#who am i kidding i will definitely buy more cat ears

[unpretty]

my headphones finally busted so badly due to my being a Fat Head Haver that i can't really wear them, rip my cat ears (2021 - 2023)

now i have to decide if i'm going to buy a new pair of the same headphones, or if i will give in to practicality and buy lighter weight headphones better suited to Fat Head Havers

[dashielldeveron]

soulmate trope | shigaraki tomura

Shigaraki’s route of soulmate trope.

"post-canon shigaraki? canon isn't even finished as of when this was posted on 4 january 2024!"

yeah. thank god. gives us time to write our own endings. and obviously i will be wrong about some things. i recommend you read at least one other route, preferably dabi’s, before reading this one. warnings: female reader. manga spoilers up to around chapter 390-411ish, based on language used by others to describe shigaraki and his trauma. bodily consequences to his trauma (some things are intended to read as AFO having forced an ED on shigaraki, but this is not made definitive). sexual content. stalking. gore (in a game). reader is experiencing a type of gifted kid burnout.

~28k

There’s a hentai book lying on your bed.

You’ve never seen it before.

Flipping through it, you winced at the positions the large-titted, ponytailed woman was manhandled into, and though you were frankly impressed that she managed to wear such intricate lingerie underneath her everyday business attire, the protagonist only just got home from work; let her decompress for, like, ten minutes before railing her against the window, please.

Whom did you know who would read volume four of something called GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK?

Unfortunately, you were burdened with knowledge about your friends’ sexual habits, and some of them, therefore, were already ruled out: Shinsou only read erotica because he preferred his own imagination to any images hentai or live-action could provide, and Monoma only read hentai in which the woman’s eyes had hearts in them to let the reader know she’s enjoying it—not to mention Monoma wouldn’t buy a hard copy of it, let alone a story that didn’t have more plot and character development to it. There wasn’t enough drool for Sero to be interested, and the male protagonist wasn’t enough of a twink for Kaminari to project onto, so whose was this?

Moreover, who the fuck would come all the way back to your old school’s campus to break into your room to leave it on your bed? (Shinsou would be your best bet for that part, but whenever he finished a patrol nowadays, he went directly to sleep, and his and Monoma’s flat was across town.)

You cat, Dango, jumped onto the bed, slithering up next to you and bumping her head on your elbow affectionately.

“Is this yours?” you asked her, and she sniffed the book before climbing into your lap.

You tossed the book aside to pet your cat with both hands, and you resolved not to think about it any longer, even though the cringy way the mangaka depicted the female orgasm was burnt onto your brain.

***

Hopping to put your heel back into a ballet flat, you held the phone between your ear and shoulder while you struggled towards the lift. “I’ve got to cancel on you, Ochaco,” you said, flipping the back of your blazer collar down and adjusting the lapels, “I’m, fuck—I’m not gonna be able to make it this evening, so just go without me.”

Uraraka sighed on her end. “Okay. I know a lot of us were excited to see you after so long—there’s a card Tsu’s made us all to sign, and everything—but we’ll manage. ‘Spose we’ll just have a routine night at the bar and reschedule when you can make it. I miss you,” she said, “and I’m pretty sure I can say the same for everyone.”

The elevator door slid open, and you entered. “All of you are so clingy. I’ve only been away from the agency for around two months, and you know where to find me.” You mashed the button for the ground floor. “In fact, it’s embarrassingly easy to access me.”

“Well, we’re very busy,” said Uraraka, “People are very eager to conscript us for missions, even if they really could be done by the police. U.A. alumni have somehow upticked in their popularity even more since we graduated—”

“Ochaco, I know. I was there. Allow me to weep for your success. I am playing the world’s tiniest violin.” You shifted your bag’s full weight onto your shoulder and exited into the commons. “But listen. I’ve got to go; I’m running late this morning. I couldn’t find my pantyhose even though I laid them out last night, and they weren’t in any of my cat’s usual hiding places. I had to turn my flat upside down and still never found them.” The outside doors slid open when you approached, and the harsh, morning wind upset your hair on impact. “Give everyone my love, O. Tell Todoroki to smile in his next interview.” Eyes darting across your surroundings for any witnesses, you shrank in on yourself and bit the inside of your cheek. “And tell everyone I’m sorry, okay?”

By the time you arrived at U.A.’s administration building, the wind had been joined by a light drizzle that would probably morph into a storm within the hour, a prediction compounded by a plethora of faculty umbrellas in and beside the stand by the sliding doors. The front office was gloriously vacant, though, so you were able to slip behind the front desk without someone rebuking you for being—you shook the computer mouse to wake it up, the clock popping up in the corner—seventeen minutes late.

(You’d graduated with the rest of the class six months ago, and you’d founded the all-girls agency uptown, with most of the women in the graduating class joining to form an instant powerhouse of the industry.

Founding an agency appealed to a good deal of graduates, but you were the only one to go the distance: you were the one to actually make the calls, fill out the paperwork, get aggravating shit done, and by the time to move into the building, it had pleased you to no end that Midoriya had asked you for help on kickstarting his own.

And then two months ago, you’d pulled off, frankly, what was supposed to be an impossible rescue. For the first time, you were getting enormous amounts of attention, from civilians, from press, from other heroes—and you were being followed, never having more than a moment to yourself—always being watched, either from well-wishers or nay-sayers—and sometimes, the analytical critic, eager to point out your faults in the rescue mission to try to drag you out of the hero scene.

You hated yourself for this, but they won.

Too many expectations. All sinking down on you, as if no other hero existed while the light shone in your direction. [And you hated yourself for even daring to consider this—what reprehensible audacity, but—but was this how All Might had felt?]

You’d had something next door to a panic attack when a convenience store, a regular stop in your weekly routine, filmed your reaction to how they’d auctioned off your signed receipt for over nine hundred thousand yen. Breaking their cameras, Shinsou had to escort you out of there in a rush and call Aizawa for help.

Sobbing into Shinsou’s phone on the soggy concrete of a darkened alleyway, you did something you never fathomed you’d ever do, something you could never see any of your friends ever doing, something that seemed as alien and unthinkable as sticking your hand into a pit of needles: you begged Aizawa to get you out of the hero business.

You’ve been handled with care and relocated into a surprising covert secretarial job in the U.A. admin, Nezu’s logic was that you’d adjust to one person needing you at a time, say, over email or at the desk, and if you only answered the phone with only a shortened version of your name, then no intruding civilian would be the wiser.

The job was easy, anyway. Paid well for what it was, but perhaps that was simply standard for U.A. Nowhere nearly as well paying or exciting as working as a hero, but you were adjusting into mundanity. Some days had stretches of hours in which you didn’t interact with anyone, sitting at the front desk without a task, and you even had a few days in which you’d gone in, piddled around at the desk for your whole shift without seeing another soul, and gone home.

Your friends were always so busy. The two times you’ve been able to meet with them contained nothing but conversation about hero work, or else everything was somehow tangentially related to it, and you found yourself unable to contribute to the conversation. Both times, you’d left early, a little overstimulated, leaving Shinsou to make your excuses.

And Shinsou, bless him. Not avoiding you on purpose. In fact, you knew he’d drop almost anything for you to hang out, but you knew his schedule and how little rest he got. So, it was more of a self-imposed boundary on your side, taking into account that he needed sleep more than he needed to spend time with you.

So, yes, some of it was directly your fault, but you were achingly, astonishingly lonely, with an ever-lowering threshold for tolerance of outside stimulation, ultimately feeling like you didn’t belong here.)

Pens aligned. Coaster. Check the school email for—good, no emails. No voicemail. Get out your planner and write your hours in it to look busy. Hey, your water bottle’s nearing empty; maybe you could go fill it or even waste time brewing coffee. But where’s your work mug? You probably left it on the cleaning rack next to the office sink. You should go check.

“Hey,” said Aizawa out of nowhere, ignoring how you jumped out of your own skin, “Good morning. Are you doing a specific job at the moment?”

You gripped the arms of your swivel chair to ground yourself. Is this a test? “I was about to take a moment to make some coffee,” you said, because never let someone in a position of authority know that you were doing jackshit, “Is there something I can help you with, Aizawa-sensei?”

Frowning, he dipped his chin into his capture weapon, still tucked closely to his neck to shield him from the wind, and he shifted his weight to one leg, his fingers tapping in a ripple on the reception desk. “You don’t have to call me that anymore.”

“I’m gonna,” you said, “How can I help?”

Please don’t need anything. Please don’t need anythi—

“Permission has just cleared for me to assign you a long-term task.”

Shit, you thought, internally wincing at how he used the term task and not mission, as if you’d be plunged into the ice-cold water of a panic attack at the word. The kid gloves that everyone handled you with somehow both ingratiated and insulted you.

“You’ll be paid for it,” Aizawa continued, “and it’s low stakes interaction, not even face-to-face. It’s all online.” Aizawa clasped his hands on the desk and hunched over the top of it, the ends of his scarf trailing down onto your keyboard. “You’ll recall moving some boxes into room 310.”

“Of course.” Early in your first month back at U.A., you’d helped clean out and move some boxes into 310 in the same hall that housed Aizawa, Eri, and now you—you’d unofficially dubbed it as U.A.’s drawer to shove social rejects. “Is someone about to move in?”

“He’s been moved in for a while,” said Aizawa, pulling his capture weapon away from his neck, “Keep all of this quiet. You’re allowed to know because I’ve advocated for you, because I trust in you and in your ability to do this well.” Aizawa paused, the silence dragging on much longer than usual. His eyes glazed over, as if considering how to phrase his next proposal.

You waved your hand, prompting him to continue.

His eyes focused again. “The new person is a ward of the school, but All Might and I are his primary—caretakers isn’t quite the right term, and nor is supervisors, so perhaps it’s better to—”

“No, I get it,” you said, “This person is an adult, but they’re not quite independent. Go on.”

Aizawa paused, brow furrowed just slightly as he scrutinised you again, but he nodded slowly after a moment. “I’ll allow him to introduce himself to you. He doesn’t need me to set up expectations. What’s important for you to know, regarding your own participation, is that he’s very new to the hero scene and is receiving his hero training later in life than usual. He won’t be attending class but will be trained personally by select U.A. faculty, mostly All Might, Nezu, and me.”

“Is he officially a student?”

 “On paper.” Something strange passed across Aizawa’s face, but you couldn’t name it. “Where you come in is his socialisation. He’s spent most of his life in disciplinary isolation. Because of the adults raising him, his instincts trend towards distrust and animosity.”

So, Aizawa wanted you spend time with him until he was no longer bad with people, like spending time with feral cats at animal shelters until they’re ready to be adopted. “So, he’s distrustful. Hostile. Angry,” you said, scratching the side of your head, “Is he—do you think he’ll bring up bad stuff I’ve done to use it against me?”

“He doesn’t know who you are, aside from someone trusted by U.A. with hero experience,” said Aizawa, shaking his head, “and you can choose what information you give him.”

“Does he,” you said, sucking in through your teeth, “Does this guy know about how you’re going about this? I think—wouldn’t he be insulted if he knew about how you’re socialising him like an animal?”

Aizawa looked over his shoulder at the empty office, but he bent farther over the desk and spoke softly, anyway. “Recently, when I was training him at night, he expressed that he never knows what to do when someone wants to talk to him after mission, whether it’s successful or not. He froze entirely when a senior citizen thanked him last week, and that’s when we decided something tactile needed to be done. Since he’s grown used to me, you’re the solution.”

Okay. A volatile man, someone who couldn’t go to U.A. at the average age but for whom Aizawa, Nezu, and All Might were making an exception, even going so far as to personally take him out at night to practise hero work.

Hm. Fishy.

But if the good, good men who took care of you wanted you take care of another misplaced person, then you’re going to do it to the best of your ability.

“I hope I can live up to your expectations,” you said, making a note in your planner, “What am I doing?”

“I need you to learn how to play a video game,” said Aizawa, “and I need you to be absolute shit at it.”

***

For you to help some loser with socialisation, he would be teaching you how to play some janky, twenty-five-year-old MMORPG called Cipherstone—and not even the current, polished version of it; you had to sign up for an account on the version preserving the game exactly as it was in 2007. Nostalgia reasons, apparently.

You nudged Dango out aside to check your bedside clock. The discord call would start in five minutes, and you were making your Cipherstone account, completely unable to come up with a suitable username.

“Don’t connect it to your other online accounts or your actual identity,” Aizawa had said that morning.

Dango’s tiny prance across your stomach was not helping, and you couldn’t use Dango in your username, because if someone knew about your cat (and hopefully no one did, because cats were not allowed in the dorms), then a Dango username could be linked back to the real you. You plopped your head back on your pillow, knocking against the headboard. What’s something that couldn’t be traced back to you? Slumping, you let your head fall to the side and sulked.

The hentai book peeked out from underneath a jacket on your dirty clothes chair.

GinsengTea

That username is unavailable.

Well. You couldn’t use your birthdate as added numbers. You kept typing.

GinsengTea69

That username is unavailable.

You’re not about to try Lustful Ballsack. Maybe if you put aside your secretarial propensity for being correct for a moment.

GinzengTea

Username available!

Oh, thank God. You sorted out your password and started customising your character, though you couldn’t do much with the negative six billion pixels you were dealing with, and oh, is that the noise discord makes for a call? You plugged in your earbuds and clicked the answer button.

“Hello?” you asked into the microphone on your earbud cord, narrowing your eyes at his profile picture of a rotund, cartoon mouse. Username Tenkopeito. Looks like he ran into the same spelling trouble you did.

“Greetings and salutations,” he said, his tinny, rasping, just-got-out-of-bed, gruff-from-lack-of-use voice striking you with about fifty psychic damage, “I am Aizawa-sensei’s pupil, here to teach you about the intricacies of Cipherstone. It will be my pleasure—”

“Cut that shit out,” you said, narrowing your eyes at his profile picture: actually, that mouse was so round because it had just swallowed an enormous piece of konpeito whole, with the little star spikes jutting out underneath its fur. “No one talks like that. You sound fake as fuck.”

“I see,” he said after a beat, tone deflating to sound resigned (and though he’d relaxed, it somehow sounded as if talking this way took more effort, like it physically strained his vocal cords). “Am I not supposed to be nice?”

“You weren’t exactly being nice. You were using a customer service voice—which is being polite, not nice. Not even kind. Politeness is usually some sort of put-on affectation of niceness, forced for the situation. I understand if that’s what you think you need to do when you talk to people as a hero, but in hero work, since the stakes are high, you need to be genuine, or at least sound like you are.” Dango crawled across your stomach again, but you lifted her off before she could settle into a loaf on your keyboard. “In the field, it’s often hard to be kind because of how involved you get as a hero; being kind takes effort and drains you emotionally. Kindness implies there’s some sort of reciprocity, some sort of ongoing relationship. You can choose to be kind if you want, but it may wear on you in the long run. What will probably be healthiest for you, on your side, is if you aim to be nice, meaning being honest in a gentle way, framing situations positively but realistically for listeners. The public doesn’t want to be lied to and told everything’s fine, but telling them the harshness of reality doesn’t go over well. Kills morale.”

“Holy shit.” He was scratching something close to his microphone—it must be a fairly good mic, since you could deduce short fingernails against a dry surface. “That’s…a lot.”

“It is. But you can do it. All it takes is practise, and that’s what I’m here for,” you said, moving Dango from your keyboard again, “And I didn’t mean to overwhelm you with all of that; it just came out—I, uh, I happen to know a lot about the way heroes present themselves.” Swallowing thickly, you ran your tongue over your lower lip. “Why don’t we begin with what you were saying before? But in the actual way you talk, please. You need to be comfortable in your own voice.”

His mic picked up the distant noise of slurping through a straw, against what sounded like the bottom of a metal cup, which clinked when he set it back down. “Have you played Cipherstone before?”

“Total newcomer. Though I’ve seen some screenshots in memes.”

“Cool,” he said in a way that was clear it was not cool, “I can’t add you to my in-game friends list until you get off Tutorial Island. Share your screen with me until then.”

All right. You can be bad at this. You can be so bad at this. “What’s a screen?” Not that bad, idiot! “I mean,” you said, fumbling, “How do I share my screen with you?”

The scratching grew louder. “Bottom left. Screen button. Right click. Share option.”

“Ah.” You should probably lure him into thinking you’re competent while there was a literal tutorial onscreen so that he would be more frustrated with you later. “Gotcha.”

For a few seconds after your avatar popped onscreen for the first time, nothing came through but the 8-bit tutorial music. “Is that what you look like in real life?” he finally asked.

“No,” you said, not exactly lying. The character had her hair down in her face (which you wouldn’t normally do when you were on patrol, since it could get in the way of physical hero work), and, hoping to endear yourself to this weirdo, you’d chosen the sluttiest shirt: while none of the horrible pixelated options showed any boob whatsoever, the poor rendering still managed to convey that the top was off-shoulder. Again, not great for hero work. “In real life, I’ve much, much more panache.”

Another silence, during which you assumed he was looking up the word. “So, you click on the screen to go where you want to walk, on either the overall game interface or in the mini-map in the corner. Your destination will show up—”

“Wait, what should I call you, screwboy?”

“—as a red flag,” he said, frown audible, his rasping voice screeching to a stop the way brakes are slowly applied to the wheels of a train. “Not screwboy.”

“I’m not calling you by your handle. Not only is it cringe, but you won’t have to answer to it anywhere else in your life. If you don’t want to give me your name, that’s fine. I could call you by your hero name, if you like; it’d help you get used to answering to it. But no, I’m not calling you your username,” you said, shoulders slacking once Dango finally settled in a ball at your hip, “Especially since you couldn’t even get the correct spelling of Ten Konpeito.”

“It’s—it’s not supposed to say that,” he said, sputtering with a groan coming in at the end, “It’s a play on my name, and including the n makes it harder to say aloud. I think these things through; I have to be aware of my public image and branding now; that’s the whole point of this stupid—my name is Tenko, you asshole.”

“Oh, you’re gonna call civilians asshole?” You clicked your tongue. “Bad. Bad and evil. Speaking from experience, people don’t like that.”

“Just fu—just click on the map.”

“Fine. But you can’t fool me with your medieval, point-and-click game,” you said, clicking to pick up a fishing net, “Incidentally, the oldest known fishing net is the net of Antrea, crafted of willow and dating back to 8300 B.C.”

Tenko paused. “What would be the socially expected response to that?”

Your avatar fished for shrimps. “Oh, usually people yell at me. Get mad for bringing up total non sequiturs. My friend Bakugou is fond of telling me that I’m a collection of those bottle caps with facts printed on the inside.”

“Would…would you like me to get angry? Am I supposed to? I was under the impression I was supposed to curb my anger. To be nice.”

Your inventory filled with shrimps.

“You only need one shrimp,” said Tenko.

“You’ll thank me when we have food later,” you said, continuing to fish for shrimps.

“It’s the tutorial,” he said, frown creeping into his voice, “You won’t keep any resources from it. You should go chop the tree down to light a fire.”

“Well, hell. I want my shrimps.” You clicked away from the fishing spot and onto a tree. “Nothing’s happening.”

Tenko cleared his throat. “You need to talk to the woodcutting tutor first. She’ll give you an axe.”

“I thought this game had magic,” you said, guiding Dango’s head away from blocking the screen, “Can’t I just get logs with magic?”

“No, it’s—you must want me to get angry. As a test.” Scratching. “Magic comes later. Not for getting logs.”

You interpreted that as a sign to make the rest of the tutorial go smoothly. You followed the instructions for a few silent minutes, proving to him that you could read, and when you reached the end of the tutorial, a wizard teleported you to the crossroads of a town centre.

“Ah,” you said, genuinely surprised as other players’ avatars, decked out in what must be high-level gear, dashed past, “I don’t know where I am.”

“You can turn your screen-sharing off now.” Tenko typed on what sounded like a mechanical keyboard. “I’m over here. I’ve got—by the fountain—white hair, all black clothes. I’m not—there you are.”

Dozens of other players were running past the two of you, the only bare, new players in the area. Tenko’s pixelated avatar waved at you. Cheeky bitch. He’s so poorly animated and so very 2007 that it gave no indication what he could look like in real life. But he’s chosen to have a black t-shirt as his default, so he has to be a slut.

You resisted the urge to ask to feel his pixelated bicep. “You don’t have any equipment. I thought you’ve played Cipherstone before?”

“My main account is max-ed out. I started a new account to grow at the same rate as you. Before anything else, notice where we are,” said Tenko, “We’re in the centre of the city of Renfield. Get familiar with it. Think of it as home. It’s where you’ll always come back to when you get lost.”

It’s a barely animated town centre, with a short path up the stairs to a castle door and a few market stalls split between fountains.

“I have no idea what that means, Tenko.”

“It means that—that,” Tenko said, and stopped.

You couldn’t stop grinning, biting at your lower lip to keep from laughing—he’d let out a flustered huff, sounding a little strangled, because you’d said his name for the first time—and, judging by how long this delicious silence was dragging on, Tenko was probably his given name, not the family name. Beautiful, really, that a guy his age (however old he was, but he’s at least the same as you, since he couldn’t attend U.A. at the usual time) could get this nervous over a woman calling him by his name.

Tenko recovered in a way that showed he didn’t: “It means that you are always able to cast one spell, regardless of magic level,” he said in a rush, “It is a homing spell that teleports you back to this spot, so even if you get lost, you can always get back to Renfield. You can teleport other ways, too, but that’s for another time, and I need a cup of coffee.” He inhaled sharply.

It's only the first day, so you should go easy on him. Let his moment of awkwardness go.

However, Aizawa gave you a mission.

Excuse you, a task.

“Do you plan on getting flustered every time a civilian calls you by name?” you asked, petting between Dango’s ears, “Or are you planning on avoiding as much publicity as possible by being an underground hero like Aizawa?”

“I don’t—they’re not going to—it’s different with you. I can already tell,” said Tenko (you froze, fingers curled into Dango’s fur), “because I’m going to have some sort of working relationship with you. I assume you’re here to stay.”

Putting it that way made your heartbeat throb around your ears. You decided you could ask directly. “Tenko’s your first name, then?”

“Yeah.” He must have covered his hand with his mouth, muffling his voice at first. “But people usually—people have been calling me something else.”

“Then I can call you something else, if you like,” you said, getting back to petting Dango behind her ears and resolving to treat him with the same tenderness—he must need it, since no one in his life knows him well enough to call him by his given name.

“No, I think you should,” he said a bit too quickly, “Call me that. Tenko. I’m tired of that other stuff. Click on something to keep from logging out, by the way. There’s a timer.” Mechanical typing noises. “No, Aizawa-sensei wants me to be better. Of all things, I need to learn to respond to my real name.”

You squinted at your screen, as if the methodical rise and fall of his avatar’s chest could betray how he was feeling. Something had to have happened to this guy to make him feel this way about such a basic part of his identity, to make other people avoid his real name so universally. Aizawa couldn’t’ve have assigned you this task just to socialise him; something else was unfolding here. How did you enter the equation? If you’re supposed to guide someone who’s also lost their direction in life, you’re a hell of a bad candidate.

But what if you fuck up Aizawa’s plan, whatever it was?

Your recent history is riddled with things going downhill. What if you somehow screwed over Tenko? You’d be dragging someone else down with you, down to…the beginning again, a humiliating re-start, back at your fucking school, when the rest of your friends were out living the dream you’d all crafted together, the dream that apparently could go on without you in it.

Well. Enough of that. Distract yourself. Distract Tenko, too. “Got it. I want a hat.”

“What?”

“I want a hat,” you said, clicking the space around the fountain for your avatar to walk, “My head is cold. How do we get a hat? Hats. You should get one, too.”

“Hats. Very well,” said Tenko, clicking to face you across the shitty fountain, “Do you want one that’s purely decorative or one that has some sort of stats? Decorative ones we can get within a minute, with good RNG, by killing goblins across the bridge. There’s a low chance we could get a low-tier wizard’s hat doing that, too.”

“Then it will be a pleasure killing goblins with you, Tenko.”

“Mm,” he said at the back of his throat, “First, we’ll need to obtain some sort of weapons, since bare-handed punching them will take forever. We could either talk to the melee tutor to get a temporary sword or start wi—actually, we should talk to the melee tutor. Melee will probably be the easiest fighting style for you right now, and it’ll be the simplest, since you won’t have to worry about running out of ammunition or runes.”

“Sure,” you said, leaning back in bed, “Do we go starboard or port?”

“You can just call them east and west, y’know. And we go north.”

To be obstinate, you clicked the opposite direction that Tenkopeito was going, and the moment you ran offscreen, Tenko spoke in a low, grumbling voice into his microphone. “No, don’t run away from me. Come back here.”

The rumble in his voice shot warmth straight to your lower stomach, the nature of the encounter between the two of you changing in a second. Your avatar kept running to her destination, your hand frozen and hovering above the tracking pad. You blinked, your throat drying. Snapping back into it, you ran back to Tenko, who seemed unaware of what he just did to you—and he almost negated your arousal in the way he kept talking about sword upgrades and something called RNG.

Uh.

“—now, it’ll take about ten minutes, but it’ll seem like two hours of hard labour. Follow me across the bridge. Follow—there’s a follow mechanic, if you’ll right-click on me.”

Oh, you’ll right-click him, all right. You needed to know more about Tenko—why you’ve been paired off, what Aizawa’s planning for him, what—a tinge of shame soured at the back of your tongue, because what currently gripped you were minutiae: more about him, what he looks like, what he likes, what he does for fun, if you’re…the sort of person he’d get along with in real life, if you hadn’t been forced together.

God, get over yourself. You spend two months away from men your age, and now, you’re thirsting over someone you don’t even know because he said one hot thing. You needed to be socialised—no, stop. This isn’t about you. Stop thinking about what his hands would feel like on you, what he’d sound like grunting into your ear as he ground against you—

“You’ve been quiet for a minute,” said Tenko, slashing the first goblin, “Are you all right?”

A very heroic question when you haven’t been thinking too heroically. The thought of his voice muttering against your neck still grasped you tightly. “I’m having—technical difficulties.”

***

Poking your head outside of your dorm/apartment door, you scanned the hallway for witnesses. You gripped the handle of Dango’s carrier, still hidden behind the door inside your dorm, and you nodded back at her when she meowed at you.

“I know, baby,” you said, listening for footsteps, “We’ll be outside soon enough. Gotta check for people, though.”

Okay, nothing coming. You shifted Dango’s carrier out of your dorm and pulled out your key, sticking it in the lock at the same time as a door opened down the hall.

Too fast—you had to prod her carrier back inside, your foot stuck in the crack between wall and door, just as—as Midoriya strode down the hall. Keys jangling. Civilian clothes (a Froppy hoodie, in fact).

“Oh, hello!” Midoriya only seemed to notice you once you were struggling to close the door despite the carrier being the way, and hopefully you thrust it fully inside swiftly enough for him not to catch the flash of burgundy. He trotted up to you, hands in the pockets of his worn cargo pants. “I didn’t think you’d be around. Do you not have work today?”

Dango meowed mournfully through the door, and you stepped in front of it. “It’s my lunch break. I’m going for a walk.”

Midoriya nodded, and he glanced over his shoulder back to the room he’d left. “Gotcha, gotcha. Good weather for it, especially after that storm earlier this week.” easy smile stretched across his face as he faced you again, but his gaze weighed down on you, as if the number one hero’s attention magnified your failures in comparison to his rise to the top—and the fact that he didn’t mean to pressure you only exacerbated the feeling.

“Uh,” you said, stuffing your keys in your backpack and setting it on the ground, as if you’re not waiting to go back inside, “May I ask what you’re doing here? Don’t you have better—aren’t you busy?”

Chuckling, Midoriya scratched the back of his neck (and oh, in that laughter, he was hiding something). “I make time. I’m just visiting,” he said, jerking his head back towards the end of the hall, “A friend. I want to take care to see him regularly. I didn’t know you lived on the same hall.”

“If you can call it living,” you said, and for some reason, Midoriya frowned, took a step closer to you, and said your name under his breath, eyes fucking wide and too damn concerned for your comfort. Fuck, you only meant to make a self-depredating joke, not make the situation serious. 

“You—you know that you can reach out to us. I mean that. If you’re scared you’re gonna burden any of us—”

You’d squatted down to go through your bag, just to have something to do, to have an excuse to not look him in the eyes. If you were going to cry—which you were not!—then the number one hero’s not going to get to witness it.

“—then reach out to me, at least. I’ve got time, or else I can make it.” Midoriya was kneeling next to you, and you kept your eyes on the inside of your backpack. “If it makes you feel less like you’re bothering any of us, I could check in with you when I come see my friend. I’d already be on campus. I wouldn’t be going out of my way.” He sighed to fill the space when you didn’t answer. “What are you looking for?”

“I can’t find my planner,” you invented, and, acting like you were upset, you zipped your backpack again. “I think I need to go back inside to locate it.”

He shifted his jaw, and he glanced down at your bag and back at you. “Come with me to the vending machines, at least?”

The new symbol of peace, asking to spend time with you. You didn’t deserve it, so you shook your head. “I don’t have much time left in my break. I think I’d better let you go.”

Shifting his jaw, Midoriya tilted his head at you, his eyes glinting. “All right,” he said slowly, “You know yourself better than anyone else. Do what you need to. Rest up.” He started walking backwards towards the stairs. “And I want to see you more—we all do. I’ll see you the next time I come around. Maybe the three of us could hang out?”

“Sure,” you said, shoving your key in the lock to let a thrashing Dango out of her misery.

***

“The church. It’s the one with the altar icon in the minimap.”

You clicked enough so that your avatar would backtrack. “How am I supposed to know that’s the church? Is that icon supposed to be an altar? It looks nothing like an altar. It looks more like a steaming cup of tea.”

“That’s fair,” said Tenko into his headset, “but this is the easiest quest in the game. How are you having this much trouble with it?”

“Oh, stop that,” you said, reaching his character in front of the priest, “It’s intuitive to you because you’ve been playing this for years. Do we kill this guy?”

“What? No. He’s going to give us each the key to a dungeon underneath the church.”

“How can he give us both a key if there’s only one?” You clicked through the dialogue with the priest, and a key appeared in your inventory. “Also, how accurate is this dungeon? Because if this is a broadly medieval game, then the dungeons will be closer to underground bathrooms rather than, like, creepy and wet with shackles and bones. That was popularised by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.”

“How the hell do you know that,” Tenko asked flatly, “Ne—never mind. It doesn’t matter. Follow me to the trapdoor outside.”

You did, and it was locked. “Are we allowed to do this?” you asked, clicking on the key and then the lock, “Will we get arrested for trespassing?”

“Wha—no. No, we’re supposed to in order to progress the quest. In fact, our characters do a frankly criminal amount of breaking and entering throughout the game and never get checked for it. Hey, don’t go down there without me.”

Your character had only just gone down the trapdoor, prompting a blackout loading screen, but you popped back up to the surface before you could get a good look around. Your character stood next to Tenko’s, still next to the trapdoor. “What’s the holdup? I thought the only step was to use the key on the door. Did I skip something?”

“No, I—huh,” said Tenko, cutting himself off with a tinge of frustration creeping into his voice, “I lost the key.”

Raising a brow, you tilted your head. “What? How’d you lose it?”

“I don’t know. It was in my inventory one minute, and now it’s not. I didn’t touch it.” His mic picked up light scratching. “You’re not supposed to be able to lose the key, but I guess I can go back to the priest to get another. You wait—”

“Hold up,” you said, brow furrowed, “I have it. It’s in my inventory.”

“The hell? Are you sure it’s not just your own key?”

“Positive. I have two of them now. Same key, right next to each other. Want me to share my screen?”

“No, I—I believe you.” Tenko took a moment. “I’m not familiar with this sort of glitch, where an item from one player’s inventory randomly transfers to another’s. This doesn’t even happen, in my experience, but maybe it’s because this is one of the earliest quests coded into the game. It’s twenty-five-year-old code at this point, and it might have glitched because we’re both trying to perform the same quest actions on the same game tick.”

“Sure,” you said, “So, what do I do? Do I drop the key for you to pick up, or?”

“It disappears if you drop it. Trade me. Right-click, trade option.”

Once the key was traded, the two of you went down the trapdoor and wove your way back into the underground headquarters of a low-level cult, vacant for the moment but with evidence of rituals on the walls and floors, particularly in front of their bloodstained altar.

“Okay, we’re in their headquarters,” you said, making your character walk up the aisle, “What now? Priest guy didn’t give us any instructions.”

His avatar followed you and sat on the only programmed-to-be-sittable seat in the pew, his black cape (that he stole from a highwayman’s corpse) folding under his legs. “Actually, he did. You just clicked through his dialogue.”

“Because you’re here to tell me what to do, Quest Man.”

“Click on the—” Tenko heaved an enormous sigh, microphone sparking. “You figure it out. What’s clickable in this room? What has examine text?”

You hovered your mouse over most of the room, and nothing popped up with the examine option, except for something on the altar. “It’s this weird-looking, severed hand, isn’t it? This thing standing up on a slice of wrist by itself?” Your character walked nearer to it, fingers splayed widely enough to hold an in-game apple. “Weirdest ring-holder I’ve ever seen.”

When Tenko didn’t say anything, you glanced towards his character, but he was still sitting on the pew.

“Is this whole quest a pun? Because it’s one of the easiest quests, so they’re giving us a lot of guidance, so it’s like they’re holding our hands to get it through?”

That broke his silence: he scoffed into the mic. “I doubt it,” he said, “You need to grab the hand for the quest to keep going.”

“Fine,” you said, clicking the hand, and the instant your avatar touched it, a zombie spawned from the altar and began to attack you. “Dude! Did you know that thing was gonna jump me?” you asked, clicking away a few spaces but turning around to stab at it with your stupid bronze dagger, “And you just sat there? You could’ve warned me.”

“I did, and the priest did, and the duke who gave us this quest did. That’s why we went and baked all those pies in your inventory, yeah? For you to eat during this fight?”

Your character kept missing hits. “Yeah, but—like! I didn’t know the fight would be now.”

“Hey, relax.” Tenko’s voice sounded muffled, like his mouth was smushed as his fist dug into his cheek. “It’s only a level 12, and you’re level 9. Not too big of a difference. With your armour and weapon, you out-level it.”

