#trying to make four different lighting w the same fits look the same was a STRUGGLE here

[princemick]

the don.

[multiplicity-positivity]

do you have any tips for making a more welcoming/friendly headspace? over the past four years where we've known about our plurality, every headspace we've succeeded in creating has been... kind of gloomy, and impersonal, almost? one was a dimly lit room with dark hallways and such, and everything looked kind of run down and broken. our current one is a lot more clean and purposeful, but it kind of has the same energy as a school or work building, with cold overhead lights and very little decoration. it also has the same issue with long hallways that look kind of creepy and ominous. these places have/had pretty chill vibes i think, but they look like the setting for a psychological horror movie, despite the fact that we didn't originally visualize them that way •́⁠ ⁠ ⁠‿⁠ ⁠,⁠•̀

-🦇/🦀

Hiya! We think that headspaces can work a bit differently for different systems, but visualization and imagination are usually big parts of the headspace-creation process! They might sometimes need to require some conscious maintenance in order to preserve their vibes. Occasionally areas of our own headspace can get a bit fuzzy or change in unwanted ways if we don’t spend time consciously working on them and adjusting them to reflect how we want them to appear! >w<

That being said, maybe y’all can try setting aside some time like once a week or something to work on changing the vibes of your headspace? By doing things like imagining what you want for your headspace or even actively doing construction work internally!

If you’re looking for inspiration, Pinterest and Unsplash are both great places to search for images that fit a certain aesthetic, scenery, or vibe! And we also set up the blog @headspace-visuals recently where we will do our best to help folks find some images to help inspire their headspace building process :33

If you haven’t before, it could be useful to check out some guides on building headspaces! In our headspace post we include links where folks can learn more about headspaces with tips for building their own >w<

Headspaces can be really really vast, and I do think some systems have headspaces which are not so easily adjusted or changed. We aren’t sure how y’all’s headspace works, but if you find you can’t really consciously change much about your headspace, maybe y’all could try leaving to find a different area to settle? And keep in your mind an idea of what you’d like to find ideally so that you’re more likely to stumble across it? Idk, this is just a thought!

But we do hope this helps somewhat! We hope y’all can find success with improving the vibes of your headspace! And if anyone else who reads this has tips for 🦇/🦀, please feel welcome to share! :3

[brettbowden]

  I interviewed National and World champion Aussie sailor Roger Blasse about preparing for a race or regatta and parts of that chat are reproduced below. Roger has won 11 National and 2 world championships in the OK class and is a front-running competitor in the International 14’skiff class. He is also a past commodore of the Black Rock Yacht Club in Melbourne Australia, serving many years in various committee positions. Success is the icing on the cake and if you ask Roger why he continues to compete he has said that the real reason is not to win things but because of all the friends that he has made around Australia and the world.” Brett: So do you have any secrets to preparing for a regatta? Do you have anything that you do to prepare yourself mentally and your boat? Roger: The first thing I think you need to do is you need to decide whether you're going to do the regatta or not. And usually, I think like three-quarters of the year or nine months out, you need to make that decision. And as that time gets closer—I mean obviously—the first things you’ve got to work on is you got to take... practicing in sailing and so forth, working on your fitness, or even organizing support like facharbeit ghotwriting if your academic load gets heavy. AUSSIE SAILORS - BOOK AND BONUSES Brett: So what do you do if your boat is away for two or three months, do you try and borrow another boat or do you have two boats for instance? Roger: Well thankfully in the OK I've got two boats but if I didn't have that I'd try and borrow a boat. Unfortunately, with a 14ft skiff, it's a little bit different because people are less inclined to lend you a boat and they're all very different. So I guess with the 14 you've got to probably just try and maintain your fitness and maybe sail other boats while just keeping your tactics and your strategies in tune. So I think the other thing you got to make sure is make sure that the venue you're going to, that you're going to be suitable.   That you've got the right gear and so forth and you have the right weight. I mean particularly if you try to maybe get into the top 10 boats or something like that you have to make sure that the boat, the gear you've got is at World pace. And that if it's going to be a light regatta you've prepared for that, if it's going to be a windy regatta likewise prepare for it and things like that. Brett: Weight is critical in every class I guess. So what do you do to lose weight or whatever, have you got any particular techniques or you're trying to stay the same? Roger: I've got plenty of techniques. The question is whether they work or not. But look yeah I think I probably what I'll do is I probably could lose maybe three or four kilos or something like that. I haven't been very successful in losing lots of weight. But I think what you do is you manage your expectations. So you have a better understanding of how well you go. I mean if you're a big bloke and you're going to Worlds that would potentially be light then you need to have think about your rig, maybe shed a few pounds or so forth. But manage your expectations and come up with a clear idea of how well you're going to go. FREE BOOK - TIPS FROM SAILING LEGENDS Brett: So speaking about the venue, how do you gather local knowledge regarding wind, currents and weather? Have you got a particular thing you do? Roger: I think it's just like a group of a lot of things. The first step is to maybe have a chat with people who've been there before which is very important. And obviously, even if they're outside your class, have a look when the last Worlds who've been there or even read, maybe get on the website and have a look at the report. Have a look at the results and see where some of the Aussies went and just from the people who have been there you'll understand whether they are a light or heavy crew and so forth. I think the next thing is to get on the internet. There are plenty of sites that you can have a look at and just check what the winds are going to be like during that period. Download PredictWind or something like that and just have a good understanding of what the conditions could be. As we all know sometimes the weather isn't exactly what it's meant to be. Just often go with the knowledge it will be what it will be and you have to adapt to what the wind strength will be and the conditions. Brett: So you get your head around that a bit before you go to the regatta? Roger: Yeah you shouldn't...like if you've got, you think, “It's going to be a windy regatta, it's going to be fantastic, we're going to go really well,” you got to be careful that you don't go with that preconceived idea on the regatta. The first day is a light one and you just haven’t got your head around...everything is out the window, you haven't just gone with a one-trick pony type thing. I think it's very important to check the weather and find out that you're going to be comfortable when you're there and be on the pace. FREE SAILING GLOVES Brett: You do pick a lot up from mixing with other people at regattas. Food and drink is the fuel that keeps us going, do you look for the best restaurants and supermarket?  Roger: I think that's a big part of that getting there three or four days before the regatta. You pick up where you can eat, you pick up where the supermarket is. And you can stock up where you're staying, the type of food you like and what you want to eat in the morning. So I'm not fussed about the type of food I eat. Like all I suggest is that you eat reasonably well. Pick foods that aren't going to upset you during the race or something like that so don't have a spicy...    Be mindful that the tap water might be OK but it might just set your stomach off a little bit. So just try and be careful, drink some bottled water for the first few days until you're acclimatized a little bit. I would try a few restaurants maybe pick a favourite one that you're happy with. You might just go there two or three times in a row because it's easy. For breakfast, I think it's important that you have a reasonable breakfast beforehand. Sometimes I'm just mindful if it's an early start that having a big meal prior to racing within an hour is probably not ideal. In general, have a good breakfast and then obviously refuel after the race.            Read the full article

[chaoskiro]

Voiceteam roundup part art

Since there´s still a couple of the round three works I contributed to that haven't been made public I figured I could make a cover art round up today. I ended up making a lot of cover art for other people's podfics and turns out I really enjoy it! I have learned so many new things in photopea, it's been great. I'll try to go in chronological order from first to last. Here goes!

I (as always) began very ambitiously (is it even a bite if it doesn't look like more than you can chew?) with this coverart:

It was quite a bit of work isolating all the hats from their background and covering the musicians on the stage in a way that looked natural by copying other parts of the background. This was also before I found out you could make a border around text in photopea so that was done by putting the same words in a slightly bigger font behind the other words and fiddling and cursing until it looked decent, I do think it's a nice effect.

Then comes this one:

This story is so beautiful. It's a moment between Max and Robin right after Starcourt where they sit and talk on the edge of an ambulance. I really wanted to show their backs, but I couldn't find any good screengrabs that would fit, so I went with this idea of the silhouettes. The robin one is actually taken from the bathroom scene and I can't remember where the Max one is taken from, just that I made sure she had the two braids in it like she has in the final Starcourt scene. I had to do so much fiddling to get their silhouettes properly shaped, because both of them had complicated backgrounds that photopea wanted to lump in with them. That is also part of why there's the slight glow around them, it softened the edges and made them more forgiving. This is probably the cover art I've ever made I am the most proud of.

I had so many ideas for this one. I'm pretty glad I ended up going with this one though. The neon lettering was harder to get to work than expected, I spent ages fiddling with that, and then making the poster fit in more with the picture and not feel stamped on took a bit too. I was really glad to find that background on pixabay since it really helped making the edges of Eddie's hair not stand out so much (that hair is a nightmare to remove background for). This one feels like a study in crucial details that no one would know that I spent so much time on, but would stand out if I hadn't spent that time.

Speaking of things I had a hundred ideas for. This one is actually the one where I worked on the most separate ideas. I think I had four beginnings on drafts that all looked wildly different plus an idea that never saw light of day because I am still suffering from the lenovo AAAA prank.

See, the thing is there is this bouquet of flowers that is absolutely central to this story and also extremely well described, so I at first wanted to include that on the cover or at least something resembling it. As it turns out when wondering the free-to-use pictures on the net that might not be as easy as that and even finding a bouquet with just about the right colourscheme turned out to be hard, and so did tuning the hues of a bouquet nicely.

In the end what decided it most of all was also having to include so many names and that I really fell in love with this specific flower mentioned in the fic.

Making the coverart for this one was mostly about learning how to manipulate the shape of text and exploring the many different colours of fire until I found the right one to pick for the text. (It's a Dutch translation of a Good Omens fic for those of you wondering)

This one, for me, ended up being an exploration in remembering what my grandma's videotapes used to look like, and yet not at all being able to find a good base image for making a more film-like tape case before going with this simple option. I do kinda enjoy making covers that seem like real things that could exist.

Aaaand last, but not least:

This one caused me trouble. Mostly because my ideas where too hard to execute and also because it's a very short fic that doesn't give many visuals. All the others are rooted in some visual from the fic, but this one is a conversation on parenting that doesn't include many visuals that I felt like vibed with the fic as a whole. So I ended up grabbing onto the fatherly aspect of it all.

This photo originally had a black background, but I felt like that would clash with the vibes, so I decided to change that, then cursed a bunch when I found out that was easier said than done, did a bunch of things that felt illegal and arrived at this little thing.

Thus ended my voiceteam cover art journey. I have really taken a liking to doing this, which maybe shouldn't have taken me by surprise since I also love illustrating songs. There's something about having text and a story and a picture all mixing together that I really enjoy. I plan to make many more, I kinda had a day where I was just itching to make some, two days after the regular rounds of voiceteam ended, but I didn't want to take any points from tie-break participants. We will see what the future brings.

[waterlilyunit6]

Design Boards

^(these are the final design boards. Photos of the experimentation are down at the bottom of this post)

Since I liked the idea of my designs displayed onto 2D mannequins, I decided I wanted to do this for my design boards. I found a folder of intricate, patterned wallpaper samples, with the colour palette and designs complimenting my collection. The wallpaper samples were textured, so I thought that would also be a great 3D element to my boards.

My first idea for my design boards was to lay out my mannequins cut out from the wallpaper, and they place the sheet of acetate across the middle, and they lay my specification drawings over the top in line with the mannequins. I came to realise that the acetate was pointless, and I would only use this concept if I had layers to my specification drawings.

There were many thing I need to experiment with, which included whether the design boards looked better portrait or landscape. I also needed to decided what colour card I was to use, and my original thought was just black or white, but then realised that the designs get lost against the white due to the pastel colour pallette. Black also didnt work, although it made the colours really stand out it was too sharp. I decided to collect a few different colours of card that I thought would compliment designs. The colours included navy, a soft grey, peach, cobalt blue, and light brown.

The peach coloured card was nice, but like the white, the designs began do get lost. The brown was also a lovely colour at first, but when placed behind the designs, the color didn't match the colour palette and looked really out of place. Grey and navy were the next colours to try, and I decided I really liked them both. The grey was soft enough to fit with the pastel theme, despite not being part if the colour palette, and it was the right colour inbetween black and white; dark enough that the colours stand our, and not too light that the designs get lost. I thought navy was a great choice as well, as there is navy in my colour pallet, and the cool tones of clash with the warm tones of my designs as well as having a soft look to it.

I decided I was going to use two colours for my boards as k could decide between grey and navy. Navy was slightly more my favourite, but I thought having two would add variety, and I wouldn't have to choose between the two either. I was going to have four grey and four navy, but then I remembered I till had to try the blue card.

I tried the blue card, and although I didn't like this as much as the grey or navy, I thought it complimented the navy colour. However m the color didn't look right with any of my designs apart from my garment spec drawing I then decided I was going to use navy for seven of the designs, and the blue for tjlhe garment design, as it made the garment designs stand out whilst fitting with the navy boards.

After choosing the colours, I experimented whether I wanted it it portrait or landscape. I thought that having it portrait made the designs look longer, and the designs could also overlap slightly, which I quite liked the concept of.

I then thought that the boards looked plain and empty, and had the idea to photo copy the diamond pleating on my garment, and then cut it into different sized strips, and then played around with the composition of them. The strips added some slight background, not too much that it's distracting, but enough that the background doesn't look plain.

I added same colour swatches from my colour pallete to match the design. These were created by applying watercolour or pro-marker onto some card and cut out small squares of each colour. I also wanted to add fabric swatches from my lept over fabric. Since I didn't have any pink, coral, green, or yellow pastel fabric, I decided to dye a few small pieces of the left-over ivory satin with some Brusho, making sure the fabric wasn't too vibrant and matched the colour pallet/designs. For my chosen garment design, I also wanted to add a small sqaure of my boat print.

The composition for all elements to the boards were experimented with first before being stuck down.

[hoardlikegoldenirises]

Like a man possessed, I felt like drawing what the gang's various graduation outfits looked/will look like... lol

edited to add glasses

Notes about each one (and the close-ups again) below the cut:

Midtown High!!! 2005! I made it light blue to match the design I came up with for Flash's varsity jacket, with little white and red bits of course. I made Midtown's colors blue, white and red a long time ago on purpose cause I thought it would be funny. I think the baby blue is cute.

(here's a pic of the letter jacket btw)

Flash doesn't have any honors, except ALLLLL of his sports shit, but they don't really have like... cords for that? so i gave him some medals. but he did like... three or four sports in high school and had a bunch of state wins so i figured he should have something.

I decided Liz should be the Valedictorian so she has the national honor society cords and a little valedictorian stole... the kind you get custom printed of course, not from the school.

Peter somehow managed to graduate high school magna cum laude despite his uncle dying and also getting his ass beat a bunch of times, but he and his aunt can barely afford to live when he's in high school so he definitely can't afford $15 for a stupid rope. (😂) (really his aunt probably would have found a way if she had been made aware...) (i'm sure there are other ways to get the cords but it feels fair to say, personality-wise... this is fitting...)

also... i think i accidentally drew him without his broken nose but i moved shit around so he gets his nose busted way before graduation lol

Still 2005, Standard High! Harry and Gwen! I used green and white as the colors based off like a comic panel from the Gwen Stacy solo comic. and saw some stuff about high schools that have white for girls and blue for boys (i actually think one of my high schools did that? but i graduated from the other school, where the colors were black and orange, so the gowns were... black lol) so I color-coded it based on gender as well, in contrast to Midtown's exclusively sky blue gowns.

Gwen is also Valedictorian, OBVIOUSLY, and I used a V-neck stole for that, plus all the honor cords, and a bunch of medals for shit like the science olympiad, honors, etc. AND a key club stole. cause. that all seemed fitting for her.

Harry gets a medal cause Gwen made him do SciOly with her. and the cord is DECA. REALLY I'm sure there are other societies and clubs from which he could have accessories since he's a little rich boy but I got tired of trying to google stuff and gave up 😂

All the high school gowns, even from Gwen's school, are shiny...

2009—originally I was gonna have Harry graduate too but then I decided he should drop out, so Gwen and Hobie ended up being the only ones in their friend group to graduate on time (or in some cases, at all) lol —

I thought even with his life being a little stressful, Hobie deserved to graduate with honors especially since he's like. a genius. so i guess, much like peter, despite adversity, he managed to get a very high GPA (I chose to, for various reasons, make ESU an expensive possibly private university (loosely based on NYU w/ some deviations) w/ high standards for performance so in this case, magna cum laude is like 3.8+ GPA lol) He's in the same track as Peter and got his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical(?) Engineering. a very smart young man but better at coding. (i actually wonder if he's less mechanical engineering and more a different engineering degree... hmm... definitely engineering either way but maybe more technologically focused than Peter's)

except for Liz, whose business degree I may or may not have forgotten about while drawing this, the others (except Peter) either don't graduate (Harry and Flash) or don't go to college in the first place (Betty, Glory, MJ)

Gwen gets to be the consistent overachiever in this group as I think becomes very apparent... so she's summa cum laude but not, I think, valedictorian. this despite her father dying between sophomore and junior year?? lol? (spoilers i guess 😂) and I decided that at ESU, for summa cum laude, instead of three pairs of cords, it's two pairs plus a satin/silk stole. and also they use their own institutional colors for honors cords (this is where I deviate strongly from NYU, which does not hand out cords or stoles or anything for honors) Oh also she got a BSN (nursing degree)

I put ESU in Stuyvesant Square Park btw.

like. Actually in it. (and several blocks surrounding it) the park is the college green lol

meanwhile Midtown High is just where Forest Hills High School is.

anyway

oh yeah, since I designed Flash's ESU jacket to be cream/off-white with burgundy leather arms and various maroon and crimson accents I decided to run with that and make ESU's school colors maroon and ivory, so the robes are maroon.

Eventually Flash is gonna give this jacket to Peter btw. since Peter actually went to ESU for more than two semesters and also is always on that damn motorcycle.

anywho

2010!! Peter finally graduates just in time for—Gwen to graduate AGAIN LOL — this makes it seem like Gwen finished an entire Master of Science in the time it takes Peter to finish his BS in Mechanical Engineering but technically Peter will graduate in January, he just can't walk until May, and Gwen graduates in May officially. So Gwen only finished HALF her master's degree in the time it takes him to graduate (because her toxicology MS is a two semester program lol)

so like i said this is just Peter's undergrad; he has to take a full extra semester to make up for being withdrawn in "Creep" but luckily an official withdrawal doesn't count against your GPA. which. for a second i was like "OH FUCK" cause I was worried i'd accidentally put him in a situation where he'd be forced to drop out etc. but no his GPA is fine lol. But. No more honors for Peter. Because at a fancy school like ESU 3.62 is just "good" LMAO

So Gwen will be getting a Master of Science in Toxicology at this point, which is afaict generally Medicine so she got a master's hood with dark green for medicine. but Science is like, sage green or something, so I included that in her tights lol

By this point Flash and Peter will be steady so Peter gets to sit in Flash's lap for this lol... Also there should be like 4 more people here but man... my hand hurts 😂 I ran out of steam, but like, Glory, Betty... Felicia... and I think Aunt Anna (Felicia's very flattered to be invited instead of having to sneak along the rafters of the stadium LMAO)

In my head Gwen and Peter carefully coordinate their guest tickets (5 each) so that they can invite their entire friend group and some family so amusingly, despite dating and living together, Peter does not invite Flash, Gwen does 😂 but they agree on this beforehand. Peter invites Aunt May and... i am realizing this retroactively... all the people I didn't draw LOL

This is also 3 months after Normie is born which I realized while drawing Harry and then was like, omg i need to google what a baby carrier looks like Immediately

also mj has short hair for a few years cause i thought it would be cute

moving on

you. might have noticed something.

(2013: Peter's Master of Science in Teaching)

He's wearing red and blue...

Unlike Midtown this was NOT on purpose LMAO I realized only when I was looking up degree colors for the velvet on the hood and discovered that education was light blue... so I decided to lean into it, and then the FF stole just added to it 😂 so he gets spider-man colors for his master's degree lol

That being said, I'm still debating this honestly. this one has already changed a lot as I tried to figure some things out and figure out what timeline isn't wildly unbelievable for him to have a job as a teacher by 2013 lol, cause it's kind of intertwined with some plot stuff that once again involves him graduating a semester late, for a program that normally would be two semesters + one semester of student teaching (his is three semesters + one because I added in an extension for special ed because I want him to get an extended certificate, so he's taking an extra semester of special ed classes) but it ends up taking him two and a half years instead of just one or two and... also as you can see his GPA is not very good because this time instead of a W, he gets an N for the classes he was doing when he uhhh is kidnapped so that brings his entire GPA down, which is Bad News For Scholarships and why I have him with the FF sash.

He already HAS the FF grant (it's one of those kinds that fills in gaps in financial aid) for all of his Master's (no they don't know they've given Spider-Man a scholarship LMAO) so that he can go to grad school like, at all, but I decided that the Fantastic Four also has an emergency fund for Students In Crisis so he gets that his final semester after losing all of his other scholarships (missed the deadlines to apply because he boldly assumed he was One Month From Graduating 😅 and obviously didn't feel the need to reapply for scholarships he wouldn't need anymore) because he... uh... is a student who has had a major crisis lol

also realizing suddenly I should have named this the Fantastic Four Collegiate Fund lmao i'll update my notes.

At this point the Future Foundation is just the Fantastic Four's charity uh... branch? front? idk they do charity and scholarships for marginalized students with it. later it will be more than that.

Here's this again cause I think it's cute.

Peter's final semester is actually half-time student teaching, but I've been considering having him not graduate at all since he already has 40+ days of student teaching, but I'm torn, cause like I said, I want him to have a special ed extension on his teacher certification, but that requires like 70 days of student teaching lol so even though he could still get an initial certification without the MA, I don't think he'd be qualified for what I want him to get a job doing... IDK WE'LL SEE. i'm thinking about possibilities.

IF he graduates, I wasn't even sure if he would walk at commencement anyway, but I also figured that his dear old aunt would really really really really want him to because he put all that hard work in and had such a hard year and doesn't he want to celebrate being alive etc?? even if Peter would rather eat glass. He's so tired. He needs a thousand year nap. But at least by this point he might be willing to be convinced to go be surrounded by 5000 people in a theater... perhaps... maybe.

If he does walk I think he is going to have 4 tickets for guests so it would be obviously May and Flash cause that's his mom and his long-term romantic partner, and... at first I was like, what two other people?! he can't pick and choose favorite friends?! but then i realized it could only be Robbie and JJJ in this specific context that I CANNOT keep going into, just trust me, it's the only correct choice. and also it makes me 🥺

They care him...

jesus. god. anyway.

Gwen's PhD:

I said she was the overachiever. Literally like A MONTH before The Curse of the Man-Spider, Gwen graduates from her doctoral program with a PhD in Toxicology lmao so I wanted to draw THAT up too, so here we get much of the same in the form of maroon robes and a hood with a red and ivory lining, but since it's a PhD she gets the fancy doctorate robes and since ESU likes to be unique apparently it has ivory velvet for the panels and arm chevron stripe things, instead of black, lol. I almost went the ivory robes + maroon velvet route but that looked a little too much like MIT 😂 so I swapped it. I like this.

Also leaning into the Spider-Man red and blue.

Actually I was gonna do a maroon tam but I decided matching it to the PhD blue for the hood edge looked better and I was like. Listen if I'm gonna lean into the red and blue, I might as well lean all the way in. lmao. And yes. 8 sided. like a spider.

This is EXTRA FUNNY because she KNOWS now too (since the year before) so she's probably looking in the mirror like, God Fucking Dammit Peter. But she won't let something as silly as spider-man colors get her down!! tbf i could have had her just get her PhD at a different school, but, you know, it's whatever lol

So, in the end, Gwen has a PhD in Toxicology, Peter has a Master's in Teaching probably (somehow), Hobie has at least a BS in engineering, Liz has at least a Business degree, and... everyone else dropped out or didn't go to college. lol.

also here are some more closeups of that MAT drawing cause I like it

look how tired he is. he's so tired. but there's a little smile. see, peter, it's not all bad.

🥺in love🥺 actually Flash has also been very stressed lol but I think by the time Peter would be walking at graduation, Flash will be much less stressed... especially now that peter isn't having quite so many Extremely Disruptive Nightmares so Flash can get some sleep 💀

She's proud of her boy. I realized partway through drawing this that an oxygen tank would probably make sense cause she was uhhhh *checks notes* stabbed in the chest lol

she's like... 77 or 78 years old now?? and was mostly spry-ish (not counting rheumatoid arthritis) but after this she's definitely much more weak.

anyway that's my long ass post that's honestly probably missing some context but oh my god

[castle-dominion]

5x2 cloudy with a chance of murder

Love the mandolin style music or w/e this is

castle shut up lmao & fun lighting Oh we can still see her scar RC: No one is going to be able to tell that we’re together by how you are dressed. KB: Oh, no? I only work with a roomful of detectives. It’s their job.

I thought that one was HIS lol that's why he said no not getting paid, not your coworker lmao Ooh they are in europe!

Man I miss kissing people... Reminds me of lanie & esposito "no puppydog eyes" but they are sort of coworkers but not exactly, same with demming, he was in a different department so they could date

Oh this is how esposito always knows mor ethan becks, he gets there first & gets info from the unis

Becks is pretty *notices the coffee immediately* it could be BECAUSE it was her first day back

"as a single man"

Lanie is lookin awesome rn! she can Tell. woman's intuition

Ryan is pretty <3 this is the hair mum said looked like mine before we both cut our hair. Still mad at each other : (

Becks no, they really are still mad...

That was a long sigh

This man is,,, not normal...

Oh look at that he's really acting like me "it's johnny" Jonathan Goodheart: That stalking was a misunderstanding, and… That other thing happened on a really hot day.

I like things that are soft HE'S JUST LIKE ME FR

AFTER the gunshot? Lanie detective moments!! She def pointed as if it was between people "I know a lot of guys"

mandy michael slaying nice word The five day forecast won't be the same RC: What kind of a family, happy or dysfunctional? In the commentary I think andrew marlowe said castle at the beginning of the year is like a big happy family but at the end of the year like a big happy family at thanksgiving fog is an awesome name lol. Mum had a dentist called doctor ow

"the bay" New york's finest lmao

Lucrative "sell by date" & "according to harvey" set dressing with cleavage XD

Yeah she's probably in bed by seven pm.

Lol castle playing on the screen

haranguing??

KB: Isn’t she the reporter that shows up to cover stories in her bikini? RC: Yeah, y—I don’t—is—I didn’t notice that. KB: (playful) You want to…try it again, make it sound a little more convincing? RC: No, I’m good. KB: (playful) Okay.

Faster-than-my-ex-husband-in-the-sack fast. Isn't he married? Uh huh

Ryan interrupted him & now look at them fight

Music <3

JE: Let me take the lead. KR: Whatever. JE: What? I got more experience. KR: Yo, Javi, do you mind if we call a time-out… while we collar this guy? Huh?

Reggie's wife is sleeping with her too

True, there are some careers that are very age dependent, like gymnastics. You can keep up your physical fitness but it takes more work & you need to let some things go.

When harry met sally

RC: Well, I don’t know. You and I were just friends for four years. KB: Yeah, except you were trying to sleep with me that whole time. RC: What? KB: Mm-hmm. RC: Excuse me, it was you that was trying to sleep with me. KB: Wh—? RC: Don’t tell me you dress like that for Esposito. [Esposito walks up.] JE: What’s for me? KB: (simultaneously) Nothing. RC: (simultaneously) Don’t worry about it.

Clipping the tinted moisturizer scene where espt interrupts ryan in the middle of giving information. Why is he wearing makeup tho? To hide that he got f'ed up a bit? To pretend he didn't [do what he did for the reason he did]? Also he still does have a black eye, it just isn't as visible now

What kind of relationship? Rings a bell huh? & the sex is amazing *both smile looking in the distance*

I can't tell if ryan is taking off or adding on makeup but it def made esposito pause

Proposing to your wife with ray the helicopter pilot flew her straight to the hospital

Kristina Coterra: I’m sure you must have women throwing themselves at you all the time. RC: Well, we all have our crosses to bear. She goes back to watch He could have said "I didn't want to stand you up on TV"

RF: Uh, well, if she was up in the chopper, she must have been using the direct tox monitor. RC: The direct tox monitor, of course. KB: You have no idea what that is. RC: No, not a clue.

Yeah that's so right, doctors so often only talk to the parents not the kids. I had a great pediatrician.

Ryan knocks & CASTLE leaves to talk with him... becks stays in the interview... interesting. Castle really is part of the team

Lenny my beloved

THE FANCY PAPER

Wow this factory owner is... INSANE

"shuts her down" is not funny

Yeah lol it could be "if any of this" this meaning styrene "gets out" into the air "I will kill you"

lmao that is SUCH a big corporation thing. Turning the fricking frogs gay. GIRL NO THEY ARE TRICKING YOU THEY ARE TRICKING YOU KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT

Ryan's makeup is actually sort of working Cool how they can get tech to do sun time verifying

Nah y'all should go home, don't work through supper. One of you even has a wife to go home to!

RC: Uh, are you sure you’re okay— turns to address the room as a whole about leaving the case instead of Beckett about the date Are you okay with this? JE: Okay? Are you kidding? It’s Kristina Coterra. KR: Yeah, besides, since when have you let cop work get in the way of your busy social life?

interesting scene going in there through the city, helicopter type scenes

Ew oysters may be an aphrodesiac but I would not want to kiss someone after eating oysters

Oh no his phone is calling her also castle you could totally say "I'm not comfortable with this on the first date"

KB: Yeah, well, there’s gotta be something that we’re missing. KR: Speaking of missing something, Castle should be way more excited about his date tonight. KB: Why? KR: According to Celebrity Examiner, Kristina is notorious for seducing famous men with her extensive bikini collection. (chuckle) [Esposito and Beckett stare at Ryan.] KR: What? Jenny buys it, and it just happened to be open to that page on the coffee table. KB: What’s your point? KR: Isn’t it obvious? She’s totally gonna put the moves on him. JE: No way. Not gonna happen. KB: Thank you for actually showing some maturity. JE: He’s totally gonna put the moves on her. (chuckle) KB: Don’t you guys think that he’s actually evolved beyond that by now? JE: He’s a man, he has a pulse, so… KR & JE: No.

How did he get away? what if you do say no? If the genders were reversed we would be outraged. In fact, I am. lmao the upside down shot I love it

GIRL HE IS ABOUT TO GO LIVE, LET HIM FINISH HIS SEGMENT OR SMTH, YOU ARE SO WRECKING THE NEWS

gay!? Not for a story, but for the career the story would bring Girl if you didn't mean to kill her but just to scare her then you would have the safety on, empty mag, empty chamber, not cocked, & also careful with your muzzle control, altho ig u were trying to threaten someone

Ryan is letting his bruise show again esposito on the other hand looks like he is wearing makeup now

Wow that is a tall place to go for those volume buttons. lol wow that was a crappy fight scene. Must be embarrassing for ryan to have that freezeframe on tv in the middle of the precinct. Also I still have an old tube tv with that style of volume. Did u see ryan punch that man & he had no reaction but ryan made a face like he himself had gotten punched in the gut?

Oh no are they going to break up after ONE DAY? & even if you do implode, you got to enjoy your time! Good. Set boundaries. Did she threaten him? I mean it was a joke but still KB: It's--it's too soon. I just--I keep seeing her boobs in your face. RC: *smiles, also thinking about the boobs in his face*

Ok it has only been two hours, I've got this. I watched about one & a half episodes, that makes sense time-wise

[ncssian]

time flies, messy as the mud on your truck tires, now i’m missing your smile, hear me out. we could just ride around.

a/n: this is soooo long and MAJORLY unedited but it feels perfect for xmas eve so im posting it now. it might even be missing paragraphs but we ride

***

Nesta refused to go fully no-contact with her sisters. To this day, she didn’t know why, but that was how she found herself standing outside Feyre’s house for her mandatory family dinner, held only three times a year.

