#“i don’t smoke and i don’t know what i’m doing here but my doctor said to come here for insomnia like eight months ago so plz help

[amaranthsynthesis]

have also acquired and taken for the first time some cbd/cbn sleepy gummies and god i hope they help bc the insomnia/feather light sleeping and general restlessness has been kicking my ass for like a week and i’m a) exhausted b) irritated by every noise my partners make and c) incredibly guilty that the rotisserie chicken charade is keeping THEM up

[ugh-yoongi]

the very last thing i decide | pjm

(or, the one in which a love exists that's easy and instinctual as much as it is painful and self-destructive.)

✘ PAIRING jimin x f. reader ✘ SUMMARY you learn what it means to love with blood on your hands. ✘ GENRE hitman/assassin au; angst, smut ✘ RATING explicit. minors dni. ✘ WARNINGS they are both hitmen (hitpeople?) so there's all the content that goes along with that: violence, death, mentions of blood (a lot) and weapons, murder, but no explicit gore. everyone is morally grey at best and downright psychotic at worst (especially yoongi). reader gets stabbed. no one knows how to be a functional human being. swearing, smoking, light smut (penetrative & oral sex), miscommunication and unrequited love but not really, i drop a classic tumblr meme in a line of dialogue. ambiguous/hopeful ending!! some of the themes here are kinda heavy and i am not entirely sure how to tag them so if you have any questions pls don’t hesitate to ask! ✘ WORDCOUNT 12k ✘ LISTEN TO manchester orchestra - telepath ✘ THANK YOU i cannot remember everyone i’ve showed this to over the years. @the-boy-meets-evil for looking this over and brainstorming with me today. @hot-soop for always being a help. @effortandmore because you told me an embarrassingly long time ago this was worth finishing. and i’m pretty sure i also sent this to @jihopesjoint at some point too. i did a quick edit of this on my own, but after nearly three years i just wanted it posted and out of my wips so i'm sure i missed things. pls ignore them. ✘ AUTHOR'S NOTE fic drops two days in a row?? who am i?? i started this in may 2021 and it was supposed to be a simple pegging fic. i abandoned it bc i was convinced no one would want to read it. between today and yesterday i have written thousands of words and made it across the finish line. i hope you like it. the violence is a metaphor for love or whatever.

[37.5665° N, 126.9780° E | Seoul, SOUTH KOREA]

Jimin’s hair had been red the first time he met you.

How fitting, he thinks, considering he’s currently bleeding out on a table.

Well, there’s still a bit of fight left in him. He hasn’t lost consciousness yet, which he assumes is a good sign; he can still hear Hoseok barking out orders quite clearly. The edges of his vision are fuzzy and the pain in his abdomen is sharp and unrelenting, but he still has enough brain power left to wish he’d died instead.

Because you’d saved his life. And now he’s further indebted to you.

(Jimin never leaves a debt unpaid, but he’s not sure how to make even on something like this.)

Jungkook and Taehyung are fetching supplies faster than Hoseok can ask for them. Two pairs of frazzled, spaced-out eyes. Four sets of trembling limbs. Namjoon’s wearing burn marks into the floor, his cuticles bloody and nearly worried to the bone since he can’t keep them out of his mouth.

And then there’s you.

Sitting cross-legged in a chair as you scroll through your phone. Jimin’s blood is still drying on your hands, leaving smears as you drag your thumb back and forth across the screen, and this doesn’t seem to faze you one bit.

Behind you, Yoongi takes a seat at the piano and starts playing Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and Jimin simply cannot die like this. He can’t die on a wooden table in a room with a piano on which Min Yoongi is playing Baroque organ pieces.

“What is this, a fucking funeral?” Hoseok snaps, though there’s a desperation creeping into his tone that Jimin does not like, does not want to hear. “Cut it out, Yoongi.”

Said man staunchly ignores the doctor, transitioning flawlessly into the fugue. Jimin barely hears the tinkle of your laughter but he hears it all the same, and he wants to pretend it doesn’t calm him, bring him back down to earth when he starts drifting too far away. But you do, and it does, and all he can think about is: will you miss him if he dies? Will it take you long to wash his blood from your hands?

Hoseok’s absolutely incensed, pushed to the limits of his stress at the thought of not being able to save Jimin’s life, and Jimin appreciates this, really, but not when Hoseok pushes two gloved fingers deep into the wound in his stomach so hard all he can do is cry. “Yoongi—”

You snort. You don’t even look up from your phone.

Namjoon, for all his leadership and stoicism and poise under pressure, is just as frantic and panicked as the rest. It’s not everyday one of his people is inches from death ten feet away from him. Most people usually die in the shadows. Kim Namjoon has faced down death more times than most, yet watching the life slowly fade from Jimin’s eyes is too much even for him. “Yoongi, please—”

But the fugue keeps going, tempo change after tempo change, the two pillars of this organization spiraling completely by the time the coda starts, unfocused and sweating and praying. To gods they don’t believe in, to hope, to chance—whatever and whoever might be listening. Jimin usually loves hearing Yoongi play. It’s the only thing that humanizes him, and Jimin had spent so many restless nights shoulder to shoulder with him on that exact bench in the blue hours of the early morning, hypnotized by the way the older man’s knobby fingers moved across the keys.

This is it, he thinks.

Jimin’s going to die with Toccata and Fugue in D minor playing in the background.

He’s imagined his death so many times. Stupid not to in this line of work. Violent, quick and painless, in his sleep, drawn out and gory, a message. And in all of those scenarios, it’s either jarringly silent or there’s someone screaming. Usually him, sounding much like he is now, two fingers stuck in his gut. In all of those scenarios, Min Yoongi is never playing Bach as everything fades to black.

You sigh. “Shut the fuck up, Yoongi,” you say, your tone as blasé and inconvenienced as ever.

Shocked at your audacity, one of Yoongi’s fingers slips and hits the wrong key, something dissonant and metallic as it rings out. But the music stops all the same, the silence nearly giving Jimin whiplash. Now he can hear the clinkof Hoseok’s tools, the squelching of his wound, Jungkook’s desperate pleading for him to just be alright, please God, just hang on. He wants the music back. He doesn’t want Jungkook’s crying to be the last thing he hears. Doesn’t want the sound of his own organs imprinted into his memory.

“What’d you say?” Yoongi asks, because no one talks to him that way. They wouldn’t dare. Most people try not to talk to him at all.

But you do.

And, inexplicably, Yoongi listens.

You roll your eyes. “You go deaf in your old age? I said shut the fuck up. Hoseok’s two knuckles deep in Jimin’s fucking stomach and you’re over there having your little Amadeus moment.”

He bristles. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” Yoongi repeats, and Jimin can’t see him, but he knows his eyes are narrowed, lips pulled back in a snarl, fists clenched at his side.

“Oh, princess,” you coo, and Yoongi’s fury is palpable, permeates every inch of this place, overrides all the fear and anguish. “I’m talking to you, baby. I know Jiminie’s busy trying not to die and that’s stressful for all of us, but please do try to keep up.”

Jimin hears the flick of Yoongi’s switchblade. Then he hears him say, “Please let me fucking kill her,” in that lazy Daegu drawl of his, like forming full words are beneath him. Not worth the effort when they’re directed at you.

Still seated, you uncross your legs and, through blurred vision, Jimin watches you grab Yoongi by his belt loops to tug him closer, grab the wrist that holds his knife and press it to your own throat. “Don’t threaten me with a good time, Yoongi. Be a good boy and make it hurt.”

Jungkook’s near hysterics at Jimin’s side. “What the fuck is wrong with you two? He’s dying!”

Jimin tries to say I’m not, Kookie, I’m okay but the pressure on his abdomen is too intense. He can barely breathe, and Hoseok’s still digging around, still looking for that stupid fucking bullet, had to do something and do it quick so there’d been very little anesthetic and finesse, and he’s silently screaming for someone to just comfort Jungkook, tell him everything’s going to be okay, but instead—

“Serves him right for being a fucking idiot,” you say, words muffled by the knife still pressed to your throat. “What a painful, permanentlesson in not forgetting your fucking vest.”

“Stop it!” Jungkook sobs, fingers ghosting along Jimin’s matted fringe.

Yoongi’s still scowling. “Just say the word, Joon-ah. I’ll make it quick.”

You actually laugh at that. The kind of full-belly laugh Jimin would kill to be able to produce. “You wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid.”

Someone snarls. Probably Yoongi. “You’d look so good gutted on the floor like a fish,” he replies, and if Jimin knows him at all, he knows he’s got that dreamy, faraway look in his eyes. The one he always gets when he’s about to kill—the one that makes him so unhinged and dangerous. “Left there to bleed out and die all alone like the trash you are.”

No one’s survived that look before, but you just grin, as if being on the receiving end of it is nothing more than another simple inconvenience. “Do it, then,” you prompt. “You’re so big and bad, yet here you are, waiting for Namjoon’s permission like some kind of pathetic fucking dog.”

“I’m no one’s dog.”

Your eyes slowly flick over to Namjoon. “No?” you ask, smile widening as Jimin watches you drag your heeled foot up the inside of Yoongi’s calf, his thigh, stiletto coming to rest in the center of his sternum. “That’s a shame, princess. That pretty neck of yours was just made for a collar.”

There’s no doubt in Jimin’s mind now that he actually died back in that penthouse and is now residing in whatever level of hell is watching you give his associate a semi despite him being a millisecond away from murdering you.

Yoongi would do it, too. No hesitation. You’ve been on his shit list for as long as Jimin can remember, and you’ve been daring him to put his money where his mouth is and just kill you already for just as long.

Taehyung groans. “Can you two just fuck already so the rest of us can be spared of this?”

You click your tongue, tone melting like butter. You’re fond of Taehyung, soft on him. “No can do, angel. Yoongi here knows I only have eyes for our Jiminie, and god does that hurt his little feelings.”

Your wicked smile gives away nothing—whether you’re telling a bold truth or just unnecessarily needling Yoongi further—but Jimin’s caught off guard and chokes on your words nonetheless.

Hoseok’s forceps still digging around in his stomach, there’s a quiet hurrah of triumph as he finally locates the bullet. Jimin feels nothing as he retrieves it and plucks it out, a reverberated clank! as he drops it into a kidney dish, your words the anesthetic he’s needed as they play on a loop in his head.

When he finally blacks out, either from the pain or the adrenaline or both, it’s your face that greets him. He never gets the chance to tell you why he forgot his vest.

[64.1466° N, 21.9426° W | Reykjavík, ICELAND]

Jimin’s hair is blue when it happens the first time.

It’s November. Namjoon has sent the two of you to Reykjavik and it’s dark all the time, the midnight hue of his hair blending into the impenetrable nighttime that surrounds you. Jimin works best like this—out of sight, part of the shadows. He’s light on his feet, lithe in ways no one else is, not even you, and he’s impossible to anticipate under the cover of darkness.

That’s why Jimin always takes care of the appetizers.

It’s your job to clean up the main course.

The two of you are two halves of the same lethal coin, working together flawlessly after years of carefully honed practice. Jimin slams an unsuspecting man’s head into a wall and you’re right behind him to put a bullet in it.

It’s just how it goes.

And he trusts you. He has to, otherwise he would’ve gotten taken out years ago. You’re not always in his line of sight, but he always feels you, senses your movements before you’re even on your feet. The times it’s gone wrong—and it’s gone wrong so many fucking times, despite how cautious and skilled the two of you are—you’re always right there to catch him before he even hits the ground. Just like a ghost, as if your only purpose in life is keeping Jimin safe and alive.

(It isn’t, but it sure feels that way.)

Tonight it’s another hit carried out in an overpriced penthouse overlooking the northern shore. You’re in and out, don’t waste a second more than you need to. Jimin doesn’t spare a glance at the carnage left behind. Nothing he hasn’t seen a hundred times before. All blood bleeds the same, but he still wonders, foolishly, if his looks different to you. If it feels wrong when it stains your hands and seeps into your clothes.

Jimin has never been covered in your blood before, but he likes to think it would.

The two of you don’t speak until you’re in the quiet safety of yet another hotel room, chain lock thrown across the door, deadbolt secured. A small arsenal of weapons is retrieved from ankles and waistbands and cleaned and packed away meticulously. Jimin’s the one who makes the call to Namjoon, tells him in code that the job’s done. You’ve barely broken a sweat, but under the fluorescent light of the bathroom, Jimin can see a small smattering of blood just along your temple when he closes the distance between you.

Someone else’s, of course.

Anyone who made you bleed your own blood wouldn’t be a quick, clean kill. Jimin would make sure of that.

There’s less to be done about the half-inch scar in the hollow of your throat—a pearlescent reminder of the twin scar he has just below his navel; a callback to the day your devilish mouth said the words Jimin can’t stop thinking about.

“No can do, angel. Yoongi here knows I only have eyes for our Jiminie.”

Maybe it’s stupidity. Maybe it’s the feral, years-long build up that’s been simmering between the two of you—low enough to keep warm, contained enough to never evolve into a rapid boil. Maybe Jimin’s just finally desperate enough to go seeking out answers to questions he’s far too scared to put a voice to.

(Really, Jimin knows it’s adrenaline. Nothing more than chemicals. The two of you high on it, heads floating above the clouds. Powerless; or, at the very least, indifferent to stop the very clear path that’s unfolding on the ground below.)

But, god, he needs to know.

Needs answers.

Needs to know if there’s even a chance you feel it, too: the magnetic ebb and flow the two of you have been dancing around for years. If you see how fondly he looks at you. If you have any idea how easy it is for him to get lost in you. If you know he’d let someone put a bullet between his eyes before he placed his life in the hands of anyone else.

Jimin knows he loves you. He’s known it for a long time, just like he knows all those other things that are second nature to him. Loving you is easy and instinctual as much as it is painful and self-destructive.

At least that’s what he’d thought. Until your devilish mouth said those devilish words and sent him into a tailspin he’s yet to recover from.

You have to feel it. God, can’t you? The way the air crackles between you. The way his skin ignites with a simple look from you. The trembling of his fingers at his sides, desperate to just reach out and touch you—fingers that have been bathed in blood, that have taken life. Fingers that now just want to graze softly across your cheekbones, catch on your bottom lip. Fingers that want to hand you the world on a silver platter. Jimin would do anything for you, give you whatever you wanted. You wouldn’t even have to ask.

Can’t you feel that?

He needs to know.

Jimin is composed, elegant. He kills with grace and still maintains as much of his softness as he can. Isn’t ruled by emotion the way Yoongi and Jungkook are. But now, as he teeters on the edge of the unknown, all he wants to do is jump. Wants to buck all his training, all his resolve and forethought, and jump.

“Did you mean it?” he asks, voice thick. Fingers curl into the expensive silk of his shirt just so they have something to do—something to keep them from reaching out and touching you. “Back in Seoul.”

You’re the smartest person Jimin knows. When you ask, “Did I mean what, Chim?” he knows you’re fucking with him. Dragging this out. You know exactly what he’s asking and he knows you’ll never give anything away so easily.

“What you said to Taehyung,” he answers.

You tsk, eyebrows raising in intrigue. As much as Jimin trusts you, as well as you know him, know all those dirty, dirty secrets he’d never tell anyone else, he’s never been so bold with you. “That those long fingers of his would look good wrapped around my throat? Yeah, I meant that.”

Jimin’s jaw clenches at your taunt. “Don’t play games with me.”

A smirk graces your lips. “Trust me, sweetheart,” you say, voice sickly-sweet as the affection starts popping at the last seams holding him together, “if I wanted to play with you, there’s nothing you could do to stop it.”

With Jimin pressed into the wall behind you, you turn to meet his eye in the mirror. Another smile, teeth bared as you run your tongue across your lips, and this one is his undoing. Makes his cock twitch in his dress pants. Makes him bold. “Do you want to, then?” He takes a step forward—close enough to smell the gunpowder stuck to your clothes, your hair. Close enough for the sulfur and metal to sting his nostrils each time he breathes you in. “Do you want to play with me?”

You love Jimin. Maybe it’s a trauma bond or the implicit, unwavering trust the two of you have in one another, but you know you love him limitlessly. But you also know you can’t love him the way he loves you, the way he deserves to be loved by someone, which is why your mask slips as you say, “I can’t give you what you want, Jimin.”

You try to make him understand that. Really, you do—because Jimin is the smartest person you know, and you know he’s thought about every possible consequence down to the most minute detail and has decided this is worth it anyway. You want to believe in something the way Jimin believes in you, even though he’s wrong. You want something worth throwing all of this away for.

Maybe it’s Jimin, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just been so fucking long since someone has looked at you with any gentleness in their eyes at all that when Jimin meets your gaze and says, “I don’t want anything more than you’re willing to give,” you take his hand and jump, too.

And there’s nothing gentle about the first time.

It’s all raw, urgent need, Jimin trying desperately to convince himself it’s more than it is while you convince yourself it’s less.

It’s the two of you finally giving up and giving in, letting yourselves be pulled taut by that invisible string tying you together.

It’s Jimin’s sharp intake of breath when you fully step out of your clothes, the sight rendering him immobile. Whatever plans he’d had before seeing the curves of your body, all the scars from years of working by his side, the mottled yellow-greens and purples from the bruises lining your skin—he has no plans now. Can barely think. Wouldn’t be able to tear his eyes away from you with a gun to his head.

It’s the final bricks of the wall he’d built around himself—around his heart, around all those words and feelings he’d never put a voice to—crumbling into ash at his feet. Now he knows he can’t go back. Can’t return to a reality where this isn’t his truth. Where there’s no you and him, him and you. Where it’s just a physical exchange, a give-and-take, tit for tat.

And god, he knows he shouldn’t think like this; knows he’s keeping the truth buried somewhere deep behind lock and key.

…But now that he knows how it feels to move inside you, what else is he supposed to do?

You’re everywhere. Clenched around him. Your taste on his tongue. The feel of you on the pads of his fingers. The smell of you making a mockery of all logical thought. No—no, he can’t do a goddamn thing to stop the avalanche now it’s started.

“Fuck,” he whines, fingers digging into your hips. The soft skin he finds purchase in such a contrast from your hardened exterior, but Jimin knows. He knows you, knows the person behind the mask, sees straight through you each time it slips.

What stared back at him had always been just out of reach.

Taunting him.

Screaming come and get me, come make me yours, come and fucking take what you want.

Until now.

Now it’s tangible. Now it’s breathy, fractured moans that echo off tile walls. Now it’s the sound of his name thatleaves your lips like a prayer. Now it’s the sheen of sweat that covers both of you. Now it’s nails scraping down his back, tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck.

(And Jimin won’t tell you this, but those red welts are proof that this is real, this happened, and later on when he’s alone, when his mind is working overtime, he’ll look at them and he’ll smile. Because they’re real. Because this happened.)

Now, it’s the way blue becomes his favorite color. Because he can see his reflection in the mirror as he unravels and comes to his own demise as he spills inside of you; can see the fluorescent lights reflecting off the hue of his hair.

Jimin’s hair is blue when he realizes he’s in love with you.

[34.6037° S, 58.3816° W | Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA]

Jimin is blond when Namjoon sends you to South America.

The details had been scarce: a diplomatic advisor with a rap sheet of human rights violations that have been continuously swept under the rug and his equally-corrupt lawyer. A candid photograph paperclipped to another manila folder, Namjoon a fan of all those old cliches. Likes being a little cheeky that way when he can get away with it, because god knows he can’t get away with much, doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.

It’s a simple job. You and Jimin will have it dealt with in a matter of hours. Less if you’re lucky and the universe is agreeable. But the humidity sticks to your skin, has sweat seeping into your clothes and rolling down your temples, and if there’s one thing you can’t stand it’s the heat. Makes it hard to think. And Namjoon—Namjoon, who makes sure all of his agents want for nothing—is a cheap bastard. Rarely approves nice lodging, says it’s too risky despite your arguments to the contrary, that people don’t care what you do when you have money, so you’re stuck in some shithole motel room with an aircon unit that keeps blowing out stale, warm air.

And maybe you shouldn’t, maybe you should be more cognizant of Jimin and all his feelings, but it’s fucking hot, so you peel your shirt over your head and undo the button of your pants. Sit on the edge of the bed and try to think about anything other than the temperature, how it’s starting to prick uncomfortably at your skin.

Jimin clears his throat, keeps his eyes glued to the disgusting carpet. “Got a text from Seokjin-ssi,” he says, words strained. “Looks like they’ll be solo jobs.”

You groan. Leave it to Seokjin to change the plan at the last minute. “Tell Kim Seokjin he’s a useless piece of shit.”

“Done. Anything else?”

“Tell Kim Namjoon if he ever sends us to South America in the summer again I’ll kill him myself.”

Jimin has a laugh like an anodyne. A laugh that takes all those broken, bleeding parts of you and soothes over them like a balm. “Seokjin-ssi says he’s not passing along that particular message.”

“Tell him he’s a bitch, then.”

“He’ll kill me if I say that.”

“He hasn’t done field work in years and he’s probably too vitamin D deficient to leave the basement. He couldn’t even kill a fucking rat.”

There’s another laugh. More forced, less tinkling. You recognize it right away, the sound of anxiety. Solo jobs aren’t common for the two of you. For Yoongi and Taehyung, sure, but not you and Jimin. You’re a team for a reason, and though you’re more than capable of getting this done and out of the way, it doesn’t feel right. Settles in your gut like something rotten, knowing you’ll be without Jimin.

And you know he’s thinking it, too. How he turns the burner over and over in his hands, as if there’s some combination of words he can send back to Seoul to get Seokjin and Namjoon to reconsider. Plans don’t change often; not like this, anyway. These have been declared solos for a reason, and that’s a thought you can’t linger on too long.

“Are they leaving it up to us?” Jimin nods, still not meeting your eye. “Do you have a preference?”

He shrugs, tossing the phone on the small table in the corner. Nothing else to be done. “Not really. What do you think?”

“Nah, don’t care, either. Just toss me one.”