The miss sound effect spoke for itself.

“You’ll kill it eventually. You won’t always hit zeroes, so it’ll pass.”

Though your character dealt her first damage, you frowned. “That’s…that’s actually really good advice, Tenko. The stuff you just said would work well if you were trying to calm someone down—reminding people of reality and emphasising perseverance over luck or natural talent are some of the better ways to encourage people.”

“Is that so,” he asked flatly, trying to put off a yawn and failing, “I haven’t—I wasn’t thinking about hero work. Just thinking about the game.”

“Well, it was nice,” you said, “and it seemed like it came naturally. Mind if I ask if something caused it?”

He yawned again, but he must have leant away from the mic so that you wouldn’t hear anything besides the initial inhale. “Nothing special happened today, but I’m too tired to get irritated. Therapy took a lot out of me today.”

Therapy. Therapy. Okay, so he’s got an official diagnosis somewhere. The word today implies that it’s a regular thing, and for some reason, this session was more intense. Intense emotionally? Physically? What kind of therapy? Well, they offered cognitive behavioural therapy on campus, but considering his non-traditional student status, his might be outsourced. Plus, if you, a former hero but technically a civilian, are being implemented into his care plan without being informed directly—

“You usually don’t go this long without saying some inane non sequitur,” said Tenko, that same, strange scratching picking up on the mic, “Snap out of it. You’re gonna get killed by the easiest quest boss in the game.”

Making an undignified noise, you shook yourself and spam-clicked on a cherry pie for your character to eat until she was healed completely, and then you clicked on the zombie to attack again.

“Why’d you pause when I said therapy? Surprised I’d go? Think that sort of thing is below me?”

“Of course not,” you said, trying to seem like you were focused on the fight so that he wouldn’t get nervous about sharing personal information, “Therapy good. Therapy great. Everyone needs to go to therapy.” Since he appeared to be taking this casually, you could probably ask after the type without it seeming too intrusive. “What kind? CBT? That’s what—”

“You think U.A. would arrange for me to get my cock and balls tortured? That wouldn’t qualify as therapy for me, certainly, and there’s no way that U.A. would pay for—”

“Not fucking cock-and-ball torture, you muppet; cognitive behavioural therapy. The sitting-down-with-therapist-to-talk-about-your-trauma-and-restructuring-the-way-you-think-through-practise type. You fuckin’ pervert,” you said, grinning at his avatar onscreen.

“Good to know. I didn’t know the name for it.”

“It’s good that you made this mistake with me instead of with Aizawa-sensei.”

“He’s probably more inclined towards bondage. Congratulations on killing your first boss,” said Tenko, and you blinked in surprise at your character: you’d defeated the zombie while staring at him. It fell to the ground, dropping bones and some sort of arrows.

“Take those. Check to see if they’re iron or steel. All right, equip them in your ammo slot for now so that they don’t take up an inventory space.”

You did so. “Why didn’t it attack me with the arrows if it were holding them?”

“There’s no logic to it besides that arrows are on its drop table. It’s coded to attack by punching you in the face, which doesn’t involve arrows.”

“Sure. Now, let’s get out of the cult basement; I wanna bake more pies until we can make apple ones. Did you know that the first record of fruit pies was around 1600? That means these fruit pies are anachronistic, since this game pitches itself as medieval.”

“Is that…” The hesitance had you beaming, daring him to actually ask it. “Is that not medieval?”

“Tenko, get your head out of your ass. For reference, 1600 is arguably the year the Azuchi-Momoyama period ended and the Edo period began. The game frames itself as medieval European, and 1600 is hard Renaissance-slash-Early-Modern. That’s Shakespeare times, screwboy.”

Only silence on your headphones. Character still on the pew. You made your character walk over to his to perform the curtsy emote, and in real life, you frowned. “Did I go too far there? Bit too annoying? I’m really sorry if I’m bothering you with this sort of thing; my friends say that I—”

“Nothing’s wrong. I needed a moment,” came Tenko’s voice, quiet and steady, “I could hear you smiling, and it was—it was good.”

Inhaling sharply, you pressed a fist to your mouth. Great. Fucking fabulous. Goddammit, you hadn’t aimed for it to go this way, but were you now the one getting flustered at something as simple as—

“Do most people consider a long pause in conversation rude? Did I fuck up with that?”

“No! No, of course not,” you were saying, trying to recover but still startled at how he was able to flip the vibe of your conversations in so few words, words that seemed so casual to him but grabbed you by the throat/cunt, “Especially since you followed-up with a check-in of how it might be strange; a lot of times, people will be comforted by checking to see if something’s okay with them personally…”

Frowning, you trailed off when another avatar entered the cult’s sanctuary and strode up the aisle. You hovered over the new guy’s stupid frog mask to see his username was Venomothman.

“Fucking great,” grumbled Tenko, “Here comes someone else to break our immersion. Ignore him. I’ll go ahead and fight the zombie so that we can get out of here.”

“The zombie’s dead. You don’t have to fight him,” you said, as Venomothman sat directly on top of Tenkopeito, with both avatars glitching as they took up the same space on the pew.

Tenko made some sort of noise in the back of his throat. “No, I have to kill it, too. It’s like each of us is the only one doing the quest, so in your version, the evil has been defeated, but in my version—it’s this thing called an instance—”

Venomothman: wow a couple questing together

Venomothman: bet ur one guy on two accounts

Venomothman: roleplaying that he can get a gf

The new guy’s in-text chat appeared in yellow font above his avatar’s frog-faced head, and somehow, the boggly, green eyes made his words more irritating.

Venomothman: leave the basement sometimes ya incel

“Some people are assholes recreationally,” said Tenko, making his avatar stand to go to the altar as the clatter of mechanical typing came through the mic, “Let me get rid of this fucking scumba—wait.”

 Venomothman: ur doing too much work to stare at pixelated ass

“Would it be correct for a hero to insult someone online?”

You shrugged, even though he couldn’t see it. “Eh. You’re not on duty, and you’re not under any persona connected with your public branding. I would say go for it, but since you’re trying to be better with people, you may want to practise.”

Venomothman: somehow this is even more pathetic than never knowing the touch of a woman at all

“Then I’ll shut him down. The shit-talking isn’t bothering me so much as his breaking our immersion in the game,” said Tenko, grabbing the hand on the altar to start his instance of the fight, “I’m trying to cultivate a particular experience for you, and he’s a fucker who won’t stop yapping. Give me a second.”

Venomothman: is this what does it for you??

Venomothman: why no response

Venomothman: hard to type with one hand, isn’t it, ******* shithead

You laughed through your nose. “Cipherstone censors the word fuck?”

“It censors fuck; it censors cunt,” said Tenko, avatar casting a weak air spell at the zombie, slowly, slowly draining its health, “Everything else is fair game.”

“Will it censor variations of cunt? Like, if I typed in cuntbag? Or—actually, let’s find that out later,” you said, tapping the buttons on your earbud cord to turn up the volume, “Let’s practise navigating difficult social interactions. What’s our goal here in this conversation? Is it to continue to engage?”

“No.” His spell missed, and the zombie landed a hit on his character, prompting him to eat half of a pie. “It’s to close the interaction. Therefore, I need to say something concise that invites no response, right? I’m assuming that a simple fuck off is unacceptable.”

“You’re getting better at this, y’know?”

“Is that condescension I detect?”

“Only a little.” You slumped back against your headboard and reached for the bottle of water on your bedside table. “Actually—no. No condescension. Genuinely, Tenko, you’re picking up on this stuff easily, and it’s impressive. You’ll be able to walk little old ladies across the street with style and flair in no time.” 

“Hilarious,” he said, voice restrained and tight at the mention of his name (too easy—he gives himself away aurally so freely; who knows what you could read off of him when you had a visual?), “I’m sure no one wants me touching them. Can I—hm.” He sounded like he was pressing his fist against his face somehow. “Why you keep bothering to compliment me? Most people bitch down to me like I’ve spat my own cum in their coffee.”

“Wha—how about because you deserve to be complimented? Listen,” you said, electing to brush over his vivid simile, “Silent admiration rots. By keeping in appreciation or gratitude, you’re not doing anyone any good. Kind regards are meant to be shared. Like, now, if I held back any positive thoughts concerning your growth, then you might not feel encouraged to keep going.”

“Like I’m gonna go around fucking complimenting ev—”

“I’m not saying you have to,” you said, “but consider trying it more often. See if anything turns out better. And be sure to be sincere about it—obviously.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Just consider it. So. What has he told us about himself based on how he’s insulted you?”

“He’s so low-level that it looks like he just created his account. His stats are even lower than ours,” said Tenko, speaking more quickly now that it was a subject he was more comfortable with, unequipping his wand to punch the zombie instead, “But he’s gone out of his way to get the frog mask.”

“His words, Tenko,” you said, unscrewing the cap and doing your fucking darndest to pinch your mouth from smiling at his slight hitch when you said his name, “I’m trying to get you to notice on whom he looks down and what that means for his personal social status.”

“Right,” he said a bit too quickly, a bit of a break in his voice on the word, “He’s debasing me for—oh, you’re brilliant. How the hell do you notice these things? He’s using basement dweller as insult, meaning he considers himself above that. Leave it to me.”

You muted yourself briefly to glug down water; you didn’t know how sensitive the mic was on your earbuds, but considering that you could catch onto Tenko’s occasional rustling of what sounded like plastic bags on his side or typing on his mechanical keyboard, as he was right now, you would prefer not to be emitting the same.

Tenkopeito: Your mom wishes you would come out of your room to talk with the rest of the family more often

You spluttered into your water bottle as the yellow text appeared above his head, and you unmuted yourself. “That is not what I meant for you to—”

“Was I being mean?” The mic caught the creak of Tenko’s chair as he leant back in it, and you could picture him defensive and pouting as he crossed his arms (and it struck you that you couldn’t imagine his face. Grimacing, you bit the inside of your cheek). “I wasn’t being rude. I could be so much crueller, but I thought this would be more of a devastating blow. Living on the same floor as your family isn’t the same as living in the basement, so I’m acknowledging his level of social power while still demeaning—”

Venomothman: i mean you right

Venomothman: lmao how tf did you know it was me

“I think we should log out,” you said, wiping the water off of your chin with the back of your hand and setting the bottle back on the bedside table.

Over Tenko’s microphone, you heard the shrill pitch of a custom ringtone and a startled but violent shuffle at the noise. “Hold on. I’m getting a call,” he said, voice coming through at a distance, as if he’d knocked his mic aside.

“Oh? Who is it?”

It took him a minute, but Tenko eventually replied, “A friend.”

That must be a damn good microphone, because you could still pick up on Tenko’s side of the conversation a few feet away. “Yes, hello?” he asked, a bit more brusquely than you’d heard him before.

“Oh. I didn’t,” he was saying, “How was I supposed to know that you’d—yes, that’s her. The one working with Aizawa-sensei.”

Very nice, you were thinking, as you unlocked your own phone to check your messages. Very good for him to have friends. Not that you would’ve pegged him as the absolute loner type, because he proved to be adaptable and quick on his feet, but since Aizawa’d recruited you for interpersonal help, you’d considered that he may not have friends. So, good on him for having at least one friend, it seemed, who cared enough to create an account on some stupid video game solely to annoy him.

“—cool of you to make an account to hang out with me. Stop fucking laughing; I am trying to be kind to you, shitstain. Okay. I don’t know. I haven’t been in contact with him in the past two days. I’ve been busy. Let me check.” Tenko leant back towards the mic to address you. “Do we have a schedule for the rest of the week? For instance, are we doing this again on Thursday?”

“I thought we were,” you said, scanning your room for your planner so that you could check your calendar, “Did something come up?”

“It’s not imperative that I go,” Tenko was saying into your ear, while you picked up your laptop to walk over to your U.A.-issued desk, “but another friend who’s been out of town will finally be back then. We might hang out.”

“Psh, go with your friends,” you said, delighted that he had more than one (fighting envy that it was so easy for them to meet up), “We can do this another time.”

“Understood,” Tenko said and backed away from the mic.

Venomothman: so have you sucked his dick yet

Tenko’s incensed shout of “Touya!” had you turning down the volume.

Venomothman: not to be the world’s worst wingman, but my dude is packing. and goes commando all the time.

Venomothman: and i would know. “i” sometimes “did” our “laundry”

You: what’s with all those quotation marks

Venomothman: and do you know the last time it was sucked? never

(Fucking hell. This Touya was walking you back into forbidden territory: the sexualisation of Tenko. After that first session, when you’d been turned on by his confident, rumbling voice as he’d given you an order, you’d felt guilty for sexualising him for the rest of the night. It was as if instead of friend-zoning him, you’d sex-zoned him, only able to see him as a sexual person/object. For the sake of your mission task, that felt unfair.

Or maybe you weren’t even sexualising him. Maybe your brain was appropriately interpreting what he’d done as sexual.

Whatever. Something in your gut was begging you not to see Tenko only through romantic or sexual lenses right now, and you couldn’t explain why.

And talking about Tenko’s apparently massive dick was not helping.)

Tenkopeito: Touya if you don’t ******* shut up I am going to tear off your other arm

Venomothman: no need, boss man

You heard Tenko sigh and say into his phone, sounding exhausted, “I’m not your boss anymore, Touya.”

Venomothman: no need, douchebag

***

Draped over the side of your bed, you dangled a shoelace in front of the gap in an attempt to coax Dango out from underneath. “Dango, sweetie,” you said, whipping the shoelace to the side, “Come out here so that I can look you in the eyes. Where is my planner, you whore?”

At a firm knock on your door, you shot up, dropping the lace. “Never mind,” you said, sliding off the bed, “Stay hidden.”

You opened your door on Aizawa, bare arm raised in mid-knock, wisps of hair plastered to his forehead by dried sweat, and a sweatshirt tied around his waist. He took two seconds to look over you before saying, “Get dressed. Civilian clothes. You have three minutes.”

Throwing on yesterday’s outfit, you rushed to follow Aizawa out of the dorm and off campus, nearly stepping on his heels while he wove through night pedestrians, pulling on his own sweatshirt to minimise skin contact once the crowd thickened.

You flipped up your coat collar to sneak a glance over your shoulder. “Is this a test?”

Aizawa combed his fingers back through his hair, gaze straight ahead. “Not for you.”

“Right.” You stepped more lightly, naturally falling back into patrol patterns: noting exits (narrow alleyways favouring the left side, underground into the subway station), checking vantage points (upper-storey windows in the resident buildings, non-industrial rooftops), honing in on light sources (yellow- and LED-tinted streetlamps, ambience from open businesses) and physical presence (close enough to brush shoulders with passerby [putting you on edge, because the slightest touch could be pivotal]). You had to consciously unclench your jaw, body flooded with stress it hadn’t felt in months. Swiping at the inner corner of your eye, you asked, “Does it have anything to do with the guy in the black hoodie and face mask following us?”

Aizawa laughed through his nose, once. “All right, then. What’s that ice cream place you and Shinsou went to all the time? Take us there.”

Bewildered, you changed directions to head towards Nekozawa’s, with Aizawa placing a hand on your shoulder to slow your pace, and by the time you pushed open Nekozawa’s glass door to the glowing, pink parlour, you were prepared to hold it open for your follower in the face mask. You watched his broad back as he ordered some ungodly, radioactive-blue ice cream with gummy bears before retreating to a table outside despite the dropping temperature, and Aizawa gestured you forward so that he could pay for the three of you.

Holding your ice cream, you hesitated at the door, swaying underneath the seasonal cat decorations dangling from the ceiling.

“Go on,” said Aizawa, retrieving the U.A. card from his wallet, “I’ve got to make a phone call, so don’t wait up. Don’t be too harsh on him; we’re here because he did a good job in the field today. Tailing you was extra practise.”

Nodding, you nudged open the door, bracing yourself at the cold, night air, and let it drift shut behind you as you approached the table, the farthest one from the pink lights.

Hood pulled up, Tenko bent over his blue monstrosity, face mask hanging by a loop over his left ear. Scuffing your boots on the concrete to announce your presence, you sat across from him, setting your cup on the cast iron before swinging your leg over the bench. You managed a cursory glance over what appeared to be a sketchbook before he closed it, and once he’d stowed it away, he swopped his spoon to his dominant hand to keep eating.

“You draw, Tenko?” To make him feel more comfortable, you kept your gaze towards Aizawa inside on the phone. “Do you think you’re any good?”

“Not yet. But I’m gonna be,” he said, clicking his pen and clenching it in his left hand, “I’ve got all these fucking artist’s gloves, so I might as well put ‘em to use.”

“Very nice,” you said, nodding, closing your eyes as you dipped your spoon into your ice cream, “But as a reminder, you don’t have to be good at something to enjoy it. I love doing stuff I’m absolute shit at. It reminds me of medieval bestiaries. They didn’t know shit about animals, but, boy howdy, did they have fun illustrating them. Did you know a weasel used to be called a polecat?”

Tenko huffed, his face mask fluttering. “It really is you.”

“Of course it is,” you said, beaming, and for the first time, you looked at him.

Tension flooded your teacup of a body and overflowed into the saucer and onto the floor. Heightened by the cold, a vein on the back of your hand strained and pulsed visibly, and, jaw locking, you lunged over the tabletop to grab him by the shoulders, shaking him.

“What the hell is wrong with you‽” You climbed over the table, pushed his ice cream out of the way (he shot out a hand to save it from toppling off the table, and he ripped off his face mask to set it aside before it fell to the ground), and planted your foot on his thigh and your elbows on his chest, caging him in as you forced him flat on the bench. “Why the fuck are you using your real name in your fucking Cipherstone username, you fucking moron‽ People could fucking track you!”

The man who had been Shigaraki Tomura eyed your fists in his hoodie and then his cup of ice cream. “You didn’t have a problem with it before.”

“I—” This idiot! “I didn’t know it was you. There are a lot of Tenkos.”

“Then there’s my logic,” he said, hands dangling by his sides, making no attempt to touch you—you didn’t know if you appreciated it or not. “I thought you knew who I was.”

“No, I fucking—I would have given you advice that was more specific to you, over the spiel I was giving interns.” Releasing your grip on his hoodie, you sat back up and scooted over on the tabletop. Though you wanted to keep holding him, to hug him after all he’s been through, he probably wouldn’t want that. “I’m—sorry about tackling you. I, uh—fuck,” you said, and, grimacing, you slid his ice cream back to him and reached across for your own, pretending with everything you’ve got that it was perfectly normal that you were sitting on a table next to Shigaraki Tomura, who’s been teaching you to play a video game, who’s apparently living at the end of the hall, who’s decorated his door with Eri’s silver tinsel for Christmas, who’s banned from drinking caffeine, who could rest his fucking head on your thigh if he wanted. Normal. Yeah.

“Again, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to keep doing that,” he said, fishing out a gummy bear like you hadn’t lunged at him, “Your reaction was reasonable.”

“It—it wasn’t, really,” you said, laughing nervously, “I wasn’t expecting you. I mean, no one knows what—what happened to you. Afterwards. It was really unclear.”

“It was that way on purpose,” said Tenko, “It was thought to be better to emphasise the total destruction of All for One instead of whatever happened to his leftovers.” He shifted a bear to his back molars to bite into the frozen gummy better. “Nezu-sensei decided it was better to keep it muddled for now.”

Muddled was a good way to put it. There’d been so much chaos at the end of the war that so much never was accounted for. You’d think that the location of Shigaraki’s body would be high on the list, but satisfaction was found simply in the splintered, spectacular remains of AFO. Shigaraki’s name wasn’t cleared, per se, but in the aftermath, Midoriya especially stressed that yes, Shigaraki committed atrocities, but he’d been abused, groomed, and literally bodily possessed by AFO to think that way. Didn’t excuse him, but wasn’t entirely his fault.

The locations of the other PLF members—well, the core of the League, really—were public, if not vague. Spinner was in the States at a rehab that specialised in heteromorph trauma; Toga was at a local women’s facility called Sakura Grove, and Dabi was living with his family—he must have been that Touya on the phone, holy shit.

So, here he was, sitting on the bench at the same ice cream parlour you visited with the same friends who fought him, hunched over in oversized, black clothes you suspected were Aizawa’s, broad shoulders and faded scars out of place in the pink lights, white hair pulled back in a blunt ponytail with his bangs flopping over his forehead, seemingly unbothered by the toe of your boot pressing against his denim-covered thigh.

God. He’s scratched at his neck so much that it looks like he’s been beheaded with a blunt axe.

Tenko’s eyes flickered up to you, their colour deepening to crimson in the tinted lights. “So. You’ve got questions.”

“Are you okay?”

Tenko swallowed with effort, scowling. “Don’t start with a hard one.”

“Right,” you said, throat drying, “Who knows you’re staying at U.A.?”

“Faculty and staff. My therapist. The police force. The ramen shop Aizawa-sensei and I go to. The intensive rehab I was at before. The top of the hero commission. Touya, Touya’s father, Spinner, Toga. Eri and Midoriya,” he said, tongue swiping over his lower lip, “You.”

Somehow both fewer and more than you’d figured. “What exactly…is the situation? Aizawa-sensei was vague.”

“Officially, I’m like Eri: a ward of U.A. My old rehab thought I was good enough to live off their campus, so I’m back here, where I can be watched by people capable enough to bring me down if I go crazy again,” he said, brow furrowed as he traced the side of his cup with his spoon, “I should resent that, but it’s not like I have anywhere else to go, especially somewhere as comfortable as this. This is fucking stupid to say aloud, but fucking—fuckin’ All Might is the closest thing I have to family now, along with Midoriya.”

“I’m not following.”

“My grandma was the holder of One for All before All Might had it.” He pointed at you with his spoon. “So you can make the connection from there. But it’s stupid; I’m stupid—” He was shaking his head and staring into his lap. “—because it’s like I have a brother in Midoriya and a goddamn father in All Might—and then Aizawa-sensei’s acting like a dad, too, to me and Eri, and Nezu-sensei? Nezu-sensei is so fucking cool,” said Tenko, dragging his hand down his face, “He’s got a driver’s license! I don’t even have one of those. And he can type fucking 210 words per minute with those little rat paws, and I’m still getting used to using all five fingers, fuck.”

Cute. You scraped the bottom of your cup. “Hey, I think you type well.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why it takes me so long to reply in the in-game chat function. Why I prefer communicating over voice call. Learning new habits, and shit.” Tenko stabbed his ice cream with his spoon. “Nezu-sensei has arranged for me to train as an aftermath-clean-up hero. I had been—” His fingers on one hand circled the thumb of the other. “—in discussion with him in rehab about what I could do, and we decided I could consistently help when there’s collapsed buildings after attacks; I could dust the wreckage so that we could find hostages or make it easier to clean up and rebuild, and Aizawa-sensei and All Might-sensei have been working with me to control what parts of what I touch gets dusted so that I could create pitfall traps for holding criminals. It’s…going. It’s going,” he said, curling his lips in his mouth to moisten them, and with narrowed, determined eyes, he took another bite of ice cream, the blue staining the inside of his lips.

“Tenko, that’s a really cool application of your quirk. I hope you can find more,” you said, tilting your head and smiling down at him, “but—I have to ask—aren’t you tired?”

Tenko rolled his eyes. “Of course. You’re part of the group ensuring I don’t have caffeine.”

“No, I mean,” you said, shaking your head, “I mean, you don’t have to be perceived as useful. You’re—you’re just fine if you wanted to rest. You’re worthwhile just as you, not as—as a job, as a, I don’t know, a redeemed hero or anything. You can just be Tenko.”

“I know. My therapist keeps reminding me. But one of the most vivid memories I have from when I was living in that house,” said Tenko, sneering, “is that I desperately wanted to be a hero and that I would pretend to be one a lot. While I’m aware that I can never atone for what I’ve done, if I did nothing but rest, I’d be alone with my thoughts. And with what I’m learning to do, as a hero, someday, someone might…need me. Need my help. I imagine that’s a good feeling.”

You sat back, leaning on your hands, the cast-iron pattern cutting into your palms, to survey him. “You’re very much re-writing my first impressions of you as my gaming buddy and as the post-war Shigaraki. You’re surprisingly well-adjusted.”

He snorted. “I shouldn’t think it’s surprising. I’ve had almost a year and a half in intensive rehab, and I’m still in therapy every day.” He started listing on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “I’m on antidepressants; I know where my next meal’s coming from and when I’ll get it; I consistently have a safe roof over my head, and I know my friends are getting that, too. I have mentors who care for me as a human person instead of as a tool. I get to stay in contact with my friends and get to make new ones,” he said, nodding curtly at you before quickly looking away, “I’m fucking away from that sadistic fuckface. He’s goddamn dead and burned away to nothing. That’s the main thing. Everything else is a bonus.”

Tenko sighed, bangs fluttering with the movement, his shoulders straining as he leaned onto both his elbows on the table. He sighed again and scooped the last gummy bear out of his cup, and you let the silence carry on while you finished eating.

“Long phone call,” Tenko said eventually.

An increasingly grumpy Aizawa was leaning against the glittery wall inside, phone between his ear and shoulder, and furiously scraping the inside of his ice cream cup.

“Yeah,” you said, “but it’s been good talking to you, Tenko. I really appreciate you telling me all of this.”

“I would’ve talked about it sooner, but I figured you knew who I was and didn’t want to address it,” said Tenko, tapping his fingers one by one on the table.

Pulling the collar of your coat closer to your neck, you frowned, hesitating on how to phrase it. You watched your breath cloud in the night air before settling on, “There’s an off-switch?”

Brow pinching very slightly, Tenko followed your gaze to his hand, with all five fingers coming to rest on the cast iron, and he tapped all five of them on it for emphasis. “Yeah. There always has been. All for One kept it from me. Power of belief kept me jittery and alert my whole life.”

“So long as you thought you’d destroy anything you touched, you would?”

He nodded. “That bitch.”

“Agreed. We should kill him.”

And Tenko laughed. Just for a moment, barely making any noise, but he smiled with his teeth, grin stretching across his face as he looked away and eventually closing his lips, the smile lingering for a few more precious seconds.

***

You closed your laptop to answer the phone at work, clearing your throat to ready your receptionist voice before you picked up. “U.A. University Administration; how may I help you?”

“I need you to fucking murder me,” Tenko spat through the phone, angry and panicked, “I need you to rip out my bones and suck out my guts through a straw. He fucking let me hold onto them, and I’ve fucking gone and lost such a fucking iconic piece of—”

“Tenko, please, take a breath,” you said, relaxing your customer service mode but clutching the phone to your ear, and after catching the eye of the woman with jars of strawberry preserves waiting to see Nezu, you slumped over in your seat so that she couldn’t see you over the desk’s overhang. “Tell me what’s wrong. We can fix it. Are you alone? Is everyone else busy? Do you need to come sit with me?”

“I—fuck,” he said, and you heard some deliberately slow breathing, but his voice still had an irate, twitchy edge afterwards. “During our practise patrol last night, Aizawa-sensei was talking about support equipment for me. I’d never given it much thought, because it’s always been just me and my hands. He leant me his Eraser Goggles for me to think about for my—and I don’t know where they fucking are,” he said, inhaling sharply on the last word, “I’d left them on my desk, but I’d taken them up to the roof to sketch them, and then I’d brought them back to my dorm—”

“And Aizawa-sensei must have swung by to pick them up since then,” you said, pushing yourself back to slide in your swivel chair to the back of the reception desk, “because he was here at the beginning of my shift to print something off, and the goggles are on top of the printer. Relax, Tenko.”

“Hooooooly fuck, you’re kidding,” said Tenko, audibly deflating, and you smiled to yourself as you slid their band around your wrist.

You kicked yourself back up to the front. “You’re okay. You’re not gonna get in trouble. I’ll bring them by at the end of my shift.” You sat up straight, and the strawberry preserves woman was shooting a concerned look in your direction. “I’m at work, though, so I think we’d better end the call soon. Anything else you need?”

Tenko hummed into the phone. “Not really. You can’t be that busy.”

You smiled again, feeling—feeling domestic, as if he were your boyfriend calling you during work hours. How strange, Shigaraki Tomura. How interesting. “Would you believe I was grinding in Cipherstone when you called?”

“And you don’t call yourself a gamer,” he said, clearing his throat multiple times, “What skills?”

“Woodcutting and firemaking,” you said, opening your laptop again, “Are you feeling under the weather? Your voice had a bit of a rasp there.” Sounded like his old voice for a moment.

“Further cementing that Aizawa-sensei’s right to be worried about you. He says your brain’s going haywire analysing any detail work you can get, because you’re not out in the field anymore,” said Tenko, clearing his throat again (?), “Am I your new project?”

“Tell me what’s wrong, lest I pick up some damn throat lozenges for you before I come home,” you said, and a voice in the back of your head screamed that that threat was extremely cosy and intimate, especially since you’re claiming both of you have a home in the same place—which, sure, you both lived on the same hallway, but so did Aizawa and Eri, and please shut up; Shimura Tenko needs a friend, not a lover right now. Besides, that stupid hallway wasn’t really home for either of you but was more like a temporary holding cell.

“Fine. I’ve been throwing up all morning.”

“Thank you,” you said, electing not to make a pregnancy joke, “Do you need to see Recovery Girl?”

“No, I’m used to it, and I’ve already talked to her about it. I threw up a lot out of anxiety and stress when I was growing up with All for One, and now I’m throwing up because my body can’t handle the amount of food it’s getting regularly, which is fucking ridiculous, since it’s still less than a normal person’s version of three meals a day.”

What. The fuck. How can he casually drop details of deep trauma like it’s nothing? How could AFO let a child keep vomiting out of stress for years and years and never interfere? Well. Yeah, he could. You supposed that Shigaraki’s voice, as you first heard it as the USJ incident, was the ultimate result of that heavy strain on his throat for years. Explains some things about his teeth back then, too.

God. If AFO weren’t dead, you’d strangle him. Keeping a child physically weak because he’d be easier to mould. It was known that AFO had been psychologically manipulating Shigaraki, but now that you thought about it, manipulating his physical growth would have served AFO, too, since he was planning to move into Shigaraki’s body.

And what did this guy do now that he’s got bodily autonomy? Oh. Just. Play some video games. Talk with his friends. Try out some new hobbies. Make crafts with Eri.

It’s a shame AFO didn’t have a grave, because you’d be skiving off work to drown it in acid.

“My stomach is killing me,” said Tenko, “I’ve got to hang up to drink something and go to sleep. Knock on my door when you get home. I want to start a new quest as soon as you finish work.”

Home. He’d said it, too. He probably didn’t mean it in the same, domestic way that you’d been entertaining, but it made your heart swell. “Okay, Tenko. See you then.”

***

His therapist had assigned him homework: go on a planned, public outing with a peer, and stay out for at least an hour.

It wasn’t exactly a picnic you were packing, you kept telling yourself, scooting behind Tenko to get to the spice cabinet in the dorm kitchen, because that’d be too close to a date rather than homework. But the two of you packed a meal to take, with Eri sitting on the kitchen counter while she nibbled at rabbit-cut apple slices, and she held the thermos of decaf tea in her lap until it was time to stow it away.

After a short train ride and a quiet walk through midtown, Tenko stopped you in front of the back gate to what appeared to be a restored, historical estate, judging by the golden shachihoko shibi on each corner of polished hip-and-gable rooftops of the extensively aristocratic—mansion? palace?—that you could make out in across the distance of its sprawling grounds, the immediacy of which was the excessively well-kept, traditional garden that you and Tenko were breaking into.

“Is this legal?” you asked as Tenko reached through the grate to unlatch the doorway.

“I have an in with the gardener,” he said, sweeping the gate open for you and gesturing brusquely for you to enter.

“No, that wasn’t a joke,” you said, taking the few steps inside, finding yourself planted onto a polished, level stepping stone, and staring down a squeaky clean tsukubai despite the thin layer of frost over the water’s surface as the whole bowl began to freeze, “You can’t be doing anything even vaguely illegal, Tenko.”

When you said his name, he closed his eyes, pausing for just a hair in his relatching the gate, before facing you and shifting the strap of his bag farther up his shoulder. “Prude. Yes, we have permission from the owner.”

He kept looking back over his shoulder at you as he led you through the gardens, hopping across stepping stones to pass over a carefully shaped brook that led to a tiny waterfall near stone lanterns, weaving through trellises with the wintry shells of wisteria vines and shaped evergreens. He tutted and rolled his eyes when you stopped at the waterlily-coated koi pond, its fish swimming and flicking their tails in the artificially heated water (for some, odd reason, what appeared to be a compact duck coop had been constructed near the pond’s edge, its wood new and un-bleached by the sun like the rest of garden décor). You’d been about to ask about it when Tenko had jumped out of his skin at the sound of a deer scare, bamboo tapping stone.

“Stop laughing,” Tenko said, cheeks burning (and you tried not to take too much pleasure in that, but you couldn’t help it).

“Oh, a sensitive boy, a delicate boy,” you said, grinning as you hopped onto the same stone as him, cool, clouding breaths mixing together in the proximity, and you yourself could feel heat rise to your face. “Nothing to be ashamed of. Good traits to have, actually. Means you’re feeling secure and comfortable in your surroundings, if you’re off-set that easily.” Feeling bold—it was the cold; it was how the proximity already flustered him; it was how his hands were full because of the bag; it was—whatever—you reached for his silly All Might scarf and re-tied the front, fluffing it up to cover more of his neck.

You made the mistake of making eye contact: full of caution, his eyes kept darting from your hands to your face, searching for something, his lips parted, otherwise completely fucking frozen.

Were you making him uncomfortable? You stilled, your fingers still in the fringe of his scarf, tension tightening in your chest and jaw (clenching).

Tenko noticed. And—and to this day, you can’t believe he fucking did this—he ran his tongue over his lower lip and lifted his chin, exposing more of his neck to you. He then was suddenly very interested in the koi pond, the ruddiness spreading from his cheeks to his ears.

Throat dry, you gave his scarf a final tug and patted it (?) to show (??) a job well done (???). “Yeah,” you said, smoothly, like a smooth person, like someone who adjusts scarves of hot, in-process-of-reformation villains on the regular, “Where are we going?”

Tenko spun on his heel and strode away, muttering what sounded like, “Right into my grave.”

