#;written in the stars<plotlines> | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

moonriizing · 8 days ago

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Rewrite the Stars | j.sc (18+)

Ghostwriting fanfics about a KPOP group you barely know? All fun and easy money, until one of them walks into your life and refuses to leave. When fiction meets reality, neither of you is ready for the rewrite.

Genre: idol au, strangers-to-lovers, smut Pairing: RIIZE Jung Sungchan x afab!reader Warnings: mature themes, explicit sexual content (18+) MDNI Notes: 16k words. Listening to Rewrite the Stars from the movie, The Greatest Showman. I have never written an idol AU before, and by choice because I didn't wanna cross that line. But I've been thinking about this plotline for a while now, and the only way it would stop bothering me is if I wrote it. Lol. Hope you like it! Disclaimer: I do not know them, nor claim they would ever in real life behave the way they were portrayed in this fic. If you see the same exact fic in a different blog, for SEVENTEEN, that is me. I did not plagiarize myself; otherwise, lmk.

You were a ghost writer employed by an online blogger to write fanfiction for them. Not your first choice of profession, but after two years of trying—with no luck—to land a decent job using the Creative Writing degree you were once so proud of, you had no choice but to take what you could. Ghostwriting gigs paid the bills. That was enough.

You got it. Life was tough. You knew that better than anyone. And even though you were an orphan with big dreams riding on a full scholarship at a local community college, you foolishly believed you didn’t need to spend four years studying something practical just to get a guaranteed paycheck.

Your passion was writing—pouring your heart and soul into stories, unleashing your endless imagination into literary masterpieces that would touch hearts and change lives.

But in hindsight? Yeah. Maybe you should’ve been more realistic. If you had been, maybe you wouldn’t be stuck writing for some random influencer who ran a popular Tumblr page posting fanfictions about a K-pop boy group you barely knew. Maybe you wouldn’t have to sit there watching people praise her for stories you wrote.

“It pays the bills, hon,” you muttered, squinting at your screen as your fingers tapped briskly across the keyboard. “Suck it up.”

You really shouldn’t be complaining. You took the job willingly, and the pay wasn’t bad. Twenty bucks per thousand words. And with this blogger, you were locked into writing at least 15,000 words every three weeks. A walk in the park—usually.

Except on days like today.

You had five days left to finish the latest fic. This time, you and your employer had agreed on a 20,000-word college AU starring someone named Anton Lee. Easy enough, if not for the fact that you were completely out of inspiration.

You weren’t a procrastinator, not by nature. That was how Jasmin had managed to milk two full-length fics out of you each month. But every now and then, you’d hit a wall. And today, the wall was Anton.

Still, you had to ‘power through’—so Jasmin said.

“Your mind is a bottomless vault of infinite ideas and masterful works,” she told you this morning when you called to confess your writer’s block. “Writer’s block is just your brain taking a quick nap from the alternate universes you’ve built brick by brick out of literally nothing but your genius. You got this. I believe in you.”

Of course, Jasmin, your employer, had an eloquent tongue. She used to post her own original works before the blog blew up, and she needed someone else to crank out 20k-word epics about emotionally constipated idols falling in love at college. Hence, you.

“Come on, Anton!” you groaned at your screen. “Say something already!”

You stared. Typed a line. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that too.

Eventually, you slumped back in your chair, peeled your fingers off the keyboard, and slammed your laptop shut with the force of someone about to dramatically quit their job.

You met someone’s gaze the moment you slammed your laptop shut.

He was mid-step toward a nearby table, a to-go cup in one hand, and your sudden outburst had made him pause, blinking at you like a deer caught in high-definition LED headlights.

You blinked back. He looked vaguely familiar. You tilted your head at him, trying to place where exactly you’d seen him before. He looked like someone you’d passed a few times in the same space but never actually acknowledged. You were pretty sure you'd seen him sitting at the corner table with an Iced Americano and something on his screen that made him smile to himself.

Meanwhile, he stood frozen for a second longer, clearly waiting for some kind of reaction—like maybe you’d scream, or ask for a selfie, or launch into an unsolicited compliment about his jawline.

But instead, you said, “...Sorry. Did I scare you?”

That broke whatever spell he was under. He smiled, a little sheepish. “A little. But it’s okay. That was a pretty solid slam.”

You raised your coffee cup in mock salute. “Creative frustration.”

“I figured,” he said, stepping past you toward his usual spot by the wall. He sat down, took a sip of his drink, and pulled out his phone—but not before casting one last glance your way.

You turned back to your now-shut laptop.

You didn’t know his name, but you’d seen him around from time to time. Always past ten. Always quiet. A hat or hoodie on, head ducked low. He was probably a student. Or a night-shift worker. Or someone who just hated mornings as much as you did.

What you didn’t know was that he’d noticed you too.

Sungchan had been coming to this café occasionally, drawn by its ambiance, the indie jazz playlist, and the simple fact that no one ever bothered him here. Least of all you.

You, who was always glued to your screen, typing like your rent depended on it. You never spared him more than a glance. Never whispered about him or sneakily took a photo. He liked that.

He liked it so much, in fact, that he’d started timing his late-night coffee runs to match yours. Not on purpose. At first.

And now here you were, laptop finally closed, looking at him like he was just some guy who got caught in your dramatic breakdown. Which—he kind of was.

Sungchan smiled and lifted his cup in acknowledgment of you. You smiled back just as you were standing up to pack your things away and leave.

Funny. You’d never noticed how nice his smile was until now.

You didn’t mean to start talking to him. It just happened.

He was in line behind you at the counter the next night when the barista told you they’d run out of oat milk, and you turned around to groan dramatically into the nearest stranger’s personal space.

“Oh my god, this is the third time this week,” you said. “Being lactose intolerant is the worst.”

The guy behind you wearing a ball cap, hoodie, and a handsome face, chuckled. “Maybe the universe wants you to build tolerance.”

You squinted at him. “Tried that. It was a disaster. Trust me.”

He smiled. “Then I guess you’ll have to suffer with almond milk like the rest of us.”

That was the first real interaction. It was short and mostly unremarkable. But when you sat down at your usual spot later that night and saw him settling into the table across from you, you gave him a polite nod. And he smiled like he was hoping you’d notice.

The next time, it was raining, and he asked if he could share your outlet. And the time after that, he asked your name.

You told him without much hesitation. “You?”

“Chan.”

“Chan?” you repeated, waiting. “Chan what? Just Chan?”

There was a pause. His gaze flicked to his phone screen, which had just lit up with a message from someone. “Song,” he said quickly. “Chan… Song.”

You stared at him. “Chan Song?”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “It’s Korean.”

“I figured,” you replied, shrugging. You took a sip of your drink to hide your amusement. “Well, Chan Song, welcome to the sad people café. Everyone here’s avoiding something. Deadlines, heartbreak, lactose.”

He grinned. “What are you avoiding?”

“Deadlines. And dairy, apparently.”

“Good combo.”

“Thanks. What about you?”

He looked like he wanted to lie, but then shrugged. “Just insomnia.”

You nodded in understanding, even though something about his face still itched at your memory.

You didn’t think much of him for the next three days—too busy cramming 20,000 words into a fanfic you still weren’t sure made sense. One night, he said hi, and you said hi back, but that was the extent of it.

Until, finally, you looked up from your laptop—and at the same time, he lifted his head from his phone. Your gaze met. You didn’t speak.

You raised your cup. He raised his back. Then you exchanged smiles before you went back to your work.

The whole night, you were so deep into your writing that you barely noticed the world around you. It wasn’t until a plate landed next to your laptop that you looked up and blinked in confusion. It was a pastry with a paper napkin folded neatly beside it.

Your gaze followed the hand that had placed it down.

Chan was already zipping up his hoodie, one strap of his backpack slung over his shoulder, clearly on his way out.

You opened your mouth. “What’s this?”

“You looked like you needed it,” he said with a small grin. “I saw you eat the same one last week. You mumbled something about ‘crisis carbs.’”

Crisis carbs. Right.

You looked at him again, a little stunned. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, already backing toward the door. “Good luck with… whatever it is.”

Two days later, you were a new person. Your deadline was met, the fic submitted, the invoice sent. You’d even replied to Jasmin’s unnecessarily emotional ‘thank you’ voice memo with a heart emojis and treated yourself to a full eight hours of sleep for the first time in a week.

Tonight, the café was quieter than usual. But the soft drone of the espresso machine and a slow playlist of lo-fi piano wasn’t any less therapeutic.

You didn’t come to write. You weren’t even pretending to write. You were just sitting there, enjoying your overpriced drink and the feeling of having absolutely nothing due.

So when Sungchan walked through the doors, you noticed him right away. This time, you waved first.

He raised an eyebrow, amused, but made his way over anyway.

“Wow,” he said, looking at your closed laptop. “No laptop tonight? I almost couldn’t believe it was you.”

“Deadlines are dead,” you announced dramatically. “Long live the part where I get a whole week of being idle.”

He laughed and slid into the seat across from you like it was the most natural thing in the world. “So what is it you write, exactly?”

You took a sip of your drink, leaned forward, and smiled. “You sure you want to know?”

“Yeah, why not?” he replied, smiling. “Is it fiction?”

“Fanfiction,” you said bluntly, watching him for the usual wince or awkward pause.

But he didn’t flinch. He just blinked. “For what? Books? Movies? Musicians? Anyone I’d know?”

You squinted at him. “I mean… probably? They’re a K-pop group.”

“Oh.” He took a slow sip of his drink. “Which group?”

“RIIZE.”

He choked on his coffee and started coughing hard. Alarmed, you sat up straighter. “You okay?”

“Yeah—hot coffee,” he managed, rubbing his chest with the back of his hand. “So… uh, you like them?”

You shrugged. “Not really. I don’t actually follow them.”

His brows furrowed. “But… you write about them?”

“Yup. I treat them like original characters, pretty much. It’s all AU stuff. College tropes, office romances, vampire boyfriends. That kind of thing.”

You figured he was just curious, like most people. So you kept talking.

Jasmin’s fanfic blog was dedicated to RIIZE—a group that, apparently, was popular. And it’s not like you lived under a rock. You knew K-pop existed. You’d heard of BTS and BLACKPINK. You even followed Jennie on Instagram. But you didn’t care much for the industry, and what little you did know came from the occasional trending tweet or article.

“I’m confused,” Sungchan said, laughing softly.

You gave him a knowing look. “Yeah, I get that a lot. I’m actually just the ghostwriter. It’s not even my blog—I get paid to write that stuff.”

He blinked. “Wait, someone pays you to write fanfiction?”

You smirked. “It’s a very popular blog, Chan. I’m talking ten thousand followers. Twenty-thousand notes per post. That kind of popular.”

He leaned back, trying to wrap his head around it. “But… why would someone pay for something people can just read for free?”

You laughed. “That’s the thing. She’s not paying me for the content. She’s paying me to keep up the content. The blog pulls traffic, and that traffic drives her Etsy store. She sells handcrafted RIIZE merch, advertises through the blog, and makes real money off it.”

Sungchan’s expression shifted from confusion to dawning comprehension. “So the blog is basically her marketing campaign.”

“Exactly.” You showed your phone to him, toggled your screen, and scrolled through posts under the ‘riizefanfic’ tag. “See this? Your average Tumblr fanfic gets around 1,000 to 3,000 notes. That’s considered decent.”

He nodded, eyes scanning the dashboard as you toggled to your employer’s blog next. You missed the way he froze when your arm brushed against his.

You pulled up a random post. “And this one? Over 30,000. That’s a lot of people.”

He nodded again, just as you scooted away. He cleared his throat before saying, “Still doesn’t explain why she’d pay that much for a ghostwriter. She’s not making money off the posts directly, right?”

“No. That’d violate fair use. But indirectly? Absolutely. People love her work—well, my work, technically—and that love turns into support for her shop. And if you know anything about custom merch,” you added, sipping your drink, “you’d know it’s not cheap to make… or buy.”

He gave a small laugh and leaned back. “Wow. That’s actually kind of brilliant.”

You smiled. “It is, isn’t it?”

He was quiet for a moment, just watching you look at your screen. Then he asked, “Why don’t you just make your own blog? Post your own stuff?”

You looked up from your drink, already knowing this question would come. “I could,” you admitted. “But there’s no point.”

“No point?”

You leaned back in your seat. “First of all, I’m not a fan of RIIZE. Or any K-pop group, really. So I’m not writing these stories out of love for the group—I’m writing them because it’s a job. That’s reason one.”

He nodded slowly. “And two?”

“Two is the hype,” you said simply. “Jasmin already has a huge following. Ten, maybe fifteen thousand regulars, not counting the casuals who reblog. When she posts something, it blows up by default. I could post the exact same fic on my own blog and it’d probably get a hundred notes. Maybe two hundred if I begged.”

Sungchan let out a small laugh, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Lastly, and most importantly,” you said, raising a brow, “is that Jasmin pays me. If I made my own blog, that same fic would be up there for free. And no offense to RIIZE or their fans, but I don’t care about them enough to write 20,000 words for free.”

That was the most honest answer you had. You weren’t trying to be rude. You just didn’t see the point in devoting hours of effort into something you didn’t believe in—unless there was compensation.

Sungchan didn’t respond immediately. He just stared down at the rim of his coffee cup, brows knit.

“…That’s oddly upsetting,” he said after a moment, scoffing in a self-deprecating way.

You tilted your head, surprised. “What is?”

He hesitated. “Hearing you say you don’t care enough about RIIZE.”

“Oh, I don’t care about them at all!”

Sungchan’s chuckle came out strained. “Okay. I heard you the first time. It’s just… I don’t know. The idea of someone writing about people—real people—like that, but not actually caring about them is kinda sad.”

You blinked at him, unsure how to respond. “It’s not personal,” you said after a pause. “It’s just work.”

“I know.” He looked away, but you could still see the slight pout forming on his lips.

You frowned. “Stop it. I feel like I’m hurting your feelings.”

He smirked faintly. “Why would you be hurting my feelings?”

“Exactly! It’s not like I’m saying I don’t care about you.” You chuckled incredulously. “But you’re scoffing and pouting, like, are you RIIZE or somethi—”

You paused, seemingly coming to a realization. You stared at him, mouth gaping open. Sungchan straightened in his seat, bracing himself for the words that were about to come out of your mouth.

“Oh my god,” you blurted, hand covering your mouth in shock. “Chan, are you...”

Sungchan could feel his heart picking up pace, beating harder and harder the longer you stared at him, holding back on blurting out exactly what—or who—he was.

“...Are you a BRIIZE?”

Sungchan choked, turning away to cough into his hand. You reached over and patted his back, frowning. “You okay?”

He cleared his throat and recovered. “BRIIZE?!” he croaked, blinking at you with wide eyes.

You nodded, completely serious. “Yeah. That’s what RIIZE calls their fans.”

Sungchan laughed in disbelief and then cleared his throat again before leaning on his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “So you know about BRIIZE but don’t know the members?”

You shrugged. “I don’t see how those correlate. Jasmin calls herself a BRIIZE all the time, of course, I’ve heard it.”

Sungchan chuckled, shaking his head as he scrambled to change the subject.

“So you don’t…” he gestured vaguely, “…look them up? Just to see what they look like before writing about them?”

You laughed, shaking your head. “I did once. But I don’t like doing that.”

“Why not?”

You sat back in your chair, fingers curled around your mug. “Because I write mostly on inspiration. And I like to think I’m writing for my own renown, not someone else’s fantasy. It’s important to me that I don’t picture someone else’s face in the image of a character I created. Especially not a guy—or guys—I know nothing about.”

Sungchan tilted his head. “Wouldn’t it help, though? Having a visual?”

“I have all the visuals I need right here,” you said, tapping the side of your head with a small grin. “Trust me. My brain’s got better casting than Netflix.”

He laughed. Genuinely. Then leaned forward a bit. “So if I told you I knew RIIZE… like, personally…”

You narrowed your eyes. “I’d say good for you, and tell you I know Beyonce. She’s on my speed dial.”

He grinned, but didn’t push. “Fair enough.”

Sungchan: guys wake up. she writes fanfic. about US. she doesn’t even like us 😭 Shotaro: wait WHAT who is she send her @ Anton: is this the café girl again? Sungchan: yes. her. she thinks i’m just some guy named Chan Song Also she thinks i’m a BRIIZE 💀 Wonbin: Chan song? You’re joking that’s the fake name you used? Eunseok: Chan Song. Sungchan LMAO Anton: dude he used ur last name lol Eunseok: YOOO?? WTF! Shotaro: wait so she writes about US but doesn’t KNOW it’s YOU while TALKING to YOU this is like a fanfic inside a fanfic Sungchan: guys this is not funny i think i like her Anton: don’t simp. Investigate. Sohee: does she write good stuff tho 👀 Sungchan: its literally so good I think I fell in love with myself reading one I'm scared Shotaro: bro Eunseok: bro 💀 Anton: she could be lying. stop seeing her Sungchan: idc she's cute Wonbin: btw when are you flying back? Shotaro: he hasn't even been gone a week clingy ass

He was just about to type another reply when a shadow fell over the table. He glanced up and nearly dropped his phone.

“Hey,” you said, smiling as you slid into the seat across from him. “You’re uncharacteristically early.”

Sungchan fumbled with his phone, locking it so fast it almost flung out of his hand. “Oh—hi. Yeah. No. I mean—yes. Early. Breakfast. I’m getting breakfast.”

You raised a brow at him, amused. “It’s noon.”

“Brunch,” he said quickly, coughing into his drink.

You sipped your drink, watching him with a soft laugh. “Cool. Me too.”

Sungchan tried not to look like he was malfunctioning. The words “i think i like her” were still visible in his recent messages, glowing up at him from his screen.

You sat there scrolling through your phone for a minute, while he watched you cautiously. Then, clearing his throat, he broke the ice.

“So, um,” he began, taking a sip of his drink before continuing, “I read one of your works last night.”

You blinked. “You did?”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “It was really good. The one where this college guy was childhood friends with the girl and had been in love with her since they were little?”

“Oh, the Jung Sungchan one,” you replied, smiling proudly.

“Right, that one.” Sungchan shifted in his seat, trying to act casual. “That version of, um, Sungchan, is super flirty. But it was a great story.”

“Thank you,” you said, pleased. “I thought you said you weren’t a fan?”

“I’m not,” he said quickly, then paused. “I just wanted to check out your work, which, by the way, your stories are… engaging. And interesting.”

You chuckled, sipping your drink. “You think my version of Sungchan is too good to be true?”

“No, no,” he insisted. “Just… maybe a little bold. His game was unreal. No one I know is that smooth.”

You snorted. “Yeah, well. That’s fiction for you.”

“Anyway, I gotta learn from him. Or, from you,” he said, pointing at you with a crooked grin. “You wrote him, after all.”

You let out a soft laugh. “I did write him, but I can’t help you. Just because I can write charm doesn’t mean I have it.”

He tilted his head. “No? You’re pretty charming to me.”

You raised an eyebrow. “Are you flirting with me, Chan Song?”

“Is it working?” he asked back, tilting his head at an angle that highlights his jawline.

“Try harder,” you replied, sipping your drink. He laughed again, and somehow, the conversation didn’t end.

You started seeing him more often after that. At first, you told yourself it was a coincidence—same café, same hours, nothing unusual. But Sungchan—or Chan, as you still knew him—always seemed to show up within ten minutes of you settling in. Sometimes earlier. Sometimes already there, waiting at a different table before casually strolling over to ask if he could join you.

You’d asked him questions he found weird sometimes. Like, “If you could live in any fictional universe, where would you go?”

But he never hesitated to indulge you each time. “Probably the one where people don’t cancel you for the smallest things.”

You had nodded solemnly. “So… a fantasy world.”

Sungchan laughed then. “Exactly.”

Other times, he asked things that caught you off guard, like, “Do you ever wish you wrote under your own name?”

You paused. “All the time. But honestly? Right now, being paid and anonymous isn’t so bad, I get to put my skills to work and practice until I find something I want to write about in my own name. I can’t just sit around and wait for my big break to magically land in my lap.”