Santiago Aguirre… 47 years old… Resides in a high-rise luxury apartment in Retiro…

Your eyes skim the file, study the black and white photograph of the lawyer. Read over the list of all his high-profile, degenerate clients and all their high-profile crimes. You read about the previous attempts on his life, the seemingly never-ending list of people who want him dead. Your eyes go back to his photograph, frowning at the smug look on his face. What stares back at you is a man who thinks he’s invincible, who thinks a penthouse apartment on the top floor and a security team in the lobby means he’s impervious to harm. A man who has made money off people just like him: dirty, corrupt, hands stained red.

“Okay?” Jimin asks, looking up from his own file.

He’s so striking. So safe. And you know what he’s done, giving you the hit he thinks is easier, willing to risk himself on a solo mission to ensure you make it out. There’s no guarantees in this line of work, in life in general, but Jimin’s brand of selfless love is certainly one.

So you just nod, knowing someone slimy like this can quickly go sideways, and decide you can do the same.

“I’m gonna get ready,” you say. “The plan is the same as all the other solo jobs. Get in, get it done, get out as quickly as possible. Lay low. Don’t come straight back here.”

Jimin rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Anything else?”

You exhale. Try to quiet the nerves roiling in your stomach. Barely resist the urge to press a lingering kiss to Jimin’s forehead before you swallow hard and say, “Yeah. Stay alive.”

It comes out more like a plea.

—

You’re good at your job.

Rarely feel much guilt over it, either, which—well, you’re not sure what that means. That something is permanently broken in your psyche, probably. Being able to take life so easily and without remorse. It’s not natural.

Kim Namjoon is a man who plays God, is the one who decides who gets to live and who has to die. His word is the only law you adhere to. And that’s… that’s something. Makes it less burdensome, takes some weight off, because Kim Namjoon wouldn’t accept a morally-ambiguous job. He wouldn’t ask you to put your life on the line for some petty bullshit.

This is how you’ve lived for the last four years. Four years of blindly following Namjoon’s word, of being a good little soldier and doing whatever is asked of you. Four years of being responsible for not only your own life, but Jimin’s as well, just as he is for yours. Four years that have served you well, all things considered.

Until now.

Something about this job hits you hard. Doesn’t settle quite as quickly as the ones that have come before. For the first time, you’d looked down at the lifeless body at your feet and couldn’t stop the trembling, could barely quell the nausea. Thought what the fuck am I doing, what kind of life is this for the first time. Thought back to that day four years ago when Kim Namjoon saved your life and offered you a job and wondered, for the first time, what would’ve happened if you’d said no.

Now, as you suck on a cigarette, legs dangling off the roof of a building looking not far from collapse, a new thought:

Would Namjoon let you go if you asked?

He’s taken care of you. For four years you’ve wanted for nothing. Have socked away more money than you’ll ever be able to spend, even if you live to a thousand. You could go anywhere, become anyone, and no one would suspect a thing. There’d just be you and a million lifetimes’ worth of transgressions, alone under the weight of all that burden; alone, except for all the ghosts that come to greet you every time you close your eyes.

Doesn’t matter. Namjoon might be willing to let you go, give you the chance to salvage something from this life in the name of normalcy, but Yoongi would gladly put a bullet in your head before he let you disappear with all his secrets.

Doesn’t matter.

You stub out the cigarette and put the butt in your pocket. Make your way down to the street. Stay under the shadows—just visible enough to redirect any suspicion shot your way. You pretend to take a call, flawless Argentinian Spanish falling from your lips as you tell the imaginary person on the other end all about your fucked up day at work. How your manager never gets off your ass, doesn’t trust you, thinks you’re too fucking stupid to run a simple executable.

No one spares you a second glance.

Not here, on this nondescript street in a nondescript Argentinian neighborhood, and not when you stumble into the tiny lobby of your shithole motel. The poor kid behind the desk doesn’t even glance up, just mutters a good evening, miss under his breath that you return in a voice far too high-pitched to be your own.

Better to be seen and be unremarkable than draw attention to yourself trying to stay invisible, you figure.

The cameras in the stairwell are broken so you take the steps two at a time. Pull the room key from its place inside your boot, happy to no longer have it digging into your skin. Pause just long enough to make sure you don’t hear anything on the other side of the door before you’re unlocking it with your free hand wrapped around the trigger of your gun.

It’s empty.

Of course it is.

Jimin stashed the burner in a place no one but you would think to look. You text one simple word to Seokjin—Hey!—and you get two in return: Who’s this?

You know who it is, you fucking dickhead.

It takes a few seconds, but the reply is a simple—

Sorry.

Then you toss aside the phone and float in the darkness of the room. There’s nothing to do but wait, because you don’t dare to do anything alone. There’s sweat and blood and fuck knows what else stuck to your skin, your hair, but you can’t risk taking a shower. Can’t risk the water dampening your senses. Can’t risk being cornered in a moldy bathroom, only one way out. Can’t risk doing anything alone. Can’t take a fucking shower.

It’s this thought, more than anything else, that has your body flushing with rage.

What kind of life is this?

Namjoon had never mentioned repaying your debt. He’d never insinuated you owed him anything at all for saving your life, but you know something like that never comes for free. Namjoon doesn’t do anything just because. Has no goodness in his heart to do anything in the name of it. Watching Jimin nearly die in front of him had been the exception to his usual nature; a rare slip-up by an otherwise detached, uncaring man.

Still, whatever you owe him has surely been repaid by now. Tenfold, if the bloodstains along your collar are anything to go by.

It’s time for Namjoon to let you go.

—

Something is wrong.

Two hours have ticked by and there’s no word from Jimin. No word from Namjoon or Seokjin, either, which is the only reason you’re still in this nauseating motel room and not out on the streets searching for him. Solo jobs don’t go like this. The two of you are always in and out, tragically efficient. Back to where you started and then back on a plane, nothing left behind except a singular bullet hole and another fragmented piece of your conscience.

You’ve had a lot of jobs go wrong, but never two hours.

You’re about three minutes from coming out of your skin. Sick to your stomach with worry, anxiety weighing you down like an anchor. You wouldn’t be able to go out searching for Jimin like this even if you could, and there’s no point in dwelling on that, examining it further. All you can do is wait.

It’s another hour before you hear the click of the lock. You’re nearly on your knees in relief, but you stay rooted to the flimsy mattress. Try not to think about how you’ll have to sleep on it, even though you’ll be up half the night with residual worry. All those lingering ghosts.

Jimin doesn’t say anything, so neither do you.

[55.6761° N, 12.5683° E | Copenhagen, DENMARK]

Jimin’s hair is orange when you go to Copenhagen.

Not for a job, just to breathe. You wanted to see the city at Christmastime; Jimin’s never been.

You crack a joke. Point out buildings of similar color, have him stand in front of one as you take a picture. Everyone smiles when they pass the two of you on the street, Jimin’s eyes fond even though he rolls them as you pose him how you want. Still stands against an apricot-colored wall and flashes a smile and a peace sign, cheeks pink from the cold. Does a good job of pretending the two of you aren’t here just for fun, that this is something more.

It’s not.

The two of you fucked in a hotel room in Reykjavik and haven’t spoken a word of it since.

You nearly lost your mind over him in Buenos Aires and haven’t spoken a word of that, either.

Instead, his hand finds yours as the two of you walk around Tivoli Gardens. You marvel at the lights and Jimin marvels at you. You share mulled wine and spiced doughnuts. Jimin tries to drag you on the swings but you plant your feet and refuse, laughing through your refusals. As dangerous as your lives are, motion sickness might be the most. He gets his revenge and poses you in front of a giant nutcracker, then again in front of one of the endless Christmas trees.

Jimin pays for the two of you to decorate honey cakes. You’re surrounded by families with shrieking children and palpable adoration, and it’s all you can do not to wonder if anyone you’ve taken out had ever had something like this. Something that makes your soul warm; something that still lingers in your bones years later.

The two of you take a selfie when it starts to snow. It stings when you have no one to send it to, so it just lives in your phone. Maybe it’s enough.

On another day, Jimin holds your hand through Torvehallerne. This time you marvel at him while he marvels at all the food, eyes wide each time he turns to ask if he should buy something. You always say yes and he always shares, and it’s all you can do not to think about why you don’t have to budget yourselves. Why you’re able to walk through the market and buy whatever you want; how you could buy every item for sale and it wouldn’t make a dent.

(You pick up small trinkets for Taehyung and Jungkook. Not because you want to, but because it feels nicer than remembering that you have no one to buy gifts for. Not really. Not anymore.)

Jimin wants to ice skate, so you do. He holds your hand then, too. More out of necessity than anything else, and he has none of his usual grace. Someone hands you a free cup of hot chocolate, just because. Jimin pouts and then it’s his hot chocolate. It’s all you can do not to kiss away the whipped cream on the corner of his mouth.

Back in your lavish hotel, after countless days have blurred together and Jimin’s fresh from a shower, skin flushed, you finally ask yourself if it’s worth putting up such a fight. If it’s really all that bad to care for Jimin and be cared for in return. If it’s all that bad to be someone else, just for a little while: someone with a normal life who makes a normal living and has a normal capability to love. Someone who isn’t damaged beyond repair.

That will never be you. Not fully, and certainly not in this lifetime, but maybe it could be, a little.

“Jimin,” you say, because you need to try. Jimin loves you in ways you’ll never understand, and you want to be better for him. “We should talk.”

Your voice is small and hesitant, and Jimin hates it. Sees trouble where there’s only vulnerability, so he misreads. Shakes his head. Takes a risk and stands between your legs at the edge of the bed—yours, because there’s two—as he tilts your head back, thumbs pressing into the contours of your cheeks. The scar still sits in the hollow of your throat, and that version of you feels so far away. That life feels so far away.

There’s no violence here. There’s no blood, no fugues. There’s just you and Jimin, whose voice is small like yours when he shakes his head and says, “You should kiss me instead.”

The second time is nothing like the first.

Jimin moves delicately. Feels like silk lace, tastes like spun sugar. Moves both his mouth and his body fluidly, no hesitation, yet he still takes his time. Still pauses to look at you with endless devotion; with awed reverence. Makes a map of your body and marks all his favorite places with his lips.

“Tell me what you want,” he says. Speaks the words against the skin just beneath your ear. “Anything. I’ll give you whatever you want, just have to ask.”

What you want isn’t tangible, isn’t possible, so you stay quiet. Thread your fingers through Jimin’s hair, gasp when he mouths along the column of your throat. Jimin reserves all his softness for you. Bathes you in it. Would kill anyone to keep it that way.

So you say, “Want your mouth,” and let slip a quiet moan when he gives you what you’ve asked for. When he situates himself between your thighs and sucks and licks until you’re writhing, making a mess, grasping fruitlessly at the sheets, his hair, his shoulders, only calming when his hands find yours and your fingers interlock.

Jimin mouths at you until you’re trembling. Until you’re needy and desperate, hips moving on their own, fucking yourself against his face. Until nothing exists except the heat in your belly, the stars behind your eyelids, the heady, fucked-out sound of Jimin’s voice as he talks you through it, murmurs praise against your cunt.

Jimin mouths at you until you forget.

This isn’t your life. This is not something you can have.

But, in the grand scheme of things, what does it matter? You’ve made peace with death, and there’s only one of two ways it’s going to come for you in the end: by Namjoon’s hand or someone else’s. So what does it matter?

This time, Jimin fucks you slow. Kisses you with your taste still in his mouth. Thumbs over a hardened nipple just to see what earns him a reaction, and what you truly want is more time—something else that’s impossible.

Jimin’s hair is orange when you think you might be in love with him.

[ 48.8566° N, 2.3522° E | Paris, FRANCE ]

Jimin’s hair is pink when—

“Sit,” he says, gesturing to the toilet.

Soaks a washcloth in warm water. Wrings it out. Stands in front of you, and there’s water dripping onto the floor and Jimin doesn’t care, doesn’t seem to see anything in this moment except for you, your hands covered in someone else’s blood, and he reaches out, gently grabs your wrist. Palm up. Someone else’s blood. Everything smells like copper and iron. Looks too surreal beneath the fluorescent lights of this hotel bathroom for your mind to make sense of it.

There is care in the way Jimin cleans your hands. There is tenderness in the way he both refuses to see what you really are and the way he’s the only one to ever see you so entirely, when you look down at the blood he’s washing away and all you can see is stigmata. When all you see is sin.

“I know you don’t love me,” he says, and there is a conviction in his words that stuns you into silence. “Not the way I love you, anyway.”

That tenderness is still there as he says this. As he presses the wet fabric into the meat of your palm, wipes the stains away, and the warmth is as calming as it is undeserved. It feels like something forbidden. It feels like salvation and condemnation all at once, like whatever sick depravity permeates you is contagious, will take over Jimin, too, just from touching you.

Jimin is close enough to reach out and touch. Close enough to see the violence that he exists in alongside you: the rips in his clothes, the scars that decorate his skin. Close enough to know he smells sickly-sweet, just like death. Your hand shakes as it reaches for him and never follows through. Doesn’t want to contaminate him.

“I do,” you finally say. Whatever is in your voice is not conviction. “I can’t.” You suck in a breath, try to steady your breathing. This is where it all comes crashing down, you think, because in all the years you’ve done Namjoon’s bidding, you’ve never cried. You can take life so freely and without thought, but you cannot love Jimin. “Someone like me isn’t capable of it.”

Jimin pauses, the washcloth stuck in the space between your ring and middle fingers. “And who is someone like you?”

Water is still dripping to the floor. Serosanguineous: blood tainting something untouched. Not something one thing or another but both, watery-pink. Looks like Jimin’s hair. “I’ve killed a lot of people,” you answer. “More than I can count. More than I can name. More than the ones that come to haunt me at night.” Your free hand moves to your chest, covers your heart. “There’s nothing here, Jimin. I’m not sure there ever was.”

The washcloth drops to the floor, and all that blood belonging to a man whose name you never bothered to learn before you put a bullet between his eyes finds a new place to rest. “I think,” he begins, clasping your unclean hand in his own, voice dropping to a whisper, “you forget, sometimes.” You gasp as he places your palm to his cheek, drags it across his face, smears a stranger’s blood across his skin. “That we’re the same.”

Jimin is always overwhelming, but the love he has for you is even more so. It consumes you entirely, embeds itself beneath your skin, makes a home, would tear you apart, body and soul, to return to him.

[ 47.4979° N, 19.0402° E | Budapest, HUNGARY ]

Jimin’s hair is lavender when it all goes to shit.

“You’re being followed.”

Seokjin’s voice is garbled through the earpiece, tinny and metallic, and you roll your eyes. Some things don’t need to be said, because you’ve known someone was following you for the last three blocks. Average height, black peacoat, close-cropped haircut. Not the kind of person that’d stand out here, and that’s exactly why you’d sent Jimin in the other direction.

“No shit,” you respond in Hungarian, because you already know the man following you doesn’t speak or understand it. “Give me somewhere to go.”

It takes Seokjin a few moments to run the translation. “There’s a side street up on your right,” he answers. “It’s tight, but there’s an alleyway at the end. You can buy some time if you’re quick.”

“Where’s Jimin?”

You pass a vendor selling lángos and duck into the street behind the stall. Just as Seokjin had said, there’s a small alleyway up on the left, and your footfall is near-silent as you break into a sprint to reach it. “Safe,” is all Seokjin says.

You take a second to steady your breathing, knowing you’re good on time—the man following you was close enough to know where you’d turned, but, if you’re lucky, not much after that. That plays on a loop: if you’re lucky, if you’re lucky, if you’re lucky. What is luck, what does it look like, in a life left entirely to chance? In a life with no guarantees?

You tuck yourself away, focus on Seokjin’s metallic breaths. Think about his basement in Seoul, why he’s in it. Ask, “What happened in Addis Ababa?” because it feels important to know.

There’s not much you know about Seokjin’s life. Whatever happened in Ethiopia had been before your time, reduced to hushed whispers and gossip fodder after your arrival. No one spoke of it, Seokjin especially, but every now and then something would slip in the same way weeds grow in sidewalk cracks.

A job gone wrong. A bombing at the consulate with Seokjin inside.

His reply is simple, words spoken carefully: “I loved someone once, too.”

He can’t see it, but you nod nonetheless; an answer that doesn’t require a response, because you know. It’s enough to fill in the rest. What Seokjin’s trauma looks like. Why he doesn’t do field work anymore. Why he prefers the solitude of the basement, rarely a sound beyond the electric thrum of the server racks.

Who had gone in to retrieve him, and why Yoongi has the scar over his eye.

“You loved someone,” you conclude, “and he would’ve been willing to die for you.”

“Yes,” Seokjin says, and it’s like the word’s been punched out of him. Sounds like something repressed, something left to rot in the darkest corner of the world.

Love, to Seokjin, looks and sounds the same as death.

“I think most people spend their entire lives searching for a love like that,” he continues, and if you could see him you think he might look dazed, off-kilter. You think he might be an avatar. Seokjin is prying his ribcage apart, unwrapping the barbed wire from his heart, saying I once was in love and this is all I know of it. “But, to me, in this life, it’s a prison. Once someone is willing to die for you, how do you keep them alive? How do you—I kissed that skin. I worshiped it. I pressed my lips to it with whatever softness was left in me. How do you look at that same skin and know you’re the reason it’s mangled?” He exhales, all tremor. “You can’t. You can’t.”

You know this all too well. You know what it feels like to look at Jimin and know, intrinsically and subconsciously, that you wouldn’t even hesitate. You’d take and give life to keep him alive and safe. You know that when you exit this world at someone else’s hand his face is the last thing you want to see.

You know it’s a liability.

You know it’s a target painted on your back. Between your eyes.

You know there’s nothing left to say, that this particular conversation has run its course. The two of you sit in an amicable silence, and you hope Seokjin can hear the life that surrounds you, however mundane. Hope he can hear the lángos vendor trying to hawk his goods; hope he can hear a city 8,000 kilometers away; hope he can hear these regular, everyday people going about their lives and remember there’s hope beyond his four walls.

I think you’d like it here, you think, but you don’t dare to say it aloud.

Time passes in a meaningless blur. Could be minutes, could be hours. No one’s come to kill you, so you reckon you’ve long since been in the clear. And maybe it speaks to Seokjin’s idea that love is a prison, because you know something’s happened to Jimin long before Seokjin speaks it into existence.

You’re up and out of the alleyway before you’re told to move. Have no idea where you’re going, but you’re racing through the streets of Budapest with a panic you haven’t ever felt in your life. Feels like quicksand; feels like molasses; feels like you have to wade through all the blood you’ve spilled, now congealed, to get to him.

“Where am I going?” you demand. Your lungs are on fire. In the split-second of silence it becomes a desperate scream. “Seokjin, tell me where the fuck I’m going!”

“The—fuck, the wa-warehouse up on your right.” You can’t think about why he’s crying. “I don’t—I don’t know wha-what’s there, you need to be careful. Please, you have to—”

Twenty seconds and you’ll be there, you’ll be with Jimin, you just need to keep running. You need to keep your head on straight. Remember your training. Remember you’ve built a life in a viper pit.

A man in a uniform is unloading a shipment around the back of the building. Faces away from you, bent at the waist. Takes very little effort to smash his head into the stone exterior and knock him unconscious, pocket his badge. You can’t get stupid now. Tell Seokjin to make sure all the cameras are cut, ask what floor when you shut yourself inside the freight elevator, unwilling to take the stairs and run into anyone who might be waiting. All the way to the top, he says, so all the way to the top you go.

—

Over the course of your life, you’ve made peace with death. Have stared it in the eye more times than you can count. Have dealt it out, evaded it, shook its hand.

You are wholly unprepared for the sight that greets you.

Red. Everything is red—the walls, the floor, what used to be a beautiful parquet pattern in the wood. In the center of the room: two bodies, maybe three. Not much that’d be able to identify them beyond a pile of teeth, no saying whose is whose. Slaughterhouse scraps.

And this is not—Jimin doesn’t work this way. Isn’t his MO. Jimin’s kills are elegant and neat, topped with a bow. What you see before you is ultraviolence. It is unhinged, it is fury, it is a complete loss of control. It’s what love looks like to Jimin, because he sits at the very edge of a rotted chair, legs crossed. Face streaked with blood, clothes covered in it.

“Jimin,” you say, because what else is there?

He tilts his head to the side, smirks a little, looks at you beneath his lashes. Eyes that used to find you across a room and calm you. Eyes that have locked onto you in the throes of pleasure. Eyes you’ve seen yourself reflected in, bathed in love and adoration.

Eyes that now contain nothing.

“Jimin, what the fuck happened?”

He removes his gloves with his teeth and doesn’t flinch away from the taste of iron. “They said they hurt you,” he states simply, “so I did what needed to be done.”

“What—” Nausea claws at your throat; for the first time, it’s all too much. This isn’t Jimin. This isn’t your Jimin, who smiled as you posed him against apricot walls in Copenhagen, who took a bullet to the stomach to protect you and never, ever told you. This is not the Jimin who wasted the last of his goodwill on loving you. “What did you do?” you whisper.

He rises to full height and it makes you flinch. You are scared of Jimin for the first time in your life: scared of who he is in this moment, what he’s capable of. And he sees it, lets that brand of anguish overtake him. Reaches for you before he decides against it and lets his hand drop to his side. Says, “I would never hurt you,” as if the words could brand themselves into your skin so you’d never forget.

“No, you’d just—” You squeeze your eyes shut. Don’t think about how one of the men nearly embedded into the floor was the one trailing you earlier.

Instead, you think about Seokjin: Once someone is willing to die for you, how do you keep them alive? You think about: How do you look at that same skin and know you’re the reason it’s mangled? You think about: In this life, it’s a prison.

You drop to your knees. Let the blood seep through your clothes and into your skin, undeserving of shying away from it.

Namjoon should’ve let you go.

You think about the men in front of you. Who they were, who they loved. The grief all of this is going to leave behind, and it becomes impossible to breathe. You grasp at your throat, think about all the times you’ve been strangled and who’d been there to cut the rope. There is no limit to Jimin’s devotion, and you understand now, how it drove Yoongi to madness. How he loved someone so much he would’ve retrieved their corpse from a building and how that same person can no longer bear to look at the damage they’d caused.