Three times a year, Nesta had to dress up and submit herself to a painfully awkward night of being left out of conversations and eating mediocre food. Tonight it was for Thanksgiving. She’d long resigned herself to the torture of it all, and she was nothing but grateful that it was only three nights out of the whole year.

That still didn’t make knocking on the door any easier, however.

“Nesta?” a voice behind her asked, immediately raising every hair on her neck. She turned away from the front door to find a familiar face walking up the lit pathway to the manor’s stone porch, approaching her.

Oh God. “Cassian?”

Wow, did he look… different. In the three years since he’d left to work for the Peace Corps, Cassian’s muscles had subtly grown not bigger, but more defined, his clothes now better-fitting. His dark hair was shorter than she’d ever seen it before, no longer wild and untamed, but still long enough to fall near his chin. He looked so tame in comparison to the hulking giant she’d used to know.

He laughed and rushed up to her to sweep her into a crushing bear hug, making her gasp in surprise. They’d never been close enough in the past for a greeting this enthusiastic, but maybe the Peace Corps had made him demented. “How have you been?” he exclaimed, setting her down on her feet and placing a hand at her shoulder so she wouldn’t tip over. “I was wondering whether I’d get to see you tonight.”

Nesta could only open and shut her mouth, no words coming out. “You’re back,” was all she could say.

He grinned wide. His smile had remained the same. “I am.”

Her mind frantically flipped through the encyclopedia of social etiquette. “It’s good to see you again,” she forced out. “How was—life?”

His laugh was quiet, but she didn’t know what was funny. “I should be asking you the same thing. What are you waiting out here in the cold for?” He nudged her softly.

“Just trying to work up the nerve to knock on the door,” she answered honestly.

“I see.” He nodded. “Well, if we both put our heads together, I'm sure we can manage it before dinner is served.”

Was he making fun of her? His manner seemed serious and earnest, and it was confusing the hell out of Nesta.

Just then, the door swung open, a rush of light and warmth spilling out onto the front porch. “I thought I heard a ruckus outside,” Elain said, thin brows furrowing as her gaze swung to Nesta, then quickly smoothing out with a smile as her eyes landed on Cassian. “Come get out of the cold," she said. "We’re so glad you could make it.”

Nesta knew Elain was addressing both of them, but she couldn’t help but feel the last part had been directed to Cassian more than her.

Cassian swept inside with a grin and greeted Elain with a kiss to her cheek, and Nesta had to force herself to look away. Suddenly the hug she’d gotten no longer felt like overkill. A kiss had to mean more than a hug, right?

“You both are a little late, but you haven’t missed much. I’ll bring everyone else to the dining room,” Elain said, before wandering off down one of the mansion’s grand hallways to get the rest of their friends.

Nesta took in a subtle breath, but a deep one nonetheless, as she set about taking her coat off. It was stupid to be so anxious about a simple dinner. In no less than four hours, she'd be tucked in her warm bed with a swoony romance book, and the whole evening would disappear like the fragments of a bad dream. This was nothing.

Cassian came up to her side as they made their way to the dining room, bending down to speak into her ear. "There's so much I want to catch up with you about. I wish I'd known you were going to be here earlier, I would've prepared more."

Nesta's responding look was confused, if not bewildered. Prepared for what? Was there something grating about her presence that required preparation? He kept saying things that sounded like potential jabs in the softest, friendliest manner.

She ran her jittery hands down the sleek low ponytail of her hair, then the blue velvet of her simple dress. "Yes, well." She didn't follow through with the rest of the sentence.

They arrived at the dining room, where it was both a relief and a weight to no longer be alone with just Cassian. Everyone else in her sister's little friend group was already there, ooh-ing and aah-ing over the platters of food and rushing to claim seats at the table.

Nesta heard several exclamations of "Cassian's here!", all of which she ignored as she tried to decide which seat would suit her best tonight. She might have heard Cassian say, "Nesta's here, too," but it was quickly swallowed up and lost to the rest of the room's conversation.

Cassian took a seat next to Azriel and started pulling out the empty chair beside him. His eyes searched for and met Nesta's just as she picked her seat on the opposite side of the table, near the very end. A look of defeat took over his face as Morrigan took the chair beside him. Nesta didn't understand what the look was supposed to mean, but as it was awkward not to smile at someone after a certain amount of eye contact had been made, she offered him a small smile that probably came off as a tiny grimace before looking away.

After a lot of scrambling around, Elain ended up seated on Nesta's right. Not too bad, as conversation with Elain was less likely to make Nesta's skin crawl than with others at the table.

Everyone started piling their plates with food, and Nesta let Elain take her plate to serve her. It was easier than drawing attention to herself by reaching out and getting the food on her own.

"You shouldn't have come so late, Cassian," Feyre said from the head of the table. "You missed all the appetizers, they’re all finished now."

“Don’t tell me you didn’t save me any of Elain’s lobster rolls,” he said with wide eyes, acting offended.

Elain giggled at that, but the sound seemed more calculated than genuine. It probably wasn't nice to think everything that your sister did was calculated, but Nesta wasn't feeling very nice tonight. She felt like staring into her mashed potatoes while dreaming about a handsome man crashing this dinner party and promptly sweeping her off her feet.

Morrigan and Feyre led the conversation by gossiping about some work friend of Rhysand's they'd run into on their latest shopping trip, and time melded around Nesta and held her captive. She imagined she'd been painted to match the printed wallpaper behind her, rendering herself invisible to the rest of the room.

To everyone except one, that was. But everytime she accidentally made eye contact with Cassian, she looked away before he could even register it. By the time she looked back, he'd refocused on whatever jokes or stories his friends were telling.

Thirty minutes passed by without anyone asking Nesta a question. She counted each one, until—

"So what do you do these days?"

It took a long moment of awkward silence before Nesta looked up from her plate to find Cassian staring at her, his eyes warm. She realized the question had been directed at her. "Me?" she said in disbelief, because she needed the confirmation.

"No, one of these other losers," he teased. Some made noises of mock-offense, while others stifled their laughter.

Nesta shifted uncomfortably at how all the attention in the room had shifted to her. Being ignored wasn't fun, true, but this was far worse. "I run a dance studio," she answered. She didn't mention anything about how she was also a ghostwriter of romance novels on the side, although maybe she might have admitted it if they'd been alone.

Cassian's eyes lit up, and he imperceptibly leaned forward over the table. "No way. What kind of dance?"

"Um, just pole for now." Normally she'd leave it at that, but something in her wanted to give the full picture to Cassian. "I'm working on hiring more teachers and splitting it into contemporary and hip-hop-based classes, though."

"No ballet?"

She shook her head, distracting herself from his heavy gaze by taking a bite of salad. Ballet had been Nesta's first love, even more so than the ballroom dancing her grandmother had forced upon her, but she'd been bitter for a long time at how puberty and big boobs had taken away any chance she'd had to dance professionally. More than that, its ways were too rigid and painful, and Nesta would rather teach students how to let go rather than restrain themselves.

"That's crazy," he said, grinning. "I never imagined you doing anything than classical."

Right. He'd seen tapes of her old performances once a long time ago, though she was surprised he still remembered them.

"Nesta got the idea from dancing at that strip club a few years ago," Morrigan interjected with a wave of her fork.

Nesta's face flamed with heat at the misinformation, because even though there was nothing wrong with being a stripper, there were certain things you couldn't say to certain people without being judged for it. Like announcing that you wrote erotica in your free time, or that you were bisexual.

"It was just a regular club, and I was a go-go dancer," she corrected, as if that would lighten the blow. Rhysand made a noise that implied this was not much better than stripping.

"Holy shit, how much have I missed?" Cassian sat back in his chair in disbelief, not picking up on the light waves of discomfort that floated around the group whenever Nesta's past was brought up. Then again, he'd never found anything about her to be uncomfortable.

After Feyre and Rhysand had cut off all sources of her income, she’d been forced to find a real job. Dancing was the only thing she’d been good at doing, and she knew from the seedy bars she frequented that one of the nearby nightclubs was hiring. Thanks to her body and skills, she’d been able to indulge her alcohol problem off tips alone, at least until she’d made the decision to get her life together. That had been a year and a half ago.

But she couldn’t tell any of this to Cassian. She didn’t need to, either, because Amren answered his question for her. “Nesta's unrecognizable from when you last saw her, isn't she?" she drawled. "Don't worry; I promise her personality's still the same."

"Indeed," Rhysand grumbled, and a few others laughed.

Cassian still had that smile glued to his face, but it now looked frozen and false, as if he was no longer happy but didn’t know what to do about it.

But the conversation was out of his control now, due to the unfortunate fact that once attention landed on Nesta, it was usually difficult to make it go away. The next thing she knew, she was being bombarded with questions from all sides of the table.

"Were you late tonight because of that old Toyota again? I told you you could afford a new car if you took up my job offer."

"One of my friends took a class at your studio and said it wasn't too bad. You should give me a free membership so I can see for myself."

"What's your new address again?" This one from Feyre. "I need it for my Christmas cards."

Nesta blinked hard, head spinning at everyone's words being thrown at her, wondering how unacceptable it would be if she just—snapped. Wondering if maybe she could get herself uninvited from these things from good.

"I—" Mor started to lob another question.

“Let the woman fucking breathe, Jesus,” Cassian chuckled into his wine glass, cutting her off. But it was targeted at the whole room to hear, and the bitterness beneath it was clear.

The room went still. Awkwardness, sharp and cold as ice, swept over the dinner table until Nesta felt like her bones were frozen in place.

When no one responded, Cassian took a large gulp of wine and set the glass down with a dull thud. “I mean, if we want her to come around more often maybe we shouldn’t be giving her reasons to never visit,” he said, his voice too loud in the quiet room.

“We’re just catching up since we never get to see her,” Feyre said, sounding hurt and defensive at the same time.

Rhysand’s barely-audible growl implied he wanted to kill whoever had put that hurt in her tone—which in this case and most cases, was Nesta.

“That’s enough,” a delicate but firm voice beside Nesta said. She felt a soft hand rest on her arm, and looked up to find Elain’s sympathetic brown eyes watching her. But when Elain opened her mouth to speak again, all that came out was, “Eat more, will you? You’re so skinny it’ll make the rest of us look bad.”

Nesta had actually been gaining healthy weight lately, but for some unfathomable reason this was Elain’s attempt at diffusing the hostility in the room, so Nesta hummed a sound that technically counted as a response and busied herself with picking at her cut of roast beef.

Her lack of aggression seemed to satisfy the table, and one by one, people slowly went back to ignoring her and redirecting their focus to another topic of conversation.

Not even a minute later, Morrigan cackled far louder than required at something Azriel had said, causing Nesta's shoulders to inch up toward her ears. The hand that held her fork had fallen still, and Nesta’s other hand was fluttering subtly on the table, her index finger digging sharply into the thin skin around her thumbnail. The pain was a welcome balm to her agitated nerves.

She forced her hand to straighten out and lie still when she noticed Cassian's gaze on her. The action only sent her pent-up nerves straight to her spine, where she feared they would spontaneously combust and cause a meltdown in front of the whole table.

But then she met his eyes, and something in her heart choked, then settled.

She’d long forgotten the true hazel of his eyes. Hazel could be any color and every color, but looking at Cassian now, even from this distance in this weak lighting, her brain was starting to fill in the gaps of her memory. So many shades of brown and yellow speckled with blue-green colliding together, reminding her of undiscovered planets.

He was the first to pull his gaze away, but it was slow and required effort. Spell broken, Nesta’s own gaze dropped to her plate. At the very least, she no longer felt like ripping her fingernails off.

Nesta was left fairly alone for the rest of the meal, but the odd tension that had formed with Cassian and spread over the rest of the room didn’t dissipate. Even when everyone once again became lost to bantering and arguing with each other, Nesta felt the sense of awareness burning along every line of her body. She tried telling herself it was just in her head, but when she caught Amren sneaking a glance at her out of the corner of her eye, it was undeniable.

As more and more people finished their plates, they got up from the table to use the bathroom, talk on the phone, or wander into the adjacent drawing room to make use of its minibar. Among the noise, Nesta quietly excused herself and made a beeline for the emptiest part of the first floor of the house.

Alone in the kitchen, she finally allowed herself a deep intake of air. It felt like her first breath all night.

Shuffling toward the liquor cabinet, she pulled the first bottle of red wine she could find and grabbed herself a glass. Low footsteps behind her made her look over her shoulder before she could open the bottle.

It was just Cassian. Though the sight of him made her insides flutter, she didn't think he would judge her for drinking, so she turned back to her glass and uncorked the bottle.

"I needed some air," he spoke after a few moments of silence. Nesta nodded as she filled her glass perhaps a little too high. He took a few more steps toward the counter where she stood, and she belatedly realized that he was trying to engage in conversation with her.

Her brain scrambled for something to say, and just as she thought of asking him if he wanted some wine as well, Cassian was speaking again. "I'm sorry for everyone's behavior back there. It was super embarrassing."

Oh no, Nesta internally groaned. She'd almost rather put up with Feyre's lecturing and Amren's nitpicking than deal with an apology.

"They're not usually like this," he promised. "Someone must have spiked their drinks tonight."

Nesta didn't bother telling him that he was wrong. She didn't know how to react to such an unexpected statement. "There's nothing to apologize for," she said, sounding stilted and awkward. "I'm not really a sensitive person."

"Still," he said, looking up at her, "the vibes in this place are so weird tonight." He shuddered to himself. "Don't you feel weird?"

Was he referring to his friends, the sharp-edged way they spoke to her, or something else? "Maybe because it's your first time back in a long time." Nesta shrugged. "I'm used to it."

"Well, I'm not. In fact, I can think of a dozen other things I'd rather be doing right now than having dinner here."

Nesta glanced at him, her eyes widened in surprise. "Haven't you missed your friends, though? They're so excited to see you."

He shook his head. "This is honestly, like, our fifth meeting together since I got back. I see them all the time."

"Ah."

"What about you?" he pressed. "Do you want to stay or go?"

Nesta looked around the kitchen as if someone else might have walked in during their conversation and he was talking to them instead. "What do you mean?" she said.

He let out a small laugh. "Do you want to ditch this dinner?"

"But—wouldn't that be rude?"

He shrugged as if the consequences didn't matter much to him. "The door's right there." He gestured with his head toward the hallway leading to the foyer.

Nesta didn't know what overcame her. She chugged as much of her glass of wine as she could and set it down with a thump, looking at Cassian. Less than a minute later, they were speeding out the front door on quiet feet, stifling laughter and the jingle of car keys as they went.

***

"What about my car?" Nesta asked as Cassian started up his Ford truck, turning the heat up to full blast.

"We'll come back for it later tonight," he promised, shifting into drive and pulling away from the hulking mansion. "After everyone's gone, so you don't have to run into them."

"That'll take hours, though," she said, chewing the inside of her cheek. There was never such thing as a short dinner when Feyre's inner circle were gathered together.

"I've got hours to kill," he shrugged, then glanced over at her. "You can go home whenever you want, though. I can drop you off or take you back to your car."

Nesta took half a second to mourn her dream of cuddling in bed with her books all night, then got past it. This wasn't such a bad replacement for her former plans, anyhow.

"What should we do?" she asked, hesitant excitement bubbling in her stomach. Cassian opened his mouth to answer, but she cut him off. "Should we go to the movies? I wanted to see that new horror comedy—"

"I thought it wasn't out for another week."

"Oh." She sat back, trying to think of something else. "Is Nude still in theaters?"

Cassian chuckled. "Don't think so, Nes."

She ignored how the nickname made her feel. "What about Back to Black?"

"Director's a creep."

"The new Marvel movie?"

"Terrible reviews, and you hate mega-franchises."

True. "...Maybe we can just keep driving around?" she finally suggested.

Cassian surrendered with a cheery grin. "I love that idea." He glided into the right lane and made a turn that led them straight onto the highway. The truck hummed as it accelerated from 45 to 70.

In the dark lit only by the dashboard lights, Nesta kicked her heels off and stretched out in her seat, letting herself smile. She could hardly remember why she'd been struggling for air back at that dinner. This, driving at night with Cassian in silence, was one of the most relaxing feelings she'd ever experienced.

Even so, she was surprised to find she didn't mind it much when Cassian eventually interrupted the quiet.

“I really did miss you.” His words took her by surprise, and it must have showed in the look she threw him.

He chuckled lowly. “Is it that hard to believe?”

It was, actually, though Nesta didn’t tell him that. “I just don’t remember us being that close,” she said, shrugging. They’d rarely talked without Feyre or one of her friends in the room, and when they had talked alone, the conversations hadn’t been very deep. He’d tried to tease and challenge her in the beginning, as she was sure he did with every worthy person who came his way, but when Nesta was unresponsive to his efforts, he eventually dropped the asshole act.

“We weren’t,” Cassian agreed, “but sometimes your favorite people are the ones you see the least.”

That made Nesta’s breath hitch. He couldn’t mean it the way she thought he meant it. She couldn’t be his favorite.

"I had a huge crush on you when we first met, you know," he added.

Nesta’s shoulders deflated, in either relief or disappointment, she didn’t know. Of course; that was what he’d meant. She gave him a dry look in response. "Yeah, I sensed that."

He did a double-take from the road to her. "You did?"

It had been painfully obvious any time they were in the same room together, with the weight of Cassian's gaze feeling like hefting a barbell of anxiety and discomfort and embarrassment. She remembered how her skin would itch with how she blushed, how her throat would close up and her breathing would shallow out. It had felt like suffering from an allergic reaction.

Nesta didn't say any of that to Cassian now, though. "What made you stop liking me?" she asked instead, propping her elbow on the passenger-side window and leaning her head against her fist. She was genuinely curious to hear his answer. It had happened before she'd fallen too deep into her hole of depression and brought shame onto Feyre and the Archeron name, so it couldn't have been the fact that she'd been a hot mess. "Was I too rude? Too quiet? Too boring?" How had she let him down?

"What?" Cassian looked over at her like she'd gone insane. "No."

"Then what was it that made you stop liking me?" Because Cassian had stopped liking Nesta at a certain point. After a few awkward conversations and a failed attempt to spend time alone with her, Cassian had pulled away from Nesta as if he'd never known her in the first place. The heavy gazes lessened, then stopped altogether, and the conversation would rarely go past a friendly "hello" up until the day Cassian had left for the Peace Corps.

Cassian bit down on his lip, looking both amused and flustered by her scientific questioning. "I didn't stop liking you. I just stopped chasing you."

That information took Nesta by surprise. She was stunned, still figuring out what to say in response when Cassian continued, "I was too young and too stupid back then. I didn't know how to make decisions for myself, and I let other people convince me not to go after the things I wanted. I regretted it for a long time while I was away overseas, but eventually I just had to get over it, you know?"

Nesta blinked, staring out the windshield and saying nothing.

He'd wanted her. Even when she was drinking and fucking her way through every bar and club in the city, he'd wanted her, all the way up until the day he left—and even after that, if she was understanding him correctly.

"Anyway, what about you?" Cassian said, changing the topic. "You been seeing anyone lately?"

"Why? Are you asking for yourself?" She meant it to be taunting, but her natural deadpan tone made most things she said sound serious.

Cassian made a noise that sounded like a choked cough. "It was just a question."

She tried not to be disappointed at his response, even though it was no surprise that he was over her by now. Why would he be interested in reigniting something that had never sparked in the first place?

"No," she finally answered, her voice sounding small but not weak. "I haven't really been interested in meeting people lately, not even for casual hookups."

He threw a glance over at her, the surprise subtle but there. "Can I ask why?"

She shrugged, never having had to explain the answer to anyone else before. "I don’t like putting myself in situations where men want my body. I already feel like a blowup sex doll as it is, so it’s better to not date at all."

"Why would you feel like that?" Cassian said, the slightest hint of alarm and concern creeping into his tone. "Did somebody call you that?"

She shifted in her seat, feeling awkward at being put on the spot. "I don’t know, it’s just the way my body’s built. I’m always getting asked whether I do porn or have an OnlyFans. People always give me their unwanted opinions on my boobs or my hips or my butt."

"Who said that to you?" he demanded.

"I was a go-go dancer, remember?"

"That's not an answer." His voice was hard. "Or an excuse."

"I only told you because you asked why I don't date," she said sharply, suddenly cold. "I don't need your pity." And she was regretting opening up so much to him so soon.

Cassian opened his mouth to speak and she cut him off before he could decide to pity her anyway. "What would you do with the names of my harrassers, anyway? Find them and beat them up? Give them a real piece of your mind?" she mocked. "You can barely stand up to your own friends when they're being dickheads, tough guy."

Cassian made a choking sound, which soon devolved into wheezing, and when Nesta finally looked over at him she found that his shoulders were shaking with restrained laughter. Her brows scrunched up in confusion, her nerves getting whiplash from the sudden shift in mood.

"Holy shit, there she is," he barely got out between laughs of disbelief. "Where the hell was she all this time?"

"Who?" Her bafflement must have been written all over her face.

"The proud Nesta I first met so many years ago," he stated. "The one who'd rather choke to death on her own arrogance than give in to someone else."

Nesta felt like he'd just pointed to an obvious crumbling corpse that everyone else was trying hard to forget was in the room. That prideful Nesta was the opposite of the person she was trying to be these days, even though her ghost might have made an appearance when she'd been a little unnecessarily rude to Cassian just now.

She only shook her head, denying that old version of herself's right to exist. "I don't have the time or energy to be that person anymore. And I hate getting into fights. Losing all the time gets exhausting fast."

Instead of responding with something witty, Cassian drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel, his tongue poking into his cheek as he clearly thought something over. "The Nesta I knew never used to lose an argument," he finally said.

"A lot of things change once you lose all your financial and social capital," she murmured, almost too quiet for him to hear. It was the closest they'd gotten all night to touching upon that uncomfortable period of her life—Alcoholic Whore Gone Wild, as Amren had coined it. But she couldn't bear exposing that part of her past to Cassian, even though he'd already witnessed it with his own two eyes. She refused to say more, not wanting him to remember what a mess she'd been only a few years ago.

"Is it Rhys and the rest of the guys?" Cassian said, plowing right through the topic she was trying to avoid. "Did they outnumber you into changing so you'd fit into his PR campaigns or something?"

Cassian was scarily close to being on the nose of what had actually gone down, and it made Nesta flare her nostrils in defense. "I don't think we're close enough to be talking about things like this." She was back to being cold, even though it required more effort this time. "Change the subject."

"Fine," he said casually, though not even the dark could hide the subtle tightness of his jaw. "Let's go back to that sex-doll thing then. Did that start before or after I left?"

"Are you my therapist?" she felt the need to resist against him.

"Do you ever answer questions without another question?" he shot back. When Nesta still refused to budge, he released a sigh. "You just never seemed to me like someone who gave a shit about how others saw you. That was what made you Nesta. So yeah, sue me if I wanna know more about how your pretty little brain works."

Nesta swallowed his words like a rough pill, doing her best not to linger on the word "pretty". Now that he didn’t seem so uncomfortably shocked by her confession, she twisted toward him like she was telling a juicy story. Honestly, she felt a perverted excitement at getting to discuss parts of her life that she never got to speak about otherwise. "I used to not care that much about it," she started, "but one day while I was alone at home I saw my ass in skinny jeans in the mirror. I don’t know, it just flipped a switch in me. I felt so dirty. Like an object to be used instead of a person. And I realized that was how most people probably perceived me, too. It freaked me out so bad I just retreated from men and the dating pool altogether."

She felt dirty going out in certain clothes, and dirtier still when other people looked at her in those clothes. Even the dress she’d worn tonight, formfitting with the neckline cut out to accentuate her chest, had required her to avoid full-length mirrors while getting ready. She knew it wasn’t normal to feel the way she felt, but she also knew there wasn’t much to be done about it.

Cassian let out a low whistle. "That’s fucked."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"No." His answer was smooth. "But I think you'll get mad at everything else I want to say, so I'll leave it at that. It's really fucked you have to feel that way, Nesta."

Her swallow was tight, and she was more than a little surprised. Never in a million years could the Nesta of three years ago have imagined Cassian talking with her about things like this, and more than that, comforting her.

In truth, she had thought about Cassian too while he was gone. She wouldn’t say she’d missed him, because she didn’t know how to miss something she never had, but there’d been an empty longing on the rare occasions she thought of him. A bittersweet desire for what could have been, if only she’d been less of a mess and more of an easy person to be around.

She didn’t know how to tell him this, so she settled for, “For what it's worth, I really am happy that you're back.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cassian stifle a smile. He roughly cleared his throat and changed the subject. “You wanna go to Town Square and see the Christmas lights?”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay.”

Nesta tucked her feet beneath herself and got comfortable, and they continued driving in companionable silence. Twinkling holiday lights and towering decorations passed in a blur outside the windows, and at one point Cassian stopped at an In-N-Out to order fries and a milkshake. "You didn't eat much back at the house," was his only explanation as he handed the food over to Nesta.

She accepted the kindness without complaint, happily munching on fries and melting into her heated seat. Something about the warm truck made her forget time was moving, but the next time she pulled her gaze away from the windshield to check the clock, she saw it was already midnight.

Cassian seemed to take note of it at the same time she did. “Damn, I have an early morning tomorrow…” He trailed off, not stating the obvious—that their little getaway drive had to come to an end.

“Me too,” Nesta lied, so she didn’t sound stupid for wanting to stay like this, driving in silence.

She turned on her phone for the first time all night, finding no less than five missed calls and a handful of upset texts from her sisters. Holding back a grimace, she shut her phone off again. "Maybe you can drop me off at home instead of at Feyre’s."

"You sure?" Cassian looked over at her. "What about your car?"

She waved a hand. "I'll get it back later. I just want to be home right now."

Cassian didn’t hesitate before making a U-turn off the left lane. “You still live in Brentwood?” he asked casually.

Brentwood, with the roach-infested grimy one-bedroom she’d inhabited in the depths of her depression, back when it was all she could afford and all she could stomach to come home to after a long day of self-hatred.

Unlike most, Cassian had never judged her for it. He’d even shown up on her ratty doorstep one Christmas Eve to drop off gifts from her sisters, saying nothing but that he hoped she would be okay, and to have a merry Christmas. There was no direct mention of her obvious miserable state, but no tense avoidance of it, either. It had been the most ordinary interaction Nesta’d had that year: short, sweet, and simple.

Nesta blinked herself out of the sudden memory. Being reunited with Cassian was bringing back too many moments she’d forgotten had happened. She shook her head, even though he probably couldn’t see. “I moved to Goldridge.”

“Ooh, fancy,” he teased. He pulled out his phone and held it out to her. “Put your address into the GPS.”

Clicking on his phone, Nesta found notifications for several missed calls and texts on his screen as well. They were at least double the amount she had, but she didn’t let her eyes linger on the messages as she swiped up onto the home screen. Of course he didn’t have a password on his phone. He could be so dumb sometimes.

Typing her address into his Maps app, she turned the navigation on and set his phone down in the cupholder between them.

Cassian glanced over to it and squinted to read her address while he drove. "That's only twenty minutes away from where I live."

"Really?" Nesta perked up, intrigued. In the past, Cassian had always been an hour or so away, considering the heavy traffic between Velars and it's poorer outskirt cities. Now he was basically her neighbor. "But isn’t it far from your friends and family?”

She'd purposely chosen her current home for the distance it placed between her and said friends and family.

Cassian shrugged as he merged onto the highway. “Not too far, but not too close, either.”

The rest of the drive passed with light conversation between them. Addicted to how the low rumble of his voice paired with the darkness of the night roads made her feel fuzzy and sleepy, Nesta let Cassian ramble to her about his time in Tunisia while she leaned back in her seat, her eyes millimeters away from drooping shut.

Sometime later, Cassian pulled up to the curb of her brownstone townhouse and put the truck into park. He let out a low whistle as he inspected the tall windows and the quality brickwork, then looked back at Nesta, who was still blinking the sleep out of her eyes, with an embarrassed grin. “I’m a fool. I completely forgot to ask how you ended up with your dance studio.”

Nesta opened her mouth to tell him about her business, but Cassian shook his head fast. “Don’t tell me now. I want to hear the whole story, sometime when the night isn’t right about to end.”

Sometime other than now…? “What do you mean?” she voiced.

He met her gaze with serious intention, no amusement or nervousness to be found. “I’d like to see you again, Nesta Archeron.”

The words hung between them like the start of a promise.

Despite the sudden warmth flooding her insides, Nesta was hesitant with her answer. She still didn't completely trust Cassian—nor herself when she was around him. She didn't want to spiral into obsession over him just for him to break her heart. She still needed to test the rock face of this thing between them, checking for cracks and loose areas that could give way. “I’ll think about it," she finally said.

Cassian's lips slowly curled up into a clever smile, looking like he'd just won a prize. "Give me your keys." He held his broad hand out.

Nesta frowned. "What for?"

"I'll bring your car over in the morning. It'll be a quick drop-off."

"You really don't need to..." She trailed off as Cassian reached over and stuck his hand in her tiny purse, quickly finding and pulling out the shiny keys. He jingled them in her face. "Thanks for these," he said, as if she were the one doing him a favor.

She opened her mouth, closed it, then nodded. She'd given up on trying to keep pace with their conversations, especially not when he rendered her speechless so often. "I should get inside now," she said.

"Don't freeze on the way to the door," he said, even though it couldn't have been more than a ten second walk. Again, was he teasing or being genuine? Or somehow both at the same time?

"Get home safe," she responded, because that was the only phrase her encyclopedia for social etiquette held right now. She exited the car and reached inside again to grab her purse. She might have left it behind so she'd have an excuse to linger in the pinecone-scented warmth of his truck for a bit longer. Eventually, she had to force her head out of the front seat, away from Cassian's kind smile and gorgeous eyes. "Goodnight, Cassian." Nesta shut the door between them, eager to end their interaction quickly so she could go inside and spend the whole night thinking about him.

Even with the door shut and the windows too dark to make out Cassian's face, Nesta swore she could feel it in her bones when he murmured back, "Goodnight, Nesta."

***

a/n: the gifts were not from her sisters…but that’s a story for later (never)

tags:

@rarephloxes @moodymelanist @arinbelle @sayosdreams @bridgertononmymind @live-the-fangirl-life @a-court-of-valkyries @secretlovelybeauty @humanexile @helion-ism @my-fan-side @royaltykxx @xoblivisci @planet-faerie @katekatpattywack @imagine-me @meridainthedisneyland @jungtaekwoonie-is-life @rainbowcheetah512 @valkyriewarriors @loosingdreams @chosenfamily-valkyriequeens @perseusannabeth @that-golden-lyre @swankii-art-teacher @laylaameer01 @awesomelena555 @claralady @ghostlyrose2 @thewayshedreamed @drielecarla @superspiritfestival @aliveahaahahafuck @thebluemartini @nessiantho @missing-merlin @duskandstarlight @lucy617 @sleeping-and-books @cassianscool @wannawriteyouabook @everything-that-i-love @sv0430 @xstarlightsupremex @faeriebambula

[bestiesenpai]

Dirty Little Secret - Toji Fushiguro

I love a good meanie :) this was inspired by a thrilling convo i had femme reader lads, everyone 18+ 12.3K words

content warnings are as followed: dubcon, blackmail, age gap, manipulation, noncon somnophilia, pseudo-incest, cheating, infantilization(?), mention of guns, drinking, choking, burning(w/ a cigarette? Idk how to explain), a lot of different pet names lol and Toji calls himself daddy

It all started with the messy, bitter divorce your parents went through, leaving your mother a struggling woman all on her own. You tried to help with bills, tried to tack on a few side gigs here and there and get a couple part time jobs but it just wasn’t enough.