He didn’t argue. He just looked at you like he understood.

He told you about his dream of becoming a pro footballer as a kid. You told him about dreaming of being a novelist before you accidentally became a ghost. He laughed at that, and you told him that, no, you meant ghostwriter—but honestly? Same thing.

You told him you liked waking up early, that the air before sunrise felt like it hadn’t been breathed in yet. He made a face and told you you were always in this cafe pulling all-nighters or just hanging out by yourself.

You said, “That’s what writers do. And I said I liked waking up early, not that I do wake up early every day.”

He laughed then. “You always have to have an answer to everything, don’t you? Bet you don’t ever let anyone have the last line.”

“I always get the last piece of pizza too,” you smirked. “I’m competitive like that.”

Some nights, you were both quiet, lost in your own screens. Others, you filled hours with nonsense—debating which ramen flavor was superior, naming the pigeon that always hovered outside the window, wondering whether ghosts ever got bored of haunting the same house.

Sometimes you get into deep conversations about existence and life. Other times, you debated over the silliest things. But overall, it felt nice to hang out with him. You weren’t sure when it started, but you began looking up every time the cafe doors opened. And you started smiling at the sight of his face.

You didn’t think much of it the first night he wasn’t there. Maybe he had something to do. People have real lives to live. Surely, you didn’t expect him to spend every single night in the cafe like he didn’t have a life outside of it.

But then came night two. Maybe work was keeping him busy. And then three. Maybe he finally got sick of overpriced drinks and jazz playlists.

And by the fourth, you caught yourself glancing up every time the door opened—only to pretend you hadn’t. You stayed a little longer that night, ordered an extra drink you didn’t even want, hoping maybe he was just late.

He wasn’t. He didn’t show. The same way he didn’t for the last three nights.

You went through your past conversations in your head, trying to remember if he’d said anything. A mention of a trip, a warning, a see-you-later. But there was nothing. You thought maybe you’d scared him off. Did something that turned him off. It could be anything.

“Maybe you talked his ears off,” said Isla, your roommate. “I mean, you can talk a little too much sometimes, if I’m being honest.”

You squinted at your ceiling. “Yeah, but, really? He hated it so much that he ghosted me?”

Isla sighed from her bed on the other side of the room, exasperated. “Girl, it’s three in the morning. Please. Can we do this in the morning?”

“Right,” you said sheepishly. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

“Thank you,” she blurted, covering her face with her blanket. “I love you. But I really need to sleep right now.”

“I know.”

You tried not to overthink it. Maybe it wasn’t something you did. Maybe he got bored. Maybe he was just passing through. People drift. Especially people you never really knew in the first place.

So you went back to writing. Half-heartedly. You kept the same table, kept sipping the same drinks, kept pretending it didn’t feel a little colder without him there.

And then, nearly a week later, the barista called your name as you were packing up.

“Hey,” he said, jogging after you with something in his hands. “Sorry. Totally forgot. This was left for you.”

You turned, confused. He was holding a small box, taped shut, with your name scribbled in all caps on the lid.

“This… what?” you asked, taking it from him.

“Guy in a hoodie left it. Chan. You know, the one you always hung out with,” the barista said, looking apologetic. “Like, days ago. Said it was for you. My bad. It got shoved behind the register.”

You stared at the box. Your chest suddenly felt too tight for how small it was. Funny how something that small could make your chest feel so full. You sat back down and smiled at the barista. “Thanks.”

The café had cleared out by now. The playlist had looped back to something familiar. You peeled the tape off slowly, your mind racing with thoughts and feelings you couldn’t quite make out, but mostly relief.

Inside, there was a neatly folded note and a small keychain—the kind you’d find in a gift shop. It was shaped like a pen. Silver, a little cheesy, but weirdly thoughtful.

You unfolded the note.

Sorry, I didn’t get to say goodbye. Something urgent came up at work. I’ll be back soon. –Chan (P.S. That’s my number on the back of the tag. In case you miss me a little. I’ll wait for you to reach out.)

You stared at the handwriting for a long time. Then flipped the keychain over. And there it was. An international phone number, and three words: Your Chan Song.

You let out a soft laugh. It didn’t even feel as simple as relief. More like... oxygen, after holding your breath for too long without realizing it. You tucked the box into your bag and stared at your phone for a long moment.

You started texting him that same night. Just a short message—casual and nonchalant, like you weren’t sitting cross-legged on your bed, anxiously watching your phone the moment you hit send.

He replied within ten minutes. And just like that, a new part of your daily routine began. It wasn’t constant. You weren’t glued to your phones. But the messages came often enough that you started to expect them.

A photo of some pastry with the caption: “your favorite lol.”A sleepy update at 2 a.m.: “can’t sleep. what u up to?”

Some mornings, he’d text first, asking if you’d eaten. Other times, he’d disappear for hours with nothing but a quick “brb. work thing.” Still, you found yourself scrolling back through old messages more often than you’d like to admit, re-reading lines that made you laugh or feel some sort of giddy feeling in your stomach.

By the fifth day, he hadn’t texted yet.

You found yourself glancing at your phone more than usual. You even opened your chat, typed something, deleted it, then placed your phone face down on the table—like that would stop you from thinking about it.

He messaged late that night.

Sungchan: Did you miss me? I hope you did. Long day. Tell me something good?

You smiled and almost started jumping up and down on your bed. Only to slap yourself on the face and tell yourself to calm the heck down. “He’s just a guy,” you chastised yourself.

You: The café pigeon is back. Sungchan: I miss the pigeon. And the girl who talks to him like he understands English. You: He does understand English. He just pretends he doesn’t. Sungchan: Smart bird.

That was the last message for the night. You didn’t hear from him the next day. Not that you were counting. But part of you kind of was.

Some nights, while you worked on a new story, you couldn’t focus because you were waiting for his message. Other nights, he’d fall asleep mid-conversation and text you a sheepish “oops” the next day. And even though you still didn’t know what he did for work or why he kept disappearing without warning, you didn’t pry. You just kept texting him anyway.

Because for now, that little corner of connection—between the deadlines and the doubts—was enough.

And besides, you were starting to miss him more than just a little.

“Chocolate chip or matcha?” you asked no one in particular, peering through the glass display with your hands stuffed into your jacket pockets.

“Matcha,” said a very familiar voice beside you.

You froze. Then turned. And there he was—standing just close enough, eyes already crinkling with a smile.

Your heart picked up speed almost embarrassingly fast. Something about hearing his voice again felt like plunging into a cool pool on a hot summer day. Jarring. Refreshing. Kind of impossible to recover from.

“Chocolate chip’s safe,” he continued, nonchalantly like this wasn’t the first time you were seeing each other again after two whole months, “but matcha has ambition.”

You blinked at him, then raised a brow, crossing your arms and pretending like you weren’t actively losing your mind. “Matcha tastes like grass and regret.”

He gasped—actually gasped—and put a hand to his chest, wounded. “Take that back.”

“Never,” you said, grabbing a packet of chocolate chip cookies and walking away with a smirk. Half-hoping he’d follow.

And knowing he would.

You didn’t have to look behind you to know he was still there. He was matching his steps with yours as you made your way to the counter, pretending like this was any other night and not the moment you’d replayed in your head at least a dozen times since he left.

Sungchan set down his drink next to yours while you paid for the cookies. Then he nodded toward the corner table you always claimed and said, “Still your spot?”

You shrugged like your heart wasn’t doing cartwheels. “Unless you’ve suddenly grown too cool to sit there.”

He smiled. “Not a chance.”

You both slipped into your usual seats. And it was quiet between you for a moment. But not the kind that was awkward and tense, but the kind that happens when someone’s absence had been loud, and now their presence feels even louder.

“So, Chan,” you said, peeling open the cookie packet. “Vanished off the face of the earth, huh?”

Sungchan winced, but not dramatically. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

You nodded slowly, chewing thoughtfully. “I almost thought you’d ghosted me.”

“I didn’t want to,” he said quickly, and you looked up at him. “Had to leave last minute. Didn’t have a way to reach you. Though technically, you were the one who took a while to reach out.”

“Me?” you blurted, scowling, but then you remembered how the barista ‘forgot’ to give you the note Sungchan left you. You glanced over your shoulder, glaring at the oblivious barista. “Yeah, well… turns out someone forgot to give me your note.”

“It’s fine.” Sungchan chuckled, and you turned back to him. “I did think you didn’t wanna bother reaching out at all, but you did eventually, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t glad you did.”

“Flirting on your first day back?” you said, raising an eyebrow as you brought your cup to your lips. “Calm down, Chan Song.”

Sungchan leaned his head back and groaned in feigned distress. “Is it not working? I practiced hard while I was gone!”

That made you laugh. “Where were you anyway?”

“Places,” he replied casually, placing his elbows on the table. “I was swamped with work. This, um, project I was working on took a while. And it’s not done yet, but I can do it remotely in the meantime.”

“What’s the project?”

“Can’t tell you. Confidentiality clause and all.”

You narrowed your eyes at him in playful suspicion. “Is this your way of telling me you’re in the CIA?”

He laughed, and the sound reverberated beautifully in your ears. “No. Definitely not cool enough for that.”

Then he looked at you—really looked at you. The golden café lights caught in his eyes, turning them to amber, and his usual half-smile was soft and warm. For a moment, it felt like time paused around your little corner of the world. You weren’t thinking about pigeons or playlists or the months in between—you were just watching him, and thinking stupid things like: This is the face I’d give a love interest if I ever wrote a story with me as the heroine.

God, you were so down bad.

“But I did miss this,” he said gently. “You. The coffee. Jazz. The pigeon updates.”

You blinked, pulling yourself back into your body. “He got a girlfriend while you were gone,” you said, exhaling a laugh to cover the way your heart was racing.

Sungchan gasped. “No way.”

“Way. They sit on the third lamp post now. Real estate upgrade.”

He shook his head in mock devastation. “I miss one month and everything changes.”

“Two months,” you corrected, before you could stop yourself.

He smirked teasingly. “You were counting? You did miss me.”

You did, but you weren’t about to admit that, so you rolled your eyes. “I’m a writer. I keep track of time in coffee cups and cafe playlists. Hard not to notice the gaps.”

You lingered in the cafe longer that night. The conversation continued to flow, never quite running out. Something about being back in each other’s presence felt too rare to cut short. You watched the way Sungchan leaned back in his chair, the way his fingers curled around his cup, how his gaze sometimes softened when it landed on you. And maybe it was the mellow jazz or the cookie sugar in your system or the fact that you missed him so much more than you admitted—but the moment soon started to feel intimate.

The café lights had dimmed hours past midnight, and only two other customers remained, tucked into their corners, half-asleep. When even they decided it was time to call it a night, you realized you couldn’t stay forever.

Sungchan glanced at the clock, then at you. “You gonna keep holding this table hostage ‘til morning?”

“No,” you said, sipping from your empty cup. “But I like it here.”

He smiled. “Wanna come over instead? I live five minutes from here.”

Your heart stuttered a little. He said it casually, like it wasn’t a big deal. And maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just two friends, too wired to sleep, choosing to stay in each other’s company a little longer.

So you nodded. “Yeah. Why not?”

He didn’t say anything else and just stood up, slid his phone into his pocket, and waited for you to gather your things. When he offered to carry it for you, you didn’t hesitate to hand it over.

The walk was comfortable. You talked about nothing. About the weather, about the stupid pigeon, about how you used to hate lo-fi but now kind of love it. His apartment was small but clean, set up like a showroom for a studio condo. It was well-kept and didn’t really look lived in. But it kind of made sense. He’d been gone for a while after all.

He tossed his keys onto the counter and flicked on a soft lamp near the couch. Warm light filled the room.

“Tea?” he asked.

“Sure,” you said, not because you wanted tea, but because you weren’t ready to sit down yet. Not ready for whatever this was becoming.

You watched him move through the kitchen, sleeves rolled to his elbows, looking so relaxed and handsome, and that was when it hit you.

You liked him.

God, you really liked him; your heart wouldn’t shut up about it.

He sat beside you on the couch, knees brushing, the cushion dipping with his weight. It was the first time you really noticed how small you looked next to him. You’d always known he was tall—but now, seated this close, it hit you that he was also broad. Solid, and larger than you were.

Somehow, that realization made the nerves all over your skin tingle.

You didn’t drink your tea. Neither did he. The room was quiet, save for the faint hum of the fridge or the occasional sound of the city outside. You sat side by side, not touching anymore, but still close enough that your body remembered the warmth from just seconds ago.

Neither of you spoke, but you could feel him glancing your way now and then. All while you kept your eyes on the mug in your hands like it was the most fascinating object in the world.

Eventually, you broke the silence, just to say something. Anything. Just to shake off the static.

“You could’ve texted,” you said softly. “That you were coming back today.”

Sungchan didn’t answer right away. You turned your head to look at him and caught him already looking at you. Then, quietly—like he didn’t even mean to say it out loud—he replied, “I was nervous.”

You blinked. “Why?”

“Because I knew if I saw you again, I’d want to do this.”

You didn’t have time to ask what “this” meant because he was already leaning in and kissing you.

It was a tentative one, testing your reaction. And the second your mouth moved against his, he sighed against your lips and kissed you deeper. Your fingers curled into his shirt, tugging him closer. His hand came up to cup your cheek, thumb brushing your jaw, holding you steady.

You set your mug down without looking. His was abandoned somewhere on the floor. Your knees brushed again, then his hand slid to your waist, pulling you onto his lap.

“You’re warm,” he whispered, wrapping strong arms around your waist, pulling you closer against his own body. “Warmer than you look.”

“Did you think I’d be cold?” you smarted.

That made him grin. I didn’t say that. I said warmer, meaning I already thought you were warm, but you turned out to be warmer than I expected.”

You let out an exasperated sigh. “Okay, let’s not argue about semantics right now. We have far more pressing matters to—OH!”

Sungchan flipped you onto the couch with one swift movement, immediately hovering over you and kissing you like it wasn’t a decision, but a pull—like gravity.

You didn’t stop him. You didn’t want to.

His hands slid under your thighs as he pulled you closer, your bodies fitting together like this had always been inevitable. His mouth never left yours for too long, just long enough to murmur your name or breathe out a soft curse when your nails dug into his back.

His fingers slipped beneath your shirt, and his lips trailed down your throat. He touched you like he already knew you, like every inch of you had already been memorized in his head and he was just retracing it now, slowly and thoroughly.

Clothes disappeared in the quietest, clumsiest kind of way, in between laughter and breathless silences. He kissed your shoulder when you trembled, grinned into your skin when you sighed, and talked you through it gently, though his pace was anything but.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was real. Messy, clumsy, with a touch of awkwardness here and there, but it was amazing. And at the end of it, when you both curled up into each other, tangled limb by limb and breathing in each other’s skin, you couldn’t remember the last time you’d felt so warm.

Or so wanted.

That night with Sungchan changed everything—and nothing at all.

You still saw each other at the café, still sat at your usual spot in the corner, still argued about nonsense like whether black coffee was superior to lattes or if matcha was real and not just the new social construct these days (like Pumpkin Spice Latte once was). But more often now, you’d find yourself at his apartment instead.

His apartment became the new favorite spot. Mornings, nights, entire afternoons together on that couch, in his bed, in the shower, on the kitchen counter. There was no routine—only instinct, desire, and passion.

There were days you didn’t even bother getting dressed, moving from bed to fridge in one of his shirts, hair a mess, legs still aching from the night before. He’d pull you in again anyway, say something stupid like, “You’re distracting me from feeding you,” only to set the food aside five minutes later because, well, you were both starving—but not for lunch.

You lost track of how many times it happened. Just that it always started the same—him reaching for you like it was second nature, like your body had become his default setting. And maybe it had. Your shirt lifted before your coffee cooled. His fingers trailing your spine while you brushed your teeth. The two of you under the sheets, out of breath, half-laughing, completely undone.

But it wasn’t just that.

Sometimes you cooked together. Ramen, argued over whether ketchup belonged on eggs, more ramen. Sometimes you fell asleep on his chest mid-movie, only to wake up to him still there, scrolling his phone with one hand, the other resting lightly on your hip like he didn’t even notice he was holding you.

There was no talk about what it meant. No confessions, no “what are we doing?” panic. There was only a growing comfort that settled between your bones like muscle memory.

You told yourself it was just physical. But the way he brushed your hair behind your ear before kissing your forehead said otherwise.

And maybe he knew it too. But neither of you said a word. Because if there was anything stronger than your chemistry, it was your shared refusal to ruin a good thing by naming it.

But of course, things couldn’t just stay that way forever.

One day, you were on his couch again, legs crossed, half-listening to his playlist while you typed away on the laptop resting on your thighs.

“What are you writing?” Sungchan asked out of nowhere, walking into the living room with a bowl of what you assumed was his breakfast cereal.

You shrugged. “Not really writing yet, just brainstorming this new idea for a plot.”

He joined you on the couch, draping one arm on the backrest behind you. “You should write about us.”

You paused. “Why would I do that?”

“Why not?” he said, nudging your leg with his knee. “Come on. Writer girl meets charming cafe stranger who turned out to be an amazing lover.”

You snorted, giving him a look before turning back to your screen. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not? You don’t think I’m an amazing lover?” he said teasingly, leaning in to kiss your cheek while his hand slid into the hem of your shirt.

You rolled your eyes and swatted his hand away. “You are amazing. But you’re not my lover.”

He looked confused, so you said, “I don’t write about myself. And besides, a lover is more than someone who warms my bed. He’s…” You shrugged. “The boyfriend type. You know?”

Sungchan tilted his head, interested now. “So a lover’s a boyfriend?”

“For me? Yeah. I don’t use that word lightly. If I say lover, I mean he’s mine. Officially. Not just in my bed, but in my life.”

You glanced back at him and saw a thoughtful flicker on his face, replaced quickly by a smug grin. “So…” he said slowly, “this your way of asking me to be your boyfriend?”

You flushed, surprised by the turn of the conversation. “Absolutely not.”

"Why not?" He grinned, leaning closer. “Because I will. No questions asked. Just say the word.”

You stared at him, then laughed softly. “God, you’re serious?”

“I am,” he said, and there was no lilt of teasing in his voice. “I understand why labels are important. It’s better to have some sort of agreement making things official, rather than just cruising with it.”

You were speechless for a moment, watching him look at you with the same fondness in his eyes and the small smile on his lips.

And then, shyly, you said, “Okay.”

His smile widened, and he kissed you—quick and sweet—before whispering, “About time.”

From then on, something had changed. You still hung out the same, still ended up in his bed more often than not, but there was something more certain about it now. Your toothbrush joined his in the cup. Your jackets ended up in his closet. He called you his girlfriend, casually at first, and then like it had always been the case.

And maybe the biggest surprise of all? You started writing a plot about it.

Not in full detail, not everything. But the bones of it. The gist of how it began. How you met this guy at a café and didn’t expect him to stay. How he made you laugh when you were stuck, how he kept you glowing and smiling, and how he now warms your nights with his embrace.

Sungchan left again the following week.

He didn’t want to. That much was obvious in the way he lingered in the doorway, kissing you one too many times, pulling you into one last hug before muttering “I really don’t wanna go” against your hair. But work called, and his time off had already stretched longer than planned.

This time, he didn’t disappear without warning. He told you exactly where he was going, for how long, and promised to call whenever he could. You didn’t ask too many questions. You knew what he did now—not the specifics, but enough. And you didn’t need the whole story to understand the parts that mattered.

You stayed in his apartment for a few nights after he left. It still smelled like him. Your laptop stayed open, pages half-written, but your thoughts kept circling back to him.

On the fourth day, Jasmin messaged you.

Jasmin: Hey! Do you think you can do Sungchan next? Haven’t posted any fic for him in a while, and I think you’d kill it. Something soft and light, maybe? I’m thinking comfort character vibes.”

You stared at the screen, smiling because you had only been working on one plot outline all week. You typed in a reply.

You: Absolutely! I have just the plot for this.

You picked up your laptop and opened a new document. Sat cross-legged in the middle of his bed with the scent of his laundry on your skin. And for the first time, you didn’t write about a character you made up. You wrote about him.

