Hello?” Bradley asks, genuine confusion laced with the word, and you know you can’t do that.

“Hi,” you call back, and your voice sounds tiny. Miserable. You push up on your knees to preserve a bit of your dignity. The room goes spinning in a whirlwind, and you catch yourself with both hands on the wood, lifting up to peek at him over the edge of the bar. “I’m down here.”

For a moment, Bradley just stares at you. He takes in the scene, the smeared mascara, the swollen eyes, the fresh tears leaving tracks down your cheeks like you’re drawing rivers on a map.

Then he snaps into action. He’s crossing the room before you can even really come to terms with the fact that he’s here in the first place, pushing through the hip-high swinging door that separates the oval space hugged by the bar from the rest of the room and falling to his knees by your side.

“What happened?” Bradley asks, something hard to his voice. But when he goes to touch the side of your face, carefully as if you’re injured, as if you’re made of porcelain that’ll break at the slightest jostle, his brown eyes show nothing but genuine concern.

It makes you cry harder.

“Nothing,” you say, which is a ridiculous lie, all things considered. You’re crouching on the floor of your workplace, over an hour after your shift has ended, crying your eyes out. Clearly, there’s something wrong. “I’m fine.”

Bradley sits cross-legged on the hardwood floors, his knee close enough to graze against yours. He looks decidedly out of his depth, almost uncomfortable. Helpless. His mustache quivers as he opens his mouth, then closes it again.

But he doesn’t push. Doesn’t try to get you to explain it, doesn’t ask again. He just sits there with you, elbows on his thighs, and lets you cry. 

It’s nice not to be alone. To have somebody with you, even if he doesn’t know you. Even if he has no idea what it is that has you on the brink of a complete crisis.

You do your best not to think about it. Not about the baby, not about the guy who just dumped you. Not about gold foil and Instagram posts and wedding bands. Not about how he’s made you a homewrecker, and you didn’t even know.

Maybe this is karma. The universe punishing you for your sins. Something like that.

Maybe it’s just really, really bad luck.

“What are you doing here?” you ask when you’ve finally calmed yourself enough the sobbing has subsided to sniffles.

Bradley jerks his head noncommittally. “I forgot my wallet.”

“Oh.” You try to get up, but your legs won’t cooperate. “I’ll help you look.”

He shakes his head, pulls you back onto the floor by the elbow. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll look for it later. What happened?”

There’s something about his tone that tells you this time he won’t let you get away with a half-assed lie. Which doesn’t stop you from trying.

“Just… rough day.”

Bradley looks at you, then pulls his knees up, lets his arms dangle between them. “You don’t have to tell me,” he says, and his voice is very gentle. “But if you want to… I can listen.”

This is the thing about Bradley Bradshaw. He has the kind of face that makes you want to tell him things. Makes you want to spill your secrets to him, pour them into his space. He’s steady, reliable, calm. It would be so easy to trust him.

That’s dangerous.

But you’re so tired, and you’re so broken, and you’re so terribly, horribly lonely. With Luke gone, with your parents out of the picture, with nobody to help and no one to hold you, the loneliness is like an ache, like a stain, like something that festers and spreads and unfurls inside of you.

You just want to pretend you don’t have to do it alone. Just for a moment.

So you say, “I think I did something stupid.”

Bradley’s eyes are very brown. A soft shade of brown, like milk chocolate. When you look at him, you feel warm all over.

“Alright,” he says, and there isn’t an ounce of judgment in it. It’s just a gentle, careful nudge for you to continue.

“I…” You exhale shakily, look down to the floor, twist the bracelet around your wrist. It’s so much harder to form the words the second time around. “I’m pregnant.”

Saying it to Bradley, who is practically a stranger, saying it to someone outside of whatever little bubble, whatever vacuum two people playing at love built around themselves, makes it real in a way it wasn’t before.

You’re pregnant. In a few months, your belly is going to grow to the size of a watermelon. You’re going to get ultrasounds and wear maternity clothes and buy a crib. You’re going to hold a baby in your arms, a baby that will become a toddler, will become a child, will become a teenager, will become an adult. They’re never going to leave again.

I’m pregnant.

One moment - and in it the rest of your life.

It’s a skyscraper, it’s a monument, it’s a mountain. It dwarves you. How can you ever be enough for the path that lies ahead?

The panic jumps you. It rattles you. Suddenly you’re panting, you’re shaking, you can’t think, your head spinning circles around the enormity of it all.

“Oh,” Bradley says. He sounds like he expected you to say just about anything except that. “Congratulations.”

You stare at him, and he backtracks.

“Unless you don’t want me to congratulate you? Sorry, I shouldn’t just….”

“No,” you stop him, your voice a tiny, trembling thing. “It’s okay. Thank you.”

You wonder what it might be like if you were older, if you were married, if you weren’t such a fuck-up. Would people beam at you, hug you, shake your hand? Would they share the joy they must assume you feel?

Neither one of you says anything for a while. Through the opened windows, the sound of the ocean drifts in, of the waves crashing against the shore. The chrome of the fridge you’re leaning against is cold even through the layers of your shirt. You count the wooden tiles on the floor.

After half an eternity, Bradley says, “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

It’s like a knife to the heart, it slices right through you, stabs you between the ribs. And you’re not even angry, don’t even feel betrayed… it just hurts. The kind of pain that stays with you. The kind of pain that leaves phantom traces even after the wounds have healed.

“I don’t,” you say finally.

Beside you, Bradley shifts his weight. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I’m really putting my foot in it today, aren’t I?”

It’s almost enough to make you laugh. “It’s okay,” you say, even though it isn’t. This whole thing isn’t okay. “I’ll be fine.”

Without hesitating, Bradley says, “I know you will be.”

There’s such conviction in his voice that it baffles you. You stare at him, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“He’s… have you told him, though? Or are you guys not in contact?”

Still trying to recover, you shrug. “Yeah,” you whisper, drawing your shoulders almost all the way up to your ears, “I told him.”

You can tell he wants to ask more, but he gives you a second before his next question. “And you… you guys are gonna try co-parenting? Or is he… are you going to get married?”

That makes you frown. You say, “What is this, the 1950s?”

“I just think….” Bradley clears his throat. “I just think if you get a girl pregnant, you should step up. Take responsibility.”

Of course he’d think that. You’re not even surprised.

There’s always been something traditional about Bradley Bradshaw, like he’s one of those men written by women people rave about all over TikTok. If he takes a girl out on a date, he probably holds open car doors and pulls out chairs for her, hands her his jacket if she gets cold.

Distantly, you wonder what that would be like.

“I don’t want somebody to marry me out of responsibility,” you say. “I can take care of myself.”

Bradley scrambles. “I know that!” he says quickly, and out of the corner of your eye, you see him shift his weight forward, elbows resting on his thighs. “Of course, I know that. I just thought… I just thought you shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

It’s such a simple thing to say, but it almost bowls you over. You turn your head to the side, press your face into your shirt sleeve and dig your fingernails deep into the skin of your shins.

Bradley watches you, eyes intent, and then he probes carefully, “Are you… are you going to keep it?”

You sink your teeth into your lower lip, blink against the sudden dampness. Keep your face turned away from him. The shame of it all, of the situation you’re in, of him seeing you like this, overwhelms you. Your vision blurs.

“I think…” You swallow around the lump in your throat. “I always used to think if I ever got in this situation, I’d just get an abortion but now… I don’t… I just don’t think it’s the right thing for me.”

Slowly, he nods. “You want to have the baby,” he says, and it’s not really a question, but you answer anyway.

“Yes. I mean… I don’t know, it’s just… I want this. I don’t know why or how, but I… it feels like I have to do this.”

“Yeah,” Bradley says, completely sincere. “Your body, your choice.”

Now you do snort. “What, are we at a rally?”

“I follow a few Instagram accounts,” he admits. His voice has gone almost sheepish. “Abortion rights should be everybody’s concern. Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

It’s endearing in a strange way because there’s nothing performative about it. It’s just bumbling and awkward and peculiarly genuine.

“You sound like you spend too much time on Twitter,” you say softly, and it makes him laugh. Bradley’s got a nice laugh, one that starts in his belly and seems to end at the back of his throat, punches out into the air from back there.

After things have gone quiet again, the anxiety sets back in. Or maybe it’s been there all along, chomping at the bit, and you just didn’t notice.

“You must think I’m crazy,” you say finally, a self-deprecating chuckle loosening from your throat.

But when you glance up at him from beneath lowered lashes, stomach tight with anticipation, Bradley doesn’t look judgmental at all. Instead, his face is wide open, his eyes clear, the corners of his lips still curled upward with the remnants of his smile.

Luke laughed at you, but Bradley is looking at you with something like admiration, and it takes your breath away.

“No,” he says. “I think you’re really, really brave.”

And then you’re crying again.

You’re surprised there are any tears left in you after your earlier session, but they burst forth now, in a sudden eruption of all the fear and all the pain. And Bradley is so nice. So goddamn kind even though he doesn’t know you, not really, even though this isn’t even his problem. Sits there on the floor of the Hard Deck with you at half past one am on a Sunday night, and doesn’t complain, doesn’t sigh. He just listens.

You don’t feel brave. You feel terrified, you feel overwhelmed, you feel… you feel… you feel like the whole world has toppled over. You feel like Atlas crashing down, buried beneath the weight of his burden. You feel tiny. Inadequate. You feel scared, scared, scared.

“I don’t know what to do,” you confess, choke it out between sobs. Wonder why you’re telling him this. When you don’t know him.

Funny how it is so much easier at times to be honest with strangers than it is to be honest with the people we love the most.

“I’m so… I’m so scared, Bradley.”

He moves as if to touch you, then seems to think better of it and slumps back into himself. The expression on his face is unreadable, his eyebrows furrowed, his jaw clenched.

“He’s not gonna… the father isn’t going to help you out?”

It makes you realize you never really answered his earlier question. And you don’t know why, can’t explain it rationally, but for some reason, this, too, makes embarrassment well up at the back of your throat. 

What is Bradley going to think? The poor, little, stupid girl who got herself knocked up by a guy who won’t even stay? Is that what everybody’s going to think now? Is that all you’ll be?

It’s a life sentence, this whole thing.

You shrug, pause. Shake your head. “No,” you say finally. “He’s not going to be involved.”

You know it’s true. Luke won’t come back, not now, not in ten years, not in twenty. There was something final about that exchange, something permanent. Something that can’t be undone.

Suddenly, you think of that tiny, unborn child inside of you. Abandoned before it ever came into the world.

It’s just you and me now, baby, you think to yourself, and it goes through you like a current, sweeps you under like a wave. We’re all alone. All we have is each other.

“What about your parents? Your dad’s in the Navy, too, right?”

If you could, you’d run away. Fold yourself to invisibility. Slip into the pockets between moments and become something other, something that exists out of sight.

You think of your parents. Floral couches and polished hardwood floors. Tom Cruise on the television as your mother scrubbed every part of the house like she was getting rid of an illness, wiping away a disease, perpetually finding another stain or another cobweb or another wrinkle to smooth over. Think of your father, rigid and strict and absent. Always on some mission, always thinking of a greater good that definitely didn’t involve you, always looking through you even as he looked at you. You don’t know if you have a single memory of him smiling.

You haven’t spoken to them once since you gave up a perfectly fine full-ride scholarship to college.

“My parents,” you say, and as the words spill from you, you realize they’re the truth, “would probably kill me if they found out I got pregnant out of wedlock. Maybe if I were married, they’d give me back my trust fund or something, but… No, I don’t think they’d help me out.”

A muscle in Bradley’s jaw jumps, then he’s looking away. Turning to the side so you’re knee to knee again. You stare at his profile, at the curl of his ears, the cut of his jaw. The jagged edges of his scars blur through the fog of your tears.

“So, how are you… do you have a plan?”

You had one. You had Mojitos and Daiquiris and Cosmopolitans. You had a slew of business classes at a community college. You had a dream and a set of tools to achieve it, and when you close your eyes, you can almost see it right there in front of you.

But now it’s been swept up in a hurricane. Swallowed by a tsunami.

“No,” you admit, and your voice trembles. “I have no idea what to do.”

Bradley’s jaw moves as he chews on his lower lip. He swallows, and his throat unudlates with it, and then he’s shifting, shuffling forward a bit.

“I…” He clears his throat. If you didn’t know any better, you’d say he looks nervous. “I may have an idea.”

“An idea?” you repeat slowly.

You think he’s going to tell you about some friend who’s looking to hire someone, looking to rent out a very cheap apartment, works at a doctor’s office and is going to treat you for free. Something like that, maybe.

Instead, Bradley takes a deep breath and says, “Marry me.”

It takes a while for the words to register. At first, you think you’ve misheard, then you wonder if maybe the romantic parts of your mind cooked that up. If he even said it at all.

But Bradley is looking at you expectantly, the only indicator of nerves the slightest glimmer in his brown eyes.

And you can’t help yourself. You laugh, even through your tears. It’s a sound that rips from you unconsciously, unstoppably, because surely he’s joking. It’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard.

“Good one,” you say, and wonder just how big of a mess you look like. You wipe at your cheeks, your nose with your sleeves and sniffle once, twice.

Bradley’s lips twitch into the pathetic half of a smile, then he’s serious again, avoiding your eyes.

And that, finally, is when you realize that he isn’t joking at all.

“I…” You pause, mind whirring, head spinning. “What?”

“It’s just….” Bradley shrugs, then explains, “It’s only a suggestion. But you said your family might consider supporting you again if you were married. It might be an option.”

You don’t know what to say. You feel like you’re in a low-budget Hallmark movie.

Bradley pushes on, “It wouldn’t be permanent. We could get a divorce quickie in a year or two, just stay together long enough for you to get settled with the baby and everything. Plus, you’d get free healthcare.” He glances at you, and the blank expression on your face must light a panic in him. Now his words come faster. “I wouldn’t expect anything from you, of course I wouldn’t. It would just be… keeping up appearances. Just for a while….”

Finally, he trails off. The silence stretches between you like a palpable thing, thick and dense like summer heat.

When you were twelve, sitting in the back of the car as your parents argued up front, the woods of Washington flying past in rapid ribbons of black and blue and green, the moon a disk of silver in the sky, a deer ran out into the road. You remember the screeching of the tires as your dad did what you’re not supposed to and brought the car to a sudden, abrupt stillstand. You remember the wide eyes of the animal, the muscles locked in its state of catatonic horror. You remember the flanks rising and falling quickly beneath the matted fur.

For a second, you feel like that deer. Frozen. Caught completely off guard. Vulnerable.