Until she met Toji and all the worries you two had about money just suddenly melted away. He wasn’t outlandishly rich but somehow he made enough money that both you and your mother could quit all the jobs you’d had to take on.

Your mother was ecstatic, positively thrilled about the newfound freedom she has. She’s able to afford luxuries she’d never been able to before and there was no need to worry about pinching pennies and scrounging for every last meal. You could live comfortably, but there was something about Toji that rubbed you the wrong way.

There wasn’t one singular thing that drove you to disliking him, it was all just a culmination of things. His cocky attitude, the way he acted like he owned the whole house the first time he visited, how he seemed to be eyeing you up in a way far less acceptable for a man that was meeting his new step-daughter. As soon as his eyes landed on you, it was like your mother no longer existed.

They got married faster than you could blink, a rushed ceremony done at city hall with a few random witnesses watching her take the surname Fushiguro. Your mother was beyond happy, and while you were happy to see an easy smile on her face again, the knowledge that Toji would be living with you now hung like a dark cloud in the back of your head.

“Careful there doll, wouldn’t want you to break a nail.” Toji teased as he saw you pick up a moving box that was left in the living room. He was moving his and his sons belongings into the house and you’d been tasked with helping.

“Shut up.” Glaring at him, you grabbed the box in a huff and stormed up the stairs, stomping your way into the room that was your step-brothers, Megumis. You’d only met him once at a formal dinner and he seemed nice enough. Far different than his father but strikingly similar in appearance. He was away at university in another city, only visiting every other weekend if he felt like it.

Lingering in the empty room longer than you should, you tried to steer clear of Toji. The physical labour of moving boxes had made him sweaty, a nice sheen building up on his forehead and arms that highlighted the taut muscles underneath the skin and underneath the tight black t-shirt he was always wearing.

“Why don’t you go sit pretty on the couch, hm? A little girl like you shouldn’t be trying to lift such heavy things.” Catching you coming down the stairs, Toji was sporting his usual signature smirk whenever he saw you.

“There’s still a lot of stuff to bring in and I don’t want this to take all day.” Standing at the top of the stairs, you wavered. He wasn’t making any move to get out of your way or to come up the stairs and the two of you were stuck in a staring match.

“But you’re just so delicate, are you sure you can keep up?” Toji finally started moving up the stairs, a large box in his hand that looked to be no trouble for him.

“I’ll be fine!” You snapped at him, backing up and out of the way to let him pass you.

“You sure about that?” Stopping right in front of you, Toji held the box out of the way so he could lean close to your face, almost brushing his hair against your forehead.

“I’m sure!” Face erupting in a hot flush, you scramble away from him and down the stairs. You can hear the dark chuckle leaving his throat and the incident has your hands shaking as you go to the moving van.

Starkly avoiding eye contact with him for the rest of the day, you take the pizza your mother ordered for the family straight to your room and don’t come out for a good while. She knocks on your door not once throughout the night, too busy giggling stupidly in the living room with Toji.

“Good morning baby girl.” Toji croons when he sees you appear in the kitchen in the morning, a hot cup of coffee in his hands as he leans against the kitchen counter. Your ears burn at the nickname, but you ignore him and go straight to the refrigerator.

“Hey!” Shuffling back when he slams the fridge closed in your face, another shout is caught in your throat as he looms over you, large calloused hand keeping the door closed.

“You just gonna be rude and not say good morning to your new daddy?” The smell of coffee and cigarettes hangs on his breath, fanning over your face. He’s cornering you against the refrigerator, using his looming stature to force you against the door entirely.

“Go away.” You whisper, but you want to shout, push him away and stand up for yourself. But something in Toji’s stare and the way he carries himself has you withering.

“I don’t even get a good morning kiss?”

“Huh?” Your eyes go wide when he grabs your jaw, tilting your face up and holding it there so he can lean in and graze his lips against yours. Slapping your hands on his chest, you struggle to keep him at bay.

“Toji, have you seen my car keys?” Your mothers shout from the other room rips away the quiet, tense moment between you two. Toji takes a few smooth steps back, shuffling back into his place against the countertop right as she comes into the room.

“Yeah, right there.” Flicking his chin to the kitchen table, there lies her keys.

“Thanks.” Grabbing them, she takes a glance at you and then a double take, furrowing her brows and pointing vaguely at you. “Sweetie, what’s wrong? Why are you making that face?”

“I-” A tiny flicker of your eyes to Toji has your face burning all over again and any words are lost on you. “I feel a bit sick.” Ducking your head down, you rush out of the kitchen, the passing cry of ‘go lay back down then’ from your mother going ignored as you slam the door to your room and lock it.

Toji leaves sometime after your mother does and for a while you’re home alone. Finally able to eat in peace, there’s a few things you’ve been wanting to do ever since you met Toji, one of them being snooping through his things.

He was secretive with so many things, it was only right that you get a little intel on him. You barely knew what he did for work, the only thing he said he did was ‘freelancing’ and that was it.

Walking through the open bedroom door, you steered clear of the things you knew were your mothers. The old dresser she had and her section of the closet was still exactly the same as before Toji came into her life.

But now there was a new chest of drawers tucked away in the corner of the room, rich dark wood that contrasted with the light color palette of the rest of the room. There was also a safe tucked under the bed and one in the closet as well, you’d seen Toji bring those in himself.

Opening the top drawer, it was no shock to find folded piles of socks and underwear, a few black tank tops. The second had more shirts, the third was the baggy pants Toji mainly lived in and the fourth had more fitted bottoms.

But sticking out from between a few folded pairs of slacks was a thick file folder with your families last name on it. It was in pristine condition and once you opened it, you saw that so were the things inside it.

Detailed records of your bank history, notes that had everything about you on them; your favorite food, color, your typical daily schedule, who you hung out with and all their personal information, the places you frequented and all the jobs you’d held in your life.

“This fucking stalker.” Reading over notes clearly written in Toji’s handwriting, the contents of the folder made your stomach churn. Shoving it back between the pants, you stood up properly and turned to the closet.

The safe in here was buried under a stack of folded clothes waiting to be hung up. Toji’s side of the closet was relatively bare, with the only thing hanging up being the lonely suit he owned that he wore to get married in.

Punching in all the possible number combinations you could think of - all the phone numbers you knew by heart, your home address and every birthday - you came up empty. There was no way to open the safe in the closet, and you had to abandon it.

The safe beneath the bed was heavy, nearly breaking your back as you tried to drag it out into the open. It was a thin black metal box with a long rectangular shape and the same number pad as in the closet. Only this time, when you punched in the last four digits of your phone number, it opened with a click.

What you saw inside wasn’t what you were expecting. Sure, Toji was a mysterious guy with secretive habits and a job you knew nothing about. You had barely information on him, yet you still weren’t prepared to see all the guns he had stored inside the safe.

There were long shotguns, handguns, revolvers and plenty of ammo and holsters. Even with the slight wear and tear on some of the barrels, you could tell Toji took good care of them as nearly all of them were freshly polished.

“Just couldn’t help yourself, could you?” Just as you reached out and skimmed a finger across one of the handguns laying innocently in the pile, Toji’s flat monotone voice sounded behind you.

Ripping your hand away, your head whipped over your shoulder to stare at him in terrified shock. He shouldn’t be home, you hadn’t heard him come in or the front door open and close. Frozen on the ground, you struggled to find the air to breathe.

“Such a nosy little thing.” Toji commented, his eyes drifting to the open closet door and the dresser drawer that you’d left ajar. “If you were curious about daddy, you could have just asked.”

“Why do you have these things?” What were you referring to? The guns? Records of your every move, down to how long your phone conversations were late at night?

“They’re for work.” Pushing away from the doorframe, Toji sauntered into the room, dragging his feet lazily.

“But-”

“That’s all you need to know.” He cut you off with a stern look, kicking closed the safe.

“Why...why do you have all those papers about me?” Came your next question. Looking up at Toji, you were suddenly aware of how you were presented to him. Sitting on your knees, hands balled up into fists in your lap, looking up at him with wide scared eyes - and he noticed it too.

“You’re my little girl, why shouldn’t I know everything?” Biting his lip as he looked down at you, Toji had to stop himself from grabbing your hair and shoving your face into his clothed cock. Instead he flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulders and used his foot to push the safe under the bed. Scrambling to your feet, you watched as the safe disappeared.

“What’s in the safe in the closet?” You were standing far too close to Toji for your liking, he was within less than an arm's reach of you and you could smell the dark woody aroma he liked to put on.

“Important shit. ‘Gumi’s birth certificate, passports, the usual.” Shrugging casually, Toji walked over to the dresser and kicked it closed as well. “Got some stuff for your mom and you in there too.”

Letting a lull fall into the conversation, you scurried from the bedroom when Toji went to close the closet door. You could hear him chuckle and mutter something under his breath upon discovering your absence, but he closed the bedroom door shortly after and you could hear him go down the stairs.

Hours later and your mother informed you she wouldn’t be home for dinner. Something about meeting up with friends for an unexpected late night outing and staying out past dark.

Left to your own devices, you tried to avoid being detected by Toji as you milled around in the kitchen and fed yourself.

“Sweetheart, that you?”

Keyword being tried.

Biting back a harsh sigh, you emerged from the relative darkness of the kitchen and into the living room where Toji was lounging on the couch with no shirt on, all his muscles and scars on full display.

“There’s my baby girl.” Toji broke into a smile.

“Yup, I’m here.” Rolling your eyes so you could force yourself to stop ogling his body, you turned halfway back to the kitchen.

“Woah woah come back!”

“What do you want?” Not keeping this sigh at bay, you quirked a brow at him.

“Ya know your mothers not here and I’m getting awfully lonely sitting in this house by myself. Why don’t you sit with me?”

“No thanks.”

“That’s too bad, sweetheart, ‘cause I wasn’t asking.” You can feel his hand wrapping around your upper arm before you even hear him getting up from the couch.

“L-let go!” Thrashing in his hold does no good, you’re thrown onto the couch like a doll in no time and Toji sinks in next to you, spreading his legs wide and throwing an arm over the back of the couch.

“Your mother wants us to spend more time together, get better acquainted and whatnot.” Grabbing the beer he had on the coffee table, Toji drinks until it’s empty and he crushes it in his hand. “And what better time than now?”

Huffing and puffing, you adjust yourself on the couch and try to focus on whatever Toji has playing on the TV screen. It’s some cheesy action movie made way before you were born, and while it makes you groan at the cliche plot points, Toji is having a grand old time.

“You want a beer?” Toji asks, picking up a can and cracking it open.

“No.” Shaking your head, the last thing you’d want is to possibly get drunk and lose your senses around him.

“Oh, oops.” Upon hearing your no, Toji not so subtly tipped the can over and let it fall into your lap, the beer inside spilling out onto your clothes.

“Toji! What the-” Leaping up and tossing the can onto the coffee table, you could feel the cold liquid seep into the fabric of your pants and underwear, even stretching to the back of your pants.

“That’s too bad, my mistake! Better go get changed.” Toji laughed, completely unashamed of what he’d done. Flipping him off, you stormed away. “Put your pajamas on, it’s getting late!”

“Fuck you!” Angrily walking to your room, you ripped off the wet clothes clinging to you. You were tempted to stay in your room the rest of the night, but there was no doubt that Toji would come up and drag you back down to the living room.

“Aw, don’t you look cute.” He teased when you came back down in an oversized shirt and sleeping shorts. He had procured a blanket from behind the couch and it lay on the arm.

“Ugh, it’s still wet.” Even though he’d grabbed a blanket, he hadn’t grabbed a towel to sop up the beer in the couch cushions.

“It’s okay, you can sit right here.” Grabbing your wrist, Toji yanked you onto his lap, wrapping an arm around your waist as you fell into him. Throwing the blanket over you, Toji forced you to lay against his bare chest.

“Let me go sit in the other chair.” There was a perfectly good arm chair a few feet from the couch you could sit on.

“Now how could we bond if you’re so far away?” He chuckled, hiking you back up as you tried to slide off him. Biting your tongue against any further useless arguments, you tried to get comfortable in Tojis lap.

“Be careful now, baby, all that squirming might get me excited.” Toji whispered in your ear, gripping the flesh of your waist tightly underneath his fingers. Chuckling again at how your body went completely stiff, he settled back into the couch and watched the movie.

Begrudgingly focusing on it as well, it was almost inevitable that you relaxed into laying on Toji, the smooth up and down of his chest expanding with every breath lulling you into a sense of comfort.

“This movie’s stupid.” You grumbled as a commercial hit. Your arms were crossed tightly, having gotten riled up at one particular scene for how predictable it was.

“S’not stupid, it’s a classic.” Toji replied.

“Still stupid.” Shaking your head slightly, you let out a soft yawn.

“Aw, is it getting close to your bedtime?”

“Shut up.” It wasn’t that it was particularly late, but sitting in the low light of the living room, under a cozy blanket with a warm body underneath you holding you tightly, it was more relaxing than you thought. Coupled with the quietness of the TV and the slow even breaths Toji took right by your ear, who wouldn’t get a little sleepy?

“Poor baby’s tired.” You could just feel the mocking pout on Toji’s lips. Shifting his hands and grabbing onto your thigh, he turned you to sit sideways in his lap, legs across him and your head securely tucked under his chin.

“Not tired.” Trying to reason with him was impossible, and you gave up once the movie came back on. With a secure arm wrapped around your back and his other hand resting snugly on your outer thigh, Toji had you right where he wanted you.

“Still awake?” Toji asked ten minutes later and he already knew the answer. Your breathing had gotten quiet and you’d fallen slack in his arms, and when he rubbed your back you let out a soft, sleepy hum and snuggled deeper into him.

Careful not to wake you, Toji dipped his hands to the hem of your shirt and tugged it up so he could get under it. Trailing his calloused fingertips up your back, he felt the bumps and ridges of your spinal cord as he went. Pushing under your arm, he got to where he wanted: the soft flesh of your breast.

Cupping it in his palm, Toji bit his lip to hold back a soft groan. He’d wanted to do this since the day he started dating your mother and learned about you. From the very first picture of you she’d shown him he was hooked and every subsequent move he made after was calculated to get right to this very moment.

A soft uptick in your breathing let him know that you could feel what he was doing, but you did nothing else as he pinched your nipple and rolled it between his fingers.

Pushing you to lay back a little, Toji crept his other hand up your thigh. Your legs were simple dead weight to him and with a few nudges he was able to get his hand down your shorts and cup your sex.

“Be a good girl and get nice and wet.” Mumbling to himself he pushed his middle finger through your folds, coming to your clit and grinning wildly. Rubbing it with practiced precision, Toji kept his ears trained on the sound of your breathing and he was prepared to keep going even if you woke up.

Pressing a few kisses to the top of your head, he cooed at the delicate sigh you let out. You were getting aroused, Tojis finger was starting to get slicked up and glide easier against you.

Pushing his index finger against your clit, he worked you up even further. The movie was forgotten on the television, all of Tojis focus going to you and the way your brows scrunched up at the feeling of someone else’s fingers against your cunt.

You weren’t wet enough for Toji to push a finger inside, but he was fine with waiting for another time. Just playing with your clit and pinching your nipple was enough for him for now.

Pressing his nose against the top of your head, Toji let out a shuddering breath when you came in your sleep. A few desperate whimpers fell from your lips, and your face screwed up a little, your body clenching as pleasure rolled through your sleeping form.

Taking his hand slowly out of your shirt, Toji laid it back on your thigh and tried to collect his own breathing. Getting you to cum in your sleep on his lap had riled him up more than he expected, the thrill of making you come undone without your knowledge going straight to his head.

It wasn’t long after that your mother came home, gasping at the sight of your sleeping body in Toji’s lap and delighted that you were finally getting more comfortable with him. Not wanting to wake you, she snapped a few pictures for posterity and had Toji carry you to your room.

“You want me to what?” Staring at your mother like she’d grown another head, you couldn’t hide the disdain at what she had just proposed of you in the late morning.

“I want you to spend the day with Toji! He’s going into town to do some shopping and I think it’d be a great way for you two to get closer.”

“I don’t want to get closer to him.” The memory of last night made your cheeks burn. You were far more embarrassed about falling asleep in his lap than you’d ever be willing to admit.

“C’mon (Y/N), I saw you two together on the couch last night! It was so cute, I want you to have more moments like that with him.” Your mother gave you a pout, one just begging to humor her request. The desire to say no was right on the tip of your tongue.

“Fine, I’ll go with him.”

“Yay!” Clapping her hands together lightly, your mother turned away and started to gather a few things to start her own day.

“Let’s be quick, okay?” Ten minutes later and you were sitting in the front seat of Toji’s vintage camaro.

“I think we should take it nice and slow today.” Toji replied, firing up the engine and drowning out your thoughts with the loud roar. It was hard to look at him, so you kept your gaze trained to the passing scenery outside.

“Did you sleep well last night, baby?” He asked as the car came to a stop at a light. Toji was staring right at you, a wide smirk on his face. Pressing your lips together, you refused to look back at him. You might have slept well, but waking up with slick coating your inner thighs ruined the entire experience, whether good or bad at all.

“Why do you care?”

“Ha! Why do I care?” His sharp laugh made you jolt, turning to glare at him as the car started moving again. “You must have slept well, you were knocked out on my lap.”

“Won’t happen again.” You grumbled, watching his hand fiddle with the radio and turn it to a random station.

“That’s what you think.” Giving your thigh a quick pat, Toji settled into his seat. Driving to the shopping district he had in mind, as soon as you stepped out of the car Toji was by your side with a hand on your back. “I’ve got some business to take care of first, let’s go.”

“Don’t touch me.” Shoving his hand away, it was right back where it was in seconds. A low wave of annoyance washed over you, but you started walking in the direction Toji was taking you. The annoyed feeling only grew as you passed people by on the street and women openly stared at him, not giving a care in the world about the gold band on his finger or the fact that you were next to him.

And he didn’t seem to care either. You could see the way he would look back at some of the women, sending them easy smiles or holding eye contact longer than normal. Walking into a jewelry shop, you were finally away from their prying eyes, but the hand Toji had on your back only got firmer.

“Want me to buy you a little something?” Toji whispered, leaning close to your ear.

“Like what?” You challenged, looking across the shop floor. There were countless expensive jewels just lying in wait behind thick glass cases.

“Whatever you want, baby girl. Just point and I’ll get it once I’m done.”

“Done with what?” Looking at him incredulously, you saw him nod to someone waiting against a back wall.

“Business.” Patting your back, Toji went to talk to them, slipping into a back room and leaving you alone on the shop floor. Trying not to stand out, you found an open chair and pulled out your phone, already bored.

“Finally.” You said upon seeing Toji appear in front of you after nearly thirty minutes.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, I was doing some negotiations.” Inspecting him further, you could see he was breathing a little heavier and there was just the slightest sheen of sweat above his brow.

“What, did you kill someone back there or something?”

“Almost.” He replied with a shrug. You’d meant it as a joke, but with the way Toji wasn’t smiling you couldn’t tell if he did too. Letting his eyes roam over the shop, he flicked his chin out. “Find something you like?”

“No.” Taking a step toward the door, you were tugged back by your sleeve.

“I bet you didn’t even look.” Toji chuckled, dragging you over to a case. “How about a little tennis bracelet, hm? We could add a little charm, how about a T?”

“I don’t want it, I won’t wear it.”

“Ah, sure you will.” Brushing you off, he waved over a sales associate. “Now, tell the nice worker what color you want, gold or silver.”

Walking out of the store with a pretty little bag in hand, you followed Toji to the next few stores he had to go into for ‘business’. Sometimes he was quick and you didn’t have to wait even a few minutes for someone to hand him a thick envelope that he tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket. Others, he’d slip into the backroom and you’d have to awkwardly wait around.

“Are we actually going to do some proper shopping today, or is this it?” You snapped after being dragged around for a good while. You hadn’t even wanted to come, but now you just felt like a kid being dragged around against their will.

“Relax baby, daddy’s done, he’ll pay attention to you now.” Toji teased, pinching your cheek and cooing at you.

“Whatever, lets go.” Swatting him away, you stormed off in a random direction, Toji’s laughter burning in your ears. It was your turn now to drag him from store to store, some you weren’t even interested in. Following you dutifully, Toji bought whatever you wanted regardless of price tag.

“Let’s go in here.” Toji stopped you right in front of a popular lingerie store. There were large adverts in the windows of scantily clad women dripping in lace and frilly garments, and there were a large number of people inside as well.

“You can’t be serious.” You blanched, watching in slight horror as he toed his way over to the front door.

“Cmon baby, you deserve something nice.” He said loud enough to have a few passersby giggle. Seeing your face turn from one of shock to embarrassment, Toji knew he had won. Following him into the store with your head down, you tried not to look at all the bras and panties displayed so prominently.

Taking a seat at one of the chairs near the front of the store, Toji kept his eye on you as you walked around. Seeing your fingers glide across silk and lace, pass mannequins in intricate pieces of lingerie, he couldn’t help but imagine you in some of them. He’d only gotten a taste of what you had to offer last night, and he already hungered for more.

“I think you’d look great in that.” He came up behind you as you looked at a bra and panty set, little red and white love hearts adorning lacy pink.

“Pervert.” Glaring over your shoulder, you tried to conceal that you’d grabbed a pair for yourself. “Go sit back down.”

“I get it, you wanna keep it a secret and surprise me.” Fishing out his wallet, Toji handed you the credit card he’d been using the whole day. “Take your time baby, I’m going to have a smoke.”

Making sure he left the store, you let out a sigh of relief at finally being alone in a place like this. It was bad enough he suggested it, but to have him watch you pick out underwear was downright mortifying.

Grabbing whatever you liked, you walked out with a sizable bag in your hand and a pretty long receipt. Toji was nowhere to be found outside the store, and as you scanned past the people milling about, he wasn’t on the street either.

You had his number, feasibly you could call or text him to find out where he was. But with a limitless credit card in your hand and newfound freedom, that was the last thing on your mind. He would find you eventually, say something snarky and tease you and then you’d be on your way to grab lunch.

“Excuse me, miss!” For a moment, you thought the gentle voice calling out to you as you walked down the street was Toji. But as you turn around and are confronted with a stranger, you’re reminded that Toji would never be so polite.

“Yes?” He was an average looking man, around Toji’s age.

“I couldn’t help but notice you walking around, you look so beautiful.” The man had a hopeful smile on his face, taking in your reaction to the sudden compliment.

“Oh, thank you.” Giving him a once over, you quickly spotted the silver wedding band on his finger.

“What’s your name? I’d love to take you out sometime.” Shuffling a tiny bit closer, the man was already pulling out his phone before he even finished the sentence.

“I’m s-”

“She’s not interested.” A heavy hand landed on your shoulder, yanking you back into a firm chest. There wasn’t a need to look up and see who it was, the distinct cologne wafting into your nose and the rough treatment was enough.

“Huh?” Bunching his brows together, the man looked confused between you and Toji.

“Huh?” Toji mocked, leaning towards him with a raised brow.

“I think she can speak for herself.”

“My baby doesn’t talk to insignificant flies like you.” Staring him down for a moment, Toji got him to turn tail and leave in a huff.

“I could have handled that myself.”

“Yeah, well I handled it better.” Turning you around, Toji smirks down his nose at you for a moment.

“What?” His look is unnerving, it makes your heart flutter a bit and that’s the last feeling you want to have for him.

“I deserve a reward, don’t you think?”

“A reward for what?” Scrunching up your nose, you recoil a little as Toji bends at the waist and presents his cheek to you.

“For coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress.” Tapping his cheek with one finger, he looks at you from the corner of his eye. “Don’t leave your daddy hanging, now.”

Looking him over, you weighed your options. It was only a kiss, an innocent little peck on the cheek. Where was the harm in that?

The harm came when, as you were leaning forward with your lips slightly pursed, Toji turned his head and kissed you square on the lips.

Jerking back in shock, you didn’t get far as Toji grabbed your chin to keep you in place. His lips were rough, dry and cracked and the scar on the edge of his mouth wasn’t helping in that regard.

Brushing his nose against yours, Toji didn’t keep the kiss going for long; even he had boundaries for being in public. Pulling away, he swiped your bottom lip with his thumb, grinning at your flushed face and slightly labored breathing.

“Daddy got you flustered?” He teased, taking the shopping bags out of your hand and holding them himself.

“No.” You reply a few seconds too late, your lip’s in a pout and your voice has a slight whine. Biting his lip, Toji scanned your face.

“God, the things you do to me.” Roughly grabbing your hand, he tugged you along down the street. “Let’s get some lunch, I’m fucking starved.”

“You’re back!” Your mother exclaimed upon your arrival, leaping up from the couch to hug both of you. She quickly hurried out of the way upon seeing all the bags Toji insisted on carrying in by himself, her jaw dropping in shock.

“Don’t gimme that look, babe, you know I had to spoil the little princess.” Toji laughed at her expression, dropping some of the bags into your hands and kissing your mother on the cheek.

“I-I’m just shocked...we never come back with that many bags when we go shopping.” Her voice was quiet as she looked between the two of you.

“You gettin’ jealous on me now?” Toji teased, poking her in the side and making her jump. “I was just following your orders, forming a closer bond with my new step-daughter.” Pointedly shielding the lingerie bag from her view, Toji passed it into your hands. “Maybe she’ll show you some of the outfits she bought, we even picked some out together.”

If by ‘together’ he meant he shoved a slew of tiny skirts and low cut tops into your hands in the dressing room and then bought them when you rejected all of them anyway, then yes, you could say you two picked some out together.

“Uh- yeah mom, I’ll show you some of the stuff later.” You nodded along, eager to escape the situation and hide in your room. Not waiting another moment after the words left your lips, you ran up the stairs and to your room.

Pouring out all the things Toji bought you, you couldn’t say you didn’t enjoy going out shopping with him. There was no limit to what you wanted, anything your eyes touched was yours in an instant.

“Knock knock.” Pushing open your door and swiftly closing it behind him, Toji held up the remaining bags. “You forgot some.”

“Thanks.” Reaching out to grab them, you didn’t get the chance as Toji set them down and stepped around you, grabbing the little bag from the first store you went to. Fishing out the velvet box, Toji opened it and dangled the dainty tennis bracelet from his finger.

“Put this on for me, will you? Wanna make sure it’s a good fit.” Dropping the bracelet into your hands, Toji chuckled when you struggled to get it on. “Need my help?”

“No I’m fine.” You said, pinching the clasp between your fingers desperately.

“Let daddy help you.” Grabbing your wrist and pulling you closer, Toji swatted your fingers away.

“Your fingers are too thick, how’re you ever-”

“Got it.” Releasing the bracelet, Toji watched triumphantly as it hung from your wrist. You barely mumbled a thanks before he was grabbing your wrist again, nearly pulling you chest to chest with him. “Now, what was that about my fingers?”

“N-nothing!” Slapping your free hand on his chest, your face burned terribly and only got worse as he laughed.

“No, no, go ahead and say it. My fingers are too thick, huh?” Grabbing your jaw, Toji slid his index and middle finger across your face until they came to rest on your lips. “Say ‘ah’.” Pressing your lips together firmly, you shook your head as best you could.

But Toji wasn’t one to take no for an answer and shoved past your lips, forcing your mouth open with his other hand and flattening your tongue. Clutching onto his wrist tightly, you looked up at him with watering eyes as his fingers slid too far back and choked you.

Growling at the sight of his fingers stuffed into your mouth, Toji dropped his other hand, grabbing your ass tightly in his hand and rocking your hips against him. Looming over you, Toji ripped his fingers from your mouth and slammed his lips onto you.

The kisses you shared before were nothing compared to this one. With a hand gripping the back of your head, Toji made sure not even a centimeter of space passed between you two. His lips molded to yours perfectly, mouths slotting together as he pushed his tongue in and claimed your mouth for himself.

Drool began to drip down the corners of your lips, sliding down your neck and chest and creating a glossy mess. It was getting harder to breathe the longer you went, your body quickly growing weak from lack of oxygen.

Gasping for air when Toji finally broke the kiss, your mind was spinning, barely able to focus on the fact that you were kissing your mothers husband and certainly not paying attention to the way Toji pushed you back onto your bed, body bouncing roughly on the mattress.

“God, I’ve been waiting for this moment.” Toji says with a sigh, climbing over your body and pressing his lips against the curve of your jaw. His hands pawed at your clothes, bunching up your shirt as he tried to get to your breasts.

“T-toji! Stop!” Letting out a scandalized gasp, your eyes flew to your bedroom door. Surely your mother would hear and come to save you.

“No need to be nervous, baby-” yanking down your bra, Toji palmed your breasts roughly, “daddy’ll make you feel good.” Sitting up just enough to yank your shirt and bra off, Toji held your arms down and stared lovingly at your chest, his cock twitching to life the longer he looked.

An argument had bubbled up from your chest, ready to spew out and knock some sense into Toji, but as he descended onto you, taking one of your nipples into his mouth and rolling it between his teeth, the words died just as quickly as they formed.

What was the use of telling Toji to stop when you knew he wouldn’t? There wasn’t a shred of doubt in your mind that if you yelled at him, told him it was wrong to cheat on your mother and fuck his step-daughter, he wouldn’t laugh straight in your face.

Fire back and ask why you think he cares about that? You’ve already seen the file he has on you and the lack of information he had on your mother. He’d already proven himself to be more than enamored with you and what kind of man would he be if he let something like ‘morality’ get in the way of what he wanted?

Moaning under your breath as Toji kissed and licked your chest, you had an argument with yourself brewing inside your head. You couldn’t deny that you enjoyed the attention he was currently giving you. He was confident in what he was doing, so sure of himself unlike some of the people you’d been with. The knowledge that came with being older was surely showing itself now.

Especially in the way he rolled his hips against yours, getting you to moan out a little louder this time, the sound coming from deep within your chest.

“Sound so pretty, baby.” Toji groaned, peeling himself away from you to shed himself of his clothes and to take the rest of yours with it. Letting out a low whistle at seeing you completely bare in front of him, Toji slapped his hands onto your thighs, peeling your legs apart to stare right at your cunt.

“Don’t look at me like that.” The pure animalistic look in his eyes had you throbbing, both with need and embarrassment. No one had looked at you like that before, unadulterated and hungry. Shyness crept in and you flung your hands down to cover yourself.

“No hiding, little one.” Smacking your hands away, Toji laughed at the pitiful, embarrassed whine you let out. “Aw, is someone getting shy? Can’t handle daddy looking at your messy cunt?”

“S’not messy.” You pouted, but it was true. A steady buildup of slick dripped out of you, coating everything between your legs and even dripping down between your asscheeks.

“You’re my messy little girl, aren’t you?” Ignoring your light protests, Toji laid himself down between your legs, making a show of putting your thighs on his shoulders and squishing his head with them. “I bet you taste as good as you look.”

With one last wink, Toji dove between your thighs, his tongue already out and ready to lap at your folds. The first touch of the tip of his tongue to your clit made you jump, hands flying down to grip his hair as your eyes went wide.

Flicking it a few times, Toji wrapped his lips around the bud, sucking hard as his fingers dug into your thighs firmly. You moaned just as loud as Toji did, the vibrations from his mouth travelling up to the ones leaving your chest.

Toji’s dream of being here with you, having you laid out on your back with his face buried in your cunt, had only gotten stronger as time went by. He nearly lost it in the lingerie store, seeing you walk so innocently around all the thongs and delicate lingerie. He had to leave to smoke a cigarette and cool down or else he would have dragged you into the dressing room in front of everyone.

Lapping at your entrance, Toji shoved his tongue in, his nose bumping your clit as he did. Massaging your walls, he drank in your essence, easily getting drunk off the taste and feeling of your thighs crushing his head. Painstakingly letting go of one of your thighs, he brought his thumb to your clit.