You pretended not to hear it and let him lead you to the only building unattached to the main house: a small, traditional teahouse that had a recent addition to it in the back. The creak of the bamboo engawa when you climbed onto it was muffled underneath the bright pealing of windchimes strung across the covered porch. Tenko was already kneeling at the tearoom’s sunken fireplace inside, its handle carved into a fish, fiery as its kindling, and was unpacking the travel teacups from the bag as you closed the door behind you, shutting out the cold, enveloped by the comfortable heat trapped inside by the cushioned walls.

Tenko must have arranged for this space to have been prepared for you. A kotatsu with floor cushions was tucked near the fireplace, pre-heated, with two further space heaters in the unoccupied corners, cords trailing into what must be a hallway linking the traditional and modern rooms, the latter of which was shut off from view. Beside a red-tinted wooden dresser stood an oddly empty tokonoma, and instead of a scroll or painting, amidst bits of pieces of scotch tape hastily half-torn off the back was a shittily cut-out, paper heart.

Shaking your head, you took a step towards Tenko, and the floor chirped at you, freezing you in place.

“Yeah, I don’t know why they do that,” said Tenko, pushing on his knees to stand, “They just do.”

“These must be nightingale floors,” you said, crossing to the kotatsu, a bird under each step, “The chirping’s caused by the way the nails rub against the v-shaped clamps holding the floor together. Have you been to Nijō Castle in Kyoto? These are in the hallway—supposedly used as a security measure, but who knows.”

“You need a hobby.” Tenko ripped the paper heart from the back of the tokonoma, crumpling it in his fist. A shred of it remained under the scrap of tape on the wall, which he bent towards to scrape off with a blunt fingernail.

“I have several,” you said, easing down onto a cushion and unfolding your legs underneath the kotatsu blanket, the luxurious heat swaddling your legs and hips. You fought the urge to curl up underneath it entirely.

“How many of them involve getting your ass thrashed by me in Cipherstone?” Tenko retrieved the bag from the sunken fireplace before returning to the kotatsu, and he sat on your left, resting the bag between the two of you.

You took the thermos of decaf tea when he handed it to you. “Tenko, you’ve been playing that game for years, and I just began. Of course my ass is gonna be thrashed by—you know how the game works. You have all of this previous information about the game that I don’t have.”

Tenko scoffed and slid your teacup across the kotatsu’s surface.  “As if I could conceal any information from you. You’re too…eh.” He waved it off, shaking his head.

“I’m too what?” You unscrewed the thermos lid, and steam surged upwards, rising to caress the planes of your face.

“It’s been unfair of Aizawa-sensei to make me tail you,” said Tenko, leaning your way, all five fingers curled around his own teacup as he stretched across the tabletop. “I’d have a chance of success if it were anyone else.”

“I’ll give you that,” you said, pouring steaming, amber tea with slices of yuzu into Tenko’s cup, “You’re getting quite good at it, not that you were bad in the first place. But yeah, it’s a bit mean of him to test your tracking skills on me.” He’d never said to stop, so you poured until liquid almost overflowed at the rim.

He gasped at the heat but nudged his teacup back to his place at the table, unable to hold it in his palm anymore. “I think I would’ve preferred working with Hound Dog-sensei for that. He’s less detail-oriented. I could win, if it weren’t you.” Jutting out his lower lip, Tenko glared down at his tea for a moment before slumping in his seat to slurp at the tea without picking it up.

“Don’t feel bad about it. It was literally and actually my focus for hero work, profiling and detail shit and being aware of my surroundings. Information stuff. Infiltration stuff.” Setting the thermos on the far corner, you cupped your hands loosely around your teacup, appreciating the warmth and getting cosier by the minute.

Tenko was rooting through the bag for the other thermoses, full of sukiyaki for each of you. “It’s clear you’ve worked hard to hone your skills. Were you this talented as a student?”

You accepted the new thermos, fingers clenching tightly around it. “Uh. I think I may have been better back then. More focused. More passionate, anyway. I had to think about it really hard back then, make conscious decisions to notice things, and now I think I do it instinctively. I think I’m slipping because of that.”

“Hm,” said Tenko, tongue rubbing over his teeth behind closed lips, and he opened his mouth to say something but shut it, instead twisting off the cap to his soup thermos. He took the first sip of sukiyaki broth and—and was absolutely beautiful (you couldn’t make sense of it beyond that; he was a mess of details that you couldn’t fit together into a larger picture that made any sense: white eyelashes light against his cheeks as they fluttered shut, face muscles relaxed, scars overlapping with laugh lines, cracked lips becoming moistened by the soup, both hands cupped around his thermos like a child, no strain to his posture, baggy hoodie swallowing him up, kotatsu blanket yanked up to his hips to cover his crossed legs, scar on the corner of his mouth delicately shifting with his baffled smirk when he caught you staring, a strange pink rising to the tips of his ears). “What?”

Uh. Hm. You pinched the bridge of your nose and then moved to rub your eyelids. “What were you going to say about me?” you asked, and you withdrew your hand from your face to raise the soup thermos to your lips, taking a mouthful of noodles and the sweet, salty broth.

Tenko shook his head. “I’m trying to avoid thoughts that fall back into my old habits.”

“Try me,” you said, holding his gaze when he met it, “I won’t tell.”

Weary, he broke eye contact, and he fixated on fishing out a certain slice of green onion. “We needed someone like you back then.”

Back then? When he—oh.

Back in the League.

Though you attempted to hide your grin by taking a sip of sukiyaki, you caught his eyes flicker to it. “You would’ve taken me? You would’ve let me in?”

“Would you have joined?” he shot back, a bit too quickly.

“No,” you said, rolling your shoulders and settling down farther underneath the kotatsu, “Never. But since you shared something you shouldn’t’ve, I’ll do the same.” You set your thermos down to rub your eyes again—God, you couldn’t look at him for too long, lest your intrusive thoughts hand you your ass. “I thought about it. About joining you.”

You dragged your hand down your face, peeking between your fingers at a muted clink. Tenko was staring at you, something fucking unreadable in his scrounched eyes, and both hands lay five-fingered and flat on the kotatsu, steam from his open thermos fluffing up hair on one side of his head. “You’re not serious. You wouldn’t have.”

“Not in the way you think,” you said, tilting your head back, “but I often thought, in the aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation Raid, what I could’ve done, if I’d known what I know now. And as the rest of the war was unfolding, I only wanted it more.”

Tenko blinked, slowly. “Tell me what you would’ve done.”

“Oh, you would’ve hated me, down to the dregs of my very soul,” you said, shifting to sit on your knees, “I would’ve started after your fight with Re-Destro, after the PLF was established. When you were letting allllllllll those heroes in, the sidekicks, the nobodies, anyone who seemed like they were with the cause. I would’ve infiltrated. Slipped in without notice. Hawks did, with the Commission, but I would’ve been going in as a free agent.”

“No one notices a U.A. student slide in between the masses. Re-Destro’s lackeys wouldn’t notice you at the door like I would. You get in,” Tenko said, taking his thermos in hand again but still engrossed in you, “What then?”

“There was a short period of time between the PLF establishment and your procedure, right? Around a month? That’s when I go. I worm my way into the good graces of some of the nine lieutenants—I’ve decided my pipeline would’ve been Geten to Toga to you. You’d just come out of an enormous battle, with Re-Destro and that city and Gigantomachia for a whole month. I heard you were bandaged up, on crutches, that you’d lost fingers that you regrew in that regeneration tank,” you said, eyes on his hands, one in a fist in his lap and the other around his thermos, five fingers pressing onto the grip but the pinkie finger hitched farther up than the rest, “That you’d given a speech and made your appearances regardless. That you’d pushed yourself to your limit and then broke yourself a little more. And you would’ve loathed me, because I would’ve come in, earned my way to your side, and I would’ve put my hand on your shoulder, slid it up your neck to cup your cheek to ask Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to rest?” You smiled and huffed, shoving it down, and though his hard stare should’ve pinned you to your seat, you pushed on the corner of the kotatsu to edge yourself over to his side, a knee on his cushion. “I like to think that you’ve sighed, sulked a bit, reluctant to admit anything was wrong at all, because back then, you had no use for moonlight. But I would’ve made you look at me, taken you to a bed, made you lie down until your eyes fluttered shut and the tension swept through your body and left. And you would rest,” you said, finding yourself leaning over him very slightly, knees touching his, just enough so that he leant backwards just a fraction, “I would’ve made that month so soft for you. I would’ve taken care of you, when nobody was fucking paying attention to you in the way that they should’ve. I fucking—I wanted it.” You gripped the front of his hoodie, fist grasping more fabric than necessary to shake him. “I wanted it. I wanted to care for you. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know. And you were fucking alone, in an unfamiliar place, and it kills me to think about that.”

You ducked your head to wipe your watery eyes on your sleeve, taking a breath—and realising what you were doing. You loosened your grip, but before you could pull away, Tenko was cat-like quick to grab your sleeve—why won’t he touch you?

“I wouldn’t have accepted your help,” he said, quiet, controlled, holding you down with his eyes, hand shifting to curve under your sleeved wrist, signalling that you could escape at any time, “That was after the worst month of my life, fighting Machia, and I wouldn’t have accepted it. I had too much to do. I would’ve shaken you off.”

“No, you wouldn’t’ve.”

“I would’ve,” he said, a bare finger, featherlight, skimming over the tender, bare skin of the underside of your wrist (oh, wow), “I wouldn’t trust that easily in that short of a time. You’d have met me, and that’d be it. If you’d persisted, I would’ve ripped you to shreds and tossed you aside.”

“Tenko,” you said, both relief and tightness blooming from your wrist, “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

The hallway shoji slammed open, somehow rattling as it slid in its tracks and shook the walls, and you and Tenko scrambled apart, with you jolting backwards on your hands, grappling for your seat cushion, and Tenko banging his thermos on the kotatsu, hastily wrestling with keeping it upright as he flung his body to the side.

“Hey, fuck you, Touya,” Tenko spluttered out, elbowing himself upright as—as fucking Dabi strode inside, hands in the deep pockets of his black sweatpants. “You said you’d stay in the main house.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Touya, cool as you please, raising both of his hands in defence, “I had to ensure you’re not fucking in my bed.”

“What is—” Tenko clambered to his feet to cross to him, chirping with each stomp, and whisper-shouting once he’d corralled Touya into a far corner. “I said we’d hang out later today, Touya. You swore you’d stay inside and watch Naruto this afternoon.”

The polite thing to do would be to appear fascinated by the tea. You returned to your cushion and poured yourself another cup.

“Yeah, but I’ve been told I’ve got shit to do later. I’ve got to go to this fuckin’—fuckin’ family stuff. I don’t wanna get into it,” said Touya, at full volume, “and I wanted to check that your girl was real. Y’know, she looks nothing like someone who’d have GinzengTea as her username. Have you given it to her already?”

“Shut the fuck up. I was just about to do that, if you hadn’t interrupted, cockhead.”

“Cool,” he said, a bird-note as he shifted his weight, “I wanna see what she thinks.”

“Hell, no—”

“I helped pick ‘em out. Let me watch and have an ohagi, and I’ll leave,” said Touya, chirping towards you before he finished the sentence, and Tenko followed him, muttering under his breath.

Touya sat on the bare tatami next to you, joints cracking as he yanked the kotatsu blanket up his legs, shooting you a small salute and a concerningly charming smile. “Hey,” he said, tilting his head, eyes half-lidded, smile stretching to show more of his even, white teeth, “I’ve seen you before, yeah? When was the last time you laid eyes on me?”

Tenko pelted him in the chest with a plastic-wrapped ohagi, cutting off the ooze of charisma. “Show-off,” he said, nudging another sweetened rice ball your way.

You nodded but didn’t move to unwrap it, since you were still working on your sukiyaki. “I’m surprised you remember, Touya,” you said, the name feeling strange on your tongue, “It must’ve been years since I elbowed you in the tit.”

Eyes lighting the fuck up, you snapped towards Tenko when he laughed into his plastic wrap: still not loud, still not making any vocalisation with it, but releasing a heavy, sharp burst of air with a wide, open grin. He hunched over to hide more of it, using both hands to unwrap his ohagi—and in the moment he realised he’d been unwrapping it with only his pointer fingers and thumbs, he dropped the rest of his fingers onto the rice ball, still smirking to himself.

Biting your lip in your own smile, you turned back to Touya (you caught his moment of mild alarm at how thrilled you were when Tenko laughed—or maybe it was alarm at Tenko laughing at all—but Touya relaxed his eyebrows and shut his mouth the second you faced him again). “God, yeah, it must have been before that last battle that we’d met in a fight, and I’d gotten close enough to hit you, and…” You shook your head. “Actually, I don’t wanna talk about that stuff. It’s not who we are now.”

“That’s fine.” Touya nodded towards Tenko and took a bite of his ohagi. “Shimura, don’t you have something to give her?”

Shimura. That was his last name, you supposed, but wasn’t it odd that Tenko called Touya by his given name and that Touya called Tenko by his family name? Tenko didn’t make you call him Shimura. Well, you supposed that there’s only one Shimura now, and because of the number of Todorokis, it paid to be specific—

“Here.” Tenko set a flat box in front of you, flipping the buckle of his bag back over. “I was going to give it to you with more formality, but since this bastard showed up, I’m doing it like this.”

Biting the inside of your cheek, brow furrowed, you unpacked a pair of pale blue headphones, soft to the touch with a mesh headband so that your head wouldn’t ache.

“Noise-cancelling,” Tenko said, gabbling, frowning very slightly, “Rechargeable. There’s a detachable microphone so it can function as a headset. I wanted to do something good for you.” His eyes darted towards Touya, and they dropped to his ohagi’s bulging filling, seeping out onto the plastic wrap. “You need them, anyway. I’ve been sick of hearing you through those shitty earbuds; their sound is terrible, and when you said you’d lost your only pair—which I don’t fucking understand how you can lose those things, because they just fucking show up in my shit all the time, like a goddamn plague—I thought you needed something quality—just to make it easier on my end, obviously, so that I don’t have to tell you to yell into that shitty, built-in micropho—”

“Tenko,” you said, reaching over to place your tea-hot hand over the back of his, fingers curving with his along ohagi’s edge, “Thank you so much. I adore them. I’m really grateful that you would think of me.”

Tenko froze, the same as he had when you’d adjusted his scarf. Unable to look you in the eye, like a prey animal, stiff, shoulders tense, colour rushing up his neck to his face and ears again—but this time, he lifted his hand just a hair from his ohagi to press back into your palm, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Hoo, boy,” said Touya, startling the both of you when he slammed his hands on the kotatsu to push himself up, “I’ve had enough. I’ve had my little snack. I’m leaving.” Once on his feet, he stretched, pressing his hands to his lower back and arching it, grunting.

“Good fucking riddance, cocksucker,” said Tenko, rising and grabbing Touya by the elbow to haul him to the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Touya, dragging his feet, chirping slurred and confused by his movement, and when Tenko had him at the wall, trying to shove him out, Touya, smirking under your watch, whispered something to Tenko while forcing something into his palm. Touya ducked out as Tenko looked at what he’d accepted and, letting out a yelp, dusted whatever it was before he hurried back to the kotatsu.

(When you left the teahouse half an hour later, you discovered that he’d decayed only the wrapper and not the condom itself.)

***

“One moment, please. Nezu-sensei is in a meeting right now, but he’ll be out momentarily. Please take a number—yes, the ticket puncher when you first came in,” you said to yet another impatient and pissed client in the admin waiting room, packed to the gills with parents, press, vendors, potential sponsors, and, for some reason, Mt. Lady’s entire representative team. “By the door. If you’ll take a seat, we’ll be with you shortly.”

God, you could punt Nezu for this. Not that there was anything wrong with establishing a new, annual event for U.A.—a cherry blossom garden-set, competitive scavenger hunt coming up in the spring—but because of his casual comment that it would rise to the same importance as the Sports Festival, you were swamped with those eager to invest early. Unable to take a break, you had to work with your head bowed, desperately hoping none of these people recognised you and your failure, when all you wanted was to reply to Tenko’s messages on Cipherstone that morning.

Tenkopeito: You’ll like the next quest. You can pet a dog in it

Tenkopeito: Come over to my room this evening so that we can talk in person

Was he intending to speak with innuendo or with such sincerity that it cut right through you? Moreover, was he aware he was even doing it? Based on what you’ve observed, Tenko had no idea what he was doing to you, nor did he know how hard you were trying not to act on your attraction, though you weren’t even doing a great job of suppressing it.

It’s strange: Tenko evoked some strange, unnameable emotion in you like nothing else. You wanted to coddle him; you wanted to play stupid video games with him; you wanted to sweep his hair out of his eyes, and though you kept telling yourself that you didn’t, you wanted him to tell you how to touch yourself, how to touch him. You brushed it off. Another time. Perhaps never.

“Oh, hi!” Former pro-hero Ragdoll squealed your family name, making you jump in your seat. “It is you. I couldn’t tell from farther back in the line.” Fuck, Ragdoll would recognise you, since she and the rest of the Wild, Wild Pussycats trained Class A, and she specifically spent time with you on your tracking skills because of her Search quirk.

Don’t cause a scene. “Hello, Shiretoko,” you said, doing your best not to let your face be seen from over the reception desk’s overhang, “It’s good to see you. How can I help?”

When she beamed, she was as bright as ever. “Oh! The Pussycats want to offer our services for the scavenger hunt! We wanna get back into charity and civilian events now that we’re back from our mission for—but wait, you know all about that!” You didn’t. But her cheerful voice carried, and people were already turning towards Ragdoll, part of a hero team ranked in the top thirty. “I wanna hear more about what you’ve been up to! Since you left the hero business, no one’s known where you’ve been! Gosh, have you been behind this dreary old desk the whole time?” Ragdoll leant over the overhang, flicking at a loose strand of your hair. “I thought you were sent out on missions out of the country! Like, really important, top-secret stuff. It’s weird seeing you in an office, especially since I consider you a mini me. Why are you back at your alma mater? Did your agency not want you anymore?”

She wasn’t meaning to be cruel. Her loud, blunt sincerity, though, drew the attention of onlookers, and their flashes of recognition, subsequent judgment, and turning away made your chest tight. “I needed a break. That’s all.”

A thin, blonde woman in a burgundy overcoat leaning against the wall immediately next to the reception had been evaluating you, scanning you from top to bottom during the exchange. She didn’t bother hiding her curiosity, and when you shakily handled the rest of the conversation with Ragdoll, she turned to the short, softly featured man beside her. “You know her?” She hadn’t even tried to quiet her voice; it jolted you from Ragdoll, but you steeled yourself and continued printing off a schedule for her—and from the depths of your brain came the woman’s identity: Uwabami, the snake hero, one who usually flaunted her celebrity status but currently dressed down, without her hair snakes (a rattlesnake, a yellow king cobra, and a Japanese rat snake, which—shut up! You don’t need this information right now! Can you be fucking sane, please?).

Her sidekick—no, an intern, a student at U.A., some fuckin’ twink in the year below you, name escaping you at the moment—had some iota of tact when he looked you over, slanting his body away, as if he weren’t staring. “Yes,” he said, trying not to let you hear, “She’s my former senpai and nothing more to me. We didn’t run in the same circles. She’s the one who made that rescue a few months back, the one that got a lot of online backlash.”

“No, seriously,” Ragdoll was saying, “Why are you back at U.A.? Don’t you have somewhere else to go?”

“My—” People behind Ragdoll in line were listening. Trying not to show it. Your throat ran dry, and you couldn’t think of a lie or a pleasant half-truth. “My flat was compromised. My address was leaked, and eventually, people were—look, Shiretoko,” you said, forcing the words out of your mouth, “I really don’t want to talk about this. Here’s the printed schedule. I’ll talk to you later.”

You slid the paper across the counter, and she took it, waving goodbye and still beaming.

“Is this what happens when a hero career doesn’t work out? They just shove you back where someone will take you? At any old office desk?” that fucking twink was asking Uwabami, “I can’t—it honestly scares me to think I could lose myself and be misplaced like that. It’s wasting talent, don’t you think?”

“How can I help you?” you asked the next person in line through gritted teeth.

When Uwabami lowered her sunglasses to glance over them, you inhaled sharply and swung your swivel chair so that you wouldn’t see her. “I don’t know about that. Maybe this dreadful administration office is where she’s meant to be.”

Biting his lip, he shifted his jaw and crossed his arms, slumping against the wall. “You’ll always have a place for me, right, Uwabami? I don’t want this to happen to me.”

“Yes, I can print you out a copy of the same schedule. If you’ll allow me a moment to print.”

“Of course, Kakeru,” Uwabami said, ignorant of how you were gripping a pencil so tightly that it could snap any second, “You’ll never be left behind.” But then she fucking stared you down, deliberately holding eye contact while you were at the printer, and she said, “You’ll never need a place to hide. I’ll make sure you don’t fail.”

“Hey, how about you shut up?” you hissed, ripping the printer-warm schedule from the tray and storming back to your current client to shove it into their hands. “Aren’t Japanese rat snakes supposed to be in hibernation this time of year, anyway?”

***

Someone in Mt. Lady’s group recorded it. Someone posted it.

wizardjenkins11: jesus christ who knew u.a. had its own island of misfit toys

emotionalsupportdynamightsweat: nice to see that she kept her snark, but what is she doing back at school?? don’t heroes have some sort of paperwork component to their work. why isn’t she still at an agency

blood-is-thiccer: lol ua’s the only one who’d take the bitch. she’s being rude as hell to an actual pro hero. lameass quirk anyway and ass flat as hell lmao she fucken deserved that guy lighting her mailbox on fire

LynchianTiddies: You’re encouraging domestic terrorism???

blood-is-thiccer: that’s not domestic terrorism

LynchianTiddies: Then what, pray fucking tell, is it??

blood-is-thiccer: wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalism

XylemPhloemBuckaroo: no but I get what that guy was saying about wasting talent tho. Out of everyone in that class a, she’s the only one not topping the fucking hero charts rn. She’s the only one who’s left hero work. What makes her weaker than the rest of her classmates? What happened to her to make her like this?

koiboi69: wouldn’t you quit if people were camping outside your house/work/grocerystore? And also FUCK, man, there’s no fucking need to say she’s fucking weak. that’s kicking her while she’s down

XylemPhloemBuckaroo: I’m not kicking her while she’s down. I’m stating facts and asking reasonable questions.

koiboi69: bro wouldn’t YOU feel down if you’d didn’t have a home to go back to??? going back to u.a. is like admitting defeat, like you couldn’t handle it on your own and need protection

mawatadaddysgorl: i love seeing updates on her bc it makes me feel so good about what i’m doing with my life

***

Uraraka and Shinsou texted you but couldn’t call, let alone come from across town. Aizawa was AWOL, and Dango was hiding under your bed, so you, blotchy-faced and damp, were crumpled on the floor outside of room 310, eating vending machine bullshit and waiting for Tenko to return home.

Exactly all the insecurities you’d been stuffing down for months and months, brought out to air in front of everyone. Instead of doomscrolling, you locked your phone and slid it across the hallway carpet, burying your face in your hands and stomach lurching to the thought that you might soon be plastered everywhere in sight, again. Another round of intensive laying low loomed on the horizon, especially now that your location was made public. Your little secretary job was good enough, and relocating elsewhere on campus would lead to more job training, which would be a bitch.

Where was Tenko? You needed him here to say something irreverent and vindictive. Something unhinged. Or you needed him to hold you, pull you into his lap, and bitch about the whole thing while watching a movie. Tenko had messaged you to come by after work, so why wasn’t he…?

The staircase door hissed open, Tenko pushing it with his back, reusable grocery bags on his arms, and—and wearing a cape? Who the fuck wears a cape casu—oh shit he’s in his hero costume.

You’d heard that he had one, designed by the same company that’d made Midoriya’s and Shouto’s, and the similarities were clear: a boxy sort of design due to thick fabric that still somehow hugged his chest, a minimalist utility belt, and sturdy, knee-capping boots, positively flaming scarlet in contrast to the dark greys of the rest of his jumpsuit. The most obvious connection with another hero, though, made your chest throb: his cloak fastened with the same clasp his grandmother’s had. His dust-blocking respirator lay around his neck for the moment, but what was most embarrassing for you was how your brain fucking wheezed like a boiling kettle at his bare arms, biceps bulging, every fucking inch of skin down to his fingertips completely on display like a goddamn slut.

Whore behaviour. Whore behaviour! You had to duck your head when he squatted next to you, because oh, now you could see the stretch marks on his upper arms, because he’d gotten large way too quickly to be healthy, and smell his fading Old Spice and sweat from being out on what must have been an emergency call, and he was setting his grocery bags aside, reaching out to graze your shoulder, and wow, he’d been complaining about how he didn’t have abs yet despite working out five days a week now that his stamina had increased, but that fabric clung to his lower abdomen, looking very, very flat.

Initially pinching the fabric of your sweater, he shifted his jaw and laid his hand on your shoulder. “Who am I dusting?”

“God, Tenko,” you said, trying to look anywhere but his arms, or his abdomen, or his fucking lips, but he was leaning so much over you that he occupied most of your line of vision, and the only way to avoid seeing anything besides wisps of white hair was to gaze at the popcorned ceiling. “You’re not supposed to do that anymore.”

“Oh, yeah? Who am I dusting?” He squeezed your shoulder, stretching his thumb out to rub at your collarbone.

“Unless you can dust everyone in the country, I don’t think decay will help.”

Tenko clicked his tongue. “I have been explicitly told not to do that,” he said, shifting to sit on his knees, “I have—” He dug into a grocery bag for a moment. “—this for you. You like this shit, right?” Tenko pressed a bottle of pink lemonade into your hands.

“Fucking. Fuck. I do,” you said, passing the condensation-coated bottle from one hand to another, chest tightening, blinking to keep the water levels low, “Thank you. You didn’t have to get me this.”

“I know that,” he said with a dismissive wave, and he paused, fists in his lap. “Would it help if I gave you a hug?”

(What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the—)

“Yeah,” you said calmly, like a calm person, and when Tenko opened his (muscular) arms, you crawled into them, wrapping your own around his back to rest between his shoulder blades. You rested your chin in a fold of his cape, cheek pressing against the side of his respirator, and you frowned as his embrace tightened, pulling you closer in a sloppy, unpractised sort of way, grounded by the steady rise and fall of his very solid chest.

(This felt…affectionate. Romantic, even.

But Shigaraki Tomura didn’t do romance, and you don’t—you’re not—you wouldn’t dream of being conceited enough to read someone’s perhaps thoughtless actions as flirtation, because why would someone be flirting with you? No one did that in general, and being U.A.’s humiliating problem child exacerbated the fact.

Moreover, why would the man who was Shigaraki Tomura, in the middle of his rehabilitation and re-discovery of self, even in the microscopic chance that he had the mental energy to experience romantic feelings, aim that romantic impulse towards you? It would make more sense if he liked someone he’d known for a while, like Touya or Spinner or Toga, and if his romantic feelings leant towards recuperative trauma-bonding, wouldn’t it be more apt to feel for someone at his rehab? His therapist, maybe? He’d idolised Aizawa before he’d met him, and even that would make more sense than latching onto someone as late in the process as you.

He’d gotten flustered when you’d tied his scarf, and Touya’s played terrible wingman. But still. You couldn’t know. You can’t read into this, even though reading into things had been your job, because—because no one would want you. You’ll have to…You’ll have to gather more evidence. You couldn’t be certain.)

Tenko hummed, chin digging into your shoulder, blowing strands of your hair out of his face. “I calmed a kid down earlier by hugging her. Is this working for you?”

(…oh.)

You sniffled and hid your mouth in his cape so that he couldn’t catch your pout. “That’s—that’s good that a kid allowed you to comfort her. What happened?”

“Pipes broke in an old apartment building in the Takoba district. The third floor collapsed under the pressure, and it trapped families in part of the building. I was called out to dust the rubble trapping them,” Tenko said, tapping his fingers high on your back in a ripple, “and they had me dust some other walls to help start the repairs. It was cool. And this one little girl who’d gotten out before the rest of her family was really nervous, and she was sticking to me, holding onto my cape. I was telling her that everything was gonna be okay, like you’ve taught me, and when I asked how she was doing, this fuckin’ kid extended her arms to me. So, I fucking hugged her. Picked her up so she could see what was happening better. It was weird, but it felt good.” Tenko sighed. “I hate how it wants me to be kind more.”

And fuck, fuck, that’s the last straw to this horrible day, and you’re crying, silently, controlling your breathing to keep Tenko from finding out, because goddammit, this idiot bastard man was surprisingly easy to love.

You buried your face fully in his shoulder, hoping he couldn’t feel any wetness through his costume, and you and Tenko sat in the quiet of the hallway for a minute, interrupted only by the A/C kicking in.

Tenko tried to part the two of you enough to look you in the face, but you doubled down, curling your fingers into the fabric of his jumpsuit and keeping your head bowed. Scoffing, he sat upright, making you follow his movements to stay hidden. “You gonna tell me what’s wrong yet?”

“Forget all that shit I’ve taught you,” you said, grumbling to his tits now that he’d changed positions, hating how stopped up you sounded already, “It doesn’t matter what you fucking do in the public’s eye, because there’s always gonna be someone who hates you. You can’t please everyone, so just fucking be yourself. That’s funnier, anyway.”

“Did you psychoanalyse some press member’s pathetic sex life, or something? Deduce an affair based on the way he knots his tie? Announce the state of his dick to the whole room because of the length of his pants?”

“Fuck off, Tenko. I’m not some pretentious-ass Sherlock Holmes bitch,” you said, pursing your lips and instinctively pulling back to glare at him—

And the moment you did, Tenko cupped your face in his hands, soft at the palm and strongly calloused along his fingers, keeping you facing towards him no matter how hard you tried to jerk away, struggling to stay upright. “You are crying.”

“No, I’m not,” you said, just as a falling tear touched his thumb. As you adjusted to his grip, your hands fell to his thighs, pressing against them in fists.

“Hm. Well, you don’t have to tell me,” he said, eyes on another tear trailing down the other cheek, “but you’re joining me to watch a movie with Eri. I got snacks on the way home.”

You sighed, taking in how big his hands were and how much of your face they encompassed, trying to memorise their feeling until they were snatched away forever. “I thought we were gonna start a new quest tonight. I was excited.”

Tenko balked and shifted into a sceptical grin. “You wanted to play Ciperstone tonight?” he asked, both thumbs rubbing your cheekbones and moving to swipe underneath your eyes.

You sighed again, shoulders heaving as Tenko released your face to flick tears off of his hand. “I didn’t want to be myself for a few hours.”

Tenko pushed on his knees to stand. “That’s actually related to what I originally wanted to talk to you about. Furthering the working-with-others mission,” he said, and he extended his hand to help you up. “What do you know about Dungeons and Dragons?”

***

“God fucking dammit!” Tenko slammed his palm to his forehead and leant back to balance on the kitchen chair’s back legs and then combed his fingers back through his hair, upsetting some strands from his ponytail. Groaning, he crooked his face your way, smushed his face against the chair back, and pointed towards his forehead, where a red splot was forming. “Hit me as hard as you can.”

“Being bludgeoned won’t change the fact that you rolled a three,” you said, nodding towards his d20, “I ignore his whining and continue to drain the fig tree to charge my spell.”

Behind the DM screen, Shinsou rolled his own dice, and once his eyebrows had shot up to his hairline, he turned to Midoriya. “I need you to roll two d12s and a d4.”

Tenko bolted upright, hastily sweeping his bangs out of his face. “Wait, what does Midoriya have to do with it? He’s across the fucking grove! He’s engaged in close-ranged combat.”

You turned away from Shinsou’s sly grin and towards Tenko, mouth nearly a straight line, yanking another cluster of grapes from the communal bowl, and shoving two grapes in his mouth. He pinched at his lower lip as he chewed, twisting and peeling at dead skin, frowning as he focused on his character sheet, scanning it for some sort of information he was forgetting and absentmindedly raising his knee to his chest, the heel of his foot propped on the seat of his chair (thank God his jeans were from Best Jeanist’s Moulded to Your Ass line: the denim strained with his muscles. Your eye twitched). In this particular morning, with the five of you squared off at Aizawa’s kitchen table, papers and dice strewn among grocery store bakery cinnamon rolls and coffee cups (Tenko’s was full of gatorade instead of coffee, much to his chagrin), as Tenko was throwing grapes into Touya’s mouth while Shinsou did math, the narwhal house slippers dangling off Tenko’s feet, it struck you that Shigaraki Tomura had become just some guy. One who went for walks to clear his head, who spent hours failing to do a kickflip on Present Mic’s skateboard, who used emoticons over emojis, who got nervous in fast food drive-throughs, who collected hero merch (of Aizawa fervently and Present Mic against his will), who was losing his sensitivity to foods like leeks and onions, a man who was growing more and more exquisitely mundane.

And goddamn, he’s clever and perceptive and patient and cheeky in a devastatingly attractive way, and he’s flustered easily, eager to do a thing correctly, and utterly, totally captivating in his endless discoveries of what it means to be alive.

You timed it so that the shudder and shock crossing his face could pass as response to Shinsou’s description of how Tenko’s enchanted crossbow bolt missed the Spirit Realm Necromancer entirely, instead sinking into the sacred Grand Oak and instantly shattering the tree as if it were glass, its elaborate root system holding up the floating grove splintering into thousands of tiny shards, the ground beneath your party’s feet crumbling at the slightest suggestion of the shifting of weight. But really he curled in his lips with a furrowed brow and stuttering breath when you reached underneath the table to graze the back of his hand, and when he forced himself to relax, shoulders slackening, frown fading, Tenko spread his fingers to cover more of his denim-clad thigh, which you took as a timid sort of consent. Biting the inside of your cheek, you eased your palm over the back of Tenko’s hand, lacing your fingers through his and going through the motions of reacting to Shinsou’s shattered earth. Neither of you looked at each other while Midoriya’s character suffered the Necromancer’s spell to increase gravity, each movement of Midoriya’s bulky, steel armour accelerating the fall of the floating grove. By the time each of you had had enough turns to land on solid ground, preserving little of the sacred grove but all surviving, Tenko finally squeezed your fingers back, curling his own to grip them more firmly, keeping your hand pinned to his thigh, steeling himself, sitting up straight, and proposing getting close enough to the Necromancer to drive a crossbow bolt directly into his skull.