Then you think you might be a little overdramatic. 

You say, “What the fuck, Bradley?”

Part of you expects him to backtrack immediately, laugh, and tell you that he was joking after all. But Bradley stands his ground, even as he still won’t look right at you.

“I probably wouldn’t even be home much anyway. I leave for work all the time,” he says, brows drawn into a straight line above his eyes as he stares intently at his thumb rubbing circles into the skin of his arm. “But I could babysit, and then you could go back to work. I really wouldn’t mind. I’m good with kids, you know?”

You’re not entertaining the whole thing, not really, but you can’t help yourself. Your curiosity takes the upper hand.

“Why would you… why would you ever offer this? You barely know me.”

Bradley seems to think about it for a long moment, his face unreadbale. Then finally, he says, “There’d be something in it for me, too, you know? I’ve been meaning to get assigned to North Island permanently, do a relocation. But those spots tend to go to the guys with family, so…” He shrugs, but the gesture seems forced. “I could help you out, you could help me out. Win-win.”

“That’s all?” you ask, and you don’t know why there’s something like disappointment in your voice.

Bradley looks like he wants to say something else, and for a moment his face is vulnerable. But then it shutters again, and he nods. “That’s all.”

For a second, just a second, you let yourself imagine it: Imagine saying yes to this mad, insane, incredible proposal. Imagine marrying Bradley, someone soft and warm and responsible, someone completely opposite to Luke. Imagine him in a tux and you in a white dress, imagine his mustache tickling against your cheek as he leans in to kiss you. You imagine one of the quaint little houses you grew up in, but one that would belong to you, at least for a while. You imagine a toddler running through it, imagine Bradley bending down to scoop them into his arms. You imagine a life without this aching, shifting loneliness. You imagine a life with Bradley.

When you finally shake your head, when you let go of that ghost, it feels like it takes a piece of you with it.

“No,” you say softly, and it breaks you open in ways you can’t describe. “I can’t let you do that, Bradley.”

It’s just too insane. Too far out there. It wouldn’t be fair to him, when you’d be getting so much more out of that arrangement.

And besides. I don’t want someone to marry me out of responsibility. That’s what you told Bradley earlier, and you meant it.

When you do marry, when you walk down that aisle, you want it to be for love. And people can call you delusional, naive, whatever. You don’t care. You just know you want the big thing, the real thing, True Love, capital t, capital l. You want the hurricane of romance, the monsoon of love. You want to fly into it.

Bradley’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “Okay. But if you… change your mind, yeah? I’ll be here.”

And he means it. Bradley carries his heart on his sleeve, you’ve learned this much. He tries to hide it, but he’s no good at it. Eventually, his emotions always get the better of him, burst forth like fountains. It’s part of his charm.

“What,” you say, “right here on the Hard Deck’s floors?”

It’s a sad attempt at a joke, but Bradley is nice enough to laugh anyway. “Sure thing. You guys have the cleanest floors in all of North Island, did you know that?”

You hum. “Sure. I’m the one who cleans them.”

Finally, you get up off the floor, unfold yourself from the bundle of misery you’ve crumbled into. Your legs ache, your back hurts, your chest still feels hollow. All the crying has left a dull pain pulsating behind your left brow.

The two of you look for Bradley’s wallet together, finally find it over by the pool table. You pretend like you’re not still reeling from his proposal, like it’s not suddenly become impossible to do so much as look at him without your heart flopping around like a fish finding its sad end on dry land.

“Can I give you a ride home?” Bradley asks as he watches you lock up. The Hard Deck has an old lock that gets jammed whenever the slightest bit of dampness creeps into the air. You have to hang onto the doorknob with all your weight while simultaneously turning the key to get it to lock.

“I drove here,” you say, casting your eyes about for the tiny tin can you call your car. You can’t even remember where you parked earlier.

“You okay to drive?” Bradley asks.

You glance at him. With the lights off, the parking lot is almost covered in a thick blanket of darkness. The headlights of a few passing cars winding their path along the coastal highway illuminate patches of gravel now and then. Moonlight spills silver and dim across his shoulders, like fingers caressing him. He looks concerned, examining the state of you.

The truth is that you’re tired. Bone tired. Dead tired. So tired you could probably go to sleep where you stand if you put your mind to it. But you don’t want to bother Bradley anymore, have already stolen enough of his time.

So you’re about to decline, but it seems you hesitated too long.

“I’ll take you home,” Bradley says decidedly, “and you can come get your car tomorrow, okay? I don’t think you should be driving like this.”

“You don’t have to do that, you….”

“I know,” he interrupts you, a smile spreading on his face. “But I’ll feel better knowing you got home safe.”

That makes your insides clench in a way they shouldn’t. Your chest feels tight, and you look away just in case you start crying again.

Is it too soon in your pregnancy to start blaming raging hormones?

Wordlessly, you let Bradley lead you across the parking lot toward his monstrosity of a car. His hand hovers at the small of your back, incredibly close yet never touching. He’s big behind you, bulking, and you try not to think about it. When he opens the door for you and waits until you’re buckled in to close it, you feel like your head’s going to explode.

The ride home is quiet, as is the town around you on this Sunday night. An old Killers song plays on the radio, and you think of deer stepping out into streets, then press your eyes closed and will the thought away.

In Bradley’s car, with the windows rolled down, with the Californian night breeze whipping your hair into your eyes and clearing the fog from your head, for a short, blissful while, nothing seems real. It’s one of those liminal moments, a not-time, when reality feels like a dream and even the sharpest knives don’t cut deep enough to hurt.

It ends quicker than expected because time always goes the fastest when you want it to go slow. Then you’re thanking him, saying goodbye, both of you pretending he didn’t just propose some strange, fake marriage to you behind a bar counter not even thirty minutes ago.

Bradley waits until you’re inside the building before he starts the engine again. You hear the roar of it as you climb the stairs up to the second floor.

In your bedroom, you don’t even bother getting undressed. You just slip under the covers, pull them up over your head, bury in the sticky, stale air beneath them, close your eyes, and fall asleep within seconds.

+

The first time you told your parents about your bartending dreams, your father yelled at you for forty-five minutes. He hurled words at you that hurt, that left scars, that made you wonder and kept you second-guessing yourself for years, that stayed with you. Your mother didn’t say anything.

Somehow, that was worse.

You call her on the landline at five pm on a Tuesday, just before your dad gets back home, and she answers after the third ring. You’re so sure she’s going to acknowledge the four-year gap in contact, the crumbling of the relationship, the fall-out of screaming and crying, and your dad kicking you out of the house.

What you get, instead, is a ten-minute spiel about who brought what to last week’s church potluck and which laundry detergent your father’s contact allergies don’t act up with.

You’re sitting cross-legged on your bed, your digital alarm clock counting down the time in radioactive green. Outside, you hear the sounds of jets roaring through the sky. In your tiny kitchen unit, the faucet is leaking.

Finally, five minutes into a lecture on the advantages of pre-chopped garlic, you interrupt, “Mom?”

You wonder if she hears the shift in your voice, the slight tremble of it. Something makes her go very quiet on the other end of the line, no sound but her breath.

Drip-drip-drip goes your faucet.

When she doesn’t acknowledge you, you push on, your heart beating a staccato rhythm against your ribcage, “I might… I think I might need some help.”

She doesn’t answer for so long you think you might have lost connection. Then you hear shuffling, imagine her walking through her empty house the way she sometimes does - like a phantom, like a specter.

“With what?” she asks after an eternity.

It’s all you can do to keep yourself from hyperventilating. Years of pain and fear clog up your chest, settle like goosebumps on your skin. You close your eyes and let your head drop back against your pillow.

“I’m pregnant,” you say.

And then you can feel it through the phone, like something physical. What you’ve always known deep down. The disapproval and the disappointment, and the complete lack of understanding.

You’ve never been who your parents wanted you to be, and they’ve always punished you for it like it was a crime.

When your mother says your name, it’s so plain. That she can’t understand what you’re doing, with your cocktails and your late nights. That she doesn’t see why you’d ever choose something like that over a real education and a real job. That she cannot fathom how it could come to this now - you, broke, young, alone, pregnant.

It’s like being five again, trying to get somebody to look at the picture you drew. It’s like being ten again and being overlooked. It’s like being fifteen again, still vying for the attention you’ll never really get.

Your mother is a stubborn woman, set in her ways. She knows what she wants from people, more specifically, what she wants for them. And you’re no exception. Nobody’s ever asked her a question whose answer she couldn’t find in the bible.

More than wanting you to go to college, wanting you to work in an office, your mother has always wanted you to get married. To fit yourself into the picture-perfect stencil of white picket fence and smiling husband she cut herself. For you to let some guy put a ring on you, put a kid in you, buy you a house and a porch swing and a family van.

It’s pathetic, but it doesn’t matter how much time passes. How much older you get. At the end of the day, you still want her approval, just once, even if you have to lie to get it.

So, like a child, like you’re five again, like you’re ten again, like you’re fifteen again, you say, “I’m getting married.”

“Oh?” your mother asks, and there’s so much hope in the one word it hits you like a ton of bricks.

“Yeah,” you confirm, and then the lies just burst out of you, and you hate yourself, hate yourself so much it’s like bile on your tongue, “yeah, we’ve been engaged for a while, and now with the baby and all… It’s been long overdue.”

Your mother almost sounds excited. Sure, she’d probably prefer for you to have been married before getting knocked up, but all of this must still seem better than the last plan you presented to her four years ago. “What’s his name? What’s he do?”

You squeeze your eyes closed. If your mother knew you at all, if you hadn’t spent the past few years not speaking, you’d like to think she would have heard the shame in your voice when you say, “Bradley. He’s a Naval aviator.”

It might be the worst thing you’ve done in your life: Dragging poor, kind Bradley Bradshaw into the mess you’ve made of your life. Nevermind that he offered. It doesn’t matter.

Your mother starts babbling, the way she only does when she’s actually pleased about something. She’s talking about how happy your dad will be that you’re getting married to a fellow army guy, but you barely hear it. Now that you’ve gotten the approval, it doesn’t feel at all like you thought it would. 

It just hurts. 

For a while, you just let her keep talking as you blink away the tears, as you stare at your bedroom wall, as your mind spins and spins and spins in circles. Then you promise to send her an invite, say your goodbyes, and hang up.

It’s like you’re numb all over. You stay on your bed for another five minutes, and then another, and you feel just as empty as you did after your last conversation with Luke.

What has your life become? How could it crumble as quickly as it did, going from okay to horrible in less than a week?

Even when you weren’t speaking to your parents, you never felt this distant from them, this far removed. A chasm you’ll never be able to breach. An ocean you’re never going to bridge. The only way you’ve ever gotten your mother to be happy with a decision you’ve made is when you lied to her.

The loneliness is everywhere, then. In your chest, in your bed, in your veins. Crawling like a shadow that swallows you whole.

And then the panic sets in, ice cold in your veins, and with it comes the guilt. Your stomach rolls with it. 

What have I done? you wonder. What have I done to myself, to Bradley? How will I ever get out of this?

You scramble. Blindly reach for a dress to slip into, for a pair of flip-flops, for your car keys. It’s a miracle you don’t crash on your way to the Hard Deck. Your heart works itself up into a frenzy, and the guilt gnaws at you, slashes at you, paws at you. All these emotions are tearing you apart.

In the back, Bradley and Bob are playing Pacman on one of the retro machines. They’re pretty loud, too, and from what you gather in your mad dash through your workplace, Bradley seems to be disproportionally competitive about the whole thing.

Figures. Nobody gets into Top Gun without a cutthroat streak and a mean penchant for ambition.

“Bradley,” you say, and when he looks up, his eyes sparkling, the smile slides right off his face. “Can I talk to you?”

He seems stunned for a second, then nods and deposits his beer on a nearby table. “Sure thing.”

You lead him out the back. Out of the corner of your eyes, you spot the exact corner you huddled in a few days back, agonizing over the positive pregnancy test, the decline of your life, the decay of your dreams. Don’t look, you tell yourself, and then do it anyway.

The sun hasn’t set yet, but twilight is descending on the world rapidly. Everything is washed into soft pastels, the sand and the last surfers shaking salt water from their hair. Bradley’s shirt and the honey gold of his skin.

You can’t look at him. It’s a shame that grows in the pit of your stomach, that settles there, heavy like a stone. How can you do this to him? 

You’ve never felt worse about yourself, and still… The fear is too big. 

Since you decided to give up on the scholarship, since you walked out of your parents house four years ago, you’ve been on your own. You’ve been footing your own bills and renting your own apartment and paying for insurance on your car. You were alone the time you got a cold so bad you couldn’t get out of bed for two days. You were alone when your tire popped on the highway and you almost hit another car. You were alone when you got rejection after rejection from the big San Diego bars, the ones that end up featured on TV and in magazines.

And that was fine. You’re strong, you know you are. Any issue that came your way, you managed to figure out eventually. You’ve been doing fine without any help.

But this, here, now. This… You just can’t do it on your own. Not when it’s about a baby. Your baby.

So you take a deep breath and ask, “Is the offer still on the table?”

Bradley exhales. You watch as he takes a step closer to you, as his shoes move in the field of your vision, grains of sand crunching beneath the soles. When he speaks, a cadence of insecurity has snuck into his voice, “The marriage?”

You nod because you can’t say it. Your mouth just won’t form the words.

“If…” Bradley clears his throat. “If you want it… yeah.”

When you look up at him, there’s something strange on his face. Something that looks less like surprise and more like awe.

His eyes are so brown, and your heart beats so fast, and you’re dizzy like you just got off a rollercoaster. 

“I…” You pause to collect your thoughts, and then you rush it all out at once, scared that if you don’t say it now, you never will. “If I were to say yes, like, hypothetically… I’d need to know that you’re not just doing it for me. That there’s something in it for you, too, so….”

He’s nodding before you’ve finished. “I told you. I wanna stay here. I’m sick of getting sent around the country all the time, so… It’s good. It’s an opportunity.”

An opportunity. That sounds like business, sounds like a transaction, sounds rational and level-headed and reasonable, and you latch onto the idea. Maybe if you try to take the emotion out of the equation, it’ll be easier.

Bradley seems relaxed about the whole thing, much more relaxed than he should be given the absurdity of the situation, but you feel like you need to make things clear anyway, if only to put yourself at ease. That’s what people do before singing contracts, right? Put all the cards out on the table?

So you go on, “And I wouldn’t, like… Like you’d still get to do anything you want. I wouldn’t expect you to help with the baby or anything. And you could keep dating, of course, you could, I won’t mind. I promise. It’d just be for show, right?”