The charming stranger who sat beside you in a café. The man who touched you like he already knew you. The boy who made you laugh as easily as breathing.You didn’t use his name—not really. This was still a fanfic for Jung Sungchan, but every word belonged to your boyfriend, Chan.

Chan came back like he always did—without much warning but with his arms around you before you could ask what took him so long.

“I only have five days,” he said, forehead pressed against yours like he was apologizing in advance. “Work’s close by. I’m technically still on the clock.”

You didn’t ask for details. You knew by now that his version of “close by” meant another country, and “on the clock” meant being shuffled between hotel rooms and planes. But you also knew that if Sungchan had five days off, he’d use all five of them on you.

So you spent time with him. In his apartment. In his bed. In your world, like he’d never left in the first place.

“So… what’s the mystery project this time?”

He smiled at his coffee, noncommittal as ever. “Just work. Same old.”

You gave him a look. “You do know that’s the least convincing answer in the history of ever, right?”

“It’s the only one I can give you right now,” he said, and even though it was vague, he kissed your temple right after. So you let it go, because he was here.

And maybe five days wasn’t forever—but it was still five mornings waking up tangled in his arms, five nights of late conversations and whispered nothings, five chances to pretend that the clock wasn’t ticking.

The first night, he didn’t want to talk. Just kissed you the moment the door shut behind him, backing you into the nearest wall with all the urgency of someone who’d been craving this for weeks. He touched you like he was trying to memorize the feel of you all over again.

The second day, he slept. Like, did nothing and just slept for hours. You spent the afternoon working on his bed, glancing at him every now and then to make sure he was still breathing. He looked peaceful for once—none of that usual tension he carried in his shoulders. Just Chan, with his big arms wrapped around your torso, face buried on your side, and long legs curled into his chest.

You couldn’t help reaching for your phone to snap a photo of him like that—like he wasn’t an actual grown man curling up like a baby.

On the third day, you tried to cook and nearly set off the fire alarm trying to make pancakes, and he teased you about it until you flicked batter at his arm. It turned into a flour war, which turned into a makeout session by the sink, which then delayed breakfast by another two hours.

The fourth day was quiet. He sprawled out on your couch while you sat cross-legged nearby, laptop open, fingers moving across the keys.

He glanced over mid-scroll through his phone and asked, “What are you working on?”

“The usual.”

“Fanfic?” He raised a brow. “For which member is it this time?”

You turned your screen toward him slightly, curious to see if he’d have any reaction. Maybe he'd know the member, you thought. Maybe he'd laugh.

Instead, his smile dropped. His posture stiffened almost imperceptibly, and his gaze locked on the name at the top of your document.

“Sungchan?” he said, voice suddenly tight.

You blinked. “Yeah. Apparently another member of RIIZE.”

He stared at the screen. At the words Jung Sungchan in the title bar. At the bullet point list underneath: Soft-spoken. Thoughtful. Says things like “I’ll wait for you” and means it.

Then he chuckled and leaned back on the couch, casual as ever. “For a second there, I thought you were finally writing about me.”

You rolled your eyes. “I’m writing for Sungchan, not Chan Song. Both names sound oddly similar for some reason, but no. Not about you.”

“Right,” he said, grinning. “You’re very defensive.”

He was right, you were. While you did decide to write about your own story, you didn’t wanna tell him that because it was lowkey embarrassing.

You threw a pillow at him. He caught it and hugged it to his chest, smug. “Can I read it?”

“Nope.”

“Not even a line?”

“Nope.”

He pouted and rested his chin on your shoulder anyway. “I’ll read it when it’s posted, then,” he whispered.

You didn’t say anything to that. Just kept typing, trying to ignore the way your heart stuttered a little from having him so close.

On the fifth day, it rained. You didn’t leave the apartment. Barely left the bed. You lay tangled together, limbs sore and words soft, talking about everything and nothing. And when the clock struck midnight, you realized his five days were up.

The seasons blurred before you noticed how much time had passed.

Chan still came and went, and you stayed. Not in the way that you were waiting around for him—no, you had your own work, your own life. But somehow, everything always fell back into place the moment he walked through the cafe doors again. As if time outside of each other didn’t really count.

He still kept things vague. His work, whatever it was, still dragged him away. You knew the time zones changed depending on where he was texting from, but he never gave names of cities. Or clients. Or what exactly he did that involved so many trips and deadlines and a phone that never stopped buzzing.

You didn’t push. Not because you weren’t curious, but because pushing never worked with Chan. He was gentle with your questions—deflecting, redirecting, charming his way around the answers until you forgot why you asked in the first place.

And maybe, for a while, you didn’t need to know more. Because he always came back to you.

You knew his apartment better than he did. Knew where he kept the extra towels, knew how to wiggle the bathroom window when it jammed, knew the name of the neighbor downstairs and which flavor of cup ramen he always kept stocked.

You knew he slept best with one arm under the pillow and the other over you. That he couldn’t stand not working out at least once a day. He liked trying different flavors of smoothies and had a weird addiction to everything matcha.

You also knew he dodged your questions whenever they got too specific. “What’s your schedule like next month?” “Do you miss Korea?” “Will I ever meet your friends?”

He never answered directly. Just grinned or kissed you, or said something sweet to reroute your thoughts. Sometimes, the doubt crept in. Slipped into the silence between goodnights. But most of the time, you were too busy wrapped up in him to notice.

Literally, most of the time.

Like now, for example. He was stretched out across the couch, arms wrapped around your middle, head buried into your chest like a human-sized house cat. You absentmindedly ran your fingers through his hair, the TV humming quietly in the background.

“You’re too tall for this,” you mumbled, shifting under his weight.

“I’m perfectly sized,” he said, his voice muffled against your shirt.

“Mm. Sure. Perfectly sized to be called a Tiny Giant.”

You felt him stiffen slightly. Then he pulled back, blinking up at you with dramatic offense. “Tiny what?”

You grinned. “That’s what your contact name is in my phone.”

“Me? Tiny Giant?” he asked, pointing to himself like he couldn’t believe it.

You nodded. “You’re a giant man who likes to be babied. You literally curl up into me like you’re five foot.”

He scoffed, feigning offense. “So what? Just because I’m tall, I can’t ask to be cuddled by my girlfriend?”

“I did not say that,” you giggled.

“You know what? Call it what you want to.” He pouted, then snuggled back into your chest. “I am a full-grown man. There’s nothing tiny about me.”

You grinned, enjoying his reaction. “A full-grown man who steals only my green skittles and says ‘yummy’ while doing it.”

“You’re a bully,” he huffed, then pulled you close, mumbling into your shoulder, “I like it though. Don’t change it.”

Moments like that made it easy to forget the cracks.

Like how you never saw any family photos. Or how he always changed the subject when you mentioned having Korea in your bucket list of places you wanted to visit. Or how once, you walked in while he was mid-call, speaking Korean in a clipped, professional tone and he hung up the second he saw you.

You wanted to trust him. And most days, you did. But some nights, when he was gone for too long and all you had were his cryptic texts and charming excuses, you wondered who exactly you were sharing your heart with—and your body, and your very soul.

“You’re really warm tonight,” he murmured.

You were curled into him, naked under the sheets, one arm slung over his chest, your cheek pressed against the warm skin of his shoulder. He played with your hair absentmindedly, twirling it around his finger and bringing it to his nose.

“You say that every time.”

“I mean it every time.”

You smiled into his skin. “Maybe you’re just cold-blooded. Lizard man.”

He chuckled and gave your hip a lazy squeeze. “Maybe. Or maybe you’re just…always warm.”

You hummed at that, sleep tugging at your eyelids. He saw that and cupped your cheek to press a soft kiss to your forehead. “Wanna wash up before we sleep?”

“I should,” you groaned, hugging him tighter. “But I’m too tired. My legs aren’t working.”

He chuckled softly. “Can’t say I’m sorry. How about I go take a shower and wipe you down? You can stay here and wait for me.”

“But it’s cold,” you grimaced.

“Either that or be stuck feeling gross all night.”

“You say that like you’re not the one who made me gross,” you mumbled.

Sungchan laughed and kissed you again. Then he climbed out of bed, tugging on his sweatpants and stretching his arms overhead as he padded toward the bathroom.

“Don’t fall asleep,” he warned, pointing at you from the doorway, already smiling. “I’ll be right back.”

“No promises,” you yawned, grabbing the nearest pillow to hug against your chest.

The bathroom door clicked shut. Water began to run. You stared at the ceiling for a while, letting the sounds lull you into that dreamy space between sleep and thought. His phone buzzed once. Then again.

You glanced over instinctively. It was on the nightstand, vibrating against the wood with an incoming call.

“Chan?” you called out, voice still hoarse from earlier. “Chan, baby, someone’s calling,” you called out half-heartedly. No answer. He probably couldn’t hear you over the water.

The phone kept buzzing. You didn’t move to answer it—of course not. You weren’t that kind of girlfriend. You just leaned over and peeked at the screen, just to check the caller ID in case it was one of his clients or something important.

The phone stopped ringing before you could read it. You didn’t catch the name. But you saw the wallpaper.

It wasn’t the usual blank black background he always swore was “less distracting.” It was a photo—taken in a studio, professionally lit and filtered.

At first, it was the image itself that caught your eye: seven men standing against a concrete wall, each turned slightly sideways, looking over their shoulders. All dressed in metallic silver jerseys, black gloves, and baggy pants. Sharp styling. Photo-shoot quality. A group shot, you assumed.

But then your gaze landed on him. Same height. Same shoulders. Same side profile you’d kissed a thousand times.

He was looking right at the camera, a half-smile tugging at his lips. The same lips that kissed your forehead goodnight. The same lips that whispered sweet nothings while tangled up in your sheets.

And on his pants was big block letters spelling one word—RIIZE.

You sat up straighter, leaning in without meaning to. Squinting. You didn’t need to zoom in to know it was him. No makeup or hairstyle in the world could change that bone structure, that posture, that slightly tilted way he always carried his chin.

Your Chan.

The bathroom door opened then, and Chan stepped out with a damp towel in one hand, hair still wet, a bead of water trailing down his chest.

“Baby,” he said, voice warm and carefree, “you really should get in the shower. The water is so warm, you’re gonna love it.”

“Chan Song,” you mumbled, making him pause.

He hummed inquiringly. You looked up at him, confusion written all over your face. “Chan Song. Is that your name?”

He froze. Then, with a slow breath, he smiled and said, “Great name, isn’t it? Very main character.”

You squinted down at him. “Is that your real name?”

A second passed, and you could see his smile faltering. “It’s a name.”

“Chan.”

He took a step closer, lifting the towel. “Why are you asking—”

“Don’t.”

You stood, the sheet still tangled around your legs, your body still warm from where he’d touched it. You gestured vaguely at the phone, where the screen had since gone black.

“That’s you. Isn’t it?” you demanded, picking up the phone, tapping on the screen, and showing it to him as soon as it lit up. “Right there. That’s you in the picture.”

His hand dropped. So did the towel. There was a long beat of silence. Then, finally, with his chest still bare and the scent of your skin still clinging to his—he nodded.

“…Yeah.” His voice was almost a whisper. “That’s me.”

You exhaled slowly. “So your name isn’t Chan Song.”

“No,” he said, quieter now. “It’s Jung Sungchan.”

You blinked. Once. Twice. Like your brain was still trying to reconfigure what it all meant.

“How long were you planning to lie to me?” you asked, though your voice didn’t rise. If anything, it dropped lower.

“I wasn’t lying,” he said quickly. “I just… didn’t say anything. I wasn’t ready for you to know.”

“Because what?” you snapped. “What did you think would happen if I found out?”

“I don’t know…” he muttered, looking away like he was ashamed to say that.

Heat prickled at your eyelids, and a lump started forming in your throat with all the emotions flooding you. “So, what? What’s all this, then? A double life? A temporary fix? A social experiment to see what it’s like having a foreign girlfriend and living a regular, not-a-celebrity life?”

“No, baby, that’s not what this is. You have to believe me.” He looked at you then, wanting to move closer, like he wanted to fix it with just a word, but you stepped back.

“This whole time,” you whispered. “I thought I knew who you were.”

“You do know me—”

“No, I know Chan Song. The guy who’s gentle and clumsy and curls up on my chest like a six-foot toddler. I don’t know this guy.” You motioned to the phone. “I don’t know him.”

Silence fell over the room again. You waited for him to say anything, but he just kept his head down, sighing deeply every now and then. You swallowed hard and turned away, reaching for your clothes in a daze.

“Wait—baby, wait,” he said, stepping forward as you grabbed your shirt from the floor. “Don’t go. Please, let’s talk about this. Just let me explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain,” you said, voice sharp now. “You’re not who you said you were. And I—I can’t do this right now.”

“You’re not even dressed—can you just—please, just talk to me.”

You pulled on your jeans, fingers trembling. “I can’t look at you right now, Sungchan.”

That stopped him in his tracks. The first time you’d ever called him that. You pulled your top over your head and bent down for your phone. You didn’t look at him—not even once—because if you did, your resolve would crack.

He stepped forward again, helplessly hugging you from behind and burying his face in the crook of your neck. “Don’t leave like this. Please. Stay.”

“Would you?” you whispered, staring right at the door. “If it were you in this position, being lied to for almost a year by someone you thought you could trust, someone you love, would you stay?”

He didn’t say anything; he just froze. Then a few seconds later, his embrace loosened. You took the chance to pull away, reaching for the knob and pulling the door open.

And then you were gone, the door clicking shut behind you.

You couldn’t believe it. You really, genuinely couldn’t believe it. But at the same time—God—it made so much sense.

The ambiguity. The secrecy. His habit of dancing around questions with just enough charm to distract you from asking harder. The newly furnished apartment that felt like a hotel suite more than a home. The obscure description of his job. The time zone differences, the weeks—months—where he vanished and only texted in vague updates. All of it.

All of it made sense now.

You sat alone on your bed, still in the jeans you barely managed to tug on before storming out of his place. Your phone buzzed a few times on the table beside you, but you didn’t check it. You knew who it was. You knew he’d call. Probably say all the right things. Probably beg you to understand.

And the worst part? It might work. You’d been so caught up in your feelings, so drawn to his warmth, his stupid smile, the way he held you like he never wanted to let go—how could you not fall for that? He was kind. Sweet. Goofy, even. He made you feel like you were the only person in the world who ever really mattered. But he lied.

And not a small lie, either. Not the kind you could write off as a white lie, or a protective omission, or something forgivable in the name of love. No. He lied about his entire identity. About who he was. What he did. Everything that came before he walked into that café the first time and sat beside you like a perfectly normal guy.

You buried your face in your hands. Let out a laugh that sounded too bitter to be funny. Now here you were—heart broken, pride shattered, and a phone full of messages from someone who wasn’t even real.

Chan Song didn’t exist. Not for real, anyway. There was only Jung Sungchan. And you had no idea who the hell he was.

You didn’t see or talk to him for the rest of the week. And he tried—God, he tried. The messages came nonstop. First through text. Then calls. Then emails. DMs. He even left a comment under your most recent post on your locked side account.

“Please. Just talk to me.”

You deleted it without replying.

Back then, it had felt odd how you never gave him your address. But then again, why would you? You spent most nights at his place anyway. Now, it felt like the smartest thing you’d ever done. There was an odd sense of safety in being unreachable. Emotionally, that is.

You turned off your notifications and buried yourself in writing—not the story you’d been working on about him, of course. You couldn’t even look at that draft without your heart clenching. So you opened something else. Something mindless and cliché, just to stay busy. Just to not think about his face.

Jasmin: Hey! Just checking in—any updates on the Sungchan fic? No pressure, just wondering when you think you’ll be done.

You stared at the message, thumb hovering over your screen. A hundred different responses came to mind. You could tell her the truth. You could say, “Actually, I’ve been hooking up with the real Sungchan for almost a year and just found out who he is.” But you didn’t.

Because even if she did believe you, what then? You’d seen the way some fans reacted to rumors. You weren’t delusional—you knew exactly what kind of firestorm that could bring down on you. On him.

And despite everything, you weren’t trying to ruin him. So you replied with the simplest thing you could.

You: Actually, just finished it. Doing some editing rn, should be ready in a few hours.

Jasmin replied with a sticker of a little bear holding a pencil and a “fighting!!” message. You set your phone down and exhaled slowly. The ache in your chest didn’t lessen, but it dulled a little. Enough to let you breathe through it all.

The next day, at the cafe, you ran into him, which, in retrospect, you should have known would happen. The universe had it out for you, after all.

Right when you finally decided it was enough hiding and you needed to get out of your apartment after a week of holing up inside, you went to your favorite cafe and Sungchan just happened to be there. Of course, he’d be there.

Sungchan was sitting at your usual corner, hunched over a half-finished drink, his fingers absently tracing the rim of the glass like he’d been waiting for something. Or someone. When his eyes lifted and met yours, he recognized you immediately.

His face softened as he stood up. “Baby.”

You turned, already on instinct, but he was quicker. “Wait—please.”

You sighed, not turning back around yet. “Chan, I really don’t wanna—”

“I just want to talk.” His voice was gentle but desperate. “Five minutes. Please.”

You glanced over your shoulder. He looked… awful, actually. Not unkempt or anything. He was, still handsome, still put-together, but there were dark circles under his eyes, and his shoulders were sagged like you’d never seen before. That made you pause.

You crossed your arms. “Fine.”

He swallowed. “Maybe… maybe back at my place? Just so we can have some privacy?”

You scoffed, loud enough for the nearby barista to flinch. “Oh, right. So you can charm your way into my pants again and avoid the actual conversation like you always do?”

His mouth opened, then closed. He looked down, ashamed. “No. I didn’t mean—okay. Here is fine.”

You picked the furthest table in the corner, where no one else was seated. He followed you like a scolded child. You didn’t speak and neither did he. The silence stretched too long, and you were the first to break it with a pointed remark, “If you don’t start talking in the next five seconds, I’m leaving.”

He looked up, alarmed, then nodded. “Okay. Okay.”

He took a breath. “I’m sorry. I know it was messed up, but I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen. When we were getting to know each other, you told me you were a RIIZE fanfic write. And I just… I wanted to be friends, but didn’t wanna tell you I was… you know, an idol—the idol you’d been writing about.”

You scoffed. “So instead, you just… pretended to be someone else.”

“I didn’t pretend—”

“You literally gave me a fake name.”

“It wasn’t fake. It’s just…” He faltered. “It’s my name too, in a way. A version of it.”

You didn’t respond. You just stared, dumbfounded by his statement. He continued. “It’s a me who was your friend, and fell in love with you later on. I swear, I wanted to tell you. So many times. But things just kept getting deeper between us and I… I didn’t want it to change.”

“You say that,” you said flatly, “but if you could lie about something as big as your identity, what else did you lie about? Did you mean it when you said I was the only one? Did you mean it when you said I made you feel like home? When you said you were in love with me?”

“I did. I do.”

You let out a bitter laugh, one that didn’t sound like you. “Right. Of course. So now you’re lying straight to my face. Oh—wait. You’ve been doing that since the very start.”

Sungchan looked like he’d just been punched in the chest. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. You stood. He stood with you, like he still thought there was a chance you’d change your mind.

“Go home, Jung Sungchan,” you said firmly, brows furrowed, your throat tight and eyes stinging.

He staggered a half-step after you, with a pained expression, like he might fall to his knees any moment now and beg.

“And don’t say you’re home right now,” you added, voice barely above a whisper. “Because we both know you could never have one here.” And with that, you turned and walked away.

You went home and cried—again. It was starting to feel like all your tears had his name at the root. You hated that. Hated how heavy your chest felt, how empty and hollow it was.

You quit ghostwriting that same week. Not just for RIIZE, but altogether. Jasmin didn’t argue. You hadn’t given her a real reason, and she hadn’t pressed for one. She simply said it was about time she got back into writing and thanked you for your service of over a year.

You thought that would be it. That you’d cut ties, burn the bridge, and move on. Except you didn’t.