Midoriya was already muttering to himself over the effectiveness of the action while Shinsou worked, and Touya irreverently flicked his dice at Tenko, chugging coffee with his other hand. “You plunge the bolt by hand into the Necromancer’s head,” said Shinsou, “but with your strength debuff still in effect, you only nick him.”

“I try stabbing it through his ear.”

“It goes through,” said Shinsou, nodding and running his hand back through his hair, which sprung back into place, “It doesn’t pierce the neocortex, so he can still summon another—“

“I stomp him to death with my hooves,” said Touya, picking at his teeth and running his tongue over the spot.

The rest of you turned to him slowly in various states of incredulity.

“You don’t have hooves, Touya,” you said, tilting your head at the same time Tenko rubbed his thumb over yours, prompting your breath to hitch and a strange warmth to travel through your body, making you feel dizzy.

Touya grimaced and reached for a cinnamon roll. “I take off my leather breeches and boots to reveal my hooves. I have been a satyr masquerading as a human this whole time.” He leant forward on his elbow, glaring at Shinsou and gesturing with his cinnamon roll. “I stomp him. To death. With my hooves.”

Tenko sneered, his teeth cutting into his lower lip, but he merely opened his mouth and closed it, poking his tongue into his cheek. “I suppose maiming a party member wouldn’t coincide with my character’s chaotic good alignment,” he said, heaving a huge sigh to—oh, that cunning rat bastard—to conceal how he flipped his hand over in yours to touch palms, weaving your fingers back together and squeezing again, planting them back on his upper leg, massaging between your knuckles with his thumb.

“What’d you just roll?”

“Nineteen,” said Touya, casting Shinsou a slice of his most charming smile.

Midoriya let out a little laugh as Shinsou bitterly plopped his head on his fist. “Fuck you, Touya. Congratulations. You clomp over to the Necromancer and stomp all over him. Stompy stomp stomp stompy stomp. It’s difficult to watch at the insane speed you’re going, so no one stops you from doing such a good job pounding him that he’s ground into dust. Bits of him drift away in the wind.”

Here Midoriya winced. “Weren’t we supposed to retrieve the soul crystal embedded in his gauntlet? We can’t get our reward from that Silver Age dragon rider if we don’t have it.”

“Correct,” said Shinsou, glancing down at his notes, “It has been stomped to smithereens. You can’t even make out what parts of the pile of dust were once flesh.”

Ready to bolt, Touya was getting up from the table and holding up his hands in defence, but before Midoriya could start a speech that would have been more apt for the number one hero to use on patrol rather than during a DND game, the door to Aizawa’s flat opened, and in he walked, covering his yawn with the back of his hand. He halted at the sight of the five of you around his kitchen table, taking in the scattered papers and remnants of breakfast before settling on your DM. “Shinsou,” Aizawa began, disappointment outweighing the exhaustion in his voice.

“You’re the only one with a table that could fit all of us,” Shinsou said, spinning in his chair to face him, “This dormitory doesn’t have a good common area like the student ones do. Would you really prefer us to—”

“We can find you a table; there’s plenty on campus.” Aizawa lifted his goggles over his head to set them on the counter. “Is this why Monoma kept slowing me down during patrol?”

“No,” you and Shinsou said, while Tenko said, “Yes.”

Aizawa actually smiled as he unwound his capture weapon from around his neck. “Look who’s the only one telling the truth.”

“Why would I lie to you, sensei?”

Touya smacked Tenko on the arm. “Suck-up.”

“You promise?” Tenko shot back, nose wrinkling with his grin.

“This coffee had better be amazing, because it’s the only thing keeping me from kicking you all out right now,” said Aizawa, rubbing a dry eye with the heel of his palm, other hand outstretched for someone to pass him a mug.

Tenko’s thumb bent inward to swipe the inside of your palm, a silent protest while he drank from his stupid little mug of gatorade, and when he noticed what was at the bottom, he flinched. It must have been Touya who’d put your dice in Tenko’s cup.

***

Following the video of you insulting Uwabami, you’re garnering an unnerving amount of attention again, but it’s clearly someone different than last time. Whoever your stalker(s) was this time around, they were careless and unsubtle—and this confidence to be careless left you jumping at the slightest sound when you were alone.

Furthermore, you legitimately couldn’t deduce your stalker’s motivations, because no clear message linked his actions. At first, you chalked it up to the dorm’s shitty dryer eating your bright blue thong, but when you couldn’t find your lip balm or trolley pass or eventually your favourite sweater, you concluded that something else was at play here, further cemented by more and more tiny things going missing—things that, if you were stalking someone, you would’ve selected as small enough not to miss.

But bizarrely, your stalker left shit of his own lying about. A phone charger appeared underneath your pillow; loose change and a travel pack of alcoholic wipes showed up in your bathroom sink. Hello Kitty band-aids, a hair clip that looked like one of Rumi’s ears, deep-moisturising hand cream, a tiny lizard keychain with a white hamburglar mask drawn on. You couldn’t wrap your head around it. What could your stalker be trying to say besides he could access your personal space with ease? Hoarding it all in the drawer with the GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK hentai, you were struck with the notion that this may have been going on even before the video.

God, you missed when this school felt more like home instead of a holding cell, back when Shinsou and Uraraka and the rest were all still living together with you, when you could simply turn the corner to the common area to demand who took your laundry detergent and get an answer immediately (you also missed taking Aoyama’s bougie food, though you suspected that towards the end he was buying extra specifically for you). You sent an email to Aizawa about the potential break in security, and he promised to monitor the situation, though there was no evidence of physical entry.

Evidence. It’s been on your mind.

Sure, Tenko’s done stuff that could be read as romantic: how he plops your hand onto his head to demand you play with his hair, how he hovers whenever Touya stands too closely to you, how he gets upset on your behalf when people glare at you in public.

(Tenko grabbed your elbow, breaking your focus on the clothing rank. “We’re going.”

“But we haven’t found you a red coat yet.”

He lifted the hangers from your arm and slid them back onto the rack, despite belonging elsewhere. “Don’t care. I don’t like the way the cashier’s looking at you,” he said, jerking his head their direction, and when you tilted your head to glance at them over his shoulder, Tenko tapped your chin twice, guiding you to look back at him. “You shouldn’t have to be on guard when I’m with you.”)

If you were reading into it—and you were—Tenko was being so careful with talking about the pro-hero scene around you that it was almost as if he’d gotten a mission task from Aizawa to distract you from anything that might make you feel bad about yourself.

(“I hear you’re causing a lot of paperwork for my old man,” said Touya, pulling out another floor cushion from the storage space in the teahouse wall, “He hates that you’ve had to dust so many structures near his agency. He’s a decrepit creature of habit, and now that his commute is different, he’s—”

“Hey, Touya, tell us what flower bulbs you planted this winter,” Tenko said abruptly, clamping the lid on the pot hanging over the sunken fireplace, “Tell us what your garden’ll look like in spring.”

You shut your book, even though you’d just opened it. “Wait, are you saying that Touya is the one who keeps this garden? That’s—”

“You like it, sweetheart?” Touya dropped his cushion next to yours, ignoring the way Tenko was glaring daggers into his back. “Think it’s impressive?”

“Holy shit; I thought we were in the back of some professionally restored historical site the first time we came here,” you said, smiling at how Tenko’s petulant stomps to his seat chirruped, even when he scooted his own cushion towards yours (adorable; you’d think he didn’t like you giving attention to anyone else).

“Well,” said Touya, propping his hands on the kotatsu so that he could get a better view of Tenko, “With enormous pride and a huge erection, I’m pleased to announce that this garden is all my hard work.”

“Stop that,” barked Tenko, jabbing a finger towards Touya, “Stop bringing up your cock.”

“I could talk about yours, if you want. His monster cock is excruciatingly leaky and so shaped.”

Groaning, Tenko clonked his forehead on the kotatsu’s tabletop before Touya could say anything else, arm still outstretched. He peeked out from underneath his bangs towards you, tension leaving his body at your burst of laughter.)

He’s also taken your comment about silent admiration to heart. Over the discord call (through very comfortable headphones), you’d made a dumb joke about not being able to play for long, and he’d shut up immediately. When you’d confessed to lying and hoping you’d scared him, he’d replied seriously: “I want to protect my time with you. I don’t like it being taken away. I feel better when you’re with me.”

You’d frozen in the middle of weaving bowstrings while his character continued stringing them onto bows. You’d never have gotten that sort of remark at the beginning of your relationship. Tenko must genuinely be listening to you.

Anyway. You decided in the event that Tenko was collecting evidence, too, that you would leave him some.

The first time you’d been in his room had been for a specific purpose, which was to help him rub in his new facial scar moisturiser (not to take them away, or anything, because Tenko wanted to keep them, claiming he wouldn’t recognise himself in the mirror if he didn’t have his scars—and you thought they were devastatingly attractive, anyway—but just to keep them hydrated enough not to itch), but now you were here just to spend time in the same space. You were reading on his bed (oh, hohoho, his bed), and Tenko was drawing in his sketchbook on his couch by the window. With his mouth pinched in concentration, he squinted down at his paper, swiping away eraser shavings with his artist-gloved hand.

Drawing by natural light. Tenko was in room 310 because of its wide windows. It had been his one request when U.A. was placing him.

AFO had deliberately raised him in a bedroom without windows. You’d kill him if he weren’t already dead.

Thankfully, AFO’s influence was absent from Tenko’s dorm: Naruto sheets from Touya, an old Nintendo DS on his bedside table with Nintendogs in the cartridge slot, Present Mic’s skateboard propped against the coatrack that held only a black hoodie, unfolded but clean laundry in a basket next to a dresser with prescription bottles atop it, a mirror that served more as a bulletin board of Eraserhead merch than as a way to check his reflection, red shoes by the doorway, books borrowed from everyone from All Might to Shinsou to the ramen delivery guy strewn across the room, on shelves, his computer desk, his rug. The thing Tenko’d had to explain to you was a therapist-assigned painting hanging over his desk: he’d painted a murky, purple-blue, abstract sort of thing, and you were strangely touched when he’d explained it was Kurogiri (and now that you were looking, among his bulletin board of Eraserhead, a few drawings of Loud Cloud were mixed in).

There’s a lot of people in Tenko’s life who care about him now, and you’re happy to be one of them. Setting your book aside, you got up to sit next to him on the couch.

He paused when you sank into the cushion next to—well, no, you were basically sharing the same cushion, especially since he unfolded his legs from underneath him so that you could get closer. You scooted over so that your shoulders touched (scandalous) and looked over his drawings.

He’s drawing your DND characters. While his sketches aren’t exactly good, you can clearly tell who’s supposed to be whom, and they’re fun to look at, so that’s all that matters. At the centre is your character, Ginseng—you named it after your Cipherstone account because why not—in the process of spell-charging. Your character relies on the traditional ritual of tea ceremonies, from the growing of the tealeaves to serving it, summoning whatever tools you needed, like the table and dishware, and if an enemy got caught by the conventions of politeness of the tea ceremony, they were trapped in it until they’d drunk their teacup dry. Tenko had drawn her early in the spell-charging process, with branches of tealeaves sprouting from underneath her skin, with her harvesting them from her forearm. It’s rather flattering, the way her determined expression lit up her face.

Next to Ginseng was Tenko’s character, Peito, also lifted from his Cipherstone character. He was sitting on the same log as Ginseng in the middle of camp, backs touching while he cut feathers as the first step in the fletching process. His carved-willow quiver leant against his knee-high boot, red even in a fictional universe. Peito’s hands were bare, five fingers pressed against his knife and arrows.

Further back in the camp (really just towards the top of the paper, since Tenko wasn’t good at foreshortening yet), Midoriya’s character, Jackrabbit, was holding up two hangers, one with his steel and the other with sleek, black leather armour. A nice touch, really, since Midoriya had swopped Jackrabbit’s primary armour to the more lightweight leather since the shattered grove incident, and wow, you could even tell it was leather based on the pencil strokes.

Seated nearby, Touya’s character, Granddaddy Slapkins, roared with laughter at him. His shoes lay next to him, his hooves out. For some reason, he’s not holding his pet duck; he’s instead cradling what looks like your character’s wild shape, a cat with the same chocolate-point markings as your real cat (your character’s shapeshifted form was just Dango, but Tenko didn’t know that. He still didn’t know Dango existed, because cats were still illegal in the dorms, and Tenko, that little brown-nosing shit, would probably tell Aizawa about her. Cute how he’s only a suck-up to Aizawa, though).

Your favourite detail, though, was how his character was smiling. Unabashedly. As if it were a no-brainer, as if doing anything else made no sense at all.

With a stab of affection, you nuzzled into Tenko’s shoulder, resting your chin there while he sketched loops of chainmail onto Granddaddy Slapkins’s shirt, and a shiver racked through him.

“Oh, are you cold?” you asked, sitting back up and heading over towards the bed, “Let me get your blanket.”

“Wha—no, I—sure,” said Tenko, setting his pencil on his sketchbook and the whole thing on the arm of the couch, eyes half-lidded as you returned with his throw blanket.

And without thinking, you moved on impulse, as if all higher orders of cognition had checked out for the night, because you behaved like you did in your head whenever you thought about Tenko: casually, intimately, and domestically. You wrapped the blanket around yourself and knelt on the sofa before swinging a knee over his lap, and you snuggled into his chest, clutching his shirt and nosing at his neck.

Your eyes snapped open.

(What the fuck?

If this had been a planned attack, then it would’ve been a thing of brilliance: casual, seeming to meet a physical need [heating a chill] in the name of physical closeness. But you fucked it. This wasn’t planned, and thus you don’t have a way out of it without otherwise betraying your romantically-motivated interior.

Thank fuck he’s frozen up, too. But how do you get out of this? God, you really shouldn’t be teaching him how to navigate interpersonal relationships when you get yourself into shit like this.)

You swallowed thickly, pulse pounding in your ears.

“I need your advice.” Tenko’s chest barely rose when he took his first breath since you climbed onto his lap. “What would be the socially expected response to this?”

“Uh. That depends on if you’re into it or not,” you said, forcing yourself to sit back in his lap to give him some space, “If you dislike it, then it’s to get me to get off of you, and if you welcome it, then, uh. Anything else.”

Tenko unclenched his fists at his sides and—a pause, shifting his jaw—he let his hands rest at a barely-there touch on your hips, dragging them upwards to your waist, applying enough pressure there for you to feel all ten fingertips through your shirt. “Is this,” he said, wetting his lower lip, and he couldn’t continue, instead swallowing saliva.

Gathering your nerve, you wove your hand through his hair to scratch at his scalp in the way he’d liked when you’d played with his hair, and at the familiarity, Tenko huffed, shutting his eyes tightly and pressing his forehead to yours in a rush, almost knocking them together. He took another breath, heat washing over your face, and you slid your other up hand to cup his cheek.

Tenko shivered again, and he clamped his hand over yours to keep it there. “Are you sure this is what you mean to do?”

He seemed receptive enough to it, but you couldn’t be certain. “Yeah,” you said, “If I’m reading it right.”

“But it makes no sense. I’ve got to be reading it wrong,” Tenko was saying, frowning, “No one would willingly like me—”

“For fuck’s sake, Tenko—”

Practically slapping your other hand to his cheek, you kissed him, pulling him closer, one of his hands still over yours with the other now gripping your waist as if he’d never let you go. Tenko grunted into it, surging forward to keep his rough lips (sticky from his freshly applied pineapple-beeswax chapstick) seared to yours. You felt, more than heard, his miniscule whimper at the back of his throat when he opened his mouth, sliding his tongue into yours, and you could hardly keep kissing him for smiling. But he needed a breath before you did, so you broke it, sensing he wouldn’t do it out of wanting to keep you nearby.

Panting, Tenko tried and failed to push your hair behind your ear in an attempt to be suave. “Now, I perceived that as romantic.”

“It was romantic, you muppet,” you said, thumping his chest with the back of your hand.

“Good.” He cleared this throat. “Cool. Excellent,” he said, shifting underneath you (with difficulty, under the constricting denim of his Moulded to Your Ass jeans), “I want it to be, when it comes to you.”

“Thank God, I really want that, too,” you said, sighing, “but, like, I really don’t know if it’s ethical to pursue a romance this early into your recovery—”

“The fuck is wrong with you? I want it. I want you.” Frustrated, Tenko grabbed your hips in an iron grip and ground up into you, slowly, and that tight-ass denim let you feel precisely where in the drag of his hips his cock touched you, letting you feel the shift in pressure at his tip, down his shaft, to the first curve of his balls. “I thought I was alone. I thought no one else would ever be able to understand me, having fallen from what I was raised to be. Fallen,” he said, spitting, “Such a nasty word for what we’re actually doing: we’ve been reborn together. We get to build our lives back up together. We get another chance at it. I wanna spend mine with you.”

He strained his neck upwards to kiss you again, insistent, moving with confidence when he took your lower lip into his mouth but only nibbling on it once, despite being posed to bite down with vigour.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about what anyone else thinks of you and what anyone else thinks of me. I—”

“That’s not true,” you said, your turn to catch your breath, “You care so much about what Aizawa-sensei—”

“You know what I mean,” he said, shaking his head, hair falling out of his loose ponytail, “You think of me as me, and that’s all that matters. If you’re really that fucking worried about me getting into a relationship too early, go talk to my therapist. She says you’re good for me. A good influence, anyway.”

“Holy shit,” you said, mostly in reaction to how Tenko started trailing frantic, dry kisses down your neck, and, realising you should probably be doing something back, you rolled your hips, feeling awfully warm under the blanket.

He bucked back up into you, more out of desperation to keep you close over a need for friction but still giving you a taste of what it would be like to have him thrusting into you. “Fuck,” he said, almost grumbling, “I’d say fuck being ethical about it, because I’ve wanted you for a long time. I got hard when you shook me by the shoulders outside of that ice cream shop; I thought my soul was gonna leave my body when you adjusted my scarf. Hell, I—” He cut himself off, grinning in a way that, back before you knew him, you might have described as maniacal. “I wanted you back during the war. I saw you fucking elbow Touya during that battle, and the way you made him crumple to the ground was so fucking sexy. And you recovered from when he swiped at you so easily; you slipped around his attacks like it was fucking second nature. I thought it’d be cool to have you by my side, having you—” He realised what he was saying, and he relaxed, smile fading into a curious, pensive sort of look while he brought his thumb to your kiss-swollen lips. “And now I get to.”

You kissed the pad of his thumb, blinking slowly.

“So. Yeah,” he said, dropping his hand to your shoulder as he broke eye contact, a little red, “I think it’d be cool to be with you, even if we have to be careful.”

“That’s the thing, Tenko,” you said, biting the inside of your cheek as you gathered your thoughts, “I’m scared, because while I know that we should, because that’d be safe, I don’t want to be careful. Since I’ve quit being a hero, every single thing about how I’ve been living has left me feeling empty and alone, because it’s like I’m wandering through limbo. Everything screams that whatever I’m doing now is temporary, that it’ll pass, that I don’t truly belong in this situation, because I’ll find what I’m supposed to be doing later and my real home is somewhere down the line, but—fuck.” You rubbed your eye with your fist. “You, Tenko. You don’t feel temporary. You feel forever.”

Underneath you, Tenko stretched to pop a crick in his back, and he tilted his head to lie on the back of the couch. His ponytail had come loose, and his hair splayed against the fabric as he stared at you, one hand idly rubbing at your waist.

“Well. You’ve got to belong somewhere,” he said eventually, and he tapped all five fingers onto your thigh. “It could be with me.”

***

Dango was missing.

Incredible how the best evening of your life preceded the worst day you’ve had in years. You called out of work and spent hours scouring the dorm and then campus. A gruelling, miserable sort of day, anyway, grey and rainy and cold, and the campus was swarmed with people setting up for the scavenger hunt event later this month, populating the area with non-U.A. personnel and construction. Your cat was out in that mess, and you didn’t even know where to search first. It’s loud, scary, and wet, so Dango would most likely be hiding and not come when she’s called.

Had Dango escaped your flat? Had your stalker stolen her? Had she been confiscated by U.A.?

You couldn’t call any faculty for help; they’d get onto you for having an illegal cat on campus—and Hound Dog, the one who’d be the most help, might just scare her to death. Too early in the morning to call any of your friends, and you doubted they’d alter their busy schedules to help you out of a situation you should be able to fix yourself. But damn it, how come your own tracking skills only worked on people?

You shook yourself, coming out of your spiral the best you could, and you were close to hyperventilating. You sat down on a curb.

You found yourself calling Tenko, despite it being too early in the day for him to be out of training, filling with dread about never seeing your cat again and having to clear out her stuff from your room. Pulling your soaked jacket closer, you wiped at your nose and waited at the dial tone.

“Hey, I thought you couldn’t call during work. Miss me that much?”

The second you heard his strangely chipper voice, you started crying into the speaker.

He inhaled sharply, tone shifting. “Tell me who the fuck I’m stomping to death with my hooves.”

Ducking your head, you managed a smile but continued to fucking sob. “You don’t—don’t have to kill anyone, Ten—Tenko. I’ve f—fucked up.”

“What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“I’m on cam—campus,” you said, unable to speak for a full sentence without having to cut yourself off to keep bawling, ugly and loud and getting snottier by the minute, “It’s my fucking fault that I haven’t been ta—taking my stupid sta—stalker seriously, and I should’ve reported it, but—but I—goddammit!” The rain picked up again, coming down in rapid, fat drops, and, shielding your eyes, you rubbed your phone screen on your sleeve, not that it did much. “Sor—sorry. Rain got heavier.”

“Where on campus?”

“No, Te—Tenko, I’ll get up. I’m coming to you,” you said, sniffling and pushing on your knees to stand, wet and hungry and ready to crawl into your sock drawer to sleep for days. “I—I’m just so fucking pissed at myself, because my cat is fucking lost, and I could’ve sto—stopped it if I hadn’t been so secreti—tive.” Hands shaking, you yanked your soaked hood over your head and trudged towards your dormitory, and you kicked gravel, rocks scattering over the path, before losing your footing on it and nearly falling. Fuck this.

“You have a cat,” said Tenko, losing his fervent. “What’s it look like?”

“Beautiful.”

“I need more than that.”

“She fucking—I based Ginseng’s cat form on her, okay? She’s this enormously fluffy thing, mostly whitish with a brown face and legs, and it makes her look like she’s wearing a mask and thigh-high socks like God’s sluttiest little jester,” you said, knocking on your dorm’s mailboxes for luck out of habit as you passed them, “And you can’t tell Aizawa-sensei about her, because if she’s taken away the moment I find her, then I—”

“I have her,” said Tenko, “She’s in my dorm with me.”

You ran the rest of the way to his room, panting and absolutely disgusting by the time you got there, and when Tenko opened his door, there was Dango, loafing on the back of the couch and watching raindrops race down the window.

“What the fuck,” you said, dropping your wet coat and toeing off your shoes, “How the hell did she get in here?”

Tenko shrugged and hung your coat next to his hoodie. “Can she open locked doors?”

“I hope to fuck she can’t,” you said, and you rounded the couch to wrap your arms around that dear little loaf, and Dango jumped off the couch to crawl underneath it before you could fully hug her. “Oh, good. She’s fine. Acting like normal.” You sat on the couch’s arm, adrenaline evaporating to render you boneless.

“She was in my room when I came back from training. We ended early today, since Aizawa-sensei has something.” Tenko stooped to yank two bottles of gatorade from their plastic rings and headed towards the sofa to offer one to you. “She didn’t seem upset or hurt. She’s been sitting there, napping on and off.”

You accepted it and twisted off the cap. “So, who put my cat in your room?”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I don’t know,” you said, taking a shallow sip, careful not to overwhelm your agitated stomach, “They’d have to know about Dango in the first place, and I suppose my stalker would, since they’ve theoretically been breaking into my room.”

Tenko paused mid-sip, and he hastened to swallow. “Someone’s been breaking into your room?”

“Yeah,” you said, easing down the arm of the couch and onto its cushions, “I think. There’s no physical sign of entry, but my shit keeps going missing, and stuff that’s not mine keeps showing up. Let me tell you, I need some of that shit they’ve stolen; it’s hard to replace—”

Tenko touched your lips with three of his fingertips to quiet you, and he gestured for you to stay put while he scrambled over to his closet, where he stood on his toes to retrieve a wicker basket from the top shelf. He dropped the thing into your lap. “Are any of these yours?”

All of it was, missing things you blamed on everything from Dango to your stalker to your own forgetfulness: your favourite sweater, your trolley pass, lip balm, your shitty earbuds, your good pantyhose, your planner, your d10, and, among many smaller things, even that bright blue thong you’d lost in the wash (Well. It’s better to find your thong with your new boyfriend over finding them returned to your dorm coated in your stalker’s cum, you supposed).

“I was losing my goddamn mind,” Tenko was saying, “Stuff kept showing up. I thought it was a test at first—”

“I don’t have a stalker,” you said, absentmindedly rubbing the fabric of your thong between your fingers, “Your shit has been—you read that GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK shit? Tenko.”

“Oh, you have that?” Tenko scratched the back of his neck, but not in his self-harm way; it reminded you of Shinsou’s nervous habit more than anything. “Haven’t you read it? Isn’t that what you were naming your characters after?”

“Ah, ha, ha. Moving on. What is important, though, is why and how this is happening to us.”

“Yeah, I don’t…”

The two of you spitballed for a while, long enough for the both of you to finish your bottles of gatorade and for Tenko to start another, and neither of you came up with anything substantial.

“Hell with it,” said Tenko, standing to stretch, his movement disturbing Dango from her nap in his basket of clean laundry, “Let’s go ask Aizawa-sensei.”

Aizawa was not pleased when he discovered the both of you waiting in his kitchen, but he listened to the story, and when you were done, he stepped out of the room to make a phone call. When he came back, he looked even more exhausted than when he’d first come in.

“I’ve just gotten off the phone with Sakura Grove,” said Aizawa, wincing when his bones creaked as he sat in his chair, “Tenko, do you remember villain in-fighting within the PLF? In particular, I’m asking if you remember breathing in a pink dust cloud. It would’ve been in Deika City, in the month between your fight with Re-Destro and your body modification surgery. If our sources are accurate, you would’ve been with Touya.”

Tenko scrunched up his face. “Why would I have been—hm.” Frowning, he reached into the bag of popcorn you’d commandeered from Aizawa’s cupboards. “I know what you’re talking about. They were only letting me eat healthy stuff in the week before I went under. Touya was taking me to scrounge for something salty and shitty for me, because I couldn’t take it anymore. He started hitting on someone he thought was a waitress, and she—this is why I remember it—she compared the width of her hand to his thigh and said no thanks.”

“That’s Ito,” said Aizawa, sighing and crossing his arms, settling his chin into his capture weapon, “When did she use her quirk?”

“She shoved her hand on Touya’s face when he opened his stupid mouth again, and he passed out with swarming, pink particles floating around his head. She turned to me—and she must not have recognised Touya, but she knew me, because her face lit the fuck up. She never touched me, but I remember having to sneeze.”

“She never told you what her quirk did?”

“I woke back up in the PLF headquarters. I assumed whoever picked me up had killed her and that her death negated any effects.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why? What does it do?”

Aizawa let out a soft laugh, muffled through his capture weapon, and he jerked his head in your direction. “You tell him,” he said, snatching the bag of popcorn and heading towards his bedroom.

***

He’d been nervous about wearing a suit. They reminded him of AFO.

But you’d strayed away from dark colours and too much structure, so his light greyish-blue suit jacket stayed unbuttoned even as you leant across to the passenger seat to adjust his All Might tie for him (a Put Your Hands Up Radio tie had been offered, but Tenko had already closed his fist around the striped tie Midoriya would loan him). Part of his bangs had been pinned back to show off his annoyingly handsome face, especially in how his sharp, red eyes observed caught every movement of your terrible attempt to tie the tie based on the pictures Aizawa had sent you.

“We’re not gonna be late, are we?” Tenko drawled out, the corner of his mouth quirking upward, hand resting on the car ceiling as he angled his chest towards you.

“Shush; we are in the parking lot,” you said, looping the larger end. Or were you supposed to be looping the smaller one? “Besides, the world won’t end if we’re a few minutes late to my class’s annual reunion.”

A flimsy excuse for a party, one made because hero agencies needed some sort of named event as an excuse to dismiss your friends en masse. But it was spring again, and they were coming out of the winter blues, and they wanted to see you again, so, hey, why don’t we work something in around your schedule? If you can’t come to this date, then we’ll reschedule it until you can.

And, like. They knew. They knew Tenko was your soulmate. You suspected they all wanted to see what he was like now, too, because no one but Shinsou, Midoriya, and, apparently, Bakugou had known.

You undid the loose knot and tried again. “Are you nervous?”

“No,” he said, scrutinising the tacky balloons and streamers swaying in the night breeze outside of the otherwise intimidatingly elegant venue, “but those kids might be.”

“Those kids happen to be friends my age,” you said, “and I’m barely younger than you are. They know you’re coming. You’re fine.”

Tenko sucked in through his teeth, tapping the roof of the car one finger at a time. “The last time they saw me was as a thing. An object of destruction.”

“Well, they’ll definitely see you as a human person when I spill how you designed a unicorn DND character for Eri.” You pulled the fabric taut but kept it from lying closely to his neck (a boy didn’t like feeling constrained). “You know what? This tie is as good as it’s gonna get.”

He ducked his chin to examine its knot. “It’s shit.”

“It adds to your devil-may-care, reformed-bad-boy sort of charm,” you said, giving the tie a final smooth-down and poorly suppressing your smile when you felt his muscles through his shirt. “Mathematically, there are only 85 ways to tie a standard tie knot. I don’t believe we’ve reached any of them.”

“How do you know these things? You’re unbeliev—” Tenko jerked his face out of view of the window as Aoyama and Kouda, gesturing wildly, strode past the car and into the venue. “Listen,” he said, clearing his throat, “I know I don’t care and that you don’t care, but other people will. Your reputation is gonna plummet right into its grave if we’re out in the open together.”

You shook your head, letting your smile show. “So, I fucked part of a rescue job almost a year ago. So what. So I’m dating my soulmate. Am I supposed to do otherwise? Honestly, Tenko,” you said, curling loose strands of hair behind his ear, letting your fingers linger around his cheek and neck (he leant into the touch), “I don’t care. I would’ve chosen you even without the soulmate bond. You’re too endearing to pass by. You’re too…babygirl.”

Tenko had been guiding your hand to his mouth, and he snorted before it got there, warm air scattering in a short burst. “Don’t call me that,” he said, pressing his lips to the centre of your palm and waiting until you met his gaze to retract them.

A different warmth shot to your lower stomach, but you had to keep pressing, for the sake of the bit. “Oh, then what should I—darling? Honey? Pookie bear?”

He scoffed and nipped at your pinkie. “None of those are good.”

“Tenko.”

He breathed in, shoulders rising, eyes fluttering shut. Taking a moment to kiss the tiny bite mark on your finger. “Yeah,” he said, opening his eyes in a slow blink, catlike, “Feels good. Feels—like coming home.”

Beaming, you reached down to lace his fingers through yours. All five of them squeezed back. “Then let’s go.”

soulmate trope taglist: @bakugouspsycho, @pansexualproblemchild, @doonaandpjs, @sunsetevergreen, @the-coffee-is-on-fire, @liberace2, @ladymidnight77, @nonomesupposedto, @gooooomz, @kissmebakugou, @pachiibatt, @celestair, @tiredkittykat, @cheshireshiya, @90s-belladonna, @infjsnightmare

[pray4byron]

Omg I love you Hazbin matchups!! If I could get one I'd be blessed. Pun intended.

About me!

My name is Venus, and I'm a single/teen(18-19) mom. I'm 5'2 and really punky. I've got lots of piercings including an eyebrow, my septum, a nostril, and 00g ears. I plan on getting more and I hope to devour my arms in tattoos. I've been reading since I was 8 as a form of escapism till I left my parents house and got into a safe and healthy environment and now use it just as a hobby. I'm a woman, or fem/leaning enby using mostly she/they pronouns. I am Demisexual and pansexual. I was diagnosed with PTSD and Tourrests syndrome with Echolalia and coperalia. I was diagnosed with depression ages ago but has successfully overcome it and was taken off my antidepressants. I went to 5 middle schools and I've lived in 8-14 diffrent places. I lost count.

Some of my unique traits include

Charisma and people skills (which I don't like people but like- I can't be a menace to society no matter now much I wanna.

Passion for all things animal. I'm in school to be a vet and I also live on a farm and hunt!

I'm a practicing pagan(witchcraft) and I use alot of nature related things

Sometimes I go into a "god complex state" and just think I'm God's greatest gift (narcissistic I know)

I'm piss poor with sarcasm and yet I try to use it constantly and just look like an idiot.

I do Dino arms when I get exited. I also snort when I laugh and my eyebrows flex when I'm talking passionately.

I bought 50 dollars worth of jelly beans not too long ago by accident and I don't even wanna explain how that happened.

Likes

My daughter is the most important thing in my life.

My favorite colour is olive green and forest green. one of my favorite foods is chicken. I drink an absurd amount of peach tea from cracker barrel. (You can buy it by the half gallon) I take a special interest in rocks and collect them. I also love to garden! Art is one of my passions. I make playlists for every mood and I even have a special playlist that I dace to with my 6 month old daughter.

Blue ppl avatar and avatar the last Airbender are litterslly Fandom that have absorbed me. Avatar was one if my big escapism places.

Horse riding, Cow calf care, and goats that break into my car.

My favorite animals are a wolf, lions, longhorns, most well bread dogs/cats, and snakes

I love photography and the mountains!

Dislikes

I'm very much not a people person. I have a hard time tolerating 80% of people and the people I do enjoy my company with took awhile to get used to. It takes persistence. I've also got a bone to pick with people who I relate to to much and tend to veer away from them. Sometimes I stg I have a "I can fix them" complex which I do not like. I've got a fear of needles.

this was a hard call, but in the end, i went with…

Alastor !!