Bradley hesitates, and for a second, you think he’s going to say something. But then he just shrugs, nods, says, “That’s fine. Yeah. Whatever you want.”

For a moment, you both just look at each other. 

“This is insane,” you say because it is, and you don’t know what else to say.

And Bradley just chuckles and agrees smoothly, “Yeah, it’s nuts, isn’t it?”

As you look at him, here in this pastel lighting, here on the verge of something monumental, there’s something so reassuring about him. Something so steady and reliable and constant. Something that makes you think, with him, maybe it could be okay, no matter how insane the whole idea is. An opportunity. An investment that just might pay off.

North star, you remind yourself. Bradley Bradshaw is the North Star.

At the very least, you won’t be alone.

“So is that….” Bradley shifts, scratches the back of his neck. “You saying yes, then?”

There’s a lump in your throat like you’ve swallowed a pebble. It almost chokes you.

“Yeah,” you agree finally, and can’t believe you’re saying this, doing this, can’t believe you’re this mad and this selfish and this desperate. “I guess I am.”

It’s awkward after that. You both just stand there, you with your arms around your own ribcage, Bradley with his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. Space and silence stretches far and gaping and glaring between you.

Then he says, “Can I hug you?”

That’s sort of the last thing you expected him to say.

You blink at him. “Uhm… sure?”

When Bradley pulls you into his arms, when he holds you against his chest loosely, carefully, giving you room to pull away at any moment, the whole thing almost bowls you over. It’s the first time anybody’s hugged you since you found out you’re pregnant, since your entire world came crashing down, and you can’t help yourself. It’s a visceral reaction. You cling to him, wrap your arms around his neck, press your face into his shoulder and your chest against his and squeeze your eyes shut, and stay there for longer than you planned to, longer than you should. Let him hold you tight enough that for a moment, for a while, it almost feels like you’re whole again. Like you’re not alone.

For the first time in a week, for the first time since that positive test, things feel real. You feel real. Only with his hands on you. The thoughts that have been echoing through your head constantly, loud enough to drown out everything else, quiet.

You could get addicted to it, could get greedy and selfish and never-satisfied. Could eat it raw.

Bradley smells like sunscreen and sandalwood. You try to commit that scent to memory, try to ingrain it into your brain and your body. Something to remember the next time the loneliness sets in.

Finally, he pulls away, and his smile is gentle. You feel every inch of separation like an ache in your bones, like an echo, like a reverberation.

You can’t cry again. You’ve been doing it so much recently that you just won’t allow it again. If you’re going to do this, if you’re going to be a mother and a wife, in whatever capacity, you’ll have to be strong. No matter how hard that will be.

“I don’t even have a ring for you,” Bradley says, a frown etching itself into his forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh.” You’re shaking your head quickly, vehemently. “No, Bradley, that’s fine, you don’t need to….”

“I think you should have something, though. I want to give you something,” he interrupts you. “I just don’t know….”

And then he seems to think of something. The epiphany is practically written all over his face, and for a moment, he looks so much younger. Rosy cheeks and all.

Bradley reaches into his wifebeater and pulls his dog tags from beneath the fabric. Before you know what’s happening, he’s tugging the thin silver chain down over your head, moving your hair out of the way carefully. It settles against the skin of your neck, warmed by his body heat.

You stare down at the metal dangling over your dress, the letters of his name etched into it. Bradley Bradshaw. 

Your heart seizes.

When you were younger, much younger, you used to dream of this. You used to imagine what being proposed to would feel like, what it would be like. A fancy restaurant, an expensive glass of champagne, and a diamond ring at the bottom of the flute. Something flashy, something extravagant, something beautiful. The man in your fantasy was faceless at first, and then he looked like Robert Pattinson, and then he looked like your first crush, and then he went back to being faceless again.

He never had a mustache. He was never a stranger. Your dreams were never this: Rushed and fake and no ring at all. You, pregnant with somebody else’s baby, and Bradley, marrying you to get assigned to a base of his choosing. None of it real. No True Love, no capital t, no capital l. Not even lowercase. Nothing but madness and guilt and business between you.

And still you want it, want it so bad it swells inside you, pushes against your ribcage with enough pressure to crack bones - you want to be wanted.

You wonder what Bradley dreamed of. Not you, probably. So much younger than him, so naive, so gullible, falling for married men and getting yourself into situations you can’t climb out of yourself. Making him do this when he deserves better, more, deserves something true and real.

It makes you sick to your stomach. It makes you want to cry. It makes you want to ask Bradley to hug you again, so you can forget, just for another second, just for another moment.

Instead, you say, voice barely a whisper, “Thank you.”

Bradley shakes his head. “You don’t have to thank me,” he says, and he sounds so genuine you have to avert your eyes. “We’re friends, right?”

Friends. This man you barely know. This man who is doing something unfathomable for you.

“Yeah,” you agree softly. “Friends.”

And then later, in the bar, as Bradley’s friends discuss some new Star Wars show you haven’t seen, as they order round after round of beer you can’t drink, as the sky goes from pastels to blues to blacks, you’ll pretend you don’t see Natasha staring at the dog tags around your neck, pretend you don’t wish you could hold Bradley’s hand, pretend you don’t feel like you’re falling apart, like you’re capsizing where you sit, like you're kicking water miles and miles and miles below the surface.

Beneath the table, you put a hand on your stomach, fingers spreading out, close your eyes, and let the current drag you under.

part 2

[thcfountain]

Dating Noah includes:

afab asexual edition. MDNI.

Baking together!!! You and Noah have made huge messes of the kitchen, throwing flour at each other or feeding each other chocolate chips or cookie dough here and there.

His fingers, somehow, are covered in cookie dough and Noah waves them at you teasingly. "I'm a mess," he laughs.

"Yes you are," you reply, taking hold of his wrist and licking the chocolate chip dough off his fingers. "I love you anyway."

The two of you sitting down to have a conversation about sex together. He promises that it's not a big deal to him, it's not some make it or break thing he needs in the relationship.

If you're not sex avoidant, on very rare occasions, you'll do sexual things with him and he treats you with so much love and respect and constantly asks if you're okay and if you want to stop because he will never ask anything of you that you don't want.

Also if you're not sex avoidant, you've absolutely watched him masturbate.

You and Noah are huge fans of snuggling. Noah loves the feel of you sleeping on top of him, like a weighted blanket and you love how warm he is, like a personal space heater.

Noah, as a joke, gets you a body pillow with his face on it for you to sleep on when he's on tour.

He's not entirely sure how you managed it, but once, when visiting him while on tour, you managed to bring enough homemade cookies for the band and crew.

"TSA just let you through with this many cookies?" He asks, biting into an oatmeal raisin.

"Hallongrottor!" announces Jolly, cutting you off before you can even attempt an answer. He holds up the raspberry cookie, a Swedish recipe you had found online, as if it was a prize. "Hon är fantastisk och jag älskar henne!"

You aren't sure what he's saying but by the way he scurries off with several handfuls of cookies, you assume it's good.

You and Noah talking about the future and what it holds for you. He doesn't really want kids because he doesn't lead a life where he can be around enough for them and you're not interested in the sex aspect of having children or raising adopted children alone when he's on tour, so the unanimous decision is to become crazy cat ladies together.

You plan to go to the shelter together to look at cats for adoption but never get far enough because one day, the cat distribution system picks Noah.

You hear the cries of a kitten as he walks into the room and then a little, furry orange head, pokes out of Noah's jacket, where he had been cradling it against his chest.

"His name is Naruto," Noah tells you, handing the small little baby to you gently. He ran out of the bushes and scaled my leg."

The kitten cries for Noah as you hold him. "He must think you're his mommy," you tease, handing the baby back.

"I'm a mommy!" Noah announces, giving the baby kisses. "Oh," he says after a second. "He has fleas. I guess we need to take him to the vet."

Naruto quickly ends up with several brothers and sisters because the cat distribution system loves Noah. It picks you eventually though.

You're in the middle of facetiming Noah, when you hear a gravelly sounding meow outside the house. You take the phone with you, opening the front door.

"What's up?" Noah asked, not having heard the meow on his end of the call.

An old tom cat wanders over from the bushes, meows at you like he's got a smoker's voice, and then walks straight into the house.

"I think we just adopted a new son," you tell Noah, switching the camera onto the tom who has curled up on the couch for an immediate nap.

"MY SON!" shouts Noah excitedly from the other end of the call.

Taking tons of photos of Noah when he's home because every time he naps, he ends up with all the cats curled up on him.

One day the cat distribution system gets a little confused though.

"Don't be scared," Noah says before he's even walked in the door, which definitely spikes your anxiety. "But we have a new son."

He walks into the room with a python around his neck and draped across his shoulders. The serpent looks far too at ease on his new tree of a human being and you watch Noah scratch under his chin lovingly.

"Where the fuck did you find that?" You ask, half amazed and half worried.

"He fell out of a tree onto my head. I'm calling him Orochimaru."

Playing video games together!! You and Noah get snacks set out and play games against each other. Loser has to wash the dishes for a week.

if you play an instrument, Noah demands jam sessions with you. If it's an instrument he doesn't know how to play, he asks you to teach him how.

stealing Noah's hoodies and wearing them to sleep in when he's not around.

taking care of Noah when he's sick. He always demands extra, extra smoochies to help make him feel better.

when Noah's on tour, he demands to know everything that's going on in your life without him so you guys do calls so you can tell him all the hot goss.

"And then my coworker stole my lunch out of the fridge!" you tell him, concluding the work day's important events.

"No they did not!" gasps Noah, acting as if it's the worst thing he's ever heard. "Want me to come beat them up?" he jokes.

having the entire band over at the house occasionally and getting to watch Noah be silly with his friends.

You laugh, heart warming at the sight of Folio on Noah's back for a piggyback ride. Noah runs around the yard for a bit, he and Folio laughing as Jolly films. The laughter grows louder as everyone watches Noah slip, tumbling into the pool with Folio.

You sip on a soda as Nicholas tells you about his own cats at home, a story that's immediately interrupted by Noah running over and proceeding to play bongos on Nicholas' ass while giggling.

Nicholas looks down at Noah's hands and then up to Noah's eyes and laughs. "Brother, you have crack energy," he says in that light southern accent of his, earning a laugh from you and Noah both.

Noah absolutely buys a babysling so he can wear it and have the cats swaddled to his chest like babies when he's home.

date nights are always planned out in advance, you two take turns planning dates. From seeing moves together, to sensory museums, fancy dinners, petting zoos. Date night is always a lot of fun.

You guys definitely go to concerts together and Noah always makes sure you're super safe in the crowd. He would never let anything happen to you.

You're at the venue bar, paying for overpriced sodas when a strange man sidles up next to you. He won't take no for an answer and because Noah was in the bathroom, he takes your excuses of having a boyfriend to be lies. You feel scared - this stranger won't take no for an answer and he's in your personal space, hands all over you.

Until he's not. Noah had come out of almost nowhere, pushing the man back so hard that the stranger stumbled, almost falling over himself with the momentum.

"She said no," the growl in Noah's voice sends a shiver down your spine. You've never seen him so angry before.

His fists clench and you wonder if he's about to throw a punch - one you know will totally rock that man's shit with the muscles Noah is packing. The stranger gets the message in bright neon lights and vanishes. The moment he's gone, Noah pulls you into a hug.

"I'm sorry," he says gently. "Are you okay?"

Noah got serious cake and so sometimes you like to smack it. He always laughs but its obvious that you're the only one allowed to play with his booty cheeks.

You guys love makeout sessions. Hours spent just making out, usually until a roommate or friend jokingly complains.

getting piggyback rides from Noah or sitting on his shoulders to get a good view during outdoor concerts or when there's fireworks.

playing board games with Noah and the band and having to keep an eye on Noah and Jolly because they cheat.

[lllivia]

"I kinda knew you had a thing for me"

Shauna Shipman x f!reader

summary: Shauna comforts you after you and your boyfriend break up

Warnings: not proofread, slowburn, prb cringy and cliche

_

"Shauna!" you call as you knock on her front door for what feels like the 100th time.

"Shauna are you home?"

Sighing you stand up on the tip of your toes to look through the window of her door and into the hallway for any sign of her, nothing.

With your red, puffy eyes you scan around for just one more second before giving up and sitting down on the stairs in front of your best friend's house, feeling too sad and exhausted to go home.

_

"Y/n?? What are you doing here? You said you were going to Tom's house today"

Shauna asks as she jogs up towards her yard, still clad in her well known yellowjackets uniform with a worried frown on her face as she sees you sitting with your knees drawn up towards your chest and the hood of your jacket pulled up over your hair.

"He broke up with me" was the quiet response she got in a low and broken voice as you look up from your lap. "I went over to his house earlier this morning and the only thing he said was that he didn't see our relationship going on any further and that he has found a girl that makes him happier than I ever have" you continue and sniffle as you try to hold in the inevitable crocodile tears.

"Oh sweetie" Shauna said and pulls you up, embracing you tightly into her arms and gently leading your head into the crook of her neck as you cry.

Despite just coming back from soccer practice she still managed to smell like her signature vanilla perfume comforted you.

"I don't know what I'm going to do, we've been together since 8th grade and I've practically surrounded all my life around him ever since then!" You squeeze her tightly and sob, finally letting all your emotions out after holding them in check since you left his house.

Shauna rubs your back and lets you cry into her shoulder for a couple of minutes before softly speaking up and turning your head to meet her eyes by taking a hold of your tearsoaked chin. "Y/n, baby?... How about we go to the diner down by the old bowling alley and get something to eat, maybe it'll make you feel better with some food in your system"

"Mm yeah.. yeah that sounds good" you sigh and step back, wiping your eyes on the sleeve of your jacket and directing a wavering smile up at Shauna.

"Let me just quickly take a shower and get changed first"

_

You sit in silence the first half hour, slowly eating your food as you listen to the 80s music silently jamming in the background.

You're not even completely sure why you're feeling this way, you and Chris had been fading away from each other for months now, and you knew that it was only a matter of time until you finally broke up your stereotypical high school relationship.

Other than that you were also starting to feel like the romantic emotions you had for him hadn't even been sincere for a while, the only thing keeping you from leaving was the emptyness you would be left with after so many years with a boyfriend.

"...are you feeling any better yet y/n?" Shauna speaks up after a while, breaking the tense silence as she notices how your gaze had drifted off into space.

"Hm? Oh yeah, thanks Shauny, I really needed this" you say, smiling up at your friend and blushing slightly in embarrassment as you get back from your thoughts.