Instead, you found yourself falling down a YouTube rabbit hole—starting with a random RIIZE music video that popped up on your homepage. You clicked on it out of morbid curiosity, expecting it to be bad, just some overrated visuals and fan-hyped mediocrity.

But it wasn’t. Not even close.

Sungchan was radiant and confident. Moving with precision, singing with excellence, and rapping with a good flow. The same body you knew so well suddenly transformed under the lights. You kept watching these videos, exploring the contents, and surprisingly enjoying them.

Your roommate noticed by the third day. “Didn’t peg you for a K-pop fan,” she said from the kitchen as you replayed one of their dance practice videos for the third time.

“I’m not,” you called back, eyes still on the screen. “Just watching to see how awful they are.”

But they weren’t awful. The more you watched, the worse it got. You learned their names. Their dynamics. Their strengths. Sohee’s bubbly charm. Anton’s oddly relatable humor. Shotaro’s work ethic. Wonbin’s magnetism. Eunseok’s visuals. Seunghan’s charisma. And of course, Sungchan.

You learned to separate the boy you loved from the idol on stage, but the overlap hurt because now you were seeing pieces of him he’d never shown you. Not because he didn’t want to—but because he couldn’t. Not as Chan Song.

You started seeing the boys differently too. The ones you used to write about like they were plot devices. Archetypes. Playthings for fandoms to project fantasies onto. You hadn’t questioned it before. Never thought twice about why it was okay to give them made-up pasts, invented traumas, perfect romance arcs. Everyone did it. It was normal.

But now? Now you knew their voices. Their faces. Their idol personas—the little ticks and quirks you could never have invented. They weren’t movie characters or book protagonists crafted for the sole purpose of being consumed. They were people. People with careers, pressure, families, real-life stakes. You’d never felt weird writing about fictional characters before. Superheroes, fantasy leads, actors from dramas—you could fictionalize them because the boundary was clear. Fiction was fiction.

And it made you cringe because Sungchan had seen some of your works. Had read them. Had probably imagined what it was like to be fictionalized and flattened, turned into someone else’s daydream.

You remembered the time he’d jokingly said, “You should write about us. Or me.”

You had. Except you hadn’t known who he really was then. And now that you did, it wasn’t funny anymore.

Did he lie when he said they were good? You wondered. He’d read some of your stories and gave you his thoughts. He even pointed out how some of the dynamics didn’t quite fit. You remembered him laughing at one of the lines and saying, “Anton would never say that,” tapping the screen with his knuckle. “He’s too shy for that.”

You’d argued, of course. “Well, maybe fanfic Anton is a little more confident.”

“Yeah, maybe. But that’s not him,” he’d said with a shrug and a smile.

“And you know this because?”

He’d shrugged then, brushing it off casually. “Gut feeling. Have you seen his face? He looks like a dork.”

The memory made you laugh a little under your breath. Laughing about it made you miss him. Missing him made your chest hurt.

You tried to push through it, maybe clean up the dishes or open a new tab on your laptop. But it hit you all at once, like a freight train—this grief you hadn’t fully registered yet. You curled up and a sob escaped before you could catch it. Another followed, louder, more broken.

And then you were crying loudly, uncontrollably, the kind of crying that made your head hurt and your breath hitch.

Your roommate came running from the bedroom, barefoot and wide-eyed. “What happened? Are you okay?”

You couldn’t even answer. You just sat there on the rug with your arms wrapped around yourself like that might stop the aching. It didn’t. “I miss him,” you choked out between gasps. “I miss him so much it hurts.”

Isla crossed the room, crouched beside you, and wrapped her arms around your shoulders. You felt her hand stroking the back of your head gently, shushing you like a child caught in the middle of a nightmare.

“I’ve got you,” she murmured. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

You didn’t answer. You just cried harder, buried in the warmth of someone who didn’t need explanations.

The next day, you were alone in the apartment. Isla was out for work, and you hadn’t moved from the couch in hours, legs curled under you, your thumb hovering over the screen, staring at the contact name—My Tiny Giant. Still saved the same way you always had.

That was what he was, after all. Your Tiny Giant. All six feet and something inches of him, always curled up against you like he didn’t have a whole wingspan to spare. Snuggled into your chest for as long as you’d allow him. Loving it when you hugged him from behind like he wasn’t a whole head taller than you

You missed him. God, you missed him. Your thumb hovered over the call button, then pressed.

It rang once. Twice. Thrice. And a few times more. You were seconds from hanging up when it finally connected. There was a pause, then a groggy voice, low and confused.

“Did I wake you?” you asked.

There was shuffling on the other end. “Who—” He paused, then his voice sharpened. “Baby?”

“Hi,” you whispered.

“Baby, is that you?”

You let out a sob. “Yes.”

You heard a loud thud, something crashing to the floor, and then more movement—Sungchan cursing softly under his breath, fumbling for something.

“Sorry, baby,” he said, a little breathless now, his voice clearing. “Are you—are you still there?”

“I’m right here.”

“Oh, good. Good,” he paused, let out a soft shaky sigh. “Good.”

You didn’t know what else to say. Neither did he. The silence stretch long, filled only by the sound of his breathing from the other line. You had expected to say or hear a lot of things. But right now, in the silence, it felt like there was plenty to say and nothing at all.

“What time is it there?” he asked softly, finally breaking the quiet.

“Early. It’s 10 am.”

He hummed. “Did you eat?”

You nodded before realizing he couldn’t see you. “Yeah.”

“What did you have?”

You shrugged. “Coffee and a bagel.”

“Mm. Still eating like a writer, I see,” he quipped.

He asked about your week. What you’d been doing. If you were eating enough. If your roommate was around. If the weather was nice. You answered in soft, gentle tones, short replies, nods he couldn’t see, but you were listening. You were both trying.

Eventually, his voice began to slow, the spaces between his words stretching further apart until it faded completely.

You didn’t hang up for a while, and just listened to the sound of his breathing, steady and deep, like a heartbeat on the other end of the line.

For the first time in a while, your heart was at ease. You always found it odd when people said the best cure to any pain was what caused it in the first place. But now, you realize they were right.

Sungchan woke up to the first ring of his alarm, but didn’t move. The digital clock blared at his bedside, but he lay still—eyes open, unfocused, fixed on the blank wall across from him.

It felt like something had happened. Something important. But his brain is fogged. He didn’t know if he’d dreamed it, or if you had really called him in the middle of the night with your voice trembling on the other end.

A loud series of knocks made him glance at the door.

“Hyung,” Sohee’s muffled voice said through the door, “your alarm’s been going off for five years. Turn it off.”

Sungchan didn’t answer. Instead, he turned his head and reached for his phone on the nightstand. When he didn’t find it there, he searched for it on his bed, in the sheets, under the pillows. His fingers swiped at the screen as soon as he found it. The light made his eyes squint, but he blinked past it, thumb tapping into his call history.

There it was. My Lovely Writer. Call duration: 2 hours, 17 minutes.

He let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. It wasn’t a dream. You really had called him last night.

The door swung open, revealing an annoyed Sohee. “Hyung, are you deaf or—” Sohee cut himself off mid-sentence, staring at Sungchan who was grinning from ear-to-ear. “Are you okay?”

Sungchan didn’t look up. He just slowly, quietly turned off his alarm. Sohee blinked at the silence, then narrowed his eyes. “What got you smiling like that?”

Sungchan didn’t answer that either. He simply smiled wider, dazed and quiet, still staring at your name on his phone like it was already the best thing that had happened all day.

And then—without a word—he pulled Sohee into a hug.

“Okay, you’re being weird,” Sohee muttered, stiff as a board in his arms.

Sungchan just hummed. A low sound, somewhere between a laugh and a breath of relief. Then he got up, still wearing that strange, faraway smile, and walked out of the room with his phone in hand—already drafting a message to you.

He walked into the kitchen like he hadn’t spent the past week stomping around like a sleep-deprived ghost with a broken heart. Like he hadn’t just been curled up on the living room couch two days ago rewatching Totoro in the dark.

He was humming. Everyone turned to stare.

“…No way,” Anton said from the fridge, holding a half-empty juice carton.

“Holy shit,” Eunseok whispered dramatically. “It’s alive.”

Wonbin blinked, midway through his skincare routine. “Is he humming?”

“He’s humming,” Shotaro confirmed, poking his head out of the hallway. “And smiling. Jesus. Someone check the weather. Is hell frozen?”

Sungchan just gave them a sleepy grin and reached for a mug. “Good morning, children.”

“What the hell happened?” Shotaro asked.

Anton squinted suspiciously. “Did you win the lottery?”

“Better,” Sohee said, joining everyone in the kitchen. “I think they made up.”

Sungchan didn’t answer, but his grin gave him away.

“Oh my god,” Eunseok gasped. “He’s back. He’s so back.”

“I told you he’d cheer up eventually,” Sohee cheered, slapping Anton’s arm like this was a bet he’d won. “You owe me ten.”

“Alright, spill,” Shotaro said. “What did she say? Did she take you back? Did you cry? Did you cry?”

“I didn’t cry,” Sungchan denied.

“He definitely cried,” Wonbin mumbled.

“He sobbed,” Eunseok said. “He probably started crying the second he heard her voice.”

“I did not cry,” Sungchan said, smiling so hard now it looked like it hurt.

Shotaro slung an arm around his shoulders and shook him like a wet rag. “You did, didn’t you! Oh my god, you cried. I’m so proud of you.”

“No, I didn’t, though, I almost did,” he admitted. “But she called. And I heard her voice. That’s all.”

The teasing died down for a moment. Then, gently, Shotaro clapped him on the back. “You’ve been walking around here like your dog died for a week,” he said. “It’s good to see you alive again.”

Sungchan laughed. “Thanks.”

Wonbin pointed at him dramatically. “Just don’t screw it up this time, lover boy. I really like her.”

“You haven’t even met her,” Sungchan said.

“Yeah, but I like her better than you,” Wonbin said smugly, crossing his arms. “Her Wonbin stuff was impressive. Almost like she knew me personally.”

Everyone groaned. “She made you delusional,” Sohee muttered.

Sungchan didn’t say much after that. He just sipped his coffee, phone in hand, thumb absently brushing over your name on the screen. He straightened up when your reply came in, then he left his mug on the counter and ran back into his bedroom.

“...He’s running. Did she text back?”

“I think so.”

“Godspeed, king,” said Anton, not even looking up.

Sungchan: Back in town, baby. Wanted to see u first but didn’t know where you’d be 🙁 My door’s unlocked if you wanna come over Maybe we could meet at the cafe? Lmk babygirl Babe :( text me back i miss you Pretty girl Baby girlll Where are youuuuu my loveeee????

You didn’t bother knocking. Didn’t even tell him you were coming. You’d rushed out of your apartment and took the first cab to his place. But you stood outside his unit for a few minutes, trying to steady your breath and make sure you didn’t appear like you were too eager to see him again.

Then, after wiping your sweat and checking your reflection in the elevator doors, you stepped into his apartment.

It was clean, dimly lit, and quiet. It still smelled like him—matcha, laundry, a hint of sandalwood body wash—and the scent wrapped around you like a familiar hug. You didn’t realize how much you’d missed it until your lungs started to ache.

You’d barely taken a step inside when hurried footsteps thundered down the hall, and Sungchan popped out from the door with his eyes wide.

“Baby!” he exclaimed, darting from the bedroom door to the foyer where you were kicking off your shoes.

He stopped himself from pulling you into a hug, clenching his fists at his side like he wanted to wait for you to make the first move. He watched you move quietly, like he was scared one wrong breath would scare you off again.

You kept your eyes on him, not quite smiling, but not looking upset either.

“Hi,” he greeted sheepishly.

You raised an eyebrow. “That’s it?”

His eyes widened slightly, confused but then he played it cool with a nervous chuckle. “No, but I… well, I didn’t wanna… overstep.”

You scoffed then crossed the room slowly. He stayed still until you were close enough to touch, but he didn’t reach out just yet. He was about to, but he stopped himself again.

“I said I’d give you as much space as you need,” he said, hiding his hands behind his back.

You chuckled, dropping your keys on the counter and your bag on the floor. With your hands now free, you open your arms wide for him. “Come here, you.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. The second your arms opened, he was already in them—hugging you like he’d spent years without the feel of your body against his instead of just a few weeks. His arms wrapped tight around your waist, pulling you flush against him, burying his face in the crook of your neck with a ragged breath.

“I missed you,” he murmured, almost like it hurt to say. “I missed you so much.”

Your fingers curled into the back of his shirt, gripping him like you couldn’t believe he was real again. That warmth, that scent, that heartbeat thudding against your chest—it was everything you had almost lost to pride and prejudice.

Your hands came up to cup his face, and he looked at you like he was melting under your touch.

You didn’t say anything. You didn’t need to. You just kissed him hard and fast and desperate and feverish—like you hadn’t done so in years instead of weeks. Like nothing else mattered except the way your lips found his, over and over again. He kissed you back like a man starving, stumbling forward as you tugged at his collar, your bodies crashing together in the middle of the room.

Neither of you broke the kiss as he backed you into the hallway, bumping into walls, fumbling for direction, your hands already slipping beneath his shirt. He laughed into your mouth when you accidentally hit your hip against the hallway cabinet, but you didn’t stop. Not even for a second.

You reached the bedroom with matching gasps, half-laughs, your kisses turning sloppier with every step. Your clothes were peeled away with every step—his hoodie first, then your top, followed by your skirt, then him shimmying out of his jeans. His hands found your waist, your back, your thighs—every familiar curve he’d been aching to hold again.

By the time you tumbled onto the bed, only your underwear remained. You bounced on the mattress, but neither of you noticed. You were too busy chasing each other’s mouths, tracing skin, fingers threading through his hair as he kissed down your jaw, your neck, your collarbone.

“I love you,” he murmured against your skin, and you felt your heart do a cartwheel in your chest.

His lips crashed into yours again, harder this time. His hands gripped your thighs, spreading them open around his hips, grinding against you with a soft groan that made your skin prickle.

“Fuck,” he murmured against your lips. “Missed you so bad.”

Your nails dug into his back as you bucked your hips against him, the friction sending heat all over your spine and low in your belly. You tugged at the waistband of his boxers, fingers slipping under, pulling until he helped you push them down. He leaned up just long enough to kick them off, then reached for your underwear, eyes locked on yours for permission.

You nodded. Breathless. Barely able to think.

He dragged them down slowly, eyes never leaving your face as he dropped them to the floor. His hands returned to your thighs, trailing upward, fingers brushing where you needed him most, making you gasp.

“Can I—”

“Yes!” you whispered back before he could even finish his question. “Yes, please, Chan. Touch me.”

He chuckled lowly and leaned down again, kissing the hollow between your breasts before taking your nipple into his mouth. You moaned, legs tightening around his waist, desperate for more, desperate to feel him again in the way that made your world tilt.

His hand moved expertly between your legs, circling, pressing, flicking. Fingers going in and making you gasp. He continued to ravage your boobs, moving from one to the other, all while playing with your sex like he’d memorized exactly how you liked it—he had.

“Chan,” you cried, voice broken and needy. Your hand slipped down his toned chest, reaching to wrap your fingers around his manhood. “Inside, please.”

“Yeah?” he rasped, mouth wet against your skin. “Need me that bad, baby?”

You grabbed his face, pulling him into another dizzying kiss. “Sungchan,” you said, breath broken. “Now.”

He reached between you, stroking himself once, twice, before lining up. He slid into you in one long, slow thrust—so deep, so perfect it knocked the air out of your lungs. You clung to him, gasping into his shoulder, nails digging into his skin.

“Fuck,” he groaned, head dropping to your neck. “Perfect. So perfect.”

He moved slowly at first, like he wanted to savor it—every inch, every gasp, every whimper you let out against his ear. Your bodies moved in sync, your hips rising to meet his, and every thrust had your thoughts scattering, your mind teetering to the edge of insanity.

“Sungchan—” you moaned, breath catching.

“Yes, yes,” he breathed, eyes locked into yours, his thrusts never faltering. “Say it, baby. Say my name.”

“Sungchan—AH!”

He picked up the pace, rolling his hips deeper, faster, making you cry out. Your legs wrapped tighter around his waist, dragging him closer, keeping him there. His name echoed from your lips again and again like a mantra. He kissed you through it—sloppy, hot kisses broken by moans and the sound of skin slamming against skin.

You felt him everywhere. In your chest. In your stomach. Between your legs. In the tears burning at the corners of your eyes because you’d missed this—missed him—so much it hurt.

It was messy. Beautiful. Too much and not enough. He touched you like he was trying to rewrite every memory of the last week—like if he held you hard enough, long enough, the world might go back to how it was. And you let him. You let him love you the only way he knew how right now.

Your body tightened beneath him, euphoria catching up fast, and he felt it. He whispered encouragements against your neck, his thrusts turning desperate.

“Come for me, baby,” he begged.

You cried out, body arching, eyes squeezing shut as release crashed through you. He followed with a broken moan, thrusting once, twice, then spilling into you with a deep groan of your name.

The aftershocks made your body tremble. He didn’t pull away right away—just collapsed against you, face buried in your neck, both of you breathing hard.

You didn’t speak yet. Not because you didn’t have anything to say. But because neither of you wanted to break the fragile, golden silence that had finally returned. The moment between the storm and the cleanup.

The one where you both got to breathe.

The room was warm. Your skin was still buzzing, lungs still trying to remember how to breathe at a normal pace. Sungchan hadn’t moved much—just rolled onto his side so he wouldn’t crush you, one arm still draped over your stomach, his face pressed into your shoulder like he had no plans of going anywhere.

You stared up at the ceiling, blinking slowly, your chest rising and falling with every breath. Everything felt heavy. Not physically, but emotionally. And not sadly, just, generally heavy. Like having a question you wanted answered so so desperately.

He let out a breath, soft and shaky, then murmured, “We can talk about it… If you want.”

“Yeah,” you said quietly. “We should.”

You turned on your side so you were face to face with him. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth sooner? Were you ever going to? Did you ever plan for this to become serious?”

He chuckled heartily, kissing your knuckles. “How about one question at a time?”

You didn’t respond, instead, you just furrowed your brows at him. He sighed. “Okay. Fine. Everything at once.”

You tutted. “Stop weaseling your way out of this.”

“I’m not. I really wanted to tell you the truth sooner,” he said finally, eyes flickering to the ceiling like it held answers. “So many times. Especially when we started getting serious. I just… I couldn’t figure out how. Every time I thought about telling you, I got scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“That it would change everything,” he said, sighing. “That you’d stop seeing me and just start seeing… him. Jung Sungchan. RIIZE. The idol. The fantasy. Not the guy who loved curling up in your lap and eating green Skittles out of your hand.”

You stared at him, lips parting slightly.

“I was stupid,” he added, before you could say anything. “I know that now.”

You were quiet for a moment, taking in the sincerity on his face and his voice. Then you said, “I didn’t fall in love with Sungchan from RIIZE.”

He looked at you, confused but expectant. You smiled, continuing, “You know exactly who I fell for. Chan Song, some tall, handsome, adorable dork.”

He chuckled, but didn’t say anything.

“And I’m still in love with him, with you,” you confessed, and it felt like the easiest thing you’d ever said. Sungchan’s mouth parted, surprise painting his expression.

You reached out to cup his cheek. “I just wanted to know if, even if you lied about who you were, was everything else real?”

He held your hand against his cheek. “It was. It still is.”

“I need to hear that you knew it was wrong. That you’re sorry.”

“I am. I’m so sorry,” he said instantly. “I’m so fucking sorry. Not just for lying, but for not trusting you enough to tell you the truth.”

His grip of your hand tightened, and he intertwined your fingers carefully, as if afraid you might pull away.

“I love you,” he said. “I don’t know if I deserve you, but I love you. I don’t want to lie ever again. So if you want to ask me anything—anything at all—I’ll tell you everything. Honestly.”

“Okay,” you said softly.

Sungchan leaned in to kiss you, hand cupping the back of your head, eyes closed and savoring it like it was the first time. When he pulled away, he had a contented smile on his lips. You smiled back and planted a soft kiss on the tip of his nose.