“This isn’t love, Jimin,” you choke out.

He stands in front of you. Stigmata. You’re worshiping at the altar of some kind of devil. At least his hands are clean when he places his fingers beneath your chin, forces you to look up at him. “What is it, then?”

“Destruction.”

A quiet huff of cruel laughter. “See, this is the difference between me and you, darling.” He takes back his hand, runs it through his blood-streaked hair, and your chin sags to your chest without his support. “Because I already knew that. Because I have destroyed myself every single day loving you.” He squats down, eye-level, and he says, “I need you to listen to me when I say this, sweetheart: you do not love me the way I love you, because I would do worse. When it comes to you, there is nothing on this earth I would not destroy to keep you safe.”

He clears his throat. Collects whatever’s in his mouth and spits onto one of the bodies. “If this is enough to have you tucking your fucking tail between your legs, then go, because this doesn’t even scratch the fucking surface.”

You can’t bring yourself to say anything, and sometimes that says it all.

Jimin presses a kiss to the top of your head. Makes a call. Cleaners will be here soon, he says, better get going.

You watch him go.

[ 37.5665° N, 126.9780° E | Seoul, SOUTH KOREA ]

Jimin’s hair is black when Namjoon calls the meeting.

He takes the seat across from Namjoon’s desk because they don’t meet like this often. Assignments are usually manila folders slipped under doors, hushed whispers in hallways confirmed with a nod or a text on a burner phone. Assignments are not last-minute assemblies in conference rooms and offices.

But the way Namjoon is looking at him, with his clenched jaw and a gaze that’s meant to look barbed to anyone who doesn’t actually know him—Jimin doesn’t need to ask what this is about.

Had he bothered to look, he would’ve known by the way you stood in the far corner of the room, face obscured by the mid-afternoon shadows. Yoongi’s close to you, for some reason: dressed head to toe in black, perched on a lateral file cabinet, using a metal corner to sharpen his switchblade. Just like a harbinger of death. Some sort of fucked up omen, a warning that’s come too late.

Didn’t I tell you this would end badly, he hears Yoongi taunt in his head. This is what happens when you lay with trash.

Easy for Yoongi to say when he doesn’t know what it means to be cared for by you. Doesn’t know how it feels to give in to the freefall and plummet at your feet, stripped back and laid bare. Doesn’t know how it feels to kiss secrets into your skin like constellations, to map his tongue along every unspoken confession.

Easy for Yoongi to say, because he doesn’t have to survive the aftermath. Doesn’t have to feel the heartbreak, the agony of having you and watching as you slip through his fingers. Yoongi doesn’t have to struggle just to breathe, doesn’t have to endure the nights staring at the ceiling, watching as the daylight creeps into the corners of his vision. Doesn’t have to watch you looking so unaffected.

“Jimin.” Namjoon’s tone is flat, needlelike.

Behind him, Yoongi chuckles lowly. “What?” Jimin asks, his gaze trained on the painting behind Namjoon’s head. Looks like one he’d seen in Berlin, the time the two of you had gone just because and spent an afternoon ducking in and out of museums to escape the rain.

When he closes his eyes, he still sees the raindrops stuck to your eyelashes. The beads of water rolling off the sleeves of your leather jacket. How blinding your smile had been. The laughter in your voice as you ordered beer after beer after beer for the two of you in flawless Berlinisch. A brief, fleeting glimpse at normalcy. At the kind of life the two of you could have if you were just… different. Lived different lives. Were different people.

“You’ve gotten sloppy.”

Namjoon’s words are a cold bucket of water. Snap him back to reality, yank him back to the present where he’s forced to leave those river-lined streets behind. You’re silent and Yoongi’s still snorting laughter. “Okay,” is all Jimin can bring himself to say.

Jin had gotten sloppy once, too, and Namjoon stuck him down in the basement to work logistics. Might not be so bad, Jimin reckons. He’d be away from you, spared of this fucking misery. “So you know that’s unacceptable.”

Jimin just shrugs, resigned to his fate, whatever it may be. “I’m reassigning the both of you,” Namjoon continues. “You’ll both have new partners for your next assignments, since you clearly can no longer be trusted together.”

“Who?” Jimin manages to choke out.

Namjoon raises an eyebrow, clearly having expected an argument. “You’re being sent to Shanghai with Jungkook. You,” he says, turning his attention to you, “are going to Moscow with Taehyung.”

She’s fond of Taehyung, Jimin wants to say. But you’d been fond of him too, once upon a time, and that’d only ended in heartbreak, so who fucking cares.

They’re cruel, the tricks Jimin’s mind plays on him. How he convinces himself you look pained. How his fingers wring together at the thought of entrusting his life in the hands of someone else, someone new. At your life being just as at stake; at Taehyung being tasked with keeping you alive. Would you die for him, too, the way you’d always told Jimin you would for him? Would Taehyung take a bullet to the stomach to keep you safe the way Jimin had?

Even more cruel is the way you scoff, pushing yourself off of the wall as you fold your arms across your chest and say, “That’s bullshit, Kim Namjoon.”

No one talks to Namjoon that way except you.

Yoongi’s knife stops twirling. Just like a bird sensing a storm, senses on high-alert as he flicks his gaze over to you. “I’m sorry?” Namjoon says. “What part of Jimin losing his mind and nearly outing all of us seems like bullshit to you?”

“Hm, let me think,” you retort, a manicured finger tapping against the hollow of your cheek. “The part where you’re reassigning me for someone else’s mistake?”

Which part was the mistake? Jimin wants to ask. Needs to know how much you regret. Was sleeping with you the mistake? Falling in love with you? Getting too caught up in all these daydreams and letting reality get away from him?

“This organization is more important than Park Jimin getting his goddamn dick wet,” Namjoon snaps. “Keeping all of you safe—keeping you alive—is more—”

You scoff. Take an entire container of gasoline and pour it right on top of Namjoon’s flammable ire. “Then perhaps you’d be so kind as to explain to me why Min fucking Yoongi can fuck damn near everyone in this establishment, yet I have to sit here and listen to your goddamn mouth—”

Jimin doesn’t think Yoongi even knows his arm is moving.

There’d just been the trading of barbed words. His own name being spoken into the ether. Yoongi’s arm moving away from his body, switchblade clasped tightly between his fingers as he plunges it into your flesh.

Jimin watches it puncture your arm in slow motion. Feels the bile in his throat, the heat in his belly. Looks first at Namjoon whose jaw has gone slack, skin pale, as he stammers over words that won’t come. Then he looks at Yoongi—expects to find shock or guilt but finds only a muted disinterest and flared nostrils.

Finally, he looks at you. Watches the white cotton sleeve of your shirt slowly turn red and sticky-wet. Watches as your lips move around syllables and vowels and consonants Jimin can’t decipher.

“—fucking piece of shit, this is my favorite shirt! I’ll never get all this goddamn blood out of it—”

Jimin thinks he hears Yoongi say you deserve it. But Jimin isn’t really thinking much as he clambers out of his chair and moves in Yoongi’s direction. Doesn’t think at all as he lets instinct take over, lets adrenaline steer him headfirst into yet another bad idea.

He’s always known there’d come a day he’d be face-to-face with the sight of your blood. Had always known it’d come from someone else’s hand. Had always promised himself that hurting you would be the last thing anyone ever did.

Jimin has his fingers wrapped around Yoongi’s throat and he finally understands it—the joy Yoongi finds in taking life.

“What’s the matter, Jimin-ah?” Yoongi taunts. Jimin tightens his grip. Suddenly hates that fucking scar across Yoongi’s eye. “You’re never on clean-up duty. Always make your girlfriend do the dirty work. Finally grew some fucking balls, huh?”

“Fuck you,” Jimin says stupidly. Can’t think of anything more to say. Not that he needs to. Wrapping your hands around someone’s throat sends enough of a message, he thinks.

Namjoon’s still tongue-tied as you yank Yoongi’s blade from your arm, immediately pressing your other hand over the wound to stem the bleeding. The sight of your blood is making Jimin dizzy; the smell of the iron hanging in the air. All he wants to do is choke the life out of the man in front of him, but more than that, he just wants to hold your hand. Wants to comfort you, even though he knows you don’t need it. Not from him, not from anyone, but he still wants to. Wants to press his lips to the sweat at your brow.

And Yoongi can see it, too, because he starts laughing. It’s an odd, fractured noise. Jimin isn’t sure if he’s ever heard him laugh before, decides he also hates the way it sounds. Feels all wrong watching it leave his crooked smirk. Makes Jimin’s stomach plummet to the ground.

“Oh, you’re fucked, aren’t you?” Yoongi teases around Jimin’s slackened grip. “You weren’t just fucking her, you’re in love with her.”

Weird how Jimin is the one with his hands around someone’s neck and feels like he’s the one suffocating.

[ 31.2304° N, 121.4737° E | Shanghai, CHINA ]

Jimin watches the life drain from an innocent woman’s face and feels nothing.

Jimin watches Jungkook cut a man down and feels even less.

When it’s over, he cleans up wordlessly and doesn’t eat for three days.

[ 37.5665° N, 126.9780° E | Seoul, SOUTH KOREA ]

Jimin’s hair has faded to brown by the time he returns from Shanghai.

The more complicated job had gone to you and Taehyung. Jimin had tried not to take it personally. The Russian hits are always unnecessarily violent and Jungkook still isn’t fully trained. There’s still a phantom pain in Jimin’s stomach that warns him of the consequences of taking on more than he can chew. So, sure, Shanghai had gone fine, but his mind had been nearly 7,000 kilometers away the entire time.

Good thing he’d returned to Seoul unscathed, too, because he’s sure Namjoon would’ve eliminated him without a moment’s hesitation if he’d fucked up again.

But Shanghai had only served to prove the leader right. Jimin can’t work with you anymore. Can’t focus, can’t stomach the violence, can’t keep his goddamn head on straight.

He sighs as he glances at Jungkook to his right. Jimin had watched him murder two men in cold blood not even thirty-six hours ago and now he’s doe-eyed and sucking down his third banana milk of the morning. It really makes his head spin, being paired with this grown-up infant of a man now instead of you, but for all of Jungkook’s apparent shortcomings, he’d kept Jimin alive. He isn’t dead.

And then you walk in with Taehyung and he wishes he was.

Because you’re laughing and Taehyung’s got his arm slung around your shoulder and you look happy. It’s the kind of happiness that should be contagious, bloom warmth in his chest, but it doesn’t. It just takes the last frayed strand of hope he has and sets flame to it.

You don’t look like you miss Jimin at all. Don’t look like you’ve lost sleep or skipped meals.

“Didn’t take you long, did it?” Jimin says, because he’s wounded and lashing out. Not because he means it.

You must know he doesn’t, too, because you don’t react. “Watch your mouth, Park Jimin,” Taehyung warns, because he doesn’t know, and this only sets Jimin off more. You don’t need defending. Or had you, and Jimin had simply thought it wasn’t his place to provide it? That you wouldn’t want it?

“Or what, Kim Taehyung?”

Taehyung is cherubic. It’s part of his charm, one of many reasons why he’s so effective. If you’re looking to die, you look for the guy who looks like Yoongi, not the one who smiles wide and warm like Taehyung. So when he sets his jaw and pokes his tongue into his cheek and says, “Or I’ll cut your fucking head off, you stupid fuck,” your attention is finally piqued.

“I’m so sick of this,” Jungkook wails, banana milk tossed carelessly in the trash. “All of you need to get your fucking shit together!”

Taehyung rolls his eyes at the same time you pretend to inspect your nails. “Is that why you’re so temperamental, Chim?” Taehyung prods, looking every bit the pretentious, murderous angel he is. “Because you got sent to China on a babysitting mission while the grownups did real work?”

“Fuck you,” Jungkook snaps, rising to full height. “I’m not a fucking child.”

“Oh? Could’ve fooled me.” Taehyung’s words are razor-sharp and smell like kerosene. “Tell me, then: were you on babysitting duty? Had to look after our precious little Jiminie while he nursed his broken heart?”

You sigh, full of faux-exasperation, and place a gentle hand on Taehyung’s forearm. Dig your nails in just enough to be a warning, and if Jimin hadn’t been looking he’d miss it: the way Taehyung deflates instantly, anger dissipating like smoke, back in control. Just because you’d touched him. Just because you were there. Jimin knows that touch, how it feels to be under your control, and it makes his chest ache. Makes everything feel like it’s sitting wrong in his stomach, and he’s either going to be sick all over Namjoon’s overpriced fucking rug or wrap his hands around Taehyung’s throat the way he’d done to Yoongi.

He’s out of his goddamned mind; he feels untethered. Helpless. Like it was always going to end like this, and maybe Jimin knew that and had just ignored it. Maybe now he’s paying the price—maybe he’s finally found something he can’t afford.

Jungkook’s still going off, nasty gaze set on Taehyung because he’s the only one playing along. They’re exchanging words Jimin can’t make heads nor tails of. Words he doesn’t care about. Words that ring empty and hollow because they sound nothing like the way you say his name. Shapeless, unlike the way your lips move around those syllables.

“Jimin,” you say, the sound finally registering and bringing him back down to earth. All he can do is stare. “Can we talk?” Taehyung and Jungkook are still trading barbs.

Wonders how he got here. Looks around the room and wonders if each and every one of them is destined for this same fate, this madness. Wants to tell you why he forgot his vest, why he was three hours late in Argentina. Wants to grovel and beg and leave this place and never look back.

More than anything, he wants to know what it feels like to actually be human.

So he shakes his head. Tries not to be haunted by the way your face falls at the rejection.

There is a scar on his abdomen and a scar on your arm that both tell the same story. There is a man in the basement who is in love with a man above ground and is too weighed down by guilt to do anything about it. There is a man here who plays god, has soldiers to do his bidding, and there is very little here that Jimin has only for himself.

The two of you will have that conversation, but he needs to be human, first.

[ 34.6901° N, 135.1956° E | Kobe, JAPAN ]

This is a waste of your fucking time.

Whatever Namjoon had thought would be here doesn’t seem to exist. Yoongi can barely tolerate you on a good day, threatens to stick a dagger in your neck at least twice an hour, but the more time the two of you waste chasing ghosts, the closer he comes to unraveling entirely.

“Stop fucking staring at me,” he snaps, blowing the smoke of his cigarette right in your face.

You tut. “But you’re so beautiful, Yoongi, I just can’t help it.”

He digs his switchblade from his boot. Makes a show of flipping it open. “I can cut your fuckin’ eyes out of your skull,” he intones. “Maybe that’ll help.”

In your ear, Jimin’s laughter rings like crystal.

Ricochets off of all the corners of Seokjin’s basement, makes the echo sound warped through the earpiece. “Please tell Yoongi-ssi to keep an eye on the man with the shaved head. In front of him, roughly sixty degrees to his right.”

You relay the message. Watch as Yoongi transforms—sharpened gaze, rigid posture, disappears into the shadows. More apex predator than man. “And me?” you ask.

“Backup,” comes Seokjin’s voice. “We haven’t found your mark yet.”

You hum. Pick up the cigarette Yoongi left behind and stick it between your lips. Smoke it nearly to the filter. “You got it, boss,” you tease, just because it flusters him.

“I’m—that’s not—knock it off.”

Exhale. Stub out the cigarette. Butt in your pocket. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Jimin says, and his voice is soft, sounds like spun sugar. “Stay alive, all right?”

Jimin’s hair isn’t dyed at all.

if you've read this far: thank you so, so much! i am more appreciative than i can put into words. this is very different from what i typically write, but i hope you enjoyed it nonetheless.

i would love to hear your thoughts if you have any. <3

[writerseclipse1]

✎ doctor!abby headcanons ✎

she would definitely be a heart surgeon or a cardiothoracic surgeon to be more exact. she would have the steadiest hands known in all of seattle. a very notable and arguably the best surgeon in all of seattle’s finest hospitals but most especially in washington general hospital.

she likes her coffee black, sometimes with a hint of sugar but that’s for the shorter days. for her night shifts, black coffee keeps her awake until the most outrageous times in the night.

she would first meet you, a medtech who works in the same hospital, during one of her night shifts. you would be typing away at your computer, analyzing data samples for other doctor, heaving a sigh as you sipped on your fourth coffee of the day.

she never noticed you before, mainly because she worked on the west side of the building. but since nora, the medtech assigned to the west building wasn’t clocked in, she had no choice but to resort to going all the way to the east building to find the other medtech.

“hey,” she said suddenly, making you jump in your seat. when you turned around, you saw her in all her glory, standing there with her white coat on and her blue scrubs. “can you analyze these samples for me? need them done by tonight, really urgent.”

you had rolled your eyes, muttering under your breath about how “medtechs are really underappreciated” and “a good evening would’ve sufficed” but you took the samples from her anyway, putting it in your machine as you crossed your arms over your chest, sipping on your coffee.

“i’m sorry, are you new here? i don’t think i’ve seen you before.” she asked, watching as you looked at her from above the rim of your cup.

you told her your name and when she tilted her head at you, you knew she’s never heard of you. “i don’t expect some hotshot surgeon knowing about me honestly. i just kind of come and go. i do my job and i leave, that’s it.” you shrugged as she nodded along.

“well, for the sake of an introduction,” she stepped forward into the dim lighting of the room and you could make out her muscles bulging out of her white coat, her right hand outstretched to shake yours. “i’m dr. anderson.”

you shook hands and made some small talk. she found out that you lived alone in a nice apartment, you’re thinking of getting a pet, and you really like music. you found out she has a dog, her dad used to be a neurosurgeon, she went to the gym more often that not (not that you needed her confirmation to know), and that she used to live in salt lake city.

“what made you move?” she chuckled at your question, her eyes darting to the machine as it beeped, showing the green light that the results were ready. but she wasn’t ready to leave the conversation just yet.

“my dad had to find a new place to work. i don’t really know what happened, i just know that whatever did, we had to move because of it.” she shrugged as you nodded along, placing your cup of coffee on your table and you turned around, taking the results and giving it to her.

“well, it was nice meeting you, dr. anderson.” you mused, sending her a wink as you got your cup of coffee again, watching the smoke lift up into the air. she chuckled lightly, looking at you with a curious grin

“abby. call me abby.”

‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾ a/n: was supposed to be writing my tess s. x reader but then i got distracted while looking for nice pictures for the header so here's doctor!abby hcs

[dokkamj]

ALL MINE.

-before read! THIS IS 18+ STORY MDNI

again, english is not my native language sorry for grammar errors etc, enjoy.

(i found this pic on Pinterest, i don’t know who to give credits at, sorry)

-

One word, forbidden.

Simon was watching you while you two were in the woods.

You were damn beautiful, how could you be so divine without doing anything?

You were to be protected at all costs, you were his without even knowing it, you don't know exactly how long this had been going on, with your superior, with your lieutenant.

But you couldn't help yourself. of him and his stolen glances, of the sweet words he whispered to you when others were turned away, when your hands caressed under the table in long meetings.

The palm of his hand on your cheek as he stroked your lips with his thumb and pulled you against him to kiss you and play with your hair.

He was damn obsessed whit you.

“how was ya’ day?” he asks you in a murmur, you wrapped your arms around his hips “good, you know i saved some life’s” you said and chuckle, he smiles at you caressing your neck.

“Oh, now don’t flatter your self” he said rolling his eyes, you were so tiny in his arms, 5’5 and he was 6’6, the difference in weight and height where noticeable, another thing that turn him on.

you two met for the first time in the field on the front lines. Simon was wounded in the shoulder for a bullet, his team dragged him to the arranged triage, and you had been the first one to notice him and take care of him back then.

the sexy medic notice him.

and even when he finds out that you where his submitted and he was your boss he couldn’t help himself breaking the rules and do what he can to put a smile on your lips.

“how about you?” you asks caressing his chin covered by his skull balaclava “hmm, a lot of paperwork’s” he muttered as he breath in your scent, his sweet little thing.

you two start to walk in the woods where Simon had his house, nothing too special but it was comfortable enough for the both of you. He make a copy of his keys for you, so when you had your days off or when you need some intimacy you can come here even without him.

It was true that you wasn’t that comfortable, still going around on your tiptoes make sure to don’t break anything.

And you take care of the house too, cleaning, change sheets, make sure that he always have his favorite whiskey on stock. You two sat on the porch on the little couch.

He pull you closer on top of him, so you where now sat on his lap, on his thick tights.

It was late afternoon, the weather was warm and there was that gentle breeze “look at ya’ so pretty” he murmur on your neck before place a kiss under your ear, you chuckle gently pressing your back against his chest.

you go grab a glass of whisky for him and an iced tea for yourself then go back to sat on him. “thank ya’ pretty girl” he said before kiss your cheek in a caring way rubbing your things with a hand and with the other sip his whisky.

“ya’know i could get used to this, me and ya’” he said as he look at you, damn you were something else “then keep being a good lieutenant for me and i won’t go anywhere” you tease him a bit with a small smirk on your face.

“oh is that so, ya’ little fucking thing” he murmur as he squeeze your tights roughly, you light up a cigarette, looking at him with your beautiful eyes, fuck he need to contain himself.

you take a drag from it and then blow the smoke on his face covered by his balaclava, he look at you “smoking is bad, a doc surely know it” he said as he take a deep breath “yeah, but i’m not in my doctor vest.” your replayed.

the sight of you with your civil clothes smoking a cigarette on his lap was making him a little too excited. Your hair wrapped in a messy bun as you wear your blue jeans and a black top, his eyes travel down to your breast, he took another sip of his whisky trying to contain himself to rip your clothes and fuck you there.