She nods pitifully. "Of course sweetie, I know how hard this must have been for you" She says and reaches over the table for your hand, running her thumb over the softness of your flesh. Her own thoughts running wild as she thinks of all the times she secretly wrote in her journal about how she wished for this to happen.

Your smile widens. "I'm really happy to have you in my life Shauna, you're the best friend anyone could ever wish for"

"Of course y/n, yk I would do anything for you, anything" She says still smiling sweetly as she tightens her grip on your hand almost possessively, not noticing herself do so.

All you can do at the gesture is look away, slightly flustered as you try to think nothing of it.. You didn't want to admit it, even to yourself, but the last couple of months while your feelings were fading for Tom, they were embarrassingly growing for Shauna, everything she does - every lingering touch she leaves on your arm or when you catch her staring in your direction before she turns away, saying you had something on your face, they all make you feel all tingly and warm inside, you knew that you'd somehow managed to obtain a crush on her, but that didn't mean she had to know, you weren't even sure she liked girls, and if she did then the first person she would go for was probably her teammate Jackie.

-

"Fuuck, you know exactly how to get me in a better mood Shauny, I love this place above anything else!" you say, mouth still full of the sweet buttery dough and eyes filled with laughter at something Shauna just said.

You'd already been at the diner for a little over an hour now and your plates were starting to empty.

"Of course" She giggles, she'd quickly turned your mood from a 0 to a 100 real quick.

"Wanna get out of here? I'll pay the bill for us m'lady" she says and jokingly winks before almost knocking over her water glass. "Oh shit!"

You only start to laugh again, the thoughts of your now ex dissipating into thin air.

"Ok, follow me home?" You ask after your breath slowly returns to your lungs. "Yeah, sure" Shauna smiles back before paying the bill and grabbing her jacket as you head outside.

"So, you think you'll be okay? He meant a lot to you, didn't he" She says from her spot on the sidewalk beside you, her fingers anxiously playing in the pockets of her flannel as she tries to sound like she wasn't slightly bitter about your relationship.

You guys had always been super close, having been friends since the first day of elementary school, but one thing you never really spoke about was relationships, it had become a sort of unspoken rule that you guys had after Shauna once got unreasonably angry when you tried to tell her about the first time you made out with Tom.

"I'll be fine.. I think I'm mostly just kind of surprised, I always thought I would be the one to break up with him" you joke awkwardly and glance down at your shoes.

"And I think this was actually a good thing in the long run, we both had very different views on everything and I think I deserve to be with someone who loves me for who I actually am and not who I'm pretending to be."

Shauna quickly glances over at you, her mouth opening slightly to say something before she closes it again, deciding against whatever it was.

As the minutes go by in what feels like mere seconds, you eventually reach your house.

"Thanks again Shauny, you really helped me take my mind off of things" you say.

"I wouldn't have done anything less" she responds, her eyes flickering down onto the lower part of your face and she seems to hesitate for what she wants to say next. "I.. I want to tell you something" she finally continues after a painful couple of moments.

"Are you feeling alright Shauna-" You start to say, a crease forming between your eyebrows as you notice her shuffling around.

"I like you"

Silence.

She tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear nervously. "I'm sorry that I'm suddenly saying this now but I really like you, like as more than a friend" she rambles "I've liked you for so long now, and I just can't go around pretending like I don't anymore. I know this is selfish of me to admit on the same day you got broken up with and I'm sure this is really confusing but I just had to tell you how I feel before some other stupid guy decides to see what I see in you and swoop you of your feet before I even get a chance to say something" She finishes slightly out of breath and considers running for it when you don't immediately respond.

"I like you too"

She looks up to meet your eyes once more, not believing what she just heard had come out of your mouth.

"What? But-"

This time it was your turn to interrupt her as you grin up at her. "Just kiss me"

Giggling you start leaning towards her, poking her arm when she just continues to stand still, seemingly shell shocked.

Her attention immediately gets drawn back to you before she pulls you towards her, arms quickly wrapping themselves around your waist as she not so carefully slams her lips onto yours, making you both stumble slightly. Her lips slightly chapped against yours as her teeth catch onto your lower lip.

You continue kissing outside your front door until you have to pull away for air feeling starstruck and dizzy.

"Well.. I kinda knew you had a thing for me" Shauna says, her arms still wrapped tightly around you as she smirks in a cocky manner, seemingly forgetting that she was about to start sobbing on your doorstep just a couple of minutes ago.

"Shut up dumbass"

_

a/n: please tell me if there's anything I can improve with my writing as I haven't written anything in a year.

This was all written at 1 in the morning so if anything is kinda confusing it's probably bcs I'm about to fall asleep 😭

Also if you liked this feel free to send requests, I really don't know what to write about 😍🙏

[guessimwritingficsagain]

(Not) Entertaining the idea of (fucking you)

Summary : Joel's fixing a toilet in the Bison's ladies' room. He overhears something.

Warnings : Mature content, MDNI, masturbation.

Tags : Just ask. ———

The Bison’s bathrooms are divided. One for men, one for women. In each bathroom, there are two different toilets, which is why Friday night found Joel on his knees trying a fix the goddamn toilet that kept on breaking in the ladies’ room. It should be an easy fix, but he still had locked the door to give the giggling ladies who came in an out to use the other, functioning, toilet, a bit of privacy. The apocalypse hadn’t changed that : women still went to the ladies’ room in flock and turned the place into a gossip room. He’d fixed that thing so many times in a year being in Jackson that he’d heard it all - the pep talks, the compliments, the bitching about boys and girls. 

Janine had a crush on her neighbor, except she never realized she was into women before that. He knew the neighbor, Lydia,a no-nonsense woman Joel liked enough to go visit at the bakery even though it was just to say hello.

Janine’s neighbor, Lydia, had a thing for Janine too. 

Apparently that Tom guy Joel’d often seen at the stables was not good in bed. Details had been given, and Joel hadn’t been able to stop from quietly humming in agreement as the faceless, nameless woman had recounted what had clearly been an embarrassing moment for both parties involved. 

Joel remembered when you’d came in, once, with Mrs Turner. The old lady had given you the secret ingredient to her famous apple pie, because you’d wanted to do something nice for some kid’s birthday. He’d take that secret to the grave. 

Somehow, his bad ear didn’t seem that bad when he listened to gossip, hidden like some pervert spying on women. 

He heard the door open and close, bringing him back to the task at hand. A voice he couldn’t place shouted a drunk and enthusiastic :

‘Girl, Jason is so into you !’ 

Giggles, then - Joel counted three or four women. 

The lack of answer prompted another remark. 

‘Come, Jul. She’s on patrol with Joel fucking Miller. She doesn’t care about Jason.’ 

‘Joel’s hot’, added another voice. ‘I mean, I’m sure he has a big dick. Like, you know, huge. Right ?’ 

Another fit of giggles. Then Joel froze, because you started talking, and if there was one thing he could do without, it was knowing how uninterested you were. 

You were a young thing, early thirties maybe, and Joel had never once entertained the idea of trying anything but he was a man with eyes. And every time he looked at you, he saw something real pretty. You’d started patrolling together a couple of months ago after Tommy had stepped down to take care of his baby. You were quick on your feet, smart, funny. Pretty. 

Joel had never entertained the idea but he was also a man with an ego and he didn’t want to hear what you had to say about him. 

‘Listen, we work together. I don’t think about him like that. Y’know… I don’t think about like, his dick or whatever.’ 

Your words were slurred - he pictured you, with your cheeks flushed from being drunk and being hit on by Jason. Pictured you, hip leaning against the wall, arms crossed, shaking your head the way you had done that time when Tommy had suggested to switch patrol partners so Felicia could be trained by Joel. 

‘She can come with us, but I’m not leaving Joel alone with someone who doesn’t know what she’s doing. I’m his partner, and he’s mine. I get a say in this.’ 

Your words had left no room for discussion and Joel had felt himself relaxing into his chair, legs spreading slightly. That night, he hadn’t given a damn about not entertaining the idea when he’d fisted his cock thinking about he’s mine. 

‘Yeah, whatever.’ The woman answered, bringing Joel back to the present. ‘I think you’re full of bullshit. His dick has to be huge, right. Like, painfully huge.’ 

Joel was not a shy man by any means, and he knew from Tommy that he was pretty popular with the ladies here, but hearing a bunch of women fantasizing about the size of his dick was something else entirely. It was not something he wanted to hear and yet, he could not come out right now. It would be embarrassing for everybody. Would be embarrassing for you. So he stayed put, his work long forgotten. 

‘Okay.’ That was you again. Joel turned his good ear towards the door. ‘I’m gonna- Gonna level with you here. If I thought- I mean if I did think about his dick, even though I don’t, and if- I thought it was painfully huge- and of course I don’t because I don’t think about his dick at all. But. I mean. If I did …’

You trailed off, then. There was just a second of silence, and Joel got worried you all could hear his heartbeat because he was pretty sure he was having a heart attack, right now. He heard you take a breath.

‘If I did, and if he was all of that, then, I guess I wouldn’t mind a little bit of pain.’ 

Laughter irrupted in the room and whatever was said next was drowned out by Joel’s mind going on repeat-

He’s mine. 

I wouldn’t mind a bit of pain.

He’s mine. 

When you all left, Joel was so hard he jerked off right there before finishing the job. 

Ten minutes later, he walked out of the bathroom to see you leaning against the counter of the Bison, being chatted up by Jason. Joel’s feet dragged him to your side before he could reflect on what he was doing. His right hand found the small of your back on its own volition and his mouth asked :

‘Mind if I talk t’you for a second here, darlin’ ?’ 

Your eyes were so wide when they turned to him that he had no doubt you were drunk. Your beaming smile was the prettiest thing he’d see today, and your ‘Hey, partner’ the best thing he’d hear. One of your hand shot up to his bicep to steady yourself as you both took a couple of steps back, still close enough to Jason that Joel had to lean in and whisper in your ear to be heard. 

‘I’ve been thinking’, Joel started, feeling more in control of himself now that he was grounded by you and you grounded by him, relishing in the way you were leaning on him for support. ‘Sunday we’re goin’ the long way round. Why don’t we take our time ? You can make that apple pie of yours- heard the kids loved it.’

He couldn’t resist, then, brought you just a little closer. Watched your eyes widen as he turned your face so your were looking right at each other. He knew the whole scene was one of possessive display, from the way he held you close to the way his hand was holding your jaw, thumb right below your ear. 

‘Maybe’ He started, voice low. Stopped when he saw you gulp and felt your fingers slightly grab his shirt, your fingernails grazing his skin through the fabric. 

‘Maybe’ He started again. ‘Maybe we can stop by that clearing, y’know ? The one where we saw that deer. I recon’ the weather’s better now. Ground was all wet then, but on Sunday, we can stop, eat some pie, y’know. If everythin’- you know. If all goes well.’ 

Your only answer was a nod, your eyes even wider than a second ago. You looked- He didn’t know. Dumfounded ? A tiny bit wrecked ?

‘Got somethin’ to show you.’ He added, probably fucking out of his mind. He was suddenly glad he was ancient because otherwise he’d be hard again, with the way you were pliant in his hands, Jason in the back completely forgotten. But that was also a stark reminder that you were not quite in your right mind at the moment. So he laid the offer, with an out, his hand discreetly leaving your jaw to rest on your chest, right above your breasts, naked skin on naked skin. 

‘Somethin’ you’ll like. Show you a little bit o’ pain. Heard you like that.’ 

He heard you gasp but went on. 

‘You got company, right now. And you’re drunk, pretty girl. You do your thing, tonight, and I’ll do mine. You don’t like the offer ? Just don’t bring the fucking pie, I’ll get the message.’

He turned you around, then, before he did something stupid like sneaking a hand in between your legs to see if you were wet, because you were in the middle of the Bison and you were drunk. He guided you back to Jason, a fake apology on his lips as he saw the weary look on the other man’s face. 

‘Sorry, just heard the next patrols might be a pain in the ass- sights of runners and all. I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page. I’m her partner, y’know, and she’s mine.’ 

He gave Jason a smile as he felt you tense next to him, and one hand went to squeeze the back of his thigh. 

Joel walked away then, but before leaving, he did something so unlike him he’d deny it until the day he died. He spotted Lydia at a table, whispered Stop stalling, ask Janine out and walked out. 

On Sunday you showed up on patrol with a shy smile, an apple pie, and you said as a way of greetings :

‘So the craziest thing happened after you left. Lydia kinda pushed Felicia against a wall and kissed her.’

Joel only smiled and motioned you forward. 

———

Taglist

@pedritobalmando @amidjarin @ajeff855 @justpedropascal @sara-alonso @sarahjkl82-blog @amidjarin @sara-alonso@justpedropasc@mrsbentallmadge @farfromjustordinary @hnt-escape @kirsteng42

[jessicaloons]

Chapter 40:

And some things you just can’t speak about…

Masterlist - Previous - Next

TW: Miscarriage

Charles POV:

I felt my phone vibrate for the third time, while trying to focus on the questions, wondering what was going on. As soon as Tom Clarkson ended the press conference I stormed outside, taking my phone out. Multiple missed calls from JK. I called him back immediately, a sickening feeling in my stomach.

"What’s going on, JK?" I asked when he picked up.

"Lizzie ran away." JK answered and I was confused.

"What do you mean, Lizzie ran away? Where are you?" I asked, panic starting to overcome me.

"I don’t know what happened. She ran off in the middle of her interview. She’s gone. All of her stuff is still here. But she’s gone. And she’s not picking up her phone either!"

"I’m coming to you…"

"I’m already here…" JK stood in front of me all of a sudden.

"But… she wouldn’t just leave?"

"Julie said that she said 'Fuck this shit. I’m done.' and then left. She’s not at her garage or hospitality. All her stuff was still there, but she’s gone."

"Why did she run away? She wouldn’t just say fuck it and leave for no reason?"

"She was in the middle of an interview and then she left…"

"I bet my ass it was a Spanish outlet." I said and JK nodded "I should’ve said something. Set the record straight. Fuck."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"She didn’t just punch Sainz for no reason, who does that anyways? He said that I should learn how to tame my bitch." I grit out and he looked at me with big eyes and a look of pure disgust on his face.

"Asshole."

"I know… but now I need to find her!"

"Try your hotel. I think that’s the best option then." he suggested.

"Yeah… but what if…" I began.

"Don’t think like that. Go. Look for her. Call me when you’re there. If Lizzie is there, good. If not, we’ll go and find her!" JK patted my back and handed me Lizzie’s bag.