“I still don’t know everything about you,” you whispered.

“That’s okay. You know the important parts.” He leaned in, brushing his nose against yours. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know later.”

You gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “I’m still mad,” you said, lips twitching.

“Totally fair.”

“And you’re still on thin ice.”

“Understood,” he nodded solemnly.

You tilted your head toward him and finally smiled. “But I love you too, Jung Sungchan.”

He let out a relieved exhale. “Oh, damn. Can you say it again? My name?”

“Jung Sungchan?”

He closed his eyes, humming, and it seemed to relax something in him. “Shit. I think I might bust a nut.”

You chuckled and then hit his chest playfully. “Stop overreacting!”

Sungchan just grinned, pulled you back into his arms, and locked you in a tight embrace. “I love you so much, please don't go bald.”

That made you laugh, and he did too. You spent the night like that, laughing, giggling, and talking like no time had passed at all. Like nothing outside of that small bedroom ever mattered.

That was just wishful thinking. You knew there would be a whole lot of things you'd need to face, a whole lot of adjustments now that you knew who he was. But you'll worry about those later. For now, you'll focus on this moment right here.

[fin]

#sungchan x reader #sungchan smut #riize x you #moonriizing fics #riize smut #riize fanfic #sungchan imagines #sungchan fluff #sungchan x you #riize x reader #riize imagines #sungchan riize #jung sungchan #riize #calcali #sungchan x y/n

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housemdork · 4 months ago

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6x11: when a reductive gay joke plotline is still queer-coded (or more metatextual queerness in house md)

in its later seasons, house md keeps doing this really funny thing where they play into house and wilson with increasingly low-hanging fruit gay jokes (dw i still laugh lol). but they manage this without sacrificing the 6 seasons' worth of cultivated subtext that permits genuine queer coding above queerbait/2000s gay jokes/etc. 6x11 is one of the best examples of this so far.

so i'm not a musical junkie, and i'm sure this has already been written about to hell and back, but 6x11 prompted me to look more into the song that wilson was singing at the end of the episode.

"one" from the musical a chorus line (also the poster house bought):

"One singular sensation Every little step she takes One thrilling combination Every move that she makes One smile and suddenly nobody else will do You know you'll never be lonely with you-know-who!"

according to genius lyrics, "Despite the lyrics which praise a singular star, the star at whom it’s directed is never shown. The “One” is absent...The star is not even named – only referred to as ‘she’ or ‘You Know Who.’"

there is a "one" in 6x11 - nora, whom both house and wilson stake their claims for dating (which is exceptionally gross & misogynistic of them). but the song/musical choice implies that she was never important enough to be The One in question.

this frame seems self-aware of the potential absence of "The One." the shot gives the impression of symmetry, but it's very uneven. house is reclined back, warping the straight line of the couch, and the boxes on wilson's side are neat and tidied, whereas those on house's side are sparse and thrown about. more importantly, there's that arm rest between house and wilson's seats. if The One (nora) was to sit anywhere, this frame seems to imply that it would be there.

thus, this frame isn't straight.

house seems to be aware of this pseudo-absence, as well. he looks at wilson with a thoughtful, revelatory look on his face:

superficially, he's probably just astounded that wilson is singing the song from a musical he hates so much, but he lets the song continue, nonetheless. here, the episode remembers the genre of the song that wilson is singing - a showtune! and what happens in showtunes/musicals? the singers are spot-lit! the audience watches them perform!

here i'm gonna posit that wilson is a (non-self aware) paul, a chorus line's man character whose revelation that he's gay is both tragic but also drives the plot. house can see this. meta-textually, we see this THROUGH house seeing this.

taken together, this scene's asymmetry, implied spotlight, and awkward arm rest divide offer wilson as the performer in this musical-adjacent exchange, with house as the in-text audience, and us, the real audience, as the outer-textual audience. what a long winded way of saying that wilson is performing comphet here!

and there's another note i want to make on the subject of performance/performativity...

this is from the golden globes official article, "'A Chorus Line' Brought Visibility to Queer Stories in the 70s and 80s'":

"The audience gets to see [Paul, the main character's] valor, which may be an inspiration to those in the audience who face similar challenges."

wilson's proposal to house is complete performance. the entire precedent for the scene is just gay joke after gay joke and wilson's anxiety that this false impression of him will negatively impact his dating life.

when he makes this performance of homosexuality, he's lauded for it. the restaurant urges house to say yes, and everybody claps even before house has given an answer.

also from the article: " The character of Paul delivers a touching monologue about how performing revealed his identity as a gay man."

6x11 inverts this dynamic. the performance in question is that of homosexuality, and wilson is not rewarded for it in the end. he loses The One, as does house, and they go home and watch a hockey game together in yet another intricate ritual (as stated above).

i also think there's something to be said about house enlisting nora's help in bringing the poster for a chorus line up to his apartment.

i'm genuinely hesitant to applaud this show - or any show, really - for subtextual intentionality like this. i have a hard time believing that there was, long ago, a time where tv didn't just capitalize off fandom's tendency to pair up its characters in our internet fanbase/fanfiction age but deliberately queer-coded things. but even silly episodes like this one remind me of that one robert sean leonard quote about house and wilson, that they are the only relationship in the show based completely on choice - the choice to always come back to each other.

all that is to say that i sincerely think these 2 are written in a subversion of gender norms and binary platonic/romantic relationships. for 2000s tv, that's just like lightning in a bottle.

oh and apparently there's a gay character named greg in the musical, too. someone who's more qualified to talk about a chorus line should hijack this post. what the hell are we doing, david shore.

#long post #is anyone else hesitant to admit deliberate queer coding in this show?#because it just feels too ahead of its time to be true #and because a fucking man wrote it #but these things just LEAP out of the story #house md #malpractice md #greg house #james wilson #hilson #like i think abt that season 10 supernatural episode 'fanfiction'#where the entire premise was just shipping culture and gay jokes #if that were somehow a house episode the joke wouldn't stop there #the underlying plot would actually confirm the essence of those jokes in an ungodly sincere way #s6 era #film bro moment #comphet wilson

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physalian · 1 year ago

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What No One Tells You About Writing Fantasy

Every author has their preferred genres. I love fantasy and sci-fi, but began with historical fiction. I hated all the research that historical fiction demands and thought, if I build my own world, no research required.

Boy, was I wrong.

So to anyone dipping their toe into fantasy/sci-fi, here’s seven things I wish I knew about the genres before I committed to writing for them.

1. You still have to research. Everything.

If you want any of your fantasy battle sequences, or your space ships, or your droids and robots, or your fictional government and fictional politics to read at all believable.

In sci-fi, you research astronomy, robotics, politics, political science, history, engineering, anthropology. In fantasy, you have to research historical battle tactics, geography, real-world mythology, folklore, and fairytales, and much of it overlaps with science fiction.

I say you *have to* assuming you want your work to be original and unique and stand out from the crowd. Fanfic writers put in the research for a 30k word smut fic, you can and will have to research for your original work.

2. Naming everything gets exhausting

I hate coming up with new names, especially when I write worlds and places divorced from Earthly customs and can’t rely on Earthly naming conventions. You have to name all your characters, all your towns, villages, cities, realms, kingdoms, planets, galaxies, star systems.

You have to name your rebel faction, your imperial government, significant battles. Your spaceships, your fantasy companies and organizations, your magic system, made-up MacGuffins, androids, computer programs. The list goes on and on and on.

And you have to do it all without it sounding and reading ridiculous and unpronounceable, or racist. Your fantasy realms have to have believable naming patterns. It. Gets. Exhausting.

3. It will never read like you’re watching a movie

Do you know how fast movies can cut between scenes? Movies can balance five plotlines at once all converging with rapid edits, without losing their audience. Sometimes single lines of dialogue, or single wordless shots are all a scene gets before it cuts. If you try to replicate that by head-hopping around, you will make a mess.

It’s perfectly fine to write like you’re watching a movie, but you can’t rely on visual tricks to get your point across when all you have is text on a page – like slow mo, lens flares, epically lit cinematic shots, or the aforementioned rapid edits.

It doesn’t have to, nor should it, look like a movie. Books existed long before film, so don’t let yourself get caught up in how ~cinematic~ it may or may not look.

4. Your space opera will be compared to Star Wars and Star Trek

And your fairy epic will be compared to Tinkerbell, your vampires to Twilight, your zombies to The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead, World War Z. Your wizards and witches and any whisper of a fantasy school for fantasy children will be compared to Harry Potter. Your high fantasy adventure will be compared to Lord of the Rings.

You can’t avoid it, but you can avoid doing it to yourself. When people ask about your book, let them say “oh, you mean like Star Wars” to which you then can say, kind of, except XYZ happens in my book. These IPs will never fade from the public consciousness, not while you exist to read this post, at least, but Harry Potter isn’t the only urban fantasy out there. Lord of the Rings isn’t the only high fantasy. Star Wars isn’t the only space opera.

Yours will be on the shelves right next to them, soon enough, and who knows? You might dethrone them.

5. Your world-building is an iceberg, and your book is the tip

I don’t pay for any of those programs that help you organize your book and mythos. I write exclusively on Apple Notes, MS Word, and Google Suite (and all are free to me). I have folders on Apple Notes with more words inside them than the books they’re written for.

If you try to cram an entire college textbook’s worth of content into your novel, you will have left zero room for actual story. The same goes for all the research you did, all the hours slaving away for just a few details and strings of dialogue.

There’s a balance, no matter how dense your story is. If you really want to include all those extra details, slap some appendices at the end. Commission some maps.

6. The gatekeeping for fantasy and sci-fi is still very real

Pen names and pseudonyms exist for a reason. A female author writing fantasy that isn’t just a backdrop for romance? You have a harder battle ahead of you than your male counterparts, at least in the US. And even then, your female protagonist will be scrutinized and torn apart.

She’ll either be too girly or not girly enough, too sexy, or not sexy enough. She’ll be called a Mary Sue, a radical feminist mouthpiece, some woke propaganda. Every action she takes will be criticized as unrealistic and if she has fans who are girls, they will be mocked, too.

If you have queer characters, characters of color, they won’t be good enough, they won’t please everyone, and someone will still call you a bigot. A lot of someones will still call you a bigot.

Do your due diligence and hire your army of sensitivity readers and listen to them, but you cannot please everyone, so might as well write to please yourself. You’re the one who will have to read it a thousand times until it’s published.

7. Your “original” idea has been done before, and that’s okay

Stories have been told since before language evolved. The sum of the parts of your novel may be original, but even then, it’s colored by the media you’ve consumed. And that’s okay!

How many Cinderella stories are there? How many high fantasies? How many books about werewolves and witches and vampires? Gods and goddesses and celestial beings? Fairies and dragons and trolls? Aliens, robots, alien robots? Romeo and Juliette? Superheroes and mutants?

Zombies may be the avenue through which you tell your story, but it’s not *just* about zombies, is it? It’s about the characters who battle them, the endurance of the human spirit, or the end of an era, the death of a nation. So don’t get discouraged, everyone before you and everyone after will have written someone on the backs of what came before and it still feels new.

#writing advice #writing resources #writing tips #writing tools #writing a book #fantasy #scifi #writeblr #what no one tells you about writing

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readingbunny44 · 3 months ago

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I'm So Hungry I Could Eat Your Ex │ Oliver and Mark Snippet

Very small snippet of Oliver doing the "I'm so hungry I could eat …" trend on Mark

CW: ooc, does not fit anywhere in canon plotline, very short

WC: 1.6k

Oliver was giggling to himself while holding an old, clearly worn-out phone that he had found two weeks ago when he was aimlessly walking around the house.

It was boring to be left alone, and it was only natural that he went snooping around drawers and cupboards in search for something to entertain himself.

That was when he found an old phone that used to belong to someone else in the house, the older model and the scratches that littered the front of the screen clear that it had a previous owner a long time ago.

Though it was his now—not that mom or Mark knew.

They said that he wasn't allowed to have his own phone until he was older and was taught properly about internet safety. Which was stupid, he'd been on the internet before on Mom's phone and it wasn't like it had fists to fight him!

Not that he would lose if it did—he'll so kick its ass.

Using his not-really-brand-new phone, he found the App Store and began downloading a bunch of stuff.

It was mostly mobile games with bright flashy colors and the simplest game mechanics known to man, but he became hooked on them quickly. That was until Oliver became slowly fed up at how each time, he finished a level, a one-minute advertisement would pop up to interrupt his fun.

He associated his phone to simply playing games when no one was around, not really thinking anything more of it.

That was until one of his mobile games advertised TikTok to him, and he was so curious on seeing what it was he downloaded it immediately.

And boy, it was the best thing ever!

Oliver discovered so many funny things and discovered funny people! He followed everyone and anyone that made him laugh, and he actually began gaining some mutuals because of how active he was in every comment section he came across.

His favorite thing right now however was the trend that was going around about people saying they were hungry and calling out the name of the person's friend that they shouldn't know—it was hilarious!

Oliver kicked his feet in the air, the phone close to his nose as he opened up the comment section.

XxsupercoolkidxX 😂😂😂ts so funny i gotta do it 2 my bro

He got a notification that someone replied to him.

bonsubear LOL do it n post it while the trend is still alive !!

XxsupercoolkidxX ok😂😂😂😂

Oliver jumped from the couch, floating in the air with his phone still in hand. He scrunched his brows as he tried to think how to get the funniest reaction from his brother, not really knowing how to find out the names of any of his friends.

Especially one that would get a big reaction out of him.

Eh, he'll figure it out!

He snooped around hard enough to find this thin, black book that was lying around the house. It was stashed inside the corner of a closet, clearly tossed and forgotten about as soon as it hit the wall.

In front of the cover was written in a white marker, Mark Grayson, with the year written next to it.

This belongs to Mark!

Opening it curiously, it was a bunch of photos with words next to it. He had an unimpressed look on his face as he flipped through the pages absentmindedly, not really interested in what the paragraphs had to say.

He came across endless pages of random people posing for a picture, and Oliver pouted as he thought this was boring.

That was until he came across a page that had a picture of a girl with curly hair, the frame around her picture adorned with hearts drawn on. The colors were pink and red, with yellow stars next to it.

Underneath the photo portrait was the name Amber Bennett, and it seemed like Mark really liked her.

“Hehe.” Oliver giggled, a mischievous grin blooming on his face. His lips resembled that of a cat’s smile with how the corner of his lips curled, rounding upward. “Perfect!”

Mark Grayson was sitting at the dinner table, having entered the house through the sliding doors. He was stuffing his face with the dinner that they had last night, heating it up in the microwave moments prior.

He was hungry and tired, practically shoving the food down his throat without swallowing with how empty his stomach was. He had pushed off not eating because of so many things happening for too long, the stomach pains while flying over here actually caused him some trouble.

Oliver flew around the corner, hiding the phone behind his back that was already recording. He had a sly grin on his face, Mark not noticing as he was too preoccupied by filling his stomach.

“Hey Oliver.” He greeted lazily, not sparing a glance as he barely chewed his food.

“Hehe, hi.” Oliver giggled, already unable to suppress his laughter that was bubbling in his throat. He hovered closer to his older brother, shifting the phone in his hand to face his direction. It was slanted, but it still captured Mark eating—completely unaware what was about to happen.

“I’m—pfft—I’m so hungry right now.” The purple-skinned boy snickered, covering his mouth with his free hand.

“There’s still leftovers from last night.” Mark pointed out, still not looking over to the direction of his younger brother that was having difficulty in holding it in. “Go heat it up for lunch, it’s still good.” He commented, stabbing his fork inside a cube of meat and popping it in his mouth.

Oliver shook his head, dismissing what his brother had told him to do. Mark was about to plunge his fork into another piece of meat, Oliver continuing to speak. “No, like, I’m so hungry right now I could eat Amber Bennett.”

CRACK!

Mark hand slipped, the fork going straight through the ceramic bowl that held his food in and impaling itself inside the wooden frame of the dining table. His head whipped to Oliver, his eyes wide and blinking like crazy, processing what his younger brother had just said so casually.

Oliver jumped, startled, letting out a nervous laugh.

“How—what I—how do you know her?!” Mark stuttered, looking at Oliver as if he had grown a new set of arms. He stood up from his seat, the chair getting knocked back and falling on the floor with a thud.

He let out a nervous, but deranged laugh not knowing exactly how to take his brother bringing up the first ever girlfriend he’d ever had. “How do you know her? How—ah—Oliver how do you know who that is?”

“Uh... you never get hungry for some Amber Bennett?” He shrugged. The camera was still filming.

“Wait—well uh, I used to I guess—okay that’s beside the point. Oliver, how do you know who that is?” Mark repeated the question again, walking towards his younger brother. He narrowed his eyes, noticing the phone peeking out of his back that had the flash on.

“Are you filming me? Whose phone is that?”

“It’s mine.”

“You’re not allowed to have your own phone yet! I didn’t get my own phone until I was fourteen!”

Oliver stuck his tongue out, blowing raspberries. “Sucks to be you! I’m mom’s favorite!” He taunted, bringing the phone in front of him to emphasis his point. “Got my own phone and everything.”

Mark scoffed, shaking his head. “I’ve been with mom for 18 years, I’m pretty sure I’m her favorite. Now, give me that phone—how’d you even get that?!”

“No!” Oliver screeched, turning on his heel in the air to run away. “I still have to post this!” He screamed before running out of the room, Mark quick on his trail.

“Post?! You are not old enough for social media!”

“I’m old enough for some Amber Bennett!”

“No, you’re not! Never say that again!”

Oliver burst out laughing, his smile reaching his ears as he landed on the wooden sleek floors just in time before Mark swung his arm in attempt to grab the younger Thraxan hybrid.

The momentum he was going at in the air didn’t transition well when he hit his feet on the ground, his socks causing him to slide across the floor. His eyes widen as he was hurled straight into a wall, crashing inside of it leaving a gaping hole of his silhouette behind.

He let go of the phone he had in his hand, the electronic flying across the floor.

The front door suddenly opened, Debbie holding a bag of takeout that she had bought before coming back home. She looked up, a gasp leaving her lips as she immediately noticed the gaping hole that was inside the wall of the hallway.

Oliver hissed, rubbing his head while he stepped out of the hole.

“Oliver!” Debbie gasped out.

Oliver jumped, looking at his mom. “Uh,” his eyes flickered at the hole in the wall that was obviously shaped like him. He raised a finger, pointing at Mark who was standing behind him, trying to muffle his laughter. “He did it! He pushed me!”

“What?! I did not push him!”

“You so did!”

“I so didn’t! Stop lying!” Mark turned to his mom, pointing at his younger brother. “He has a phone somehow! And he brought up my ex!”

Debbie looked at the two of them like they were wild, shifting her gaze from Oliver to Mark. She was confused on what was happening, not expecting to be greeted so soon with chaos. “What?”

“What’s an ex! I said Amber Bennett stupid!”

“Stop saying her name—how do you know her?!”

Oliver simply stuck his tongue out, “Amber Bennett! Amber Bennett! Amber Bennett!” He repeated like a mantra, Mark raising his voice as he grabbed a hold of Oliver’s shoulders—shaking him back and forth in an effort to interrogate him.

Debbie sighed, shaking her head as they continued to bicker loudly.

Oliver I'm so hungry I could eat the fine piece of ass called your older brother aka Mark Grayson !!

also this is just so random whyd i write this

Tag List for All Works: @calicocat-ina-tuxedo

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cellarspider · 3 months ago

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Star Wars: The Old Republic and the virtues of hiding under a rock

After all the fun I had writing a deep dive on the delightfully unhinged decision-making process that gave everyone in the Sith Empire equal opportunity to shoot lightning out of their fingertips, I decided hey, why not do another post on Sith-side stuff? Why not focus on another aspect of how The Old Republic's backstory set up for the players to run around being special little guys?

Welcome to the Chiss Ascendancy, which really would rather not be here, thank you.