“what? a little frustrated?” you asks as you recognize his behavior, caressing his abs trough the soft material of the t-shirt that he was wearing. “careful love, you might regret it.” he said looking at you at your beauty before grab the cigarette from your lips and kiss you.

you chuckle as you pull him closer caressing his big tights with your little hands, he let out a sigh, he knows that you wanted to play, it’s been too long since you two didn’t have a nice moment alone where he can see you all naked for himself.

his jeans get tight as he look’s at your perfect face “sweet little thing wants to play yeah?” he murmur as he put down the whisky glass and grab your tights making you the sign to wrap your legs around his hips, you did it and he stand up brining you in the house, he did really wanted to get in the bedroom, but he wasn’t in the mood to wait any longer.

ripping the little black top of you and undo you bra throw it somewhere in the kitchen, exposing your perfect and round breast “fuck- look at ya’ so perfect makes me wanna shove my cock in that little cunt of yours” he whisper in your ears biting your earlobe, you moaned softly, you missed him, missed his rough hands exploring every inch of your body.

you where ovulating and it was since that morning that you want him inside of you in some way or another, but both of your superiors where around so you contained yourself, but now? no.

you pull him closer kiss his neck and nibbling on it gently as you hear him moan, he was already rock hard just seeing you smoking a damn cigarette that now was in his hands, he take a drag of it and blew the smoke away, sigh as he feels your hand undoing his belt.

“ya’ can’t even fucking wait a second yeah? need me so bad?” he asks, you bit your bottom lip feeling your underwear soaking in your humors. It wasn’t the first time that he makes you all soaked with just some little talk, but today you were more frustrate that ever, you need him, and you are not going to stop until his fat cock will stretching your walls.

“si, need you” you muttered licking his neck as you finally start to unbutton his jeans, caressing his shaft trough his boxer, he gasped, you soft hand around him, what a sight, he really can’t get enough of you.

“y/n, fuck—“ he moaned breathless as your thumb teased his head, you could see the pre-cum, he was turn on too.

you lick your own lips in anticipation as you get off from the kitchen counter and drop yourself on your knees, you want him to moan to see him weak just for you.

you licked his shaft from base to head, his hand gripped tightly the kitchen counter, your wet and warm tongue was doing an amazing job even if you didn’t even put it in your mouth yet.

“want this?” he ask as he tap his head on your tongue, “then suck you little slut.” he said as he shove his fat cock down your throat, you gagged a bit but didn’t try to back off, taking a deep breath as your gaze look at his eyes sparkling.

you suck on his head as your right hand move his shaft, he slap his hands on the kitchen counter trying hard to don’t cum in your mouth already.

“so pretty with ma’fat cock inside your mouth” he muttered as he looks down at you, gripping your hair tight in his fits pushing way down on his dick.

“Ohh- Fuck!” he moaned rolling his eyes back into his skull, you where proud of yourself when you bring him at points where the cold Ghost was just a far away memory.

you cupped his balls in your hands and squeeze it “y/n…. fuck, fuck, fuck!” he sigh as you swallow around him with tears in your eyes, it was just too much seeing you on your knees whit your mouth full of him.

he thrust in your throat then pull away from your mouth “com’here little slut, gagging me so good makes me wanna break ya’ perfect fucking body.” he murmur in your ears.

your breath still irregular but you look at him with a smirk as your lips where still tasting of a mix of your saliva and his hard dick.

“want you inside of me.” you said as he play with the hem of your blue jeans that in a seconds where throw on the floor. He makes you sit on kitchen counter whit your legs spread wide, his hand on your stomach before stroking your wet pussy trough your blue panties.

“fuck, so wet already?” he asks, sometimes he need to work you up a bit to make sure you can take him without making you hurt, the sight of your cunt cupped in his palm makes him salivate like a damn animal.

he lift aside the fabric of your underwear and shove one of his thick finger in you, you moaned all flustered, nipples hard, he start to fuck you with two fingers and you couldn’t even say anything as your moans fills the room.

his kisses travel down to your belly than on your puffy and needy cunt biting it and sucking it hard, you screamed as your hands sneak under his balaclava and take it off, he smirks “wanna see your face when you eat me.” you moaned.

squeezing his head between your tights as he devours you, his big tongue on your clit sucking and nibbling it as he fucks you whit his fingers “my girl taste so good—“ he moaned as your legs shake, sign that you where close, so he speed up his space sucking your clit even harder.

“Simon, oh god oh please—” you screamed as you came on his mouth, he licks his lips with a satisfied grin, you breath heavily feeling your body relax on the kitchen counter, but still this wasn’t enough.

he stand up quickly “taste so good almost addictive.” he murmur on your neck as he start to stroke the head of his fat cock on your needy cunt.

“can i?” he murmur just push his head inside of you making your legs shake, you couldn’t even talk, drunk of him “please sweetheart?” he asks again, he always make sure to ask, to have your green light to fuck you.

his head inside of you as he brings a hand on your lower body, pressing his thumb on your puffy clit, you swear that you almost see the stars as you moaned “talk to me y/n, please” he said as his thumb start to make circles movements.

you push yourself on his shaft, he moaned as he looks down where your body’s unite. “Si, please.” you finally said out loud, pushing yourself on him once again making him smirk.

“such a little slut ya’ are” he moaned as his first thrust was deeper than usual, your walls squeezing his fat cock as he start to fuck you slowly, but you need him all inside of you, so once again you push yourself on him.

“look at ya’ fucking yourself with my cock.” he said whit a grin on his lips before slam himself in you hardly making you scream his name “this what ya’ want huh?” he said as his hand pose on your neck squeezing it as the other one was painfully teasing your clit.

his thrust where deeper and steady “good girl, fuck—“ he moaned feeling you getting even tighter once again sign that you were probably near at your second orgasm.

“yeah babe, come on this fat cock yeah?” he said as he slaps your tights and squeeze your ass with his big rough hands, you moaned loudly once again came on him like a needy slut, you where so damn wet that your juice was dripping on his balls and on his pubic bone.

“that’s a good girl, fucking good ya’ are for me” he murmur as his thrust became more irregular and needy, resting his face on your breast, breathing your scent as he his hands keep you from move away.

another rough thrust and he pulls out of you cum on your pussy as he strokes his shaft, moaning deeply on your collar bone “Fuck y/n making me cum hard on your little cunt makes me wanna fuck you once more” he blurted out whit an irregular breath, you grab his chin making him looks at you and smirk.

“then? what are you waiting for?” you ask. “you are going to be the death of me.” he said as he slam his lips against yours.

-

[toulousewayne]

Wake Up : A Bat Family One-Shot

———

Beep….Beep….Beep.

That’s the only sound in the room. That and the sounds of the tubes contracting. The room is full of your brothers and father. Alfred had stepped out to speak with the doctors.

Bruce sat in a chair to your right with Damian on the opposite side of your hospital bed. Tim sat like a cat perched in the window seal. Gotham City in her rainy and gloomy glory was just beyond the glass. Though it seem a lot more dim then normal. Jason had snapped and left an hour ago. Dick was in the corner pf the dim room not meeting anyone’s gaze.

“I’m sorry.” Bruce managed to choke the words out. They were the first words he said to you since you fight hours ago.

You were Bruce’s Daughter, and you too didn’t always see eye to eye. But he loved you in his own way only Bruce could understand. He gently pushed a stray piece of hair away from your face.

Beep…Beep…Beep.

That was the only reply he gotten. He replayed early tonight over and over like it had his parents deaths for many years.

——

“Are you fucking serious!” You hissed at him. You glared daggers at your father.

“Y/n”

“No, you told me the reason you and canceled on me was because of some life saving event,” That was true, Bruce had canceled on her for the millionth time this week alone.

“I didn’t lie to you,” he spoke monotonously. “Clark asked me to accompany Jon and Damian on a mission.” He took a sip from his wine.

“Oh, I forgot your Boy’s clubhouse.” She spat.

—-

Bruce gently brushed your black and red knuckles. He let out a deep wounded sigh. Dick glanced over and narrowed his gaze. “This is all your fault.”

Bruce didn’t meet his gaze. “I didn’t make time for her I know that, I don’t your in put here Dick.” He said his name so cold it was almost as if that was he was calling him rather than calling his name.

Tim scoffed,”You both are to blame.” Dick shot his gaze to the college student nearly giving himself second degree whiplash.

“And what do you mean by that,Timmy?” The older man gaze never leaving the younger one.

“We all know Bruce blows everyone off unless it’s about the mission. You just do it because you don’t care about anyone but your Team or your girlfriend.”

Dick stares down at his brother and crosses the room some he’s with earshot of him.

“Tim that’s bullshit and you know it,” he tries to keep his anger in but it’s simmering and he could pop at any giving moment, “I do my best to be there,and yes I can be everywhere at once but I do try. At least I try to be.”

The room felt silent again with everyone’s on the comatose girl. The fight between them feeling as though it dismissed itself within seconds. Dick shoves his hands in his pockets and turns on his heels.

“I’m gonna go to the cafeteria, I’ll be back.” No one stops him. The door shuts softly and the only sound is the machines and the rain on the window.

A knock on the door brings everyone back to earth. It’s Alfred. “The Commissioner is here, he needs a moment with you Master Bruce.”

Bruce excuses himself and leaves the room.

——

Jason takes a long puff and the smokes leaves his lips. He looks toward the city through a rainy night. The red light the hospital cases a highlight on his face.

He blew up on Bruce twice tonight, not that he didn’t feel that it wasn’t necessary he did. But it didn’t change the pit in his stomach, nor the smells of gasoline, burning rubber, and metal.

He remembers everything.

——

“You avoiding me too?” He turns to the doorway of the library. You walk into the light of the fireplace.

“No but I don’t have any interest in spending the night in my old room.” He fired back turning the page of his book and placing a bookmark in it before standing up.

She shakes her head at her big brother. “Forgot, if I’m not apart of the missions you guys forget about us on the surface.”

He clicks his tongue and huffs,”Not like that.”

She shakes her head and grabes his plate and mug. “Sure it’s not, we used to hang out but now that I do go out anymore it’s like I’m a ghost to him. You too.”

Jason doesn’t meet her gaze right away. “I’m not talking to Daddy Bats right now. I only came because Golden Boy wouldn’t stop blowing up my phone. I just got back from Columbia this afternoon. I’m just tired is all. I’m free in a day or two.” He rubbed his face and turned back to her.

“Forget it Jason, rain check.” She mumbled and walked out the room.

——

Jason puts out the smoke and stomps on it before pushing his shoulders away from the hospital and heads back inside.

——-

Dick sat at table in the corner in the cafeteria. He took a sip of his coffee which tasted like old dirt water. Then again it was 1 am.

He throws his head back rubbing his temples trying to massage away his stress to no avail.

He gets to his feet and leaves and heads down the hallway. The rush of the hospital in full swing. Doctors getting paged, the sounds of nurses making rounds, phone lines ringing,etc.

He took a sit in the main lobby. He closed his eyes for a moment thinking about the last time he spoke to his sister. It was growing on three weeks.

——

“So??”

Dick woke up from dosing off. He rubbed his eyes and sighed.”Sorry it’s been a long 24 hours.” He sighed and scratched Haley’s head.

“I can tell, you’re not sounding like yourself.” He picked up the phone and walked into the kitchen opening the fridge. It’s only contents being a Chinese takeout container, a pizza box that he got earlier, two cans of diet soda, half a case of beer and three water bottles.

He takes a water and downs it. “Tell me about it and with this mission around the corner I need to get some rest but I doubt it.”

“What mission?”

Dick stopped in his tracks. He hadn’t told anyone but Barbara and Bruce that he was leaving for San Francisco in the morning to meet with the Titans.

“I heading back to the Titans, we have to head to investigate a lead.” He almost whispered the last part.

The line was silent for a moment. “And how long will you be gone Dick?” He couldn’t make out her tone but he could tell she wanted a different answer that what he was going to tell her.

“A month maybe less maybe more I don’t know until I get back.”

“So you’re not coming to graduation then.” She said a little more with intensity.

He sighs,”Look I’m sorry I know I haven’t been around—

“That’s an understatement.” She cuts him off.

He rubs his face,”I’m come to the next event I promise.”

She scoffed,”And what’s that Dickie Bird? You missed Ballet recitals, High School graduation and now college. You missed everything? You and Bruce are not that far apart.”

“That’s not fair, it’s important what I’m doing.”

“You don’t miss Damian art exhibition? It’s or Donna’s new studio opening. You were there for Bruce for a charity dinner two months ago yet you couldn’t bother to call me or even come ten feet to me at the same dinner to tell me you weren’t even staying till the next morning to go out like you had planned for months! You don’t miss anything for anyone else because they’ll be disappointed,but it’s fine to flake on your sister and I’m so supposed to be okay with that!”

“I’m so sorry it’s really not like that, look I’ll make it up—“

“Don’t bother Grayson, for once in all these years I thought for once you were gonna show up for me. I was wrong.” He could hear the hurt in her voice. Before he could say anything else she hung up.

That was Three Weeks ago and they hadn’t spoken.

——-

Tim hadn’t moved from his spot in the window. He turned back towards the room. Damian was sleep in his chair. He turned his attention to his older sister.

He thinks about the last few hours tonight. How things got so ugly so fast.

—

“Y/n, you’re being ridiculous. It’s a mission in East Asia not strike.” Bruce replied.

She glared at her father. The room was silent. “Do you take me for one of blind followers.”

“Excuse me?”

She leaned down so she was eye level. “I’m not one of your soldiers, and that’s part of the problem isn’t it Father?”

He returns her gaze. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, I may not always be there for you but I’m trying.”

She laughes at him, “When was the last time you were there for me that wasn’t lurking in the shadows, or stopping one of the criminals you created from nearly killing me and thousands of other people.” He gaze never leaving her and his jaw when slack too.

“You sit there and smile for the news and the rest of the world like we’re one Big Happy Family but we have never been.”

Tim pushes his food with his fork. And sighs. She turns to him, “Anything you want to say Tim, we may as well get everything off our chest.”

He huffs,”No but this isn’t going to change anything. “

She grins,”I agree with Tim.” Jason and Dick stare a look and Damian as long stopped eating and is watching the spectacle.

“You do?” Bruce raises a brow at her. She nods again. “Tim’s right, you’re never going to change until you take your last dying breath. Because God Forbid your kids dying own your watch doesn’t register to you that you need to be present more.”

The air in the room was still.

Bruce doesn’t look at her. Jason doesn’t look away but his plate. Damian squirms in his seat and Dick clears his throat.

“I tried to be there.” Bruce finally speaks.

“But you weren’t, and no one is blaming you for that.” Alfred cuts in hopefully to stop the mess from going any farther.

She huffs,”No but I least that would change your perspective of only throwing yourself into harms way every damn night. All of you, it’s like you all don’t even stop to think about yourselves.”

“Sister we are all trained, even yourself.”

“That’s not the point. I’m not saying you’re not capable,” she tone softens,” I’m saying that most of the time you remember that and that’s all that matters. You don’t think what happens if you miss step, you underestimate the villains next move, or what the consequences are for you charging into a mission without a second thought.”

Bruce leans forward,”I know what the stakes are. You don’t think I don’t know what happens if I don’t stop and think about that. You don’t know anything about what I do at night, the were a child and didn’t want this life for yourself.” He stood up and looked at her in the eyes.

“I never wanted you to be apart of that life, I know you couldn’t handle it.”

The boys turn to look at their sister and Bruce.

“So you thought that little of me?” Tears formed in her eyes but anger was the clearest emotion across her face.

“I thought you didn’t need to do what we do, you’re better at what you do now.” Though Bruce thought he was being sincere his tone was more condescending and cold.

“Bruce!” Dick shouts.

“Screw you, you just wanted be to be apart of your image.”

It dawned on him how he hadn’t been able to properly communicate to her.

“Y/n that—

She took off from the table, she grabbed her purse and keys.

“Don’t worry Father, I wouldn’t want to tarnish your reputation.” She slammed the door and charged to her car. Not once slowing down even with Tim calling her phone multiple times and Damian yelling from the doorway.

She sped off through the gates and onto the road.

——

Y/n takes a sharp turn onto the main road and wipes her face with her sleeve. She sob to herself feeling so many things at once.

The sky opened and rain harmed down onto the road. “Great.” She turned on her wipers and lights and continued driving back towards the city to go to her apartment.

She ignored her phone that wouldn’t stop buzzing from calls from her brothers.

She felt like not just Bruce but they also thought so little of her. Maybe that’s why they didn’t want to spend time with her.

She graduated from Gotham University last night with a Bachelor Degree and yet it felt like she was alone. Alfred and the girls came. Bruce had missed the entire ceremony along with Damian. Tim was just landing from attending a business meeting in New York,Jason and Dick already had prior encounters.

She felt like she didn’t really feel like she belong with them. She snapped out of her daze and grabbed her phone inside of purse. She answered.

“Tim please you guys have got to stop—

A loud hoar range out and within seconds she looked to see a large truck. She attempted to move out of his way but it all happened to fast. She took a sharp right turn but the truck smashed head on the passenger side door causing everything to feel like a free fall. Her phone, contents of her purse falling all around her. She herself was jerked all over.

The car was immediately crushed by impacted and began to roll and tumble down the hill until it crashed into several trees.

Tim heard the crash and ran downstairs to where is his brother and Father were sitting in the study. By the tears on his face Bruce stood up and was in front of him.

“What’s wrong?”

“She was hit…the truck…I-i can’t hear her.”

—-

Bruce was racing down the road. Tim was still on the phone but all he could hear was beeping from the car and something tapping.

He stopped with red and blue light came into his view.

The two got out the car but two officers tried to block their paths.

“That’s my daughter let me through.” He order but the officers tried to keep him through but he managed to push the two men and run towards the site. Detective Montoya was at the scene.

“Please, how is she?” Bruce asked. Her expression was anything but hopeful.

“I don’t know Mr. Wayne I just got here, the Fire Department got her first and are working to get her free. As if on time two paramedics rushed down the side with an Orange board with straps. Moments later the returned with three firefighters carrying Y/n. Cuts, bruised and marks littered her body. Her eyes were black and blue and a tube was down her throat with a brack around her neck.

“Is she gonna be okay?” Bruce asked uneasily.

“We’re taking her to Gotham General, she stable but we have to go.” The younger paramedic told him. He turned to Tim who hopped in the ambulance with his sister and Bruce backed away slowly as the ambulance rushed down the street with sirens and light flashing.

He made it inside his car followed them.

—-

The first few hours were a blurry, she was rushed into surgery. Tim sat in the emergency room waiting area until Alfred arrived with the rest of the boys and they were taken upstairs to her room where Bruce was already waiting.

45 minutes later a nurse came in to tell them she was out of surgery. Shortly, afterwards the surgery told them the damages she suffered and she would be in a medical coma for a few days to help with the pain and swelling

And that brings us to the present.

Bruce re-entered the room and took his seat back.

“She’s gonna be okay,right B?”

He nodded. “We hope so. She’s a fighter like us.” He took her cold hand and offered a gentle squeeze. Dick,Jason and Alfred returned as well.

Alfred placed a hand on Bruce’s shoulder,”She is, and now we have to wait for her to fight her way back to us.”

[tiredfox64]

Hello! Can you write a Smoke x reader scenario where Smoke is in love with the reader but he doesn't realize it because he's never been in love before (not even have a crush) but he knows he strongly feels something and asks for advice on his feelings and for that person to be like "dude you're in love." And tries to help Smoke confess his feelings to the reader?

Sorry if this is very long lol 😅

Spit it out!

Prior notes: Hi hi! Not long at all. Let’s see what we could do with this sweet man of ours.

Pairing: Tomas x Gn reader

Warnings ‼️: None you silly goose

There is a feeling that Tomas gets whenever he looks at you. It feels like a whirlwind is starting up in his stomach. His heart rate skyrockets to the heavens above. His mind gets clouded with thoughts about you. What is this feeling?

Tomas doesn’t know. But he yaps about it like crazy. He talks about it like a patient would to a doctor. Filled with curiosity and even some concern as if he hopes it’s nothing too bad.

“I mean, I don’t get it. There’s no reason that my heart should be beating that fast and tingling. I don’t feel like it’s a heart attack. Do you think they have some sort of power or ability to do that to people?” Tomas asked Kuai Liang.

He didn’t even realize that Kuai Liang stopped drinking his tea. He had this blank expression yet his eyes show that he was lost in thought.

By the gods, he doesn’t know does he?

“But why would they try to do that to me? Or even cause me to get distracted during training? It’s so weird. And when I get images of them in my head I feel-“

“Tomas.”

“Huh?”

Kuai Liang took a deep breath before calmly trying to explain to Tomas what he was feeling.

“You’re in love. It is simply that.”

“…oh. But what does that have to do with that feeling in my heart?” He’s like a clueless puppy.

Kuai Liang couldn’t blame his brother for not understanding his feelings. His father nor his mother had the time to teach him how to deal with his feelings. It was all just training to become a Lin Kuei assassin. Looks like he has to be a good brother and help him out.

“That’s how love works. It makes you feel things. That feeling won’t go away unless you confess your feelings.” He calmly told Tomas.

Immediately Tomas was against the idea. He didn’t even know he was in love before. Now he’s being told to confess his feelings for you? That sounds hard, impossible even!

“I will help, Tomas. There is no reason to be afraid of confessing your love. I confessed mine and now Harumi is my wife. The worst they could say is no.”

Tomas contemplated for a bit. This is all too much. But if Kuai Liang is right, maybe it is for the best to just spit it out. You never made him doubt that he couldn’t trust you or that you would ever hurt his feelings. At least if you’re gonna say no, you will do it gently. You better do it gently.

══💤══╡°˖✧🦊✧˖°╞══💤══

You were a little nervous when your grandmaster said he wanted to see you in his office. You didn’t do anything wrong, trust me.

You knocked on the door of his office where you heard him call you in. You opened the door and were surprised to see Tomas there as well. He looked a bit paler for some reason. It looked like he was hiding something behind his back. Yet Kuai Liang looked as if nothing was strange.

“Ah good, you’re here. I must apologize however as I need to step out for just a minute. I will get back to you soon. I’m sure Tomas can keep you entertained.” And just like that Kuai Liang was out of the room as if he just set it on fire. It was only you and Tomas now.

“Tomas, are you okay? You looked like you just saw a ghost.” You asked with concern as you went up to him.

He was already a nervous mess, confused on what he was supposed to do. It didn’t help that your hand went up to feel his forehead as if you were checking for a fever.