"I go and grab my stuff now, then I go to our hotel. Thanks JK, really!" I sprinted back to the Ferrari hospitality, Mia already awaiting me "Whatever it is, it has to wait, there’s an emergency."

"What happened?" Mia asked alarmed.

"Lizzie ran away… she’s gone. No one knows where she is… I need to find her." I already walked up the stairs, just grabbing my things and ready to leave when Silvia’s voice called out for Mia.

"Mia? Is Charles back from the press conference? He and Carlos need to film a video."

"Charles just left…" Mia began but got interrupted immediately.

"He left? He can’t just leave? Call him! He has to come back!" I rolled my eyes at her shrill voice.

"You don’t want him to come back, Silvia. He threw up. Twice. I’m just glad that he was thinking fast enough to hide behind a container. Just imagine if someone would’ve filmed that!" Mia lied.

"True. That would be something we don’t need right now, one of our drivers vomiting in the paddock." Silvia sighed "Alright, then I go and look for Carlos. You check in on Charles."

"I will." Mia said and walked up the stairs "Alright. Go out through the back door, no one will see you there! And text me when you’ve found Lizzie. Or if you need help finding her!"

"Thank you Mia!" I hugged her and then left through the back door like she said. I made it out of the paddock and back to the hotel without being seen by anyone. I almost sprinted out of the elevator, through the door of our hotel room.

There she sat. On the sofa. Knees hugged tight to her chest. Eyes closed. Quietly humming. Relieve flooding me, although the way she sat there, looking so small, almost made my heart break. I carefully approached her, gently touched her knee and she flinched a little, looking up.

"Hey." she whispered as I sat down next to her.

"Hey." I replied cupping her tear stained cheek "What happened?"

"It’s ridiculous. I overreacted." she mumbled but I shook my head.

"I don’t think so… it was the Spanish media. They are coming after you because you dared to touch their hero Sainz senior." I said and she chuckled bitterly.

"Yeah. But you know, without proof what he said? No one will believe me. And they won’t believe your words, because of course you would lie for me…"

"I’ll find a solution. I promise you…"

"No! You can’t do anything Charles! I don’t want you to lose your seat because of this!" she almost cried and I pulled her into my lap, leaning back.

"I won’t, trust me! I already have an idea and if it works they all see what a disgusting man he is…" I whispered and she nodded slowly.

"I want this season to be over." Lizzie sighed after a while and I kissed the crown of her head.

"Yeah… me too. It’s one to forget, to be honest. But we have to put on a brave face and show everyone who doubts us that we’re better than them, okay? Better than all of them!" I smiled encouraging at her and she nodded slowly.

"Yeah… and we’re starting out with you on pole and me right behind!"

"Hell yes."

"Charles? A word?" Mattia said right as I wanted to grab my helmet.

"What’s up?" I asked, taking a sip out of my bottle.

"I need you to stick to our plan today. You can’t get your feelings for Lizzie get the better of you. You have to defend Carlos. He made it on pole! Keep Lizzie out of his range…" he said and I rolled my eyes "I’m serious Charles!"

"Whose idea was it to start on the softs? To be able to fully attack? Right. Mine. Who said that getting in front of Lizzie at the start is the most important thing to do to help Carlos? Right. Me. I know what I have to do. No need to remind me…" I said grabbing my helmet, wanting to leave.

"I just wanted to make sure that we’re still on the same page."

"Yeah. We are. Can I go now? Thanks." I brushed past him.

"What was that about?" Andrea asked when he took my helmet from me.

"He wanted to remind me to stick to MY plan…" I sighed and Andrea rolled his eyes.

"Your plan to help Carlos win… because he can’t do it alone…" he said under his breath and I chuckled a little.

"Andrea." I chided.

"I didn’t say anything…" he grinned, following me out to my car "But if I did… it would be the truth."

"Lizzie rubs off on you." I chuckled.

"Maybe. But it’s just for the best I think." he shrugged his shoulders and I nodded.

"Yeah, it really is. Let’s go now, let’s help Carlos win this race." I sighed while Andrea rolled his eyes.

"Yay. Sounds fun… not."

"It’s scary how similar you and Lizzie are getting."

"As long as you won’t kiss me, it’s good."

"We'll see about that."

The race was long. Exhausting. After half the distance my fingers began to hurt, but I powered through. After fighting with Charles for multiple laps I finally was able to leave him behind, knowing that he sacrificed his race for Sainz. Now I had to fully focus on him in front. I wouldn’t let him take home this win. He would stay winless after today. I pushed as hard as I could and managed to finally overtake him and create a little gap between us. But he was quick to recover and the next few laps were a tight battle, with me staying in front but not with much.

"Do I have anything left?"

"Negative."

"Fuck. My tires are gone as well."

"Just keep pushing. 5 more laps to go."

I tried. I gave my all. My car was going around the corners with barely an inch between the walls at some parts of the track. My tires were more than gone. And when Pete finally said that it was the final lap I felt relieve flood me. One last lap. But Sainz came closer and closer with each turn. Right as I drove into turn 16 I saw him, closer as ever and I pushed hard. Through turn 17. Straight down into turn 18 and I was still slightly ahead when all of a sudden I lost all control, felt the strong pulling of the g forces in my bones, spun around and crashed right into the wall before the final corner. The impact raged like a tidal wave through my body. My mind buzzing. I was out of the race.

"Are you okay? Lizzie?"

I couldn’t answer. Hands trembling. Arms felt heavy. Neck and shoulders tense. A dull pain in the pit of my stomach, a weird pulling.

"Lizzie?"

I saw marshals approaching. A searing pain shot through my hand. When I tried to unbuckle myself. Of course. My already injured hand had to bitch now even more.

"Lizzie? Are you okay?"

"Did that really happen? Did he really…?"

Radio silence. I knew what that meant. Sainz did in fact drive straight into me. Sent me off track. Won the race.

"You have to wait for the medical car." one of the marshals said but I shook my head and climbed over the wall.

"No, I don’t." I replied, out of breath. The heat. The exhaustion. The impact still in my bones. The pain in my fingers. The abdominal pain, getting worse with every step. It all was too much and I felt myself swaying. I grabbed onto the wall to steady myself and took a deep breath. Then I almost jogged towards the pit lane. Saw how the cars passed me after their out lap, returning to the pit lane as well. I had to be there before Charles got out of his car. I knew that he saw what happened. It was still on replay on all the screens. He would be seething. He would be going straight for Sainz, cameras or not. Another Marshall saw me struggling and held me upright.

"You should go to the medical centre." he suggested but I shook my head.

"I can’t. I have to go to the pits." I breathed heavily and continued "I’m fine. Really!" he let go of me reluctantly and I felt his look on me for a while. I saw how Charles parked his car and knew I had to be faster. I clenched my teeth and kept going. Right as I felt like I would faint I dropped my helmet and someone was catching me from falling.

Charles POV:

The car wasn’t even properly parked, the engine not even switched off when I unbuckled my seatbelt and threw the headrest away. Climbed out. Threw the steering wheel back in. My helmet followed. Then I looked around. Saw how Carlos jumped into the open arms of our mechanics. Saw them cheering. Celebrating. Singing. My blood began to boil. Pure rage surging through my veins. I wanted to break his bones. Every. Single. One. I stalked towards the scene when someone stopped me.

"Wrong way." Pierre held me back.

"Get out of my way."

"Charles, not here. Not for everyone to see."

"Look at him! Look at them! Look how they celebrate!" I screamed and some heads were turning our way.

"I know but…"

"You know nothing! It’s my girlfriend he sent straight into a wall! On purpose! He probably didn’t even ask if she’s okay!" more and more people where looking at us. Some guys from my team as well, all looking conflicted. Pierre still held me back "Let go of me."

"No." he pushed me away from my destination "I won’t let you do…"

"I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU…" I began to scream when I heard a weak voice calling out for me.

"Charles…" Lizzie.

I turned around. My heart dropped. She clung to Alex, who held her upright. She was pale and sweaty. Body shaking. Her helmet on the ground, visor cracked. I ran up to her. Pulled her into me.

"Are you okay, cara mia?" I whispered and she nodded slowly.

"I’m okay. A little exhausted… I honestly didn’t think that the way would be that far. My cardio sucks." she chuckled breathlessly but I pulled away, cupping her cheeks.

"Why didn’t you wait for the medical car? Why aren’t you on the way to the medical centre?" I looked at her.

"Take a good guess…"

"Cara mia…" I began but she shook her head.

"No! You say nothing! You stay calm!" her voice was firm although I could see how hard it was for her to just stand "Please Charles, don’t do anything stupid!" she almost pleaded.

"Okay, I won’t. I promise! But can I please take you to the medical centre?" now I was the one pleading.

"I think you should first go and congratulate your team and team ma-…" she began but I scoffed.

"Congratulate them? For what? He sent you straight into a wall! He needs to be penalised…" I seethed and took her helmet that Alex handed me "Thanks mate, for helping Lizzie…"

"No worries, just get her to see a doc, she almost fainted twice on her way here." Alex said and gently patted Lizzie’s arm.

"Thanks Albono!" Lizzie smiled at him, but I could clearly see her exhaustion.

"Come on, pretty girl, let’s get you to the medical centre." I whispered following Pierre, who took my helmet out of my car, to our weighing.

I waited outside the hospital room, mind reeling. When the doctor at the track said they had to take Lizzie to the hospital I expected the worst. My heart was racing. The minutes I had to wait felt like hours when finally a nurse opened the door and let me in. Lizzie was pale but she didn’t look like she was seriously injured, but the look on the doctor’s face as he told me to wait until she would wake up made me feel uneasy. I looked around, there was a big plastic bag with her racing suit and fireproof on the chair in the corner and when I looked closer I saw something red staining the bag. I didn’t need to look again. I swallowed hard. Blood. But where did it come from? Was there something I didn’t see? Was this the reason the doctor rushed her to the hospital? Breathing got harder and I tried to calm myself down, right when Lizzie opened her eyes, frantically searching the room until they found mine and she visible relaxed.

"Hey cara mia. How are you feeling?" I asked, voice trembling a little, drawing circles on the back of her hand with my thumb. She sat up a little and smiled lightly.

"I’m okay, Charles!" she said and smoothed down my ruffled hair a little, the result of my anxiety over the past hour "What happened? We were at weighing and then all is kinda blurry?"

"You fainted-…" I began when the door opened and a doctor came in.

"Hi Lizzie, how are we feeling?" he asked and Lizzie shrugged a little.

"I’m okay. A little tired. Nothing bad going on." she answered and yawned quietly.

"Were you feeling unwell before today?" the doctor asked and Lizzie shook her head.

"You felt sick for weeks, Lizzie!" I said sternly and Lizzie just sighed.

"It was a stomach bug. That’s it." she said and the doctor shook his head slightly.

"For weeks? And sometimes it was more, sometimes less?" Charles looked at the doctor.

"I see… Lizzie there is something that we need to talk about…" he began and looked at me for a moment.

"Whatever it is, you can say it in front of him, it’s fine." she said and he nodded.

"I’m sorry to inform you, but due to the high forces in the car when crashing into the wall, you had a miscarriage…" the doctor said and I could hear Lizzie inhaling sharply "We’d say you weren’t that far along maybe 8th to 9th week if we’re correct?"

I looked at Lizzie, shocked expression on her face. She was pregnant? We were having a baby?

"Miscarriage? I was… I was pregnant?" she whispered, her voice hoarse.

"You didn’t know?” the doctor asked and she shook her head slightly, then closed her eyes and pulled her hand out of my grasp and put it in her lap, fiddling with her cuticles as always when she was nervous or anxiety ridden "I’m sorry to be the bearer of this sad news. We’d like to have you over for the night to make sure you’re all good and then you can leave tomorrow."

With that he left and Lizzie sobbed quietly, tears streaming down her face, she pulled her knees up to her chest, hissing in pain but hugged them close, her head turned away from me.

"Mon amour? Lizzie? Hey! Look at me!" I whispered and sat next to her in the bed and tried to make her look at me.

"I’m sorry Charles! I’m so sorry! I didn’t know! I would never get in the car if I knew that I was pregnant! I would never… I’m so sorry!" she cried and I pulled her in my lap, hugging her tight "I lost our baby, Charles! I’m so sorry!"

"Stop apologising! It’s not your fault! You don’t have to be sorry for anything! Do you hear me?" I said but she was shaking and whispering how sorry she was over and over.

"Please don’t hate me for losing our baby!" she whispered after a while and my heart broke.

"Enough! You hear me, cara mia? It’s enough! Stop apologising for something that wasn’t your fault! Stop feeling guilty for something you didn’t know! Stop blaming yourself! It wasn’t your fault. And please stop thinking that I could ever hate you! I love you, Lizzie! You hear me? I. LOVE. YOU!" I said and held her close, kissed her temple, forehead, cheeks again and again "It’s okay! We’re going to be ok? Alright? Stop apologising, Lizzie! Please!"

She nodded slightly but I could hear her soft sobs for quite some time, before she finally fell asleep and just then I allowed myself to feel the same devastation. We were having a baby. I would’ve become a dad. And my beautiful Lizzie would’ve become a mum. But not anymore. And she blamed herself for it. Thought I could hate her. Her out of all people. I kissed her on the crown of her head.

"I love you, Lizzie and there’s nothing you could ever do to change that. One day you and I will have a baby and it’s going to be one of the most beautiful days of our life’s!" I whispered and after some time I fell asleep myself.

I woke up when I heard someone talk loudly in Italian in the hallway and sat up, careful not to wake up Lizzie. I got out of the bed and stretched a little before I opened the door.

"…he can’t just disappear like that!" Mattia said to Andrea who scoffed.

"What did you expect? That he would celebrate while his girlfriend fainted multiple times and has to stay at the medical centre? After crashing out? Because someone sent her straight into the wall?" he replied and Mattia rolled his eyes.

"It was a racing incident. She didn’t leave enough spa-…" Mattia began.

"Bullshit. Lizzie had the corner and he didn’t leave her enough space! And instead of backing down he drove straight into her!" I said loudly and they both turned around.

"Charles, that is not what was happening!" Mattia said "They were close the whole last lap and at this corner she should’ve left him more space."

"Why? That he can overtake her? Who does that? Who? She was in front. She had the corner. So he did the only thing he could do, he touched her, made her crash out. In the last corner." I had to suppress my anger.

"Yes, they made contact. And Carlos got a penalty. For causing a collision. The FIA dealed with it. It’s all good now…"

"It’s all good now? IT’S ALL GOOD NOW? Lizzie! She had a mi-… no. Nothing is all good now!" I almost screamed, Andrea putting his hand on my shoulder.