Spoilers for the Imperial Agent plotline, Act 2 of the Bounty Hunter plotline, Act 1 and 3 of the Jedi Knight plotline, and for the expansions up through the Traitor Among The Chiss flashpoint storyline, set just after the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion. Also, spoilers for a 30 year old novel series, and bits of current canon. Assume all links to Wookieepedia may include unmarked spoilers for anything and everything under the sun.

Also, many, many side rambles in the picture descriptions. As soon as I realized they were a place I could hide secret bits of brain fluff, I could not be contained.

So, for a little out-of-setting backstory first: The Ascendancy is in SWTOR for one reason. If you're a Star Wars fan, you probably know his name by now. You might even be able to pronounce all of it: Grand Admiral Thrawn, known to his own people as Mitth'raw'nuruodo.

Thrawn was a breakout character from the early Star Wars tie-in Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn, which you can see reflected in the increasing amount of cover space he takes up on each re-release. Zahn may not have totally intended for Thrawn to be the character everybody latched onto so hard—I mean, it was originally the Heir to the Empire trilogy, but it's officially the Thrawn Trilogy now. Which makes it confusing, because Zahn has since written two other trilogies that actually star Thrawn as a main character rather than having him as the main antagonist.

Credit really has to go to Zahn for his work on those books, because despite his occasional insistence to the contrary, they revitalized Star Wars as a fandom. It had been seven years since Return of the Jedi came out, and there'd been nothing since then. George Lucas had been pretty burnt out after RoTJ, and the idea of a multimedia franchise wasn't all that common at the time. There'd been Marvel-produced comics, the West End Games RPG sourcebooks, a few tie-in novels, and a boatload of action figures, but all of those save for the West End Games books were produced to market the movies themselves, or directly profit off of their recent release.

All of these were of variable quality and "Star Wars-y" feel. The Marvel comics brought us such incredible things as a carnivorous green rabbit fighting alongside the main cast, and a couple wild comics by Alan Moore where Leia gets her heart turned to diamond by omnipotent Force spirits. The Splinter of the Mind's Eye novel was written while A New Hope was still in production before George Lucas had decided Luke and Leia were siblings, and you can really tell. Zahn, however, helped by the the West End Games books as a worldbuilding reference, did some stellar work integrating his writing into the Star Wars setting, while simultaneously shaping what fans would think of as a good Star Wars outing for years to come. Hell, some of his inventions made their way back into the movies: the name Coruscant is his. But Thrawn is what most people think of as his big contribution.

And it's for good reason! Thrawn is a memorable antagonist. He's smarter than the imperial officers depicted in the movies. He's able to outmaneuver the heroes on multiple occasions. He's got a unique gimmick that dovetails with the Imperial mindset—while the rest of the Empire utterly disdains foreign cultures, Thrawn takes an Orientalist interest in others' art, using it to build theories of a person or culture's psychology to use against them in war. In fact, as we will see repeated in SWTOR, his original role and his people are often used to represent a less obnoxious, more outwardly reasonable sort of imperial behavior.

He's also a cool-looking blue-skinned, red-eyed alien, later revealed to be from a culture of subterranean xenophobes with complex noble house dramas, among whom he's considered to be an outlier. Through all of this, he overshadowed other characters who may have been intended as the center of attention.

What's really funny is that the very next year, D&D would get Drizzt Do'Urden, a character who unexpectedly overshadowed the others in his series who'd been the intended center of attention, who was a cool-looking gray-skinned, red-eyed drow, from a culture of subterranean xenophobes with complex noble house dramas, among whom he's considered an outlier.

I don't know what precisely was in the zeitgeist in the early 90s, but apparently it was just a time for cool guys who grew up in caves.

It's probably similar fandom tendencies that have made both the Chiss and Drow big players in people's imaginations. Anecdotally, I'm one of those fans. You grow up liking elves, but you also became kind of a goth about it, maybe had a bit of an edgelord phase. You wanted cool elves. Possibly cool elves in space.

Apparently there was a critical mass of folks at Bioware who also were on board with cool elves in space, so they made their way into SWTOR, originally only playable for a couple of Sith-aligned classes. If you were to summarize their narrative role in a single sentence: they collectively act much as Thrawn did, providing a calmer, more collected, largely amoral presence that's peripheral to the overall setting narrative, but provides more substance to the villains.

If one were to take it less seriously, the Chiss end up as the serious side of an evil comedy duo. They are the deadpan comedic foil to the lightning-shooting madmen and their minions, the most obnoxiously british military to ever sail the stars.

So, let's dig into the Chiss a little. You kind of have to, given the "underground city" thing. Details around Chiss history and even biology have not remained fixed as canon has undergone its various convolutions, but it's generally theorized that they were the result of a genetically isolated human colony established on Csilla many thousands of years ago, which has since evolved into a near-human species, often with higher physical fitness than human average, but lower chance of spawning somebody with a Force-y destiny for whatever reason. When hyperspace travel became common, their region of space was discovered to be nigh-impenetrable due to a high concentration of wandering gravitational anomalies, which could turn your ship into an interesting collection of relativistic scrap metal.

This means that the "Unknown Regions" in the galactic west remained largely unexplored by the Galactic Republic, and local powers had to develop their own means of navigating the region. This suited the Chiss just fine, because they really, really don't like hanging out with other people.

The Chiss Ascendancy is a major power in the Unknown Regions, and it's highly isolationist, xenophobic, and authoritarian. A Secret Police force helps maintain internal adherence to the Chiss power structure. The average Chiss citizen in the Star Wars setting will never meet a non-Chiss in their entire life. That is, unless, they're stationed in the Chiss Expansionary Defense Force.

That's a hell of a name right there.

The CEDF takes an imperial pattern of national defense and turns it into doctrine: they never attack first. But if someone pokes the Ascendancy, the Defense Fleet will respond, and they'll make sure the poker can never poke again. But the Expansionary Fleet will scout out areas on their frontier, so, y'know, good luck to anybody who happens to be living there.

Within the Ascendancy, a rotating cast of Ruling Families run the government, noble houses that generally specialize in specific industries, space sectors, or resources. Most of the best positions go to those born into one of these houses, but a common Chiss can theoretically become a "merit adoptive", basically a probationary house member that can eventually become "trial-born" into the house proper, possibly achieving a status of "ranking distant". That is, unless you're found to be Force-sensitive, which during the SWTOR time period would either get you exiled, or you'd spend your life on Force-suppressing drugs.

This culture is, it should be noted again, not presented as nice or right by Timothy Zahn or SWTOR, though getting into the heads of Chiss characters can make it seem very sympathetic from their perspective.

Especially when SWTOR's backstory rolls around, and the Ascendancy had the misfortune of being "discovered" by the Sith Empire.

This led to a rather surprising pivot in Ascendancy policy: upon getting a whiff of what the Sith were about, their response was "Fantastic! Let's be friends," and swiftly negotiated a treaty to become a vassal state to the Empire, in exchange for the Empire leaving them the fuck alone.

Zahn's novels in the current Star Wars canon allude to this as a time that the movie-era Chiss are not exactly fans of, but it has an undeniable logic. The Sith are, frankly, out of their collective minds. They're also really focused on beating the snot out of the Jedi and the Republic, and they'll roll over anyone who gets in their way. Or might seem to be in their way. Or might, given the right paranoid squinting, one day maybe get in their way.

And given the Chiss and Sith tendencies toward similar, albeit factually incompatible politics around somebody being the most special thing in the universe, the two factions had enough in common to make the deal work. At least, up until the inevitable day when the Sith would presumably try and take a swat at the Chiss. This was a delaying tactic to defend the Ascendancy against an invasion from "Lesser Space", nothing more.

One might ask, if they're worried about the Sith, why not ally with the Republic? Well, there's two issues. One, the Republic doesn't have a damn clue where the Chiss are, and the Chiss want to keep it that way. The Empire has some clue where the Chiss are. That's more clues than the Chiss want anyone but themselves to have, really.

And furthermore, the Republic isn't really a better option from the Chiss perspective. It's an alien government, largely run by more of those weird Humans that are all over the Empire as well. Its history shows periods of aggressive colonization and expansion, and, the Sith would be very quick to tell anybody, the Republic sometimes decides to just completely obliterate their foes. Do the Chiss also do that? Yes, but they're Chiss, dammit, they're allowed.

So really, the ideal outcome for the Chiss would be that the Empire and the Republic beat each other senseless, with the Empire eventually imploding and the Republic never finding out where the Ascendancy is at all.

As Star Wars will eventually bear out, that's what happened. The Sith Empire falls apart at some point past SWTOR's time period. And in fact, the Republic would eventually go on to implode twice before anyone in the wider galaxy remembered that Chiss existed, when that funny little guy named Thrawn showed up. So, the Chiss might be the only ones who technically achieved their goals with this whole fiasco. How did they pull that off? And how funny is it to watch someone turn imperial chauvinism on the Sith Empire? The answers are: improbably, and extremely.

Throughout the initial war between the Empire and the Republic, the Chiss served as an unseen aid to the Sith. They provided resources and covert services, but they were utterly unknown to the Republic. They were also making moves unbeknownst to the Empire—if they were going to be breaking their usual isolationism, well, why not take up some territory that nobody else wanted while nobody else was looking? And even when they did let the Empire know they were on a planet, they didn't actually tell them where, or how many. Because really, the Empire wasn't too jazzed about somewhere like Hoth. But the Chiss? With a frozen homeworld, their cities dug deep into the glaciers and bedrock? Perfect! Just like home, but with more wampas. They built a sizeable forward base there, and kept that to themselves for decades.

In fact, if confronted about the existence of the base by an Imperial agent, the man in charge of the base will respond "Our presence here is legal, based on all existing treaties. The fact that you never noticed us is immaterial."

Lol. lmao, even.

By the time we get to Hoth in SWTOR, that base is still secret, but there's a sizeable CEDF detachment that are embedded with the Imperial forces on Hoth. And it's a decent little slice of folks, at least within the EDF. You get a whole range of people, from utter jerks like Warden Khel who tries to detain precious Jawa angel Blizz, to well-liked and respected commanders like Captains Yunaali and Yudrass, the later of whom has to patiently deal with the dumbest white man in existence.

Yudrass is also interesting for a further reason: his voice actor Tony Armatrading was from a British Afro-Caribbean background, and his accent comes through in his performance. In the context where the Empire is firmly Evil Space Wizard Britain, the accents of the Chiss stand out. They're a much more heterogenous mix. Yudrass speaks fluent Basic, but some of the others don't. One speaks Huttese, because he was originally assigned to the Outer Rim and hasn't had the chance to pick up a further language since then. A few speak limited Basic, best illustrated by the guy who gives a delightfully unenthusiastic response to finding out a non-Chiss player character has survived an attack by Imperial traitors: "You're still alive. Huh."

Hoth is also a fantastic place for turning around the chauvinism back on the Imperials, if you're playing as a Chiss. You can summarily ignore human officers in favor of engaging with their Chiss subordinates. You can work to have Yudrass promoted, both because of his competence and because you transparently don't like the other guy's face. You can privilege information gathered by the CEDF, because obviously they don't deal in bad intel. If you're playing an Imperial Agent, you can end up siding with the Chiss so comprehensively that you become a merit-adoptive of a Ruling Family. You can even reveal that you were never earnestly working for the Empire at all.

On the other side of the war, It's unclear when the Republic learns about the Chiss. Probably at some point during the quagmire over Hoth, but they're never thought of as a major player. Nobody in the Republic off Hoth really mentions them. They're treated with extreme suspicion, with a couple lines that are pretty eyebrow-raising. A Chiss defector dies while trying to trade information for asylum, and a Republic major responds to the news with "It's just as well. I'm not sure the men really wanted a Chiss hanging around here." Yikes, my dude.

Still, with their presence revealed, the Chiss seem to have slowly started taking more active roles liaising with the Imperial military, working in Imperial space, or even joining Imperial organizations. This begins as projects by the Ruling Families and other prominent Houses, but individual Chiss also started taking swings at making it in Lesser Space. Some of them may have been average Chiss trying to get ahead outside of the traditional Ascendancy power structure, and some of them might never have fit in well back home in the first place.

This is, for the record, why Chiss are a playable option for the Bounty Hunter class. It's not often remarked on though, and Bounty Hunters don't get much Chiss-specific dialog options.

And it's not like bounty hunters or Chiss are exactly welcomed in Imperial space, though. After all, the Empire has their blood purity laws and all that, if you're a non-human or non-Pureblood, you're constantly subjected to microaggressions and, frankly, macroaggressions. Possibly even megaaggressions. They'd never let Chiss near positions of power, or access to their secrets.

People who've played already know where this is going. And any curious souls who read my last post may recall a really odd evil space wizard gimp who decided he did not give one single fuck about those blood purity laws.

Darth Jadus, blessed maniac that he is, opened Imperial Intelligence to alien recruitment with all the political grace he was known for, which was none, with a side order of self-aware cultic rambling: Everyone should have equal opportunity to access the misery that is the Empire, because the Dark Side likes it when you do that.

And in so doing, he created a very interesting proposition for motivated Chiss willing to take the risk, and an even more interesting proposition for the Ascendancy's Secret Police: they could now embed sleeper agents within an enemy security force by submitting job applications.

And this is why new players can chose to be Chiss when they play as Imperial Agents. You get a lot of Chiss-specific dialog as an Agent. The game supports player choices to explicitly say you reject the Ascendancy, or that you're secretly working for it. Or, hell, you could play a Chiss who says they're in it for themselves, and then secretly confides later that they're actually an Ascendancy spy!

I am so, so tempted to describe the Agent plot in its absolutely bonkers entirety, but let's stick to the Ascendancy view… for now, at any rate. I probably have another of these essays in me somewhere.

So! Sleeper agents. If the Empire won't ever fuck off by itself, then the Ascendancy wanted to make sure that they had options to give it a push. That would allow them to go back to their usual isolationism, if they still wanted it—You hear at least one Aristocra intimate that the Ascendancy might go all British Empire on the rest of the galaxy, if they see the opportunity. Some Chiss now rather like the idea of being the tiny little backwater kingdom that suddenly owns literally everything, as great powers around it weaken.

Complicating their ambitions, things did not turn out that way. Well, not the way they expected. The Ascendancy was out there playing spy chess, while the Emperor was gearing up to eat the entire chess tournament.

Honestly, there was no way the Ascendancy could've predicted the crazy shit that was going to go down in the Empire. Like, really, nobody saw that coming, not even in the Empire. Except for Darth Jadus, if you're weird enough to let him take a swing at running the entire government. Hell, if you're an Ascendancy sleeper agent, maybe he's precisely the sort of destabilizing force you want in the Empire.

So, when it turns out you accidentally allied yourself with an eldritch monster that wants to Pac-Man all life in the galaxy, what do you do? Well, fortunately for the Ascendancy, the Jedi took care of that one for them! Unfortunately, the Jedi didn't count on the MMO having expansions. Turns out, the Emperor was not entirely dead, just a little dead. And also he had a spare Empire hiding elsewhere, just in case the first one didn't work out.

No, I'm not joking, this really happened.

Meet the Eternal Empire, the Sith Emperor's side project where he put all its points toward a cultural victory and military automation, so when he lost control of that empire as well, his usurper was able to just kind of fling remote-controlled fleets at the rest of the galaxy.

With the Republic and Empire all war'd out, they were pretty emphatically steamrolled by the Eternal Fleet. And because the Emperor had known where the Ascendancy was, they were also in the line of fire.

And so the Ascendancy said "Wow! We hate it! Kindly take some planets and fuck off."

And it worked! They had to pay some exorbitant taxes to the Eternal Empire, but not as crippling as what the other powers suffered—because invading them hadn't been as expensive and they made early moves to placate this new empire and its alien human madness, they mostly flew under the radar, and weren't targeted for reprisals.

After that, there was a whole song-and-dance that included a suspiciously protagonist-shaped person uniting the rest of the galaxy against the Eternal Empire, overthrowing two or three usurpers who'd taken over (depending on whether you count the evil mastermind droid who was just kind of there to vibe), and killing the Emperor again for almost the last time, the galaxy could finally stop with that whole nonsense and come to a realization: Everyone was flat broke.

The concessions to the Eternal Empire had crippled the major powers. The Republic was reeling once again, and the Empire had lost most of its leadership and was currently in a very funny series of events that canonically end up with an 87 year old who loves shenanigans assuming the title of Emperor. the Hutt Cartel was probably still having its own problems because it was only a few years since their Supreme Mogul decided to become a raid boss and got killed, then the next one was a violent Hutt supremacist who threw a tantrum that ultimately dropped his own palace on him, and we have no clear successor after that.

The Ascendancy responded to Imperial inquiries with something along the lines of "Oh, yeah, sorry, we'd really like to help, but the Eternal Empire, wow! They really did a number on us. We can't spare any resources right now. We totally would if we could, though."

Literally no one believes them, but because no Imperial ships have ever landed on Csilla, nobody could call them on their bullshit.

And that's about where things stand! There was a kerfuffle where one of the Ruling Families put their drama on display to foreigners, which was a big faux pas. The result is a brief series of missions that actually take place on an Ascendancy world.

But otherwise, the Chiss have maintained their isolationism up to the present day of SWTOR's story. Are they right to do so? I mean, the game remains pretty consistent with the rest of Legends on the Ascendancy: they're a bunch of very pretty jerks who only look better in comparison to their competition, who are grand champions of jerkassitude, and because we're not in a position to see the Ascendancy inflict itself on other people. If they were a major power on the level of the Sith Empire, we'd probably see a lot more of their ugly side.

And what about playing the part of being one of these people? It's not good, certainly. Turnabout may feel like fair play, but it's not great at actually improving the situation overall.

…But it can be fun to indulge in a bit, in the fantasy of an MMO. Especially when the Empire is just so, so dunkable. It's like a less dangerous version of when the English cricket team of 1932-1933 decided it was entirely sporting to give Australians skull fractures, right up until the West Indies cricket team said "Now hear us out—what if we attacked you with the ball as well?"

And beyond that, this is the game where you can get the chance to shoot lightning at people while your eight foot tall cannibal thrall-maybe-turned-husband approves on the sidelines. If anything, the Ascendancy might suffer from being less goofy than that. But taken in full context of the MMO, they're often standing in as the reserved or reluctant bunch who got collectively dragged into this whole mess and are just trying to ride out the chaos with all clothes, dignity, and eyebrows intact. When subjected to the galaxy's shenanigans, the Ascendancy would rather take the advice of the skeleton meme:

And that can be deeply funny to play around with.

#swtor #swtor meta #star wars: the old republic #chiss #chiss ascendancy #I have had Blue by Eiffel 65 stuck in my head for most of the time I've been writing this #Finished this one hour before a two week marathon of Suff To Do so it might be a while before I do another one #But who knows!

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iwriteasfotini · 9 months ago

Text

Perks

Remus POV, summer before fifth year Rating: Mature Unsure of WC

**I need to add an Author Note: our boys are still in the friends who lust after each other constantly stage in this scene, but I mean the Wolfstar is there, it isn’t even subtextual. They are simply both in denial

...

Remus sat out on the small warped wooden deck in the back garden, a thin trail of smoke curling up from the lit cigarette in his fingers. He took a deep pull, then exhaled a mouthful of smoke with a sigh.

It was summer. The August full moon was two days past. Sirius and James were out flying.

After Sirius ran from Grimmauld Place, after he rode the Knight Bus to Winchester and was settled into the Potter’s estate, after he and James floo called Remus the following day to recount the tale, Sirius told Remus he would never spend another full moon without him.

In July his friends had floo’d over for several days around the full moon. Remus wished the visit had been more fun and less lying around snuggled up with Sirius (ok, he hadn’t minded that bit at all but full moons were never what he would call a fun time). However, neither James nor Sirius showed any sign they were unhappy. In fact, they were positively jubilant. Probably because Sirius was free and they were together.

“Now we really are brothers!” James had declared. “Your family disowned you, so my family can adopt you.”

“Metaphorically,” said Sirius to the bemused expression on Remus’ face.

They had slept crammed into Remus’ room, which had been almost completely taken up by a magically enlarged bed.

Though Remus had never said a word to his father about any of his private matters, Lyall had gently told Remus, way back at Easter, they could drop the ruse of assembling the couch cushions for Sirius to sleep on.