Just give them the flower. That’s what Kuai Liang said, right? Oh god they’re touching me. Why do I feel so hot? Damn they look fantastic today.

“I-I, Kuai Liang said-uh, I’m s-supposed to…” Not a great start.

In a moment of panic Tomas dug into one of his pockets and threw down a smoke bomb. Just like that he was gone and you were left coughing from the smoke. Well that was strange.

Once your coughing died down you could hear what sounded to be arguing from the other side of the door. You couldn’t make out the words but you figured out it was Kuai Liang and Tomas having a scuffle.

And you would be right. The moment Kuai Liang saw Tomas teleport out of the room with his smoke magic he told him to get right back in the room. Tomas just felt worse now and he was begging his brother for another way to do this. But there is no other way. How else will you find out that he loves you if he doesn’t say it.

“I can’t, Kuai Liang. It’s so hard. They looked too perfect today and I froze up which isn’t really new. I told you they distract me. Their hands felt so nice, is it normal to want to hold their hand? Does love make you want to do those things?” He would have said more until he heard you speak.

“What?!”

Kuai Liang and Tomas didn’t realize you opened the door when he was going on his little tangent. You finally saw the flower in Tomas’ hand which you assumed was for you. That’s just an assumption after what you heard. Kuai Liang quickly turned his brother around to face you so he can properly confess. And also to apologize for almost causing you to have an asthma attack.

“I-I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to cause any issues. I didn’t even realize I was in love with you until Kuai Liang told me. That sounds dumb I know. How was I supposed to know thinking about you a lot and feeling warm inside meant I liked you?” He said that with a bit of embarrassment.

You didn’t find it dumb however. You actually found it cute. You took his hand into yours with a warm smile on your face.

“Love isn’t the easiest thing, ya know. It takes time. We all learn to love eventually. And I do have the time to teach you how to love in many ways.” There was a look in your eyes that was screaming at Tomas that you liked him back. He didn’t catch that though.

“Teach me? But I just want to be able to love you.” Whoosh

You heard Kuai Liang slap his forehead. This poor man.

“Brother, please, I love you but you’re killing me. That’s what they mean. Say yes already.” Kuai Liang sounded exhausted.

“Sorry, still very new to this. So does this mean now that we are…?” Spell it out for him, please.

“It means we are a couple. We will take it slow don’t worry. Just know that I accept your love.” You said warmly.

Tomas felt like his heart just exploded. He hasn’t been this happy in so long. He feels all warm and tingly inside. Everything he thought was weird and strange before now feels right since you are his partner now. This feels great to him!

He was over the moon. He picked you up in his strong arms and hugged you tight. All with a cute smile on his face. He never wants to let you go now. And neither do you. Cause why wouldn’t you love such a strong, brave, skilled, expressive, and sometimes sassy hunk of a man like him.

What a successful and productive day for Tomas. What an extremely long day for Kuai Liang. You have to thank him though for pushing Tomas to confess to you. Cause you sure as hell couldn’t do it. You probably would have messed it up more than he did. Though you knew that you loved him, you also knew that you weren’t the smoothest person in the universe. You still got your happy ending.

After notes: Those cookies in the corner of my room are calling for me and I told myself I can have a bite if I finished this. Hopefully I have succeeded in my duties in pleasing you. If i haven’t you can force me to drink cranberry juice by itself. I love this man to death he is literally my main. Gotta give me a kiss goodnight later. Adiós!

[urhoneycombwitch]

in sickness, to cherish

foreword: so excited to release this lil’ babe into the world. PTSD and trauma healing is of special interest to me, I hope you enjoy 💖 (p.s. from my limited research I don’t think they would have used a heart monitor for low-risk patients but it is literally integral to my plot so I’m breaking my anachronistic purity rule. soz)

wc: 3k

cw: descriptions of seizure, PTSD + hospital/medical trauma for the whole gang, brief mention of non-consensual drugging, R is referred to once as “Mrs” & “girlfriend”, angst w/ comfort

___

The mounted clock on the wall of the dingy Hawkins Memorial waiting room ticks over to nine PM, a brutal reminder that time (for everyone else, at least) has not, in fact, stopped.

Nine o’clock. As you pace from one end of the plastic chair-lined aisle to the other, you run the numbers in your head, fingers spastic at your sides- it’s nine right now, and Steve was admitted just after six, which means they’ve been running tests for three hours, even though the charge nurse said it should only take one…

”You wanna step outside for a smoke?”

Eddie speaks up from his seat at the end of the row, catching your bleary gaze before you’re turning on your heel again to complete your looping track.

His voice cuts smoothly over the buzzing fluorescents, the old television in the corner droning with last week’s news cycle; it’s enough to disrupt Robin from her half-sleep against Eddie’s shoulder, blinking into consciousness and stretching her stiff limbs as you respond.

“No, thanks.” Your hands slip to the inside of your elbows, squeezing through layers of soft cardigan in a near-bruise, feet continuing the rhythmic pacing. “You can go, though- I’ll make sure Robin comes to get you if anything happens.”

Eddie clears his throat, sinking back into the hard plastic, rings clicking at the armrests. “Nah, I’m good without one. Just thought you’d want a change of scenery, maybe some fresh air would calm-”

“I’m staying here.”

There’s a sharpness to your voice, a rarity- Robin winces, fingers in her lap twisting and fidgeting as she tries to change the subject. “God, Steve’s gonna be spitting mad when he wakes up. He’s the most doctor-adverse person I know.”

Eddie latches on to this with a humorless chuckle- “Stubborn bastard. Wouldn’t let those lab goons go near him, even after last year-”

“Fuck.” The swear comes from the bottom of your toes, even as you swivel on the balls of your feet to loop back in front of your friends; their faces snap to you, a blur of motion as you pass them again- “You’re right. Steve fucking hates doctors. I should’ve-”

Your next breath comes stilted, fingers a vice-grip on your own arms as you pace, pace, pace- “I should’ve treated this like taking a dog to a vet. Crushed up some pills in his food, or something- he never listens to me when I nag him about his hearing getting worse- do you know how many meals, how many glasses of water we share, every day?”

From the corner of your hazy vision, Robin’s gone still and pale, her voice tremulous- “I didn’t mean to imply- this isn’t your fault, you know-”

But you’re not ready to hear that, guilt surfacing like a sick wave, tears pooling, moments away from spilling over, voice trembling with anguish- “Could’ve been so easy, tell him we’re going for a ride, load him up into the passenger seat, he goes to sleep and I could’a passed him right off to a doctor, to someone who could have prevented this-”

Eddie rises from his seat to stand in the middle of your path, hands lifting to soothe and appease, but you’re still in flight mode, like a bird beating its wings against the confines of its cage.

You flinch away from his touch, standing with your back turned to them both, staring out the dark window, unseeing. “You know what Steve said to me? Right before he hit the ground? He said, ‘Don’t panic, I’m gonna pass out, try not to let my hair get too messed up.’”

An edge of misplaced humor draws a dry laugh from your throat. The dark window reflects your own face back- tear-streaked, red veins encroaching on the whites of your eyes- as you shake your head in disbelief. “He made a joke. To try and distract me from the fact that he was about to hit the ground and go all… all spastic-”

Unbidden flashes of memory surge to the forefront of your mind: victims of last spring. Twisted forms snapped at the bone, Max’s arms and legs bent at horrifying angles, plaster casts from head-to-toe, freckled face still and sallow against the starch-white hospital sheets-

A leather-jacketed form in the reflection behind you, Eddie’s hand solid on your back against the shuddering breaths wracking all the air from your lungs. You don’t flinch away this time.

Your beautiful boy. Steve. With his eye-crinkling smiles and sharp wit and gentle heart, stiff as a board in the middle of your living room, eyes rolled back in his skull like a downed deer, unreachable, just three hours ago.

“I thought it was Vecna. It’s been so long but I thought he’d come back, somehow, I was this close to running upstairs and grabbing our Walkman-”

”But you didn’t.” The hand at your back is joined by another at your arm as Eddie pulls you to face him, his gaze locking on your own, brown eyes full of grave compassion. “You heard the nurse. She said tipping him on his side was the best call you could’a made, sweetheart- you saved him.”

”But I didn’t know,” you insist, “I didn’t know that’s what would help, I just did it ‘cuz I was worried he was going to choke on his own tongue-”

“Semantics. You intuited it, then.” One of Eddie’s hands leaves your arm briefly to make a dismissive gesture through the air- “Which, in my book, is all the more impressive.”

Unconvinced, your voice small and tightening along with your chest- “What if this happens again, and he’s alone, this time? What if he’s working one of his three closing shifts a week, without Robin- what if he’s driving?”

You can’t help the spiraling of your thoughts, what-if scenarios jumping in line, each one more horrifying than the last.

Robin rises to stand beside Eddie, opens her mouth- to deny, to comfort, it’s unclear- but is interrupted by a new nurse who’s just appeared in the doorway.

“Mrs. Harrington?”

This snaps you back to earth, a bit, another watery laugh as Eddie takes a step back, allowing you to swipe at the mess of tears on your face before turning to the nurse- “Yeah. As good as, I guess. How’s he doing?”

With a last look at your friends, the nurse leads you down sickeningly-bright corridors while reading from a clipboard- most of it’s medical jargon, your foggy brain struggling to keep up as you stay on her heels.

What you gather, as you’re led to his room, is nothing new- Steve’s had a seizure, likely due to the trauma his brain incurred from the ‘earthquake’ of ‘86, and it’s unclear what triggered it, or if it’s likely to happen again.

“We’re going to keep him overnight, just to monitor his condition.” The nurse stops at a door labeled Room 202, hinges squeaking as she pushes it open. “He was really lucky, this time. Must’ve had a good guardian angel looking out for him.”

Heart thrumming thick in your throat, you almost ask the nurse to wait, to give you a second- maybe a quick bathroom break to splash some cold water against the tear-tracks, or even an extra few seconds to pretend at being stoic- but she’s already ushering you in with a kind smile.

The nurse pulls the door shut, and you’re left alone with the boy in the bed.

He looks exhausted, dark circles pulling at the soft skin below his eyes, which are full of relief, trained on you as you approach.

“Hey, there’s my girl.” There’s a scratchy quality to Steve’s voice, on its way to being lost.

You were doing really well, no crying or anything, before he spoke. But hearing him, paired with the awful sight of a medical cord wrapping around the width of his broad chest, has your face crumpling in an instant.

“Oh, shit. Aw, honey. C’mere-” Steve reaches for you, halfway to sitting up off his supporting pillows, and you quickly close the gap, sitting near his hip on the bed.

“No, hey- stay down,” you chide through the tears, pushing at the shoulder of his white hospital tee. “Don’t put any stress on your body.”

“Cut the stress, she says,” Steve grumbles, leaning back against the stack of pillows but compromising by pulling you in closer. “My baby’s crying, and she tells me no stress?”

His left palm slips over your cheek, thumb swiping away tears, while his right hand- IV taped flat over the back of it- slides to rest on your waist.

”Gonna tell me what’s wrong, hm?”

Under different circumstances, you’d laugh at his question- christ, where did he want you to start: but with that amber gaze so full of empathy, desperate to fix what’s making you sad, you’re stripped raw with sincerity.

”I was just- I was so scared, Steve-”

Steve pulls your face towards his, needily, a breath away from begging for a kiss before you lean in for one.

He tastes salty, like sweat and tears, lips plush and softly seeking against the seam of your own. Between the kisses, he’s mumbling apologies, “sorry, so sorry”, broken by the need to be as close to you as all the medical gear will allow.

There’s a soft noise from the back of his throat, and you pull away just enough to bump your nose into his, hands running up to push through the soft strands of his hair.

Steve practically purrs under your touch; you’re careful not to disturb the tubing wrapping around the length of his chest, leaning your weight into his shoulders instead.

A vein of hilarity spikes as you remember Steve’s last words before he went under: and here you were, fingers pulling at his dark roots, breaking his one request. When you start to giggle, Steve’s eyes pop open, baffled, hair sticking up at the ends when your fingers leave his hair. Both hands now squeezing at your hips, he feels left out of the joke- “What?”

“I just- nothing. Never mind. I’m really glad you’re okay.” It’s the truth. You frame his lovely face with your hands, kissing his forehead once before sitting up fully. “I don’t wanna fight about it here, okay? Let’s just focus on you feeling better, and then-”

“See, now, wait a minute-” Steve holds up a finger to interrupt. “You don’t get it. I’ve been hoping and praying for hours now that my pretty girlfriend would come in here just so we could have a good fight.”

He tweaks at the skin of your hips (with the IV-hand, so you can’t just smack it away, dammit), smiling up at you far too dreamily for someone reclining in a hospital bed.

Settling against the length of Steve’s torso, your arms cross over his stomach just under the tubing as you start, carefully- “You know, Max had one of these- when she was in the hospital?”

”Yeah, you’re right.” Steve’s hands worm their way under both your cardigan sleeves, seeking out the comfort of skin like a magnet- “Think it tracks heart rate. Or something.”

“Mm-hm. And… you know how she had to go to physical therapy three times a week? For, like, half the school year?”

Steve’s thumbs swipe absently at your wrists, a line pinched between his brows, trying to piece together your angle. “…yeah?”

“Takes a lot of time, to heal from something like that.” Your eyes drop to his chest, throat swelling with the effort of holding back a sob. “And I’m just- just thinking of all the times you might be alone, and how we could have prevented this, and-”

“Hey, hey, hey- shhh…” Steve soothes, shaking his head. “Honey, it was inevitable, okay? Nothing we could’a done. The doc told me this shit can happen, like, years after a big event. I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I promise.”

Fighting against the wall of emotion that makes speaking harder, you return his head shake, desperate for understanding- “But you can’t promise that, baby. You had a seizure- an actual, medical emergency, and… we don’t know if it’ll happen again.”

With a purposeful straightening of your spine, you state, resolutely: “I want a different promise.”

Steve presses the crown of his head back into the pillows, melodramatic, resurfacing with a tsk. “So stubborn. What promise you want, then, huh?”

”I want you to promise that you’ll see a doctor- a real one. A head guy. Not some… family medicine quack.”

Steve grins, charming even while unusually pale- “I love it when you talk medical, really gets me going-”

He decides to bail on the rest of that sentence when he sees the flare of irritation on its way to real anger in your face, raising both hands in appeasement- “Okay. Hey- I promise to see a real head doc. I don’t intend on putting you through this again.”

WIth a sigh, you surge forward again, mumbling “Thank you” into Steve’s lips, a kiss of relief and gratitude. Best news you’ve heard all day.

His groans vibrate through you, hands running down the length of your side, near the bottom of your cardigan; you squeak at the intrusion of his cold palms on the bare skin of your waist but they warm quickly, and you’re willingly distracted as his tongue presses against the seam of your lips.

Perhaps not exactly hospital-appropriate, but as it’s been an evening full of adrenaline-filled panic and heartache, you figure some making out might be a good cure for the both of you.

“Won’t scare you like that again,” Steve says, lips already pink and spit-slick, intense and breathless as he clings to you between kisses- “Gonna be okay. You saved me, angel. Love you s’much…”

Your hand, previously resting on Steve’s knee, automatically slides up at his words, notching into the soft expanse of his inner thigh over the thin sheets- “Love you too, so much…”

A bright, electronic noise jolts into frantic beeping- the monitor that Steve’s hooked up to is loud enough to startle you into sitting up.

There’s no time to process or even rearrange yourselves before the nurse from earlier bustles into the room to glare at the machine’s screen; best you can do is a swipe across your mouth, hopefully hiding any evidence of moments-ago spit-swappage as you stammer out, “Um, yeah, sorry- h-he was trying to sit up and that set it off, I guess…?”

Steve lies placid and amenable against his pillows, giving the nurse a gold-medal grin, which unfortunately does nothing to allay her suspicions.

“Uh-huh.” The monitor alarm is stopped short with the press of a few buttons, and she gives Steve a sideways look, clipboard tucked under her arm- “You ready for your other visitors, Mr. Harrington, or should I give you a few more minutes?”

“Bring forth the party, Patricia.” Steve folds his hands behind his head, wincing when his IV gets bumped but covering it with a wink.

Nurse Patricia leaves. You cover your heated face, mortified- “Oh my god. She probably thought I was giving you a handjob or something, jesus, Steve-”

He’s outright laughing at you now, unable to help it- “Come on, no she didn’t. And even if she did…”

Steve is momentarily distracted, frowning down at his chest, following the monitor’s line to the machine; you watch through cracked fingers, his face lighting up, triumphant. “See, I bet if we unplug it from the wall same time as disconnecting it from here, we might be able to fit a handy under the radar, after all!”

Robin and Eddie enter the room just as you’re swatting Steve’s shoulder; over your subdued and mildly horrified laughter, he groans in faux-pain: “God, you two got here just in time. She’s beating me up for no reason.”

As Eddie settles into the plastic chair under the opposing wall’s window, you scooch down the mattress, patting the side closest to Steve with an encouraging smile at Robin.

She takes the seat, appreciative, her clammy hand slipping into yours for support as she addresses Steve: “Y’know, if you did this to get out of doing inventory this weekend, you could just say so.”

“You caught me, Robs,” Steve says, thumbing over her knuckles fondly. “Finally gonna join my conspiracy to make Keith’s life hell?”

You’re about to cut in, emphasizing that no one else should be making any hospital visits, when a metallic screech has the three of you on the bed whipping around.

Eddie’s managed to crack the barred window- judging by the sound, it hasn’t been opened since the 70s. He freezes with all the attention, then speaks around the cigarette clenched between his lips, suave again- “Pardon the interruption. Anyone else care for a smoke?”

Everyone in the room blinks at him, in various stages of disbelief; Steve starts laughing, first, which gets Robin going, and eventually you, too, until Eddie’s grinning around the cigarette, lighter halfway to his mouth as he chuckles- “Well, can’t say I didn’t offer…”

Robin makes a comment about nicotine fumes, which quickly devolves into her and Eddie fiercely bickering.

The elevated chatter of your friends fades into the background as Steve takes your hand atop the sheets, head tilted to get you in his line of sight again- love you, he mouths.

Love you, too.

[munsonkitten]

cw: sexual discussions, gender dysphoria (trans Eddie Munson pov), virgin Eddie, mentions of period typical transphobia and homophobia

It comes as a bit of a surprise, when Steve comes out to Eddie as gay. Even more of a surprise when Steve follows it up with and I’m attracted to you. Eddie has to remind him, with clenched teeth, bracing for the impact of rejection, that he doesn’t have the parts Steve wants. 

“You think I care what’s in your pants, man? You’re hot, either way. I’m just saying, like, I’d fuck you,” Steve says, blowing smoke into the air in front of him. He’s sitting against the side of Eddie’s bed, hogging the joint Eddie rolled for them both. “I’m also, like, really fucking high. So forget I said all that.”

Eddie reaches over the edge of his bed and snatches the joint back before Steve can bring it to his mouth again. 

He takes a hit, letting the smoke fill his lungs while he ruminates on, well, all of that. 

“You sure you’re gay?” Eddie asks, settling on that question first. He winces as he says it, his own internal hangups taking hold of him. He knows he’s a man, there’s no doubt about that. He’s been validated to hell and back by Wayne, a bunch of older queers Wayne is friends with, and the one doctor in the state of Indiana that has shown him any kind of compassion. 

He just knows how other people are. How, despite him knowing who he is, a lot of people just see him for his cunt and his tits. Well, not like he has much of his tits left, not after the demobats performed a botched mastectomy on him and left him with one and a half breasts. The doctors that put him back together wouldn’t remove the rest. He knows that Steve could just be getting some wires crossed — yes, he could be attracted to Eddie, but Eddie has to ask if it’s really because he’s into men and sees Eddie as a man, or if… If it’s the alternative. 

“Pretty sure, man,” Steve answers. He tilts his head back over the edge of the bed and looks at Eddie, where he’s lying against his pillows. “Like, I don’t think about,” he waves vaguely at Eddie’s body, and Eddie knows he’s being careful, like he can’t just talk about him without overthinking each word. “I think about, like, how you pinned me to a wall with a bottle to my throat and I think about how you hotwired that RV. I was definitely into you during both of those things, and I had no idea about, you know.”

And that’s true. Eddie’s been hiding it pretty good since he moved to town. Buzzed his head in his bathroom the day his dad got arrested. Had a pretty good feeling his pops wasn’t coming back from this one before he even left. Usually he took Eddie along with him, but that final time he left him with a pile of change and a phone number and told him to call Wayne if he wasn’t back by the next afternoon.

Wayne took one look at him when he showed up, asked him about the buzzcut, asked him what name he was going by these days, and then took him to meet some friends. Didn’t even have time to meet any other kids before he started getting tips from an older trans man that Wayne met years back. Since then, Eddie kept his head down, his chest bound, and never uttered a sound until he got on testosterone and his voice started to deepen and crack along with all the other boys. 

“Okay, well now you do know, so,” Eddie points out. He shrugs, takes another hit and then passes the joint back down to Steve. “You’d really fuck me? Pussy and all?”

“I mean, I’ve got experience with it,” Steve says. “I just don’t like women, is all. You’re not a woman.”

Eddie doesn’t really get it. How Steve can go from Hawkins’ biggest lady killer to lounging on Eddie the freak Munson’s dingy bedroom floor saying he doesn’t like ladies at all. Steve Harrington, who, and it’s no secret, called Jonathan Byers a queer a few years ago and laughed when his slimy friends called other boys fags. Yet here he is, saying that Eddie’s a man. So much of a man that Steve says he’s gay and wants to fuck him in the same breath.

It doesn’t make any fucking sense. 

“What about you?” Steve asks. “Would you?”

“Would I what?”

“Fuck me,” Steve clarifies. “Want to get fucked by me. I mean, hey if you’ve got a dick laying around, I’d let you put it in me, too. I don’t think I’m picky.”

Eddie sighs, dropping his head down to his pillow. This is where it gets tricky. Yeah, he’d have sex with Steve Harrington. Who wouldn’t? But as much experience as Steve has with pussy, Eddie’s a pussy with no experience. Other than a few drunken kisses in dark clubs eighty miles from home, he’s completely terrified of putting himself out there, and honestly for good reason too. 