“Toji!” You gasped and your thighs got even tighter around him. Toji could barely breathe let alone think about anything but making you cum on his tongue and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Shoving his fingers between your legs, he slid them down to the hilt and felt your walls clamp down onto both them and his tongue. Your essence was everywhere now and he was sure the scent of your arousal would linger on his skin for days.

Putting his tongue on your clit again, Toji fucked his fingers into you. The obscene wet sound was music to his ears, a song he hoped to play over and over. Your moans had turned into babbles, your fingers carding through his hair as the pleasure washed over you.

“F-fuck-” Barely able to get the word out, you came on Toji’s fingers, whimpering loudly as he sucked your clit harder. You were sure you had crushed him for good now with how hard your thighs tensed up around him, but Toji seemed more than okay when they finally relaxed and fell to the wayside.

“What a good fucking girl.” Toji was breathless and lightheaded himself but he wouldn’t miss the opportunity to tease you, slap your quivering thighs with both hands and drink up your release. Your feeble hands were too weak to push him away, just a slight nudge on his forehead that he easily ignored.

Forcing air into your lungs, you got a moment's reprieve when Toji finally pulled himself away from your cunt. Your arms wound around his broad shoulders, pulling him into a half hug as your legs were hoisted up around his waist.

“You gonna let daddy take what’s his?” Toji whispered in your ear, blindly grabbing his cock and tapping tip against your clit.

“Yes!” You sobbed, nodding your head desperately. Glancing down between your bodies, you could see just how thick Toji’s cock was; his fingers surely did not compare.

Pushing the tip of his cock in, you could immediately feel the difference from his fingers. The stretch that his cock gave was unimaginable and you nearly broke into tears as he bottomed out.

“Hurts- s’too big-” Unwinding one arm, you pushed on Toji’s chest.

“Sshh, sshh, you’re fine.” He cooed, intertwining your fingers and pushing your hand onto the mattress.

“Toji…” Whining under your breath, you blinked away the mist of tears at your lashes and looked at him. “Daddy, please.”

The soft ghost of a smile on Toji’s face fell after hearing you call him daddy. His whole face fell, in fact, eyes going wide and pupils blowing out. The hand that was holding yours tightened, smashing yours into the mattress as his other flew to your thigh.

“Oh, you’ve done it now.” Toji could hardly get the words out before he was pistoning his hips, thrusting his cock into you at an alarming rate. He had intended on taking it a bit slow, savoring the moment more as he finally got to fuck you.

But that plan was gone and in its place was the plan to fuck you into the mattress, turn your brain and body into mush as he made you cum over and over again.

“Daddy! Slow down!” You wailed and in the back of your head you wondered if your mother could hear you, if she was outside the door just waiting to burst in on the two of you.

“Not a fucking chance.” Toji responded, voice muffled against the side of your neck. His tongue lashed out, hot and heavy against your pulse. Leaving bite marks along your skin, Toji growled into you, grinding his hips and getting a shiver down his back.

Already sensitive from your first orgasm, the second one came with no warning. Scratching your nails down Toji’s back, your feet dug into his back as your cunt clamped down on him. Any remaining sense you had, any thoughts about your mother or being caught were gone now, the only thing filling your head now was the drag of Toji’s thick cock against your walls and the way his balls slapped against your ass.

The sound of Toji fucking into you seemed to echo off the walls, mixing with the choked moans you let out and creating music to Toji’s ears. Every drag of his cock along your oversensitive walls, every thrust forward bringing another gush of your sticky release to coat his skin - all of it was heaven for him.

“Honey, have you seen Toji?” Your mother’s sudden call wafted down the hall as she came up the stairs, the familiar thud of her footsteps getting closer.

“Uh-” Your voice caught in your throat, fighting through the jumbled mess that was your mind to come up with a good answer.

“Better say something quick, I didn’t lock the door.” Toji smirked against your skin, forcing his hips to all but stop and grind painfully slowly against you, his skin just lightly catching your clit.

“I-I don’t know where he is.” Your tongue felt like lead, sitting stupidly in your mouth and barely forming the right words.

“Okay…” There was a pause as she trailed off and you could hear her right outside your door, feet shuffling a little as she thought of what to do next.

The sound of her footsteps trailed off and both you and Toji let out a gruff exhale.

“Finally.” He mumbled, pulling his hips back.

“Honey one more question, what do you want for dinner?”

“Pizza!” You screeched right as Toji snapped his hips forward. Burrowing your face into Tojis hair, you tried to stifle the squeals leaving your lips.

“Alright, I’ll see what I can do.” Waiting until her footsteps completely rescinded, Toji sat up on his elbow and smirked at you.

“Guess we’re having pizza for dinner.”

“Shut up.” Pushing his face back into your neck you avoided his teasing gaze. Chuckling to himself, Toji nipped at your skin.

“Now, where were we?”

Crawling out your room nearly an hour later with sweat on your brows and unstable legs, you tried to conceal the cum dripping down your inner thighs. Toji refused to let you clean up, sliding a pair of shorts onto your legs and telling you it would be a waste to get rid of the gift he gave you.

Sitting down at the table without him, you were thankful to be the only one there. No one could see the way you were trembling and squirming with every squishy gush of cum that seeped out of you.

“Hi honey.” Joining you a few minutes later, none the wiser to what had happened upstairs, was your mother. Greeting you with a soft smile, she was about to open her mouth to speak again when the front door opened.

“There you are!” She beamed at seeing Toji walk through the front door. Your brow furrowed at seeing him come through the door instead of walking down the stairs. He’d made a comment about climbing out of your window and acting like nothing happened, but you didn’t think he was serious.

“Yeah, went on a walk.” He shrugged, stepping into the house and holding the door open. “And look who I found on the way!” With a fake beaming smile, Toji waved his hand behind him as Megumi walked through the door looking as unimpressed as the day you met him.

“Megumi, you’re home!” Clapping excitedly, your mother shot up from her seat and to him, giving him a quick hug and taking the bag slung over his shoulder.

“Mhmm. Nice to see you again.” Polite as ever, Megumi smiled briefly at your mother.

“Go sit down at the table, we’re just about to have dinner!”

“Okay.” Nodding slowly, Megumi set his eyes on you, raking over your form as he took a seat across from you. The silence between you two was thick and you could tell there was something hanging on the tip of Megumi’s tongue.

“Hi.” You whispered, briefly making eye contact with him before looking at the wood grains on the table.

“Hi.” Sighing out the word, Megumi kept his eyes on your face, observing the way you bit your lip nervously and kept your thighs tightly clenched together. When his eyes dropped down to see the tennis bracelet on your wrist, you thought smoke would pour out of his ears.

“Getting acquainted with your new step sister?” Sauntering into the space, Toji roughly ruffled your hair, laughing at the way you swatted him away before doing the same to Megumi.

“You could say that.” The younger man replied, his eyes slightly narrowed looking between the two of you. Loudly pulling out the chair next to you, Toji sat down and slid his hand onto your thigh under the table.

“Alright, everyone, time to eat!” Ever the hostess, your mother appears without fail with the pizza you’d said you wanted for dinner.

As you ate, you could tell Megumi knew something was up between you and Toji. He always seemed to make eye contact with you whenever Toji’s hand strayed too high up your thigh and his thumb grazed your soaked slit. He was far too keen, sending you questioning looks whenever you would clear your throat to cover up a soft moan.

Left to clear the table with him, you couldn’t make eye contact with Megumi at all. The silence between you two was overbearing, made even more so when you went to the kitchen to wash the dishes.

“So, (Y/N)...my dad is fucking you, isn’t he?” Megumi’s abrupt question made the plate you had in your hands fall back into the sink with a loud clatter.

“W-what?” Staring down at the soapy water covering your hands, you could feel Megumi’s eyes burning a hole into your head.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice you two at the table. And I saw him climbing out of your bedroom window.” Taking a clean dish out of your hand, Megumi peers his head into your personal space, forcing you to make eye contact with him.

“And what if he is?” The lump in your throat was bigger than you expected, choking you as you tried to speak. This was it, now that Megumi knew he would tell your mother and life as you knew it would be over for you.

“Don’t cry.” He said softly, wiping off a tear on your cheek you didn’t even know was there. “My dad’s sick, taking advantage of you like this.”

“What?” Hiccuping softly, you rush to wipe the other tears off.

“I knew ever since he started dating your mom that he was into you, I’m sorry I didn’t try and stop him.” Megumi sighed heavily, shaking his head as if to chastise himself. “I’ll have a talk with him and-”

“N-no, don’t.” Sniffling the last of your tears away, you force your voice to be steady. “I can handle it.”

“(Y/N), he’s not a good man, he won’t listen to you if you just tell him to stop.”

“I know, I just-”

“Then let me help you!” Clearly growing agitated, Megumi’s voice rose and his palm slapped against the counter, making you jump. There was silence, then the shuffling of footsteps with Toji appearing in the kitchen entryway with a furrowed brow.

“What’s going on here?” Looking between the two of you, his gaze settled on Megumi. “You, speak.”

“I know what you’re doing.” Megumi glared at him. Refusing to back down, he remained locked in a stare with Toji as the man approached.

“Yeah? And what that might be?” Coming nearly face to face with each other, you noticed how close in height they were to each other, with Toji only a few inches taller.

“You’re taking advantage of (Y/N).”

“Ha, and who said that?” Flicking his eyes to you, Toji chuckled. “Cause I know it wasn’t her.”

“You’re disgusting, you know that? You’re married to her mother for God’s sake!”

“Whoop-de-fucking-doo, you’re so observant.” Spinning his finger in the air, Toji pushed Megumi’s shoulder. “What do you plan on doing about it?” Quirking a brow, Toji didn’t wait even two seconds for a response. “I know you’re just upset I got to her first, kid. Now all you’ve got is your little hand at night.”

“That’s not true!”

“Even if it’s not, keep your fucking hands off what’s mine.” Hooking an arm around your shoulder, Toji pressed a kiss to your temple. “If I catch you so much as jerking it when she’s around, I’m kicking your ass.”

“Fuck you.” Megumi spat, his fists clenched at seeing Toji touch you so casually. It boiled his blood to see his dad treating you like this; there wasn’t a doubt in Megumi’s mind that you weren’t suffering with him around.

“Sorry, not into boys.” Letting you go, Toji slinked away to the fridge and grabbed a can of beer. Leaving without another word, as he turned the corner Megumi slammed his hand down against the counter.

“That fucking bastard.” He snarled, hanging his head low and trying to calm his shaking breath. Slowly releasing the tension in his body, Megumi stood up straight and ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, I need to take a walk.”

“Okay.” You whispered back, probably going unheard as he stormed out the back door. Leaving the rest of the dishes in the sink, you left the room as well, going up to your room and staying there for the rest of the night.

It’s deathly quiet in the house the following day. Any instance where Megumi and Toji are in the same room, the tension rises dramatically. Refusing to even acknowledge the others presence, Toji has already whisked your mother away for an impromptu date night at five pm, promising to stay out late with a biting tone directed at Megumi.

“Finally that dirtbag left.” Huffing as soon as the door is closed, Megumi slumped onto the couch. “I can’t stand him, I don’t get what your mother sees in him.”

“I have no idea.” You mumble, feigning disinterest and scrolling on your phone. In truth, whenever you had a moment alone during the day, Toji had come up to you and touched you, teasing you by cupping your ass or kissing you. All you wanted to do was go upstairs and relieve the burn between your legs, but no good excuse to leave Megumi alone came to mind.

“Some of my uni buddies sent me home with a gift, if you’re interested.”

“What is it?” Sending him a curious look, you watched him hop up from the couch.

“You’ll see.”

The gift in question was an unopened bottle of liquor one step up from the bottom shelf. It didn’t smell good when he opened the bottle and even mixed with some juice from the fridge, the burn as it went down your throat was horrid.

“Are you sure this can be called a gift?” You blanched, face scrunching up tightly in displeasure.

“When you’re on a budget like we are, yeah.”

“I thought Toji sent you money?” Swirling the liquid in your cup, you watched Megumi take a bitter sip.

“Why would I ever use his money?” Sure, Toji made sure Megumi’s bank account never hit below five digits, but that didn’t mean he wanted it or even asked for it. Leaving well enough alone, you turned on a random movie and kept drinking, keeping all mentions of Toji at bay.

It doesn’t take long for the two of you to get properly drunk, words slurring together and dumb drunk giggles shared between you. It was easier to get to know Megumi this way, his likes and dislikes and general personality; the harsh scowl on his lips was gone, replaced with a lopsided smile.

“I gotta take a leak.” Stumbling up from the couch, Megumi strolled out of the room, keeping his hand on the wall to steady himself. Flipping through your phone in his absence, a sudden text caught your attention.

(Toji): daddy’s bored baby, send me a little something

(Y/N): like what?

(Toji): I’d love to see you in that new lingerie

Giggling coyly as if he’d spoken the words directly to you, you kept a tight grip on your phone as you made your way to your room. Megumi and the movie on the TV didn’t even cross your mind as you closed your door and went straight to your dresser drawer.

It was a bit of a hassle getting your clothes off and then the new ones on, your vision was swimming and every few seconds you stopped to giggle at yourself and your lack of ability. Bumbling through sliding the lacy panties up your legs, you flopped onto bed and opened the camera.

Emboldened by the alcohol, you took several pictures of yourself for Toji. Nearly all of them were at least slightly blurry, some brazen shots of your cunt through the panties while others were tasteful shots of your breasts.

Sending them off with a few heart emojis and a little ‘sorry, I’m drunk’ tacked on, you clutched your phone to your chest as you waited for his reply.

“(Y/N), you in here?” Megumi threw open your bedroom door with no warning or second thought, his eyes bulging out of his skull seeing you spread out on your bed in lingerie.

“Gumi, get out!” Throwing your hands over your body, you let your phone fall to the floor. Stuck in a drunken stupor, Megumi didn’t leave the room, but he did look down at the text Toji sent you.

“Why is my dad texting you that he’s fucking rock hard?” Curling his lip in disgust as he read the message aloud, he scrolled up to see the previous messages, his mouth falling open at seeing your pictures.

“Megumi!” Snatching your phone angrily from him, you gave him a hard shove. “Leave!”

“(Y/N), don’t let him do this to you!” Megumi barely moved from the push.

“Just leave!”

“No! I won’t let him ruin your life!” Grabbing onto your shoulders, Megumi swayed slightly. “I know it can be exciting to get attention like this but- but don’t do it with him.”

“You don’t know anything.” Crossing your arms over your chest, you refuse to meet Megumi’s eyes. He’s silent for a beat, weighing whatever options are inside his head.

“I do know some things.” Licking his lips nervously, Megumi tilts his head and catches your eye. “I do know anyone is better for you than that nasty fuck. Even I’m better than him.”

“Yeah?” For some reason, you crack a smile for him. There’s something about how adamant Megumi hates his father that makes you laugh a little.

“Let me show you.” His voice drops and Megumi shuffles closer to you, the fabric of his t-shirt grazing your nipples through the thin fabric of the bra. The action, along with the way Megumi looks at you, has the heat between your legs picking up again.

You’re grabbing his collar and kissing him before you can take a full breath in, lips drunkenly smashing against each other as you stumble back onto your bed. Megumi’s hands go up and down your sides, grabbing and squeezing your flesh between his fingers.

Kissing down your neck, Megumi’s hand slides under your panties and he doesn’t speak on the fact you’re already wet enough that he can slide two fingers into your cunt with ease. Even if the fact does catch his mind it’s gone just as quickly as he grinds the heel of his hand on your clit.

Sloppily rutting into your thigh, Megumi lets out a pleased sigh when you tug his sweatpants down and free his cock. Jerking him off as you kiss, he swats your hand away when he finally gets fully situated overtop of you.

“Fuck.” You both groan as he slides in, your panties hooked to the side because both of you were too frantic to properly take them off. Megumi kisses you as he thrusts into you, noses bumping painfully together as you chase your high.

Even with Megumi looking exactly like him, you still find yourself wishing it was Toji above you. They sound nearly identical as well, Megumi’s groans a dead ringer for his fathers. Keeping your eyes squinted, you force the image of Toji to be the one in front of you and combined with Megumi messily rubbing your clit, you’re able to cum with a soft moan the same time as Megumi.

“Shit, I came inside.” When the glow of his orgasm finally subsided, Megumi pulled out of you with a hiss and slid your underwear back into place.

“It’s okay, I’m on the pill.” A decision you were happy about, remembering Toji had cum inside you as well. Sitting with you a few minutes longer, catching his breath and lightly petting your hair, Megumi comes to a slow stand.

“I’m going to take a shower, try to get some sleep.” Pulling your blanket over you, the two of you share a smile before he leaves. Your phone lays forgotten on the floor, all the ensuing text messages from Toji ignored as you fall asleep.

It’s not that he’s upset. No no, Toji could never be upset with you. He was more disappointed than anything. Coming home in the dead of night to an empty bottle of vodka on the floor and his son passed out drunk in his bed, and then coming to your room to see you still in the lingerie you’d sent pictures of with cum that wasn’t his smeared along your panties.

No, Toji wasn’t upset. But the way he ripped the blanket off your body could lead you to think otherwise. Staring at you, passed out and utterly helpless beneath him, the desire to ruin you had him rolling his shoulders. He was getting excited at the prospect of hurting you, teaching you a lesson in not sharing what was his.

Climbing on top of you, Toji spread your legs apart, a sick grin pushing his cheeks up. It wasn’t everyday he got to use his own sons cum as lube, and it surely wouldn’t happen again. But as Toji slid his cock into you and the squelch of it sounded around his cock, he couldn’t help but let out a deep, low laugh.

Lighting a cigarette over you, Toji goes slow in fucking your sleeping body. He doesn’t need to worry about your mother possibly wondering where he was; he had drugged her on the way back home. Megumi wouldn’t wake up even if you screamed, liquor was always a good nightcap for him.

Maybe Toji was a bit upset, because the longer he stared at you, the more irritated he became. He knew he would have to take care of Megumi later, smack the kid around a few times and send him on a train back to university. But with you, your punishment needed to be special.

“Wakey wakey, sweetheart.” He sang to himself, nearly dropping the cigarette dangling between his lips as he shifted forward and wrapped both hands around your neck. Slowly increasing the pressure, Toji’s eyes flew open in delight when you choked and sputtered to life.

“Toji?!” Your voice was practically none existent, there was hardly any air left in your lungs for you to make a sound. Your fingers clawed at Toji, struggling to be let go in your still drunken haze.

“Thought you could go and be a slut, did ya?” Leaning over you, Toji begins to pound into you. Although there’s a slightly softer give because you’re still wet, your cunt still burns painfully from the treatment and Toji refuses to be even the slightest bit gentle.

He lets go of your neck when your hands fall slack, clamping one hand on your waist as the other ashes his cigarette over your stomach, watching as it settles onto your skin.

“Le-let me go.” You force the words out between hard gulps of air.

“Why, so you can fuck my son again?” He cocks his head to the side and takes a long drag, blowing the smoke right in your face.

“How do you-”

“Cameras, baby. I put cameras all over the house and there’s a couple in your room right now.” Toji revels in your surprised expression and even more so in the pained one you give him when he takes another drag and puts the lit cigarette against your skin. You scream exactly how he wanted you to and he does it again and again.

“Toji! Toji stop, please-” You sob, trying to swat away the cigarette butt getting your hands pinned to the mattress instead. Looking down at your thighs, there’s several blooming burns taking shape, marring your skin and leaving bloody welts.

“Only if you stop being a slut.” Finally done with his cigarette, Toji flicks it onto your bed to be dealt with later. Planting both hands by your head, Toji sneers down at you. “Tell me, are you ever going to fuck someone else again?”

“N-no.” Tears cloud your vision and you shakily put your arms around Toji’s shoulders as he fucks you even harder.

“No what?”

“No daddy!” Fully wailing, you bury your face into Toji’s neck when he leans down close enough. “No no no no.” Your quivering little cries are all Toji needs to cum, slamming his hips against yours one last time before stilling completely. He breathes deeply as his seed mixes with Megumi’s, too much for your cunt to handle as it spills out when he pulls out.

“That’s what I thought.” Toji isn’t gentle when he removes himself from you. He’s even less so in removing your lingerie, ripping it to shreds with his bare hands and touting that it was ruined now. He leaves you alone for a few minutes, returning in only his boxers with a new shirt in his hands that he forces onto you.

Sitting at the head of your bed, Toji pulls you into his lap. His shirt does a good job of covering the burn marks littering your upper thighs, something you want to forget about sooner rather than later.

“I’m telling my mom.” The words fall slowly from your mouth, taking all your courage to say. Toji snorts, lighting another cigarette and blowing the smoke into the air.

“Life’ll get a lot worse for you if you become a little tattle-tale.” He says it calmly, meeting your eye when you pull away to look up at him. “Who do you think stopped all those debt collectors? Payed off this shitty house and filled not only your mom's bank account but also your fridge.”

“I-”

“Who’s gonna take care of her if I leave? You two certainly weren’t cutting it without me.” He’s right and you know it. The truth of the matter was that you couldn’t survive without Toji’s money and if your mother left him, the two of you would have an even harder time finding work.

The truth made tears burn your lashes and fall down your cheeks, hiccuping cries left your lips that were only slightly muffled by Toji pulling your head into his chest. Putting out his cigarette, he ran a hand down your back and cooed.

“Oh pretty baby, don’t cry. Daddy won’t do it again, he promises. So long as you promise to keep that little mouth shut and let him do whatever he wants. We got a deal?” Toji half nods your head for you, pressing a big kiss to your forehead.

“Daddy, m’tired.” Sniffling loudly, you force the tears to stop falling, biting your lip to stem the flow.

“Let’s go to sleep then.” Shuffling you under the covers, Toji follows suit. He smells strongly of cigarettes, the scent overtaking you as his head hits your pillow. Pulling you against his body, Toji grips your ass tightly. “Goodnight doll.”

“Goodnight.” Biting back another wave of tears, you push your head into Tojis chest and will yourself to go to sleep.

Being awoken with your step fathers hands around your neck had been scary and was imprinted on your mind for the rest of your life. But waking up in the morning with your legs over his shoulders and his face buried in your cunt was surely a memory that would stick with you as well.

“There she is.” Toji grinned, his chin glistening as he looked up at you. “Took you long enough.” Shoving his tongue deep into you, Toji stifled any opportunity for a response. Your heels dug into his back, hand shooting out to grip his messy bedhead. With how sensitive you were already, he must have been between your legs for a while.

Sucking on your clit, Toji groaned as you gripped his hair painfully hard, your back arching high off the bed as you came. Your body thrashed around, hands trying to pull Toji closer while also pushing him away. Pulling his mouth away, Toji rubbed his fingers against your clit in the absence of his tongue.

“Good morning, princess.” Laughing when you smacked his hands away, Toji sat up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, making a show of licking off all of your slick that coated his face.

“G-good morning.” Breathless from the ordeal, you dumbly kissed Toji back when he knelt down and captured your lips. You could taste yourself so strongly on his tongue and smell yourself on his skin.

Breaking the kiss, Toji helped you dress for the day. He didn’t make any mention or acknowledge the marks on your legs, only giving them a flitting glance as you pulled on some pants.

Walking down the stairs together, to your horror Megumi was already in the kitchen when you walked in. He glared angrily at Toji, giving the man a wide berth as he moved about the space. Slinking to the farthest wall, he sent you a pitying look and took a sip of the coffee in his mug.

“Good morning!” Your mother announced her presence with a loud yawn, barreling into the kitchen with terrible bedhead and a stumble to her walk.

“Good morning mom.” You couldn’t look her in the eyes, keeping your head bowed as you returned her greeting.

“Morning honey.” Toji smirked, kissing your mother right on the mouth and keeping her there for a few seconds.

“Get a room.” Megumi mumbled under his breath, rolling his eyes at the two.

“Toji, what’s that taste in your mouth?” Smacking her lips together as she pulled away from the kiss, your mother furrowed her brows. “Is that a new gum or something?” Making direct eye contact with you, Toji snorts and pulls her into a hug.

“Yeah, something like that.”

[no-droids]

Kar’taylir

gif credit @sersi​

Part Thirteen of the Rough Day Series

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 11.8K

Warnings: language, angst and fluff, descriptions of a dead body, no real smut in this one but there is some nudity and touching, uhhh i think thats it tbh

A/N: Omg hi hi hello this was written in a week and a half so please be gentle, also I’m back on my linguistics bullshit and I can absolutely guarantee a vast majority of it is inaccurate

***

Everybody is asleep and you’re just a complete mess.

Truly.  And it fucking sucks, because this should be enjoyable.  This is home.  You’re in hyperspace, the hull is pitch black, the baby is asleep, and Din’s breathing is slow and quiet through the darkness.  Your cheek presses to his chest as it rises and falls hypnotically, you’re comfortable and safe and this would normally be a dream.  But your eyes are wide open right now and you are just going through it.  Spiraling in the midst of the most stable surroundings you could possibly conceive.

You suppose that this is partially your fault.  You don’t know why literally any part of you expected Din would explain himself without prompting from you, but you still couldn’t work up nearly the nerve necessary to ask.  Every potential question you came up with contradicted your intent, every way you tried to mentally phrase it gave off the wrong impression.  How do you ask somebody if they were being serious about something without revealing anything about your own intentions?  You can’t—that’s a downside of staying silent.

Din hasn’t said a single word since he urged you to leave the shooting range earlier, and he didn’t really seem like the quiet didn’t suit him, if that makes sense.  Yours was awkward, it fit you wrong.  You struggled for words while he easily ignored their existence altogether, able to navigate the Crest into hyperspace and exist comfortably around you without ever addressing the giant bantha in the room.  Maybe that’s part of the reason you floundered so hard—he didn’t avoid you, he held the kid while you took a shower in the small fresher, and even though he was quieter around you than he’d been in awhile, he gave no indication that anything was wrong at all.

You spent that time getting clean but also formulating some sort of plan.  As you bathed in actual water for the first time in a week and scrubbed your body clean, you tried to figure out at least why you were having so much trouble coming up with something to say, but even then, words evaded you.  You spent the entire time staring blankly at the metal wall, at a complete fucking loss.

When you came out of the fresher with wet hair and comfortable clothing to sleep in, Din was armorless and resting in your makeshift bed on the floor, the baby tucked soundly in his crib next to him.  You turned off the lights and carefully found your way under the blankets next to him in the pitch blackness, feeling him lazily reach around you and pull you to rest against his chest.  His fingers gently drew circles along your arm for maybe the first few minutes while you worked up the nerve to speak.  You needed to say something, this was your chance—

But then his hand soon fell to rest in one place on your shoulder and he passed out.  Helmet on, not even a few minutes of your quiet breathing next to him.

So now, you’re here, just… a little ball of stress in the middle of paradise.  Hours have passed, you need sleep after such a physically exhausting week but it’s like you haven’t even processed the fucking proposition he presented to you yet.  You’re having trouble even thinking the words, that’s how much he’s got you fucked up.

He said… hit the target and I’ll ma…. hit the target and I’ll marrrrr…

Fuck.  You stay on that loop for ages until your eyes begin to grow heavy, until you just settle on thinking about it with them closed.  Slow breaths from Din under one ear, the silence of hyperspace all around you—how are you supposed to contemplate when his body is so warm?  No, you can ask tomorrow, you’ll ask him tomorrow.

Eventually, you’re able to drift off into a troubled slumber, dreaming of bells made of beskar that deafen anyone who rings them.

***

You wake up what feels like two minutes later.

It’s not, but you don’t know that.  You’re so warm and the second your eyes open, they start stinging and burning and tearing up like your body just wants to cry for even being awake right now.  You finally got to sleep—you moan pitifully and start to turn your head further into the warm blankets, but then a gloved hand smooths your hair back and a voice whispers quiet through the darkness.

“I have to go.”

And oh, his touch is just the gentlest thing, but what he says makes your already fragile mental state want to shatter.  The first words he gives you in hours and they’re the ones you loathe to hear the most.

“W-Wha?  No,” you whimper and automatically reach for him, your throat starting to close up.  Maker, you’re so tired, you’re so tired, you feel so fucking emotional and vulnerable right now and you’re not even awake enough to realize it.  “Why?”

Din just catches your hands and brings both of them together in front of him, slowly pressing your knuckles to the cold beskar on the face of his helmet.

“I meet with Karga in three days,” he murmurs back, voice pillow-soft and barely loud enough to come through the steel under your fingers.  It’s gentle and lulling and it makes you want to sleep again, but you can’t and you feel like you could burst into tears for that reason alone.  “He gave me four pucks, I need four bodies.”

You can’t argue with it, the logic is perfectly sound.  But you still want to, and everything inside you revolts at the thought of allowing him leave like this without fighting for more.  Which means you have absolutely nothing reasonable or compelling to say to appeal to him; all you’re left with the glaring truth.

“But I don’t want you to leave,” you whisper, tightening your fingers.

And, perhaps if you were even half-conscious, you’d wince.  You’d cringe at the shake in your voice, you’d remind yourself that he has to make a living, he’s said it over and over again.  If you were completely awake, you’d scold yourself for being such a needy mess, but right now, all you can think about is how much you want him to stay, just this once.

After a moment, you feel the gloves carefully collect both of your hands into just one of his, and then he slowly reaches out with his free hand to cradle your jaw.

“I won’t be gone long,” Din murmurs.  “I can’t be.”

Your head turns slowly in his palm, and you’re just so, so sleepy.  Your voice is small and your words slur.  “Stay with me.”

Quiet, and though you can’t see him, the leather continues to press so warm to your cheek.  Your eyes slowly drift shut, needing him to stay exactly like this, stay right here just like this.  Karga can wait, the quarry can wait, the galaxy can wait—everything else can wait when things are like this, when he’s looking down at you breathing slow into his palm.

You’re almost asleep again when you hear him say something.

But… you have no idea what he says.  You hear it.  You hear his voice come through the pitch black, quiet enough to sit just on top of the silence and let the mysterious words simply become a part of it, but it’s strange.  Like his cadence lilts in a different way, the vowels are longer than what you’re used to, and your comprehension abruptly falters like it would if he was speaking another language altogether.

Maybe it’s just because it’s the first thing to pull you back from the edges of sleep, that has to be right.  It doesn’t sound like Basic because your mind is stupid and slow right now.  You need to ask him to repeat himself, but all that you can muster is the soft sound of confusion, not even able to open your eyes anymore.

His hands pull away from you and once again, you suddenly can’t decide between sleep and crying, quickly lifting and trying to reach out for him in the darkness.  You can’t feel anything, it’s like he’s completely disappeared from where you assumed he’d be, except then something tiny is placed into your hands instead and it makes an unhappy little sound at being disturbed.  You automatically hold the baby close to your chest and strong hands touch your shoulders, urging you to lay back down again.

“Leave the engine running, you’ll freeze if you don’t,” he mutters, quickly tucking the blankets up under your body while you close your eyes and feel the tears wet your lashes.  Fuck, you’re so exhausted, you just need to sleep.  “If I’m not back in sixteen hours, I’ll use my e-comm and you’ll have to fly out to me.”

He steps away from you, walks quickly and with purpose to the side of the hull, and a blast of frigid air fills the room before the door is slammed shut behind him.

***

Your head hurts.

Sparks and wires give your fingers mean, zapping reminders to pay attention every time your focus slips, but you still feel like you’re in a daze.

“Come on,” you drone, trying to use your voice to snap yourself back into the present, but the sound of it isn’t even interesting enough to pull you away.  “Come on.”

Maker, you’re going fucking crazy.  Is this just all an elaborate scheme to make you experience the same kind of insanity he told you he struggles with in your absence?  Because you don’t like this—you hate feeling like this, you can’t concentrate on anything and even if he hadn’t instructed you to do so, you’d likely still be counting the hours of his absence.