Alastor admires your charisma and people skills, despite the fact that you hate people, which he gets it, he’s like that too

He can see how much your daughter means to you so as much as he’s not too into kids he will defend her whether he admits it or not and he does try to have a bond with her

Without a doubt, he enjoys the fact that you practice witchcraft, he wouldn’t mind learning a thing or two from you, and he definitely asks you a couple questions here and there

[oraculate]

whops im a little late sorry but here i (dove, s/h, certified hag) am and more importantly, here's ko lijae, your local fuckin weirdo. surprise surprise though, she's not just a pill popping drunk, she's also impulsive to a fault, an adrenaline junkie with a death wish, and an obsessive nightmare. she's giving oracle at delphi, or she would be if you romanticized it, but it's kind of hard to romanticize someone who very clearly does not have their life even close to together and is letting that show in a way that distinctly bucks social norms. but hey, who has time for social norms when you're touched by the gods, amirite? i'm more than thrilled to be here, haven't written in a hot minute so be gentle, but her pages are here: profile / bio / connections and there's a little bit more under the cut, msg for discord!

i'm not sure what to put that isn't already on the pages so here's a little mindless rambling for you in case something resonates.

ko lijae has premonitions, visions, etc.

her family is historically shamanic and has been for centuries, passed down from woman to woman as is oft the case.

now, granted, they're lowkey scammers so at least in very recent memory "real" visions and so forth are not a thing.

not to mention traditionally in muism shamans are more focused on connection to the spirit world/those who have passed so she's not exactly on brand religiously....

so needless to say the thought process in the ko household was 'yikes'.

and if it had been truly just an expression of mental health concerns she'd have been fucked because if there's one thing the ko family does not believe in its talk therapy or mood stabilizers etc.

as a kid she found a certain idea of solace in the idea that she was probably just experiencing sinbyeong or 'shamanic sickness' (recognized as a culture bound syndrome in the DMCA) that many soon-to-be shamans go through before they are fully initiated, often that are accompanied by reported auditory and visual hallucinations.

at this point in her life she's not sure she buys into the shaman thing fully, she's come to acknowledge her grandmother as a fake, but she also grapples with the idea that there's definitely something going on with her and it's certainly not purely based on mental unrest (though she's more than happy to admit there's a deal of that going on at this point) so a part of her at least wants to attribute it to something somewhat explainable, and figures it must have some kind of genetic component that could be related to how her family ended up shamans in the first place.

in the evolutionary game of fight or flight lijae has chosen a resounding: both. she'll fight you and she'll run from herself.

a lot of that running is done via chemicals of whatever type she can get her hands on, resulting in a chain smoking habit and alcoholism.

she has an exceptionally devil may care attitude, sharp tongue (mostly at her own expense) and a deep and feral loyalty to the few people who stick by her.

honestly she gives feral cat energy, like she might gnaw her paw off if she got caught in a trap and god help you if you corner her, but if you hang around patiently enough maybe eventually she'll come around. but she's got fleas and half an ear is missing and there's scars all around her muzzle so is it worth the time? maybe not.

anyway if you've got any sort of ideas about how this weirdo might be able to round out a plot for you either with or without the inclusion of her '''''gifts''''' i'm all ears!

[i-cast-teatus-deletus]

Part 0 - Blind Spots

These aren't "disclaimers" or anything, just stuff that you need to keep in mind as you read along with this blog. Every one of these facts should be appended at the end with, "so if you are not in the situation, you may need to do something different than what we are doing."

I will probably keep adding to this list as I think of more things that might need mentioned here.

We are, unfortunately, USAmericans

We own our home

Our house is always chilly, even in summer

We deliberately picked a house that is in-town (albeit a smallish Appalachian town) so we don't drive far for groceries, the pharmacy, etc

One of the guys has his own bedroom, and the other one shares it with me

We have people living in our home who are 100% on board to help with aftercare stuff, including someone who works from home.

We are all moderately handy with medical/home care stuff, are not squeamish, and are able to do all of those tasks safely and hygienically

We don't have kids. Our pets consist of two adult cats and some fish.

We don't have to travel extensively for consults or for surgery (probably 90-120 mins each way for everything)

Both guys are moderately skilled at sewing, and we own a mid-tier sewing machine. The one guy sewed his own dress for his senior prom, which was a big fluffy 18th century-inspired thing with a crinoline. There's a few things we intend to sew rather than buy, especially a Comfort Pillow since it's basically just a long rectangle. (I suggested somewhere to buy a pattern and got "I don't need a pattern for that, it's a pillow.")

We intend to keep the overwhelming majority of the items we are purchasing even after both surgeries are done (because we will end up having injuries or surgeries we didn't anticipate and most of this stuff is nice for recovering from other issues as well). Some of it may end up being repurposed or converted into something else (see the previous point ), but we intend to sell or give away very little. It's the other reason we're doing this much research.

We already own a shower chair (though we're actively looking for a nicer one), which you should consider getting if you're able to. We also already have a 7" Squatty Potty on each of the toilets in the house already (which you also definitely consider if you don't have one)

We desperately want natural fabrics (cotton, linen, silk) and are willing to pay more to get pajamas and shirts that aren't polyester.

We are not deeply concerned if something is Men's Clothing or Women's Clothing, and that extends to not just brand/size but color, cut, etc.

The guys both have short (ear-length or shorter) hair and intend to keep it at least that short into the future. My goal is to get them haircuts in the week before surgery, and if they want to go even SHORTER for recovery, I will not stop them.

I am going to be washing their hair/helping them wash their hair after surgery and we have a decent-ish spot in the house to do so.

Both guys in question are FOR SURE getting double incision surgery due to the amount of tissue that will need to be removed.

None of us are religious and have a pretty big aversion to Christianity in general (which may not sound relevant, but try looking for literally anything on Pinterest written by someone who isn't a loud and proud evangelical Christian)

And, while we're listing things to keep in mind, I'll just add these here too:

I use top surgery resources specifically for people who are trans pretty much interchangeably with mastectomy resources for cis women. Obviously, if you don't want to hear about cis women having mastectomies (even if they have info I thought was useful and have already been vetted by someone who isn't cis for offputting female-centric content), do not click on them. I will do my absolute best to tag them [#mastectomy resources for cis women] and mention it in the text of the post as well in case tagging fails. The primary thing to keep in mind about mastectomy resources for cis women is that a mastectomy on a cis woman is a MUCH more invasive surgery (often with multiple additional steps depending on how much tissue is being removed, what kind of reconstruction, etc.), so the recovery at roughly every stage is about double the length of top surgery and that's assuming there's no complications. It's nice to see what they needed for their 8-10 week layup with similar restrictions, but I think it would be easy to overbuy if you use them exclusively since you will be actually laid up for a substantially shorter length of time.

I'm currently tagging general surgery resources with [#general surgery resources] and mentioning they are not top surgery specific resources in the text of the post. Although I've read them over before posting them, general surgery resources may and probably will give advice that conflicts with advice a top surgeon (or your top surgeon in particular) would give.

I am currently unsure what surgery goals are for the guys after top surgery, but I'll likely continue to do similar stuff for hysto/whatever else if they decide to do it.

While "top surgery shopping with a goal of having the MOST ethical top surgery recovery" is certainly someone's goal, it's not the goal of our recovery or blog. There's NO ethical consumption under capitalism, and I am trying desperately to maximize my purchasing power. So, I have bought stuff for this blog on Amazon and Sam's Club, and will probably continue to do so if their prices are dramatically better for the items I'm after.

[sunflower-butch]

hey there demons. It's me, ya boy. And by demons I mean the common cold, I've contracted the common cold. Lo I don't think I've missed breathing out of my nose so much in my entire life. I can't even greet you with the usual cute little nickname my head's so cloudy :(

In theory I like layering but in practice my sensory issues get the best of me, so the closest I get is like an open button up and a t-shirt.

the book is called Bridge to Elsewhere by many different authors since it's a collection of short stories! Fustercluck is from one short story called Whose spaceship is it anyway? by John Chu, and is one of my favourites in the whole book because at heart I am a theater kid. The whole book has amazing queer and POC rep in and out of the book!(there's a story about lesbian space birds!!!)

I love The Hobbit and Hunger Games too! There's also Sal and Gabi break the universe by Carlos Hernandez, yes it was released in 2019 and yes by then I was probably too old to read middle grade novels but that did not stop me. I have an old french encyclopedia called le petit larousse illustré, it has so many beautiful illustrations! It is reprinted every year but my copy is from 1924 so it's kinda falling apart and the part of me that worked in the library for years just wants to tape it back together but I need to buy better tape so I don't ruin it. Of course i'm a hopeless romantic so i've read pride and prejudice like a million times, it's just a really pretty book don't judge me. I really like Salt To The Sea by Ruta Sepetys it's a bit bleak but I listened to the audio book while painting the guitar and really enjoyed it.

OUTLAW ROBIN I am foaming at the mouth. if you ever finish a story like that i'd love to read it!

I really don't think you understand how red my face gets every time you call me darlin' it's not even funny.

If you want you can send me more songs and I can tell you what colour they sound like to me.

I don't get how some pretty flowers simply do not match in scent, like you look beautiful you should smell like rainbows and unicorns. it's unfair.

I only have three piercings (two on my left ear and one on my right) but like I said I need more.

asdfghjklkfj back home is also a farm for me. There's 2 dogs, 3 cats, an assortment of chickens(demon spawn), 5 ducks(my babies), and an ancient beta fish. I've always wanted a fluffy cow too! and a mini donkey 😂

I am not from the us. I really thought I already gave it away with my rantings about Alvvays not having canadian tour dates.

I am but a simple Canadian who wears tuques, listens to the vinyl cafe, and drinks maple syrup by the jug. fr the funniest thing is debunking people's Canadian stereotypes it's hilarious

your damsel under the incredible duress of her cold

-el

Oh no!!! That is terrible!! I hope you feel better soon, lovely! <333 Drink lots of water and take medicine! I wish I could make you some soup.

Is it just me, or is the whole Ronance side of Tumblr falling ill? What’s with that?

Understandable! There are some days I get like that, but for the most part I love layers. My main issues lies with long sleeves that are too loose on my wrist. Drives me nuts.

I’ll have to check that out! It’s been a while since I last read a short story collection, and I’m always down for good representation! Lesbian space birds? Sign me the fuck up.

I haven’t heard of that one! Definitely also going on the list. I’m also not above reading middle school books at my age. Sometimes they’re just that good, damnit. You’re never to old to enjoy something like that. And the encyclopedia? That is the absolute coolest thing!! Antique books are so beautiful and you gotta love the old book smell. 😌 1924, damn that’s old. Getting close to a whole century old, wow! P&P is one I know but haven’t read. I’ve never been much into period pieces, but the amount of times it’s popped up in conversations recently is feeling like a sign that I need to read and watch it.

I hope I will! It’s a future project since I’ve got too many already, but outlaw Robin lives in the back of my mind rent free

Then I will continue to do it, darlin’, because that sounds cute as hell ☺️

Ooooh, okay, I’ll give you three. “Late Bloomer” by Mereba, “Linger” by The Cranberries, and “honey” by Coastal Club (that one is a personal favorite!!)

For real! It’s so sad when you see a cute flower and go to smell it and it just,,, stinks. Bradford pears are definitely my least favorite though. They make the whole campus smell bad every spring ahdkskkw

That’s so cool! I hope you can get more! I just know they look sick as hell

Oh my gosh, that’s so cool! I love animals so much <33 And mini donkeys, you say? Well let me introduce Hope and Brayleigh—

Here’s where you figure out I’m kind of a dumbass because I definitely remember you saying that and it definitely went riiiiiiight over my head. At least I’m cute! Canadian, that’s so cool! What’s your favorite stereotype to debunk? 😂

Wishing you speedy healing and love,

- Max/Lo

[mcjeanalds]

i am in desperate need of posting so here are some random headcanons about my main 9!! (i'll do like at least 2 each, some may have more)

~~~

- connie would be the kid with the speaker in his bag (public school kids, y'all know exactly who i'm talking about)

- eren went through an eyeliner phase. in public? no, but he would just sit around with eyeliner on

- never give sasha the aux because she would just blast "tia tamera" by doja cat on full volume while screaming the lyrics with the windows open

- levi loves cats, he like...,. relates to them? idk but he sees himself in cats and thinks they're adorable n shit

- mikasa has cried to multiple different mitski songs, even ones she can't even relate to (she's just like me fr fr)

- sasha and connie always gaslight jean by making up scenarios and being like "omg remember when..." and jean gets so anxious and thinks he's losing his memory

- erwin really wants a cool sleeve of tattoos but won't do it because he remembers that tattoos are permanent and removing them is painful and expensive

- hange owns a cowboy hat for absolutely no reason, but when they remember they have it, they don't take it off for like a week

- armin, eren, and mikasa fucking love dancing even though they're horrendous at it, and they don't even actually dance, they kinda just jump around and head bang to whatever song is playing (it's cute tho <3)

- sasha is a sucker for squishmallows, especially the food shaped ones

- hange is definitely, not exactly a stoner, but an avid smot poker and is always willing to share

- mikasa can play guitar!! not that well, but she can still play better than everyone else!!

- armin keeps a picture of his pet in his wallet in case he ever feels down and needs to cheer up a bit

- eren's guilty pleasure is astrology. he's not super into it and he doesn't understand everything, but sometimes he'll just be like "oh of course she's a taurus" or some shit

- levi owns so much jewelry. like.... so much. and it's all silver. this mf has rings and necklaces and bracelets and is so tempted to get his ears pierced too

- connie bites. like if him and his friends are like fake fighting/wrestling, he will bite. not hard, but he'll do it

- jean's hair is super fucking soft, regardless of how sweaty or gross he might be

- erwin is great with kids, but not babies. like someone will ask him to hold their baby and he'll like place it under his armpit and just keep it there

- hange has the worst sense of humor– corrupt gen z humor. like y'know that one picture of the horse without legs on the ground and it's captioned "ground beef"? yeah that kinda shit

- armin collects funko pops of all his favorite shows/movies and has all of his all-time favorite characters out of the box on a separate shelf

- levi has baby soft skin regardless of any wounds or scars, and he doesn't even have like a super specific skin care routine or anything

- sasha, jean, and connie all play roblox together at like 3 am when they're drunk off of tiredness and everything is funny

- hange gets fascinated by things that are holographic and will buy it even if they're never gonna use it

- eren steals mikasa's phone and takes 4000 blurry and unflattering pictures on it. she always keeps the most humiliating ones

- armin and hange discuss fnaf lore. jean once caught them playing the first fnaf game together and then he got hooked too

- levi once got into a bad habit of calling things "camp" and then had to explain it to erwin. he was very confused

- jean and connie wanted to make their own nft. everyone immediately shut them down

~~~

literally did this on a whim.,,, enjoy my little ackersluts

[vendettaparker]

What a Dumbass [P.P]

Summary: Peter’s mistake leads to you being injured. 

Pairing: Peter Parker x Avenger!Reader

Word Count: 2.1K

Warnings: Swearing, like a substantial amount, suggestive content kinda, gun shot wound, and flustered!Peter 

a/n: I really liked writing this. I couldn’t stop laughing at some of the dialogue. and the mistake peter made to cause the whole set-up of the story is so funny to me. like i can legit see him making this mistake. also, i’m gonna make a permanent tag list, so please send me an ask or message me if you want to be on it! <3

        ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

     Peter Benjamin Parker is a fucking dumbass. All the time mostly. Most of the time his dumbassery leads to a lot of annoyed avengers, a lot of clean up, and a lot of spilled secrets. Hence why like three people who definitely shouldn’t know he is Spider-man do. But every once in while his idiocy can lead to an unexpected happily ever after, at least until he fucks something up again. 

     This particular fuck up has yet to be determined as a happy accident or your new 13th reason. It all started when that spider bitch decided it’d be a good idea to watch some explicit content on his laptop. Now, this wasn’t particularly an unknown activity for him to partake in, since we all know about his little impromptu purchase in Germany, but unbeknownst to this dork, his aunt was in the next room over working on a tear in his suit. And to make matters worse, he accidentally just so happened to purchase a subscription using said aunt’s credit card that was pre-setup in his laptop. 

     Now May is a very understanding woman. Very sex-positive, very loving, and inclusive; the whole shebang really. So when she happened to catch this idiot doing what he most certainly shouldn’t have been doing, she wasn’t mad, just thoroughly disturbed. Then she got the notification about the purchase. That was a bit more taboo in her eyes. So Peter was grounded from patrolling for a week and his laptop privileges were revoked for two weeks. That was fucking merciful compared to what this whole fuck up put you through. 

     At the school that following Monday, Peter spent the whole first, second, fourth, and lunch period trying to convince you to take over patrol for a week. Sure, you could definitely handle it, not to pat yourself on the back or anything, but you were significantly stronger than Peter, so it shouldn’t have been that big of a deal. But you just really didn’t want to. Peter had his ‘Peter Tingle’ to help him find danger, while you’d actually have to look. It just seemed harder for you to do than it would be for him. 

     “Why are you even grounded?” You sighed after Peter's 3rd time bringing up the possibility of you patrolling for him at lunch. 

     “He got caught watching and buying p—” Ned started laughing.

     “Ned! Shut up!” Peter yelled, slapping his hand over his friend's mouth. 

     “How has your identity not been leaked yet, Jesus Christ.” You mumbled, giggling. You flipped through your chemistry textbook, writing notes to prepare for Friday’s quiz. 

     “Yeah, and how come you didn’t know May was home?” Ned pushed Peter’s hand away. “Where was your ‘Peter Tingle’ then?” 

     “She’s not a threat, dude. But shit, I really wish my tingle detected her.” Peter groaned, a deep blush covering his features. “Please (Y/N). I really, really don’t wanna leave Queens without any protection for a week. I’ll try to convince May to let me go out on the weekend, so really it’s only five days.” 

     “I guess I could help you out, but you owe me. I should really spend this time studying for my chemistry test. Iron bitch is gonna have my head on a spike if I fail another chem test.” You said, highlighting more notes. 

     “Okay! Delmar’s for a week, anytime, anywhere.” Peter said putting his hand out for you to shake. 

     “Make it a month, I know my worth.” 

     Peter hesitated, but eventually gave in, “Fine, but you better do a good job.” 

        ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

     So now you were stuck patrolling from 8:30 to 11:00 every night. It wasn't bad per se, and nothing too eventful happened. You stopped a small convenience store robbery, gave a few kids some tips at the skatepark, ran some errands for an old lady, and saved a cat from a tree. Thursday night was the real kicker though. Your night had barely started and you accidentally got in the middle of a drug deal between some smaller mob and a real messed-up junkie. This should’ve been an easy takedown, only six people in total that needed to be taken out, but like was mentioned before, you don’t have Peter’s goddamn, stupid fucking tingle. So after taking all six of the perps out you started to walk away after alerting the police. Unfortunately, one of those assclowns had come to, and grabbed the gun a few feet away from him and shot it towards you. The bullet went through your thigh and out the other side. Screaming in shock and pain, you used your own throwing knives and knocked the gun out of the mobster’s hand, then you proceeded to knock him out again with a few good punches to his noggin, maybe a few more, just for good measure. But this wound would need to be cleaned and stitched up. And if you went back to the Tower, Steve and Tony would give you an earful about “watching your surroundings” and “being more careful”. So in a moment of pure adrenaline and desperation, you texted Peter. 

You: are you home

Spider-Dork: Yeah, why?

You: i’ll be there in 5 

Spider-Dork: What? Why? Is everything ok?

Spider-Dork: Hello??? (Y/N)????

(Y/N) declined (3) calls 

Spider-Dork: Answer my calls idiot. 

     Peter’s texting and constant calling was cut short from a crash in his room. 

     “(Y/N)? Is that you?” Peter called from the couch in the living room. 

     “Yeah, can I borrow a t-shirt?” You called, fumbling around accidentally knocking over another lamp. “Oops, sorry!”

     “Uh, yeah sure. In the closet!” Peter called back pausing his show, prepared to make his way over to you. 

     “And some sweats?” You called back, blood dripping all over Peter’s hardwood floor. 

     Peter got up to make his way to his room. “Yeah, second drawer on the left side.” He said as he made his way to his bedroom. Knowing you were in there, most likely changing, he knocked. “You decent?” 

     “Nope, not really. I need a pair of your boxers too, though.” You called through the door, now seeing that the blood splattered on your underwear as well. “Also, bring the first aid kit when you come in.” 

     ‘What? Why?” Peter said in a more stressed tone, pushing his way into the room, completely ignoring the fact that you were very much not decent. “Holy shit.” He said seeing you out of your suit, in your bra and underwear, blood dripping down your right leg, pooling onto the floor. Your hand, red and bloody, pressed onto what he only assumed was the wound and blood seeping through your fingers. 

     “Bring a mop too.” 

     Peter ran out of the room to grab the first aid kit, plus some extra bandages and a cleaning solution. When he came back in he found you in the same state, standing in the middle of the room, eyebrows furrowed in pain, clutching your right thigh. 

     “What the hell happened?” He gasped, motioning for you to sit on his bed. You hesitated, not wanting to mess up his sheets. He seemed to notice your thought process quickly adding, “I have to wash my sheets anyway.” 

     “Gross.” You mumbled, scrunching up your face in disgust and finally settling down on his bed. 

     “Move your hand and tell me what happened,” Peter said kneeling on the floor next to the bed, positioned right at your hips. You removed your hand, bloody instantly seeping onto the bed. Peter winced looking at the hole in your leg, quickly grabbing the peroxide and dumping heaps of it onto your leg, much to your distaste. 

     “I got shot.” You stated as he cleaned the blood around the hole with alcohol pads.

     “Well, no shit. I mean by who and how?” 

     “Mobster. Sneaky bitch got me while I was walking away.” You winced as Peter inspected the wound further. 

     “I need to stitch this up. Did it go all the way through?” He said lifting your leg to look underneath for an exit wound. 

     “Yeah.” Peter found the exit wound and held your leg up with one hand, pouring peroxide on the back of your thigh with the other. 

     “You have to be more careful, (Y/N)! This looks really nasty.” Peter scolded, setting your leg back down and prepping the needle and sutures. “What if this was in your chest? Or—or if you didn’t get here in time? You could’ve bled out!” 

     “Well sorry that I don’t have your stupid tingle to help me out when I’m being fucking shot at!” You yelped, gripping the bedsheets. 

     “You don’t need spidey sense, you need fucking common sense,” Peter mumbled, stitching his first suture.

     “What the fuck did you just say?” You looked at him incredulously. 

     “I— uh, nothing.” Peter huffed, focusing back on stitching you up.

     “This is your all your fault, to begin with!” You accused, shifting uncomfortably, due to the needle constantly being stuck into your leg. “You’re the one that begged me to go on patrol for you! You’re the dumb bitch that got caught watc—” 

     “Ok! Shut up! For God’s sake, you’re never gonna let me live that down.” Peter groaned, finishing up the last stitch. “Flip over.” He commanded, pushing at the side of your waist to help with the movement. 

     “Well, it was fucking dumb. Don’t you check to make sure nobody’s home? God, we all know you’re a vocal bitch too.” You said, fully situated on your stomach. 

     “What the fuck is that suppose to mean!?” He gasped, prepping another needle. 

     “You’re a sensitive boy.” You shrugged, wincing when Peter started his next stitch. 

     “I-I am not sensitive! I’m emotionally and physically staunch!” He defended, going in for another stitch. 

     You just raised an eyebrow in amusement. “Sure, whatever you say, babe.” You winked at him, blowing an exaggerated kiss. 

     “You're a jerk,” Peter mumbled, finishing up his stitching job. “A jerk with a fucked up leg.” 

     You hummed, quite amused. Peter got up and started to collect his medical supplies. He shuffled out of the room to put everything away. When he returned you were trying to get up and walk, wincing at every slight movement. 

     “Here, let me just—” Peter lifted you up, bridal style. A small yelp coming from you when a sharp pain shot through your leg. “Sorry.”

     “It’s fine. Can you help me get dressed?” You said as he walked you over to his desk and set you down in his desk chair. 

     “Sure.” Peter blushed, painfully aware of your lack of clothes. He picked out some clothes from his closet and drawers. He helped you into them, wallowing in the uncomfortable silence, taking in each whimper and wince from you whenever he brushed against your thigh. 

     “Fuck, I’m so sorry.” He sighed after you were all dressed. “This is my fault.” 

     You looked at his distraught face, feeling bad for initially blaming him for the events of tonight. “No, Pete. It’s fine. I should’ve made sure all of the guys were knocked out.” You put a hand on his shoulder, giving it a comforting squeeze.

     “No, I should’ve been more careful when I was watching that stuff. I have my spidey sense, I would’ve been able to avoid getting shot. It’s not your fault that you didn’t get bit by a radioactive spider.”

     “Pete, really, I’ll be better by next week anyway. It’s fine.” 

     Peter shook his head, sighing. “I just feel so bad, I shouldn’t have forced patrolling on you.” You hugged him and rubbed his back soothingly. “It’s my fault you got hurt.” 

     “Peter stop. It’s just an unfortunate accident.” You mumbled, hugging him closer. “It could’ve happened to anyone.”

     “But it didn’t happen to just anyone (Y/N), it happened to you. And I caused it. I-I don't know what I’d do if something ever happened to you. What if it was worse?”

     You sighed, pulling away from Peter and cupping his face, seeing the regret and shame pooling in his eyes. Without much thought, you pulled him closer, slowly connecting your lips in a sweet kiss. Truly getting lost in the feeling of his lips against yours, the feeling of perfection. 

     Peter’s eyes widened in shock for a moment, before he was kissing you back, reveling in the feeling he’s been dreaming about for months. You finally pulled away to catch your breath. Peter flushed at your actions, unable to stop the wide smile crossing his features. 

     “Sorry,” You mumbled sheepishly, “just needed to shut you up for a second.”

     “Maybe I should talk more, just to see what happens,” Peter smirked, pulling you in for another shorter, but just as sweet, kiss. 

     You hummed against his lips. “I really like you. Even when you're a dumbass.” You sighed against his lips.

     “The feeling is mutual.” 

     “Rude. I’m not a dumbass.” You gasped in faux offense. 

     “You’re the one with a bullet wound.” he deadpanned 

  ��  “You’re the one who got caught watchin—”

     “(Y/N)!”

[whatifyoulivelikethat]

just kidding, m | jjk

pairing(s): jungkook x reader

summary: There was a time where you would be out partying, getting drunk and fucking up a storm. But you’re different now. You stopped drinking. Now you’re the one waiting for Kim Taehyung to call so you can pick him up from his drunken adventures. There’s just one small hitch –  Taehyung’s roommate, Jeon Jungkook, offering you a mojito.

warnings: rated M (18+) for language, (a little) alcohol consumption; slight crack at the start lol; smut (fem reader, thigh riding, handjob, fingering, m-receiving oral); non-idol!AU; Jungkook is a tempter and he knows it; noona!reader and you’re a nympho, whoops

--

“I don’t drink.”

“Oh.”

Jeon Jungkook blinked at you, holding out the mojito.

“But… I made it.”

“That’s true. But I don’t drink.”

He pursed his lips and frowned.

“You sure?” he asked, putting on his best puppy eyes.

“Yup.”

“I promise it’s not poisoned.”

You laughed, jangling your car keys. “I have to drive later. But also, I do not drink.”

He nodded and took a sip of it. “It’s really smooth.”

You smiled and went back to your phone. Kim Taehyung was supposed to text you in a bit so you could pick him up from a party. In exchange, he let you borrow his computer to play League of Legends since he had a better PC and internet than your apartment. There was an event going on, so you had to grind games. You were getting tired though and you didn’t want to be in the middle of a game when Taehyung called half-drunk.

Now you were sitting on the couch, as Taehyung’s roommate Jeon Jungkook stood there and took sips from his mojito. Just standing there, thinking. He did that a lot, drifting off into space randomly. You figured it was some sort of weird habit. He was wearing a striped black-and-white turtleneck and black leather pants. His cheek-length black hair was pinned back on the right side, revealing his undercut. It seemed like he was going out, but he had spent all night in his room before going to the kitchen and then appearing with said mojito. Why? Honestly, you had no idea.

“Are you going somewhere?” you asked, looking up at him from the sofa.

Jungkook snapped out of it and stared at you. “What?”

You pointed to his outfit. “You’re dressed all fancy.”

Jungkook looked down. “Oh. Uh, not really. I was going to go with Taehyung tonight but I had an assignment to finish that I forgot about. I never changed.”

You nodded. Hm.

Okay.

“How do you know Taehyung-ssi, anyway, noona?”

“I sucked his dick once.”

Jungkook nearly dropped his glass.

You calmly scrolled through Instagram. You flickered your eyes up to see Jungkook’s shocked face and his red ears.

“I’m kidding,” you chuckled, seeing Jungkook blink rapidly to collect himself. “I used to be the Biology lab TA. He’d ask for help a lot. And he plays League, so we ended up hanging out. Also, I have a car.”

“R-right…” Jungkook crab-walked to the armchair next to the sofa and sat down, placing his drink on the table. “Right, yeah.”

You two sat in silence, rather comfortable for you, rather awkward for Jungkook. You didn’t come here that often, but it was always only to borrow Taehyung’s internet or to pick him up from random outings. It was never a big deal to you, as Taehyung was always nice and bought you food later as thanks. As for Jeon Jungkook, he was just kind of there. Introverted, quiet, sometimes piped up to inquire about something when he was curious. You weren’t exactly talkative, but he didn’t bother you either, so it was never too memorable.

“What’s on your shirt?” Jungkook asked, tilted his head.

You lifted your phone to give him a better look at the nine-pointed star and bleeding goat head of your long-sleeved black shirt. “It’s an American metal band.”

Jungkook blinked at you. “You listen to metal?”

You put your phone back down. “Yup.”

You suddenly remembered your legs were wide open because you were wearing your black velvet pants and they were hot as fuck. Wearing these was a mistake. You closed your legs and settled them on the couch. They had been expensive though, so you felt like you had to wear them to get your money’s worth. Damnnit. Why did you buy these again?

“Why don’t you drink alcohol?”

You closed Instagram and opened Twitter. “Because I become sexually uninhibited.”

Silence.

You looked up to see Jungkook trying to process what you said, imaginary question marks popping on top of his head.

“It means I fuck anything with legs, Jungkook.”

His brown doe eyes went wide. “W-what?”

You shrugged. “Yeah, you know, one time one of my friends caught me in a room with my clothes off blowing three guys at once, so I figured, hmm, maybe I shouldn’t drink anymore. That ever happen to you?” you added nonchalantly.

Jungkook shook his head so quickly his long black hair floated in the air.

“Huh. Well, me neither,” you chuckled. “I was just kidding.”

Jungkook looked like a mother who was trying to process all of their child’s sex escapades. “That’s good then. Whew,” he remarked with an awkward laugh. He took another long, hasty sip of his mojito.

“It was four guys.”

Jungkook nearly choked. He snapped his head up to see your shoulders shaking as you tried to contain your snickering, hiding behind your phone. He glared at you, clearing his throat sharply.

“You shouldn’t lie, noona,” he muttered, frowning.

You lowered your phone and straightened. “I was laughing at your expression. I wasn’t lying.”

He narrowed his eyes, disbelieving. “About what part?” he said warily.

“I do not drink because I will literally try to fuck anyone in my immediate vicinity when I’m drunk,” you stated in a matter-of-fact tone. “You can imagine it’s not very good for my sexual health or my social life as I stumble out of a party covered in cum of four guys I don’t know.”

Jungkook was in the middle of drinking his mojito and swallowed so hard the entire drink disappeared into his throat.

“What?” he wheezed out, slamming his chest with his fist.

You put your hands up. “It happens.”

Jungkook looked as if he as going to pass out, either from the image or from drinking too fast. You picked up your phone again and set Taehyung a text.

Are you dead? I think I killed your roommate.

Jungkook shook his head vigorously. “You must be joking.”

“Nope, that actually happened. Ask Taehyung.”

Jungkook looked taken aback. “What?” he said again in the same panicked tone.

“I told you someone found me.”

You swore that if this was the Wild West, a tumbleweed would have drifted by. Jungkook looked as white as a sheet. You calmly plucked the glass from his hand since it seemed like he was rapidly losing focus of his surroundings.

“How… That’s so dangerous!” Jungkook sputtered, seemingly coming back to life.

“Indeed, which is why I am sitting here right now and not piss drunk in a random bedroom in someone’s house,” you replied calmly, waiting for Taehyung to text you back. “See, this is why you don’t offer me a drink because then I would try to fuck you. You’ve been spared.”

Jungkook gave you a very strange expression and suddenly crossed one leg over the other. You rubbed your eyes. Hopefully Taehyung didn’t stay out too late. You were getting sleepy.

“Well, you still have to be attracted to them, r-right?” Jungkook commented, looking away and biting his knuckle.

You didn’t look up from your phone.

“I suppose. I don’t really have a type, and when you’re drunk you only look at the parts you’re attracted to anyway and forget about anything else,” you responded, chuckling at a cute cat picture. “At least you’re attractive, so if I met you at a party drunk, I’d fuck you, easy.” Owls could sit cross-legged? What? You squinted at the meme, trying to see if it was Photoshopped.

Silence. Absolute fucking silence.

You decided that it seemed unlikely the photo of this sitting owl was Photoshopped and lifted your head to see Jungkook staring at you like you had three heads.

“What?”

“You’re…” Jungkook chuckled awkwardly. “Just kidding, right?”

You blinked. “What? About you being attractive?” You pointed to him. “No. I’m not. You’re handsome, Jungkook.”

You saw his ears turning red once again. “Ahaha… but you wouldn’t fuck me, right?”

“I would.”

A crow cawed loudly outside the window.

Jungkook wasn’t blinking. Was he dead? Was Taehyung going to come home to a statue of a roommate? You tilted your head and waved your hand in front of his face. Jungkook didn’t move. Maybe he went into shock.

“Jungkook? You alive in there?” you asked, waving your hand some more.

He blinked rapidly, startling you. “I… I…”

Okay, now he was scaring you. Was he broken? Did Taehyung have an A.I. for a roommate and not tell you? Taehyung, please come home and oil your Jungkook, you thought dryly as you watched him scrunch up his nose, as if he was trying to stretch his face muscles out.