Being gay in this town is hard enough, but if anyone finds out he’s trans, he’s fucking done for. It was scary enough realizing Steve knows, and he didn’t even have a choice in Steve finding out. Next time he tries to die, he’s gonna make sure he gets to a hospital instead of getting his clothes cut off on Steve’s parents’ bathroom floor. 

But yeah, Steve knows, and there’s no more risk of him finding out, and that’s pretty much the main reason Eddie hasn’t had sex with anyone, so. 

“Yeah, I guess,” he answers. 

“Cool,” Steve whispers. 

And that’s it. That’s all the conversation is. 

Steve crawls into Eddie’s bed and curls up beside him like they always do when he sleeps over, and he takes the joint from Eddie to take one last hit. He reaches over Eddie to put it in the ashtray and then lays back down.

“So, um,” Eddie says. Because he’s confused. He thought Steve was coming onto him. He thought this was a precursor for Steve coming in him. 

“What’s up?” Steve asks lazily, voice catching on a yawn. 

“Well, I’m glad we established all that, but, like… Are we not going to…?”

“What? Oh, no. I’m way too high,” Steve whispers, turning his face into Eddie’s shoulder. “Another time?”

Eddie laughs because he has no idea how his life became this. 

“Sure,” Eddie agrees. “Another time.”

Steve sits up, presses a loud, smacking kiss to Eddie’s temple, and then drops his head back down. He turns his face in toward Eddie’s neck, arm finding its place around Eddie’s waist. Eddie can’t see his face, but he thinks Steve’s pleased smile might just match his own. 

Read More on AO3

[specialagentlokitty]

Shaun x Autistic!teen!reader - favourite things

Hello I haven't seen anyone asking for the Good Doctor imagines so I was wondering if you could do one where Teen Autistic Reader goes in hospital for a lung transplant (because her mother was smoking when she was pregnant with her and caused a lot of problems when she was growing up as well) and Shaun becomes a big brother while Reader tells him about her fluffy bunny plush and lots of facts about rabbits? Just a fluffy moment when Shaun's adopted father (cannot remember his name) takes the two to see bunnies? - Anon💜

You were anxiously watching the door, waiting for the familiar face of your favourite doctor to walk in.

Every day without fail he came in at this time and you had something to show him, so you stared at the door just waiting.

A minute later he walked in with your chart in his hands and he walked over to you.

“Hello (Y/N).” He greeted.

“Shaun! Look I have something to show you!”

You pulled out your phone and showed him a photo your friend had texted you.

“That is a big rabbit.” He said.

“It’s my rabbit plush! It’s huge! You like rabbits and I want to show you it, I thought you would like it, hey did you know baby rabbits are called kittens?”

“I did not know that, I like that. Thank you for telling me.” He smiled.

He looked at your chart and you looked at him, tilting your head a little bit.

“How are you feeling today?”

“I feel better, it doesn’t hurt as much to breathe anymore.”

“That is good.”

He asked a few more questions, did some checks on your and he set your chart down at the end of the bed.

“Will you tell me more facts about rabbits?”

You happily nodded and began to spout all sorts of facts about rabbits to him, and he happily listed, clasping and unclasping his hands while you tapped yours against your shoulder.

You were rocking back and forth slightly, and your breathing was ragged and Shaun frowned.

“Can I listen to your lungs?” He asked.

You nodded and you breathed while he listened to the sounds of your lungs.

“Are you struggling to breathe?”

“A little.. it’s okay though..”

“When you get excited you talk a lot, your lungs cannot keep up with the amount you breathe when you talk quickly.”

“Oh…”

“Do you need your cannula?”

You shook your head and beamed brightly up at him.

“No it’s okay. I don’t mind I’m used to it.”

“Okay. Will you call the nurse if you need it?”

“Uh huh, Shaun?”

He stopped what he was doing and turned to you.

“Will you have lunch with me? I get lonely eating alone.”

Shaun smiled and nodded his head.

“I would like that, I do not like the cafeteria it is very loud. I will have lunch with you.”

“Thank you!”

Shaun left to carry on working, and you spent most of the morning talking to your friend through texts, researching more things to learn about and wondering around your room.

You were standing in front of the window, looking outside at all the people walking past.

“You should be in bed.”

You turned around.

“You’re not Shaun.”

“No, he’s a little caught up with work, he asked me to tell you. I’m Dr Glassman.” He smiled.

“How’d you know I should be in bed?”

“I read your chart before coming in, I thought I’d do your next check up if you don’t mind?”

You shook your head, hand tapping your shoulder.

“Only Dr Murphy can do my check ups.”

“Alright, that’s okay. How are you feeling? Any chest pain or struggle to breathe?”

“It hurts a little, but that’s normal. Are you a surgeon too? Do you like rabbits?”

“I am a surgeon, and I do like rabbits. Can I sit while you wait for Shaun?”

You nodded and he sat down in a chair, and you guys spoke about rabbits and what it was like being a surgeon.

Your lunch was brought in but you didn’t touch it, you waited and carried on walking around the room until Shaun came in with his lunch.

“Oh Dr Glassman you’re still here.” He said.

“I thought id keep (Y/N) company while she waited for you.” He smiled.

You sat on your bed to eat your lunch.

“Will you be the one to give me new lungs Shaun?”

“I will be in the operating room, yes.”

You nodded your head.

“When I get my new lungs I’m going to see the rabbits. Will you come see the rabbits with me?”

Shaun smiled.

“I would like that.”

Dr Glassman smiled as he watched the pair of you interact.

He had heard from others like Melendez and Andrews that you and Shaun had bonded, you prefer Shaun because he understood you better.

You and Shaun got along really well, and anyone could see that Shaun worried about you, he liked talking to you so when you were having a bad day it made him stressed.

You on the other hand saw Shaun as your older brother, if you had a brother you wanted him to be Shaun.

Dr Glassman smiled to himself and a few days later he came back to your room.

“How would you like to go on a trip?” He asked.

“Where to? If it’s to the big machine again I don’t want to do that I don’t like that.”

“No it’s not to the CT.” He chuckled.

“Where too?”

“It’s a surprise, Shaun is coming too.”

“Okay. I want to go. Is it okay if I go? Am I allowed?”

“Well you’ll be with two doctors, and I’ve already gotten permission to take you, so it’s alright.”

You nodded and you went into the bathroom to change and he helped you get your oxygen tank and everything ready.

Shaun met you both downstairs and he was just as curious as you.

You were led into a small pet store and you looked around.

“You must be (Y/N), I’ve got a surprise for you, and your friend.”

You looked up at Shaun, and you clasped the bottom of his jacket and he looked at your hand but said nothing.

You both were taken across the store to a small pen and you gasped.

“Bunnies!” You beamed.

“They are so small..” Shaun whispered.

“Here, let’s sit you down.” Dr Glassman smiled.

He helped you sit down and Shaun sat down next to you, both of your reaching out to pet the little rabbits and you happily spoke about them.

It was a day off you and Shaun both needed, nothing to stress or worry about, just each other and some adorable little baby rabbits

[wwry2018]

Curse of Yes/No

My name was Jace, I was 26 living in the suburbs of Sydney, it was getting close to the end of my year at uni and my girlfriend Sherry wanted me to go out and have some fun. She slid over a flyer for a local festival. A Halloween festival.

We don’t really celebrate Halloween in Australia. But as time has gone on it seems to be more and more present. Decorations being available to buy in stores, kids talking about trick or treating and festivals and street markets advertising Halloween themes.

My friends wanted me to go to one that was on tonight in town. It promised Fall themed food, spooky rides and classic Halloween fun. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go or not. Usually I let others decide for me. And it was hot as hell. Fall themed food wasn’t what I was looking for when it was 35 degrees c in the shade. But as I said I wasn’t big on making decisions. 

So my best mate Ricky said he would pick me up at 8pm and we would go and have a look. Sherry was working late and said it would be good for me to get out and try to relax. Being a third year accounting student it didn’t come easy. She said go relax just don’t let Ricky get you drunk.

He picked me up at 8 as he said and I climbed in his car, “Jesus man, for a doctor you don’t exactly promote healthy lifestyle  do you?” Smoke was billowing out of he car “it’s my one vice, I know it’s not healthy but hey I’m addicted and I enjoy it” “is that your professional opinion?’ ‘Shut the fuck up and let’s go” we drove towards the fete.

He picked me up at 8 as he said and I climbed in his car, “Jesus man, for a doctor you don’t exactly promote healthy lifestyle  do you?” Smoke was billowing out of he car “it’s my one vice, I know it’s not healthy but hey I’m addicted and I enjoy it” “is that your professional opinion?’ ‘Shut the fuck up and let’s go” we drove towards the fete.

As we walk into the festival it has this classic spooky horror theme of a gypsy caravan.. There are rides and haunted mansions to walk through but mostly it’s to theme. Ricky spots a fortune teller carriage at the end of a line. ‘Perfect” he says. ‘This is what you need. Go get your answers as you can never decide for yourself’. I um’d and ah’d if I should do it or not. Ricky just said ‘exactly” he put $50 in my hand and pushed me in the tent yelling”I’m going to hit on the hot carnie, have fun”

I tumbled inside and looked around seeing a man lounging in a chair having a drink. ‘I’m so sorry’ I said gathering myself.

‘My Friend was being pushy, literally and wanted me to have my fortune read, but I don’t know if I should or not. It’s not a very me thing to do, I mean it sounds like fun and all but, you’re here I don’t see an old crone and a crystal ball anywhere. Haha ‘

Old crone and crystal ball. Well that’s not a very nice stereotype!’ The man said. ‘ but I wouldn’t expect a ginger accountant named Jace to come for a reading in Australian either, so I guess we are even.’

‘How do you know my name? ‘ I said in shock and backing towards the door.

‘We are not all old crones or female, that was just to show you I’m the real deal. Com now sit. Ricky has paid for your thirty minutes, let’s not waste this.’ He says as he walks behind me and guides me to a chair across from him. ‘Hold out your hand, palm up’ I do so in shock and almost trance, I’ve never been a big believer but I always believe  in what I experienced.

He looks at my palm only briefly and starts to speak. ‘ you are not on the right path’. I snap out of it. ‘Really ?” ‘I thought accounting was the right fit.’  

‘Nothing is right’ accounting, your clothes, Sherry. All wrong, because all were not your choice. You simply let others decide for you, so now you are on the wrong path. Ricky. Ricky is the one right thing in your life. He will be the one to correct it. Trust in Ricky. Ironically it will take someone else to tell you what to do to make you get on the right path and choose your destiny’

As I snatch my hand away I get upset ‘what do you mean, all is wrong with me. Who says that to a person. And I love Sherry, I’m going to marry her,…. I think’ ‘I don’t know who you are or how you know these things but it’s wrong.’

As I go to storm to the exit I feel like I’m in a tumble dryer the world spins on its axis. I look back and the Gypsy  is muttering and then spits at me. ‘ I give you a Curse! Not to hurt but help’ as I steady myself he walks towards me. ‘Use this to your advantage, not all curse’s can be detrimental. Until the clock strikes 12. Any question that is asked of a Yes. Or. A No. the opposite will be a reality. It has the power to rearrange you future your past. So be wise young Jace. And remember my words Ricky is the one to put you on a try path. Go now

I stumbled out of the carriage dazed wondering what had just happened. I looked at my watch. It was 9:15 pm. Sherry would be here soon and we can go home. I wasn’t looking and a bumped into a guy. “ watch where you’re going mate!” He yelled. “ hey do you smoke? Can I bum one?” 

As I went  to say no it was as if time slowed down and rewound very quickly to the day in the 8th grade when Tommy Doyle asked me to meet him behind the sheds at school to try smoking, he stole a pack from his dad. I had said no, but in this flash I has said yes. I joined Tommy, I had memory flood through my brain of school and uni and clubs always smoking, my friends were a little bit different to,, Ricky was there of course but they all didn’t seem so straight laced, my clothes seemed to feel looser, darker a little more edgier, I felt slightly more confident and strangely fitter, felt my arm tingle as a tattoo appeared as the spin came back to reality.

‘Yeah sure man”  I think passed him the packet and lit the lighter from my pocket, “ sorry I wasn’t watching where I was going”

 ‘No problem” as the guy walked away I looked back and the gypsy was standing in the door way, laughing.

Something didn’t seem right, I turned to to go taking an another deep inhale on my smoke. I needed to find Ricky and get home to Sherry.

This is the first of a few chapters, let me know if I should continue.

[phoenix--flying]

pjo characters as things my friend group has said

Hazel: I just kinda radiate towards caves

Nico: Breathing has been taken out of Nicos software

Connor: I can speedrun to your house when you're home alone

Cecil: raisins are dehydrated rats

Percy: It's a roller coaster where the only option is to die

Will: I just goooot- my jugular sliced open by a cat

Nico: We're going out tonight and killing all the homophobes. Call it a date

Will: Why am I so much taller then- Oh its cause im standing on a dead body

Connor: You're sooo welcome. I literally did nothing

Hazel: Just because your trash doesn't mean you can't do great things. It's called a trash can not a trash cannot

Piper: Cut my hair, I'll cut your throat

Thalia: Sometimes I do slap kids

Travis: When I grow up I'm gonna be a legal drug dealer

Beckendorf: I’m going to drop kick myself into space

Malcom: Briefly describe three applications that make use of the total eternal reflection of light Connor: The colour seven

Grover: Percys reaching old age, we should put him in a retirement home

Piper: Leo what did you do Leo: I may have burned down an orphanage and it may have spread to this site.

Lou Ellen: Travelling, usually done on the ceiling

Will: Imagine sitting on your couch watching TV and your phone buzzes. Reminder: Breathe

Austin: i just broke an acorn.. panic whY IS THERE AN ACORN IN MY ROOM

Nico: i feel like today happened yesterday and i just slept for all of tomorrow and woke up in the evening

Malcom: yeah i fell down the stairs and broke my spine in 3 places Connor: that's hot

Jason: Nitroglycerin. The forbidden smoothie

Will: I always look like trash. Annabeth: I know that's why I hate looking like trash

Travis: well we only have a few minutes left of class.. y'all wanna watch something explode

Piper: It sounded like you smoked 10 packs of cigarettes and then hit puberty

Jason: Imagine you get fired the day after you die

Nico: My stomach just like...started learning German

Nyssa: Leo if you don't leave, i'm shoving this desk fan up your ass

Jason: I slammed my foot on the accelerator, running multiple red lights at 220km/h, because I wanted to drive safe

Nyssa: When you go through the car wash but you forget the car

Drew: *points at trashcan* That looks like you

Nico: I only want chemistry between me and a coffin

Jake: Gotta put your wheelchair in 4Wheeldrive. Outdoor mode. Off-road mode

Leo: Murder is ok as long as its fine

Percy: Maybe if I fall asleep on my textbook I'll wake up with all the knowledge

Connor: Let's play spin the bottle but it's only you and me

Leo: Now how do we calculate the density if swiss cheese

Clarisse: I have to ask one of the experts Chris: Who are the experts? Clarisse: I don't know

Piper: Your mom is on vacation Leo: well- she's on a permanent vacation

Michael: AYO BITCH YOUR FOODS FLAMIN THE FUCK

Silena: If you're slow I'm a fucking snail

Jason: We need to hold a funeral! Percy: Here comes the bride

Beckendorf: Have you ever died? No??? Well here you go!!! Death simulator. It’s permanent!

*Annabeth and Percy sitting on a bench with drinks and a cop drives by* Percy: What if they thought we were drinking and driving Annabeth: We're not in a car

Will: I'm so smart Nico: Oh my god since when

Piper: *gives Leo a singular goldfish* Piper: Feeding the poor

Lou Ellen: Bless your soul Nico: What soul? Lou Ellen: ...good answer

Sherman: an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and anybody else if you throw it hard enough

Connor: I can see the veins in my eyes

Ellis: Whatever sinks your boat!

Cecil: You can't kill the gays if the gays kill you first

Will: dude sorry there's a knife in your grandma's face it grew wings and flew there :( Cecil: I’m sorry my knife flew out of my hand and slit that guys throat then burned it so he wouldn’t bleed

Silena: *playing Minecraft* I walked into your house and your birds started aggressively dancing at me

Lee: That's just so unfortunate for me. That is just so- oh I died

Percy: Wanna go to Toronto? Why drive just take the Earth Quake on natural disaster

Travis: The roof is just caving in on us it's fine

Michael: My arms are broken, my legs are broken, my lungs are broken, my knees are broken, I got decapitated when I was five

Connor: We're gonna die? No we're gonna beat the speedrun world record

Cecil: Hell to go down I there

Will: Mask to mask resuscitation

Travis: I may or may not have accidentally dropped a match in the building on purpose

Nico: Minecraft but I accidentally sets a school on fire

Percy: Minecraft but I die of hypothermia

Piper: Minecraft but I left my eyes at home

Jake: Minecraft but my legs are broken

Jason: Minecraft but I died

Lou Ellen: Minecraft but we're all gay

Will: If I die the game is homophobic

Cecil: Minecraft but I run my best friend over

Nico: I wanna hit a citizen with a baseball bat

Michael: Hey sir, you have Alzheimer’s. Would you like a side of bronchitis?

Silena: Why can't this be straight? Lee: Because you're not

Lou Ellen: mmmm i love my jesus fish Cecil: bro jesus fish Lou Ellen: ikr, jesus moment

[sweetsweetjellybean]

If Tomorrow Never Comes | Part 3 | Goodbye

Summary: Trapped in the Upside Down, Steve is prepared to die alone until he finds you hurt and in need of help. Doing your best to survive while the world catches fire, is there time for one more chapter in your story?

Adapted from As The World Burns by @myeuphoricmindset

TW: FemReader, Angst WC: 4221 Masterlist Here

The loud hiss in your ears drags you back to awareness from the depths of peaceful blackness. There is something off about the air you’re breathing. It’s cold and dry and leaves a plastic taste in your mouth, so different from the smoke.

The smoke. 

Your eyes fly open as you bolt upright, only to have a hand on your shoulder force you back onto the bed. 

“Steve!” Your cry is muffled by the mask covering your nose and mouth, forcing oxygen into your lungs. “Steve,” you try again, tears blurring your vision. 

“He’s alright. It’s okay. You’re both safe.” A tall man in a tan uniform is holding you against the bed. “Easy now, kid. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

There’s a dull ache where the IV pulls the skin of your wrist and a tightness where your arm has been stitched and bandaged. The stern look on his face doesn’t hide the kindness in his eyes.

The whooshing sound of metal on metal accompanies the curtains surrounding your bed being drawn back. 

“Ah, good. She’s awake,” says a shorter man dressed in green scrubs and a white lab coat. “I’m Dr. Timmons, but everyone around here just calls me Doc.” He picks up the chart hanging from the end of your bed as a nurse pushes past him, moving to your side.

“Just a minute, and we’ll get that off you, sweetheart,” she soothes, replacing the oxygen mask with tubing that fits into your nose and wraps around each ear. “There, that’s better,” she says, satisfied, continuing on to check the bag of fluid that’s connected to your IV.

The police officer stepped back a few paces to give the nurse room to work and now stands with his arms crossed over his chest, watching the doctor with a blank expression.

“You came to us in quite a state,” the doctor says, looking up from the chart. “Can you tell us what happened to you?”

“She doesn’t need to go into all that, doc,” the policeman interrupts, “It’s just like the boy said - they were exploring a cave when the earthquake hit and got trapped inside.”

“I know that’s what you sa-”

“She’s not going to tell you any different. Isn’t that right, kid?” The policeman asks without taking his eyes off the doctor.

“Yeah, that’s right,” you say with a strained voice, becoming aware of the burning in your throat, “Can I have some water, please?”

“I’ll get that for you, sweetie,” the nurse says, pulling the curtain and walking out into the busy ER.

“Look, Hopper, her injuries contradict that story. I’m gonna need some more answers here,” Dr. Timmons’ tone has changed, clearly frustrated by being given the runaround.

“We’ve got people looking into it,” Hopper assures, crowding into the doctor’s space, “The kids are back safe and sound. You don’t need the hassle of filling out all that paperwork. You just get her all fixed up, doc. Let me handle the rest.” He takes another step closer and lowers his voice, “Just like I did after you tied one on at hideaway and decided to get behind the wheel.”

The doctor blanches, his face taking on a deep shade of plum. “Fine. We’ll do it your way, Hopper, but I’m admitting her.” He slams your chart into the hook at the end of your bed and points at you. “You’re staying put until your blood oxygen is over 95. You got that?” 

Moving your head up and down you mumble a ‘yes’ before the doctor turns back to Hopper. “I’m going to go do my job if that’s alright with you.”

“By all means,” Hopper says with a wave of his hand as Dr. Timmons angrily pulls back the curtain, almost crashing into the nurse that had come back with some water. Hopper takes it from her and shuts the curtains behind them. 

“You did good, kid.” He hands you the plastic cup with the straw.

“Please, I need to see Steve.” Your eyes sting as they fill with tears. You have to see that he’s okay, that this is real. That it was all real. 

“He’ll be right back, I promise,” He says, trying to soothe you. “He wants to see you, too. That dummy wouldn’t get looked at until he knew you were okay. Nancy had to drag him away to get his hand stitched up.”

Nancy. 

“Look, I know you two have been through hell, but I’m going to need you to do me a favor and keep all this to yourself, okay?” He waits for you to nod your head. “I’ll explain more to you when you’re out of here, but staying quiet for now is safer for everyone.”

“I–” You’re cut off when the curtain opens, and you’re met with Steve’s bloodshot eyes. Ashes cling to the strands of his hair. His face is streaked with soot and blood. The only clean spot surrounds the bandage covering his temple, but he’s still the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen. The relief you feel pushes the tears over your lash line, leaving black drops on the white sheet as they run down your face.

“She’s awake,” Hopper points out the obvious, breaking the silent connection between you and Steve.

“I noticed,” Steve says, shooting Hopper a look before returning his attention to you, “Are you okay?” 