Fourteen have passed so far, not the sixteen you’re waiting for but getting close.  It’s one thing you’ve been able to accomplish.  Counting.  You can still count right now, so at least there’s that.

Oh, and another hoop you’ve jumped through.  Understanding words.  You can listen and repeat, even if you still can’t fully comprehend, but you’re getting there.

Din said… hit the target and I’ll marry you.

He said that.  Yep.  You’ve accepted it, you’ve accepted the words that were said.  Indeed.

Okay, but now… like…

What did he mean by that?  Why did he say that?

No matter how much you tell yourself he was just messing around—no matter how many times you offer up that perfectly logical answer to the burning question you’ve been sitting on, you still aren’t satisfied with it.  Something keeps tugging your mind back to it, a tether constantly pulling you away from the work that’s designed to be your distraction.

You frown down at the box of machinery.  Whelp, if he was serious, he’d probably immediately take the offer back after witnessing your behavior this morning.  You embarrassed yourself terribly, you acted like a clingy baby in the looming shadow of unconsciousness and what’s worse, you can’t even remember what he said after you begged him to stay.  It could’ve been a quiet, “Stars, pull yourself together,” for all you know.

And honestly, just… fuck these electronics.  You’re at the point where you’d probably cheer on whatever brutal impact damaged them so atrociously if you weren’t also well aware that this box was very likely attached to Din’s chest when it was crushed.  The magnetics are a complete mess, and you’re mostly just attempting to see how the individual components of each piece are supposed to communicate.  Turning the switch on doesn’t do much at all besides make the capacitors put out heat.  Not enough to shut it down or be a hazard to the housing when you close it, but enough to know that it’s going to present a problem for you at some point.

What’s more, you’re so lost in your own thoughts and busywork that you don’t see two green ears poking out over the top of the pile of armor on your temporary workstation (literally just the floor) until one of the thigh braces comes clattering down and the whole thing collapses with a ruckus.

You suddenly shove the metal box away from you in frustration and you reach for the little troublemaker with a sigh, scooping him up and getting to your feet.

“This isn’t going to work,” you grunt to him, hearing your words better for some reason when you direct them at the baby instead of talking to yourself, and his eh? allows the thoughts to come clearer and easier.  No, you can’t be distracted when your distraction is just another part of your status quo, you can’t use fixing mechanics to occupy yourself because it’s what you’ve done to occupy yourself your entire life, it’s worn off at this point.  You need something newer.  Something that takes your entire focus to do.

Eventually, your eyes drift over to the one metal panel on the wall that you’ve rarely ever opened.  One that takes up a comparatively enormous amount of space in the hull considering what you know it holds.  You eye the kid in your arm, who suddenly has sneaky painted all over his expression.  “You thinking what I’m thinking, demon?”

He squeaks his affirmative and you move over to the armory, pressing a few buttons before the doors slide open by themselves.  Because of course Mando invested in hydraulics for the gun closet but not for the hidden cot he used to sleep on, of course.

“Maker above,” you groan as the metal slides open, needing to lift your chin to eye the enormous collection.  How many fucking…?  All this for just one person?  What does that big one in the middle do that the others stacked strategically around it don’t?  They all kill whatever you point and shoot at, you’re assuming?  Are you missing something?

The baby makes a tiny sound of awe as you carefully look over your choices, not expecting nearly this many to be offered, before settling on one that looks the simplest.  A sleek silver one that’s still too big for your hand but smaller than anything else on the rack.

Grabby fingers reach out for the shiny metal as soon as you remove it from the shelf and you very purposefully set it down out of his pitiful wingspan.  “Nope.  Now come on, gotta bundle up.”

You make your way back over to the bed and pull one of the thickest blankets up, settling it over the open shield and then situating your partner in crime in his usual spot inside.  You strategically stuff and stack the fabric around him to make sure he’ll be warm enough in what you know has to be far below freezing temperatures, lifting it up over his ears and wrapping it around his neck in a loose hood.  He blinks up at you with gigantic eyes and an open mouth, clearly thrilled about your willingness to go on an adventure with him this time instead of being the tall nuisance that consistently holds him back from one, and you scoff down at him as you partially close the lid on his levitating nest of blankets for extra protection.  He should be warm enough, you’re not going to be outside long.

And then you pull out nearly half the amount of clothes you own and suit up in what feels like ten layers before grabbing the blaster.  The swirling wind nearly shoves the heavy hull door into you as soon as you open it and—Maker.

You look back at the kid behind you for a second, wondering if it’s too late to change your mind.  His expression narrows and he makes a triumphant ha! while pointing three fingers at the grey blizzard through the small open space in his crib.  Try as you might, you can’t ignore a call to arms when delivered with such ferocity.

Both of you step outside and take in the view after you wrestle with the door to haul it shut.  You don’t know the name of this planet but from what you can see, it’s one giant ice ball, mountainous and cold as fuck.  Though, to be honest, your only indication that it’s truly cold as fuck is the continuously accumulating snow blanketing the landscape and the flurries dancing in the whipping wind.  You’re too warm-blooded for climates like these—anything below room temperature and you’re freezing, you have absolutely no tolerance for cold whatsoever.

Keeping that in mind, you don’t travel far at all.  Just a few steps beyond the entrance to your shelter before eyeing what appears to be a large white boulder in the distance.  There’s a solid target, you figure—you’ll be able to see chunks splintering off when you hit it and the ice isn’t strong enough to bounce plasma back, you won’t have any ricochets.

Okay.  Okay—safety, where’s the safety on this one?  Ah, yes, okay—safety, off.  Stance, find your stance.  There it is.  Alright, now lift.  Lift, get that stupid frozen ball right in your sights, line it up.  Hold.  Hold.  Hold.

Inhale, exhale.  Inhale, exhale—

Fire.

You watch with bated breath as the bright red bolt launches from the end of the barrel and travels across the distance before melting a hole in the snow just to the right of your target.

“Mother fucker!”  You yell into the frigid landscape without warning, suddenly infuriated.  What’s the point of even having a sight if every gun is just gonna say fuck you no matter what?  Could there be some sort of mathematical reason why you seem to be fucking atrocious at this, you wonder?  Are you fucking up the angle somehow while trying to read the scope?  Should you just ignore it and try to aim without thinking too hard?

Admittedly, you spend the next five minutes shooting at that stupid fucking thing, not making a single shot.  It’s not been long at all, but your entire body is already trembling uncontrollably and it is just too fucking cold out here.  Freezing your fucking ass off isn’t going to help your aim of course, but it’s almost just tragic at this point.  Either you’ve got to accept that you’re just absolutely hopeless at this, or you’ve got to… blame the little womprat behind you for messing up your shots, yeah.  It wouldn't surprise you.

As a last ditch effort, you consider trying something a bit ridiculous to see if he really is fucking with you.

“I’m firing one last shot,” you call out loudly over the sound of the bristling wind and flurries, making sure he can hear your narration from his little blanket cave behind you.  “If I hit the target… I will present our demon overlord with a chunk of raw meat later for dinner.”

You give the offer a moment to sink in before raising the blaster, and then you jerk it up at the very last second while pulling the trigger.  The arc of plasma quickly disappears into the gloomy skies over the top of the ice boulder, completely straight.

You switch the safety on and turn around to say something smart to him, but… well.  Uh.  That’s an empty crib.

Sudden panic rips through you at the sight of the wide open shield, the blanket left abandoned inside.  Your head whips around in horror, wondering where the fuck he could’ve gone—but then you’re able to spot tiny footprints in the snow.  Your eyes quickly follow them up and see the baby wading his way up a large hill, slow against the terrain and trying in vain to get to something at the very top.

You drop the blaster and bolt through the blizzard to get to him while calling out through the freezing air and wishing, not for the first time, that you had a name to roar and strike fear into his tiny little heart.  In this case, you prefer a middle name as well.

Finally reaching him and yanking him up from the snow, you tuck him under the warmest part of your arm and open your mouth to start venting the terror from your body, but he makes a distressed noise and starts climbing.  You fumble with him on your way back down, not expecting that response, but he’s so distraught and preoccupied that he’s unable to stay still, trying to find different ways of escaping your grasp and making more and more sounds to indicate something is wrong.

“What the fuck are you—” you stuff him into the shield and at least get the blankets wrapped around him before looking back and trying to spot whatever he’s still wiggling and attempting to get to.  Frustrated cries start filling the icy air and… okay.  “Okay,” you tell him, your breath puffing like smoke in front of you, “okay okay, we can go look, but you need to stay warm.”

You clutch the edge of his metal shield and urge it to follow you back up the snowy hill, feeling the crunch of your feet disappear further and further into it as you climb.  Your outer two layers are probably soaked by now—stars, it’s so fucking cold.  You know you’re not exactly the best judge, but you’ve been outside less than five minutes and you’re already worried about getting sick or frostbite, already jumpy and wanting to go back to the warmth of the hull.

But as you reach the top and look out in the distance, you can just barely make out a familiar metallic glint on the horizon.  

Your heart picks up, but the baby makes another distressed sound.  Not… happy, not thrilled that his dad is coming back.  Some strange sort of dread begins to fill you, carefully holding the kid in his shield with one hand and looking at the bright reflection of light a little ways away just to make sure it’s…

No, it’s not moving.  Not disappearing and reappearing, not catching the sunlight differently.  Completely stationary in this absolutely horrendous weather.

You immediately make your way in that direction, your body deciding to outright abandon its trembling in the wake of this newfound worry.  You’re suddenly sweating, way too warm.  That’s Din, you recognize the glint of his armor anywhere, but why isn’t he moving?

The closer you get, the faster you move and the more you’re able to see.  He’s laying facedown in the snow.  There’s quite a bit of it covering the back of his cape, maybe a few inches, and… there’s also someone laying equally as lifeless behind him.  Your heart is slamming now, you’re doing your best to run in the unforgiving terrain, and you finally see that it’s… a corpse, a frozen corpse is behind him with a rope tied around its ankles, clutched tight in Din’s unmoving fist as it lays against the pure white backdrop.

“Mando?”  You call out, dropping to your knees as soon as you reach him.  “Hey—hey, can you hear me?”

The beskar strapped to him is frozen over and feels colder than ice when you try to shake him.  He doesn’t respond.  He’s dead weight; you do your best to turn him over on his back, but you still get nothing from him.  You shove your trembling fingers up under the helmet, and the only reassurance you have that he’s even alive comes from the petrifyingly slow pulse beating underneath.  His skin is ice cold.

Shit, he’s still breathing but he’s hypothermic, you have to get him back to the Crest right fucking now.

You fumble to get in position above his head while hooking both your arms under his, before leaning everything you have into it—but fuck, he’s so heavy.  You can barely lift him even just a few inches off the ground—the snow is deep, his armor makes him weigh a ton and the fabric wrapped around him is sopping wet.  You try again, making a tight sound in your throat while you haul, but it’s no use.

“Fuck,” you curse, starting to panic even fucking harder.  You’re gasping and breathless and getting dizzy and scared, continuing to try and find different angles to heave—

—until suddenly the burden is lifted.

You nearly fall backwards on your ass at the abrupt removal of tension, playing tug-of-war with a team that decided to give up with no warning.  But it’s like it almost doesn’t even phase you; you don’t even look behind you to see the baby’s eyes closed tight in concentration, you just recover and pull with both arms, feeling Din’s body gliding easily along the snow now and leading him all the way back down the hill.

Once you get inside the Crest and shut the door to the raging blizzard behind the three of you, there’s an extended moment where you just… you don’t know what to do.  You know all about how to deal with heatstroke, but this is the opposite—he either spent too long in the cold, or he exhausted himself trying to get back too quickly and then spent too long in the cold.  He said he’d use his e-comm if he wasn’t back in sixteen hours—was that the cutoff?  The point where the temperature outside would shut his body down and he’d need you to come get him?

Regardless, you need to warm him up.  Yes, that’s your priority, and you figure the quickest and safest way to accomplish it has to be the shower in slow increments.  The kid helps you move Din into the tiny fresher in the hull and then you sit on the floor with him, holding his limp body to your chest while reaching up to turn the faucet on.

Cold water sprays down and then suddenly—oof, he’s heavier than fuck again.  Air leaves your lungs and your neck cranes back under the unexpected increase in pressure on top of you to see the kid climbing down from his shield, no longer focused on mentally bearing most of his father’s weight or directing his own hovering form of transportation along behind you.  The baby disappears out of sight and you huff, completely trapped under Din as freezing water rains down on you.

Fuck, it’s so cold.  It’s way too fucking cold for you, but your core body temperature is also mostly normal right now.  Din’s isn’t, you’ll probably shock his system if you try to warm him up too quickly.  So you reach up and twist the knob, keeping it at a temperature he’d probably find just the slightest bit warm while inspiring violent shudders from you.

“H-Hey, I’m gonna t-t-take this off, o-okay—” you stutter down at him, knowing damn well he isn’t conscious to hear you but giving him that reassurance on the small chance he is, and then reach with trembling fingers to work at his armor.  You worry that the beskar is keeping the cold trapped the same way his clothes are, like having solid pieces of ice strapped to his body and nothing to protect him besides a few layers of soaking wet fabric.

The chestpiece comes off and you throw it blindly over your shoulder into the hull with a clang—admittedly, without thinking about where the baby is at all anymore.  The pauldrons come off next, but not before you reach up and turn the heat up just the slightest bit.  Your jerky limbs just want to blast it and remove the rest of his clothes in steamy hot water, but you can’t.  Even though your mind is hurtling at a thousand lightyears an hour, whatever reason you have left reminds you that you have to be patient or risk losing him entirely.

Eventually you’re able to get all the armor off but you hate the way he’s breathing right now.  Slow and shallow, like he just doesn’t really need the air at all but his body is still fighting for it on instinct.  His chest barely moves with it even when it’s got nothing weighing it down.

“You’ll b-be okay,” you say aloud, talking to the both of you even though only one is capable of responding.  “Y-Y-You’ll be o-okay—”

You reach up to inch the temperature a little higher, shivering terribly now.  His body feels slightly warmer under the shower than it did with the beskar, but you know you need to keep going and take the fabric off now.  Maker, it’s nearly impossible—the black clothing clings to his skin and its such a small space to maneuver, but it gives your mind and hands a clear goal to focus on while the water incrementally heats up.

Strangely, your adrenaline has been rocketing for so long that you almost lose track of time.  You just keep deadly focused on your task of undressing him and slowly heating the shower, trying not to think, trying not to get in your head and bring about disaster in such a crucial set of moments.

At some point, the water is warm.  Comfortably warm, and Din’s body isn’t ice cold anymore.  It’s warm, too, laying back into your chest and naked besides the helmet, but he’s still not moving.  No response, no matter how much mindless drabble you supply, no matter how steamy and hot the shower has become, no matter how much your own body has heated up.  Your fingers have found their home under his jaw, pressed right to his pulse point and feeling it continue to beat slow and faint, but you’re starting to feel the terror set in.  Real terror, the kind that makes you stupid and emotional, the kind that turns you back into a child again.

“I don’t know if it’s working,” you suddenly choke out, close to tears.  He’s warm, what else can you do for him?  Why is he not waking up?  “I-I don’t know what to do, Din, I…”

No—no, you cannot lose your shit, not yet.  You will exhaust every fucking option before you let that fear set in.  He’s not waking up because he needs to recover, his body needs time to work things out in a warm, comfortable environment.  He’s breathing, his heart is beating, he��s warm, and he’s still with you, so… you need to still be with him.

You turn the water off and clumsily get up, grabbing him under the arms and hauling him back into the hull.  He’s still heavy but it’s so much easier than before to move him; there’s no armor weighing him down anymore besides the helmet, no cape or snow or friction to catch him, no cold to lock your muscles up.  It’s slow going but you’re finally able to settle him in the warmth of your shared bed and then cover his body in the collection of blankets you’ve amassed.  You stand up and peel off all your wet layers of clothing, letting them plop to the metal floor while glancing around for the kid—

—who is currently swinging from the ladder to the cockpit with one hand.

It startles you for just a moment, just long enough for you to wonder what the fuck he thinks he’s doing up there, but then you figure that if he found some way to get up there then he can surely find his way back down again.

As you quickly drop to the bed and scoot up next to Din’s limp body under the blankets, the Crest’s engine suddenly gives a low rumble below the floor and heat starts blowing through the hull vents.  Again, you’re too preoccupied to even notice the gift much.  You’re tugging and tucking blankets around him and up under the metallic edge of his helmet when...

Maker, you need to take this off.  If the inside is wet, it’s probably keeping his head cold while the rest of him is warm from the shower.  You know it’s not a light thing—you know… you know at least a fraction of what this means.  You won’t look, you won’t look unless something absolutely drastic happens and it’s completely unavoidable, but you need to take his helmet off.

You catch the shoulder furthest from you and tug at his heavy body until he’s on his side, facing you on the bed.

“Din, I have to take your helmet off,” you warn him, saying it slowly and clearly.  Again, just in case.  “I’m not gonna look.  Nobody is gonna look—” your gaze flicks behind him to eye the baby, who is now somehow on the metal ground and waddling up to you both.  He blinks enormous black eyes at you, looking between you and his father huddled together under the blankets.

“Close your eyes,” you tell him very seriously, no room for negotiating.  “I know you understand me.”

It takes just a few seconds before he lifts his hands up and does exactly what you say, placing his fingers over his closed eyelids and then even so much as toddling around to face the wall.  You gasp in relief, clenching your eyes firmly shut and then pulling the helmet up, making sure you catch his head before it falls with one hand while tossing the beskar somewhere in the hull with the other.

Cold.  His hair is soaking wet and so cold, and his head rolls slightly as you guide it to rest in the warmest part of your neck.  Your hand stays attached to the back of it, wanting to transfer every single bit of warmth from your palm to him, and your eyes open to the kid’s back as your other arm wraps around Din’s bare spine.

And then all at once, you just feel… helpless.  He’s in your arms but Maker, you don’t know what else you can do.  The heat is blasting, you’re warm and pressed against him under multiple blankets, the engine is slowly heating the metal floor, but his breathing.  Slow.  Shallow.  Barely able to be felt against your neck.  He’s here but he’s not.  And you have no way of knowing if he’s getting closer or further away from you.

Tears start coming before you even realize.  But you have nothing to say.  After spending the entire time talking out loud, providing reassurances, narrating, distracting yourself—you don’t have anything anymore.  The silence twists you tighter, the nothing becomes inescapable, and the sudden sob that leaves you echoes hauntingly throughout the hull.  You pull his limp body as close to you as possible for comfort.  Wake up.  Wake up.

Your vision is watery—you don’t see it.  You don’t see the kid slowly turn around and take a few steps forward.  You only notice he’s there when green catches in the abstract blur, but you sniff and blink quickly to clear it.  It only takes a second to see the baby’s hand, extending and pressing against the blanket covering Din’s back, and you watch with wide eyes as he closes his.

And then there’s a second.  A second where you dare to hope.  Where you wonder if it’s even something that can be done.

The kid lowers his hand just a moment later and stumbles back a few steps, before plopping down on the ground and slowly falling backwards.  You have just enough time to see his little body inhale and exhale a few times as he sleeps, and then—

—and then Din suddenly jolts in your arms, bursting with too much life after spending too many heart wrenching moments without it.

“Shhh,” you breathe, instantly tightening your grip on the back of his head so he doesn’t pull away from you in a panic and keeping it tucked into the warmest part of your neck, right where your pulse thrums fast and present.  Your eyes clench tightly shut just in case and your heart bursts with pure, blinding, heavenly relief.  “Shhh sh sh, stay right here, just stay right here…”

As soon as he seems to recognize your voice and figure out that he’s not dead, his body immediately starts wreaking with shivers.  You squeeze him tight to you, feeling his large, quaking frame curl inwards into you for warmth, burying his own face into your neck even further and breathing shallow but quickly now, like his body actually wants the air again.  You do your best to will your blood to pump faster and provide him that relief, stretching and opening your body as much as possible to give him warmth.

And then you spend the next few hours like that.  Holding him, murmuring gently to him, providing him with your body heat and stars, he fucking clings to you.  He presses tight to you and trembles, and you don’t even know if he’s listening, but you keep talking.  Finding words for hours, and while some of them are just different ways of saying the same thing, you say them anyway.

He’s okay.  The kid is okay.  Everyone is okay.

Eventually, the shivering dies down until it stops altogether.  Din stays in one place and goes completely limp again, but this time he continues to breathe you in, slow and deep into the crook of your neck.  Fast asleep in your arms, and you thank the good fucking Maker above for the little angel passed out on the floor behind him.

***

He has to meet with Karga in two days.

After a few more hours of holding him and making absolutely sure he’s going to be alright, that’s all you can stupidly think about.

A deadline.  A very quickly approaching one.

You don’t know why.  But it might have something to do with the fact that you want nothing more than to climb up into the cockpit and navigate the ship off this horrid planet, and you can’t.  You’re confident that the hull and blankets are warm enough by themselves to keep Din comfortable as he recovers, and you’ve also had quite a while to regroup and get your mind thinking logically again, so you’re not worried about getting up and leaving him right now, no.  That’s not the problem.

The problem is that there’s a corpse outside.  You know this.  You know it’s there, and you know he needs it.  Nobody’s gonna take his word for just saying they’re dead, much less pay him for his services; no body, no bounty.  You also know it’s probably being covered with fresh snow right now, or maybe some sort of wild animal has already gotten their teeth into it, if anything can even survive out there.  And you’re the only one awake.  The only one capable of going to get it.

You’ve been arguing with yourself.  For about an hour, you’ve been struggling with the thought.  Din is soft and warm and every breath makes you focus less on the terrifying moments that occurred and more on the need to step up once again.

In the end, it’s the kid who gives you the final push.  You’re not going to leave him laying on the floor like that for any longer.  Not after what he did.

You take a second, grabbing the blanket and pulling it up all the way over Din’s head as it rests warm and comfortable in your neck.  You’re incredibly careful to cover his face, and even while climbing out of the warm cocoon of the bed, you keep your eyes firmly shut and continue to pull the fabric even higher, making absolutely sure you’re not going to see his face on accident.  You shouldn’t, you don’t think, as long as he doesn’t jerk awake and pull it down himself, but you want to take extra precaution regardless.

After quickly yanking on some clothes, you immediately make your way over to the kid and pick him up, seeing his little mouth open as he snores—and oh, you just have to.  You pull him to your chest and give him the most heartfelt, thankful embrace you can while not squishing him, before setting him down in his much more comfortable hovering blanket palace and closing the lid on it.

You know you have a very clear task now, but for just a few moments longer, you do your best to stall despite the ticking clock.  You start to pick up the mess in the hull—you close the fresher door, pick up Din’s discarded armor and set it in a neat pile close to the bed, place the helmet under the vent to encourage the padding inside to dry faster, and then you collect his old armor and stuff it back into one of the storage cubbies with your toolbox.

Only, an idea suddenly occurs to you as you’re putting away the chestpiece.  When you open the door to the hull, you know that a blast of cold air is going to flood the ship.  The engine is still heating everything inside and making sure you don’t get trapped in the snow by continuously melting it on the outside, but you don’t want Din to start shivering again.

So you grab the dented piece of electronics you were working on and flip the power switch, feeling the capacitors slowly start to heat up inside the housing.  You go back over and lift the blanket near his feet just enough to tuck the metal under it, close enough to Din that he’ll feel the same amount of warmth your body was providing him but not enough to overheat.

And then you make your way over to your bag and pull on the rest of your clothes, now exhausting almost every single clean thing you own just to make another trek through the snow.  You’re in the middle of pulling on your fifth pair of pants when the thought truly sinks in.

A corpse.  A dead body.  That you’re actually considering going out into the worst fucking weather in the galaxy to search for, haul back to the ship, and put into carbonite.  Because of a fucking deadline for an occupation very much not your own, very much not chosen by you.

You quickly walk over and leave through the door on the side of the hull before you can change your mind, slamming it shut behind you.

***

Well, it’s…  It’s not too terrible, you guess.

It’s been frozen out here for hours, that’s why.  It’s not bloody, not gory, not demented or malformed in any way.  Tranquil almost, like the creature died in its sleep in this nightmarish landscape, perfectly at peace.

You still don’t want to get anywhere close to it, but you have to.  You pull a face and slowly reach out, absolutely not thinking about the literal impossibility of it playing dead and just waiting for the moment to strike, but even still…  Even if there was nothing more sinister hiding underneath the surface of this scene, it’s still… existentially fucked up.  The last time you were confronted with a dead body, Din had to be the one to dispose of it—you couldn’t even think about it without threatening another wave of shock to your system.

And now you’re voluntarily grabbing the rope around one’s ankles and dragging it back down the pure white slope to the Razor Crest.

It doesn’t weigh that much and its icy exterior seems to work in your favor; it slides easily along the snow as soon as you get it moving.  As the ship comes back into view, you hurry to the door and you’re just about to open it when you suddenly get the feeling that you’re forgetting something…

Oh—

It takes a few moments of searching around in the freshly fallen snow, but eventually your fingers brush metal underneath and you stand, reaching behind you to tuck the blaster into your waistband.  When you’re positive you’re not going to accidentally shoot a chunk of your ass off on accident, you shove open the door and pull the body inside, before locking it tight behind you and keeping the frigid winter from touching this warm, quiet safe-haven.

There.  Halfway done.  You almost don’t want to look in case he wakes up unexpectedly, but then you find yourself peeking over your shoulder at the silhouette of Din’s body still passed out under the blankets and you’re thankful the squeaks and slams didn’t disturb him.

And then you take just a second to wonder if this is what it must be like for him.  Minus your obvious discomfort and ickiness at beginning to haul the corpse over to the carbonite chamber, it seems like it’d be reminiscent of any other time he’s brought back a dead quarry while you and the baby slept soundly.  Trying to be quiet, wanting it done and over with just to get back in bed that much faster, doing everything you can to prevent anything out there from so much as breathing on anything in here.

You do your best to hold on to the loveliness of the thought, because this part is the part you’re most anxious about.

The body needs to go into this slanted upright space so you can freeze it in carbonite.  And in order to do that, you have to grab it and put it there.  With your hands, you have to grab it.  With your hands.

You look down at its face, calm and at peace, frozen and forever etched into that expression, and something twists in your heart.  If it weren’t for the kid, that could’ve been Din.  If it weren’t for the kid walking barefoot through snow, fighting an uphill battle to make sure you get to him, helping you drag him back here and then overexerting himself to make sure he’d be okay, that could’ve been Din.  He drives you crazy on a consistent basis, but he came through today.

Know what?  If that little squirt can save a grown man’s life twice in a few hours, then the least you can do is finish this job for all three of you and fly your asses out of here.

Weirdly enough, being frozen solid allows for way better handling than the alternative.  It means you don’t actually have to touch it too much; you don’t have to deal with the limpness of death, it doesn’t seem as much like a person as it does a rigid board you’re simply moving from one place to another.  You can just grab the shoulders and yank and the entire fucking thing goes with it, solid and upright, naturally wanting to lean back into the chamber so you don’t even have to hold it in place.  The perfect quarry for you basically, day one stuff, as easy as it could get.

Almost done, almost done—you study the key panel on the upper-right frame before eventually pressing a few buttons, and then you step back as gas freezes and solidifies the corpse in its carbonite prison.

Yes.  You’re done.  You already want to take another shower just from touching it for a few seconds, but that can wait.  Quickly making your way up the ladder and into the cockpit, you fire up the thrusters and then navigate the ship through and beyond the swirling white atmosphere of this dreadful fucking planet, before punching in familiar coordinates to Nevarro.

***

“Din,” you murmur, making sure you have your eyes completely covered with one hand before gently easing the blanket down from his face with the other.  “Din, I want you to drink some wat—”

He jerks awake so suddenly that you hear the metal canteen fall over on the floor next to you, thank the Maker its lid is on tight.  You automatically reach out to steady him, pressing your free hand to his bare chest and continuing to speak calmly and gently to reassure him, but he still scrambles to take in his surroundings after sleeping longer than he probably has in weeks.  

You know what he’s seeing, even though you’re blind right now.  You took time to make sure everything was settled before waking him.  The hull is clean with only a single light to illuminate it, the baby is still snoozing in his closed crib, his armor is stacked in a neat pile, the blaster is put away, and you retired your makeshift blanket heater box so the only thing left is you.  Freshly showered, hair dripping, offering him water, and dressed in just a thin shirt with nothing else (you ran out of things to wear).

“Wh-Where’s my h-h-helmet—” is the first thing he asks, voice broken and raspy.  Stars, he needs water.

“The padding inside is wet,” you quickly supply, keeping your hand tight over the bridge of your eyes to make sure his freshly conscious mind immediately understands that you have no bad intentions.  “I swear I didn’t look, and I made sure the kid didn’t either.  He’s sleeping now, it’s just me—I swear nobody looked, I swear.”

You might just be saying the exact same thing over and over again and admittedly, that might be putting some weird kind of suspicion on you, but you just want to make sure he knows.  Beyond a shadow of a doubt.  It’s important that he knows he’s safe and that everything is okay now, even if he collapsed and spent an unknown amount of time in a purgatory where nothing was.

His body trembles under your palm, waves of shudders attacking him even after hours of keeping him as warm as possible.  “Are—Are we st-still on H-Ho—H-Hoth—”

“No,” you answer.  “We’re in hyperspace.  Everything’s okay now, I took care of it.  We’ll get to Nevarro on time.”

It’s like he takes just a few extra moments, as if he’s trying extra hard to remember before responding.  “But—I d-didn’t—”

“You have four bodies for Karga,” you tell him, not letting him get too lost trying to recall something that no longer poses an issue.  “I took care of it.  You need rest, I only woke you up to make sure you drink some water, so please—” you blindly reach your hand out for the canteen you know has to be around here somewhere, but all you feel is…

His.  Catching yours.

“Y-You took c-c-care of…”  His hands are trembling harder than his voice.  “Sh-shit, I’m freezing, I—”

“Drink some water,” you tell him, squeezing his fingers.  “I’ll go turn off the light so you can sleep more, but you need water.”

His hand feels like it doesn’t quite want to let go of yours yet, but eventually it does and you hear the sloshing of water as the metal flask is picked up with an unsteady grip.  Purposefully turning your back to him and making sure he’s not in your line of sight whatsoever, you finally let your hand drop and blink your eyes open at the wall across the hull.  You hear Din shakily unscrew the lid while you stand up and find the light switch, before turning around in the pitch blackness and using his loud gulps as your guide back.

Your hands and knees are barely on the blanket when you hear him toss the empty canteen to the side and grab you, pulling you down to him.  

Fuck, you’re not expecting it.  You fumble in the dark but he doesn’t really give your clumsiness much of a choice—Din pulls you under the blankets like he needs you, his body craving that warmth even though his skin doesn’t feel cold at all.  He hooks a strong forearm around your tummy, keeping your back pressed tight to his chest while the rest of him curls to fit every part of you, and you have to adjust the blankets yourself.

It’s not even a few seconds after you settle into position when his trembling hands jerk down to grab your shirt and yank it up.  You quickly scramble to help him get you as naked as he is, feeling his palms drag greedily across the heat of your tummy and breasts before you’ve even finished wiggling the fabric over your head.  The shirt lands somewhere in the darkness and you’re squeezed back against him, your hands landing on his forearms as they wrap around your waist and he clings shamelessly to you.

“You…”  Din’s body still shivers every once in a while but the heat and closeness allows his voice to even out just a bit.  He clears his throat and swallows, tucking his head and burying his face in your hair before trying again.  “You brought back the qu-quarry?”

“Yes,” you confirm, confident in your reassurance but gentle at the same time.  “It’s in carbonite.”

All you can feel or hear in response is his breathing.  His heart beating steady and strong against your back.