“You surprised me,” Jungkook sputtered, nervously rubbing the back of his head. “I just… there’s no way…”

“That I would fuck you?” you replied, completely chill. He turned even redder. You placed a hand on your cheek and rested your elbow on the couch. “Why not? You’re cute, have nice fashion sense, seem like a decent guy.”

Yeah, Jungkook was definitely breaking down because he did not seem to know how to form proper sentences anymore. He was like a fish out of water, opening and closing his mouth awkwardly.

“But, I couldn’t though.” You cut off his attempts to fathom a thought. He stiffened, his doe eyes shifting to you. “Because you’re Taehyung’s friend, not a stranger. I try not to mess up my friendships, you know?”

He swallowed thickly. “R-right.”

You removed your hand from your cheek and cracked your neck, leaning back against the plushy couch arm. Sheesh, where was Taehyung? You could have played an entire ARAM in the time he was messing about. He told you around this time, but perhaps he had run late. Oh well.

“But… if he doesn’t know…”

Hold up.

You lifted your head, slowly, slowly to Jungkook’s nervous stare and shifty eyes.

“I mean, if Taehyung doesn’t know… doesn’t count, right?” he asked innocently.

His dark hair obscured part of his angular face, pink lips slightly parted. His eyes were watching your every move like a hawk, brows furrowed slightly. The living room light reflected off his glowing tan skin and the glossiness of his lips.

If you don’t stop looking like that, you thought. There’s going to be consequences.

“Let’s not tread dangerous waters here,” you said quietly.

One of his dark eyebrows quirked upwards ever-so-slightly. “How is it dangerous? Taehyung’s going to call you when he needs to be picked up. He’s going to see the inside of your car before he even sees the inside of this apartment.”

Uh oh. Now your heart was beating fast. Fuck. Fuckity fuck. Alcohol made you sexually uninhibited because you really, really enjoyed having sex. Far too much. But you couldn’t go through life fucking everything with legs (or without them – to be honest, it wasn’t that strict of a requirement) because, hello, societal standards? Social appropriateness of maybe not fucking the cashier at your favorite coffee spot or your friend’s roommate in his apartment? You know, you had to be a productive human being and not a damn nympho. Wasn’t like you were getting paid for it.

Jungkook lifted his leg from his knee and spread them, tilting his chin upward.

Oh ho?

Well, now you knew why Jungkook crossed his legs, because a very obvious bulge was struggling in his leather pants. Where was embarrassed Jungkook? Shocked Jungkook? The Jungkook that was stunned at your crude words and straightforward manner?

Give him back. This is too much.

Perhaps you had been a little too frank for once – ah, who are you kidding, you’d probably been in this situation before.

Jungkook’s right hand slid up his thigh, long fingers with tiny, delicate tattoos, tracing the contours of his muscular quads. You tilted your head as he danced his fingers along his inner thigh before spreading them over his bulge and cupping it, stroking slowly through the thick fabric as he licked his lips.

“I am not drunk enough for this,” you muttered.

“Are you scared?” Jungkook asked softly, still palming himself through his pants. “Scared Taehyungie will be mad at you?” You felt a muscle in your face twitch. It seemed that he knew he was getting the better of you, because his voice was dropping low, sultry. You did not like being challenged, because well… you always tried to rise to the challenge. To your detriment, sometimes.

“Is Taehyung the boss of you?”

Fuck.

You snapped your head at him, narrowing your eyes.

“No one is the boss of me,” you replied icily.

Jungkook softened his features, laying his head back in the armchair. His hair curled around his cheek as his breathing deepened. His teeth caught his lower lip and gradually released it, the pink flesh popping back into place. The tiny mole under his lip trembled.

“Then do whatever you want, noona.”

Your eyes narrowed to slits, nails digging into your palms.

“What’s gotten into you?”

Jungkook’s voice was a smokey wisp, soaking into you.

“Just imagining you on your knees, naked, covered in cum…” He groaned, rocking his hips into his hand. “Sounds so fucking hot.”

Well. It had been. It was fucking hot, it made you wet just thinking about that night. It had felt amazing as the cum dripped down your skin, covering you, making you filthy with your sinful lust, so delicious and raw and dirty that right now you sat up, spreading your legs again because the space between your thighs was too fucking hot, too fucking much. Stupid velvet pants.

You got up from the couch, eyes still on Jungkook, his pupils dilating, tongue tracing the outskirts of his lips. He leaned his head back a little and moaned your name, long and lustful, eyelids fluttering. His dark hair brushed against his brows.

“Stop,” you breathed, reaching down to push your shirt up. Your fingers hovered over the button of your pants. Too hot. Too fucking hot. “You’re doing this on purpose. You’re tempting me.”

The side of his lips curved upward into a lazy smirk.

“I am.”

You placed your phone on the coffee table. The sound was on. Taehyung still hadn’t texted you. You would hear it vibrate against the wood. You took another step, unbuttoning your pants. Fuck. Why was Jungkook so sexy? You could resist if he wasn’t so damn hot.

“Don’t want you to think…” You swallowed; throat tight. “Don’t want you to think I’m treating you like a sex object.” The zipper of your pants slid down. “Because you seem like a nice guy.”

He smiled, undoing his pants too, sighing as the zipper freed his bulge.

“If I was your sex object…” Jungkook purred, pushing his tight leather pants down, down. “Even for only a little bit, I wouldn’t hold it against you, noona.”

Now your velvet pants were being peeled off your hips, leaving you in your seamless black panties. Oh, fuck, his thighs. Muscular and powerful, skin so pretty you wanted to touch. His eyes slid down your body.

“Holy shit, your thighs.”

Seemed like you both had the same idea. You climbed onto Jungkook’s lap, straddling one of his thighs. Now he was close to you, smelling like fresh linen, presence so warm and powerful you were being drugged by it. Your hands slid onto his shoulders, gripping them finger by finger, breathing hard as he tensed them. Slowly, you sat down on his left thigh, gasping as your soaked, clothed heat touched him. He grinned, flexing it under you. His own hand slid up your thigh, squeezing it, watching his fingers sink into your softness.

“Now, this,” Jungkook breathed, staring into your eyes. “This is a sexy body.”

Your heart was beating so fast, so fast. He watched you closely, eyes so dark that you felt like you were drowning in them. You rolled your hips into his thigh, hissing as you became wetter. He flexed the muscle under you, hard and unforgiving, sitting back and letting you rub yourself against it. You smeared your juices into his skin, stimulating your clit, inhaling sharply. Jungkook was still clutching your thigh, his large hand pressed into you.

“Is that enough for you?” he drawled, his other hand sliding up to land on your other thigh. “Is that all you want from me?”

Your eyes flickered to his playful, daring brown orbs.

“There’s no time…” you muttered.

“Take off your panties,” he nudged.

He placed his hands on your waist and lifted you up. You bit your lip, uncertain.

“Noona, I want you to feel good.”

He slipped one finger on the side of your black panties and pushed down. You took the other side and pushed them down, raising your legs to pull out one and then the other. Your panties fluttered to the ground. Jungkook’s gaze on you as you lowered again, bare and dripping, onto his thick thigh. Oh, holy hell. He tensed it and pressed your hips down, grinding his thigh onto your slopping wet pussy. You moaned, grasping his forearms through his turtleneck, feeling the strength in them, the hardness. You closed your eyes, humping his thigh, lost in bliss.

“Can you cum like that?” You felt Jungkook lean forward, lips brushing against yours. “Cum you cum just by rubbing yourself on me?”

Tiny, rigid nods. “If you... kiss me.”

He groaned as he felt your opening tense on his skin. “I thought you would never ask.”

And then his lips were on yours, soft, delicate. Sweet, erotic kisses contrasting with how hard you were fucking his leg, his tongue dancing in the periphery of yours, dodging you playfully as you whined, clutching him tighter. He pressed you down harder, sliding his tongue into your mouth. You shuddered, wetness pooling at his kisses, your core tightening as he whispered your name into your lips.

“Your body is so fucking delectable,” his murmured. “So sexy, it’s sinful.”

You clenched your jaw as you basically rammed your hips into his thigh, slippery and hard, your clit throbbing with need.

“Cum for me, noona.” You could feel his lips form the words as he kissed you, awe in his voice. “Cum on my thigh.”

You dug your nails into his clothed arms and shut your eyes, moaning his name, feeling the strings inside you snap, pleasure waterfalling into you as you came, squelching onto his skin, so viscous and thick that it added to the lubrication, your swollen clit throbbing. Your eyelids fluttered as his hands pressed you down, grinding your hips into his muscle so you could ride your high, extend it until you were melting, hands falling from his arms. He cradled you gently, your chest heaving with effort.

“J-Jungkook…”

“Mhm?”

You cracked your eyes open. “Has my phone made any noise?”

He shook his head. His dark hair covered part of his left eye. “No, noona.”

“Ah.”

Maybe Taehyung was getting laid. Good for him.

“I’m going to touch you now,” you stated. To the point.

Jungkook grinned.

You reached down to his black boxer briefs and yanked them down, freeing his cock and balls. He lifted his legs a little and you pushed them down, but he took your hand, placing it on his semi-hard cock. He moaned as your fingers wrapped around him.

“Do you want to take it off?” you asked quietly, referring to his underwear.

“No,” Jungkook replied tightly, cupping his hand around yours, using your hand to stroke himself a few times. “I can’t wait anymore.”

You nudged his hand aside and began your pace. He leaned back, gasping softly. Your grip wasn’t what it used to be. Carpal tunnel was a bitch. Still, you furrowed your brow, concentrating, He swelled in your hand, pre-cum leaking at the red tip dripping onto your fingers. You stopped for a moment to coat your palm with it, bringing it to your mouth and licking your hand, moaning at his taste. Jungkook shivered, watching your saliva spread all over before returning to his cock, adding to the lubrication.

He pressed his head into the back of the armchair, hips rising as you started again, jaw tense.

“I’m not as good as before,” you gritted out. “My wrist–”

“It’s perfect,” Jungkook interjected. “Fuck, your hand is perfect.”

He was rock hard in your hand as you jacked him off. You snuck a glance at him. His hands were on his face, combing through his dark hair, eyes closing, mouth open as he moaned, rutting into your palm.

He was just so, so sensual that it was driving you insane, his noises making you wet. There was something feral about it, the way he looked at you through his lashes.

“Can I finger you?” he pleaded. “Please.”

Your hips were raised to get a good angle, your arousal already dripping down your thigh.

“Of course. Touch me, Jungkook.”

He lowered his hands, hair all over his face, staring at you through the veil. His fingers slid up your thigh, slipping in between. Dipping in, moaning as he touched your wetness. You sucked in a breath, feeling his fingertip graze your swollen clit. Your grip tightened.

“Jungkook.” Your eyes found his, glazed with lust. “You can be rougher with me. If you want.”

He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Don’t want to hurt you…”

You smirked.

“You forget who you’re talking to.”

He pushed two fingers into you, feeling you suck him in as you stroked him, smile still on your lips. Jungkook grinned, pressing his thumb against your clit and rubbed it as he began to thrust his fingers into you, matching your pace, the two of you focused on getting each other off, breath mixing between your bodies.

“Noona?”

“Yeah?” you panted, whimpering at his roughness, his fingers scissoring in you, stretching your walls as you squeezed back, faster and faster.

“Wanna cum in your mouth.”

You chuckled as he shoved a third finger into you, punishing your clit repeatedly, so full, so good, it was making you crazy, but you had to focus, you had to get him off.

“This is a weird angle.”

Jungkook suddenly pulled his fingers out and pinched your clit, making you hiss and your legs shake, pained whimpers clawing from your throat.

“Do it.” His voice was a low growl. “Do it and I’ll reward you.”

You slid off the chair, still stroking his cock, narrowing your eyes at him. Jungkook looked down at you, smirk on his pretty pink lips, whispering your name. You removed your hand and replaced it with your mouth. Fuck. He sighed, hand coming up to tangle in your hair, not quite pressing you down but holding you there, his taste coating your tongue, his hard length throbbing in your mouth. You moaned onto his cock and his hips trembled, his long bangs covering his left eye.

Ugh, the way he looked at you. Your felt your pussy clench, demanding his cock.

Instead, you began to move your head up and down, soft lips around him, mouth tight around the head and length. His hand stayed there, moving with you, firm, reminding you that you couldn’t stop, that you had to keep going until he came. You set a nice, fast, tight pace, already knowing he was close, hearing his breathy groans, repeating your name over and over.

“Always thought you were fuckable,” Jungkook panted out. “Always wanted you in my bed.” He pressed his head into the armchair, shutting his eyes. “Couldn’t figure out how to convince you, couldn’t figure out how to tell you that I wanted you so very much.”

You tightened your throat around him and he dug his nails into your scalp, breathing shallow and tight.

“Gonna cum, noona, fuck, gonna cum down that pretty throat of yours.”

Jungkook squeezed his eyes shut and groaned, his orgasm filling your mouth, coating your tongue, slipping down your throat. You gulped and he yelped at the sensitivity, whimpering as you softly lapped at the head, cleaning him off. Drinking it all, intoxicated with it, so satisfied swallowing it all.

Oh, how you loved sex.

You slowly removed your mouth crawling back up, no longer aware of your obligations to Taehyung, only interested in brushing Jungkook’s hair aside and kissing him deep, moaning as his tongue forced into your mouth, tasting himself. His hand slipped back into your folds and three fingers deep into you, fucking you. You whined into his mouth, telling him how good he was, telling him how good he felt inside you, telling him you how much you wanted his cock, his beautiful, thick cock jammed all the way inside you.

The door lock clicked and neither of you heard anything.

“Ah, I managed to hitch a ride with Jim– WHAT THE FUCK?”

Taehyung’s deep voice boomed throughout the apartment and you were still making out with Jungkook’s face as his fingers thrust into your slopping wet pussy, spreading you out. You whimpered as Jungkook broke the kiss, pushing you against his body as Taehyung slammed the door and marched in, kicking off his shoes carelessly.

“Fucking shit, why are you like this, fucking everything in your sight, you absolute–”

You turned your head, somewhat ashamed, feeling somewhat sorry – but not that sorry, because Jungkook’s fingers were still inside you. Taehyung’s strong features were twisted in annoyance, but he wasn’t looking at you.

He was scowling at Jungkook.

“I told you,” Taehyung said sharply, sweeping his lush fur coat back to reveal his black turtleneck and black slacks, pointing an accusing finger at Jungkook. “Not to get her started, because she is a horny seductress.”

You raised your eyebrows at him. “Excuse me?”

Taehyung ticked his head, looking down at you. “Am I wrong?”

You pouted. “Well, no.”

“And,” he added, directing his attention at you. “Why would you not ask me to fuck first? I’ve seen you naked hundreds of times!”

Jungkook raised his eyebrows. “Hundreds?”

Taehyung ignored him, leaning down and taking your chin. Brown eyes a mix of angry and amused, observing your lust. “I am offended that I respected you and you’re sitting in my roommate’s lap instead of mine.” His breath seemed like alcohol.

Your lips parted, heart beating fast. “S-sorry, Tae… You’re just always dragging me out of weird stuff that I thought you were disgusted by me…”

Taehyung brought his face close to you. You loved his voice. So deep, so intense, so heavy. It seemed to shake your soul with bass.

“I’ve wanted you on my dick the second I saw you.”

And then he kissed you, hard and full, as Jungkook’s fingers began to move inside you once again.

-

part ii: kth x you x jjk

--

masterpost

[geminidentitycrisis]

The Scent of Leather and Hairspray

Present Mic/Hizashi Yamada x F!reader ONESHOT

(WARNINGS! - swearing)

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Sooooooo, I have a new favorite Pro, I guess haha

I hope you enjoy, and if you're underage, pretend you're older because I get it, I'd be Hot For Teacher too, but he's not a pedo sorry......

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You sighed as, upon exiting the store where you just purchased a frozen drink, the men you passed to enter that store started catcalling you. Just what you needed at the end of a rough day...

"Hey Honey, you'd be cuter if you smiled...!"

"Don't listen to that shit, babygirl, you're sexy as hell, c'mere and hang out a while...?"

Ignoring them the best you could, you kept walking, but they didn't take that very well. "You think you're too good for us, that it, stuck up bitch? Where you think you're goin'?"

You could hear their footsteps approaching behind you and turned to face them after sipping from your drink.

"Guys, please, I've had a hell of a day today and my quirk would probably scar you both for life and what do you say we just don't do this, huh?"

They exchanged glances before fixing you with threatening glares. "You think you're tough, babygirl? We'll see how tough you are when we get through teaching you some respect..." the first one said.

"HEY!"

A voice called from behind you and suddenly an arm was draped gently around your neck. You froze, being caught off guard tended to prompt a panic response when you were so tired.

You smelled leather and an overwhelming scent of hairspray.

"What's the trouble, my homies? Pretty sure ya heard the lady, she ain't jammin' to the vibe ya layin' down, ya dig? Beat it."

Heart skipping a beat or two, your eyes grew wide and a blush flooded your cheeks. "That voice...?!"

You whipped your head up to see the one and only Present Mic.

"Ah! I knew it! I knew I recognized your voice, I catch your radio show every day! You're the Sound Hero, Present Mic!" he flashed a grin down at you, winking.

"Oooh, you've got good ears, Listener! Thanks for Hypin' me up like that! Always great ta meet a FAAAN!" he responded in his commentator voice.

One of your would be tormentors interrupted angrily. "Hey, peacock head, why don't you mind your business?"

"PEACOCK...?! You boys best get ta steppin', aight?! Don't make me beat you up in fronta this pretty girl!" he replied in annoyance after his attention was so aggressively stolen from you.

The blush came back in full force and you couldn't contain a dreamy sigh as your lashes fluttered, eyes lidding contentedly now that you felt safe again.

*he said I was pretty~!* you thought.

"You believe this banana hair lookin' motherfucker? You're about to get your ass whooped, fruity!" the other threatened.

"Hey bro, watch your language! There's a lady here!" with the arm around your shoulders, Mic carefully raised it and guided you behind himself as the two started walking towards you both.

"Enough..."

Another voice came suddenly from the other side of the parking lot and everyone, with the exception of the blonde who was guarding you, turned to see Eraserhead.

Suddenly these jerks weren't so confident.

"Get lost, both of you, and go straight home or I'll bring the two of you in right now for loitering and harassment." he said calmly but with deep authority.

Mic crossed his arms, glaring at the duo as they ran off after a mere moment of hesitation, his cheeks puffed out slightly. "What a couple creepozoids! You okay, Pussy Cat...?" he quickly spun around to check you out, striking a dramatic pose while pointing at you, the trademark grin already back in place.

You smiled up at him with admiration sparkling in your eyes, clasping the cup you held in both hands and tight to your chest, stepping closer to him.

"Yes, thanks to you! You're my Hero~!"

Mic felt his own chest swell with pride a bit, the grin on his face getting bigger as he relaxed his stance and shoved his hands in his jacket pockets.

Usually by now the damsel has already flung herself on Aizawa, but not only were you praising him, you recognized him from just his voice and he was impressed at that.

"I can't believe I was just rescued by my favorite Pro, I am your #1 fan! Please, are you patrolling the city tonight? Please let me buy you a coffee or tea or something?? Just as a thank you...?"

Hizashi laughed rather loudly, one hand emerging from his pocket to be placed over his chest.

"HAHA! Aaaww, how can I say NO when you ask so sweetly?! Coffee sounds like a rockin' idea right about now!"

"Ugh, we don't have time for this, Mic..." Eraserhead complained tiredly.

Eyes rolling in exasperation, the blonde groaned twice as loud. "ugGHHH!! Don't be such a buzzkill, yo! I'll get you one, too, just chill!" with that, he trailed after you back into the store.

You watched as he doctored up the coffee you poured for him, blushing again when he threw a hint of a smirk your way, using the tip of his finger to lift the gold tinted shades he wore and showing you his emerald green eyes. "Don't worry, I'll pay for my boring friend..."

Smiling, you bounced on your heels. "Damn right you will, I'm not HIS fangirl, after all..."

This promoted a slight blush to his face, but he maintained that knockout grin. "Ha! Well, good thing his best friend is here at least, lucky for him I tagged along tonight, huh??"

"Lucky for both of us..." came your soft reply from over your shoulder as you turned to walk away, your hips swaying temptingly had definitely not escaped his notice.

He followed you to the checkout counter and placed some money beside yours, his ungloved fingertips brushing against your own when he does. Leaning down closer to you, he cocked his head, pushing his shades down his nose this time and raising a brow.

"Does my #1 fan have a name...?"

Your smile bloomed again, blushing up at him. "It's  _______...but I might prefer you calling me Pussy Cat...~"

Saying that last bit, you applied a sensual undertone which he picked up on instantly, making his blush spread over his face and grow darker as he chuckled in amusement.

When you guys walked out the door, you noticed Eraserhead seemed really annoyed but tried to ignore him, looking up at the Voice Hero hopefully.

"Listen, I know you're both busy, but if you have just one more second to spare, I can't tell you how much it would mean to me if I could get your autograph..."

Looking away awkwardly, he made a pained expression. "Aw, man, I dunno, we are kinda in a hurry here and stuff..."

You felt your heart sinking when he startled you with another loud laugh. "Hahaha, gotcha! JK! Of course I will, I ain't gonna leave ya hangin' like that, no way, that ain't my STYYYYYYYYLLLE!"

Giddy with excitement, you let out a tiny squeal, quickly fishing out a small notebook and pen from your purse as he set the cups down. When you handed it to him, his fingers brushed yours again, making you bite tenderly at your bottom lip.

They were so warm and soft...

He had started to whistle a cheerful little tune as he spun the pen between his fingers before starting to write in your book, it took longer than you expected, clearly longer than Eraser expected, too.

"Say goodbye to the girl, Mic, it's time to keep moving!" he didn't yell, exactly, too lazy, but he had raised his voice since last.

"YEAH, YEAH, I HEARD YA!!! Gimme a sec, ALRIGHT?!" the volume of the blonde's reply actually made your eardrums flinch and quiver this time, but you smiled anyway as he defended you again.

"There ya go! And hey, just to spite my buddy over there, I wouldn't mind walkin' ya home ta make sure ya get there safe."

The blush came right back, clutching the book to your heart, you gave a weak smile. "No, no, it's okay, really...I took up too much of your time already, and I only live around the corner from here..."

Eyes closing momentarily while you gathered yourself, you took a deep breath before confessing. "...I cannot express how grateful I am for you...not just for saving me tonight, but also for your talk show, hearing your voice over the radio gives me strength and motivation every week...it means the world to me...thank you..."

Beckoning him by flexing a finger, you stood on your tiptoes and pressed a sweet kiss against his cheek when he leaned in curiously.

Eyes widening, his whole face became scarlet red and his grin stretched from ear to ear. "AW, YEAH!"

He jumped, pumping his fists in the air and then proceeded to shoot you with his finger guns while  winking again. "Listen, I dropped my digits on that piece'a paper ya got there, Shawty...hit me up sometime if ya wanna chill! I'm down for whatever!"

You were caught off guard by that and checked the page he signed for you, finally reading what he wrote down as he rambled on as background noise about how he wasn't a creep like those other guys and you could say no without worrying about him making a scene, he just had to shoot his shot, I mean you DID kiss ME first ya know...

"For my #1 fan, _______...Thanks for the coffee and stay outta trouble! ...and maybe call or shoot a txt, if your feelin' this funky vibe, too? Live loud, Pussy Cat ;) don't ever let anyone try an put the mute on ya! XOXOX PRESENT MIC!!!"

Followed by his phone number, and there were little hearts drawn around the page.

You were already blushing when he surprised you again by returning your gesture and swooping in to plant a kiss on your cheek this time.

Reaching up to touch the spot, you smiled up at him shyly. "I can't wait...please be safe out there..."

"You got it! SEE YA SOON!" The Pro nodded vigorously, giving an enthusiastic wave of goodbye before grabbing his and Eraserhead's drinks, practically bouncing with every step.

It made you giggle, but you were trying not to get your hopes up too much. For all you knew, he gave his number out to every girl that asked him for a signature.

"Are you happy now...?" Shouta grumbled, taking the cup being offered as he turned to resume patrolling. "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! HECK YEAH I AM! I'M ON CLOUD NINE RIGHT NOW, I JUST MET MY FUTURE WIFE!!!!!!!!"

You heard him very clearly, the blush traveling all the way down your neck this time, and you couldn't help another small giggle, your heart fluttering with happiness like the wings of the butterflies in your belly.

He just had that effect on you.

Glancing down at the notebook in your hand as you sipped your quickly melting frosty, you noticed in the bottom right corner was a little arrow, below which was written the word "flip".

You looked up again but the two Pro Heroes were already gone.

Curiously, you flipped over the page.

MARRY ME?!?!!

a. YES!!!!!

b. a

c. b

That smooth sonuvabitch had you blushing and giggling all night.

[soulmate-game]

Can you do a prompt of Marinette being the daughter of the Joker and Harley but Harley left him before Marinette was born and when Joker found out about his daughter He decided to kidnap Marinette so she can become like him (Ace chemicals) (Daminette)

Woot, my first ask in a while! Let’s see how I can do this oddly specific ask that reminds me of a fic that might actually exist but tbh I’ve read so many fanfics idk if my brain is remembering right

—*—*—*—*—*

Marinette knew Sabine and Tom weren’t her biological parents. She had known ever since she was eight, when her mother by blood visited her for the first time, sat her down, and explained everything. Including, but not limited to, her disastrously toxic past relationship, her new girlfriend, and her recent success with long term rehab (unofficial rehab that mostly consisted of illegal anti-hero actions, but hey if it worked it worked).

Marinette understood. Well no, she really didn’t since she was only eight, but she understood that her mom— that Harley— was genuine. She had always had a knack for emotions and telling when people were sincere or not. And Harley really was regretful about not being in her life beforehand, and was serious about wanting to be part of her life now that her own was mostly sorted out.

So Marinette was not surprised when Harley really did stick it out. When Harley cooed over Marinette copying her hairstyle to show her support of her biological mom, when Harley never failed to call at least once a week even if she was in jail for punching some asshole or another. Harley never stayed arrested long anymore, she was usually found to be on the right side of the moral scale more and more often so the police didn’t bother keeping her locked up anymore. Through the years, Marinette always looked forward to her mom’s calls. Looked forward to being lulled to sleep by one crazy story or another from her mother’s past. Everything was nice. Perfect, even, for a while.

A thump sounded from her balcony, one late night when Marinette was thirteen. Blinking, the dark haired girl furrowed her brows. Who would be on her balcony? Cautiously walking towards the trap door leading to it, grasping her metal pencil holder as a weapon (she remembered all of her Mom’s stories about break-ins and random attacks back in Gotham), the teen strained her ears. Akuma attacks were only a few months old now, but she had already become in high alert for any sign of Hawkmoth or his victims. As per usual, Marinette’s paranoia began to kick in. Did Hawkmoth already figure her out? Was he here for her earrings? Would she be able to fight him?

She gently pushed up the trap door, catching a glimpse of black leather. Huh? Marinette narrowed her eyes, confused. Was it Chat? He should have been on patrol, on the other side of the city. What was he doing visiting her?

Suddenly the trap door yanked the rest of the way open, making Marinette yelp as the handle for it rugged away from her fingers. And there, backlit by the pure blue-white moonlight, was Not Chat Noir. It was Catwoman, in all her skintight black leather glory, grinning at her before pushing her cat-eye goggles up to the top of her head and crouching down by the trap door’s entrance, balancing only on the pads of her feet.

“Well hello there~” the woman purred. “So you’re the cute little kitten Harley is so secretive about. Nice to finally meet you,” the woman held out a hand, sending Marinette a sweet, if mysterious, smile. For a while, the pigtailed girl only stared before a squeal of excitement left her throat, leaving very little room for any doubt as to her bloodline. A large smile curled over Marinette’s lips, leaving her beaming widely at the catlike woman on her balcony.

“Auntie Selina! Mom’s told me so much about you! Come in, come in, come in! I’ll sneak some macaroons up for you. Or do you prefer croissants? What’s your favorite flavor? Are you really dating Batman? Oh my goodness, that necklace is so lovely! Did you steal it?”

Selina could only chuckle fondly at the word vomit, letting the smaller girl drag her down the trap door and into her very… pink room. Looking around, Selina was once again slapped with just how similar this kid was to her outgoing friend. Marinette clearly had no shame in indulging in the things she liked, such as the color pink and anything regarding fashion. But there were other things amongst the girliness of the room, like the posters of Jagged Stone and the training dummy half-sticking out of her closet door. There were a few ornamental knives hung up behind her computer, seemingly just for decoration although Selina could see that they were definitely battle ready and sharpened. A small mallet, clearly a miniature replica of her mother’s own signature weapon, leaned up against the side of the girl’s laundry basket. But then there was Marinette’s mannequin, which was surrounded by meticulously cut pieces of cloth and had other pieces pinned to it strategically. Marinette clearly had the same professionalism and love for her chosen career that had so completely defined Harley in the Time Before Joker. The same genius intellect hiding in those deceptively cheerful bluebell eyes. And for the first time, though not for the last to be sure, Selina found herself thoroughly relieved that it seemed Marinette had inherited very little from her father.

Except, as she would learn from stories Harley told her later, an apparent affinity for chaos.

“I’m not that picky, kitten. But I’m not that hungry, so don’t go too out of your way,” Selina decided to just react the same way she did with Harley’s rambles, and answer one question at a time. “Also, I am actually dating Bruce Wayne. But, if you promise not to tell anyone—“ she waited for Marinette’s eager nod before continuing casually, “— the two are maybe not as mutually exclusive as many think,” Selina finished with a conspiratorial wink. “No, I actually did not steal this necklace. Bruce has been adamant in trying to curb me of my thieving habit by buying me almost everything I so much as glance at sideways. It’s sweet. Naive, because I like stealing for the fun of it, but sweet.”

Marinette giggled, bouncing in place happily. She loved a bit of innocent gossip like this. “Is Momma Ivy ever gonna visit? I don’t think Mom told her much about me yet, and I still gotta give her the shovel talk!” the fierce look that overcame Marinette’s face made Selina laugh again. Oh yes, definitely her mother’s daughter.

“Pam has been trying to sneak over, but the laws regarding Metahumans in Paris suddenly got much stricter a few months back and have caused some problems. You wouldn’t happen to know what happened, would you?” Selina did not miss when her seemingly innocent question caused her niece to close off almost instantly. Bluebell eyes took on a familiar guardedness, and scanned her with the same soul-searching intensity that Harley had when she was channeling her Psychiatrist side. Selina found herself in a slightly concerning spot though—

Because she couldn’t predict Marinette at all. She was left to simply stand there as Marinette searched for some unidentifiable thing in her eyes, completely unable to read the younger girl’s face and with no idea of what to expect. The side effect of having chaos so thoroughly entwined in both of her biological parents, she supposed.

“Nope, no idea.”

Selina knew that was a lie, but knew equally as well that she would not be getting a better answer anytime soon. So, she let it go and the two of them once again dipped into innocent chatter.

Later that night, when Selina left and the sun threatened to rise at any minute, Tikki flew up from her hiding spot under Marinette’s pillow to land on her holder’s shoulder. Marinette giggled and looked over at her little friend.

“Tikki?”

“Yes, Mari?”

“Why was I chosen to be your holder?” She asked suddenly, flopping back into her bed and staring at her ceiling. The little goddess hummed, smiling knowingly before flying down to cuddle in the crook of Marinette’s neck.

“Because you are born from luck itself. Even when bad things happen, you have the luck and determination to get out just fine, and stronger than before. And despite the destruction and anarchy in your blood, you have the willpower to reign it in and keep control of yourself. That’s all order really is, Marinette. The decision to take all the chaos and madness around us, and make it make sense. Make it do something good. And that’s a large part of who you are, I could feel it in your soul the moment we first met.”

Marinette closed her eyes, biting the inside of her cheek. “What if I lose control?”

“... You’ll just have to get it back. It’ll be hard, but as long as you have people to support you, you will be able to do it. You aren’t evil, Marinette,” the small God seemed to sense the true question her holder was asking, and did her best to soothe the doubt the girl felt. “Just remember the reasons you fight against chaos. Remember everyone you love, and you’ll be okay. And you have me, I’ll always help you.”

“... thank you, Tikki.”

—*—*—*—*—*

“He’s going to find out, Mom.”

“No he won’t, don’t be silly! I’ve been very careful about hiding you from him, Nettie-pie.”

“Mom… I just have a bad feeling. I don’t think we can hide who I am from him. If he sees me, I think he’ll know.”

The phone went silent.

“If he hurts you, I’ll kill him. If I was crazy about him, Sugar, then I’m head over heels for you. Not even he can stop me from caving his skull in if he tries his usual tricks with you.”

“... My plane leaves soon, I’ll talk to you when I land. And mom?”

“Yeah, honeycake?”

“I love you.”

—*—*—*—*—*

It was uncanny just how often Marinette’s hunches were right. Her intuition was something to behold, truly, because it only took three days in Gotham before Joker snatched her right out of her room at Harley and Ivy’s apartment. At least Marinette had sixteen by then, so she had had enough experience as a hero in Paris and with generally unpredictable situations and people who were absolutely nuts for her to not immediately panic. Too much, anyway.

Because there was definitely a little panic there.

See, Marinette knew herself inside out by then. After her own battle with her toxic feelings towards Adrien and doing her best to heal from those before she turned out like her mom, she knew she was by no means mentally indestructible. Mental illness ran the high risk of being inherited, and Marinette was well aware that her own personality was scarily similar to her mother’s at times. She got attached quickly, felt affection and love for others very strongly and, as she found with Adrien, could easily become obsessive if she didn’t watch herself. At least Harley was the perfect person to help with that, and Marinette was serious about helping herself too. She did everything she could to keep an eye on her mental health and keep her behavior in check so she didn’t do anything too unhealthy with her relationships again.

But she knew, she knew she had a soft spot for family. She got attached too easily. And being in the same room as her biological father, despite being tied up by her hands and feet and knowing just how many unforgivable things he had done in his life, Marinette felt vulnerable. She didn’t want to hurt him, despite everything. She still loved him, despite every reason not to, despite her first meeting with him being with him shoving chloroform over her face and hogtying her to a metal chain dangling over a vat of acid.