“Don’t look so embarrassed son. You share a room with four other boys, there is no reason to put on a show for me.”

“How do you know…”

“Because no one sleeps on a pile of cushions, it would be terribly uncomfortable and someone would have asked me to transfigure them into a proper bed.”

Remus looked at the floor. “It isn’t what you think.”

“Remus, it is your business, not mine. I only want you to know Sirius sleeping in your bed is fine.”

What his father must have thought when he realized not one, but two other boys were willing to bunk up with Remus in the single, granted enlarged, bed.

A flick on the end of his cigarette had ash floating to the ground.

Now on their second visit, the arrangement felt slightly less awkward. It was still rather crowded though.

He heard whoops and yipping calls, then two airborne figures skidded to a halt in the tall grass before him.

“Alright?” he looked up at his best friends.

James was already swapping his flying goggles for his glasses and Sirius was reaching for the cigarette, which Remus relented.

Sirius sucked in, then sprinted to James and opened his mouth right in the other boy’s face.

“Blah! Stop it you twirp,” James said, waving his hand back and forth to clear the air. “You know I hate those things. Terrible for your lungs.”

“But good for the nerves,” said Sirius, taking another pull. Then he passed the nearly finished cigarette back to Remus.

“Moony, you should have come with us, it was brilliant.”

Remus shook his head. “I’m still feeling under the weather.”

Which was Sirius’ cue to sit on the deck behind him, wrapping his arms around Remus’ shoulders and chest and pulling him back slightly so they were flush. It would feel incredibly intimate if Sirius wasn’t continuing a loud and energetic conversation with James right in his ear.

James had finally hit the growth spurt he had been promising them all for years. He was only a few inches shorter than Remus, which was saying something as Remus himself had gotten even taller as of late. But James’ shoulders were broader and his face had lost all of its roundness. He also had to shave regularly, something neither Remus nor Sirius did more than once every week or two.

Sirius had gotten taller over the summer as well, and maybe slightly more broad in the shoulders, nothing compared to James though. Three days ago, Sirius had proudly ripped his shirt off to show Remus a smattering of thin dark hair growing on his chest. Which had led James to do the same, just to prove he had far more. Thankfully, neither boy asked Remus to reveal his own chest.

For all the close physical proximity he and Sirius shared, Remus still never let the other boy see him shirtless. Only the one time, when they had been tittering first years and thought themselves the height of cool for streaking through the common room, had Remus shown so much skin to anyone who wasn’t his parents or Madam Pomfrey.

In privacy, Remus had watched his own body continue to gradually change shape. His muscle definition was profound, considering he never worked out. Something James was extremely jealous of. But having seen James shirtless, the boy could now hold his own. And he secretly hoped he would stop growing taller, he was already six feet. He didn’t need any more height.

He’d let his hair grow even longer. Nothing close to Sirius to be sure, but he could pull it back into a band and secure most of the strands if he wanted. It was longer than it looked due to the curl. Thankfully his father had not cared in the slightest he had gotten his ears and nose pierced. James had double nose rings, but Remus only had one, very thin ring. It was almost invisible if you weren’t looking for it.

The hassle came at full moon when he had to remove all his clothing and body jewelry. A lesson he learned the hard way the first time he transformed with his earrings in and was lucky to not do permanent damage to his ears as they tried to incorporate the jewelry through both transformations. He didn’t need a slew of piercings to deal with on top of everything else, but he had liked the idea of the nose ring. Especially after seeing it on James. And what James did, Sirius did as well. Which was how Sirius ended up with a very thin ring in his septum. Much like Remus’, the nose ring was not flashy and if you didn’t know it was there, was easy to miss.

Tattoos though? Remus’ body was already marred with evidence of his monthly transformations. Did he really need more scars? But it was a shame, as he thought the tattoos his friends had gotten looked quite good.

Sirius had been most eager to start letting Grey tattoo on him. And he’d begun with a simple crescent moon on his inner left wrist.

“For you Moony,” he insisted. Remus thought this was excessive for a best friend and told Sirius so. They had argued because Remus said he didn’t want a reminder of the moon every time he saw Sirius’ wrist, and Sirius said full moons were his best time, though he refused to elaborate why. Which had made Remus even more angry, as they were Remus’ worst time.

Finally Sirius had huffed Remus didn’t control him and he could do with his body what he pleased. So he got the tattoo.

When James got a second tattoo, Sirius wanted one as well, because apparently those two couldn’t form an independent idea. Thankfully Sirius didn’t get anything near as grand as James, instead opting for the alchemical symbol for arsenic on his right forearm. Sirius had stumbled upon a book on alchemy symbols in the library and apparently found the symbol fascinating enough to permanently etch it onto his skin. When Remus had pressed him for why he chose the symbol, Sirius had changed the subject. Then the book had mysteriously vanished both from their bedroom and from the library.

Remus hoped James didn’t have plans for anymore tattoos or piercings in the near future as Sirius would no doubt find something to etch into his skin or pierce in camaraderie with his best friend.

“Remus, my arse is falling asleep,” complained Sirius. “Can we move to the sofa?”

“Oh, of course. You don’t have to Sirius.”

But Sirius, who was rubbing his hands over his backside, waved him off. “We are only here one more night. I want to be helpful.”

James brought the broomsticks inside and stashed them by the front door while Remus got comfortable with his head in Sirius’ lap. Immediately Sirius started combing his fingers through Remus’ hair, and ordering James around.

“Can you bring me my book mate?”

“Oh and one of those blueberry muffins.”

“I need my glasses for this muggle text, they are in my bag.”

“Machi! Do I look like your bloody house-elf?”

Remus, whose eyes were closed, imagined Sirius pulling a pout.

“But Moony needs me James. You don’t want to disturb him do you?”

“Sometimes I think the only reason you play comforter is to take advantage of the perks,” mumbled James.

“It’s only because we can’t use magic. I could have summoned all those things myself at Hogwarts.”

“Those are not the perks I was referring to.”

Remus opened his eyes and saw James was looking right at him. His cheeks became rather warm. But James had no room to talk. He would never insinuate anything openly about Remus and Sirius’ relationship, because Remus had him by the balls.

…

This is an excerpt from The Wolf and The Star which will begin posting on Ao3 on July 11, 2025.

#wolfstar #sirius black loves remus lupin #sirus x remus #sirus black #remus x sirius #our love is written in the stars #marauders era #marauders #james potter #sirius black #sirius orion black #remus loves sirius #remus lupin #tattoos are critical to my plotlines #as are piercings #dead gay wizards from the 70s #dead gay wizards #werewolves #werewolf

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warisaracket777 · 29 days ago

Text

𝒔𝒆𝒆 𝒚𝒂 𝒔𝒑𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒘𝒃𝒐𝒚… ch. 2

ᴀɴ ᴜɴᴛᴇɴᴀʙʟᴇ ᴛʀᴜᴄᴇ!

Ch. 1 here

❣ Dick Grayson x F!reader

❣ cowboy bebop au; neo-noir space western crackfic, loosely follows the plotline of the anime; animal(s) with human-engineered intelligence; science fiction ❣ cw: angst, romantic and existential; begrudging friends to lovers; eventual smut; graphic depictions and themes of violence; mentions of death; nightmares, cop corruption; stress crying ❣ MDNI ❣ Word Count: 6.5 k ❣ Ch. 2 Summary: Dick and Jason welcome pick up meet a mysterious girl who knows more than she lets on, with a connection to their father. As they make room for each other on the Bebop spacecraft, Dick tries to make the best of a mess you’ve dragged him into, despite Jason’s disapproval. You desperately need a goddamn nap and some food. As for Haley, the grey dog with three legs... she just hopes that you’ll buy her some of the name-brand dog food for her next meal.

❣ Author’s Note(s):

→ [Spike Spiegel, I see you in everyone I’ve ever loved.] → This chapter is more personal than I wanted it to be, but I am too tired to edit. Maybe it’s more dialogue heavy than I’d like it to be but hey, I’ve never written a plot this complex before. → Mysteries abound! What the hell is everyone hiding? And who’s going to betray who? How badly does Dick wanna fuck you? Stay tuned to find out, babes!

Chapter 2: an untenable truce

⋆｡°✩ ⋆⁺｡˚⋆˙‧₊✩₊‧˙⋆˚｡⁺⋆ ✩°｡⋆ ･｡

　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　　˚　　　　 . ★⋆. ࿐࿔

　　　. 　　˚　　　　*　　　　✦　　　.　　.　　　✦　˚ 　　　　 ˚　.˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　　　　　　 ੈ✧̣̇˳·˖✶ ✦　　

.⋆⭒˚.⋆☾ .🪐˖☽⋆⭒˚.⋆

One foot in front of the other, you chant to yourself. You’ll be there soon. The light is just in the distance, there has to be shelter over the next hill. You keep forcing yourself forward, but it was as if your arms and legs were stuck in a thick sludge. Time felt like a dense, gelatinous ooze and the more you tried to pump your legs, the farther the light seemed to drift. You don’t know where you are, but you know that the darkness around you is expansive, only more so the longer you try to run toward the light. Keep running. No matter how long you ran, you never got tired, the threat of darkness seemingly fueling your determination to keep moving.

.⋆⭒˚.⋆☾ aboard the Bebop, somewhere in the Solar System˖☽⋆⭒˚.⋆

Two brothers sat idly on a scratchy sofa, face aglow by the television’s blue light. The obnoxious clang of a cowbell ricochets off of the titanium spaceship, intermittently punctuated by static; no guarantee of service when you’re near the asteroid belt.

“Stop chewing on the cable, Haley,” whistles the shorter, leaner brother, snapping his fingers to call attention to a three-legged, pitiable creature. He lounges back in an insufficiently sized loveseat, eyes scanning the screen with a lit cigarette hanging in the balance, right between his lips. Occasionally, he sneaks a glance over the coffee table to see his brother, larger and bulkier and reclined in what was usually his own sofa of choice. Streaks of hair, tussled vivid white under the harsh fluorescents framed a rugged face, mouth set in a firm line as he focused on the screen, sulking about their predicament chained up in his lab.

Judy, the buxom blonde of Big Shot (For the Bounty Hunters) stood clad in plaid, lewd squeals grating against the eardrums. The grey dog whines and hides its snout under its remaining front paw, canine distress now joining the cacophony. On the TV, Judy is unceremoniously pushed aside by her gratuitously violent costar, voluptuous curves rippling in the wind, barely contained by minimal clothing. Punch starts rattling off active bounties, mug shots scrolling through the screen as he shoots off his pistol, aimless.

“All 300,000 bounty hunters in the star system and not a single one o’ ya coffee-boilers has caught our mighty fine dame of the ‘our…”

When the mugshot wrap ends on a glowering face framed by ginger hair, the younger brother starts muttering under his breath.

“Coulda had her.”

Irritation floods the man on the loveseat, and he takes a slow inhale. He slams his thumb on the remote control’s power off button, and the Bebop living room is plunged into darkness, lit only by the flaming end of a cigarette.

.⋆⭒˚.⋆☾ .🪐˖☽⋆⭒˚.⋆

Waves of pounding pressure in your skull. That was the first thing you were aware of when you came to, mouth desert dry and muscles aching with a frozen soreness. Goosebumps rupturing on your skin alerted you to the frigidness shaking your bones. Fighting against your eyelids, crusted shut by the most unrestful sleep, the blur in front of your eyes slowly focuses under the glow of a lamp somewhere in the corner of the room. A weight on your ankle is the second, coherent thing you noticed; a cuff chained to the steel bed frame, igniting a spark of fear. Somber tension reverberated throughout the halls, eeriness bounding off of the metal walls.

Sitting up way too fast, a dizzy rush unsettling your head, you whip your eyes down, making sure that all of your appendages were intact, that you were clothed in the garments you put on this morning — Was it even this morning? How long have I been out? Your spine skitters under your skin, and you taste the bitterness of unfamiliarity.

Or was it bile? Where the fuck am I?

Panic creeps up alongside every thump of your heart, fighting to overtake reason even though you do everything in your power to focus — assessing your surroundings, reflexively locating an escape route, something to break the shackle. Your gun! You look around the room, seeing your keys and jacket laid out neatly on the solid steel table in the middle of the room. The most important three items, though, were missing. No gun, no rolls of film in sight, no wallet. Bile makes its way up your esophagus as hyperventilation threatens to overwhelm you. You look at the cold metal table, bright medical lights blaring down on it from above. A few tools were lined on a tray next to your belongings: you spy a scalpel and surgical tongs. Fuck. The bile is clawing its way out now. You couldn’t reach any weapons.

Stupidly, you yank at the chain a few times with all your might. Skin straining against the thick metal of your shackles, your rigorous yanking only leaves you groaning, an anklet of bruises that were sure to cause you hell when you got out of here. If you got out of here. Maybe if you could pull on the chain with your arms? Was the bed frame attached with nails or was it welded? Fuck. You felt the tears sting your skin as they escaped, a desperate sob along with them.

Water, you needed water. You couldn’t scream yet. Your eyes dart around the room, up the walls, tracing the ceilings. There was only one entrance, and maybe a vent behind that industrial shelf? You could crawl through it, probably… There was no way out, though, if you couldn’t get that fucking shackle off of your ankle.

There was a nightstand next to you, with a reading lamp, a cup of water, and some painkillers. Outside your room, you could hear the sniffling of a dog, its snout making whiny little sounds as the sound of blunt nails scratching metal mixes with the general discomfort of the entire situation.

You’d have to face it.

So you scream, every last bit of energy you have left in you put into a brokenly vicious, bloodcurdling scream.

☄. *. ⋆

“This is your fault, Richard,” Jason growls at his older brother, “I am not the one who deviated from the plan and brought some stranger along. A stranger who has a gun and enough contraband to send us to Pluto.” The steam from Jason’s ears was palpable, almost reminding Dick of their father when he was seething but trying to keep a lid on his temper. He keeps his hands busy, cleaning both Dick’s and his guns with practiced precision and muttering under his breath, “Fucking PLUTO, Richard.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Dick attempts to assuage his brother, “I’m sorry, but what was I supposed to do? Leave her there? We don’t even know what Ivy threw at her, she could have died, Jason.” Hands on his hips, giving his brother the “I know best by virtue of seniority” look and waiting for an answer, cigarette in one hand while the other gestured his own frustration.

“You drop goons like maggots on the daily and this is the one person you want to save?” Jason makes no effort to hide his scorn as he glides the microfiber cloth over the barrel of the gun he was cleaning. Your gun.

Quite honestly, Dick doesn’t really know yet why he threw you over his shoulder and back into the safety of the Bebop. Dick and Jason had been a team for years, never letting eyes pry into their partnership, carefully evading ISSP and the Syndicate alike. He had no idea who you were, but he didn’t want to admit to recklessness.

“First of all, she’s not a maggot. Don’t be rude. She helped me escape, technically. Second, she’s got a fuckton to answer for when she wakes up.” Maybe turning the conversation toward the more interesting matter at hand would distract Jason from being mad at him, Dick reasons. “I don’t know about you, but aren’t you even the least bit interested in what’s on those rolls of film?”

“Nope,” Jason makes sure his voice sounds sufficiently clipped. “Not interested in being executed by ISSP firing squad. None of those pigs can aim, it’d take too many shots to kill me and I’d rather it be done in one go.”

“What’s done is done,” Dick says, allowing a note of contrition through his words. “But better we have her than ISSP, no? And how does she know dad?” Both brothers had combed through your belongings, and found your medical emergency contact card that stated, neatly in print: ‘In Case of Emergency, contact Bruce Wayne at ISSP.’

Jason’s scowl deepens, but he doesn’t answer. Instead, he focuses on wiping the fingerprints from each gun and knife laid out on the coffee table in front of him, his back aching from the lumpy old loveseat.

“Fuck if I know,” he says stonily, a white streak of hair falling over his eyes as he concentrated on running a cloth over the trigger. “All I do know is that I’m calling ‘not it’ on calling Dad about this.”

“Huh?” Dick’s stony face morphs into one of slight bemusement.

“You know we have to call him. And it ain’t gonna be me, Richard.”

Dick snorts, coming to sit down next to Jason and reassembling his own gun with practiced dexterity.

“Do we know what she got dosed with? Is it contagious?” Dick’s mind flashes back to the moment Ivy blew a handful of dust into your face, the fluidity with which your body collapsed — your head would’ve split open if he hadn’t lunged to ensure your skull would hit his hand instead of the pavement. It wasn’t an active decision so much as a reflex. He hadn’t inhaled enough of that powder to feel anything other than a slight headache and dizziness, but he’d recovered in less than a few hours. You, on the other hand, had slept through the night and through breakfast. Dick had made sure to check in on you every so often, just to make sure you hadn’t died on them.

“I took a look at the shit Ivy threw at her – it’s a neuromuscular blocker; paralyzes the victim for a few hours depending on dosage. But this one didn’t seem to be particularly high in concentration,” he pauses and looks pointedly at Dick, “So you can monitor her condition. She’ll need lots of fluids and food when she gets up,” he looks down at his watch, “Which should be soon.”

Only a few seconds later did a blood curdling scream rip its way through the Bebop.

“LET. ME. OUT!” Dick’s eye twitches as your screeches repeat, gradually increasing in volume by the demand. Jason figures that his capacity for tolerating his brother’s antics knows no bounds. “ONCE I’M FREE I’M GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS.” Your threat echoes down the hall, reverberating off of the metal walls of the spaceship. Your sonic assault continues for several minutes.

“Make sure you ask her where she got this little number,” Jason adds calmly, holding up your gun and looking at it with the tiniest hint of admiration.

“What do you mean? I have to question her?” Dick seems to doubt himself for a moment, your wails disturbing the mundane peace of the Bebop’s living room, a profound intimidation keeping him from seeing the pretty girl in Jason’s lab.

“I’m not the one who brought her here,” Jason runs a hand through the white streak in his hair, “and honestly what I did hear during yesterday’s bust doesn’t make her sound like a walk in the park.”

“Fair,” Dick doesn’t refute his brother. He turns the conversation toward more pressing matters. “She has to stop eventually, right?” he reasons while wiping down one of his switchblades before clipping it back into his left-hand pocket. It’s not like you could keep screaming forever, you’d lose your voice eventually. Haley hides her snout under a large paw and whines, ears cowered as your screams continue.

“I HAVE ENOUGH C4 IN MY SHIP TO FUCK UP THE NICE HANGOUT YOU GOT HERE!” Another ear splitting screech follows.

“Just—,” Jason closes his eyes, breathing through his nose and pointing angrily toward his quarters, where they had you resting on a bed in his lab. “Just go deal with it, I have enough of a headache as is.” Jason grits through his teeth, huffing through his ruffled feathers and silently cursing his luck as he stands up and disappears into his bedroom, leaving Dick to rummage through the fridge for something suitable to give someone who’d just been turbo-dosed by an anesthetic nerve agent. Haley continues to whine, desperate for an end to your distress.

Dick mindlessly wonders if Jason could possibly recreate it in his lab on the second floor of the Bebop; it’d come in handy. Then they wouldn’t have to expend so much energy chasing after violent goons with bounties on their heads and arsenals that only the worst kinds of people possessed.

☄. *. ⋆

You crouch into a defensive position on your bed the second you hear the hydraulics of the steel door slide open, the hoarse scream dying in your throat.

“Quiet, please!” a man’s voice breeches the entrance before his form, deep, and friendly, “You’re scaring Haley.” The handsome guy who had intruded on your bust strolled into the room, his boots colliding with the steel floor and doing nothing to calm your nerves. You scoped him, trying to take note of everything, anything you could use to your advantage. You had to escape.

“What the fuck am I doing here? Uncuff me.” Your voice was vicious under its hoarse strain. As threatening as you could muster in your weakened state.

In his hands was a tray lined with a sandwich, an apple, and a glass of water. No metal utensils for you to grab and use.

The man was muscular, much larger than you, but you think you could last long enough in a fight with him to escape; especially if you could get your hands on that scalpel. You’d just have to dodge him, dodge every attack until he tired himself out. You clocked the knife in the pocket of his pants, holster under his jacket.