And then Din’s arms suddenly squeeze you tight—tight.  He lets out a low shaky exhale against the back of your shoulder and presses his lips to your skin.  “Sweet girl.”

And he says just… so much with those two words.  Slow and purposeful, the steadiest thing you’ve heard from him in hours.  But the two biggest competing emotions you hear tugging at his vocal cords are gratitude and apprehension.  Like he already knows that it couldn’t have been easy for you.  Like he’s not taking it lightly.

You don’t want to talk about it.  You don’t want to talk about anything that happened in the past few hours, not right now.  “It’s okay.  Please.”

This time his silence seems to be on the brink, as if he wants to say more but the extra plea you put on the end makes him hold onto his words, at least for now.  

“How d-did you find me?”  He asks instead, scooting his legs up enough that yours actually go with him.  Cradled in his naked body, radiating heat so he can recover, pressed so close to him that you feel like gravity itself would be pushing you into his lap if the world weren’t sideways.

“The kid,” you tell him.  “We were goofing around outside and he dragged me ov—”

It’s like he’s still so cold that even just the surprise of hearing you say that makes his whole body lock down and convulse a few times against your back.  “You were wh-what?”

“I was practicing,” you openly admit to him, feeling like the earlier events already occurred a lifetime ago and you have no reason for being shy about it anymore.  In fact, you’re glad you were there, being terrible at shooting.  The alternative is unthinkable.  Though, something tells you also improbable, having a little supernatural sidekick who cares so deeply for him.  “I raided your armory.  We weren’t outside for more than five minutes before I wanted to go back in, but then he found you.”

And you think he’s going to get after you, for some reason.  Seems about on par, you figure—going outside for even just a few minutes on a planet whose name you now remember is colloquial slang for hell, even if it’s the only reason he’s not an icicle right now.

But he’s just quiet.  Breathing.  So you just relax into him, thinking that’s the end of it.  You take a few deep breaths in through your nose and just… rest.  In the near perfect silence of hyperspace you used to find haunting, but now only find comfort in.  It reminds you of him.

“Did you hit the target?”  He asks you quietly, and at first you scoff, about to ask if he’s kidding.  No, of course you didn’t hit the…

Only, after a remarkable delay, hearing him phrase it that way suddenly makes your stomach decide to drop and do a fucking somersault on the ground out of absolutely nowhere.

Everything comes flooding back.  The conflict you used to think was the most pressing thing, the one that kept you awake and your thoughts scrambled for hours.  It feels like it was ages ago.  An entire lifetime has passed since that happened, you might’ve forgotten it altogether if he didn’t decide to ask that very simple question in a very specific way.

“I…” you mumble in response, your heart suddenly pounding.  “Not… not yet.”

Okay, that’s a good answer.  It’s the truth and you’re giving nothing away by saying that.  So now what is he going to say?  What is he going to say?  You spoke your piece, it’s his turn now, that’s how conversations work.  Well typically, that’s how conversations work—but with Din… you probably should’ve known.

He falls back into silence almost immediately, appearing to accept your answer just the way it is without anything else to add.  You feel his heart continue to beat strong against your back, but there’s something too tense about his stillness that doesn’t imply he’s relaxing anymore.  His body goes slightly taut, but not from the lingering chill in his bones.

He’s going to make you ask him, you realize.  He’s waiting until you confront him about his choice in words at the shooting range.  Which means he wasn’t just joking around.  He wasn’t just messing with you.

“Din…” you whisper uncertainly, and his face suddenly finds its way into the crook of your neck as soon as the word leaves your mouth, arms tightening up around you.  You spent forever trying to find the words to even bring this up, and here he is, already knowing exactly what you’re asking just by the tone of your voice.  Still, you ask anyway, sounding small and so unsure of yourself in the darkness.  “Why did you say that?  On Tatooine, why did you…”

Din’s chest expands against your back with a long, slow breath, and then he lets it out against your neck, hot enough to raise goosebumps all over your body.

“I… don’t know,” he admits, voice muffled and quiet, but it’s not… casual.  Not like he’s brushing you off or indicating he doesn’t want to talk about it, but like it’s actually a complete fucking mystery to him, just as much as it is to you.  “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know…” you repeat slowly.

“You had said something,” he mutters, shifting just a bit behind you.  His palm slides up your bare tummy, stopping in the warm spot just under the swell of your breast.  “Earlier that day.  I thought about it, and then I just… s-said it.”

You?  Said something that made him ask that?

“What?”  You blurt out, genuinely startled and having no fucking clue.  “What did I say?”

“Something about…”  He gives the smallest shudder from behind you, and you don’t actually know if this one is from the cold.  “Not wanting anyone else to know me the way you do.”

Your heart rapidly kicks up and you flush, hating how unbelievably possessive your own words sound coming out of his mouth.  “Oh shit, I… I didn’t mean for that to be… that sounds so bad, Din, I swear I didn’t mean for it to—”

He cuts you off by clutching you tighter, burying his face deeper into your neck and breathing out shakily.  “Tell me you meant every word.”

You blink a couple of times in the pitch black before sighing, letting go of any charade or front you think about putting up for him to save some dignity.  “I meant it.”

Because it’s the truth.  You said it when you were caught off guard, throwing it out to him along with other mindless drabble that came from a place that was very real.  You don’t like the way you phrased it, but you meant it.  You do mean it.  Every word.

If there weren't so many things still left unsaid right now, you might actually worry he fell asleep on you.  Din loosens up considerably after you admit it, letting go of more tightness you didn’t even know was inside him.  His head slowly drops from the crook of your neck to the back of it and he breathes hot air on your nape, quiet for a long time.

And, you suppose you’d actually be okay with it if that was the end of the conversation.  There are, of course, millions of things left to ask.  But he doesn’t know the answers, just as much as you’re left clueless about the questions.  You’re not expecting him to elaborate anymore, and if he’s waiting for you to ask, he’ll be waiting a long time.  Soon your eyes close and you almost feel yourself beginning to drift.  It’s been such a rough day today and to just be here in his arms, it’s more than enough for you.  

But then his low baritone comes through the darkness.

“In Mando’a,” Din’s voice suddenly whispers against your skin, “the verb, kar’taylir… it means to know.  Su kar’tayli, you know, kaysh kar’tayli, they know.  Ni ke kar’tayl nu… I don’t know.”

Your eyes pop open and you immediately forget all about sleep, wide awake and suddenly hanging onto every word as it rolls so gently off his tongue.  You’ve never heard the language spoken aloud, you’ve never heard anything about the Mandalorians directly from one before.  All of the stories seem sensationalized, passed down by word of mouth and chipping away at the kernel of truth until it disappears completely.

“The language is dying,” Din continues, murmuring soft and gentle along your nape.  “By the time I learned it, too many words had been lost.  The ones left were the ones that were needed.”

“What do you mean?”  You whisper, almost afraid of breaking the quiet.  Not wanting him to feel distracted or pressed, but needing to express your curiosity lest you somehow overflow with it.

“There are only three pronouns,” he answers slowly, and you’re already fucking fascinated.  “Ni, for I or we.  Su is you or you all, and kaysh is third person.  Subjective, objective, possessive, singular, plural—doesn’t matter.  Three words, for every individual or collective in the entire galaxy.”

You blink in the darkness, your logic telling you that it sounds so simple it’d become confusing and then your logic also telling you that doesn’t actually make any fucking sense at all.  If that’s true, it’s unbelievable.  How do they differentiate?  Just context?

“How do you distinguish?”  You ask him.  Admittedly, you don’t know much about linguistics—not anywhere near the extent he does, but it seems so counterintuitive.  I can’t be the same word for we, the amount of misunderstandings would be a nightmare.

“We… don’t need to,” he explains to you, slowly, like nobody has ever asked him these things before and so he’s unsure how to phrase it.  “Individuality isn’t valued, it’s not a concept.”

And… you almost can’t wrap your head around it.  “What do you mean?”  You ask again, knowing you’re sounding like a broken record without specifying more, but trying with your whole heart to understand.

“I mean… we swear oaths to never reveal our faces,” Din tells you, something you shouldn’t need to be reminded of.  “We abandon our names.  We become… whispers, of the same voice.  There’s not many words in Mando’a with a unique meaning, almost all of them are homonyms.  Interchangeable.  Transient.”

Your eyebrows shoot up, suddenly blown away by the implication.  Almost all of them are homonyms?  How in Maker’s name are you even supposed to communicate at that point?  That’s… unthinkable.

“Most words have two meanings?”  You clarify, wanting to be absolutely sure you’re getting it right.

“Most have five or six,” he returns, and you’re downright shocked now.  “Everything just depends.”

“Stars…”  You breathe, moving a palm up the length of his forearm and holding the back of his hand with it.  Fuck, you hope this is the direction he’s intending instead of veering him off course, but you’re incredibly invested.  “What else does, uh… kay—er, kar… kar’taylir mean?”

Din lets out a slow breath from behind you, and you can… you can feel his own heart beating faster when it presses up against your spine at the apex of his inhale.  “It’s… a rare word, it only has two meanings.”

You bite your lip and start to feel butterflies in your stomach for some reason.  Slowly, his hand begins to travel up your breast and then to your sternum before heading just the slightest bit left, and your own hand moves with him.

“To know,” Din says quietly, “but also… to care very deeply for.”  He doesn’t stop until his palm presses right above the rapidly pounding organ in your chest.  “To hold in the heart.”

“To know,” you swallow thickly, curling your fingers around his hand and praying he’s saying what you think he is, “or… to love?”

“When Mandalorian’s take vows, there’s no ceremony,” he whispers into the back of your neck.  “No witnesses, no celebrations.  We just take our helmets off in front of the other and look.  It doesn’t sound like much, but… our secrecy is our survival.  Letting someone see our face and swearing lifelong devotion to them, it’s the same thing.  To know is to love.”

Your eyes close tight and your lungs empty themselves, too full of emotion to even fit oxygen inside you anymore.  Din’s lips press feather soft behind your neck, and now you’re the one shivering uncontrollably.  The move up and trail along your neck in the darkness.

“Ni kar'tayl su,” he murmurs, shifting back just slightly and pulling at your shoulder.  “I know you.”

You go with him, facing the ceiling as he fits his head under your throat and places slow, open mouth kisses down the curve of it.

“Ni kar'tayli gar darasuum,” he goes on quietly, his voice starting to sound raspy again, dragging his hand down your torso while his lips brush your collarbone.  “For an eternity, I’ll know you.”

Water wets the corners of your lashes and you inhale three or four times before exhaling, shallow hiccups and desperate for air.

“Ni ke vaabi nu kaysh ke kar’taylir su te ni kar’tayl su.”  Din says, slowly moving his mouth back up when your fingers tangle in his hair and beg him to come that way.  The words dance along your skin as he whispers them, forever searing themselves into your memory.  You can’t see them, you’ll never have a visual to reminisce upon, but you’ll know how they felt.  Right under your ear, brimming with quiet devotion.  “I don’t want anyone else to know you… the way I know you.”

Your face goes blazing hot at the sound of him translating your own rushed and half-assed sentence into something gorgeous and flowing, something that sounds so much more beautiful than when you blurted it out earlier.  You told him you loved him in that hangar, right to his face.  Unashamed and stupid about it, but meaning it with every part of your body.

“I knew you’d say no,” he finally admits, staying in this one spot.  Unmoving.  Telling you the truth, allowing you to know it.  “I just wanted to… say it.”

That… that makes sense to you.  The last part does, at least, it makes so much sense to you.  The first time you said you loved him, you said it just to say it.  You wanted to feel the words, sound them out even if neither one of you could hear them.  It felt freeing, like coming to accept a universal truth.

The first part, though.  You’re still behind.  “You knew I’d say no?”  You ask him, feeling him ease back just slightly.  Staring down at you through the pitch black, even if he can’t see either.  Keeping his palm over your heart as the ship hurdles through nowhere and everywhere at once.

“You wouldn’t take my first name without convincing,” he reasons quietly, and then moves back to lay in the blankets once more, leaving the rest unspoken.

But he’s… oh stars, he’s so right.  If he’s going to take his helmet off and let you see his face—if he’s going to commit to you that way, it is not going to be because you shoot a blaster correctly.  Not after today, not after what he’s told you.

So you move up to your elbow and turn to face him, trying to let him know why even if he’s already guessed the what correctly.

“I want it to mean something,” you say after a moment.  “I want it to… have the meaning it’s supposed to have.”

Your palm finds its way to his chest in the silence following.  Right over the beating of his heart, feeling it thrum hard and rhythmic while he considers his response.

“This is The Way,” Din finally murmurs, settling his hand over yours, and you repeat the words back to him.  Respecting them.  Feeling like, for the very first time, they now apply to you in some way instead of belonging to some mysterious creed you’ll never know anything about.

But when a shudder subtly rockets up and down his body, you realize the blankets have been pulled down with the changing positions and his whole torso is bare and exposed to the hull.  So you pull them up until you’re both covered again, before you lean down and press a soft kiss to his shoulder.

Din shudders again when your mouth opens and the hot glide of your tongue catches his skin, but you know it’s not from the cold this time.  His breathing deepens while you slowly move over him.  You ease him further on his back and let him keep feeling the warmth of your mouth on his body, alleviate the lingering chill by sucking gentle hickeys into his skin and feeling the goosebumps raise under your tongue.  He moves with you; he stretches his neck when you want to nibble his collarbone, arches when you mouth down his chest, shifts his elbow to let you drag your tongue along his ribcage.

And… and it’s as if all the stars and systems hold even more still for you than the relative physics of faster-than-light travel can explain away by themselves.  You’ve always felt timeless in here, living from one fleeting eternity to the next, suspended in perpetuity while the rest of the galaxy ages without you.  But when you’re with him and it’s pitch black and there’s no light to streak across your vision, no evidence that time and space have all but disconnected from each other just to let your insignificant little bodies through… it’s like you’re meant to be here.  In some strange, unexplainable way, you feel like you could’ve died out there with him in the frozen wasteland today and this is exactly where you’d still end up, no matter what.

To know is to love.

“Do you have brown eyes?”  You hear yourself whisper under his jaw, and you feel Din’s fingers thread in your hair and ease you up enough to brush his lips against your chin.

“Yes,” he whispers back, and then his mouth is on yours.

[pascalpanic]

Lovely Josie! Can I request a Frankie piece? Where reader is part of the friend group and really into Frankie. She knows he's also into her but just typical insecure Frankie. So she flirts with him and tries to seduce him every chance she gets until one day she's had enough and really goes for it. And if course Frankie likes it 😇 Merci!

Spicy-Sweet (Frankie Catfish Morales x f!Reader)

summary: ^^

W/C: 4.3K

Warnings: lots of talk of alcohol, food, god Frankie’s an idiot but a cute one, so much pining and flirting, implied age gap and Frankie’s insecure over it, Frankie has a brief and mild anxiety attack but is comforted

A/N: this is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, I really hope you guys enjoy it!

Bucky- that was what the men called you. When you’d first joined the group of men, it’d been as Pope’s friend, a shock to all of them; you weren’t sleeping together, weren’t sneaking around. Just friends. That threw them for a loop. You were always at his side, his right-hand wing-woman. Frankie had been a little put off at first that he’d been replaced, but he grew to like you just as much as the other men. That’s how you’d earned Bucky: Cap’s sidekick, Pope’s sidekick.

When you finally bonded with the rest of them, became friends with them, you were less Pope’s sidekick and more yourself. You grew to love the men for different things. Benny was always there to cheer you up, full of bad jokes and energy. He’d take you out when a date stood you up, buy you a beer on your shittiest days. Will Miller was a shoulder to cry on. He was smart, strong, emotionally intelligent. Wise beyond his years, Ironhead always had the best advice for you. Pope was the partier, and was the one who got things done. Organizing plans was his forte. He loved getting the group together to hang out, and was the only one who could rally the group.

Frankie was all of that and more. Everything. Frankie had caught your eye the moment Pope introduced you to the men. Frankie was the quietest, even quieter than Will. He never enjoyed the spotlight, especially when you were new, but he loved making his friends laugh. He was comforting and helpful, lending you a jacket or helping you with a manual labor task you couldn’t quite get.

Frankie is the one you have a crush on. All of the men have their attributes, and you have to admit that any of them would make a good boyfriend and surely a good lover, but they are and always have been brotherly first. Frankie was something different. You wanted to stay in his arms forever, wanted to kiss the bald patch on his jaw and steal his Hawaiian shirts. You tease him endlessly to hide your feelings, though never in a mean way at all. Always soft and joking, always reciprocated by the teddy bear of a man.

You were the same to him; the first time he saw you, he thought he wanted to marry you someday. He loves your laugh and your humor, loves the way you nudge his side and even though it’s a little painful, wants you to do it again just so he can feel your body touching his. He loves how you can hold court over the men with your stories, can get them to agree on the most divisive of issues. He’d even proposed once that you become Cap, not Bucky. You were clearly a leader. But Santiago brushed it off by saying that Bucky was getting his own show now, so he’s just fine, and besides pendejo, you can’t change a nickname once it's been given.

Emotionally constipated Frankie is just fine to sit to the sidelines. If he has one principle with love and friends, it’s that he’d rather have you as a friend than not have you at all. That’s why he doesn’t necessarily openly flirt with you, why he suppresses his feelings until it’s late at night and he’s alone and can daydream about your pretty face and tight jeans and the crinkle of your nose when you smile.

You’re different. You wear that green shirt you know Frankie always ogles you in when it’s a night out. You buy him a drink or two. You insist he dance with you, take him on errands with you on a Saturday morning. You can read the man; you’re pretty damn sure he likes you too, but you don’t want to ruin it. Rushing him is the last thing on your mind.

-

As you wander through the farmer’s market on a spring Sunday morning, you shiver as the breeze rushes past your bare arms. Frankie doesn’t notice; he’s too busy admiring a booth selling hot honey. You can’t help but laugh as he delightedly samples a spoon of the syrupy-sweet-spicy product, and turns to you with wide eyes. “Bucky, you gotta try this,” he insists, handing you a sample spoon.

Nodding, you give in and taste it. The flavor on your tongue reminds you of Frankie if he were a flavor: a little spicy, but more of a warm feeling. Infinitely sticky-sweet, floral and tasting of sunshine. There’s heat, just a little, enough to awaken your tastebuds and mingle with the honey perfectly. “That’s good shit. How much is it?” You ask the vendor.

A few minutes later, you walk away with two bottles. You hand one to Frankie. “Here. This is for you,” you tell him with an earnest smile.

Frankie’s brows slide together beneath the brim of his favorite ball cap. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I wanted to,” you shrug and pat his cheek, your path curving to the right as you approach a bakery stall.

The morning is sunny and just slightly cold, making you shiver every so often. Sweet Frankie walks dutifully at your side like the dogs and their owners similarly strolling the tent-lined sidewalk. His eyes light up as he sees breads and flowers, homemade jerky and beautiful jewelry. The variety is exciting, and you often hear Frankie shouting for you from a new booth.

While you admire the jewelry made of local stones, something warm and soft covers your shoulders. You look down to find that it’s Frankie’s suede brown jacket. “You looked cold,” he tells you and turns a little pink before patting your shoulder and wandering off.

At the end of the day, you have a full reusable bag, brimming with goodies: a small bright bouquet, two loaves of bread, cookies, fresh berries, and a bottle of hot honey. Frankie’s is similarly stuffed, though it’s with much more unhealthy choices. The two of you sit on a grassy hill, munching on a pack of thumbprint cookies Frankie purchased.

The morning sun is just starting to warm up, but the jacket you’re now wearing is cozy. You lean your head on Frankie’s shoulder as the two of you rest there without words, lost in your own thoughts.

God, he’s so cute. So sweet. A little stupid. Just how I like them. Is my flirting not obvious enough to him? You wonder internally.

Frankie’s thoughts are similar but different. She’s so sweet. She’s so nice to me. I wonder if she’d ever like me like that.

-

Partying is Pope’s favorite pastime. The man enjoys getting shitfaced and taking a similarly drunk date home. Lord knows what they do; you’re glad you don’t. That leaves you and the Millers and Frankie. You and Benny dance and sing karaoke, twirling and shouting the lyrics to the song blasting in the bar. Frankie and Will sit on the sidelines.

That’s exactly where tonight has found you. A surprisingly sober Pope has gone home with a pretty girl he flirted with briefly before she tugged him by the jacket sleeve. He shot a look of excitement at the four of you before leaving.

Now, Benny requested his favorite song through the pay-per-tune machine in the corner. You’d squealed and dragged him out, dancing with him on the wooden floor the bar provides. Frankie can’t help but think the two of you would make a good couple. The two of you are full of sarcasm and energy at most times, around the same age. Frankie’s a bit older, and he can’t help but think that it would be weird for you, that it would prevent him from liking you. If only he knew.

Benny does, actually. He’s annoyed that your group doesn’t give him enough credit for his smarts. He might be mostly muscle, but he’s packing brains too. He’s great at observing social interactions, and he can especially tell that there’s something between the two of you. He’s learned his best friend like he knows how to drive or what his own phone number is. Benny knows Frankie, and he knows he won’t make the first move for fear of upsetting you. That’s why he’s taken it upon himself to be your blonde, blue eyed Cupid and queued up Frankie’s favorite song next.

You know it’s his favorite song. Of course you do. When it comes on, you turn to the bar with wide eyes and wave to catch Frankie’s attention, then wave him over. Benny says something or another and wanders off. It takes some nonverbal persuading, some pleading eyes and pouting to the man, but Frankie eventually adjusts his jeans and gets up, leaving that suede jacket behind on his barstool.

“It’s your song!” you exclaim as you throw your arms around him, starting to dance along with him. He moves back with you, though nowhere near as fluid or free.

He shakes his head but smiles, and you flick the brim of his cap. “Oh come on, you love this song. Don’t be such a dope,” you tease and grab his hips, forcing him to move them a little more than the stiff motions he’s making.

“I am a dope,” he mumbles and you roll your eyes, moving in a way that invites Frankie to move back against it. It’s a two-person dance, and you’re starting to get him moving.

Chuckling, you look up at him. “You ever seen Footloose?” you ask him.

He blows a raspberry into the air, laughing. “Of course I have. It’s my favorite movie.”

“Then how come you can’t dance?” You tease.

Frankie makes a noise of mock-injury, clutching his chest. “Damn, Bucky. Right in the heart.”

You giggle and rest your head on his shoulder. “I was going to say that you remind me of Willard. I guess that’s fitting though. You can’t dance.”

His scent is the only thing you can think about, the way his cologne is spicy and sweet on his flushed skin, warm from having you in such close proximity. “Does that make Pope Ren?”

“And it makes me whatever the girl who dates Willard is named,” you shamelessly flirt, swaying him to the side as the song changes in keys.

If there was anything in Frankie’s mouth right now, he’d be choking. Maybe it’s just because you’re dancing together, he rationalizes. Maybe it’s just because you wouldn’t want to date Pope. It can’t be because you like him. That’s not even a thought that crosses his mind. “Ha. Sure,” he shakes his head, taking off his cap and teasingly placing it backwards on your head.

It’s loose on your head, and you laugh as you look up at him. Frankie has that feeling again in his gut: he’s going to marry you someday. It can’t be the alcohol, not in either of you. You’ve both only had a drink each. No, in this moment he realizes the depth of how bad he wants you, but he cannot comprehend that you want him too. There’s no way you could ever love a man like Francisco Morales, he tells himself. But he wants you to. He aches for you to.

The song ends and the ache only grows. Frankie is not a dancer. This is his time to retire to the barstool. “Well, thank you for holding my hat,” he teases you and steals it back, putting it on himself and patting your side before wandering back to his spot next to Will.

You frown, but then Benny finds you again and the energy returns somewhat. You long to feel Frankie’s arms around you again, to dance with him and whisper jokes next to his ear so that you can feel the way his laugh buzzes in his chest. You consider buying another play of Frankie’s song later, but that would be suspicious. You’ll have to find another way, but you have to do it soon; you’re not sure how much longer you can last before you combust from not getting to kiss his soft lips, to feel his scruff beneath your fingertips as you cup his face and finally close the gap between the two of you.

-

Frankie is much too old for parties. He’d decided that even a few years ago now, that that sort of thing was best left to the young bucks who could drink endlessly and awaken with only a mild headache. How the hell Benny had talked him into attending this party, he wasn’t sure, but he knew that you’d be there and that was enough for him.

You’re not a big partier either; you can get wild, but only around your friends, usually only with Benny there to egg you on and hand you shot after shot. You don’t particularly like getting drunk, just enough alcohol to make things a bit lighter. Benny and Santiago were the ones who’d insisted you and Frankie come along to this party a mutual friend of theirs is hosting.

Of course, the boys wanted you two there but had failed to mention they were each bringing dates. When you wandered in with Benny and a girl flung herself onto him, peppering his blonde stubble with kisses, you’d quickly learned that you weren’t going to get a good night with your favorite guys. Santiago was similarly taken, a girl draped across his lap in a busy living room, each of them holding a drink. He’d given you a two-finger salute as you wandered to the kitchen, kind of annoyed.

You’d dressed a little nicer, though nothing too special, and you immediately hoped at least Frankie and Will would be around tonight to hang out with. Will’s not a big partier, though he’s a little more social than you and Frankie. Your phone buzzes in your back pocket and your face falls as you read the text.

Ironhead: sorry guys. Not gonna make it out tonight.

He provides no explanation why; Will never does. You know better than to question it. Your only hope now is that Frankie doesn’t blow you off.

Frankie could never. The promise of you being at the party was enough for him to meticulously shave and spray that cologne he knows you love on his flannel, which you’ll surely ask for because you’re always cold. He’s not here yet, so you lean against the kitchen counter and crack open a hard seltzer as you look around. Bringing your drink with you, you hit the bathroom and when you return, there’s a familiar ball cap poking above the crowd, labeled with Standard Heating & Oil. Frankie.

Sneaking up behind him, you snatch the cap from his head and put it on yourself. “Hey, pilot,” you sing as he turns and his face lights up to see you. His hair is still slightly damp from the shower, leaving an indent in those curls from where the cap was.

“Goddamnit, Buck,” he laughs and tries to steal it back, but you dodge out of the way.

“Looks like it’s just us tonight, flyboy,” you sigh as you prop an elbow on his shoulder and look around, finding Benny and his girl making out on the dance floor and Santiago playing with a woman’s hair on the couch.

Frankie has to admit he’s okay with that. “They didn’t tell me they’d be bringing dates,” you grumble. Frankie holds back a chuckle. This was most definitely planned, Wingman Benny embracing his role in forcing the two of you together. Frankie couldn’t say he was too upset about it, in all honesty. “Come on, let’s get you a drink,” you shake your head and grab Frankie by the bicep, trying not to shiver at how muscular his arms are.

In the kitchen, you toy with the hem of his shirt as he mixes himself an old fashioned from the vast cocktail bar. “I love this one,” you murmur absentmindedly, admiring the worn fabric and the ripping seams at the hem. It’s so perfectly Frankie: an old black Fleetwood Mac shirt, nearly falling apart. There are holes in the hems and under the left armpit but it always smells sweet and spicy, just like him, and feels like a security blanket. “Looks good on you.”

“Looks like a piece of shit. I need to just throw it out, but I can’t bring myself to,” he chuckles as he finally takes a sip of his drink. He knows the reason he can’t: you love it too much.

“Good,” you nod and set down your hard seltzer, making yourself a drink.

“What you got there?” he asks as he watches you stir up a concoction.

“Essentially the same as you. Old fashioned but with Fireball instead of regular whiskey.”

“You seem to like the spicy-sweet thing, don’t you?” he teases.

God, if only he knew. “Spicy-sweet, just like someone else I know,” you tease him and nudge your shoulder with his. “Maybe that’s why I like you so much.”

Frankie’s heart does several backflips in a row, complete with a roundoff and a cartwheel. He’d earn the gold in the Olympics, the way his heart tumbles and turns in his chest. “Ha,” he laughs dryly, looking down at his own drink, swishing it and watching the ultra-sweet cherry spin through the dark liquid.

The music gets louder from the other room as you and Frankie drink in silence, both of you leaning against the kitchen counter as the amount of alcohol per cup steadily decreases. “I’m gonna go see if I can find Pope,” Frankie finally speaks over the loudening noise, nodding to the living room where everyone is clustered.

“Sure,” you call back, even though he’s just a few feet from you.

It’s practically a maze, trying to find his way through the people. They’re all moving and bouncing, the sound overwhelming him. It’s like a goddamn mosh pit, he thinks, or how it must feel to be buried inside one. How did this party become something like this, and why the hell is he here? Frankie wanders through, getting turned around as the group moves and sways.

His breathing gets heavier, and suddenly Frankie feels suffocated. His primary objective no longer is finding Pope, it’s getting the fuck out of here before this herd stampedes him to death. He feels pathetic and small, like a single fish in a giant school wandering through an abysmally deep sea.

When the tide loosens its hold, when Frankie sees a path, he takes it out. He’s not sure how long he was trapped in there- 20 seconds, a minute, five minutes, but he’s overwhelmed and his head is spinning, his drink somehow gone and lost in the shuffle.

You see him stumble out, looking terrified, and rush over. “Hey, hey, Frankie,” you murmur as you grab his forearms. “Are you okay? Did you find Pope?” You ask, your thumbs tracing over his pulsing veins.

He shakes his head, and you take it as a no for both. “Okay, come on, did you drive here? Is your truck out there?”

He nods and grabs his keys, putting them in your hand. “Alright, pilot, come on. Let’s get you out of here.” You stick the hat back on his head and hope it could maybe bring a sense of normalcy back to him.

Frankie’s head feels like radio static as you bring him to the truck, unlocking it and sliding in first across the bench seat. He follows in after you and closes the door, and he turns the air conditioning on full-blast, feeling desperately hot.

“Hey, hey. Talk to me,” you beg of him, cupping the side of his face with one hand. You shiver under the quick breeze of the vents, the cold air immediately filling the cab of his truck. “What happened?” You ask, just above a whisper, fingers tracing the stubble of his jaw.

His eyes are getting more normal, less panicked and more sane. He must’ve had some kind of anxiety or PTSD moment in the crowd. “Just… thought I was gonna get crushed,” he murmurs, not looking at you.

“Frankie. Let’s breathe together, okay? Look at me.” His eyes find yours and you smile. “Good. Follow me.”

You ground him nearly instantly, your chilled skin under his hands as he grips your upper arms, your soft lips parting to breathe in and out. The flutter of your eyelashes when you close those beautiful eyes, the one that have such a distinct unique color. He would kiss you right now if he had the courage.

He breathes along with you and is calm enough by the second breath to think rationally again. The wave has passed, leaving his body feeling tired and limp. “I-I’m good,” he assures you, tracing his fingers across your skin. “Bucky, you’re freezing.”

“Frankie,” you give a sad chuckle. “I’m supposed to be calming you, and-“

“I’m super hot, please, take this,” he says as he shucks his flannel and hands it to you. “It would help me,” he says simply, enjoying the way the air conditioning more directly contacts his skin without it on.

“Well, okay,” you laugh and slip it on, breathing in the warm scent that is Frankie and sighing contentedly. “See? I love the sweet and spicy thing, like your cologne.”

He shakes his head and looks away. “Oh, stop. You don’t mean that.”

You frown at him. “Frankie. You’re thinking straight again, right?”

He nods.

“Then how aren’t you processing how in love with you I am?” You ask with a soft laugh, resting your head against his shoulder. “I flirt with you endlessly, and it feels like you never pick up on it. So now I’m just going to say it: I like you, Frankie.”

Biting his lip, Frankie looks down at you with slight confusion. “Really?”

You laugh incredulously, burying your face in his neck. “Yes, Frankie, really. I like you a lot. I have since the moment I met you. And I’d like to think you like me too.”