Geez, she’d need more than just her mom as a therapist after this for sure. Even if her mom had a PH.D, Marinette felt like she’d need several psychiatrists to sort through her emotional turmoil right then and make sense of any of it.

Marinette licked her lips, aware that the only kindness that Joker gave his daughter was sparing her from the discomfort of being gagged.

“Don’t,” Marinette said, surprising herself with the amount of steel she was able to put into her voice. Somehow, she managed to make the single word sound more like an order than a plead. “Joker, put me—“

“Ah-Ah-Ah!” The clown walked over, tutting and waving his finger in the air in almost playful admonishment. He gave her a dramatically fake pout. “Don’t you know it’s disrespectful to refer to your father by his first name?” Neither of them mentioned that Joker was definitely not his real name. They both knew the point was moot. “Say it with me now— ‘Daddy dearest, I am more than willing to be dunked in acid for you,’ go ahead, say it.”

Marinette’s jaw clenched. Familial love or not, she would not tolerate being ridiculed like that. She dealt with enough ridicule when she was fourteen and fifteen during school, before she put Liar Rossi in her place. She had spent the past three years as a hero in charge of the war against Hawkmoth, in charge of protecting all of Paris from an emotional terrorist.

And gee, wasn’t that what Joker was, too? Sure, he was a terrorist in the classic meaning of the word as well, but he was nothing if not a skilled manipulator. He knew the human mind just as well as Harley or any other psychiatrist did, he just used his knowledge for different means. He had emotionally abused Harley for years, he emotionally abused and manipulated people all across gotham on a daily basis. He was just another Hawkmoth, but with more physical violence in place of magic.

With these thoughts strengthening her resolve, Marinette narrowed her eyes at the man who donated half of her DNA. She let her anger boil into her irises, hitting him with one of the few traits she knew she inherited from him.

Her ability to intimidate others on the tip of a hat.

“No,” she growled back at him. She took a deep breath. It had taken her a while, but she refused to be ashamed of who she was regardless of her blood relation. She would have no problem using the very things she inherited from Joker against him. She might have gotten most of Harley’s personality, she might have inherited her mother’s habit of falling in love hard, fast, and obsessively, but she also had Joker’s defiance. His bone-deep inability to be stopped from doing exactly whatever the fuck he wanted.

And then, there were Marinette’s own traits. The ones that were completely her own, developed over her life organically. Like her refusal to bow down to bullies, her creativity, her ability to take even the most chaotic situation and see some sort of balance and sanity in it that she could use to her advantage.

That she WOULD use to her advantage. The shadows she saw move out of the corner of her eye gave her the chance to do exactly that, she just needed to buy a few more seconds. Just a few more seconds.

“Excuse me?” Joker growled right back, his own intimidation, honed over more years than Marinette had been alive and thus much more potent than her own, reading its ugly head as he stalked towards her. His face was pulled down into an ugly snarl, his shoulders tensed and back straight as he glared right at her. From his spot on the metal walkway, he was easily able to reach over the railing and grab her chin in one pale, viciously strong hand. “I think you’re misunderstanding something here, little Marionette. I’m your father. Half of your life came directly from ME. That makes you my puppet. You exist to follow my orders,” his right grip suddenly let go, leaving behind the beginnings of a bruise as his entire demeanor changed from angry to cheerful. He spread his arms as if gesturing to the whole chemical plant victoriously, and an unnaturally large smile curved over his lips and bared yellowing teeth at her. “But that’s okay. I’ll forgive you this time, you haven’t learned any better yet. That’s why we’re here. We need to cleanse you of all those icky bad habits you’ve learned up until now, all you need is a little,” he bounced in place with a wicked smirk to illustrate his next words— “jumpstart. A little acid goes a long way to enlightenment you know, you’ll see my side of things in no time. And with my blood in you, you’ll make a better sidekick than that idiot Harley ever did. I can sense it, you’ve got a real talent for Chaos in you, it’s exciting, Heheeeheheee! Now then, we should probably speed things along before our family reunion is cut short. Hang in there, my little Marionette,” the man actually had the gall to spin in place while humming a tune cheerfully before all but dancing over to the lever that held Marinette’s length of chain in the air over the vat of chemicals below her. “Everything will clear up in that little head of yours in just a second!”

There! Right as Joker pulled the switch to lower her into the bubbling vat underneath her, Marinette was able to finish untying her hands. She couldn’t contain a small yelp as gravity flung her body forward, leaving her upside down on the chain for a brief moment. That was when the chain started lowering rapidly, and Marinette was barely able to rip the rope off of her ankles in time to swing off of it and onto the metal walkway that came up right next to the giant metal container of liquid death and insanity. Joker had barely enough time to shout in rage before the windows near the ceiling shattered, admitting the city’s vigilantes themselves. Batman, Nightwing, Red Robin, Red Hood, Robin, and evening Black Bat all landed on the same metal platform above Marinette’s head that Joker was still on, buying the teen time to start running. But she didn’t go towards the exit right away, instead heading right up the stairs into the thick of the fight. Robin briefly separated from where Joker was managing to hold his own, goons flooding from side doors to inhibit the heroes in their attempt to bring their boss down.

The katana-using vigilante kept one eye on Marinette the whole time, suspicious of why the girl would come back up if not to help her father. But that wasn’t what she did, instead she flipped and kicked and punched her way through the quickly growing sea of Joker thugs until she reached a small pink purse that had been abandoned near the lever that had nearly sent her into liquid insanity. Three thugs surrounded her right as she snatched the purse up and slung it over her shoulder, but Robin barely had the chance to head over before she was heaving the men, who were all easily three times her size, over her shoulder and was slamming elbows into soft spots and the side of her hand into pressure points. By the time Robin got to her side, all three men were unconscious and bound to wake up in utter agony.

Marinette glanced up, getting ready to haul Robin over her shoulder as well before she realized who he was. She let her shoulders relax just a tick, sighing in relief before returning her eyes to scanning their surroundings. She shot him a brief grin.

“Good thing my adoptive mother, Mom, Momma Ivy, and Auntie Selina all made sure I knew how to take down a small army on my own, huh?” She asked rhetorically before they were both unceremoniously dragged back into the giant brawl.

—*—*—*—*—*

“Nettie-pie!”

“Marigold!”

Harley and Pamela Quinzel-Isley shoved down anyone and everyone who dared block their direct path to their daughter. The girl of the hour stood next to the bat clan, a shock blanket held tightly around her shoulders as she did her best to finish her statement to both the vigilantes and Commissioner Gordon.

“You untied yourself… from a ship-grade knot in high quality rope… with a phone charm?” They heard Gordon ask incredulously, to which Marinette could only give a lopsided smile. That was when her mom and stepmom crashed into her, enveloping her in a nearly suffocating hug.

“Gah— mom— momma Ivy—“ Marinette flailed in their arms for a bit before finally getting her head free and continuing her statement as if she didn’t have two of the most dangerous women in the city still giving her a bone crushing hug. “That’s better. Yes, Commissioner. You see, I realized when I was in the car with Joker, while I was pretending to still be unconscious, that one of the charms on my phone had pretty sharp corners that I could use like a serrated edge if I had enough time. So I carefully detached it from my phone, and held it in my palm. It took almost an hour, but once Joker noticed I was awake I kept him talking so that he didn’t notice what I was doing even as he tied me up to that chain. Really, it’s just lucky that I was able to get it worn down in time,” Marinette rubbed the back of her neck with a nervous chuckle. “But regardless, I think Batman and his partners,” she nodded to the listening vigilantes just to the side of her. “Were close enough that I would have been caught anyway, I just wanted to make sure they had less work to do. The sooner I freed myself, the sooner ‘Daddy Dearest,’” she grimaced as she mockingly used the same term Joker had tried to get her to say earlier that night. “Could go back behind bars where he belongs.”

“Oh my little Nettie-cake,” Harley cried, finally pulling back from the hug long enough to wipe her cheeks. It was clear that she had been crying for a while, and her colorful pigtails were mussed and tangled from where she must have been tugging on them in worry. “You were right. I’m so sorry, I never should have let you come to Gotham when I knew he was out of Arkham.”

Marinette was quick to shake her head frantically, pulling her arms out of Ivy’s hold so she could grasp Harley’s shoulders firmly. “No. No, Mom, I’m fine! And besides, we knew I couldn’t stay secret forever. I really like staying with you and Momma Ivy! Everything turned out fine though, and he’s headed back to Arkham. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, Nettle,” Pam argued, distracting herself by running her hands through Marinette’s bangs. She had only known the girl for two years, but that was more than long enough for her to consider the teenager as her own. “He took you right out from under our noses. You were supposed to be safe in our home, and he still got to you. That’s not okay. We weren’t able to protect you like we should have been. Maybe you should go back to Paris early.”

“What?! No way!” Marinette argued, eyes wide. “This is the first time I’ve been able to ever visit you guys in Gotham, I’m not letting some psycho sperm donor keep me from enjoying time with my family! I came here knowing full well that it was dangerous. I’m not gonna just run away after one bad experience.”

Harley snorted, and then devolved into uncontrollable giggles. “Heh— psycho sperm donor. Good one, sugar!”

Marinette smiled and rolled her eyes good naturedly at her mom’s usual immature antics. Seeing as Gordon had walked away muttering to himself a short while ago, Marinette pulled herself the rest of the way away from her moms and turned to the vigilantes. Without a second’s pause, she bowed to them just like her Maman Sabine taught her.

“Thank you for helping save me. I know it’s probably a shock that I’ve been kept secret from you guys all this time, but I hope you don’t lump me in with the likes of the green-haired half of my DNA. I’m staying with my Moms in their apartment, if you guys decide to patrol by our place like I suspect, I’ll leave some baked goods and coffee out for you on our patio. It’s the least I can do for you all after tonight. And don’t be too hard on Auntie Selina. Me and Mom swore her to secrecy, even from you guys.”

Batman jerked a little at the mention of Catwoman’s real name, jaw twitching for a second. Behind his cowl, his eyes narrowed. Marinette laughed, easily reading his body language and expression.

“She never told me who you are, but she didn’t exactly hide it either. It was easy to put the last pieces together on my own. But don’t worry, SHE swore me to secrecy too. I won’t tell anyone.

“How the hell are you related to the Laughing Asswipe from Hell?” Red Hood blurted out, his confusion clear even from behind his hideous helmet. Marinette burst into giggles, and both Pamela and Harley smiled knowingly.

“Mom gave me up for adoption when I was born, so I spent my whole life in Paris up until now,” she admitted. “Mom didn’t visit me for the first time until I was eight, and she and my adoptive parents are so awesome that it must’ve suffocated the worst traits from his DNA before they had a chance to develop,” she guessed out loud with a good natured smile.

Batman grunted. Marinette knew that one run-in wasn’t enough for them to trust her. After all, she was still the biological daughter of their arch enemy. But she didn’t mind, she understood the caution even if she didn’t fully agree with it. They weren’t outright hostile, despite the fact that Robin had never stopped glaring at her since they fought back-to-back against the mob of thugs earlier. She could live with their suspicion, as long as they continued to not be outright rude or mean to her.

At least she could empathize with Adrien now, whenever she figured out how to break it to him that Hawkmoth was definitely Gabriel and couldn’t be anyone else. Hopefully she could help soften the blow for him a little.

Harley and Ivy were starting to herd Marinette towards their car and take her back home, where they could continue to smother her in care and make sure she didn’t have even a scratch on her, when Robin’s voice stopped them all in their tracks.

“You are a surprisingly capable combatant.”

Marinette froze, blinking in surprise for a second before turning to stare at Robin in shock. The rest of the Bat Clam was doing the same, nobody expecting Robin of all people to be the first to directly complement Marinette. He tutted, crossing his arms, but never moved his gaze away from Marinette’s eyes.

“But your form could use some work. Most of your style is incredibly improvised, which I can appreciate since you do it well, but you would benefit from more structure in your fighting. I will set up a time and place for us to spar. We start in two days, if you think you can handle it.”

It took a while for what Robin said to sink in, and another few seconds for Marinette to decipher what his semi-aggressive, order-phrased proposal really meant. And she smiled.

“It’s a date.”

—*—*—*—*—*

Woo! This started off a little rough, but I really like how it ended up! Thank you, Anon!

[procrastination-queenie]

Baby | JJK

Pairing: husband!au Jeon Jungkook x Wife!au reader.

Warning: c-section surgery, nothing too detailed. Baby fever. Very slight mention of smut. Fluff. The reader is a foreigner. Mentions of cultural differences.

The part written in italics is a flashback

Synopsis: You and Jungkook agreed not to have babies right away after your marriage, yet you find yourself witnessing a cute situation that leaves you thinking otherwise.

A/N: I am begging you guys for the gazillion time to please let me know what you think. Thanks in advance.😊

Word count: 4,178.

This part can be read as a continuation to Marry you.

Babies! Oh God! You cannot express how fed up you were because of that word. After you and Jungkook got married, your family members had nothing to talk about to you except babies. It's like they were pressuring you, well scratch that, they were, but unconsciously though. You couldn't blame them. You grew up in a culture that was not really open to the idea of "we are gonna wait a few years until we feel like we're ready."! Yeah, this ideology does not exist!

"Wait until when? I am not living more than I already am!" Your grandma would say, or "wait for what? Are you still getting to know each other after a five-year relationship?" Your grandpa would scoff, and your favourite one was "Hunny, are you kidding? You'll never be ready! No one is ever really ready! … You think me and my sister had you, kids, because we were ready?" Your auntie would say in disbelief laughing lightly at your logic with said sister, your mum, sitting next to her shaking her head in disappointment with a "can you believe her?" murmured in annoyance.

You didn't have the heart to blame your family that's how they were raised for generations, and for you to try and change their mind-set would be difficult, almost impossible. That is until you and Jungkook refused to talk upon the matter anymore saying that this is your life and you're free to do whatever you both agree on, only then did they stop nagging you; however, you knew they were not happy about it.

Jungkook on the other hand never really minded the idea of babies, in fact, if you told him that you were ready, he would gladly help you right away, if you know what I mean, but knowing your concerns, not only did he comfort you, but also respected that you were not there yet, mentally. You would always tell him "I sometimes think that I am still a baby, myself. How can I have one when I think like that!" He would chuckle, patting your head and cuddling you closely "Baby, it's okay. We don't need to have one right now! Why are you so worried about it?" He asked looking down at you since he was resting his chin on your head. "I mean, aren't you bothered about it? Don't you want to have your own child?" You pouted thinking that maybe you're holding one of Jungkook's wishes back which can make you feel that you're not good enough for him. "Well, baby, of course, I want a child, but I want to have it with you, and if you're not ready that's totally fine! I mean when I think about it, it is a huge deal, you're going to house a human being in your body for 9 long months, and your body would go through drastic changes, plus you'd have to not only take care of yourself but the baby growing inside you, as well!" Jungkook cradled you to his chest moving aside a lock of your hair behind your ear. "It's all amazing, but you're the one who's carrying a baby, I would never pressure you to do that if you're not ready!" He said looking into your eyes sincerely. "Oh, I love you so much!" You said giving him a few repetitive pecks on his lips. "How did I end up with such an amazing man!" Your lips barely meeting his, whispering before you closed the small gap between you, kissing him with all the passion and love you held for this wonderful husband of yours.

That all changed when one day you were at the hairdresser's getting a new hair cut. You were looking through your phone waiting for your turn until you noticed a woman entering the shop. She had this unusual aura to her, like something about her seemed to interest you, she walked around as if she had accomplished something amazing but wouldn't brag about it as if to let her accomplishment speak for itself. You understood why you felt that because minutes later, two identical accomplishments followed her suit. They were two identical boys who were probably 4 or 5 years of age. You were in awe when you saw them following their mummy, like lost puppies. They resembled her greatly, and behaved very well as if their mum promised to buy them Disneyland if they did. They stood next to her looking up at her as if she is their whole world.

For a moment you imagined that with Jungkook, and what would it feel like to have a baby in both of your lives. How would it feel to have a child of your own looking at you the way these boys looked at their mum.

For weeks to follow, you were almost obsessed with the twin boys you saw at the hair salon. How they dressed, how they behaved, how they sat obediently eating their sweets waiting for their mum to finish, how their mother would look at them through the mirror every once in a while to check on them, how they cutely complimented her saying that "mummy is the prettiest girl ever!" With wide eyes looking up in amazement and cute small sticky fingers from the sweets reaching up in the air in excitement. The whole thing kept repeating over and over in your head which led you to look up some photos of babies and reading more about them and what's new in the parenting world that parents try and apply with their kids. You even reached the point where you would stop at the babies section, racking through cute onesies, making Jungkook arch an eyebrow in amazement. "Are you pregnant or something?" He would ask eyeing your belly before looking up at your face trying to see what's going on inside your head. You would shake your head slightly before reluctantly letting go of the tiny baby clothes and taking Jungkook's hand to move to another department of the store.

Jungkook, too, could feel a change in your behaviour, like how you would gaze longingly at kids playing at the park when you had your picnics there, how you would pause to listen to a show that talks about babies and how to care for them, he even caught you reading a book about pregnancy. His heart skipped a beat when you went to visit your brother after his wife delivered a healthy baby girl; you kept holding her the whole time refusing to let anyone hold her unless it was your brother's wife because she needed to feed her. He even took a photo of you, you were looking at your niece so lovingly when you looked up at Jungkook smiling brightly as if she was your own. He put it as a background for his phone.

"Yaaah! If you want a baby that bad make one of your own!" Yoongi yelled playfully at Jungkook who wouldn't stop looking at the photo. "Ay! Don't pressure the kid." Namjoon said looking disappointedly at Yoongi for saying that. "Well, there's no pressure. It's just … I don't know y/n has been acting weird lately!" He took a last look at his phone's background before it displayed his worried features as he closed the screen. "What do you mean weird?" Jimin asked looking at Jungkook quizzically. "I don't know… it's… she'd stare at baby clothes when we go shopping even though there's no one we know who's going to give birth soon. I mean I could have brushed it off thinking that she wants to buy some as a gift or something, but no." Jungkook ruffled his black locks resting his elbows on his knees. "And you know she looks at them as if … as if she's imaging them on a certain baby, not the way she'd look at them as if inspecting the design or something, do you understand what I mean?" He looked up at his hyungs waiting for a confirmation that he's not imagining things. Namjoon nodded "you mean she inspecting the clothes as if she's buying it for her own baby, not just going through them?"

"YES!"Taehyung jumped at Jungkook's sudden outburst. "Sorry Hyung!" Jungkook muttered to Taehyung before focusing on Namjoon again. "Well, it's easy she wants a baby!" Hobi said shrugging and looking at Jungkook as if he's dumb and that this was as obvious as the sun. "No shit Sherlock! I know that. It's just she never said anything about it ." Jungkook was bewildered he didn't understand your sudden change of attitude, and if you had a change of heart about having a baby, then why didn't you tell him? "Just talk to her about it. See if she's ready or not, maybe she is, but something is holding her back, you never know!" Jin said patting Jungkook on the back. "we are definitely having a talk." Jungkook sighed lighting up his phone's screen to look lovingly at your photo holding your niece.

"Baby, you home?" Jungkook looked around the house for you while taking off his shoes and closing the door. "In here!" You answered from your bedroom. You heard his footsteps on the stairs knowing very well from the sound of it that he was skipping some. You rolled your eyes at your husband's child-like behaviour. "BABE!" He suddenly opened the door to your room, a huge smirk on his face as he stepped slowly towards you. "What? What's wrong? Why are you giving me that look?" You looked him up and down as if he's gone mental. Out of nowhere, he pounced on you like a cat making you put your book aside as you squirmed beneath him. "Oh my God, Kook get off. What's wrong with you!" You started laughing because he started leaving small pecks on your neck, and it was ticklish. "Tell me!" He suddenly stopped and looked into your eyes. "Tell you what?" You searched his face thinking that he might be drunk. "Tell me what you're not telling me!" He said, face getting closer to yours as you backed yours from his. "Are you drunk?" You said laughing, again. He was being unusual. "Nah, I am not. I just want to know what's wrong. Lately, you've been acting weird as if you're hiding something." He claimed as he sat beside you, taking you in his arms as your upper half laid on his bent knee; this was your position when you both had deep talks, he'd let you rest your back on his bent knee as he held you closely, usually playing with your hair locks. "You keep on checking baby clothes whenever we go shopping, you're reading a book about pregnancy and parenting, you listen to anything related to babies on the T.V. are you not telling me something?" He asked with concern filling his doe eyes as he caressed your cheek. "I … I've..." You sighed closing your eyes; words were not getting out of your mouth. "What? What is it baby? You can tell me." His thumb brushed your cheek in a soft motion encouraging you to speak up. "I … I want a baby." You said out of nowhere and looked at Jungkook to see his reaction. "Well, baby that's great. You know I don't mind, then what stopped you from telling me?" Jungkook flashed you his bunny smile, happy to know that you're ready to take this step with him. "It... It's just, you know I have been reading about it, pregnancy and stuff." He nodded, a sign for you to go on. "And it's all great and everything, but what if something went wrong?" You looked worriedly into your husband's confused eyes. "Like what if I have a miscarriage? What if something happens to the baby? Like what if …"

"Hold on, hold on … baby why are you trying to predict everything? Why can't you focus on the positive side?" He said trying to calm your raging thoughts. "What if my body is not strong enough to have a baby?"

"Baby,nooo!" Jungkook pulled you closer into his arms. "No, none of this is going to happen, we are going to keep checking up with a doctor, and everything will be fine. I'll always be by your side." He said pulling your head under his chin, then he pulled back to look you in the eyes, "and even if something happens, We will go through it together. I know it will be harder for you, but I swear that there's nothing in this life that could be offered to help you lessen your pain that I won't do it." He whispered sincerely, holding your face between his big warm hands. You hugged him tightly, "I love you so much, I don't even know what I did to deserve you!" You said crying over the fact that a man like Jungkook existed, a man who's willing to do anything for you. "Ah, baby I love you, too so much. I don't want you to doubt us or the future. You know why?" He chuckled feeling you shake your head. "Because the future is never guaranteed, but the only thing that is guaranteed is us, and I know that we're strong enough to face anything life throws at us, together." He said hugging you tighter. "Okay, baby?" He pulled back to look at you. You nodded as he wiped away your tears. "Now, about that baby..." He smirked as you laughed at his goofiness. He always knew how to make you laugh. Always.

Now fast forward a few years, you and Jungkook are parents now. It didn't take that long to get pregnant thanks to Jungkook's stamina. Your pregnancy went on smoothly and nothing bad happened. Just as Jungkook promised, he was always right there for you, for everything; from the moment you both found out, to birth-giving, till now. Speaking of which, the poor thing was so terrified when he knew that your doctor would perform a C-section and that you wouldn't be giving birth naturally.

"Is she supposed to be awake during the surgery?" Jungkook worriedly asked the doctor as he could see that the medication they have given you were not putting you to sleep. "Oh don't worry, Mr Jeon. She won't feel a thing, we drugged the part that we will be working on, and it's normal for her to be awake." Your Doctor smiled kindly at him knowing that this was his first time undergoing something like this. Jungkook was dressed in scrubs holding your hand to keep you from panicking, the doctor also hung up something like a sheet in front of you so you won't see them perform the surgery. "Are you okay?" Jungkook whispered, trying to make small conversation with you as you kept looking at him. You nodded still looking at him as he was getting more anxious by the minute because of your intense staring, "Jungkook why are you panicking, I am the one who's having her stomach open, not you." He laughed squeezing your hand, his nerves easing a bit. "How are you so cool with this?"

"I don't think me panicking right now, would do us any good, you know." Jungkook chuckled then kissed your forehead.

An hour has already passed by when they informed you that you delivered and that the surgery was almost over, they needed to stitch you up. "Jungkook go with the nurse!" You said urgently turning to look at him. "No baby, it's okay, your mum and my mum are waiting outside, I'll wait with you here." He said calming you down, he promised that he won't leave your side until you both get out of the surgery's room together. "But, this means that they'll know!" Jungkook chuckled at your worried expression. "It's okay baby, let them know." He said kissing your forehead. "You did great, and I am so proud of you!" He was tearing up because he could not understand how women could go through all of this, he was truly amazed. "I love you." You said looking into his teary eyes, "I love you, too baby so much!" He pecked your lips before the doctor announced that you were good to go.

It definitely wasn't easy, but with Jungkook there, everything was better.

Right now, you and Jungkook were asleep in each other's arms, appreciating the few hours of silence before everything turns back to its chaotic state in the morning. Since you've given birth, you could swear that you became a light sleeper. Your mum brushed off your marvellous discovery with a laugh claiming that it's normal for most mums to become light sleepers because you're always worried.

Just like now, your ears perked as you felt tiny footsteps softly padding towards your bedroom. And you were right, as you slowly turned in Jungkook's arms, so not to wake him up, you found your 3-year-old, Haneul, standing quietly by the door, sucking on his thumb and trying to search for you in the dark. "Haneul, baby I am here." You whispered and got up to see what's wrong. He padded softly towards you in his Stitch Kigurumi onesies that he insisted you buy from your last trip to Disneyland because that's his favourite character. "Oh baby what's wrong." You picked him up and held him in your arms cradling him as if to protect him from all the world's evil. You already knew what's wrong, he needed to change his diaper. "Come on baby, let's go to your room, daddy's still asleep." You left the room quietly hoping not to wake Jungkook up.

Haneul whimpered lightly in your arms seeing that he was irritated because of his diaper and he was still super sleepy. "Okay baby I'll change it for you, just please be quiet, your brother is still sleeping!" You prayed than Haneul won't throw a fit and wake up his twin, Hyun, from his sleep. It was too early to wake up the whole household right now.

"There, all done!" You whispered enthusiastically as he flashed a bunny-like grin at you just like his father. "Thanks, mummy." He grinned shaking his body cutely from side to side still laying on the changing table. "Anything for you baby!" You dived your head to his stomach attacking him with kisses as he squirmed beneath you. "Come on let's get you back to bed." You said putting him back in his crib and giving him a goodnight kiss. Before you could shut the door to the boys' room, you saw Haneul still standing in his crib giving you puppy eyes as he whimpered. You heart squeezed in your chest at the sight of your baby in discomfort. He wanted to sleep with you and Jungkook, but you can't let them get used to it. "Mummy!" Haneul whimpered reaching his tiny arms out for you. You sighed, your heart was too weak to leave him alone in the dark, you just couldn't do it. His eyes were starting to tear up as you went up to him. "God, you guys are my weakness." You muttered to yourself. As you were about to pick Haneul up, Hyun started to turn in his sleep, slowly waking up. Another pair of doe eyes slowly opened up, fluttering due to the dark smooth locks that were getting in its way. "Mummy!" You sighed great now both of them are awake and they will refuse to go back to sleep in their cribs.

Jungkook woke up to an empty bed, he jolted awake thinking you must be with the kids and that you might need his help, but didn't wake him up. He walked to the kids' bedroom to see you holding Haneul in your arms with him sucking on his thumb, drowsy eyes fighting sleep as you looked at Hyun who was carefully climbing out of his bed. "Careful baby!" You seemed to be fine, but your voice told otherwise, it was laced with worry, fearing that his leg might slip and he would get hurt. Hyun climbed down carefully then went up to you tugging on your nightdress and whimpering grumpily. Jungkook entered the room, "come here, buddy." He said scooping Hyun in his arms. "Baby, you woke up!" You frowned not liking the idea of him getting up so early. Since giving birth to your beautiful baby boys, Jungkook has put you and the boys as his top priority, and he was always there making sure you don't need anything. You didn't want him to wake up so early for once so that he could enjoy his sleep before going to the studio. "I didn't find you in my arms, so I got up to look for you." He said gazing at you lovingly. You kissed him on the cheek, he smiled and told you to go to bed with Haneul "I'll change Hyun's diaper and come right behind you." He said planting a kiss on your forehead. "Okay, baby." You said pulling Haneul closer to your chest.

A few minutes later, Jungkook and Hyun joined you and Haneul in bed. Haneul was fast asleep with his head resting on your chest, and Hyun was still awake looking up at Jungkook. "Come on buddy, go to sleep," Jungkook whispered running his fingers through Hyun's black locks that he inherited from his dad. "Appa!" Jungkook hummed softly in response. "Sing to me." Hyun traced his small fingers over Jungkook's cheek. Jungkook smiled closing his eyes for a few seconds enjoying the feeling as he started singing softly and quietly so that Hyun would go back to sleep.

You smiled, recalling all the things you've been through up until this moment. You remembered how you both were shocked when you found out you were having twins. That day was the best day of your life, you cried in happiness so much that Jungkook thought it was your hormones getting the best of you. "No... I'm just … I'm so happy." You said whipping your tears. That night you sat on the bed with Jungkook holding you in the same position that he would hold you when you're both having a deep conversation. You told him about the twins you saw that day, and how you were so fascinated by them and how they interacted with their mum. Jungkook smiled softly at you as he rubbed your belly. You both decided that you wouldn't tell anyone that you were having twins, and that it would be a surprise to your family and friends. The shock on their faces when they entered the room to congratulate you to find each of you holding a baby was priceless.

"Oh my God, are...are... You gave birth to twins!" Your grandma said in tears astonished by the surprise. "Oh, my dear bless you." She cried as you nodded with a big smile on your face. Your mum and Jungkook's mum were the ones who were in great shock because they were the ones who were waiting in the waiting room to suddenly find two nurses coming out with two babies. "How could you not tell us something like that?" Your mum asked whipping her tears as she looked at Haneul who was sleeping soundly in Jungkook's arms. "We wanted to surprise you." Jungkook replied as your dad smiled with tears in his eyes as he kept looking between you and Jungkook. "Congratulations sweetheart!" He planted a kiss on your forehead, proud of you. "Thanks, dad."

To say that the boys were shocked is an understatement. Poor Hobi kept looking left and right at each baby. "What the … twins?" Jimin burst in excitement as Yoongi grinned down at Haneul and Namjoon patting Jungkook's back smiling at Haneul, too. "They're so cute!" Jimin said excitedly as you handed him Hyun. "Careful, hyung!" Jungkook said worriedly, eyes watching Jimin like a hawk. "Look at our Jungkookie being a protective father," Jin said laughing with Taehyung bursting in laughter.

The boys kept pampering your kids to no end. Jin and Jungkook would even make sure that you and Lilly, Jin's wife, have play dates for the kids, seeing that Jin and Jungkook are the only fathers in the group. Life was treating you good with everyone surrounding you with love and care.

"What are you thinking?" Jungkook whispered. You looked at Hyun to find him fast asleep. "Nothing I was just remembering the day the boys blessed us with their existence." You smiled patting Hyun's back as you lifted the blanket to his shoulder. Jungkook's eyes gleamed at you as he smiled, probably remembering that day, too. Having kids is a huge deal to any couple but with Jungkook being there as he promised, you felt that everything is alright, and you didn't have anything to worry about. You and Jungkook fell into a deep sleep holding each other's hands as both Haneul and Hyun slept soundly between the two of you.

A/N:

Haneul means heavenly 🌌

Hyun means bright or intelligent.🤓

[malereader-inserts]

Christmas Cheer

Fandom: Avengers Pairing: Avengers & Male!Reader Summary: Everyone is spreading the Christmas Cheer Word Count: 1291 A/n: Sorry about unable to post, my laptop still hasn’t been fixed.

Merry Christmas from England :)

New York City.

Its the place you want to be for the holidays, the snow is unbelievably pretty and the decoration always stands out the best than last years. Growing up in New York, Christmas still takes your breath away, if you weren’t feeling the Christmas cheer then doing into downtown New York and you’ll find all the cheer you need.

Still, it was the first time you wouldn’t be spending Christmas with your family. You had lived in the Avengers Base, like many others, and your parents were on holiday for once.

All their kids were out of the house and your parents figured it was back to exploring the world, making the most of their lives. You were fine with it, you like seeing the messages in the family group chat to see your mother busting out her moves on the dance floor at the cruise and it’s always a crack to see your dad on the FlowRider. Your siblings were married with kids or spending their Christmas with their significant other’s family.

Meaning, it was the first time you would be spending Christmas with the team.

You consider them a second family, so you weren’t bothered about spending Christmas with them. The only struggle you had was buying gifts for them, there was a lot more of them than you immediate family, so budgeting was a little harder this year - but, luckily, you planned ahead and started buying gifts at mid-October. 

Peter and his aunt were coming to the base as well to celebrate Christmas. Tony couldn’t have a Christmas by himself with his wife and daughter - Morgan was begging to see her uncles and aunts. Clint decided to bring his family along to the base as well, more like Laura had pestered him about it.

It was a packed household, but, it warmed your heart. The Christmas tree was big enough to have presents under the tree. You put it up the moment it hit December 1st, everyone came in the morning to see you tangled in tinsels.

You remember Sam complaining the loudest that you should have waited for everyone to be up so he could help. He loves doing the decorating the tree. 

Obviously, there was a loud argument on who should put the star on the top, eventually, it was picked that you should do it. You like admiring the tree from time to time. 

The Christmas activities were highly forced by Steve, only because everyone seemed to agree to spend Christmas with each other. So, of course, there was a gingerbread house competition. Everyone knew that everyone in the team was competitive, but you’ve never seen such fury between Bucky and Steve, as Steve was betrayed by Bucky, who loudly teamed up with Tony.

Steve gasped, dramatically, and yanked Banner to be his partner, the poor man was sputtering excuses as you looked at him sympathetically. You had banned Natasha and Clint being in a team together as Clint grumbled and teamed with Wanda as you teamed with Peter, Natasha pulling Sam by the ear to get their spot to join the competition. 

Vision and Rhodey were the judges since they were the most likely not to be biased. Concluding, Tony and Bucky the winner as you and Peter came third, with a sulky second place of Steve and Banner. 

Of course, it had snowed, so there was a snowball fight. This was started by Bruce, surprisingly. He had picked up snow and clumped it into a ball. He was supposed to hit Clint, missed and hit Natasha. 

The silence was deafening when it had happened. 

It was all good when she hastily picked up a clump to throw back at the scientist, who was sure he was dead for. 