“Can’t do that just yet, sweetheart,” he flashes you an apologetic smile, placing the tray on your night stand. You look at the food and drink apprehensively, eyes flitting back and forth across the room. “It’s not poisoned,” the guy says gently, lifting the glass and waterfalling a sip into his own mouth.

You look up at him, watch his Adam's apple bob up and down as he swallows, readying yourself to smash his nose in if he comes any closer.

“Let. Me. Go.” You demand again, slower. Hoping to God you sounded menacing enough that he’d think at least twice before touching you.

You keep conducting your desperate, pointless search, head swiping back and forth as you look around as you try to find yourself a weapon - maybe if you broke the ceramic lamp in a really specific way? The glass of water?

“I wouldn’t,” the man says again, amused. You whip your gaze toward him again.

“Why am I here? What happened to me?” Oh god, you were going to hurl. A few breaths in. A few breaths out. Breathe, you reminded yourself. An anxious weight pulls under your chest.

“You’re safe. You’re on the Bebop. We took you here after you got dosed with a paralyzing agent by Poison Ivy.”

You knew better than to trust a good-looking man who assured your safety.

“Why didn’t you take me to a hospital? Are you perverts? Oh my god, I’m gonna be murdered by perverts,” you wail, near hysterics.

“What? No! You just got dosed with a strong anesthetic — you’ll recover,” he explains. “Probably will be groggy and sore.” He sounded patient, confident in his ability to handle himself. He didn’t seem threatened by you at all as he recounted the events of the past 36 hours to you. “It was hardly acceptable to bring you into a hospital, I figured you wouldn’t want people to find out about your contraband.” He flashes a winning smile at you, seemingly proud of himself for thinking that far ahead.

You just stare. Stone still.

Fuck, were they going to rat you out? Slit your throat and take the rolls of film for themselves? It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tried.

You let yourself slowly pick up the glass of water, eyes never leaving him as you sip, desperate to quench the dry burn in your throat. The man stood there the whole time, just looking at you with such patience that it made you want to start screaming again. After a beat, you ask:

“If you’re not a pervert, then why am I chained up here?” You could tell he was ISSP, or maybe former ISSP, by the way he fired a gun, the way he shifted his weight before pulling the trigger. You remember telling yourself to take note of that as the both of you tried to escape from the basement of C’est La Vie. Maybe you could persuade him to call Bruce to vouch for you.

“I mean, we couldn’t exactly let you loose once we treated you, could we? You had some interesting items in your possession that I’m sure you’d rather stay out of the wrong hands.”

You could tell he wanted more information, so you kept your mouth shut, trying to think of ways to keep his mind off of the illegal trove caught under your possession.

“What did you say your name was, again?” you start, sipping slowly at your water and calculating your chances of getting out of here alive.

“I’m hurt you don’t remember, baby,” he runs a hand through his hair, kind of scratching the back of his scalp, a sad excuse for a smolder shot your way.

You sort of sniff, lip curling in menace instead of a response.

“Anyway, my name is Dick,” he continues. “Yours?”

“You took my wallet, you know who I am. Now let me fucking go.”

You have a hard time containing your rage when his grin just grows.

“I’ll let you go once you’ve answered a few questions,” Dick offers.

“Fine, what?” You practically snarl at him, secretly glad for more time to search for a weapon. Keep him talking.

“Well, first, why does such a pretty girl carry around her death warrant? Second, I lost a pretty penny because you stuck your nose in my business. Third—” He’s cut off as another pair of boots approach your direction. Your head whips toward the door when you hear its telltale hydraulic breath of air. A burlier, taller man with a streak of bright white hair against black, stalks into the room, your gun in one hand, a mug of tea in the other. He couldn’t have been much older than the present company, grey mutt excluded.

“Third,” the man finishes for Dick, “how do you know our father?” He tosses what you recognize to be your emergency contact card you thought you’d hidden deep in your wallet. “Hi, I’m Jason,” the stranger waves to you, coming to tower over Dick.

“You’re Bruce's sons?” Your eyes flit between the two brothers, the way you’re giggling is a little off-putting to them given your state. Your ankle cuff clangs as your body wracks in fitful laughter. “I’d have gone with ‘Richard,’ by the way,” you shoot at Dick, wiping a mirthful tear from the corner of your eye.

“What's so funny?” Dick’s eyebrows furrow, lip pouting though you don’t think he meant to.

“Answer the damn question, girlie,” Jason commands, a little more threatening than his brother, though you don’t think he really means it.

“Thought you’d be quicker on your feet is all, considering you’re the spawn of Bruce Wayne.” You have a hard time getting the words out amidst your giggle fest. Both men look at you like they couldn’t quite process what was happening.

“Look, I’m not the one chained to a bed with no hope of escaping. Now, how do you know Bruce?" Jason demands again.

“He’s my handler,” you shrug, struggling to regulate your breath. Slowly, drawing out the action as much as possible, you sip from the glass Dick had sent next to you.

“What do you mean ‘handler’?” The agitation tightens around Jason’s eyes, and you decide it’s best to take him seriously. You heave a sigh, figuring that the only way you could possibly get out of this situation is to reveal more about yourself. Just enough to get out of the situation, but no more. Your situation was tenuous, and it was impossible to ignore the adrenaline pumping through you with each beat of the heart; steady thunder within a body sore and in need of recuperation.

“Look, I’d rather not get into it. Quite frankly I’m not allowed to. Just call him yourself, tell him my name — he’ll vouch,” you offer. At least you’d hope he’ll vouch; this was a unique situation. “You can let me get back to my business and you can get back to yours.”

“What makes you think that we’d trust someone associated with ISSP?” Jason questions again.

“He’s ISSP,” you nod toward Dick, whose eyebrows furrow in confusion. “I can tell by the way you shoot a gun — all technique, no raw intuition.”

Dick’s eyes narrow; at once struck by the acuity of your attentiveness and simultaneously displeased at the critique.

“What do you mean, ‘no raw intuition’?” he asks, sour note reverberating off of the metal walls of the room.

“You’re just…” you eye him up and down, this time taking a moment to process his

“Oh, come on, spit it out,” Dick crosses his arms.

“...stiff.”

You just leave it at that, snooty and shrugging as if you hadn’t wounded Dick’s pride.

Jason grunts in frustration.

“Fucking Christ, focus, Richard.”

“Yeah Richard,” you mock Dick, figuring you’d better get on the good side of the larger one; he’d be harder to fight off. Jason’s demeanor loosens just a tad, seemingly amused as he looks between the two of you with a raised eyebrow. You think that despite being adoptive brothers, they looked strikingly alike standing next to each other.

Truth be told, you had a feeling that Dick’s devil-may-care affability was a carefully constructed façade, the way the hairs on the back of your neck raised when you first met him on that sidewalk with the three-legged mutt. It was a gut feeling confirmed when the two of you laid eyes on each other under C’est La Vie. And ever since, your nerves had been alight with a sense of foreboding — not end-all-be-all foreboding, but a feeling that you were hurling toward something inevitable. And no matter how much you tried to quash it down, it kept fighting its way to the surface.

“Call Wayne, I won’t say anything else until you do.” Your tone is resolute.

“Alright,” Dick agrees smoothly, “We’ll call him right now.” He turns toward Jason and nods a silent command at him, and Jason, sticking his tongue out at his brother in annoyance, walks over to the two giant computer screens taking up the space of one wall. You hear a few clicks of a keyboard, before a female AI stilted voice calls out:

“Calling: Bruce Wayne, Chief Director, Inter-Solar System Police.”

Silence, save for the dial tone and Haley panting. All eyes were glued to one of the gigantic screens, waiting for an answer that you prayed would get you out of this situation. No weapon in sight, no way out.

“Dick, Jason — what’s going on?”

Bruce Wayne is a formidable figure, imposing in size, but ever so polite. You hated his guts.

No one has uttered a peep.

“What’s going on?” He repeats his question with the authority befitting his rank, eyebrows arched just the slightest bit when his eyes land on you.

“Yeah, nice to see you too, Bruce,” Jason mumbles to his adoptive father, stone cold.

“Bruce, hi — sorry we haven’t called in a minute,” Dick starts off… pausing to figure out how he wants his words to come out.

“Well, lads,” you sneer, looking between the brothers, “which one of you geniuses wants to explain to Daddy what happened?” You try to keep yourself calm, stop the panic just as it tries to force its way to your tongue.

Jason raises his palms, shrugging like his job was done and he was off the clock. He makes his way to the exit, a childish smile on his face as he taunts his elder brother. “You can deal with this one, Richard.”

“I am going to ask you one more time,” the man on the screen says patiently over the metal of Jason’s boots clanking on the floor. Too cool and ready to strike, he says with finality, “I am not going to ask you a third time. What’s going on?”

Would he admit he knows me? Or would he deny association? You felt your cheeks flush with an anxious anticipation.

“You tell me, Bruce,” Dick crosses his arms in a defensive stance, “She has an ID that lists you as an emergency contact. Says she’s your handler and that you’ll vouch for her.”

Bruce just glowers in thought, eyebrows furrowing expressively — a habit that clearly transcend genetic inheritance. You wait, nerves pounding in your skull, the suspense of meeting your end dangling right in front of your nose. Too much time passes before he speaks.

“Dick,” Bruce sighs, tone much more genuine and somber, “She’s doing work for ISSP.”

Dick freezes, and even in the dim glow of the fluorescence, you see the stiffness that contours his silhouette.

“What work?” Dick barks, causing you to jump.

“That’s classified, son.”

“What fucking work, Bruce?” He moves closer to the screen, gripping the computer in both of his hands, a stoic panic radiating from his shadow, plunging you even deeper into the hopelessness of your situation. You keep your mouth shut, watching the scene play out.

“Classified. I’m not even supposed to acknowledge her existence.” You couldn’t believe your eyes, but the Big Scary Pig might actually be speaking earnestly in the three years that you’ve known him. “But it’s not what you’re thinking,” Bruce adds, as if it was a secret between the two of them.

Dick just stands there, stone still. You were facing his back, but you didn’t need to see his face to feel the tension in the air.

Finally, he just scoffs at his father, shaking his head as if trying to clear unwanted thoughts flooding into his brain. You knew what that felt like.

“Fine. She says you can vouch for her — can you?” Dick turns back to you, giving you a sardonic, hard look before turning back to his father, the harshness in his features still apparent as he returns Bruce’s severe glower.

“She’s my responsibility, yes. You can trust her,” Bruce confirms in a measured tone, clearly not wanting to upset his son. Despite the viciousness of your hatred toward Bruce, your heart was going to jump out of your throat from relief.

“See? Now let me go, lunkhead,” you pipe up loudly. Your ankle was bruised underneath the metal of the cuff: a result of your attempts at escaping.

Dick just lifts one pointer finger, and you falter. “Not quite yet,” he says.

“But — “ you start protesting, only for him to cut you off.

“What about the rolls of film she’s carrying on her?” Dick asks bluntly, letting annoyance seep into his tone as he stares down his father. You freeze.

“She is authorized by ISSP for possession of the film. You need to let her go. Do not interfere with her mission. I cannot say anything else.”

Dick shakes his head, annoyance having grown into a simmering anger.

“If she’s ISSP, why is she out bounty hunting?”

Bruce gives another sigh of frustration, like he was dealing with a petulant child.

“She is not an agent. She is under a classified contract. Stop asking any more questions, Dick.”

“They don’t pay me,” you add, a falsely serene stroke of venom lacing your words. “A girl’s gotta survive somehow,” you shrug when Dick swings around to look at you in disbelief.

“Her mission is not on record. I need your discretion, son.”

Being called “son” only seemed to enrage him.

“Gotta give me something in return, old man,” Dick attempts to bargain.

“Her interactions with Jason will be off record. Jason will have immunity,” Bruce offers, his figure looming on the screen, intimidating to nearly everyone he encounters. Nearly. “That’s all I will give you.”

“Fine.” Dick moves a finger to hover over the keyboard.

“Oh, and, son?” Bruce calls his son to a pause with a dead serious demeanor.

“Hm?” Dick looks like he’s about ready to clobber his father all the way to Pluto, about to hit the disconnect button.

“If for some reason this conversation ever comes to public light, I will deny it ever happened.” The line goes dead before his finger could smash the “end call” button, plunging the room into a dimmer tension than before.

“Yeah, whatever. See ya, old man.”

☄. *. ⋆

“Oh, thank god.”

An almost sensuous sigh of relief escapes you breathlessly the second Dick unlocks the cuff around your ankle. You massage the ache, bruises already getting nasty and puce on your skin. Dick plants himself at the end of your bed, twirling the cuffs in his hands, deep contemplation seeming to have taken over his attention.

“Keys.” Your hand is out, palm up in petulant demand. The handsome man sitting at the end of your bed, makes no move to go and fulfill your command. Instead, he just looks at you, takes you in under the scrutiny of his deep blues. That foreign exhilaration in your nerves light aflame again, and you don’t know what to make of it.

“Keys and the rest of my shit. Now.” You are getting impatient. Desperate to get the fuck away from here and back to your own business. Maybe check yourself into a motel and get a hot shower. You could splurge. A treat for having endured this fucking episode from hell.

“Well, you see,” Dick laughs, more nervousness pouring into his cheeks the more he grasped the gravity of the situation at hand. “You can stay here until you’ve recuperated…”

“Where are my keys, Dick?”

“It got kinda damaged… when we were chasing Poison Ivy…” He’s ready to flinch in defensiveness, afraid you’d deal him the same hand you dealt the goon back at C’est La Vie.

“No, my baby!” you wail, attempting to get up from the bed. No can do; you collapse back down on the bed, struggling to sit as your vision blurs and a dizziness takes over.

“Woah, take it easy.” You feel a pair of hands ease you back to rest in a comfortable position. Warm, large hands. “You can’t be going anywhere in this state, anyway. It’s gonna take a minute to fix your baby given the damage. Time and a hell of a lot of Woolongs.”

You wanted to cry. God, you were going to cry. Cry and humiliate yourself even further in front of these two.

“How much money?” Do. Not. Fucking. Cry. You command yourself internally, silent prayer that things wouldn’t get worse.

“You don’t have enough. We checked through your bank statements.”

You just let out a wail, face drooping into your palms.

Dick sits there, awkwardly bringing the plate with the sandwich and apple closer to you, placing it gingerly on the bed in front of you.

“Finish your food.” His request is so soft, as if he was fearful of your next reaction. “I’ll be back with your stuff and I’ll show you around. Come on, Haley Time for a walk.”

You don’t let a tear fall, but you do follow Dick’s instructions, vision only focusing when you see him exit the room, his trusted dog hobbling after him.

☄. *. ⋆

After he returns your possessions — inspected by you, with everything intact — and shows you to the guest quarters of the Bebop, Dick slumps onto his familiar lumpy couch, an exhale of exhaustion sinking into his bones as he flicks open his lighter. He squares his shoulders and gets ready to explain the situation to Jason, who was perched over a portable microscope and labeling samples from the shit Ivy had used to incapacitate you. Dozens of slides neatly lined the coffee table. Too organized. Meaning Dick was in for a conversation with an agitated former drug lord. Fucking fantastic.

“We need to let her stay for a bit, to rest up,” Dick starts with the least offensive topic first.

“Obviously.” Jason’s voice is clipped, like he was biting his tongue, not wanting to tear Dick a new asshole until he heard the whole story. “What else?

“She’s working on something for Bruce.” Dick takes a drag of his cigarette and exhales before he continues. “Off the books.”

“Are you fucking me? She’s ISSP?”

“Keep a lid on it, she won’t report you. You have immunity.” Another drag before he whistles for Haley. “And she’s not an agent. Contracted hire.”

“For what?” “Old man wouldn’t say. Classified. But he vouches for her. Says we can trust her,” Dick muses over this influx of new information, brain processing with heightened clarity with every hit of nicotine hitting his lungs. Jason grumbles, the same bemused expression gracing his rugged features as he scrutinizes his brother.

“What else? Spit it out, Dick.”

“We need to convince her to stay,” Dick’s request pushes through the plume of secondhand smoke. Haley’s wagging her tail next to the couch, ready to appease each and every direction Dick threw at her to the best of her ability. “Grab me a Pippu, girl, go on!”

Jason carefully sets down the slide he was labeling, then turns off his microscope light before he addresses his brother with measured impatience.

“And why the fuck would we want ISSP anywhere near us? I thought we had an agreement.”

Dick just shrugs, unable to find more complex words to articulate his compulsions.

“She knows something our father doesn’t want us to know.” Dick just shrugs, unable to find more complex words to articulate his compulsions. “Plus, she needs a place to stay before she can pay for the repairs on her cute little ship, if we’re gonna be practical about it.”

Jason considers the whole damned situation, cursing Dick under his breath. Always disturbing their blissful Bebop peace. Nearly three years since they’d teamed up. Not a day goes by where Jason wasn’t grateful for his partnership with Dick, but fuck if they hadn’t gotten into some rotten situations because his older brother couldn’t resist a pretty face.

“You said you wanted to fix up a ship, learn how to reconstruct the newer models. Fix up hers. It’s rumored to be quite faaast.” Dick dangles that last part mockingly in front of Jason, knowing that his younger brother couldn’t avoid a fast number like the one you owned.With resignation, the white streaks in his hair follow his exasperatingly slow shakes of his head, annoyed with himself because he knew that Dick’s decision would be immovable.

“I’m trusting you on this. She better not try anything when she’s here or I’m dropping you both off on Pluto.”

Dick feigns sarcastic horror at the threat, silently relieved. Not a day went by where Dick didn’t thank his lucky stars for his brother. Haley comes back with a can of soda between her rather menacing teeth, placing it next to Dick’s leg on the couch; cool condensation of the metal almost seeping through his pants and onto skin. He gives his dog an appreciative scratch behind the ears, and she settles her head on her front paw, readying herself for a snooze.

Meanwhile, under the steaming beat of water against your skull, you rub your skin harshly. Red and raw all over, tears indistinguishable from the scald of the shower, you let yourself drown in self-pity, just for the duration of the shower. You think about your situation, chained to ISSP as a disposable assassin, doing their dirty work for them, leaving their hands scott free. And for fucking what? The question is one you’ve struggled to answer since Bruce had pulled you out from one prison and into another. Bruce had what you wanted. The only purpose you could latch onto, held as a bargaining chip by the fucking cops. So long as you completed this mission, he’d give you what you’re looking for. You think about stupid things you’ve read in books, like transience, the ephemeral. Dreams — you had a fixation. The in-betweenness of your life, everything and everyone simply a pathway to the next stop, but what you’re looking for is never there.

It’s the same feeling you’d felt since you were defrosted, taken in by Deathstroke. The despair that could wrench right at the heart because of avoided inevitabilities. Seeing two lovers who were destined never to touch — that was how you described this particular sadness.

By the time you’d emerged from the steam, cheeks plump and red, reality started seeping back in, demanding that you move, continue on with the necessary motions. Immediately, a distraction lays down in front of you, like a black cat begging you to halt in your path, give it a little scratch on the chin.

“GRAYSON!” You use your revived strength to inject as bloodcurdling a scream as you could into the night. “RICHARD DICKLESS GRAYSON. REPORT TO MY QUARTERS!!!”

“You know there’s an intercom system in every room, babe.” You hear his voice over through the speakers in the sealing. “I’ll be there in a second.”

You’d have to admonish him for the pet names.

He calls your name, and it’s the first time you really register his voice. It sends a shiver to your nerves, right to the edge of your fingertips.

“I need a towel.”

“You can have one if you let me sneak a peek at the goods, pretty girl.”

“I’m not in the mood, Grayson,” you warn him. All you wanted to do was sleep for a few days. Reset your body. He doesn’t wither under your stare, despite your expectations.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he just offers a crooked smirk.

“You’re a pervert. I knew it.”

Dick just chuckles, all boyish charm as fetches your towel. He swears he catches the quickest flash of red ink on the smooth skin of your back before you slam the door in his face.

☄. *. ⋆

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