There’s a beat of silence and he nods, taking one of your hands in his and lacing the fingers together. “I really like you too. I’ve been in love with you since the moment we met, Buck,” he admits, wide brown eyes looking down at you with all of the love in his massive heart. “I just… didn’t want to assume anything. You’re so good to me, but you’re so good to the other guys too.”

“Do I buy the other men bottles of hot honey? Have I ever brought a date around like the other guys do?” You ask, lovingly and hoping he sees your point. “I’ve been pining for you for so long, Morales. I just want you to get it through your thick skull that I care for you and I’ve been in love with you for quite a while.”

“I feel stupid,” he mumbles, ears turning pink at the tips. “It was pretty obvious. You’re right.”

“Hey, you’re not stupid,” you assure him and squeeze his fingers. “I personally think it’s fucking adorable that you didn’t want to assume that. I like that, that you didn’t want to do anything first without knowing the same about you. I like all of you, Frankie, from that scruffy beard to these cozy flannels you always let me borrow.”

His heart melts in his chest, reducing him to a puddle. “Then I guess I should ask if you’d be my girl.”

His girl? If you thought he couldn’t get any cuter, you were wrong. You can’t hold back any longer and you swing your leg across his lap, straddling him in the bench seat of his truck. “Can I kiss you, Frankie?” You ask, gently removing his cap and setting it aside.

“God, yes please,” he practically whines as he cups your face in both of his big hands, kissing you deeply and breathing out heavily through his nose.

It’s the best thing you’ve ever felt, Frankie’s body pressed to yours as your lips meet. You both taste that perfect spicy-sweet flavor, the way that’s so Frankie in your head. This might be the sweetest and softest man alive, you think to yourself, and goddamn, you’re lucky, Bucky.

His body radiates the heat of his love and stress and everything, completely melting into yours. You’re never going to stop doing this now that you’ve started. You’re never going a day without holding Frankie like this.

Your legs are firmly planted on either side of him, and Frankie moves his hands to grip your waist and pull you in closer. Shivering at the way he practically manhandles you, you moan into his lips, murmuring his name breathlessly. It’s like the most perfect melody, the way you say it. He mumbles your name back, your real name. Not Bucky.

Your arms wrap around his neck and you press yourself tight against him, running one hand through the soft curls at the nape of his neck. He tastes like heaven, just as perfect as you’ve dreamed about for as long as you’ve known him. When you break away, you smile softly, admiring the way he’s panting beneath you. His head is tilted back to look at you on top of him, his eyes glazed over and cheeks warmed with pounding blood. You gulp and trace the side of his face with feather-light fingertips, admiring his beauty. “God, Francisco,” you murmur. “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

-

taglist:

@remmysbounty @mishasminion360 @blo0dangel @binarydanvvers  @sleep-tight1 @apascalrascal @randomness501 @spideysimpossiblegirl @notabotiswear @pedro-pastel @sanchosammy @lv7867 @greeneyedblondie44 @hunnambabe @astoryisaloveaffair @emesispo @pedritobalmando @magikfanatic @a-court-of-feysand-and-elorcan @princess76179 @starless-eyes-remain @tacticalsparkles

[belphies-cuhm-sluht]

A continuation on the cheating Lucifer post plzzzz x

Mystic Rhythms (Lucifer x GN!MC)

A/N : I fell up my stairs today and bruised my kneecaps and my forearms when I tried to catch myself... That shit is embarrassing, especially when everyone runs out of their rooms to see you laying there trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. My knees hurt. But, anyway... The title is a song that I was listening to while I wrote this... It doesn't have anything to do with the writing at all, it's just a damn good song. Mystic Rhythms by Rush, highly recommend.

Part 1

Word Count : 2k T/W : cheating ; mentions of cheating ; Lucifer being a flat out dickhole ;

There was no way that you could possibly leave. Lord Diavolo wouldn’t allow it, would he? Of course not. In a matter of days you would emerge from your room, running back through the doors of his office to tell him how much you missed him. He was sure of it, his pride wouldn’t let him think any different. He would go about his days as if nothing happened, because in his mind, nothing happened at all. It was a little bit of fun to take his mind off of the stress that came along with his work, and yes, he could have gone to you for that kind of fun, but he also needed a little bit of change, a little bit of something to keep things interesting. It wasn’t exactly his fault that you happened to catch him having his fun. You shouldn’t have been out of the house anyway, a matter that he would have to handle with his brothers. They should have been watching you, making sure that you didn’t leave the house at all. Surely they know how dangerous the Devildom is outside of the House of Lamentation. It was everyone else’s fault but his own, and he’d stick by that until you and everyone else believed him.

Days passed and the armchair across from his desk began to bother him. It was empty, the entirety of the office was empty. Things were quiet, not a peep from even his brothers who would usually barge in and bother him at any given moment. It used to be annoying, but now it just seemed strange that it wasn’t happening at all. Not only did the lack of his brother's constant interruptions cause him unease, but the lack of you. Was he so used to you being there that the absence was this bothersome to him? It shouldn’t be that way, it shouldn’t bother him at all, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to focus on his work without some sort of distraction. These distractions gave him breaks, they allowed his mind that tiny bit of time to relax, to ease the stress. Now there was nothing, nothing but the work in front of him, and it was, in a sense, almost worse than before you got there at all. Even then, he had his brothers to agitate him. Now it just seemed like they were avoiding him, or doing everything in their power to drive him nuts by not being around. It made no sense to him, none at all. He should be thankful for the silence, for the uninterrupted time that he was being given to finish his tasks at hand, but he wasn’t. His phone vibrated on the desk, and in the complete silence of his office it sounded so loud, loud enough to make him jump back for a moment before fumbling forward to grab it. There was no reason to be like this, his mind was reeling for no particular reason at all, at least that’s what he told himself. He told himself a lot of things, most of them were based on his pride, or they were based on the image of himself that he wanted everyone to believe was real. Much like the whole cheating thing, something that he’d never willingly admit to, he didn’t want anyone to think he was the kind of demon to do such a thing. Not only would it ruin his image, but it would ruin the image of Lord Diavolo who he was around more often than not. A little harmless fun shouldn’t potentially ruin the image of the Future King, should it? There it was again, his subconscious mind speaking what he couldn’t out loud, taking his mind off of the phone that was now in his hand until it vibrated again. He assumed that it was you, prideful assumptions based off of thoughts that held no reason. If he were to be honest with himself, he knew that there was no reason for you to call him at all. If he were to be fully honest with himself, he knew all too well that there was no way for you to call him or message him at all if you had really done what you said you would do. But being honest with himself isn’t something that he’s good at. Being honest with anyone isn’t his best skill. There was no need to be honest when lies are much easier to live with. “You’ve been silent for a while, is everything alright?” The message read, and the name at the top wasn’t one that he’d like to see, but it was one that he knew well. Silence, it was becoming something that he was surrounded by. He wasn’t silent, but the world around him seemed to turn that way. It was penetrable and unbearable, he couldn’t take it for a moment more. With the push of a button and a swipe of his gloved finger, he quickly turned off his phone and placed it back on his desk. They could bear the silence for a little while longer, but he couldn’t. He needed to talk to someone, he needed to talk to you, even if it meant that you were yelling at him, screaming at him for the acts that he committed. His office wasn’t the only room that way empty, the house itself seemed to have been abandoned. There were no sounds of life coming from any of his brother's rooms, and he found it hard to imagine that all of them had a place to be that wasn’t inside these four walls, especially Leviathan. This only had him moving faster down the corridor until he finally reached the door to your room. He didn’t bother with knocking, the sound of his knuckles against the wood would be deafening in the silence. With a quick turn of the doorknob it was pushed open, revealing to him the truth of

the words that you had said when you walked out of his office. You were gone, you had actually left, and whether you had actually gone back up to the human realm or just gone somewhere else in the Devildom, one thing was clear. You didn’t want to be around him, you didn’t even want to be under the same roof as him, and it seemed that his brother’s felt the same way. He was alone, and as pleasant as the thought seemed to him before, now it scared him.

You sat on the bed in your room, looking up at the six demons who refused to let you go alone. They had tried to make you stay in the Devildom, but upon hearing about what Lucifer had done, they completely understood why you’d want to leave, as hard as it was for them. It didn’t change the fact that they cared about you though, far more than anyone you had ever known, and they weren’t going to leave until they knew for a fact that you’d be safe without them. “Is there any way that you can fix her D.D.D so that it’ll work up here?” Satan asked, looking over at Levi who was awkwardly looking around your bedroom. You weren’t sure if his demeanor was based on the fact that he was in someone’s room other than his own, or if it was the fact that he was in your room, but Satan’s question had him stumbling over his words for a second before answering his brother. “I’m… I’m not sure. I-It’s never been done before, I’ve never had to do it… It might take a couple days… J-Just to figure everything out… You know…” He ran his hand through his hair before sitting down on the floor, nervously twirling the drawstrings of his sweatpants around his finger as the motors in his mind seemed to visibly turn. You didn’t want him to overthink it, and you didn’t want him to stress himself out by thinking too hard about it, so you quickly slid off the edge of your bed to sit next to him on the floor, patting his knee and giving him a little smile. “Don’t worry too much about it right now, alright? We’ll figure something out.” Your hand on his knee had his cheeks burning bright red, but he quickly nodded in agreement, and you could almost see the stress leaving him as he finally relaxed. “So, since you all are here… I can order some food to the house for dinner?” It was strange having them all there, well, all but one of them… It was strange, yet comforting. You didn’t want to be alone, not right now, not after everything that happened, so you were grateful for their presence. The mention of food had Beel lighting up, practically dropping to the floor next to you and wrapping his arm around your shoulder. “Dinner and movies? Human world movies? And since Levi said it could take a few days, we can all stay here and sleep in your room, right?” It was impossible to tell him no, he looked so excited at the thought of it, and everyone else in the room had perked up at his words. There was no way that they would all be able to fit in your bed though, and all of them sleeping on the floor didn’t sit right with you. You’d have to figure something out, and it would most likely turn into a shopping trip to buy more blankets and pillows just so they’d be comfortable. The thought of a sleepover, in a sense, was nice though. It would be the perfect way to keep your mind off of everything, for you to relax, laugh, and have some fun with your six favorite demons.

The door knocked just as the six of you settled into the couch, the movie had just been unpaused and everyone was taking the first bites of their pizza slices. Everything had been delivered, there was no reason for the door to knock, so you decided to ignore it, just as all the other brothers did, hoping that whoever it was would take the hint and go away. That wasn’t the case though, and the knock came louder this time, almost like whoever it was was trying to break down your door. “You don’t have to pause it… Maybe it’s the delivery guy… Maybe I forgot something…” You shrugged, pushing yourself up from the couch and walking over to the door. You weren’t expecting anyone, you weren’t expecting anything, and you surely weren’t expecting him. Your stomach dropped when you saw him, his crimson eyes boring into your own. “I see you have quite the party going on here. Shame I wasn’t invited since I am the reason for this gathering, am I not?” It seemed that in that moment, time stood still. The wind that had been rustling the leaves of the trees had suddenly come to a stop, the sounds of the movie behind you had gone silent, even the sound of fabric brushing against itself whenever the brothers shifted on the couch wasn’t heard anymore. Everything had gone still, everything had become eerily quiet, and the only things you could hear was Lucifer’s voice and the sound of your heart beating faster in your chest. “Oh, don’t worry darling. I only had to take care of a few minor details, just to make sure our conversation wasn’t interrupted by my brothers.” His smirk sent shivers down your spine and had your stomach doing flips. This was the last place you expected to see him, but then again, you had told him that you wanted to leave. The only thing was, you didn’t expect him to follow you. It had taken days for you to convince Lord Diavolo to let you go back to the human realm, especially with all the other brothers begging you not to, begging Lord Diavolo not to agree, but he had finally allowed it, and that was the day that Lucifer decided to come to you. It was pathetic, and seeing him made you physically ill, but you had to stay strong just as you had before. “What are you doing here?”

[angelguk]

Omg pleaseee write the jock jk playboy bunny costume idea u had 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼😩😩💗💗

lemme do a quick little thing 4 u :)

featuring: oc and jk being dumb lovers, chayoung  (the female lead from vincenzo) as seed of doubt, anniversaries and a playboy bunny costume. somewhat mature towards the end but only because jk see's sexy gf and cannot help himself.

This is a stupid idea, so incredibly stupid that you're considering jumping out of the bathroom window right now. A four-storey jump may result in various injuries (or potentially death) but it would be a far more welcomed out come than leaving Jeongguk's bathroom in this stupid costume.

You don't know why you bothered to listen to Chayoung's drunken blabbering. The moment you'd mentioned your upcoming one-year anniversary she's launched into a spiel about how young love never lasts, or how the roots for future foreboding break-ups were planted during the first anniversary. Her words sowed a dangerous seed in your head, one that was nurtured by Jeongguk's sudden distance. You could tell he was stressed, weighed down by the daunting options before him. Coach wanted to push him to try for the national leagues, his parents wanted him to take a step back and focus on his degree, and Jeongguk, after one quiet evening at yours, had confessed he didn't know what he wanted at all. It hurt to see him like this, usually such a sure and confident soul suddenly staggering and lost. But what could you do apart from hold his hand as he walked forward and help him up when he fell? There was nothing else you could offer, you knew his parents and their concerns were sensible but those same concerns made Jeongguk wonder if they ever believed in him in the first place.

So maybe that's why you're doing this, in hopes of rekindling a spark you feel dying and taking Jeongguk's mind away from everything that burdened him – just for one night.

It's oddly quiet in his room. You'd scuttled right into the bathroom the moment you'd picked him up from practise, complaining that you needed to shower before you commenced your usual shared evenings. Jeongguk had just nodded, quiet and mulling, his eyes absent. It had made something twist in your gut. The whole entire day, from the moment you woke up to right now Jeongguk had not mentioned one thing about your anniversary – not even a text or a bouquet no matter how subtly you hinted. It hurt, but it was proof Chayoung was right. And perhaps the only think that could fix this ship before it sunk was her stupid, stupid idea.

You can only stare at yourself in brief swift glances, grimacing every time you catch the reflection of those white ears standing at attention on top of your head. The fluffy tail attached to the back of the costume was making your butt itch too. Even with those criticisms you knew deep down that you looked good... Surprisingly so. The body of the costume was black satin, shimmering under the luminescence of the bathroom lights. It fit perfect over each curve and roll, hugging your waist just right. Coupled with a pair of fishnets and the fact that your boobs looked exceptionally great today (perks of ovulating) you were a sight to behold.

So even if Chayoung is irritating as hell you had to give some props to her.

"Y/N?" The knock that follows it startles you, sending you lurching forward hard enough that your hip bangs against the counter-top.

"Y-yes?"

"Are you okay?" He sounds tired through the wood, weathered away despite his concerns.

"Hmm? Yes, I'm good–I'm good. Just give me a sec."

A pause, you hope you locked the door because normally Jeongguk would have barged in not bothering to knock.

"Okay. Hurry up though I'm hungry and I ordered food. It's here and if you don't come out I'll eat it all."

"Already? It's here?" God, how are you going to disrupt Jeongguk's chicken nights with a playboy bunny costume?

He makes a noncommittal noise. "Yep. So hurry, I'll really eat all of this if you don't come out soon."

The handle burns your palm when you finally grip it, tummy swimming like you've chugged a series of vodka shots. Jeongguk should like this, right? He calls you bunny all the time, even Chayoung had noticed it (hence the horrifying costume you were currently donning). So wouldn’t he like it? And it was a cute little anniversary surprise, at least you were doing something unlike Jeongguk.

You take in one deep last breath, heart pounding in your head, before you twist and handle and swing the door open, a forced sneaky smile slipping onto your lips.

It falls right off the moment your eyes land on Jeongguk's bedroom.

Either he's the fucking Flash or you've been camped in the bathroom for too long because somehow he's managed to turn his messy room into a perfect romantic dinner spot. He's got the lights turned on to a low rouge, lit candles scattered around the place (which is a fire hazard but the warmth blossoming in your heart is ignoring that), a couple cushions on the floor flanking a heart shaped picnic basket where you dinner presumably resides. And then you glance down, something bright bursting in your chest when you see the red petals lining your path from the bathroom right to the picnic set up.

His back is turned to you, his phone in hand which he abruptly presses on. A melody fills the room a moment later, the song low and familiar. You know that song, that's your song.

Jeon Jeongguk will be the death of you.

"Now if–fucking hell." Jeongguk turns before you can stop him, the grin on his lips evaporating when his gaze lands on you

Oh. Oh. You wilt in a second, floundering against the bathroom door frame in a attempt to hide you bare (and bunny costume covered) body.

The silence that follows is unbearable, sinking deep into your gut as guilt rises to the surface. Jeongguk planned all of this and all you did was wear a stupid sexy costume.

"I–" You start, but his brain must of started working at the same time as yours because he catches that sentence with his own statement.

"You–" It's coated with disbelief, and your tongue gets caught in your throat when he exhales heavily, head falling into his hand. You watch with a sore heart as his fingers comb through the loose chestnut curls, tugging and yanking at his scalp as if his brain was falling to pieces.

"Jeongguk," you finally murmur, meekly padding forward, the shame you feel eating you inside out. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ruin this. I'll change just give me a second."

His head snaps up when you say that, gaze sharp, almost terrifying as he surveys. "Why should you change?"

"W-what?"

"I said," he rises then, slowly moving forward as if not to startle you, his eyes never straying from your body. "Why should you change?"

"Because I look dumb," you return. "And I ruined your great anniversary surprise with my stupid one."

You only notice it then, how his jaw ticks, his head tilting to the side slow. Like he's holding himself back.

"You think you look dumb?" The question itself is innocent but the tone Jeongguk delivers it in is not. You can feel the words in your throat clumping together the longer he looks at you like that, his doe eyes different – dark and spilling with something that has you quivering, your eyes shifting away.

"Answer my question." A firm but gentle hand on your chin, guiding your gaze back to his.

"Yes." It's silent in his room, the low hum of the song bleeding into the thumping of your heart against your ribs.

"Why would my baby look dumb wearing a bunny costume? Huh? It's fitting actually, since you are my bunny."

"Yeah," you try and lighten it was a small laugh, noting the way Jeongguk is staring at your lips. "But this was dumb anniversary surprise. Yours is much better."

You see it click in his head then, like he wasn't hearing a single word you were saying before.

"You did this for me?" Jeongguk questions, eyes dipping to your chest.

"Obviously, who else would I do this for."

"No–I meant, this, this is for me? This was meant to be a surprise for me?"

"Yes," you repeat. "I'd do anything for you. Now let me take this silly thing off so we can have dinner first." You twist away then, but Jeongguk snatches you right back, your frame colliding with his solid chest, firm massive arms holding you in place. The squeak that erupts from your lips lands into tight air, a sudden tension thrumming in your veins. Jeongguk's hard against your ass, erection grazing the downy tail attached to the base of the costume. There's a palm placed steady around your neck, trapping you against his while his other hand idly explores, sparking little fires along your skin as it journeys from your chest down to your stomach before settling right between your thighs.

There's nothing in your head except how massive he feels behind you, wandering hand gentle but eager a certain roughness appearing when his lithe fingers press through the fabric, toying with your clothed clit. It's a promise for what's to come, judging by the quiet groan that melts into your skin from his throat as his hips buck into you.

"You don't know what you do to me do you?" It's whispered softly, mimicking the ginger kiss he places on your hollow of your throat.

If you could think sensible words you would speak but right now everything is loud and roaring and words feel to heavy for your tongue. So you hum instead, whimpering when his fingertips circle your clit.

You can feel the smile on his lips. Hear it in what he says next.

"I should show you then, shouldn't I?"

[knchins]

Manager’s Special - Seijoh 4

Summary: Being the manager of Seijoh University's boy's volleyball team meant filling their every need. But can you satisfy all four seniors at the same time or will you break trying?

Pairing: Oikawa x Fem!Reader x Iwa x Mattsun x Makki

Rating: E+

Word Count: 5.3k

Warnings:  Degradation/Humiliation, Oral sex (giving/receiving), Vaginal Sex, Anal Sex, Double Penetration, Triple? Penetration (I technically don't view this as triple but some might), Squirting, Vaginal/Anal fingering, Unprotected sex, Gangbang (obvs), Blindfold usage, Spit (just a little), A smidgen of dubcon if you squint, Overstimulation, Mindbreak??, Aftercare, and Oikawa being a total Asshole

Notes: This is completely self indulgent and I don’t apologize for it one bit.

 Since earning the head manager position of Seijoh University’s boys volleyball team, you had learned to keep a tight schedule. It could be very hard work at times, but honestly it was very rewarding and the experience was worth the late nights and early mornings. It was an honored title that many girls strived for year after year. You had been merely an assistant your first two years of college and now, finally, your tenacity had paid off. You were number one and with it you held a whole new set of responsibilities.

 Because while you did the duties of a normal manager, at Aoba Johsai, female managers also held a very...important role. They were in charge of making sure all of the senior players kept their head in the game and stayed at the pique of physical fitness. This meant that you were in charge of making sure all of their needs were met.

 Every. Single. One.

 And you had quickly found that the four seniors you were in charge of satiating this year were particularly hungry for one thing and one thing only. You.

 Oikawa, Iwaizumi, Hanamaki, and Matsukawa all had their own unique interests and tastes. They fought for your affection, sometimes making you feel pulled into four different directions at once. It got so bad that they had to roll die to see who could have you first. There were prime time slots in your schedule, after all, and everyone wanted to be the one to hold it. Weekends were especially cut throat among them and it was finally decided on an even rotation. Oikawa, since he was the captain, got the first weekend. Mattsun was second. Iwaizumi third, and lastly Hanamaki. You never had a moment to yourself it seemed like. The core four took up the entirety of your free time.

 But you knew what the job demands were before you took it. You agreed to this. If only you had known how draining it would be. You couldn’t have imagined the sexual appetites of athletes being this overwhelming. If only there was time to recuperate. Time and time again they worked you to tears. Multiple times a week you’d be left overstimulated and so incredibly full of cum. But none of that could have prepared you for what they had in mind for this particular Saturday.

 Makki was supposed to come over to your apartment alone that evening. You had the scene set the way you knew he liked it. Lights dim with a plethora of candles scattered across the bedroom. There was chilled sparkling water set on the bedside and a new bottle of lube. You had taken time to shower, scrubbing every inch of you clean for him. After drying yourself off, fixing your hair and putting on light natural looking makeup, you stepped into a nice little sheer white baby-doll nightie with nothing but a sea foam green thong underneath.

 After a look-over in your floor length mirror, you smiled with satisfaction. Makki was the gentlest of the four and usually he pampered a little more afterwards. It was the only time you get any semblance of rest. Maybe you could convince him to go easy on you too. Take things slow. He was the easiest to reason with and you had been looking forward to this all week.

 There was a knock at your front door and immediately you were thrown off. Each player had a unique knock to them, and what you just heard wasn’t Makki’s. It was the captain’s. Holding back a groan you padded to the door and looked through the peephole, seeing all four seniors gathered in the hallway.

 Confusion washed over you as you unlocked the door and slowly opened it. Oikawa looked particularly proud of himself, something that had your thighs clenching out of sheer habit. “Oikawa-san? Did something happen?”

 Iwaizumi forced the door open, making you take a step back as all four men walked in, putting down their things in the entryway before Hanamaki closed the door. They deposited their shoes at the doorway before Oikawa gave you some sort of answer. “I hate to do this to you, Cutie, I really do, but there’s something your Captain wants you to do for him.”

 His eyes scoured every inch of your body, making you suddenly feel incredibly self conscious. His tongue swiped over his lips, his facial expression absolutely predatory. Your cunt was already aching at the thought of him pounding into you. “W-What is it?” You asked, crossing your arms over your chest.

 Oikawa began to circle around you as you noticed the others begin to slip off their shirts. You swallowed thickly, unable to look away from the sheer amount of tone muscle present before you now. You began to chew on your bottom lip, the taste of your lip gloss crawling onto your tongue. “We decided that we all want a turn with you tonight.” He said, stopping behind you and putting his hands on your hips. He pulled you back to him and you could feel his half-hard cock rutting into your ass as he leaned to speak in your ear. “They don’t think you can handle it, but I can.”

 He pressed a kiss just under your ear, teeth grazing the skin there as you felt the flimsy fabric of the thong dampen with your arousal. All four of them? At once? Your head span as you tried to conceive it, but the captain’s cock grinding into your ass was almost too distracting. He knew exactly what he was doing and you hated him for it. “I don’t think I- Ah!” He bit at your pulse point and you felt her knees begin to tremble from the sheer anticipation of him being inside you.

 One of his beautiful hands moved to push up the lightweight fabric of the baby-doll, his index finger finding your clit expertly and pressing into you with just the right amount of force that had you keening back against him. “Don’t you want to prove them right, my little manager? What happened to all of that ambition?”

 Three pairs of eyes were devouring you as Oikawa continued to press kisses into your throat. They all looked so starving. So      needy    . Who were you to deny your team? Your body was for their taking, that was what you had wanted since you were a freshman right? And now, with Oikawa’s fingers working over your swelling clit, mouth taking claim to your neck, you have no drive to tell them no. There was no chance of you resisting them. You sank into Oikawa’s hold and he knew instantly that you were admitting defeat. You’d take on all four of them, even if it broke you.

 Oikawa dragged you into the bedroom, his right hand never leaving its spot between your legs. When he finally released you, he pushed you gently onto the bed so that he could take off his shirt. The other three came into the room, Makki had already stepped out of his pants and as in nothing but his socks and boxer briefs.

 You turned onto your back, looking absolutely doe-eyed at the large men before you. Again you kept your legs pressed together, rubbing slightly to try and create some kind of friction that would lighten the ache in your core. Out of the corner of your eye you noticed Iwa pull something out of your top drawer, and again you swallowed as you knew there could only be one thing he’d be looking for in there. The black silk blindfold you kept stashed away.

 “Hajime, please,” You cooed softly, feeling fear bubble in your abdomen at being blinded. He ignored your quiet plea, knowing that there wasn’t nearly enough fight behind it to be an actual revocation of consent. He came closer to you, making it easier for you to see the outline of his erection in his pants as he covered your eyes with the cloth and tied it around the back of your head.

 “Good thinking, Iwa-chan!” Oikawa chirped as he took off his pants. “Let’s play a game then, shall we, Manager-san?” He asked, glancing at the other guys. “If you can guess whose dick is in your pretty little mouth then you can get a reward. How does that sound?”

 His irritating voice did nothing but ignite your desires even further. You were pretty certain you knew each of them well enough by now to be able to tell the difference between the four. Besides, Oikawa always held to his word and rewards with him often meant a very intense orgasm.

 You felt a hand grab you by the shoulder and by the softness of it, you assumed it was Oikawa’s. His hands were always the most meticulously kept out of all of them. He forced you to your knees and your mouth opened as you presented your tongue to whoever was first in line.

 Mattsun decided to take initiative, his cock already out as he stroked it. He stepped up to you, guiding the tip into your warm, beckoning mouth. He clenched his teeth together to keep from making any sort of sound that may give him away. Although, he already had a disadvantage. Mattsun was the biggest lengthwise and second only to Iwa when it came to girth.

 He was unable to stop himself from sliding as much in as he possibly could, his tip rubbing the back of your throat as his hand pressed onto the top of your head. His hips rocked slowly, pulling him out a fraction before rutting back in. You swirled your tongue around him, suckling lightly (though it was enough to finally pull a groan from him). You were about to reach up and grab onto his scrotum when Oikawa stopped you. “No touching, Cutie.” He chided and you put your hand back down.

 After a minute of you attempting to work him over without the help of your hands, he pulled from you completely. Oikawa asked you who it was as you were unable to stop yourself from coughing with newfound freedom. After you had collected yourself, you finally answered him with a small smile. “Issei.” You said happily, knowing you were right.

 “Good job.” Mattsun breathed out as he stroked his length to keep it from going soft. “Maybe that was too easy for you, doll.” You shook your head, trying to deny that it wasn’t easy for you to figure it out. None of them believed you.

 The next cock to enter your mouth was slimmer and you quickly narrowed it down to either Makki or Oikawa. They were almost identical, though there was one difference that would give it away. One of them had a small scar at the base of their penis where they had a shaving accident in high school.

 You greedily took him in, drool spilling over your lips and down your chin as your tongue searched every centimeter for the small white line of tissue. You tried to mask what you were doing by sucking and moaning at the small thrusts, the pubic hair at the base ticking your nose as he forced his tip to your throat. He suddenly pulled out, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself any longer if he didn’t. “Takahiro.” You said before Oikawa could ask.

 Makki let out a small laugh. “I guess you know me too well, huh?” He asked, not expecting you to actually answer. You smiled, reaching up to rid your chin of the spit that had made its way down it. Though you were somewhat positive that it would be replaced very quickly.

 “Alright, princess, so no one gets left out you’ll do Iwa-chan and I at the same time.” Oikawa said and a small frown formed on your lips. There was no way      both     of them would fit inside of your mouth. How were you supposed to do this without your hands?

 Iwa huffed, obviously not wanting to share your mouth with his best friend but nevertheless not objecting to it. They both stepped before you. “Can I at least use my hands this time, Captain?” You asked, head tilted upwards as if you were looking up at them.

 “Yes, you can use your hands this time.” Oikawa said back, placing a delicate hand on top of your head to rub it soothingly. You were doing such a good job for him and he was making note to make sure you knew that next time you were alone together.

 Again you opened your mouth wide. Oikawa nodded to Iwa who gave a shallow thrust into your mouth. Your hand searched up the leg of the person to your left, finding the shaft of his penis and stroking it. The telltale ribbing of a small scar at the base of it. The same scar you had been searching for when you were blowing Hanamaki. Not only that but Iwa’s girth gave him away. Oikawa was slender and pretty, Iwa was thick and veiny. Telling the two apart was almost like night and day.

 You bobbed your head, keeping the same pace with your hand giving them both a moment to enjoy the sensation before switching sides. You kept one hand on the base of each cock, making it easier to switch quickly between the two. When you had finally set what you thought was the perfect rhythm, a steady hand stopped you. “Who is who?” Oikawa asked in a chipper voice, never one to be upset when his dick was getting serviced.

 “Tooru-kun, you’re on the left.” You said, “Hajime is on the right.”

 Oikawa chuckled, “Wow, what a good little manager you are. You know us all so well. Are you ready for your reward?” You nodded your head enthusiastically. “Alright, get up and lay back on the bed we’re going to take good care of you.

 He grabbed your hand, helping you to your feet and guiding you to the bed where you laid down. He wasted no time in reaching up and grabbing the thin elastic of your thing and sliding it down your legs, enjoying the sight of the middle sticking to your slick folds for a moment before pulling free.

 Mattsun took position to your right, Makki your left, and Iwa was hovering over you, grabbing either of your thighs and spreading them. His calloused hands felt like a stark contrast from Oikawa’s, a feeling that made you shiver and clench around nothing. The blindfold was taken from your eyes at once by Makki.

 Tooru lowered his face to your core, giving you a nice slow cat lick up your slit that had you quaking in Iwa’s grasp. Mattsun forced the top of your babydoll down, freeing your breasts from the see-through material. He ran a thumb over your right nipple while Makki began to kiss along the swell of your left breast.

 Your brain was in overdrive at all the different sensations going on. Oikawa’s tongue pressing into your folds, Iwa’s mouth peppering kisses along your thighs as he held them apart. Matsukawa’s fingers massaging your breast firmly while Hanamaki is sucking hickies into your other one. There was just too much going on, you felt like you were going to short circuit already. Every inch of you was quivering with delight.