You can’t remember the last time you had a snowball fight, it had been years really. It was great fun, especially with a gang of superheroes. No one was backing down in the fight, it had only stopped when Nick Fury came to visit and he was hit in the face with a stray snowball.

No one knows who threw it. 

(It was Rhodey.)

When that stopped everyone seem to try and play it off as if they weren’t having a snowball fight. You, Peter and Wanda did a few snow angels and inevitable - seeing that Clint had declared a competition on the best snow sculpture, with no teaming up. 

You were doing the judging this time with Bucky by your side, he liked shouting insults towards Steve to overthrow his game. You weren’t surprised that Tony had built his own Iron Man suit with snow. You were surprised to see that Natasha built Spongebob, you were unaware she knew what that was, she doesn’t seem the type to enjoy a cartoon. 

“Does it have to be a grand thing?” You asked as you watched everyone build such great sculptures, taking up the front of the base, luckily they were located in the middle of nowhere.

“Where’s the fun of not doing it ENORMOUS!” 

The winner was Bruce with his sculpture of a massive cat, Clint was sulking when he wasn’t even declared second or third.

“Clint, you built a giant dick, you could have put some detail on it!”

“Go suck some dick, Wilson.”

(Clint was bitter that Sam took second - he built the head of a falcon.)

Christmas has most definitely been the best time of the year. How could possibly forget everyone having a movie week of Christmas movies? Don’t forget a highly toxic argument that rise among the team which was the best Christmas movie.

“It’s clearly Home Alone,” Peter spoke loudly as Banner scoffed.

“No, it’s The Grinch.”

“Okay, just because Hulk is green and so is the Grinch-” 

“Steve!” You called him out as Natasha was busy howling in the background, her side was hurting from laughing too hard.

“I’m just saying Elf is a great movie.”

“Of course you would say that, childish!” Bucky called him out.

“Oh, what do think is the best one then Bucks?”

“It’s a wonderful life,” Bucky said as if it was obvious.

“The guy was going to kill himself, how is that the best Christmas movie?!” Tony argued, “Come on, guys, it’s Polar Express!”

“Actually, it’s Die Hard.”

“CLINT SHUT UP!” Everyone shouted as he started to crack up again.

“(Y/n), what do you think is the best Christmas movie.”

You put your hands up, “I am not getting involved with this...”

“You suck, man,” Sam announced, with a smirk on his face, “Krampus.”

“That is a horror film,” Rhodey pointed out, looking at Sam as if he was insane.

“A Christmas horror film,” Sam says, hands out with a bright smile.

“I would like to watch that,” Thor piped up, his hand up to talk.

You raised an eyebrow, “For once, Thor had been so quiet that I forgot you were here.”

The argument lasted for a while, but everyone had seemed to forget about it or at least, sweep it under the rug as Christmas was nearing closer. It was lovely to see everyone in a Christmas cheer, wearing lovely and ugly sweaters.

(Bucky had taped a mirror onto his sweater with a note cello taped to the jumper saying “Ugly.” - Tony did not take it well.)

You admired the tree, a few nights before Christmas, excited to open gifts. Though, upon inspection, perhaps you have to be the parent to be holding a black bin bag and collecting everyone’s wrapping present this year.

[sevlgi]

opposites

requested: yes

group: blackpink

pairing: rosé x fem!reader

genre: fluff, angst

contents: college!au, good girl!rosé, bad girl!reader

warnings: none

synopsis: They say opposites attract, and when the campus’s resident sweetheart falls for a bad girl, Rosé discovers just how true that statement is.

a/n: I’M SO SORRY FOR HOW LONG THIS TOOK ME OMGGGG  hope you enjoy, and I’m glad you like my blog ❤

word count: 3.6k

Chaeyoung has never quite believed that opposites attract.

To be fair, she doesn’t have much experience to go off of. Despite being attracted to basically every person she meets, she hasn’t actually dated much. (As her friend Jennie jokes, she’s not bisexual, she’s by herself.)

And obviously, she’s not only attracted to people soft and sweet like herself. Especially in college, it’s more likely to find people in sweats and ratty T-shirts than people in pink sweaters and cute dresses.

It’s no secret that Chaeyoung is a hopeless romantic, convinced that she’ll find someone who she just works with. It’s also no secret that she’s determined to find someone similar enough to her that a relationship would actually work out.

Imagine her surprise when her next crush is the complete opposite of her.

You’re utterly fascinating to Chaeyoung; every little detail about you absolutely contradicts her, and she thinks her parents would faint if they saw you. Unlike Chaeyoung’s usually well-styled hair, you look like you’ve just rolled out of bed to go to class. Your leather jackets and heavy denim look stiff to the touch, and your dark circles, tattoos, and piercings are enough to ward all your classmates away.

But somehow, all of it just draws Chaeyoung in more. She’d never dream of dying her hair as much as you do, or getting as many tattoos as you have, but for some reason, you intrigue her.

She still doesn’t believe opposites attract. You might be gorgeous, but Chaeyoung is sure that your personalities would clash, and a relationship, however imaginary it may be, would never work out.

Of course, she’s also not willing to admit that she’s wrong to her friends, all of whom insist that opposites do attract. She just knows Lisa would gloat, and Chaeyoung is never giving her friends that satisfaction. 

“Who’re you staring at today?”

Chaeyoung pouts at Yeri, who slides into the seat beside her with a knowing smile. Joy, on the other side, is already following where Chaeyoung’s eyes were earlier. “Hey. I’m not always staring at people.”

“Yes, you are,” the two other girls chorus. “Come on, you’re always searching for ‘your other half’ or whatever,” Yeri rolls her eyes. “You barely focus in class because of it.”

Studiously ignoring where you sit in the lecture hall (3 rows ahead and 2 seats to the left), Chaeyoung scowls and twirls her pen. “Rude.”

“You know I am,” Yeri smiles, beginning to scan the room as well. “So, come on. Who’s your pick of the day?”

Joy narrows her eyes; Chaeyoung’s a bit panicked to see that her friend is already zeroing in on you. “Wait… it can’t be her, right?”

“Who?” Joy whispers in Yeri’s ear, and the youngest girl’s eyes widen. “Chaeng, it’s not her, right?”

The blonde attempts to play it cool, asking nonchalantly, “Who are you even talking about?”

Both girls point at your back, the dark leather of your jacket and the two empty seats on either side of you making it unmistakable that you’re the one they’re pointing at. “Y/N Y/L/N. It’s not her, right?”

Y/N Y/L/N. Chaeyoung tests it out on her tongue silently before realizing her friends are still waiting for an answer. “It… maybe, what’s it to you?”

Yeri groans, and Joy shakes her head in what seems to be disappointment. “You have the worst taste, Chaeyoung. I mean, she’s cute, but…”

To be honest, the most surprising part of the entire conversation is that her friends aren’t even teasing about the whole ‘opposites’ thing. “What’s wrong with Y/N?” Chaeyoung can’t help but feel a bit defensive; after all, it’s her taste in girls that was being attacked.

Joy leans in conspiratorially now, despite the professor clearing his throat at the front of the classroom. “Okay, so, she’s kind of the designated bad girl? I don’t really know, but I heard she’s killed someone.”

“What? No, she set a building on fire,” Yeri argues, rolling her eyes when Joy opens her mouth to disagree. “Whatever, whatever. Anyway, she’s bad news. She’s a serial dater, too, and she doesn’t like cats. Who doesn’t like cats?”

Chaeyoung’s eyebrows scrunch together as her friends argue. It’s probably not likely that you’ve killed anyone or set a building on fire, but still… a serial dater? None of it sounds good.

“Anyway, she’s the polar opposite of you,” Joy sighs, patting Chaeyoung sympathetically on the arm. “You know, you’re sweet and soft, and she’s… her.”

Suddenly, the professor clears his throat again and raises his eyebrow at where the three girls sit. “Ms. Park, Ms. Kim, the other Ms. Park? Anything important?”

“No, sorry, sir,” Chaeyoung blurts out, cheeks red. She’s not even blushing because she’s been put on the spot, though; it’s because you’ve finally turned around to look at her.

Maybe it’s the eyeliner, but something about your gaze feels like it sees right through her. With the tiniest quirk of the corner of your lips, you turn back around and leave Chaeyoung fully flustered.

Yeah, definitely a player.

Every day, Chaeyoung attempts to work up the courage to sit a little closer to you. She’s not making much progress; to be fair, you can’t blame her, when you’re usually given a 3 foot radius of empty space by everyone.

However, she discovers something new about you every day. She discovers that you drink black iced coffee (she drinks tea), and that you use mint flavored chapstick (she uses strawberry). You prefer cinnamon gum (which Chaeyoung thinks is a bit gross), and you only ever wear black socks (she wears white).

Joy really wasn’t kidding when she said you were Chaeyoung’s opposite.

Of course, it’s just the blonde’s luck when the professor announces a group project, and your name is the only one out of 40 that Chaeyoung knows.

It takes a lot of energy for Chaeyoung to approach you after class. “Hey,” she smiles; you don’t return it. “So, I was wondering if you have a partner for the project? If you don’t, I was thinking we could be partners…”

You look startled at first, though it settles behind a mask of calm indifference immediately. “You don’t have friends?” At the blonde’s wince, you roll your eyes, lips quirking into a smile. “Kidding. Sure. Let’s work together.”

“Great!” Chaeyoung beams, looping her arm through yours. You look even more surprised now, but it’s cute. Everything you do would probably look cute. “I’m Roseanne, but you should call me Chaeyoung or Chaeng.”

“I’m Y/N,” you offer. Your voice is quieter than Chaeyoung had imagined, but that’s probably her fault for thinking your voice was demon-like or something. “You’re a sophomore, right?”

“Right.” Chaeyoung has no idea how you know how old she is, but she can roll with it. “You?”

You nod, looking anywhere other than Chaeyoung face. “Yeah. Same. So, do you have any ideas for the project yet?”

“No, sorry.” She can’t help the smile on your face, still shocked that you’re holding a conversation with her and not murdering her already. “Let’s get coffee? We can talk about the project. If you’re free, of course.”

“I am.”

And that’s all it takes for Chaeyoung to grin again, grab your arm, and lead you to the nearest coffee shop.

Chaeyoung likes the way you’re honest about what you want. When she offers to order, despite knowing what you want, you quietly ask for the iced black coffee and hand her 10 dollars even when she tries to protest.

You don’t ask about what she ordered, and you make sure she tipped the extra before opening your laptop and asking for ideas.

As the afternoon goes on, you seem to grow more comfortable, and Chaeyoung can let go of some of her slightly forced enthusiasm. She actually finds herself enjoying your dry sense of humor and sarcastic comments, though she can’t really make any of her own.

By the time she has to go to her next class, Chaeyoung’s actually making jokes of her own, and she has your number stored in her phone.

All in all, a successful day.

“Hi.”

You look surprised (or as surprised as you deign to look) to see Chaeyoung sitting next to you in the lecture hall the day after the project was turned in. “Uh, hey.”

“How do you think we did on the project?” the blonde asks, taking out her laptop. She ignores the way you stare at her, hoping that you didn’t want to just forget her existence after the project or something. 

“Pretty good. You’re smart, I just helped a little bit.”

Chaeyoung laughs softly, swatting at your arm. “No way, come on. You’re smarter than your leather jackets let on, too.”

“And you’re smarter than your overly sweetened tea lets on,” you tease, a smile twinkling in your eyes.

She scowls and swats at you again, but you dodge this time. “I thought we agreed never to mention that again!”

“You’re right, you’re right.” Chaeyoung misses the way you smile at her after she turns to the board.

It becomes sort of a routine to sit next to you during lectures and copy off your surprisingly comprehensive notes. Chaeyoung can’t help but fall deeper and deeper at your ever-tentative smile, at each offhand, yet sweet comment.

All the little details about you, the tiniest things you notice, only make Chaeyoung fall harder. You buy non-cinnamon gum especially for her and keep 2 packs in your bag in case she wants some. Sometimes, you show up with a cup of so-called ‘overly sweetened tea’ next to your own coffee.

You see everything about her, and you both make the most subtle changes so that the two of you complement each other absolutely perfectly. Chaeyoung starts carrying blue pens because you prefer them, while you carry black ones in case either of you forget. You even carry a strawberry chapstick just for her.

Even Chaeyoung starts unconsciously enjoying the smell of your sweet mint chapstick; she wears it sometimes, not because she likes it more, but because she’s curious how it’d taste on your lips.

It doesn’t need to be said that Chaeyoung doesn’t just want to be friends anymore.

At first, she just wanted to understand you a bit better, to relieve her own fascination with you, but the more she learns, the more Chaeyoung is pulled in. It’s more than just a crush now, more than simple butterflies in her stomach.

Now, it’s an unconscious smile always tugging at her lips when you’re not with her, laughing at a joke that wasn’t necessarily actually that funny. It’s adapting to fit with you, and it’s accepting that maybe opposites do attract after all.

The only thing left is to introduce you to her friends.

“Are you ready?”

You frown, tugging at the sleeves of your leather jacket. Chaeyoung’s heart warmed when you offered to tone down your look for her, but she didn’t want you to change anything about yourself, so you just went with your jacket. “Sure, I guess.”

“Great!” the blonde beams, waving at Yeri and Joy, who she sees a few yards away from the huge table the two of you occupy. Behind them, Jisoo, Jennie, and Lisa lag, though they’re too far away to clearly see you.

Yeri’s expression isn’t exactly favorable; she stops right in her tracks to talk furiously to the others, and Chaeyoung frowns at the unreadable expression on your face. “Um… don’t worry, Y/N-ah. They’re probably just… talking about what to eat?”

“Sure,” you mutter, looking down. As the other girl has discovered, despite all your bravado and sass, you’re quite self-conscious. “It’s not like pizza is the only food this place offers.”

There’s no time for the blonde to reply; Jisoo, ever the tactful one, sits first and offers a tight smile. “Chaeng, good to see you. And you are?” 

“Y/N Y/L/N.” If Chaeyoung didn’t know you well enough, she wouldn’t be able to see past the mask of bored confidence you put on. “Jisoo, right? I’ve heard of you.”

The oldest girl flushes and nods. “Um, these are Jennie, Lisa, Yeri, and Joy.” They raise their hands or nod when their names are called, though their expressions are hostile.

Just as Chaeyoung opens her mouth to try and break the awkward silence, Lisa leans forward with her eyes narrowed. “So. What do you want with Chaeyoung?”

“Lisa!” The younger girl is usually sweet and puppy-like, but she’s also notoriously protective of her friends. Chaeyoung doesn’t miss the way your eye twitches just the slightest bit, and she resists the urge to put her hand on your arm. “Stop it.”

“What? You can’t deny this feels an awful like you’re introducing your girlfriend to us, and she’s the worst girlfriend you could have,” Lisa scowls, crossing her arms.

You sigh, shaking your head and standing up. Joy actually lurches back in her chair, as if expecting you to beat her up, but you just toss a quick smile to Chaeyoung, picking up the leather jacket slung over the back of your chair. “I think we’re done here. For your information, I’m not dating Chaeyoung, even though it wouldn’t be any of your business if I was.”

All the other girls stare at you, including Chaeyoung, as you continue, “You don’t know anything about me, so don’t assume. I appreciate that you care for Chaeng, but this is not the way to show it.”

With that, you’re gone, a light brush of your fingers on Chaeyoung’s shoulder the only way for her to tell that you aren’t angry at her.

As soon as you’re out of earshot, though, she scowls at her friends, hissing, “What the hell, Lisa? It was not your place to say any of that.”

The younger girl looks sheepish now, rubbing at the back of her neck. “I… I’m sorry.”

Jennie, though, rolls her eyes. “Come on, Chaeyoung. It’s what’s best, you don’t want to be dating her. She’s only going to break your heart.”

“I’m not that fragile, are you serious?” It’s honestly pretty uncharacteristic for Chaeyoung to actually be mad, but she can’t seem to control her words when her relationship with you might’ve been ruined. “It’s not your business anyway.”

Jisoo bites her lip, reaching for Chaeyoung’s hand across the table. “Chaeng, please. We just want what’s best for you, and Y/N isn’t that. You understand, right?”

No, I don’t. I don’t understand any of it. “Sure. I understand,” Chaeyoung exhales, sitting back. Despite everything she wants to say to her friends, she knows that they have good intentions, however misguided.

She’ll talk to you tomorrow. 

You don’t show up to class the next day, and Chaeyoung sits alone in her usual seat, feeling empty when you’re not quietly making snarky remarks beside her.

It’s odd, and it really shows how much you’ve ingrained yourself into her life.

After a day of thinking, Chaeyoung has come to realize that, despite all her friends’ warnings, she does have feelings for you. She wants to be with you, to enjoy the little things and the small moments together, and she thinks you might feel the same way.

Obviously, she’s still too cowardly to actually go to you and tell you.

After you don’t show up for the next 2 classes, Chaeyoung dials your phone. You don’t pick up there, either, and she’s left to frown at her phone in the middle of the road.

She’s not a passive person, so she fully intends to do anything she can to make you talk to her.

On Monday, she decides she’ll text your roommate Miyeon, but she gets caught up in classes. On Tuesday, Chaeyoung thinks she’ll bring you some notes, but she forgets to write an extra copy. On Wednesday, she catches a cold and Lisa refuses to let her go anywhere.

A week passes exactly like that.

Finally, 9 days after the disastrous lunch, she manages to get your dorm room number from the office lady she bribes with homemade cupcakes. You’re always home for lunch, probably because you don’t eat with anyone but Chaeyoung.

Her heart thuds in her chest as she rounds the corner to head into your hallway, the buzz of other students around her drowned out by the ringing in her ears. She knocks three times- one, two, three- on your door and she waits.

You look terrible when you open the door.

The permanent dark circles under your eyes are ten times darker than usual, and your lips are dry and chapped. You wear a rumpled Disney shirt that Chaeyoung would tease you about if she wasn’t so concerned. “Um… cupcakes?”

“Thanks for coming by.”

“No problem.” The blonde watches you pour out some cheap, college-student coffee at the tiny desk in the corner of the dorm. “I was just concerned. You haven’t been to class in a while, you know?”

You sigh and hand her a cup of piping hot tea, already sweetened just like Chaeyoung likes it. “Yeah. I know.”

“Hey.” Leaning over, Chaeyoung places her hand on yours, ignoring the way her heart skips a beat at the skin-to-skin contact. Judging by the blush on your face, you feel the same. “You can tell me anything, okay? We’re friends.”

You almost seem to wince, though Chaeyoung doesn’t know what for. “Yeah. I’m fine though.”

“Was it my friends?” the blonde persists, her eyes searching yours for an explanation. “I know that they were really rude, but I promise I don’t care about anything they say, okay?”

Scoffing, you stand up, seemingly to get more coffee, even though your mug is full. “I’m not that shallow, okay?”

“Then what is it?” Despite knowing she sounds desperate, Chaeyoung’s mind is racing for an explanation, anything that could tell her why you’re avoiding her. “Please talk to me.”

The beat of silence that passes only makes Chaeyoung feel more anxious, like her brain is spinning in circles inside her head, and she almost jumps when you speak again. “Do you… do you like me?”

“I… of course I do! You’re my friend, I like you very much.” The blonde is well aware that that isn’t what you meant, but she can’t help but avoid what she really wants to say as she babbles on, “Why? Do you want me to show my platonic love for you more often?”

“Chaeyoung.” You place your hand on hers and lean forward with a serious expression on your face that honestly scares Chaeyoung. “I know that you won’t tell me honestly any time soon, so I’m just going to say it first. I like you. A lot, and not as a friend.”

As the other girl’s jaw drops, you continue on, the overly quick speed of your speech letting Chaeyoung know just how nervous you are to say all of this. “I know that I have a reputation, and I know that I’m too closed down or boring, but you’re nothing like that. You’re so sweet and gorgeous, and I just… really like you. And I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? Why are you sorry?” Chaeyoung reaches for you again, eyes searching yours for any sign of insincerity. She doesn’t find any. “You’re not boring, Y/N, not in the slightest. And I like you too, every little thing about you.”

“I don’t think you know enough about me to say that,” you try to deflect, but the blonde shakes her head.

“You’re so sweet to me, Y/N, and it’s not your fault that no one else can see it, but I do. I see all the little things you do for me, and I fall for you more every day. Maybe I don’t know enough about you, but I want to learn. If you’ll let me.”

A short pause occurs before you exhale quickly, swiping away tears Chaeyoung didn’t notice were about to fall. “Okay. I’d love that.”

“Great.” Chaeyoung sits back again, but just as you’re about to get up, presumably to busy yourself with a drink or something, she blurts out, “Can I kiss you?”

The surprised look on your face is so endearing that she’s already grinning when you smile softly. “Of course you can.”

The moment that you bend down and press your lips to hers, so soft and gentle, is the best of Chaeyoung’s life. She can finally taste the sweet mint of your chapstick, mixed with the unique taste of you, and feel the way your lips are slightly chapped against her own. When you pull away, Chaeyoung loves the flush to your cheeks that mirrors hers, and she can only grin when you move away to get your coffee.

Maybe opposites do attract after all.

“Hey, can I ask you something again?”

“You already did,” you joke, then laugh when the other girl pouts. “Sure, Chaeng. What?”

“Do you hate cats?”

An offended gasp escapes from you, matching your expression. “No, who hates cats? I think that’s the worst rumor about me yet.”

The blonde protests, “What about the one about you murdering someone?”

Sniffing and sitting with your coffee, you say, “I stand by my case.”

Cupping your face with her hands, the cuffs of her sweaters brushing up against your cheeks, Chaeyoung presses another kiss to your lips. The taste of mint and coffee, strawberry and tea, is the most perfect combination she could ever imagine.

[mixedfandomer]

So I translated a phineas and ferb episode way to many times try to guess which one it is p.S I would love to see someone make this

(I don’t know how to add those continue reading things so you don’t have to scroll for a long time sorry)

Phineas: And how do you like red and blue toothpaste?

(A mysterious capsule falling from the sky)

Phineas: Wow. Hmm, it looks like it just fell out of the sky.

(shows the color of an umbrella)

Phineas: I think so. Open it and check the contents.

(Farb jumps out of an umbrella and goes to the box. He tries to open it).

Phineas: Wow. It's a day full of questions. First the toothpaste, then this.

Color: And of course, "Where's Perry?"

Phineas: Yes! do you know what i said? We are in the secret wing!

(from Perry's shop)

Major Monogram: Oh, Officer P. Glad I came here. Duvenschmilz was unavailable for a long time. Do something right or cheat. Man, it was a little sudden. Sometimes I feel like taking on assignments here.

(Phineas and Ferb cross the garden. A scream is heard.)

Phineas: Oh, the dress. He will break this third rule with an ax. Sorry Dumpio.

Dampamir: The name is Dampamir!

Baljeet: Wow! You can't log in because the content makes you more attractive!

Phineas: Don't you know? Fortunately, Farb is working on a special Z-ray machine that can see every substance on the periodic table. It's a great test, so it's best to wear this bulletproof lead jacket.

(fire car)

Color: Well, we can't see the haircut, but it has holes in the second molar. Looks like Ms. Shapiro is making Garcia Creplach's tortillas.

(Court:)

Doofenshmirtz Evil is involved! ??

(Perry enters. Dr. Duvenschmilz is missing.)

(The flashbacks begin in black and white. Duwenschildz is on his bad blog.)

Duvenschmilz: (A blind man grabs it and screams)

(Perry saw a new prisoner. Duwenschildz was covered up. Perry saw Duwenschildz's footprint).

Duwenschmilz: Hey! This is my lunch!

(Pine and Ferb in the courtyard. There is a piano in the box).

Phineas: I think I'm really running out of ideas here.

Isabella: You play the piano.

Baljeet: Can I buy a flute pipe?

Buford: the secret to making room for a new printer!

Phineas: Is that so?

Buford: Ok! As you know, the Van Stom family has been the holder of the secret knowledge and the holder of the Secret Box for generations. The 13th century turned the Templars' wrath into a massacre. Our family kept it hidden from uneducated people all their lives. When we did, all we found was a key that could reveal the secrets of the box.

Baljeet: Is that true?

Buford: No, just kidding. On the other side I found a wall. When the coffin fell from the sky, I saw the lock drop.

Phineas - Worth a try.

(pear cut)

Main Monogram: Great job. Agent P. Karl scans a fingerprint from Doof's apartment.

Carl: If you have a variability analysis, there seems to be a lot of caffeine molecules. with rainwater.

Large Monogram: Our only meaning is coffee and rainy sky. It can happen anywhere!

(The stop is in a darkroom with Seattle, WA. Duvenschmilz Barrel Accessories)

Duvenschmilz: Uh, hi! Who is here? Mark! You must be in heaven! This should be a satisfying explanation when I'm done, or when I'm blogging!

(Cut down the pine and Ferb's garden. Ferb puts the key in the chest.)

Phineas: Yes, honey!

Baljeet: What is your secret? Maybe a dozen missing Schrödinger cats?

BUFORD: But I didn't have privacy.

(opens the capsule)

(all pants)

Baljeet: Why do you smoke like that?

BUFORD: And why are we all suffering?

Cornelius: Oops, sorry!

Crazy Old Man: What do you think you did?

Phineas: Who are you?

Crazy old man: It's me! from the future!

(all pants)

(Cut the spleen into a quilt. Remove the mask from the shadow mask)

Duvenschmilz: (panting) Peter Panda? Oh, that was my good chance. That's all. While. And it was terrible, everyone was staring with crooked noses and had to talk about it.

Suspect: Hello, Duvenschmilz!

Duvenschmilz: Hello, what do you get, the black figure walking in the dark?

Suspicious Character: Mystery Professor, it's me.

Duvenschmilz: I understand.

Professor's Secret: Did Panda Stone Take My Name?

Doofenshmirtz: No, but I don't really speak. Can you tell me why you kidnapped me? Hmm bye! I know you are still here. I can't see the apple of your eye. What is silence? It is very unconventional.

Professor Secret: secret.

Duvenschmilz: Oh. This is going to be a fun interview.

(The courtyard of Phineas and Ferb)

Phineas: Please stay a while. Do you want to know what's happening to my nose?

Crazy old man: Don't worry about our nose ... This. Hear it when a hamster runs, a black hole breaks control and something breaks. You have now opened my hamster area! It's just a moment before it slows down!

Baljit: Wait, is a hamster allergic to air?

Crazy old man: Trust me!

Baljeet: What?

Crazy Old Man: Because I'll be here in the future!

Baljit: Wait, won't I be Indian in the future?

Crazy old man: "Okay! See you in the future.

Isabella: Yes, it doesn't make sense.

Grandma: Stop telling people about you from the future!

Phineas: Who is it?

Crazy Old Man: I'm just Dennis. ignore. There is no future person.

Dennis: I heard it! Hi guys, sorry if I disturb you.

Crazy old man: there is no time to waste!

Dennis: Calm down, Bernie! Don't forget your blood!

Bernie: What did I do to you? So what slows down?

Dennis: Oh, go! I am a sick hamster who rules our lives!

(The box beeps.)

Phineas: What is there without batting an eye?

Baljeet: Not good.

Buford: Well, you've played a lot of pianos.

(Put the professor's husband in a moving box and bite into the scented sponge).

Duvenschmilz: Seriously, what was the kidnapping? And what good is a temple hanging over the petro panda?

The Professor's Mystery: Why I'm Peter Panda's Enemy.

Duvenschmilz: (pants)

The Secret Professor: Are you surprised?

Duvenschmilz: Sure. But if you know anything about the enemy company, please do so. I don't want to be another bad scientist. (See Professor Inator of Mysteries) Oh! Enjoying! Why does he do it?

The professor's secret is a secret I cannot reveal.

Duvenschmilz: ... your beauty. Yes, I know. Will you give me your advice before or after trying to catch Peter the panda? It's just ... Even in the research phase.

The mystery of the teacher: I don't say anything. The secret gun ... it's mine

Duvenschmilz: But he's your enemy! He knows what bothers you! So this is a generic title! What do you expect from her with your story? (The secret has been cleared.) Don't stay, oh no. Don't tell me, you've never told your inner story! ok i have a problem! This is your problem!

The Professor's Mystery: What?

Doofenshmirtz: Lack of communication. Give me a shot (a rhythm is established and a chorister appears out of nowhere).

(song: talk to him)

Duvenschmilz - you can do it in secret

You don't have to be so selective. ??

Chorus Girls: Too erratic! ??

Duvenschmilz: Make history your secret enemy;

For all the reasons why ...

Duvenschmilz and the girls' choir: rotten eggs. ??

Doofenshmirtz: (ooh while the choir girl is in the background) not enough to show her skill;

You have to tell him how you feel. ??

I guess you will be surprised that their attention is being held

I can only understand

Tell him about all the bad plans you have for ...

Duvenschmilz and the showgirl: you have to ...

Duvenschmilz: Talk to him

Choir Girl: Oh! ??

Duvenschmilz: Tell him ...

Duvenschmilz and Chorus Girl - all my plans came to mind

Duvenschmilz: Talk to him

Choir Girl: Oh! ??

Duvenschmilz: Announcement ...

Duvenschmilz and Chorus Girl: Give her everything you fear. ??

Duvenschmilz: Talk to him. ??

Now...

Duvenschmilz and the Chorus Girls: Stay there like a rock. ??

Doofenshmirtz - he has two furry ears to wear

Dancing girls: wear it! ??

Duvenschmilz: I know you really want to hurt him

Choir girls: Dig! ??

Duvenschmilz: But I think I'll lose you if I don't speak

Dancing girls: I want to talk

Duvenschmilz: communication is essential

When you open you can understand

And maybe it bothers me.

Duvenschmilz and Chorus Girl: you're right! ??

(The number ends and the girl has disappeared).

Mystery Professor: How did you get this girl to dance?

Doofenshmirtz: These are the unions, they are leaving.

(Go back to the courtyard where the hamster slows down.)

Bernie: (while Finna holds on) there's only one way to beat him! and listen with your ears! (A red bird in the wind comes out of your beard.) Hey Velleius, I found your bird!

Velleio: Really? where he was

Bernie: How boring! However, there is only one way to improve it! (crying and screaming)

Isabella, Buford, Baljit: No!

Finius: Hurray, everyone! Get the tree!

(They do.)

Isabelle: What are you doing now? !!

Baljeet: This is definitely the only time the camera has disappeared again!

Buford: Yeah, bad model break!

Isabella: Well, she is not a model! Subsequently, the model will disappear.

(remote effect)

I mean, Candice!

(Candice enters the room where she is still listening to the music. Then Chaos looks through the window and walks straight into the box.

Candice: (pants) mama mama mama mama mama !!!

(she goes back to the mysterious cave).

Mysterious Professor: The last person I recommend, you are a hostile thief!

Duvenschmilz: You can't undo it with a musical instrument. Hmm! I'll say it's not my fault that you and Peter are in trouble. It's yours!

The Professor's Secret: (Active Inator) The Secret Inator is an active lens wrapped in a real lens, I know who it is! Under favorable circumstances you will be nervous and full of revenge!

Duwenschmilz: (sigh) Yawn! So I was more concerned if I knew what was going on. YY-Become a man (sighs again)!

Secret Professor: Hmm?

(Burned by a plague on the wall. Peter Panda has come to the other side).

Duvenschmilz: Peter Panda! Wow, I'm not very happy to see my rainbow enemy.

Mysterious Professor: Peter Panda is not your enemy!

Duvenschmilz: Yes. He is not the enemy. H-h-this is a slow project.

Mysterious Professor: Do you want it to fall like this? (Peter accuses him) Do you understand? I am touched! Here it is, Duvenschmilz! (sighing) Yes, it is! (another shot) Do you understand? feel good. What did you give that I couldn't give you?

Duvenschmilz: A bad part of the internal dialogue!

Mystery Professor: What?

Duvenschmilz: Communicate! Oh cry! In any case, tell me what makes you turn off!

Mystery Professor: What? Oh yeah! There is no author!

Duvenschmilz: What? !! ??? ?? !! Hey, I'm worried! Clock! Communication I can do it.

(Perry finally enters, flips the switch, shoots from the ceiling, bounces a space pin.)

(He goes back to the terrace.)

Buford: I can't take it anymore! one day my friend

("Tough Gum" Song (Instrumental))

Advertiser: Durable Shoelaces!

Buford: - Wash! He lifts the branch and flies away.

(Once in line, Inator throws a bolt of lightning at the box, and once in line, Candice's mother follows him into the yard.)

Candice: Hurry up, Mom! To move on! What? !!

Baljeet: I didn't get hurt like I expected.

BUFORD: Yes, thankfully.

(Modest case where Mysterio and Peter talk so that Douffensmritz and Perry can see each other from the window.)

Mystery Master: So my parents accidentally created a black hole, got hooked on it, and went into orbit so that there was no danger to the planet, but in the process. At first I'm furious about it, and in the end you make me a nonexistent emperor, whom you killed tonight! Wow, what fun to tell someone!

(A crazy old man comes out of the yard to see him.)

Bernie and Denise: Son!

Mystery Master: Mother? Father? !! They will be called back! (hugs her).

Velleio: Oh ...

Mysterious Professor: Meet my enemy Peter Panda.

Bernie: Do you have any archenemies?

Denise: All of our kids are adults!

Bernie: Why is it a panda?

Dennis: Bernie!

Bernie: What? I was just thinking.

(Doofenshritz and Perry drop them).

Doofenshmirtz: Come on, Platypus Perry. Let's go home, I talk to you a lot, right? Yes, maybe you are right.

(He goes back to the terrace.)

Linda: Kids, why don't you come for lunch? And if he meets your father, ask him to come with us.

Candice: But, but, but ... Okay.

Finius: Intense, color. Planets can also explode and break the space continuum. I hope you have not suffered any real damage. (The bears appear next to them.) Oh, father! If you want to join, mom is having a lot of fun!

Polar Bear (voice of Lawrence): Oh boy, very good. I'm a bit bored.

Finius: Maybe the cake is still there.

(Another sees Phineas' back hole as the boy goes through the hole, proving it is true that Phineas and Ferb are working on a machine that turns humans into flies.)

Vera Finnius: W Noteworthy! What was the fate! We did

True color: can't. Here Phineas has four white shirts and you only have three.

Phineas: Okay. It must be said: Our father is not a bear.