It’s then you notice the petite brunette at his side. Her caramel curls swirl around her questioning blue eyes as she looks back and forth between you and Steve.

“I’m Nancy,” she introduces herself before you can answer him, her tiny hand winding around his elbow.

So this is her. A low pain travels from your gut to your chest. “Hi,” you address her with a forced smile. “I’m alright,” your eyes bounce back to Steve’s, “Just a little smokey.” You place a hand over your burning throat.

The screech of the curtain cuts off any further conversation. 

“Goodness,” the nurse says, clutching a small stack of papers to her chest, “You kids aren’t supposed to be in here. We made an exception for Chief Hopper.” She pulls your chart from the end of the bed to add the paperwork. “We have a room already for you upstairs.” She squeezes between Hopper and your bed to unhook you from the monitors. 

“They’re keeping me overnight,” you explain to Steve, who opens his mouth to protest.

“She needs some oxygen, Harrington. She’ll be alright,” Hopper reassures him.

“That’s right, and you, sir, should be going home to rest,” the nurse says to Steve, “Concussions are nothing to be taken lightly. 

Looking toward Steve, you suck in a breath. He’s hurt, and you’ll be apart. Anxiety directs your hand, sliding across the bed in his direction, but he’s just out of reach. 

“Maybe I should stay with her..” Steve hedges, placing his good hand on the bed inches from yours.

“Come on, Steve,” Nancy says, covering his hand with her own and pulling it away from you along with his attention, “She’s a grown woman. She doesn’t need you to protect her.” She rolls her eyes with a dismissive laugh. “Besides, you need someone to keep waking you up. You can come home with me, okay?” Her question comes out almost shyly, looking up at him from under her lashes. As his hand tightens around hers, you realize you were right all along. Everything does happen for a reason.

He promises he’ll be back first thing in the morning before leaving with her hand in his. As you’re wheeled to your room, you see him enveloped in a hug by a group of young teens, Nancy’s hand running up and down his back. A peace settles over you, blanketing your pain. Everything is as it should be.

The sheets and blankets on your hospital bed are dry and warm, but you still can feel the cold. The nurses helped you clean up and got you something warm to eat. Despite your exhaustion, you still can't fall asleep. You've been lying on your side facing the window ever since they left you alone. The cracked top of the library's clock tower interrupts your view of the blue sky and drifting white clouds. Colors you hadn't expected to see again. 

If you stand, you might be able to see the closed seam of the gate you fell through, now nothing more than a scar on this town that will soon heal and be forgotten. You may not be as lucky. Some wounds are just too deep. With all the credit you give fate, you can't imagine one so cruel that you're meant to survive losing Steve Harrington.

As the light fades, the sky is streaked with creamy tangerines and pinks, but when your eyes close, all you can see is red. It’s hard to remember that you should be grateful. You’re home, and you’re safe. This is what you wanted. He saved you. He gave that to you. He gave you everything. And you took, without thinking twice. There’s nothing more that you can ask from him. After everything he’s done for you, you can’t ask him to love you. Not when it means he’s giving up the one thing he’s always wanted–Her. 

“Sweetie, why aren’t you resting?” The nurse has come in to change the bag of fluid attached to your IV. “Are you in pain?” She asks.

So much.

“Just a little,” you reply, “I’m just having trouble falling asleep.” Your eyes don’t stray from the darkening sky. Stars are just beginning to appear.

“Well, the good news is that your oxygen levels are looking normal. You’ll be going home in the morning.” She moves into your line of sight, and you force your lips into a tight smile.

“Do you want something to help you sleep?”

“Yes, please.” 

She returns a few minutes later, injecting something into the line attached to your wrist. There's a burst of cold as the fluid enters your veins and your eyelids begin to droop. The chill at your back reminds you of his absence. One last truth echoes through your consciousness before you're dragged into the depths of sleep. 

He was never really yours.

"He wanted to come himself," Hopper says from behind a pair of dark sunglasses, his eyes never straying from the road ahead as you bump along in his Chevy Blazer. The extended weather report for the week playing softly on the radio. 

"I'm sure," you reply, watching the scenery of Hawkins blur by outside your window. 

"Nancy was worried about him driving," he  continues to try explaining why he is the one picking you up from the hospital instead of Steve. 

"Of course. Makes sense." Your acceptance sounds contrived, even to your own ears. Seeing him will just make things harder, anyway. A new voice crackles from the radio, interrupting your thoughts.

"Two missing students have been found alive and well after being missing for several weeks after yet another earthquake rocked the small town of Haw-"

Hopper’s hand shoots down to twist the knob on the radio, tuning the static until he lands on a station playing Jim Croce.

“I hear the motel six is pretty nice. They've got a pool, right?”

“They did. It cracked during the earth–” you correct yourself, “Gate opening.”

"Perdue kept paying for your room while the search was on. So everything should be how you left it."

“Well, it's a pretty good school.” 

He nods. “You're studying rocks, right?” 

“Geology.” 

“Same thing,” he says, turning onto Main Street. Traffic flows easily, most of the roadblocks have been taken down, and repairs to the buildings are already underway. “Are you ready to get back to it?”

“I don't know. Studying the mysteries of the earth doesn't seem that exciting once you've been trapped in another dimension.”

The noise that comes from him is somewhere between a grunt and a chuckle. “I see why he likes you.”

“Did you know where I was?” You ask as you pass by the library. It looks the same as you left it. Half of it rubble, a crack running up the clock-tower, a few dead vines still clinging to its side.

His mouth twists as he shakes his head. “When the gate closed, it sent the town back into chaos, and we were focused on getting Steve back. I didn’t know you were missing until the folks with your school reported it. I should have guessed.”

“He didn’t think you were coming,” you tell him, your voice turning quiet. The music is too soft for him not to have heard you, but he doesn’t react.

"Look, you seem like a smart girl. If Harrington has already filled you in, I don't suppose I need to tell you why it's important to keep this to yourself. I don't want the government here poking and prodding my daughter or Steve or the rest of them. It's for your safety as well as theirs. Can I count on you to do the right thing here?”

"I understand. Believe me, the last thing I want is any trouble. I won't say a word."

“I’ve been down there, ya know. A couple of times. I can only imagine what you had to do to survive.” His face gives nothing away as his wrist casually rests on top of the wheel, but his statement is more of a question, and this conversation isn’t going to end until he finds the answers he’s searching for. 

“It wasn’t….” you trail off, shaking your head, “Steve kept us safe.”

“Never would’ve expected anything less from Harrington. That kid throws himself between danger and someone he cares about without thinking twice. He’s a lot like my daughter in that way.”

“Eleven?” You ask, putting the pieces together.

He nods, continuing his thoughts, "Those damn kids think he's a hero–"

"He is," you say matter-of-factly without any hesitation. After everything, you won't hear otherwise.

The man's lips twitch, rising at the corners before he turns his head and peers at you from over his glasses, "Hmm. Well, they all want to meet you, hear what happened," he says before turning his eyes back to the road. "Nancy insisted on waiting one more day to let you two get some rest. She can be a little um…intense." His head bobs, pleased with his choice of words. "Now, Steve. That kid decided that she was the one back in high school. Hasn't changed his mind even though she's broken his heart a few times since then," he looks over at you again, "Me? I'm not so convinced."

"Well, thanks for filling me in on that, Chief." You try to keep the sarcasm out of your voice as you move your head back toward the window. 

"You can call me Hopper," amusement laces his tone, "And I thought you might like to know, is all."

“Why would I want to know that?”

“Look, kid, I’m not one to get involved in–"

Blowing out a breath of disbelief, you raise your eyebrows at him. 

"Okay. Maybe I am. Harrington reminds me a little of myself at that age, and I'm just trying to save the kid some misery."

“You must be a good cop, Hopper. Do people always tell you what you want to know?”

“One way or another,” he says with a sly smile, pulling into the motel parking lot. He kills the engine and pulls a blue and red keychain from his pocket. He drops the subject moving on to the next item on his agenda. “I already stopped at the office and got your key, so you can go on in and rest. I’ll pick you up tomorrow around one and bring you to meet the others. If you get reporters calling you, remember what we talked about."

“Thanks for the ride, Hopper. Don’t worry, I won’t forget.” Not any of it.

Your key sticks in the lock, and you apply a little pressure with your hip, forgetting about your stitches, until your arm bumps the door, sending pain shooting through your arm. Dust motes rise into the stale smelling air as you push into the small room. As Hopper said, everything is just as you left it. Every surface is covered with maps and books. Stacks of samples packed into boxes sitting on the floor. Extra climbing equipment and your open suitcase overflowing with clothes take up all the space on the extra bed. Having requested no housekeeping, the bed you last slept in remains unmade. An indent from your head is still clearly visible on your pillow. It’s all yours, but none of it feels familiar, like it all belongs to someone else-a girl you used to know.

“Thanks, Caroline. Yeah, there’s somebody at the door.”

“Just a minute,” you call with your hand over the phone receiver when another knock sounds from the other side of your door. 

“Sorry. I don’t know,” you say, continuing your phone call, “Yup, I will. See you tomorrow. 10:30. Okay, Bye.”

Getting up from the bed, you pull your arms through the sleeves of an old cardigan to fight off the chill from the night air, your hair still damp from the shower. “Who is it?” You ask, looking through the peephole. 

“Steve,” the reply comes at the same time you catch sight of the familiar chestnut hair.

The sound of his voice sends a dozen different emotions buzzing under your skin as your nervous fingers work open the lock. Taking a deep breath, you swing open the door, but the sight of him steals all the air away. Freshly shaven, hair perfectly styled, wearing a mustard-colored sweatshirt with an expensive-looking watch strapped to his wrist. His eyes lock with yours and you're alone together for the first time since the Upside-Down. 

“Are you going to let me in?” He asks when the silence has stretched out between you.

“Yeah. Of course,” you say, backing into your room, “I’m sorry.”

He moves inside, closing the door behind him. As if it’s a habit, he steps closer to you, moving into your space. His arms rise like he plans on reaching for you, but his fists close around nothing before retreating into the pockets of his well-worn jeans. Sometimes you hate being right. He’s made his choice. Tugging at the ends of your cardigan, you wrap your arms around yourself, trying to hold in the pieces of your broken heart. 

"Do you want to sit?" You ask, nodding toward the spare bed with your packed suitcase on it.

“Sure,” he says, moving toward the bed. He takes a seat on the edge, wiping his hands along the worn denim of jean-covered thighs, long legs taking up most of the space between the two beds. Stepping over his legs, you pull up the rumpled bed covers before sitting opposite of him, wiggling your hands under your thighs so you won’t be tempted to touch him.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to be driving,” you blurt out a little too direct.

His face falls. “I’m not,” he replies, looking a bit sheepish, “Shit. I should have been there this morning. Nance con–”

“No, no. It’s fine. I can’t ask you for anything more, Steve,” you try reassuring him, but you know it’s not coming out right. 

“Ask me?” His brows pull together in the middle, “You’ve never asked me for anything.”

“No. I just meant..” You shake your head, trying to clear away whatever this is between you that’s stopping you from connecting to him like you had before. “I just…are you okay? Does your head hurt?”

“No. Everything’s alright. Everyone is just overreacting. What about you? Your arm? Are you breathing okay?” This time he does reach out, his hand landing on your knee, the warmth of it almost feels like a burn.

“I’m fine,” you say, looking away from his hand, “I’ll just need to make a follow-up appointment in a few weeks at home.”

“Home?” His hand withdrawals to his own lap and looks over his shoulder at the suitcase behind him.

“Yeah, back to school. We both get our lives back, thanks to you. See, I was right. You did save me, Harrington,” you try keeping your tone light, a small smile on your mouth.

“I don’t know about that. I’m pretty sure we did it together.” 

You can see he’s conflicted, not ready to face the truth that’s hanging over your heads, invisibly flashing like a neon sign-you don’t fit in with each other’s lives here.

“You’re still coming tomorrow, right? Everyone wants to meet you. Especially Henderson. That little shit keeps saying he needs to hear what happened from another person of science.” He quotes the title with his fingers fighting back a smile as he shakes his head, feigning annoyance, but it’s no secret how much he loves them all.

“I wish I could. I have to get back.” This is it. It’s time. “My friend from school is picking me up in the morning.”

“That soon? I could have driven you.” He frowns.

“Steve, you’ve got a life here. Your friends are waiting for you to come back to it.” And so do you, even if it’s going to feel different than the one you left behind. This has changed you. He has changed you. You love him enough not to take any more from him.

“They’ll understand. We’ve….we….I could stay with you for a few days.” He’s arguing, but you know deep down he knows it won’t work.

“Steve–”

“Until your stitches are out. Just to make sure you're okay.”

“And what would Nancy say about that?”

His mouth opens, but the words aren’t there. 

“It's okay, Steve,” you give him a smile, “It’s okay. I'm glad she’s finally seeing you for the good man that you are.” The way I do. “You deserve that.”

“This doesn’t feel right,” he says, swallowing hard, a pained look on his face, “After everything…you and I….”

“We’re going to be alright.” Your voice cracks on the last word, but you don’t let your smile slip. He stands, reaching for your hand, pulling you into his chest. Your eyes close as your arms circle his waist, breathing him in for what might be the last time. His warmth surrounds you, fills you. It has you wishing you could bottle it. Take it with you. Let it tide you over until you feel this way again with someone else. It will never be him, but you have time now. He gave that to you. And with that time the memories will fade away, and you’ll be happy again.

“I meant every word I said,” he whispers against your ear. His fingers press tightly into your back like he might not let you go, and god, you don’t want him to.

“I know. Me too.” Your head tips back so he can see your face, and you hope he’ll remember this as truth. “You’ll always be my hero.”

He looks down at you, eyes shining before they close. His head dips until he can place a chaste kiss on your mouth, letting his lips linger long enough that you can memorize their soft feeling. His hand caresses your cheek, and he steps back.  Without his touch tethering you, it feels like you might float away. 

“I should go,” he says, his hands shoving back into his pockets, and you nod, ready to have this end. 

“Please explain to Hopper for me,” you say, following him to the door.

“I will.” His hand turns the knob, opening your room to the cold night. Once his feet are over the threshold, he turns back toward you. “Take care of yourself, okay? Don’t go falling down any more rabbit holes.”

“I’ll try,“ you chuckle, “Stay safe. Let them take care of you for once.” 

His eyes roll before he nods. “If you ever need me–”

“I know where to find you.” You grip the edge of the door to stop yourself from reaching for him.

“Okay.” His head bobs more as he looks down at his feet, a stubborn lock of hair falling over his forehead.

“Steve?”

He looks up, letting you get lost in the warm amber of his eyes one last time.

“Think about me sometimes, okay?”

“You don’t need to worry about that, honey,“ he says, lips turning up despite his sad eyes, “I’m always going to be thinking about you.”

The hollow ache in your chest spreads through your whole body, and tears escape, running hot over your skin. Before you can blink, his thumb is there, brushing them away.

“How about one more smile?”

“Yeah,” you sniff, swiping at your eyes quickly before putting all your love and hope for him into a smile, wanting him to take it with him. 

“Bye, Steve.”

“Bye.”

His shoulders turn toward the parking lot and you close the door. Your tears fall unrestrained as you turn the bolt and slide the chain into place. Turning, you lean against the door and sink down to the floor, covering your face with both hands as you sob. Knowing that it was the right thing to let him go because only the right thing could be this hard.

AN: I decided to split to chapter it was just going to be too long. Besides, I made a really cute banner for the next part. So stay tuned Part 4 The Reason will coming soon. Thanks for reading and I'd love to hear what you think. xoxo -Jelly

Beta'd by @superblysubpar

[justmeinadaze]

We're A Family Part 16 (Steddie X You)

A/N: This is very much a Steddie chapter and I love it so much. This is probably going to be one of if not my favorite chapter in this series. I wanted them to really fully embrace that lovers aspect of their relationship and totally be ok loving each other as much as they love the reader.

Warnings: Parent Dads Steddie and Mama Reader, mentions of trying and struggling to get pregnant, SMUT (between the boys <3), lots of fluff, Steve VERY BRIEFLY mentions fears of telling his family they are trying to have another kid. I think that's it. Genuinely just a lot of sweetness in this one.

Word Count: 3116

“Fuck me…”, Steve pants as he throws his arm over his eyes. 

“I just did.”, you giggle as you roll over to face him. 

You and Steve had been spending a lot more time alone in the pursuit of baby number three. Of course, Eddie was still very much involved in sexy time but he insisted if there was a point where he could take the kids out of the house, you three should take the opportunity. 

It had been a few months and still no positive test. The doctor insisted you both were healthy and fine, you just “need to keep trying.” The metalhead did everything he could to help. 

“Eddie, baby, why are you smoking so far away? You can sit next to me on the porch here.”

“I know, sweetheart, but I read online that smoke can affect you when you’re trying to get pregnant.”

“You were smoking around me constantly before and we still got Ro.”, you laugh.

“Baby, I can do the dishes. You’ve been at work all day.”

“Y/N, it’s fine. You and Steve just relax, ok? I got this. Wayne said stress sometimes can make it harder for you two to…you know…”

“Hey, princess! I went grocery shopping today so you don’t have to on Friday after work. I also got some more fruit. I read this book at work that was saying it helps with trying to have a baby.”

Steve grins as he turns to face you as well. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just…I don’t know.”

“Honey, it’s ok. It will happen when it happens.”

“I just feel bad. I feel like Eddie is stressing himself out taking care of us.”

“He has been going a little overboard.”, he chuckles. “Oh, I know that look. Dylan makes that face when he’s planning something. What do you have in mind, baby?”

***

“Mom, this place is amazing.”, Dylan’s jaw drops as he looks around the house the realtor brought you guys to. 

It was a rustic style home that definitely had that country feel. The entryway lead into the kitchen on the right and gigantic living room straight ahead with a gorgeous stone fireplace. The back door was mostly clear glass so you would be able to see outside when the kids were playing. 

“It’s beautiful. It’s not too far from Wayne either and it’s right next to the lake.”, Eddie grins, running his fingers along the countertop in the kitchen. 

“It’s also within your budget and has those five rooms you had originally mentioned, ma’am.”, the man showing you the house guides you around, pointing out the two bedrooms downstairs and the backyard that is much bigger than your current one. 

Steve pats Aurora’s back as she continues to sleep, drooling on the shoulder of his jacket.

“Do you mind if we talk for a minute?”

“No, ma’am. Take all the time you need.”

The four of you lean against the counters in the kitchen as you wait for him to leave. “What do you think, kid?”, Eddie asks.

“I like it a lot especially since it’s by the water.”

“It’s closer to my store but it’s a bit of a drive for the three of you every morning.”

You chew on your nail as you think. “Just an extra 10minutes which isn’t too bad. What do you think, Stevie?”

“I’m fine with the drive. We may need to update some things though like childproofing the locks and stuff. Other than that, I think it’s perfect.”

“Alright, gentlemen. Let’s fill out some applications and pray.”

##############

“Hang on, Ed.” Steve reaches over and grabs Eddie’s arm as he begins to get out of the car. “You guys have fun! “

“Bye dada an daddy.”, Aurora waves.

They wave back with a smile, waiting for you three to get inside before the man drives away. 

“What’s going on?”, the metalhead asks. 

“Y/N and I thought you needed some time away from the kids and the house so we’re going on a date.”

“Did Y/N not want to come? She should have a night out to.”

“Eddie!”, Steve chuckles. “She’s fine, trust me. Let me show you what a date night with Steve Harrington is like.”

“Oh, someone’s cocky. Alright, Harrington. Wine and dine me.”, he grins. 

***

“Mom? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, can you just…hold my hand. I’m so nervous.” Dylan smiles as he sits on the floor beside you and takes your hand in his. “This anticipation is killing me. With you and Ro it was just like ‘Hey, there’s a baby in there.’ I’ve never really had to utilize a pregnancy test like this.”

“With Aurora, you thought you were sick. Did you think the same thing before you found out about me?”

“Naw, with you, I was doing a routine exam and they had to make sure I wasn’t pregnant.”

The timer on your phone beeps and you sigh before reaching onto the bedside table where the test had been sitting. As you read the results, uncontrollable tears begin cascading down your face while Dylan wraps his arms around your neck.

***

“That band was fucking awesome!”, Eddie exclaims as the other man grins at his excitement. 

Steve decided to take the metalhead to new bar just outside of the city limits. He knew how much he loved music, thinking it would make him happy to see some bands play while they drank and talked. 

“It’s been a while since you guys have been on a stage like that. Do you miss it?”

The man shakes his head as he takes a swing of the beer from his glass. “I mean I still play with the guys but that rush that I used to get being on stage…no it’ll sound stupid.”

“No, come on. Tell me.”

“That rush I used to get…I get now with the kids. Dude, seeing Dylan on his first date and watching Ro learn do those vocabulary card things you got her… that makes me happy. I can’t wait to see what this new baby will be like.” Eddie notices Steve’s posture stiffen and he promptly reaches out to rub his shoulder. “Hey, it’ll happen, man.”

“I know. I hate seeing that sad look on her face with every period or failed test.”

“The doctor said everything was good though, right?”

“Yeah, just have to keep trying.”, he sighs before glancing towards Eddie. “I haven’t told my mom yet that Y/N and I are…you know. I’m afraid she’ll tell my dad and I have no idea what he’ll do.”

“Steve, babe, fuck your dad. He can try whatever he wants but he’s not breaking up our family.”

The man exhales a cute, breathy chuckle. “Did you just call me babe?”

The metalhead grins even wider as he leans closer to him. “Depends. Did you like it?”

#######

 The bathroom door to the men’s room hurtles open as Steve pushes Eddie through it with his lips on his and quickly locks it behind him. The metalhead groans, shoving his back against it and begins fumbling with the other boy’s belt before lowering himself to his knees. 

“Fuck.”, Steve mewls as the man below him takes his already leaking cock into his mouth. Eddie knows exactly how his husband likes it, you showed him well, and he revels in the sounds he pulls from him as he takes him deeper till he’s gagging around him. 