 Oikawa latched onto your clit like a leech, sucking so roughly that he pulled a loud moan straight from your throat. Your hips bucked, kegels flexing as you nearly creamed then and there. Iwa bit into your thigh, the pain ripping through your leg. You cried out, trying to squirm out of his grasp but it was of no use. He was stronger than you by a long shot and there was no way you could possibly overpower all four of them at once.

 “T-Toru p-p-p-please!” You cried, tears filling your eyes as Mattsun’s mouth replaced his hand. You just needed something, anything, inside you. You didn’t really care what at this point.

 He removed his mouth from you, a lewd popping sound came as a result. He knew exactly what you wanted, a lecherous smile on his wet lips. “You gonna beg me princess?”

 Your reply came in a whimper, Mattsun’s teeth grazed one nipple as Makki was sucking on your other one, tongue swirling as if he were attacking your clit instead. “I-I need yo-you inside.” You pleaded with him, the desperate need to have your pussy filled growing even more. “Your fin-fingers. Ah!” You tossed your head back as Iwa licked at your clit now. It was hard to concentrate on anything, especially getting the words you wanted out.

 Oikawa was extremely proud of the sight before him. Iwa’s sideways position gave him enough room to slip in two fingers into your throbbing cunt, The long, slender digits going in gently and deeply. “My, my, Manager-san. My fingers are waterlogged in this cute pussy of yours. Are you that desperate to get off?”

 You were unable to respond, too busy concentrating on grinding your hips against Hajime’s mouth and his fingers at the same time. Oikawa pulled his fingers out before inserting them back in, they slid with ease due to the amount of slick that had accumulated between your legs. Your eyes were rolling back, body jerking beneath the three boys that were hovering over you. All coherent thoughts were gone as the team captain because to thoroughly fuck you with his fingers, his vice captain’s tongue tracing fast shapes around your sensitive clit. That along with the two mouths on your chest had you crying and cumming in no time at all.

 Oikawa pulled his soaked fingers from you, inserting them into his mouth to clean them off with his tongue. He savored the taste of your cum, giving a small hum of appreciation at both the taste and the sight of you panting and teary-eyed. “Is our little cum dumpster okay? We haven’t even filled you up yet.”

 The sarcasm of his voice and sudden removal of Iwaizumi’s grip had your legs slamming shut, not wanting anyone to see how turned on you still were. How much you still needed them to satisfy you. The slutty desperation making your heart pound even harder within your chest. How much more of this relentless teasing could you take before breaking completely? You had no idea. “Fill...Fill me up, Captain.” You said between heavy breaths, eyes glossy with saline and want.

 He laughed, “Makki, tonight is supposed to be your night. You can choose what order we go in.” At least Oikawa could be fair when it came to his teammates. Too bad he wasn’t when it came to you.

 Hanamaki thought about it for a moment. “We should switch halves. Mattsun and I will fuck her while you two can have her hands and mouth.” He brushed your hair back, a small smile on his face. “I know she can take it.”

 He maneuvered himself so he was laying next to you so you could climb on top of him. Your teeth sank into your lip again as you positioned his tip at your entrance, slowly lowering yourself down. You couldn’t stop the moan from seeping out between your lips in the process of finally feeling completed. Makki pulled you down by your arm so your chest was against his.

 You hadn’t noticed Mattsun get up and grab the bottle of lube. He generously coated two fingers as he got behind you. He watched as Makki’s dick spread your lips apart, his dick disappearing inside of you in slow shallow thrusts. His own cock was throbbing painfully at this point, begging for release.

 Instead of touching himself, he inserted his two fingers into your ass. You let out a hiss of pain, the muscles burning at the sudden stretch. Hanamaki was whispering sweet things into your ear to help distract you, telling you how good you were doing for him. How amazing your soft pussy felt wrapped around him so tightly while Iwa was positioning himself at your head, stroking his cock is a slow languid motion.

 Oikawa had grabbed his phone and was now recording. He enjoyed nothing better than humiliating you by filming you in compromising positions. Most of the nights alone with him involved some sort of video equipment. Despite being hard and dripping precum onto your carpet, he seemed to totally ignore his erection and focus only on getting the perfect shot of you pleasuring his team.

 Mattsun continued to prep your ass, feeling your muscles beginning to relax around him. Makki kept his rhythm light, not wanting to jostle you around too much while his friend was getting you ready. His hands were on your waist, holding you still as you whimpered. He was being so gentle, too gentle. That wasn’t what you wanted. You were craving Mattsun’s brute force, the little whimpers coming from you only proving how ready you were.

 “Don’t leave her waiting, Mattsun.” Oikawa said. “She wants you to fuck her ass, can’t you see how much she needs it? Little cumslut can’t get off to just Makki treating her like a princess”

 Mattsun tutted, removing his fingers so that he could lube up his cock. Again he watched you take in every inch of Hanamaki like such a good little girl. He spit on your ass, letting it slide down your crack as he pressed his tip into your anus. Hanamaki was still as his friend pushed into you, leaving delicate kisses along your jawline.

 He let out a loud groan as his balls came into contact with your perineum. You fluttered around both of them, taking the moment to adjust to having two dicks inside of you instead of just one. And Mattsun was so big you thought he might rip you apart.

 Iwa was growing impatient, he pressed his tip against your lips and your tongue darted out to taste his precum. He grabbed a fistful of your hair as you opened her mouth fully for him. Makki and Mattsun still weren’t moving yet, simply enjoying the feeling of your body heat warming up their cocks.

 You tried to move your hips to feel something, anything. The neediness growing ever wilder within you. Oikawa watched with great delight, enjoying the muffled torture sounds coming from your mouth as you sucked on Iwa’s dick. “You want them to move, sweetheart?” He asked in a sickly sweet voice that was definitely anything but sincere.

 You whined loudly, despite your mouth being full. You attempted to nod your head but it was slight due to not wanting to hurt Iwa by accident though your teeth did graze him and he gave a warning tug on your locks. You looked up at him with an apologetic expression, gargling out a sorry that wasn’t really comprehensible.

 “You heard her, Matsukawa.” Makki said, his once sweet voice going sly. “She wants us to move.”

 Mattsun laughed darkly as he pulled back slowly before jerking his hips forward, roughly slapping into you. Searing heat and pain caused tears to once again spring to your eyes as Hanamaki began to move in sync with him with an almost equal amount of force. It took a moment for them to stop fumbling awkwardly with one another, trying to find a going pace that worked to both of their advantages. Once they found it though, it was nothing but bliss. Both your pussy and ass being fucked simultaneously while your mouth was stuff full had your eyes rolling back and drool slipping down your chin again.

 “Fuck it’s so tight.” Mattsun moaned, smacking your ass with a harsh slap before rubbing the area. “Why have you never let me fuck your ass before? You’ll be lucky if I ever use that used up pussy again.” He growled at you, making the welling tears finally fall down your face. They dripped down onto Makki, though he didn’t mind much at all.

 Iwa was forcing more and more of himself down your throat, gagging and choking you in the process until you could barely breathe. He was taking the liberty to fuck your mouth, allowing you to simply be another hole for his pleasure instead of an active participate in getting him off.

 Oikawa grabbed one of your hands and wrapped it around his dick. He knew you wouldn’t be able to stroke him due to your fucked out state of stupidity. He moved your hand for you, keeping it steady as he bounced his hips against your grip. “I get that ass next.” He said, “Iwa-chan, you can have Makki’s hole. I want her so full of cum that she won’t stop leaking for a week.”

 Makki increased his pace, forcing Mattsun to do so as well. The two dicks rubbing inside of you have a fast knot tightening in your lower abdomen. The thing that finally did you over was Makki reaching between the two of you and teasing your clit with the pads of his fingers. You were screaming around Iwa, eyes shut tight as you came for a second time, both holes spasming around your partners, pulling moans from them as you sucked them in more. It was enough to drive Makki to his peak as well, releasing inside of your cunt while Mattsun thrusted wildly, the sounds of his balls slapping against you was the loudest thing in the room at the moment. It only ceased when he finally came, pumping your ass so full of semen that it seeped out around his base.

 Iwa pulled his dick from your mouth and throat, allowing you to gasp and sob. You were already so incredibly overstimulated, you couldn’t imagine having to go yet another round. But you knew your captain and vice captain wanted to get off too. Oikawa’s dream of making you the sluttiest little cum dumpster in all of Japan was quickly coming true.

 Mattsun pulled out of you, enjoying the view one last time before stepping back and disappearing into the bathroom to clean up. Iwa moved to the side, ready to fuck you senseless again with growing impatience. Makki took one last breath, gave you one last sweet kiss, before slipping out from under you.

 Oikawa handed his phone to Makki so he could continue to film while he positioned himself under you. With Iwa’s help he had you sitting up and turned around so that your back was to him. “I think Mattsun lubed you up enough, Manager-san, don’t you think?” He asked, tip probing your dripping ass before suddenly dipping into you without warning. You cried out, almost not believing just how easily he slid right in. Since he was a bit smaller than Mattsun, it didn’t hurt at all for him to be inside all at once. The former had stretched you out too thoroughly.

 Iwa also wasted zero time in plugging you up, stopping anymore of Makki’s cum from escaping you. You were still crying and shaking, too overstimulated to say anything that made sense. Unlike Mattsun and Makki, they didn’t need time to sync up into a nice rhythm. They both went in hard and fast, almost competing with one another on who could be the most brutal.

 Oikawa’s hands were on your breasts, pulling at your nipples, “What a good girl, taking your captain and vice captain like this.” He said, holding back his own moans as he whispered into your ear. “Our little good luck charm. My cute little slut, you’ll do anything I ask of you won’t you?”

 Your answer was a strangled moan, throat still sore from Iwa’s previous abuse. You could tell Oikawa was struggling not to cum. Whenever he got too excited he had the tendency to lose control.

 Once again Iwa had a bruising grip on your thighs, keeping them nice and spread so he could easily see his handiwork, watching you take his thick cock as if it were nothing. The squelching sounds you were making had you feeling incredibly embarrassed, the way the previous boys’ cum had acted as lubricant for the two new ones. Oikawa and Iwa were pumping in and out effortlessly, working you over once again.

 “Iwa-chan, but your thumb on her clit, I bet she’ll squirt all over us if you do that.” Oikawa said, nipping at your ear as he tugged on your nipples again. Iwa reached down, pressing his thumb against the engorged bud and rubbing in fast tight circles. Your back arched, more sobs erupting as you felt another overwhelmingly powerful orgasm rip through you. You couldn’t stop the release of ejaculate as it squirted out of you, showering all three of you in the process, though Iwa got the brunt of it.

 Oikawa was laughing harshly, “Fuck princess, you’re just so goddamn dirty aren’t you? You like being stuffed like this? Will you ever be satisfied with just one again?” You shook, collapsed on top of him, unable to make any sound or even think straight. Your walls were still fluttering around him, hips jerking in tune with their thrusts. Iwa’s nails dragged across your skin, the pain not even enough to cause you to yelp like you normally would. A few pumps later and he was adding to the mess with his own cum, the warm liquid filling your pussy so beautifully for him as he pulled out.

 “Best for last.” Oikawa hissed, Flipping over so he could ravage you at a whole new angle. You couldn’t even hold yourself up, he had to do it for you as he rammed into you over and over. He wasn’t holding back anymore, hell you didn’t even know he      was     holding back before. He chased his own high, hitting his peak and pumping you full of even more white creamy liquid.

 He pulled out and gently laid your hips down onto the bed. You cried into the sheets, still feeling jerky from your own string of orgasms. It was over? Finally? You couldn’t believe that you had actually survived all four of them at once.

 Oikawa and Iwa began to clean themselves up as Makki put his captain’s phone away and went to pamper you with kisses. He turned you on to your back and spread your legs just enough so he could clean you up the best he could. Parts of the bed were soaked unfortunately, but Mattsun brought a clean towel to lay down over the puddles, moving you so that you were on top of the towel instead of the wetness.

 “Don’t forget, Makki, make sure she’s up tomorrow for practice.” Oikawa said in that sing-song voice of him. “Maybe we can have a round two in the equipment room.”

 You whimpered in protest as Hanamaki held you close to him. “He’s joking, love, don’t worry.” He whispered to you softly, knowing you were too outdone to do it again so soon.

 Iwa punched his shoulder roughly, “leave her alone, asshole.” He said threateningly, coming over to plant a light kiss on your forehead. “If you can’t come tomorrow, don’t stress it.” He said quietly enough that the only other person to hear him was Makki. He straightened up before shooting a glare at Oikawa.

 Oikawa frowned a bit at him before walking over to you. “Good job, princess. I knew you could do it. You made your captain so proud tonight.” He cooed softly, petting your head. “I’ll call you in the morning to check on you.” He placed a kiss identical to Iwa’s onto your forehead. “Makki is going to take good care of you tonight.” He assured before standing up once more. “Let’s go, Iwa-chan. I’m hungry.”

 The two started bickering as they left. Mattsun cleaned up around the room a little more before, wishing you a farewell before leaving. Hanamaki continued to whisper to you about how amazing you were and how thankful he was for letting them do this. He didn’t stop until you finally lost your battle with sleep, cuddled up next to him and clinging to him for safety.

 And the next day you definitely didn’t show up to practice.

Mobile Masterlist || Request Rules

Tag List: @dabi-hates-fish​, @hawksward​, @drxwsyni​

[bubblesuga]

Sleep

“the world is brighter than the sun now that you’re here...” 

Summary: Yoongi has never felt more relaxed than he has while in your arms

W/C: 2,047

Genre: Fluff

Tags: brief mention of ass

A/N: Apparently I’m not done with this soft shit yet. Soft Yoongi kills me.

Yoongi’s feet carry him into the only room he knows will be empty. 

It was moving day and Yoongi was completely unprepared. Sure, he knew that he was basically going to be rebuilding his set up from the bottom to the top, he just didn’t realize that would also include constantly helping Hoseok and Namjoon with theirs as well. Yoongi prides himself on being quite knowledgeable about musical tech but sometimes it’s overwhelming.

He walks quickly, dodging people and ignoring the calls of his name because he knows he’ll get wrapped into helping someone else with some nonsensical tech ‘problem’, taking up even more time and raising his anxiety beyond what he can manage on his own. 

Sticking his master key into the door, he realizes it’s already unlocked. He grits his teeth for a moment and tries to think of another place where he could possibly get some peace and quiet. Unfortunately for him, he hears Jimin calling Yoongi’s name and it’s either entering this room or getting dragged away from his rest. 

The door slowly creaks open and he peeks inside, seeing that it’s dimly lit and quiet. What’s supposed to be a vocal practice room has yet to become so, the shell of a computer laying on the floor and a very tired intern sleeping beside it. 

Yoongi instantly smiles. 

You began working at the company a little less than 3 months ago, and you were learning fast. What would normally take people years to learn, you were consuming in weeks and Yoongi was impressed. You had signed on in an attempt to learn more about producing, which lead you to work with pdogg and Yoongi relatively closely. As a result, Yoongi’s first instinct isn’t to wake you up and tell you off for sleeping on the job. Instead, he lays beside you, mirroring your body. 

Your eyebrows are scrunched and a frown overtakes your lips, showing that you have been just as stressed as Yoongi. He reaches his hand forward to run his thumb along the crease in your brow but stops himself, his hand pulling back quickly. 

It’s definitely not the first time he’s thought about pressing a kiss to your forehead in an attempt to ease your mind. As you were helping pack away the recording equipment near the studio, Yoongi could see the way you blew air out of your mouth and attempted to wipe away your stress with the back of your hand. Then, Yoongi wanted to wrap his arms around you and reassure you that you were doing everything right. 

You stir and Yoongi scoots a little further away, the pout on your lip softening but the crease in your brow just as strong. 

Yoongi has always found you incredibly beautiful, but it baffles him that even in your sleep you somehow manage to look ethereal. 

He debates on waking you, hearing constant footsteps outside the door that caused him to worry that you’ll be caught sleeping-- or that he’ll be caught watching you. 

A sigh leaves his lips and he reaches over, resting a hand on your shoulder and squeezing softly, “____, it’s time to wake up.” 

You stir again, this time opening your eyes briefly. You gasp, jumping at the sight of Yoongi. He chuckles, “Be lucky I was the one who caught you and not someone else.” 

You blink, your heart thudding in your chest loud enough for Yoongi to hear. For a moment he thinks it’s because you’ve seen him, but he remembers that he scared you awake. 

“What are you doing in my nap spot?” You question, a whiny tone to your voice that makes Yoongi’s heart flutter. 

“Arguably, you’re in my nap spot.” Yoongi bites back, trying to hide the way his cheeks turn red when you mirror him again. 

You giggle, “It’s both of our nap spot.” 

“Ah, does that mean you’re going back to sleep?” 

“No,” you shake your head, wiping away the sleep from your eyes, “I have to finish setting up the computer and making sure everything runs correctly.” 

Yoongi sits up, tugging the computer tower to him and plugging in all the wires to the correct input. You open your mouth to protest but Yoongi sends a glance your way and continues setting up. Funnily enough, he doesn’t mind helping you. Rather, he sometimes wonders if that’s what he was searching for in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t peace and quiet he wanted, maybe it was just your presence. 

“Y’know, you can’t keep doing my job for me. I’m going to have to learn some time,” you say after a few moments of watching Yoongi work, “how else am I going to become a badass producer like you?” 

Yoongi smiles shyly at the compliment, reaching backward and scratching behind his ear, a nervous habit he wishes he could get rid of. “I like helping you.” is the only thing he can bring himself to say. 

“Well, you can only help me so much, Mr. Min.” you point a finger in his direction, and Yoongi rolls his eyes as he continues to work. 

He stands up and turns on the tower and the monitor, allowing the computer to boot up and sitting back down beside you. He sits much closer to you than before, and takes notice in the way you don’t make an attempt to move. 

“All done.” he whispers softly, clearing his throat in the process. 

You nod, “Of course I fell asleep just before the easiest part.” 

“Eh, it’s okay,” before Yoongi realizes what he’s doing, he wraps an arm around your shoulder, “you needed the rest. It’s been a long day.” 

Again, you don’t move away from him. Instead, you rest your head on his shoulder and cuddle up closer to him. Something about the atmosphere of the small room makes Yoongi feel bold, and his hand rubs up and down your shoulder. Despite not knowing you for long, you’re the person who he finds the easiest to talk to. 

“It’s been a long day for you as well.” 

“Mhm, which is why I came to nap but you were already in here.” He teasingly reaches forward and pinches your nose, which causes you to push his hand away and clasp it in yours to prevent him from doing it again. Yoongi instantly prays you don’t notice the way his hand shakes in yours, but he realizes you do with the way your thumb moves to stroke his. 

“I’m not stopping you from napping,” she replies, “you can nap all you want.” 

In an oddly bold move, Yoongi grins, “Can I use you as a pillow?” 

You glance up at him, eyebrow raised, “What part of me?” 

Yoongi’s mouth runs dry at your question, opening and closing his mouth repeatedly while he tries to find an answer to your question. You don’t give him the chance, though, as you lay on your back and pull him down with you. 

With a giggle, you pull Yoongi’s head to your chest and softly run your fingers through the section of hair behind his ear. Yoongi wordlessly follows your lead, wrapping his arms around your midriff and trying to calm his breathing. The heat that radiates off your body causes Yoongi to flush, but at the same time he begins to slow his breathing. 

“Comfy?” you question. 

“Y- yes.” he responds, allowing himself to fall solely into you. The way your fingers run through his hair makes him feel like this is where he’s meant to be. It reminds him of the touch of a previous lover, who softly coaxed him to sleep after a night out. Yet, it’s different with you as well. Your nails are longer, they send chills down his spine, and the bare skin that resides in the V cut of your shirt seems to fit his face perfectly. 

With that, Yoongi feels himself drift off to sleep. 

~*~*~

“Should we wake them?” 

“No, they look cute... we can’t disturb that.” 

“They’re sleeping on the job, though. _____ could get in trouble if her manager sees her.” 

“Shh, Yoongi has been wanting this since she started here. Besides, we can overturn any manager here.” 

Yoongi can’t make out the voices that are whispering, and he can’t quite seem to pull himself out of his lull yet. Instead, he’s hyper aware of the way your breathing sounds in his ear, your heart beat softly thudding beneath your chest. 

He feels himself drifting back into the deep sleep he fell into, but a hand rests on his shoulder. 

“Hyung, it’s time to go home.” 

“I said not to wake them!” 

Yoongi is beginning to recognize the voices. Namjoon and Jimin are in the room, and Yoongi feels his nose scrunch. 

“Fuck off.” he murmurs against your chest, snuggling deeper into your soft skin. 

“Come on now, you can’t sleep on the studio floor all night.” Namjoon’s voice is low, and Yoongi feels you begin to move. 

“Are you coming home with us tonight?” Namjoon’s attention is now directed to you, and Yoongi decides it is best to open his eyes now. The same dim lighting greets him and he cranes his neck to see your face. 

You’re eyes are still closed but you open your mouth to speak, “Why would I be coming home with you guys?” 

“Because Yoongi is refusing to let go of you.” Jimin speaks commonsensically, though Yoongi can tell he’s teasing. 

You absentmindedly reach your hand to his hair again, “Shall I go home with you and continue our sleep there?” 

Yoongi nods, his chin against your chest, “I’d love that.” 

As the four of you exit the vocal room, Yoongi guides your sleepy figure into the elevator where you reach the parking garage. Jimin drives, the rest of the members already having left and made their way into their beds. On the drive home, Yoongi doesn’t let go of your hand. 

It’s unspoken, and although you haven’t done anything to confirm it, the two of you are aware of the change in your personal relationship. Something so simple--like falling asleep together, has caused Yoongi’s confidence to grow.

Though sleepiness is still clouding you two, Yoongi opens his mouth to speak for the first time since leaving the office, “Do you like me, _____?” 

You laugh, it’s soft and melodic, “No, I just followed you here to sleep in the big comfy bed.” 

“Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me,” Yoongi jokes, pulling back the duvet and slipping his shirt off his torso, “Here, that shirt and jeans can’t be comfortable to sleep in.” 

You nod, glancing back to the walk in closet. Yoongi nods, “You can change in there.” 

As you shut the closet door, Yoongi slips off his own jeans and slips beneath the covers. He reaches to the side and fluffs the pillow you’ll be using, then folding his arms beneath his head and watching the door for you to come out. 

When you enter into the main room again, Yoongi’s shirt doesn’t hang as low on you as he thought it would. It stops just below your ass, riding up when you bend down to place your folded clothes onto the chair in the corner. 

He tears his eyes away from your ass when you turn around, pulling but the duvet for you to slip beneath. 

You happily hop beside him, “Oh god you’re bed is soft. . .” 

Yoongi chuckles, “You’ll sleep well then.” 

You mirror his position, smiling softly, “I don’t think the bed is what will make me sleep well tonight.” 

He gnaws at his bottom lip, “What do you mean?” 

You don’t respond verbally, instead you lean forward and press a light, warm kiss to Yoongi’s lips. 

Immediately his body ignites in fire, his hand flying up to rest against your cheek. That’s as far as it goes, though, because the kiss is over just as quickly as it started. 

“Goodnight, Yoongi.” You whisper, reaching behind you and turning off the lamp on your side. 

Yoongi grins, feeling his stomach swarm with butterflies. You move to rest your head on his chest, intertwining your legs with his. Yoongi holds you tight, his face alight with joy, “Goodnight.” he whispers back. 

[dreamii-yume]

@shikigamiuwu said :

“Epel’s have a crush to y/n since they meet them and has confessed there love for y/n many times but y/n reject him. So since it was here birthday he thought of confessing again since he has birthday pass, but Y/n reject him again since he has a crush to Vil or Rook (whoever you want) to Epel’s demise, so Epel’s became so frustrated and angry that he just rape y/n and manipulate him on think y/n is not worthy to be with Vil’s so he can have y/n for himself.”

••••••••••

You, my good bitch, have sent like- four big-brained ideas for not only Epel but SILVER BIRTHDAY CRUMBS and I am ascending. Yume does not deserve this, I–

Warnings : Non-Consensual Touching | Non-Con | Yandere

“I like you.”

If it happened to be your first-time hearing Epel say those three words to you in such an affectionate manner, words that are obviously meant to be taken as a confession, it would’ve been enough to put you through a coma because of shock. You’ll be all flustered and probably stutter like a toddler learning how to speak for the first time, trying to figure out if it was a joke or not, despite the obvious signs. I mean...It was a confession from such a beautiful boy after all and you don’t really consider yourself as someone who can reach that level of beauty so, how can you not panic? If it were the first time, you wouldn’t know what to do, what words you should say, or which feelings you should prioritize. You’d be totally lost!

Except…This was no first time.

How many times had this beautiful boy confessed to you over the course of a few months? You weren’t counting, but you do know that you rejected each one of them respectfully and thoroughly. You didn’t why he kept coming back, he’s a lot more persistent than he lets on. “...How many times are you gonna tell me that?” You can answer him as differently as you want, but Epel would only smile at you and say the same thing every time.

“Until you can say that you like me back.”

The first time was as true as it could get, you were flustered, in the state of disbelief, plenty of eye movements going everywhere, grateful but unsure, and nervous sweat formed on your forehead. He loves you in a romantic sense, but even if he was someone precious to you, you just can’t see him as someone more than a really good friend, family even. “...But I keep telling you, I already like someone else.” It was your only excuse; it was a weak reason but at least it wasn’t a lie, Epel should know it more than anyone. It shuts him up, unable to say anything that could counteract your words and at first glance, it looks like a sign of giving up but soon, he’d just shrug it off like you never said anything in the first place.

It was troublesome, Epel wasn’t forcefully pushing his personal ideologies into you but having to tell you something that you already know is tiring to say the least. You wanted to be polite and even appreciate his honesty, but the more times he confesses, the more desensitized you get. Your rejections went from being apologetic to giving out an exasperated sigh and a shake of your head, just wanting to get it over with. It’ll just be the same anyways, the same confession and the same response, there was no point in sugar coating your words at this point.

“I like you.”

Epel might have thought that he’d get the response he wanted if he confesses to you on his birthday, but you could just shake your head in pity. No, you weren’t going to give in to the fact that it’s his special day and feel obligated to reciprocate his feelings because of it. You’d be lying otherwise, and you’re not about to build a relationship out of lies...Seriously, when is he ever going to stop terrorizing you with all these confessions, you’re starting to feel really bad about yourself here.

“Like I said a million times before, Epel.” You narrowed your eyebrows together with a stern and impeccable voice. “I don’t like you that way, I have someone I already like—“

“It’s Vil-san, right?”You widened your eyes as you looked back at Epel, surprised that he gave up a different answer than the usual. He was wearing the same smile as he does before, but up until now, you just can’t stand the fact on how empty it feels.

“H-How did you—“

“It’s obvious. Anyone could easily guess it if they observed you enough...Especially with how you constantly you look at him.” He said, his clear cerulean eyes burning holes into your soul. This made your cheeks flushed, quickly looking down...Do you really act that weird when it comes to Vil? It’s true that he makes your heart flutter and his presence was just something that you can’t turn a blind eye into but...You always thought that you were keeping your feelings cool and low. “What, don’t tell me you’re not aware of it yourself?”

Epel laughed, his hand covering his mouth like a delicate princess. “You’re really funny, charming even when your making such a dumb face too, hehe...” He said with a tinge of adorable red tainted on his flawless skin, rosy cheeks that you could only ever wish in your dream to have. You gulped as he looked back at you, staring straight into your unsettled eyes, making your body tense without knowing the actual reason as to why. “...But that’s only because I really like you that I’m willing to accept any of your bad characteristics. What do you think will I think if I were a normal person? If I were Vil-san?”

Your mouth closed and open multiple times, trying to find the words you want to say. Somehow, you began to piece together what he wanted to say and yet, you couldn’t actually stop him from saying it out loud. You knew it yourself; you didn’t need someone to pressure you into admitting something you already knew. Was Epel this much of a shrewd person before? Regardless, his pink polished lips twisted into a chilling smile.

“I’d think you’re disgusting.”

“You think you’re so smooth, following him around and eavesdropping every time he opens his mouth to talk just to hear his voice. You’re probably the type to steal some stuff from him too, it’s creepy!” Epel said, walking over to you as you kept your head held down, ashamed to be called out like this. “That makes you no different from a crazed fan, a stalker. Vil-san already gets plenty of those, he doesn’t need another one.”

You gasped as Epel grasped your chin, his eyes remaining as dark and cruel as you remembered them before, only that this time, he was no longer smiling. “…That’s why it’s disgusting. That’s not the kind of beauty Vil-san is looking for.” He said as you tried backing away, only for him to keep on stepping forward to stay close to you. “He’ll never acknowledge someone like you.”

You yelped as Epel suddenly pushed your shoulders down, tackling you down to the ground. Grunting, you landed in a not-so gentle manner with his beautiful face hovering above you. “...But I do.” He added, a small smile reappeared in his face, it was more like a pity smile if anything else.

You were getting scared, there was fear in your eyes alone as you try to search for your way out of this situation. Epel has a small structure despite being growing man himself, the different in size between the two of you are barely even noticeable! But with that cold, intimidating gaze, it feels as if you were forced to shrunk down beneath him. “E-Epel—“ Your voice calling out his name only became an encouragement for him to move his hands freely around your body. Even when you widened your eyes as he suddenly lifted up your shirt to expose your chest.

“W-Wait— no!” You can protest all you want, but even struggling against him as a fit resilience did nothing to reach conscience. Your breath was shaking as he merely swayed your flinging arms away, already weakened by your own will, and worked his way into freeing your mounds to be groped. His hand reached the underneath the skirt that you were wearing for his party and wasted no time in reaching for your underwear. Quavering lips turned into gasps of panic as he makes its way down to your erogenous zones, his nimble fingers able to send pleasures down your body. It didn’t take too long before the realization came to you, just how serious this is, that tears began to well up in your eyes.

He took no mind to it though, you plead and beg but you were met with cold, uncaring eyes as you felt a finger sliding in pass your folds. The way you squeaked like a mouse as he bit on your breast too, it was all too insignificant to really reach his ears at all…Looking deeper in the depths of those seemingly gentle eyes, it slowly occurred to you the emotions that he was hiding underneath there. Something that you’ve never noticed until now, or something that you never really bothered to look into, even if it was just for a split second.

All this time, Epel...was angry.

“S-Stop!” As if yelling out in a demanding voice can stop him, it only made him growl in irritation as he thrusted yet another finger inside you. Your willpower was incredibly weak, your stomach was already forming a knot ready to burst out any moment just by his fingers alone. With a scissor-like motion, it’s almost like he knew where to hit you, which places would feel good and would irk you even more, he even dug deeper down your entrance to explore undiscovered places.

An orgasm was inevitable, he was surprisingly skilled with his hands and your body wasn’t able to take all of that pleasure all at once and bursts right then and there. The toll on your body it took had you writhing on the ground, sobbing at the light-headed feeling spreading inside your brain. Epel seemed satisfied though, pulling out his fingers completely to marvel at how soaked you’ve made his fingers to be. “…You’re amazing.” He said, smiling down at you as he began to shuffle in between your legs, not even letting you rest for even a minute. “This is why I like you so much.”

“Please, stop...! W-Why…Why are you doing this…!?”

He leans in, wiping the tears off your cheek as he shook his head stubbornly. “Do you still…not understand?” He said, that chilling smile on his face was making it all the more terrifying for you as he comes and undo his pants. It’s not about whether or not you understood his motive here because you already had way too much time to do that, you were just in a state of disbelief that you’re just…doing anything you can to call off this reality your experiencing at this moment. “I said it over and over again, didn’t I?”

“I like you.”

Epel then chuckled, before shaking his head as if to correct himself from his own wording. “…No, maybe that’s why you couldn't understand.” He said, his smile becoming wider and wider. “Because it’s love.”

“I love you, (Y/N).”