"Look, I’m sorry Lizzie has to be here. But as Carlos teammate I expected you to congratulate him. I expected you to celebrate with the team. It was important. It was his first win after all! He ended the domination of Red Bull. But you left without a word. You weren’t at any interview. You’ll be fined and we won’t pay for it. That is on you. But you’re going to be at the race debrief. I won’t tolerate your absence." Mattia turned around and left, without giving me the chance to say a word.

"How is she?" Andrea asked me and I felt my throat closing in. I shook my head, trying to get a word out but couldn’t. The weight of the news still heavy in my stomach.

"She’s umm- she’s okay. Under the circumstances… I mean… yeah- she… she’ll be okay." I stammered and Andrea nodded, sensing how bad I felt.

"What happened? Come on. You can tell me. It’s okay." Andrea lead me to a seating area and sat down, I did the same and leaned back, closing my eyes.

"Andrea… Lizzie- she was… we would’ve become- she lost our baby…" I whispered the last part and Andreas eyes widened in horror "She didn’t knew that she was pregnant. But the high g-forces when she crashed into that wall? It was too much. The baby… it couldn’t survive it… Lizzie had a miscarriage."

"I’m going to kill him. He stood there, celebrated like he was a king. Celebrated like he won this race through his own brilliance when it was you who defended him for such a long time to create a big, fat gap. Ferrari wanted you to sacrifice your entire race to help him win. And you did and he… he only won by pushing Lizzie off… and then he didn’t even mention you once. He didn’t acknowledge your involvement. He didn’t thank you. Nothing! Mattia didn’t as well! They didn’t mention Lizzie at all! Not saying that they were hoping she’d be fine! Nothing!" Andrea was furious and I hid my face in my hands, arms on my knees.

"I’m not leaving her alone. I don’t care about the race debrief or what Mattia will do. I don’t care about it all anymore." I whispered.

"You’re going to that race debrief and you show them all that no matter what they throw your way, you overcome it all!" Lizzie’s weak voice behind me made me flinch and I turned around.

There she stood, pale, swollen eyes, tired, in her hospital gown. Looking nothing but determined.

"Lizzie! You should stay in bed!" I got up but she took a step back, holding up her hand to stop me "Cara mia…"

"No. You go. Both of you. Carlos won today. We can’t change that. He got a penalty but still won. It’s like this. But you don’t give him, his family, Mattia or anyone else the satisfaction that you can’t handle it or something. No. You go to that debrief. You put on a smile. You congratulate him. You be the bigger person. You show your honour. And from then on you show them who you are. You do the talking on track. You destroy him. In every single race to come. You finish ahead of him at the end of the season." Lizzie sounded determined and I looked at her. She was the strongest person I’ve ever known. I nodded slowly and took a cautious step towards her and she took one towards me as well. Two more steps and I engulfed her in a tight embrace.

"I love you, cara mia. So so much!" I whispered in her ear, kissing her cheek.

"I love you too, Il predestinato! Go and show them who’s the best driver!" she replied and I looked her in the eyes for a moment before I leaned in for a kiss. Her warm lips brushed against mine and for a moment I forgot everything around us "Go now. I’m fine. JK and Julie will stop by later with some fresh clothes. I won’t be alone."

"Are you sure?" I asked her and she nodded "Okay. I’ll be back as soon as I can!" I kissed her once again. I stepped aside and Andrea hugged Lizzie.

"Mia ragazza… I’m so sorry." he whispered and Lizzie nodded a little "I make sure that Charles won’t do anything stupid… don’t worry!"

"Thank you, Andrea." Lizzie breathed out.

"You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met." Andrea said when he pulled away, kissing her cheek "Let’s go." he looked at me and I nodded, watching Lizzie returning back to her room, climbing into the bed.

"Let’s make this quick."

I walked inside. The trophy sitting int the middle of the table. Mattia and Carlos talking with his father and cousin, Riccardo, his race engineer right next to them. A whole bunch of our team still with a big smile on their face, talking animatedly about the race. I sat wordlessly down, at the end of the table, not making a sound and waited for the debrief to start. Alessandro, Callo and Mario came up to me, patting my shoulder and I looked up.

"Hey, how’s Lizzie?" Alessandro asked and I forced myself to smile a little.

"She’s okay. Not great, sure, but she’ll be fine." I replied and they both nodded, smiling.

"That’s good. Really good." Mario said, right as Andrea walked in and sat down next to me, handing me a bottle of water.

"Charles? Hey… how’s Lizzie? I heard she’s in the hospital?" Fabrizio asked, sitting down next to me.

"Yeah, they had to make some more tests, it wasn’t just a little bump after all. But she’s okay." I said again, feeling the bile rise up my throat.

"Yeah? That’s good. I’m glad to hear that." he gently patted my arm and I nodded.

"Yeah, it is." I pressed out, gulping down some water, while Andrea nudged my thigh a little, smiling at me.

"Alright everyone. There’s not much to debrief tonight. We had a fantastic weekend with the best possible result. Tyre degradation was working in our favour this weekend, but it’s still one of our main problems. Also the reliability of some components. But we know now that Red Bull is beatable. It was a tough battle, but in the end we can all celebrate Carlos’ first win now!" Mattia said and I looked first at him, then at Carlos. Big smile on his face. His father and cousin smiling at him looking all proud, his mechanics cheering, beer bottles getting passed along. Everyone started to chat. And I sat there. Looking at Mattia. Laughing and joking with Sainz senior. I felt anger rising up. This was the important debrief I had to attend. The debrief that made me leave Lizzie behind. Alone. No.

"That’s it?" I asked loudly and the room fell silent "That’s the race debrief? That’s all you have to say?"

"What else is there to say?" Mattia looked at me as I got up.

"This is why I left my girlfriend alone in the hospital after someone sent her straight into a wall?" my voice was trembling with anger but he didn’t say anything.

"Charles…" Andrea began but I shook my head, walking towards the door where Mattia stood with Carlos, his father and cousin.

"Congratulations Carlos. Congratulations Matti, it looks like you finally got your long awaited Santander win." I said, then I walked out, Andrea following me.

"Hey my pretty girl, how are you?" Charles asked when he walked inside and I shrugged my shoulders a little.

"I don’t know. It’s weird… I didn’t know that I was pregnant… I just-…" I stopped. Looking at my hands. Not sure what to say and what to feel.

"Lizzie? Hey… it’s okay. Whatever you feel is okay. You can talk to me. Or not. Whatever you need now… just don’t push me away entirely, okay?" Charles took my hand in his and kissed my knuckles, smiling at me "We’re in this together. You and me. Okay?"

"When we talked about us having kids… I didn’t thought about the when… one day sure… but now? I don’t think I would’ve been ready… it would’ve meant giving up my career? Everything I fought so hard for? It’s selfish to think like that… I know… but- but I think I’m relieved that I lost it? I’m a horrible person for thinking that way, I know! But it’s just… I don’t know… I’m sorry." I whispered, not able to look at him, knowing that he would be shocked and hurt by my words.

"Can you please look at me?" he asked me gently and I looked up "It’s not selfish to want this chance, this opportunity not to end. I know how hard it was for you to make it into Formula 1. I know the blood, sweat and tears you invested. And it doesn’t make you a horrible person… because last night? I saw how sorry you were. And how much it hurt you… you don’t have to feel sorry, okay?"

"It’s just so weird. Because although I’m relieved… I’m also sad? This little bean? That was us. You and I. And it was in me. It was a part of me, unknowingly, but still. And now it’s gone. And I’m not sure if I’m even allowed to feel sad? Because I didn’t want it in the first place?" Charles wiped away my tears and leaned his forehead against mine.

"You can feel every way you want to… you can be sad. Mad. Frustrated. Confused. Relieved. It’s okay. It’s a lot to process. But at the end of the day, it’s only important that you know that it’s all going to be okay. I’m with you. Always. And the next time a little bean is growing in your belly? Maybe then is the time for us to be happy. To be excited. But we have time. As much time as you need." he whispered and I nodded slowly.

"How do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Always find the right words? Always know what to say? Always know what to do? How are you so perfect?" I smiled and he chuckled.

"It’s easy. I do it for you. And you’re perfect. You deserve only the best. That means that I have to be the best. So I’m trying my best…"

"You’re succeeding."

Charles POV:

I left Lizzie’s room when her doctor and a nurse came to do some final tests. I took the elevator downstairs. The silence in the confined room was deafening. Lizzie’s words still echoing in my mind. She felt relieved. Relieved that she lost our baby. Our baby. I took a deep breath. The bell signalling the doors opening. I looked up when a nurse wheeled in a young woman, baby in her arms. I swallowed hard, stepping aside. I watched the young mother gently stroking the cheek of her newborn. Kissing the baby’s forehead. A void inside of me opening. A cold numbness overcoming me. I didn’t know how to feel. Sad? Mad? Relieved? Confused? Frustrated? Overwhelmed? From everything a little? I flinched when the baby started to cry. I watched how the young mother cradled her little bundle of joy closer to her chest, softly cooing, trying to calm down her most prized possession. I stepped out of the elevator as soon as the doors opened and just started walking, no idea where I would go.

I found a quiet seating area and sat down. My mind reeling. I had no right to be mad at Lizzie. It was her body. Her choice. She would have to end her career. Not me. She would be the one carrying the baby for the next nine months. Not me. I understood her. Of course I did. But still. The thought of this tiny little bean. This tiny little something. A mix of us. Something we created through our love. To hear that she felt relieved that it was gone hurt for some reason. Like hell. After a while I checked the time, realising that I was sitting there for almost 20 minutes and got up, went back to Lizzie’s room. Putting on a brave smile. A reassuring one. I had to be strong now. And supportive. What happened didn’t happen to me, but to Lizzie. And I had to be strong now. For her.

"The cramping usually stops within a day, maybe two. You can take painkillers. It’s normal that there might be some light bleeding or spotting for the next 4 to 6 weeks. You should see your ob-gyn in around two weeks and they may do an ultrasound exam or other tests to make sure all the tissue has passed. Also no heavy lifting. And no sexual intercourse for the next one, better two weeks…" the nurse said and Lizzie nodded.

"Oh don’t worry, we don’t want another accident happen so soon." she joked half heartedly and I groaned. Accident.

"Can you maybe not make these kind of jokes just now…" I let out, harsher than intended, and she looked up from her bag, eyes wide.

"I’m sorry." she whispered, looking back down, her shoulders visible tensing.

"No… I’m sorry." I gently took her hand in mine but she pulled away.

"I’m ready, we can go… thank you for everything." Lizzie grabbed her bag and smiled at the nurse. I wanted to take her bag but she already started walking out the room.

"Fuck…" I muttered under my breath "Thank you!" I nodded at the nurse, following Lizzie, who was almost at the elevator "Lizzie wait…" I called after her "Hey! Cara mia, give me your bag."

"I’m fine..." she whispered, turning away.

"Lizzie, please. Give me your bag." I repeated, but she shook her head, still not looking at me.

"I’ll be in the car on the weekend. I can carry my bag." she said right as the elevator doors opened.

"I know that you can, but you don’t have to. So please, cara mia." I almost pleaded but Lizzie was stubborn and carried her bag all the way to the car and from the car back to our hotel room as well.

"I already packed your suitcase last night, I just left some clothes for the flight out… I hope what I picked was okay?" I said to her and she only nodded, grabbing the clothes and then disappeared in the bathroom. I heard the shower going and could’ve sworn that I heard Lizzie sob "Cara mia? Are you okay?" I knocked on the door.

"Yeah. I’ll hurry, don’t worry." her voice confirmed my suspicion, she was crying.

"Lizzie, can I come in?" I said gently.

"I’m okay, Charles. Just give me a minute."

I sighed and sat down on the bed, thinking about what I did.

"You can go now if you want…" Lizzie said and I flinched, she stood in front of me, fully dressed, her hair wrapped in a towel.

"Can we talk about what happened?" I tried it again but Lizzie walked away.

"There is nothing to talk and if you want to take a shower you need to hurry up, the car is here in 20 minutes." she sat down at the table and began to blow dry her hair and I sighed, knowing that I wouldn’t get her to talk. At least not now. Defeated I grabbed my stuff and want to the bathroom, not without looking at Lizzie once more. Her shoulders slumped, eyes trained down to the floor. Great fucking job, Charles.

I called Julie, silently begging that she would answer the call immediately.

"Lizzie, hey! How are you?" Julie sounded worried.

"I’m fine. Really." I said although I didn’t felt like it.

"Okay… if I can do anything, just let me know, okay?"

"Actually, there is something you can do…" I said, taking a deep breath.

"Yeah, sure, everything."

"Can you book a room for me in Japan?" I asked.

"It’s already booked… Mia sent me the details…" she sounded confused.

"No… umm- a room… for me. Just me."

Silence.

"Okay… whatever you want…" Julie said after a while.

"Thank you… see you in Suzuka…" I hung up and finished my hair, pulling it up into a messy bun right when Charles came out of the bathroom, packing away his things "Ready? Joris texted me that the driver is here."

"Umm yeah. Sure. Let’s go…" Charles replied and grabbed his bag, as well as mine. I cocked an eyebrow but he shook his head "Just let me carry it, okay?"

"Okay…" I mumbled and we left the room, meeting up with Joris. I didn’t listen to anything they were saying and just wanted to get into the plane, put my head down and sleep. Or at least try to. I was never really a fan of sleeping on the plane but maybe after last night sleep would find me easily.

"Cara mia?" I heard Charles whisper and opened my eyes "We landed."

"Already?" I yawned and he nodded.

"You were gone the moment you sat down." Charles smiled and I stretched a little.

"Okay…" I got up and grabbed my bag, following Charles out of the plane and all the way through to the arrival hall, where already a bunch of fans were waiting for us, mostly Charles, but still. I smiled for as many selfies as possible, signed stuff and thanked the fans for coming although I was more than exhausted. Light cramps made me flinch a little and I felt how I had to force my smile more and more with every new selfie.

"Guys, leave Lizzie a little space to breathe. The crash is still in her bones!" Charles stepped next to me and some fans immediately took some steps back, but not all of them and with Charles now next to me, even more people swarmed us and he pulled me to his side. With Joris on my other side and some securities coming to our help, we made it outside and into our car.

"I think we really should consider hiring bodyguards for yo- for us." Charles said hastily when I glared at him.

"I was fine before you and your whole mob of fangirls came along." I said bluntly and he looked at me for a moment, as if he wanted to say something, but then he shook his head and turned to Joris.

"You have a dinner later. You have to attend. Sorry…" he said and Charles groaned.

"How much time do I have?"

"Let’s say, check in, change, go? And we still might be a little late."

"Great. Just great." Charles looked at me and I shrugged my shoulders "I don’t want to leave you alone…"

"I’m fine. In fact, I’m meeting up with Julie anyways, she wants to show me some stuff for Netflix." I lied and he nodded "I’ll go straight to her room when we arrive."

"Okay… but Lizzie? Don’t overwork yourself… the doctor said to take it a little slow. Please."

"Don’t worry, I will." I replied when our car stopped and another mass of fans was waiting "Round 2 I guess."

"How did Charles react?" Julie asked when I dropped my bag on the sofa.

"Umm… he doesn’t know." I replied and she made big eyes "It’s better like this."

"Yeah maybe, but you still should tell him that! And not just let him walk into an empty hotel room…"

"I’m going to send him a text. We need a little space. He’s hurt and mad… and it’s not because I had a miscarriage… it’s because I said that I’m relieved." I almost whispered.

"But you explained him why, right? I can’t imagine Charles being mad if he knows the reasons? It’s Charles after all?" she cocked an eyebrow as I sat down on the sofa.

"Yeah but his reaction? I- I think he’s more hurt than he wants to admit. He needs time to think about it. To process it. And he can’t do that when I’m next to him all the time." I grabbed my phone and opened a text for Charles "He will understand."

"I hope you’re right…"

I groaned, turning to switch on the nightstand lamp.

"What the actual fuck…" I muttered, the hammering at my door got even more frantic "What…" I checked the time 1:17 am. I scrambled out of the bed and walked to the door, looking through the peephole. Charles. My heart hammering in my chest.

"Open the door please, cara mia!" his voice hoarse.

"Charles? What are you doing here? At this time?" I whispered when I opened the door to let him in and he pulled me into a tight embrace.

"I hate it like this. When we’re separated! I don’t sleep well when you’re not next to me… I’m sorry that I woke you up but I just couldn’t stand being away from you for just one more minute…" Charles mumbled, his hot breath tickling my ear.

He looked tired, exhausted, something I noticed this morning as well.

"I just thought that after Singapore… you were clearly mad at me when I made that stupid joke…" I began and he cupped my cheeks.

"I know and I’m sorry. It was more that I had to wrap my head around this all for a moment and you were already joking about it… and I know that it’s just a coping mechanism… but in that moment? I thought about this little bean, our little bean, and it made me sad and hurt that you were happy that it’s gone, although I completely understood why you were relieved! And I fully support you! It’s just… I don’t know? I just needed a moment to get it all sorted out. I shouldn’t have snapped at you! I know that! And I’m so, so sorry that I did! But please understand me as well. And please don’t send me away. I don’t want to sleep without you ever again. It was horrible. I felt horrible. I need you by my side… especially here…" Charles almost whispered the last words and I realised how stupid and selfish I was.

"I’m so sorry Charles! I- I honestly didn’t even think about where we are… I just wanted to give you space and-…" I began but he silenced me with a kiss.

"I don’t ever want space from you, okay? Never. We talk. We find a solution. No one leaves." he leaned his forehead against mine "And can we please go to bed now? I’m so freaking tired…"

"Okay…" I whispered pulling him with me back into bed.

"I love you, Lizzie." Charles said after a while, holding me close to his body, his hand gently tracing my spine up and down.

"I love you too…" I tilted my head up and kissed his cheek "And I’m sorry for leaving you alone here-…"

"You don’t have to apologise, cara mia. I’m just happy to have you next to me again… it’s weird, but when you’re not next to me…"

"You can’t sleep well? It’s the same for me… I’m tossing and turning, but I don’t really sleep…" I whispered and he nodded.

"Yeah… I mean when I’m in Maranello alone, I can sleep because we talk before I go to bed? But this? When we don’t talk? I hate it…" he kissed the crown of my head "But you have to believe me, Lizzie, I wasn’t mad at you, never, okay? I just… I don’t know. The doctor said that there was a baby. Our baby. And suddenly all I ever dreamed of having was just right there in front of me… and in my mind, hearing you say that you were relieved was like saying you don’t want this. Us. I know it’s not the truth! But sometimes my mind plays these kinda tricks on me and I need a moment to sort it all out in my head. But there was not one second where I was mad at you. If I was mad, then at the situation. But nothing else, okay?"

I nodded. Wiping away a stray tear.

"We’re going to be fine. It’s all going to be okay, cara mia. You and me against the world." another kiss on my head "And now we really should sleep. We have quali today. And I don’t know about you, but I really want to wipe away that grin of some certain people’s faces…"

"Yeah… me too."

"Ryan Andrew’s, CBS. Lizzie after your crash in Singapore you seemed to be a little off the whole weekend in Japan, was the crash worse than it looked like? Was it potentially not a good idea to race?"

"Of course I still felt the crash in my bones. It was a high speed corner where I crashed out. But I was and am alright. The result in Japan had nothing to do with the crash." I lied, feeling Charles eyes on me.

"Kelly Johnson, BBC Sports. Charles, in Japan the Ferrari’s looked quite strong, after Singapore another good race for your team. Do you think you can repeat that performance this weekend?" the blonde reporter in the first row asked him.

"Yeah we did quite good, we seem to understand the car better now, so I’m hoping to see some better results in the next races."

"Michael Breitner. Auto, Motor, Sport. Question for Charles. Many people expected your contract renewal to be announced in Monza… that was now two races ago. Are the contract negotiations still going on?"

"To be honest I can’t tell you much about that. Because there is not much to say at the moment. I’m focusing on this season. Then the next season. My contractual situation is not really on my mind." Charles answered with a smile and I knew how hard it must’ve been for him to sit there and look like he was believing his own words, when inside it was killing him to not know what was going on.

"Is it possible that we might see you in a different team after next year?"

"I don’t know. In Formula 1 everything is possible as we know. Everyone knows how much I love my team and that I want to win the championship with them. But at the end of the day I just want to drive and if not at Ferrari then at any other team that believes in me. But for now I can’t talk about things this far in the future when I don’t know about them myself…"

A murmur went through the room, the heads of Max, Lewis and Nico snapping to look at Charles. To say that no one expected this answer was the understatement of the year.

"To make this clear, you do think of the possibility of leaving Ferrari for another team?"

"No. I’m not thinking of leaving Ferrari. I’m saying that if Ferrari doesn’t renew my contract, then I will look for another option." the smile he forced out looked almost painful and when the press conference was over and we left, I pulled Charles with me.

"They’re persistent, no?" he chuckled bitterly and I hugged him, massaged his scalp.

"Don’t listen to their questions. They just want to get a reaction out of you." I whispered "You will get your seat. Preferably at Ferrari, I know, but at the end of the day, seat is seat, okay?"

"Yeah… you’re right."

"Now come on. Let’s finish up and then cool down in our huge bathtub…" I kissed his cheek and pulled away, before he pulled me back in and kissed me tenderly.

"Better?" I laughed when he let go of me.

"Better."

I stopped the car and switched everything off, leaning my head back. Worst race ever. I opened up the visor, hoping for some cold and fresh air to stream in just to be greeted with the searing hot air of Qatar. I was never this happy that a race weekend was over. After taking a few shallow breaths, I tried to get out of the car. The struggle was real. My knees were wobbly. I clipped out the steering wheel and put it on the hood of my car, trying to pull myself up but failed miserably.

"Come here, cara mia." I heard Charles faint voice and looked up. He gently grabbed me by the waist, pulling me out of the cockpit, then sat me down on the halo, clipping my steering wheel back in place.

"Thank you, Charlie." I whispered, fighting with the straps of my helmet.

"Let me…" he said, unbuckling the clasp, pulling my helmet off "Hey pretty girl." he pulled my balaclava off next, wiping my sweaty hair out of my face.

"Hot. So freaking hot." I pressed out, pushing off of the halo, trying to cautiously slip off and take a first step, just to be caught by Charles "Fuck." I breathed out.

"You’re done…" he said, picking me up, holding me tight. He carried me bridal style into the cold hospitality, sitting me down on the floor "You’re totally overheated, Lizzie."

"My water was gone after the first couple of minutes already." I whispered, leaning my head against the cold wall.

"Here." Andrea appeared next to us, handing me a water bottle.

"I can’t. Need to go to weighing first." my voice barely above a whisper.

"It’s okay…" I heard an F1 official say and Charles unscrewed the cap of the bottle, holding it to my mouth, the moment the cold water streamed down my throat I let out a quiet moan.

"Stop making these noises for everyone to hear… only I’m allowed to hear that…" he chuckled underneath his breath and I managed a little smirk.

"Sorry…" I whispered "Is everyone okay? I’m not the only one who’s this done, or am I?"

"You’re definitely not." Pierre sank down next to leaning his head against the cold wall "Almost everyone is done for."

"Can we please never race here again." I sighed a little.

"Yeah… I would vote against it as well." Pierre whispered, his head on my shoulder.

"Me too." George plopped down on the floor in front of us, shuffling down his race suit "That’s just too much heat."

"Well… as director of the GPDA, take matters into your hands." I chuckled and he laughed.

"Later. For now I just need a moment to cool down."

"Same, same."

The room felt warm and welcoming, the yellow walls washing a sense of calm over me, only the smell of the disinfection spray didn’t fit in. When the door opened Charles squeezed my hand and smiled at me.

"Miss Doetterer. I only have good news for you. The tissue passed completely. Your blood values look good, same for everything else. Light bleeding or spotting in the next 2-3 weeks are normal, nothing to worry about." Dr. Bernard said.

"So it’s all good?" I asked and he nodded.

"Yes. It’s all good." he repeated and I took a deep breath in.

"Thanks, Dr. Bernard." Charles shook his hand and I did the same.

"I think that’s it for today. There’s only one thing left to say for me. Good luck in Mexico." Dr. Bernard smiled and we nodded, leaving his office.

"I’d say let’s grab something to eat and then head home, the car will pick us up pretty damn early." Charles opened the door for me and I slipped in "What do you want to eat?"

"I would love a pizza…" I mumbled and he chuckled.

"Pizza it is. I’m not telling JK if you’re not telling Andrea."

"That sounds like a deal!" I leaned back and watched the busy streets of Monaco, all the young families with their babies in the most beautiful and stylish strollers "I never noticed how many babies there are in Monaco." I almost whispered and Charles took my hand in his.

"One day, cara mia. Don’t worry… the time for our little family starting to grow will come." he kissed the back of my hand and I turned a little, looking at him "There’s still enough time. Maybe enough for the both of us to win a title."

"You will win a title sooner than later… me on the other hand? Not so sure, but I sure as hell keep trying."

"No no, our baby will have world champion parents." Charles sounded determined and I laughed.

"Our baby will have one definite world champion parent and one maybe world champion parent… let’s be realistic."

"I am!"

"Okay… whatever you say."

"But until then it’s quite a long way."

"The only way I’m caring about right now is the one to Antonio’s!" I pouted a little when my stomach grumbled.

"Got you. Less talking. More driving."

"Exactly." I laughed again.

"I’m just wondering… you get already really grumpy when you’re hungry just now… but when a tiny human is growing inside you?" Charles raised his eyebrows.

"Good that you’re a fast driver then…"

Chapter 40 - some of you have guessed it 😔 I really hope I could describe the feelings and it all as natural and real as possible… the chapter feels a little rushed towards the end, but I didn’t want to put too much in it… especially now that the triple header is right around the corner and A LOT is about to happen 👀

Please leave a comment/ like/ reblog/ message and tell me how you liked it! I'm dying to hear your thoughts!

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Last but not least, English is not my first language and although I tried my best: please excuse any mistakes I made!

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[lilyrizzy]

sorry to post so much everyone, promise i will resume to writing fic only like, once every three months after this lol

“That is a very nice watch, Max.”

It’s Victoria who is the first to notice it, the two of them sat out on his and Daniel’s balcony, the August evening warm. Between them are two empty bottles of wine and a quarter full bottle of gin. Inside, her babies are sleeping on the pull out beds, and Daniel has taken Tom into their ‘hobby room’, where Max’s sim lives also, to show him the newest addition to his camera collection. Apparently the one Tom had been using to document their children as they grow died a smoky death last week, losing all the photos of baby Lio in the process.

“Daniel got it for me,” is all he says, glancing down at his wrist.

It’s Tag Heuer of course, because Max has to wear those kind with the sponsorship rules, but this one is much nicer than the big flashy ones he usually gets for free. More you, Maxy, Daniel had explained nervously when Max opened the box to see it for the first time. A classic, smooth black leather strap instead of the usual shiny silver metal, the face a little smaller, round. In the middle, where the two hands of the clock meet, a tiny little diamond that you can only see if you look close enough, like a secret. The real secret is, of course, the inscription on the back, the engraved cursive words, for my world champion.

It’s so lovely. Max hates it a little bit.

Victoria lets out a laugh that bounces loudly through the too-still night air.

“Oh no,” she says, voice teasing. “You do not like it?” When he looks up from where he’s been staring at it, her eyebrows are raised.

Max has had maybe a little too much to drink, if he’s letting his complicated feeling about the watch show on his face, but it is the summer break of course, so it’s okay, and this is his sister. Maybe he can tell her what he is sometimes too afraid to think about on his own.

“I like it,” he insists, “but-“

“Max it is okay,” she says with another laugh, her cheeks bright pink from the wine she has drunk. She says it like she is trying to help him by telling him how he feels. “Sometimes they do not always get these things right, yes? The nice thing is that they try.”

But that isn’t it. This isn’t like the time Tom brought Victoria a pair of shoes for her birthday and she had telephoned Max to ask unhappily, “do I look like the type of person who would wear Michael Kors,” like Max was supposed to know who that was. Daniel is good at presents. He is very good at making Max happy.

“I do like it,” he tries again, a little defensive now on Daniel’s behalf. His words slur together a little, and without realising it, he’s switched back to Dutch. “It is lovely, I- It even has something written just for me on the other side, so of course it is special, I just- I thought-“

He thinks back to that night, two weeks ago now, the first of summer break that they got to be alone together. The first of their break, five nights to spend in some outrageously flashy Ibiza villa that Daniel booked, 120 hours stretching out in front of them, almost too sweet like toffee.

By the pool, laughing together, as they twirled pasta around their forks. Daniel had made it for Max, one of his ‘sabbatical projects’, to get better at cooking. That way you can hire me as your chef Maxy, if I don’t get a seat, yeah? It was so nice because the rich tomato sauce almost tasted the same as Max’s favourite kind of soup, and when Max had told Daniel that his face had gone all soft the way Max loved to see it, like he’d said all the right words in the right order.

“I’ve got something for you actually,” Daniel had said then, and he’d leaned in to press a kiss to the corner of Max’s mouth before getting from his chair to go and get his present.

When he’d come back with a black box and a shy, nervous smile on his face, Max’s heart had fluttered like there was a bird inside his chest, beating it’s wings against his ribcage. Daniel wanted to-

But then it had been a watch.

Looking at Victoria now, he can feel the wonky line his attempt of a smile makes of his mouth.

“For a moment, when he gave it to me,” he explains, thumbing over the smooth glass of the watch face, “I thought it was- I thought, maybe, a different kind of jewelry.”

It takes a few seconds for realisation to spread across his sisters features, but when it does it doesn’t make him feel any better the way he’d hoped it would to share this.

“Oh Max,” she says, reaching for his hand across the table, and he wants to recoil at her pity, “I did not- I did not even know that was something you wanted.”

Which to Max, seems like a silly thing to say, because of course it’s what he wants. He and Daniel have been together for so many years now, why would he not? It’s what you do when you love each other and want to be together always. He’d thought, maybe, now Daniel was happy again and not racing, but-

“Maybe it is not what Daniel wants,” he says with a shrug, but just saying the words out loud make his eyes sting and his throat ache. He is probably just too drunk for this conversation.

Victoria hums, like she is thinking. Over the balcony, Max can see the shimmer of the moon bouncing off the sea. His face feels so hot suddenly, like he is melting, and he imagines diving into the cool water.

“Have you two ever spoken about this?” Victoria asks, and Max just shakes his head, not looking at her. “Then how can- How can you know he does not want to? Why- You could always ask him too, you know.”

She’s right, of course. It’s just- Max doesn’t know how to explain it. That he wants it to be simple, for Daniel to want Max so much that he can’t stand to not ask him. That Max is afraid if he is the one to ask, Daniel will say yes just because he wants to give Max what he wants, and not because he wants Max.

Behind him, he hears laughter, the sound of footsteps, and Victoria’s face looks up, worried, to the sliding glass door behind him. It opens. Max wipes his eyes quickly, feeling even more foolish than before as Daniel runs a hand through his hair, presses his cheek into the top of his head, just as drunk as the rest of them and asks, “what are you two gossiping about then?”

[tkaulitzlvr]

THE WRONG WAY - T. KAULITZ

synopsis: tom hasn’t been paying you enough attention lately, and, when you finally snap, he can’t understand where you are coming from, until you reach your breaking point. can the issues between you and him be resolved?

content: angst

a/n: pulled this out of my ass lol, i had to rush it because i’m in the middle of another req but it’s nowhere near done after like three hours of writing so i’ll have to finish and post it tomorrow. sorry if there are mistakes, i only proofread veryyy briefly cause i’m so tired rn😭 hope this is okay tho!!

"you don't love me."

i voice the harsh words to the silent room, clearly and with every sense of belief behind my statement. to my discomfort, saying it out loud does not make me feel any more at ease, in fact seeing the way tom’s entire body breaks for a second, processing what i had just said, before trying to cover the hurt on his face up, only suffocates me even more. the lump in my throat only gets bigger, the tension in the air thickening by the second.

"wow." he begins, shaking his head, trying to wrap his head around how i could even come to that conclusion. "that’s an awful accusation." he glances at me, his eyes already glossy, giving me enough of an idea on how much i have hurt him by uttering those four words. however i stick to it, figuring that it is too late to back out now. within me, behind all the anger, all the upset, i feel that it is true. i sense that he no longer feels the same way he did when he met me, all those years ago, the love within his eyes slowly diminishing until it is now long gone.

"and also." he speaks, leaning forward and looking directly into my eyes, staying in his position spread on the end of the other couch. "it's not true. you know it isn't."

the pressure of his gaze leaves me unable to hold eye contact with him, looking away sheepishly into my lap, hoping that somehow the ground could swallow me up. i grit my teeth, locking my jaw in anger, feeling no reassurance from his quick denial of my statement. so i decide to challenge him, standing my ground despite the nausea only growing within me. though his voice seems somewhat certain, i refuse to believe that i am making it up, that it is all in my head. "do i though tom?"

my eyes meet his, except the ones looking into me are foreign. they are angry, a glint of hostility present within them that i had not yet witnessed, this change taking me aback, yet i refuse to look away. he is sad. those eyes, past the resentment in them, i see pain. i see sorrow. i have upset him, far beyond what he intends to let out. he is usually strong, and perhaps right now he thinks that he is keeping this up, yet i can read him like a book, the way his left brow furrows, creating a crease along his forehead, the way his eyes cannot focus on one thing, darting around the room, i can see that he is struggling. and whilst part of me hurts with him, hating to put him through any sort of distress, i need it right now. because i am tired of feeling unloved and unappreciated - regardless of whether tom intends to make me feel this way or not.

he shakes his head, scoffing slightly in disbelief, letting out a shaky sigh, before speaking up, his voice loud, in contrast to the silent room. "what, so i've been lying every single time i’ve told you that i love you, over the past six years that we've been together? mind you, i say that every day, without fail."

i stay silent, my eyes becoming glossy as they quickly tear away from his. he takes my silence as a cue to continue, my sudden belief that he does not love me angering him as he desperately seeks to remind me of every reason why i am in the wrong. "don't i do everything for you? make sure that you're always safe, give you my everything-"

"give me your money, you mean." i reply, cutting him off. i don’t want to seem ungrateful - i appreciate the way tom would spend any amount of money on me if it made me happy. i am thankful for the house he has given me, the vacations he takes me on, the things he buys me, but those things are not the reasons why i fell in love with him. i fell for tom kaulitz. not his money, not his fame, not his profession. i fell for who he is, for him as a person, whether he is rich or poor, yet it feels that day by day i lose a small part of that. i have always understood that his job means that he will be away a lot, but it is hard to be in a relationship with someone that can't always be there, only their fortunes can.

"i’m grateful for what you do for me, really i am, but i'd much rather have time with you than the latest gucci bag, or the newest chanel perfume. if it meant that i would have to live with nothing for the rest of my life, i would do it. don't you understand? i want you - not your money tom! i don't need you to apologise with gifts when i don’t see you all day, i just...i need you." i am desperate, craving for him to hear me out, to understand that it is him that i need, but the way he looks at me in confusion shows me that i am not going to achieve that.

"i thought you liked the things i buy for you. have you been lying?" he completely ignores the point that i have been trying to make, this only fuelling the frustration within me as i exhale shakily, quickly grasping onto the opportunity to argue my point once again.

"i do but that's not the point tom! i like them because i feel like it's all i get from you!" my voice is raising, something which i did not want to happen. shouting never solves the problem, however right now i am far too angry to care. "i just want some of your time, to feel like you actually care! when you're with me, you're here physically, but your mind is always elsewhere. i just miss you. i need to you be mine again, i-"

"look, i’m sorry okay?" he begins, harshly cutting me off and matching the volume in my voice. "i'm sorry that my job is more demanding than others, i’m sorry that it needs a lot of my attention, but i told you this from the beginning. my career is a big part of who i am and things aren't always easy. they get hard, they get tough, but-"

"that's my problem! when things get hard for you, i don't fucking know about it! because you shut me out, every. single. time. i'm your girlfriend, tom. i want to know about your life, i want to help you, but you always run away from me! you spoil me with gifts and money to compensate for every fucking time you leave me in the dark! i don't want it anymore. i just want you to communicate!" i move from the couch, walking to the middle of the room and standing a few feet away from him. his eyes are glued to me, watching my every step, and he is listening to me this time. "am i such a headache to be around, that you can't talk to me? that you can't deal with spending time with me, so instead you spend your money to try and shut me up, because you have so much that no matter what you buy, it doesn't affect you?"

"don't." he voices shakily as i stare into his eyes, his expression more wounded than ever. my words stab into him, hitting him harder than i had anticipated. his fists clench against his thighs, holding every ounce of frustration. though we have argued in the past, i have never seen him this upset, regardless of whether he intends to show it visibly or not. "you know that i don't think of you that way, even for a second. so stop."

"you can't blame me for thinking it tom." i shrug. "you leave me out of everything, i have no idea what's going on in your life anymore-"

“because i'm trying to fucking protect you!" he interrupts, raising his voice once again. his hand slams against the arm of the couch, the sudden contact causing me to wince slightly. "i'm sorry if you feel like i'm hiding things from you. but i know parts of my life would just stress you out and hurt you. don't you get that? i'm trying to save you from the pain-"

"i want the fucking pain!" i fire back. "we are supposed to be in a relationship. do you know what that means? i want to suffer with you. i would choose that, a million times over, if it meant that i could be with you for another day. i want every part of you, the sad, the happy, the angry, i want it all. can't you see that i need you? i hate being left in the dark. i absolutely fucking hate it.”

my voice pierces through his ears, diminishing the tense silence as tom gulps, clenching his jaw and leaning forwards, pinching his nose with his thumb and pointer finger. the rash and quick responses don’t allow me time to calm down, my eyes becoming glossy with tears, the salty liquid staining my cheeks before i can try to hold them back, my weakness just as evident as tom’s. the pain, the upset, the lack of affection that have been feeling all spills out, reeling outwards from within me as i let it out, no longer attempting to hold back.

he looks up, his face softening as he takes in my hurt expression. he has never seen me like this, so broken, and the fact that he is the cause of this pains him even more, his mind coming to the slow realisation that it is up to him to fix this. although he doesn’t fully understand how i could possibly believe that he does not love me, he wants to try, to try and see from my eyes. he lets out a shaky sigh, swallowing nervously before looking into my eyes.

"i would rather feel the sadness, suffer with you." i begin, my voice small as the tears quickly take away my physical strength. "i would do absolutely anything if it means that you will love me, that you will do it with me, tom."

"i don't live a normal life, and i just want to keep you away from the crazy things." he speaks slowly, trying to reason with me, refusing to turn his gaze away from mine. "some people want to hurt me, and i would never forgive myself if someone ever did anything to harm you."

i try to wipe my tears and calm my breathing, wrapping my arms around my small frame in an attempt to comfort myself, quickly becoming overwhelmed with the situation. but my mind acknowledges tom’s change in tone. not only is he more gentle and calm, he also seems sorry, like he now recognises where he went wrong.

"what do you want me to do?" he whispers, defeated as his tired eyes meet mine. he is no longer angry. he is desperate, longing to resolve this. "i'll do anything. i- i can't lose you. you're my world, schatz, and i'm sorry if i haven't shown it, but you are everything to me."

though there are millions of things i could say, i stay silent, standing still across the room. my heart clenches painfully, hurting at the sight of him so distraught, as his mind considers the dreaded idea of what losing me would be like. his world is crumbling before him, the one thing he seeks to protect seeming to slip through his fingers. i have never seen him like this, so vulnerable, so desperate, and whilst it comforts me to know that he is slowly letting down the walls that have prevented me from truly being with him, it saddens me to see him in such a distraught state.

"all i've ever wanted is to keep you safe. to keep you happy, liebe, because if you're happy then so am i. but you deserve more than this." he points to himself angrily, letting out a shaky sigh. "more than this fucking idiot, who doesn't even know how to love. i’m so sorry if i've done it the wrong way and made you feel like i don't care. because you shouldn't for a second think that i don't love you."

everything that i have been craving to see is happening in front of me. i have longed to see him open up, to break down the barriers that separate us both physically and mentally. i don’t want him to be strong all the time, and it hurts that he feels he has to be. the tears fall from my bloodshot eyes once again - this time out of sadness for him. i hurt with him, hating to see him so upset, but i understand his pain, his anger, and i feel every emotion along with him. for the first time in forever, i feel connected with him.

after a few moments of silence, he stands up, slowly walking towards me. i refuse to meet his gaze, fearing that i will break down once again i realise how hurt he truly is, and looking into his eyes will certainly display every emotion amongst his beautiful features. his hand brushes tenderly against my cheek, wiping a fresh tear that had fallen. he reaches towards my chin, using his pointer finger to angle my face upwards so it meets with his eyes. he towers over me, taking in the sorrow etched upon my face, before tucking the loose strands of hair behind my ears, gently caressing my cheek with his lips slightly parted, shaky breaths escaping from them.

"please, look at me." he whispers, gazing longingly into my eyes. i comply, shifting my own eyes to the deep brown ones in front of me. they are full of adoration, and i feel the man that i fell in love with slowly coming back to me. "i love you, so so much, please believe me schatz. you are the most important person in my life, and i am so sorry that i've made you feel the opposite way." he chokes up, his voice shaky as i can tell he is on the verge of tears.

i listen to him, allowing every word to sink in, as it is now no longer hard to trust what he says. i feel what i have been desperate to - love. i feel truly appreciated, like i am able to confide in him like i once could. though frustrated it took the both of us to get to this state to make him speak his mind, i appreciate him opening up, his apology making up for the lost time. there is no shame in being fragile, and through his entire conversation, we have both learned this, a new found appreciation for each other gained as i feel safe again.

"don't feel like you have to keep things to yourself. i’m your girlfriend, i'm supposed to be here for you, and i'll gladly do it, but you have to talk to me." i respond, lacing my hand with his. a soft smile spreads across his face, contrasting with his bloodshot eyes whilst he slowly nods.

"i hear you. i’m so sorry baby. i love you." he whispers, pulling me into a tight hug as his hands lace together around my waist. he lets out a sob onto my shoulder, my heart breaking at the sound. he clutches onto me tighter as if i may slip away, my own eyes tearing up once again. it has been a while since i felt like this. i feel loved, and it is all that i have ever wanted from the start.

he slowly pulls away, resting his forehead against mine and looking into my eyes through his eyelashes. after a few seconds, he leans inwards, until his lips touch mine. the kiss is gentle, carrying every promise to love and cherish me like he has failed to do, and i gladly accept it, kissing back quickly and wrapping my arms around his neck. he pulls away, planting a few pecks on my lips once again, his breath shaky as the remnants of tears stick to his cheeks. i slowly wipe them away, not breaking eye contact as i do so, gently caressing the soft skin until any trace of sadness is lost within our newfound love for each other.

a soft smile graces his lips, failing to wither as he kisses me once again, the same amount of passion as the last, making up for the lost affection as i feel more treasured than ever. this is all I have ever wanted, to feel like he cares, and now that i am feeling his affection, my mind is oozing with contentment, the feeling almost foreign it has been so long.

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