It’s not just the action itself but his small, tender touches that have Steve moaning. While Eddie bobs his head, his hands roam the other man’s body, tracing the back of his thighs, up to his stomach. Steve can’t help but wonder how he would react if he spoke to Eddie the same way he talked to you. 

“That’s it, Eddie, baby, fuck. Just like that.” His eyes fluttered closed as he tangled his fingers into his hair, guiding him as the metalhead’s rhythm picked up. Steve couldn’t hold out any longer, he needed him now. 

He tugged on the boy’s hair and he took the hint, rising to his feet and hooking his lips to Steve’s sweet spot on his neck. Growling with desire, he lifted Eddie into his arms and placed him on the counter, aggressively yanking off his jeans. Pulling him to the edge, he lifted his leg over his shoulder and guided his cock into the man’s entrance. 

Eddie’s eyes rolled as Steve slid his hand along his stomach, slowly thrusting his hips as he relished the feeling of the man he loved.

Did he tell him that enough? I’m sure if he asked, Eddie would tell him he’s being silly and of course he does. They had gotten much closer these past few years and became more comfortable sexually but there was a level of intimacy Steve felt they still struggled with. 

“Eddie?” The man responded with a hm as he bit his lip to keep from moaning too loud. “I love you.”

He heard the change in Steve’s tone, promptly opening his eyes to scan him over. Propping himself up on one of his elbows, he reached over to caress his cheek as his thumb glided along his skin. 

“I love you to.”

“No, No. I love you.” 

Eddie blinked a few times before wrapping his hand around the man’s neck and pulling him down till he was hovering over him.

“I love you to. So fucking much, sweetheart. I-I grew up feeling like no one—mmm—no one ever really cared about me. Then I met you and Y/N.” He craned his neck to capture the man’s lips. “Steve, you can talk to me like you talk to her. I like it.”

“Yeah? So, you would like hearing—fuck—hearing me say things about how good you fucking feel, baby, squeezing my cock?”

“Jesus.” Eddie laid back flat against the counter as his hand reached down to stroke his own dick. 

“That’s it, Eddie. Play with yourself while I fuck you. God, you look so fucking sexy right now.”

“Ha-harder, Steve. Please.”, he moans. 

“Is that what you need, honey? I can do that.”

As he rolled his hips into his roughly, the metalhead covered his mouth with his palm, suffocating the urge to scream at the pleasure that ran through his body. His back arched as his abs tensed as rope after rope of spend hit the skin on his stomach. 

“Fuck me.”, Steve groaned as he pounded into the man faster chasing his high. After a few more rough thrusts, Eddie felt him cum inside of him, look up to watch his eyebrows scrunch together and his neck muscles tighten as he did. 

Gradually, he pulled his softening cock out of him and reached over to grab some napkins to help clean Eddie up.

“I’m sorry if these are rough. They aren’t like our towels at home.”, Steve sighs as he tosses the paper in the trash. As he begins pulling up his pants, Eddie abruptly tackles him into a hug, squeezing tightly as he lays his cheek on his chest. “Is everything ok?”

The metalhead nods. “Y/N does this to us after and now I kind of see why. I feel…closer to you if that’s even fucking possible.”

Steve softly laughs as he wraps his own arms around him, pressing him tighter to his chest with his palm. “Yeah, baby. I know what you mean.”

***

As they walk into the front door of the house, they are surprised to find it completely silent. Steve quietly searches the downstairs, turning off lights while Eddie locks everything down. 

When the enter their bedroom, they grin finding everyone asleep in your bed. Dylan was on his side with you behind him, arm draped over him and Aurora who was snuggled up in her brother’s chest as she sucked her thumb. 

Both men quickly changed out of their cigarette, bar smelling clothes and crawled into bed; Steve behind you and Eddie behind his daughter. 

***

“Daddy.”, Ro coos as she lightly taps her father’s face with her palm. “Daddy. Wake up.”

“Ro. Aurora.”, you whispered as you tapped her side. “Leave daddy alone and let him sleep, sweetie.”

“Mama, no. Daddy wake up.”

Dylan groaned in his sleep as he rolled over to face you. 

“Why? Why do you need daddy to wake up?”

She giggles as she falls to her knees and pushes at his arm. “Daddy, I miss you.”

“Well, that’s adorable.”, Steve sighs.

“Dada help Rara.”

“What do you need help with honey? Waking up daddy?” He lazily lifts his arm towards Eddie, trying to reach him with his hand. “Op, he’s too far. I can’t.”

“Dada!”, she growls and you feel the man smile in your shoulder. Aurora begins pushing at him again until he rolls onto his back and playfully pushes her aside with his hand. 

“I think I chose the wrong side to sleep on.”, he grumbles. 

“Hun-gee.”, she points to her stomach. 

“Aurora Munson- Harrington, you did not just wake him up for that!”, you giggle as she beams at you. 

“Whoosh!”, she exclaims as she pretends to throw something in the air. 

“She wants dad’s pancakes.”, Dylan yawns as he stretches. “Which actually sounds good.”

“Can you take her downstairs and put on a cartoon for her, weirdo? Give them some time to wake up.”

Your son nods as he slides off the bed, coming around to pick up his sister and bring her downstairs. Both men immediately scoot closer to you, pulling you into their embrace. 

“Did you two have fun last night?”

“Mhmm. He took me on a ‘Steve Harrington style date’.”

“Oh, you lucky man.”

“Did you three do anything exciting last night?”, Steve asked. 

“We did. Watched a few movies and ordered a pizza. I did go to the store real quick and bought you guys something. Eddie, baby, can you look into your nightstand and grab the thing on top for me?”

He sleepily nodded as he shifted his body to grab what you were asking for. His eyes suddenly snapped open as he realized what he was holding. 

“Harrington. STEVE!”, Eddie shouted startling the other man as he sat up making you laugh harder. The metalhead handed him the pregnancy test and he promptly sat up straighter. 

“Is this…? Are we…? Is this real? You’re really pregnant?”

Your grin grows as you nod. Steve tackles his arms around you, kissing every part of your face his lips can reach. As soon as you’re free, Eddie does the same much more gently. 

“Oh my god. I’m so happy.” Steve lays back down with a big smile on his face as he exhales. 

“You see what I mean, babe? Same kind of rush but better.”, the metalhead grins as he winks at the other man whose own smile grows. 

“Oh wow.” Both men look at you with confused looks as you smirk. “Ok, I don’t know what you two did last night but that energy is back.”

“Are you drunk? You shouldn’t be drinking if you’re pregnant.”

You giggle as you slap Eddie’s shoulder. “No, no, no. Nothing wrong with it. I kind of missed that…electricity…between the two of you. Maybe you both need a date night more often.”

After kissing them both again, you climb out of bed and head for the bedroom door, pausing as you turn to face them. 

“I hope you know you both can be intimate without me. I genuinely don’t mind. I know you both love me just as much as you love each other.” You flash them one final smile before going down the stairs. 

“We don’t deserve her.”, Steve sighs pleasantly as he watches you leave. 

“Yeah, we do. Charlie didn’t deserve her. Fucking idiot.” Eddie lays back down, scooting closer to the other boy. “I still think about the first time I talked to her on the stairs outside of the apartment. He was making her feel bad about him not coming to see Dylan. When I opened the door to sit outside and smoke, I just wanted to protect her. I wanted to drive to wherever he was and kick his ass.”

Steve slid a little closer to him till the back of his hand was barely touching his. 

“I always think about that night at The Hideout when we surprised her while she was on her date and you played that one AC/DC song for her. When she ran out of that bar…I can’t tell you how happy it made me especially after being away from her for so long. She fucking flew into our arms and I never wanted to let her go.”

“We kind of didn’t.”, he chuckled. 

Their fingers intertwined as they turned to smile at each other. Eddie leaned over and brought his lips to his, both men laughing as they pulled away when they heard loud noises downstairs.

“Hey! Are you trying to make everyone lose their hearing?! Turn the tv down!”, Steve hollered over dramatically as they both entered the area. 

“Told you.”, you sang from the sink as you washed some dishes you knew the metalhead would need.

Eddie wrapped his arms around you from behind, pulling you to his chest as he leaned his head on your shoulder.

“Taking more than her share, had me fighting for air She told me to come, but I was already there 'Cause the walls start shaking, the Earth was quaking My mind was aching and we were making it

And you shook me all night long Yeah, you shook me all night long.”

You grinned at the memory as he sang softly in your ear. Steve turned off the water before circling his arms around you both, kissing the top of your head. The sound of tiny feet slapping into the kitchen had you laughing in his chest. 

“Daddy! Rara and Din hun-gee!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah ya little butt. Come here.” She giggled as she ran into his arms and he lifted her onto the counter. “You’re going to help me?” Aurora nodded her little head as she waited for instructions. 

Steve lifted you into his arms and carried you to the living room, placing you gently on the sofa. 

“Did you tell them?”

“I did. They’re pretty excited.”

“I am to.”, Dylan smiled. “Did you guys want to play a game while we wait for breakfast? Especially since now she’s distracted.”

“I’m not really good with games.”

“Uh huh. Making excuses already, Steve Harrington. That’s ok. Dylan and I already know you suck.”

He jokingly scowls in your direction as your son hands you both a controller. 

“What are we playing?”

#############

@adequate-superstar @kalinaselennespeaks @strangerfreak

@steddieloverrr @manda-panda-monium @alligator-person

@decadentwombatmiracle @katie-tibo @marsupiooo

@local-stoner-bitch @steamystrangerfics @lunatictardis

@adaydreamaway08 @hazydespair @actuallyspencerreid

@moviefreak1205 @waylandmorgernsternherondal-blog

@kik51199 @strngrlytn @idkidknemore @damon-loves-pie

@k-k0129 @micheledawn1975 @eddie86baby

@justmeandmymeanderingthoughts @3rriberri

@sashaphantomhive @chelebelletx @big-ope-vibes

@munsonzzgf @munsonmoonshine86

[chichix]

Chishiya x Fem!reader

Warnings!: AIB S2 Ep8 spoiler!

Summary: After the meteorite hit Tokyo, you were put in a hospital to heal the injuries that had happen. Later, you were capable of doing stuff again. You then saw a man sitting alone outside the hospital.

╔═══════ ೋღ 💉 ღೋ ═══════╗

A usual day for you like always, but this one was quite different. You walked around for awhile and sat on a bench going on your phone, scrolling through social media. You heard people say ‘woah’ and point at the sky. You were confused why everyone was looking up in the sky, you then tilted your head up to see balls of light falling. Your eyes widened, you just thought it’ll pass by and go..but it didn’t. You put your phone back in your pocket and grip onto your bag slightly. All you saw was everyone recording and slightly smiling at the sight. You then saw a couple more of the lights quickly fall down..

It was only seconds until everything exploded. Ash and fire was everywhere, just surrounding everything around the area. You woke up surrounded by smoke and broken parts of buildings, you couldn't hear clearly, only muffles.."Ma'am! Can you hear me?" A faint voice said, "Check her pulse, she could be alive." Another faint voice.."She's alive! Hurry take her!" That was the last thing you could barely hear.

You had woken up, not knowing where you were. "Where..am I.." You spoken softy. Your parents had gotten up and started to tear up, "(Name).." Your mother spoke with a slight smile. You looked at her, you then looked at the room that you were in. ‘I’m in the hospital..?’ You said to yourself, “What happened?” You said looking at both your parents, your father spoke, “A meteorite had crashed near the area that you were in. Luckily you were found and brought here, but only a few survived..” Your mother touched your hand and nodded at you softly. You thought to yourself for a bit, you noticed your arm was in cast and had bandages wrapped around your stomach. Moments later your parents left, they wished you a good day and hope you’ll recover soon. A doctor had came in and checked you up to make sure you are functioning well. You were looking at yourself wondering if anything worse could’ve happened to you.

A week went by, you were able to walk and do ‘normal’ things again. You walked through the halls of the hospital, looking for a vending machine just to get a snack. You came across one and walked over to it, you put in your quarters and got some cookies. You got your change and walked off somewhere. You decided to go outside and go for a little walk. You walked for awhile eating your cookies slowly, you came across a man sitting on a chair staring off somewhere. You thought he was quite cute so you went over to go talk to him. When you came over to him, he looked at you. “Hmm, yes?” He said with a side smile, your heart skipped a beat after hearing his voice but brushed it off. “Do you mind if I sit here and talk to you?“ You asked softly waiting for his response, his eyebrows went slightly up. “I don’t mind, go ahead and sit.” He replied, you nodded and sat down on the other chair. “May I ask what your name is?” The man said tilting his head a little, “My name is (Name), and yours?” You said, leaning in but not to much to make him uncomfortable. “Chishiya.” He replied also leaning in a little, “Hmm..you want some?” You smiled and offered some of your cookies you got, he looked down at the bag in your hand and back at your eyes. “Sure,” He grabbed one cookie and ate it. You laid the bag on the table giving a hint he can eat them freely without him asking. “These are good.” Chishiya said with crumbs on the side of his mouth, you giggled a little at his face. “What is it?” He said furrowing his eyebrows, you reached your hand to his face and brushed off the crumbs. “Well then, guess you were laughing because I had crumbs on my face.” Chishiya said with a little smile.

{ Time skip }

2 weeks went by, you and Chishiya had gotten close and got to know a lot of things together. You both would always sit at the same chairs everyday in the evening. Chishiya always checked up on you at randoms times, he’d go into your room anytime and sit and talk with you about anything thats going on. You gained high feelings for Chishiya, you loved him so much, and so did he.

You and Chishiya met at the chairs once again to talk, “So, what are you planning on doing after your out of the hospital?” You curiously said with a smile, “Never thought about that, hm..probably continue being a doctor or do whatever. What about you (Name)?” He responded looking straight in your eyes, “Maybe pay a visit to my parents and just live my life like I did before..” You calmly replied, Chishiya bit his lip and held your hands. You looked down and noticed, “What are you doing?” You questionably asked, he kept quiet for a moment and spoke, “Maybe..we can live together and just have a happy life.” He said with a serious but calm tone. Your eyes widened as your cheeks flushed pink just a bit, “Are you asking me to be your..?” You said not finishing your sentence, “Yes, yes I am, so is that a yes or no?” Chishiya said feeling doubtful you might say no, “Yes! I will be your girlfriend, I’ll make you the best man in the world!” You answered very passionately while smiling. “My that was fast.” He replied surprised a bit, you leaned in, he took the hint and leaned in also..you both stared at each other, you both then softly kissed each other. You placed your hand on his jawline while he placed his hand on your cheek. You both pulled away slowly deeply staring at each other..

“I love you..(Name).”

“I love you too..Chishiya.”

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[kwillow]

People are too nice to me and send me so many intriguing and prescient questions and scenarios about my imaginary friends. Some of these I would have a hard time responding to with drawings, so I've gotta just use my words (SO MANY WORDS) instead!

So, for all interested parties, in response to those questions, here come some LORE RAMBLES: THEO EDITION.

Asks and answers under the cut!

Thank you! “Strange but interesting” is what I aim for with him.

I don’t think I’ve talked about Theo’s voice before! To be honest, I often struggle to imagine precisely what my character’s voices are; the qualities of my mental performance for them varies from day to day. Still, I think with Theo I can formulate a description of some kind.

I imagine his voice to be on the higher end for a man, though not exaggeratedly so, along the tenor range. He can deepen his pitch purposefully to sound more imposing or masculine, but his voice tends to rise in pitch further and further when he’s tense, like a violin string on the verge of snapping. He speaks clearly and distinctly, sometimes to the point of almost biting off the ends of words rather than having them sloppily run into each other, and only rarely uses contractions. His voice has a slight nasal quality to it at times. When he’s angry, a bit of a rattling growl can edge the end of his words.

When he was young, he was a terrible stutterer. He made a concerted effort to train himself out of stuttering in his adolescent years, but he will still lapse into r-ruh-ruh-repeating his syllables if anxiousness gets the better of him and makes him forget to swallow those extra sounds.

He is an expressive speaker, far more so than he’d prefer. Like his pitch varies, so too does his volume, and he can swing from speaking so softly as to be almost inaudible to screaming with all the volume his lungs can muster in a moment. His cadence is full of exaggerated pauses for effect mixed with swift traipses through less important words said simply for the music of reciting them to himself; his conversational tone sounds more like a performer going through a soliloquy than casual speech. In large part, that’s because he’s had more pleasant experiences with theater than conversation.

As many have noticed, he has also a vocal tic. He makes nasally sounds and guttural grunts and growls involuntarily, more often when he’s nervous or upset about something. As he gets older and his body is less able to shrug off the effects of his little smoking habit, he wheezes and coughs in the middle of his sentences as well.

For most settings, I imagine him speaking in a highly affected Transatlantic accent, but in Amaranthine (which is what I assume people are asking about and what I’m defaulting to for these answers), his accent might be more typically British posh-y, like Received Pronunciation. Or maybe not, I mean, it’s a funny animal fantasy setting, so he could have any accent I like. :P

If you want auditory examples, I think something mixing the high-pitched, sibilant, nasally breathiness of Peter Lorre with the refined yet expressive voice of Vincent Price would get you pretty close to what I imagine. To break from the classic horror actor category, you can also throw in this animated series’ depiction of Doctor Octopus to add the all-important ingredient of “nerd factor” to his voice, haha.

He’s a bookworm, yes, but that means he likes to learn! In his case, he’s also someone who enjoys mastering (or at least getting competent at) new skills and is extremely likely to learn to do something well just because someone thinks he can’t. He also has the benefit of being kicked out of school and extremely unemployed, so for most of his life he had lots and lots of free time to take on all manner of niche hobbies if he so desired!

His drive to learn a new skill is motivated by a combination of practicality, gentlemanliness, a need to know how to handle his own business to have as little outside interference as possible or simple intellectual curiosity (which itself is often a cover for boyish whimsy about Cool Stuff). To give examples of practical skills he taught himself: most people probably wouldn’t expect him to be a good cook, but he learned to do that because his family lost their household staff, and someone had to figure out how to cook beef – and because he wanted to take better care of his mother after she fell ill. He’s a great seamster because he wanted to make alterations to his clothes to better fit his unusual proportions without suffering the indignity of being prodded and measured by some nosy tailor. Where he lives, engines are extremely uncommon, being used only for agriculture if at all, but if Theo did own his own automobile, he would learn how to fix the thing himself as best as he could because he wouldn’t want some stranger poking around in his precious baby. He does know how to repair basic clockwork mechanisms, though! (Even if he won’t fix his own pocket watch for weird sentimental reasons.) He taught himself to be ambidextrous purely because he worried about losing a hand in a freak accident one day. He never wants to be caught unprepared or feel like he can’t handle something on his own if he needs to.

For skills in the “oh but if I could do this it would be so cool – I MEAN GENTLEMANLY” camp… yeah, actually, he does like to fence. He might not be able to hold his own all that well against a trained opponent, partly just because of his own physical limitations, but he knows the footwork and he certainly enjoys fighting stationary enemies while role-playing in his head as a knight. (He would be exceedingly embarrassed if anyone knew that part.) He can dance – but only as half a pair – and play the piano – or at least the chords his fingers can reach. He makes model ships and is familiar with all their parts even though he’s never seen the ocean. He knows a fair bit about women’s fashion and could probably help a lady pick a flattering dress for a gala… if she didn’t mind dressing about decade out of style. He’s a fine marksman, though that does overlap with “practical skills” when you live in a world with monsters creeping around on the edges of towns. And that’s not even getting into his self-taught anatomy lessons! But maybe we shouldn’t get into that, for the sake of our stomachs.

I could keep rambling, but to summarize, Theo lacks worldly experience, but he is a curious little guy and has all kinds of weird skills rattling around in his skull. You never know what he’s gonna know! Except for anything involving successfully interacting with other people. He’s never going to know how to do that.

Theo is the sort of person who enjoys collecting things, in that he is often captivated by the history and sentimental value of objects that catch his eye, likes to have a little hoard he can lord over like a dragon, doesn’t see value in minimalism and is loath to get rid of anything he owns.

However, he’s a homebody who rarely traveled far from his hometown of Northcrest, a small and remote barony, and his family (and therefore he) did not have the kind of financial situation that allowed for many frivolous expenditures. Therefore, he cannot regularly obtain new items for his collections because he would quickly exhaust everything that caught his eye in his own town, and he would be wary of spending his family’s dwindling funds on something that only served to satisfy his own whims. If he were in different circumstances, able and willing to travel more broadly and possessing the kind of wealth that allowed him to fully indulge his fascinations, I’d imagine he’d have quite the collection of art, weapons, antique books, clothing, and other fineries. As it stands, he only rarely adds a new object to his own collections, and he instead contents his inner dragon by attempting to maintain and catalogue the acquisitions made by past Norths that have accrued in their manor over the generations. Still… a toy store in his town has made quite a profit off him by having new model trains in stock around his birthday and holidays.

I don’t think he’d be terribly enthused with an insect collection, regrettably. At least not a live one. Preserved, exotic kinds might at least hold the intrigue of far-off places, but something more mundane (and wrigglier) would repulse him more than fascinate him.

I’m going to say somewhere along the line between “absolutely not” and “it’s complicated.” Theo obviously gets fulfillment from looking after the people he cares about, and in Amaranthine, he’s been in a caregiver role for so long he takes a certain amount of comfort in it. Even so, if he somehow knew people thought that he “wants” the people he’s close with to fall ill, or have chronic poor health, he’d be horrified. Theo’s not exactly the most hale and hearty fellow himself (and he’s also made his health notably worse through the years via his own actions, good job on that bud), so he knows first-hand how miserable frequent illness is. He wouldn’t want someone to suffer through that. Also, witnessing his mother’s slow decline and death was harrowing for him, and part of why he flings himself into caring for Hyden is that he doesn’t want to see something like that again and is doing all he can to keep Hyden stable. It brings him comfort, but the stress of feeling responsible for someone’s health – and the stress of only being able to manage their symptoms and never fix the problem – takes a toll on him, too, even if he wouldn’t say so.

So, he wouldn’t blame a sickly partner for their condition, and he’d be willing to care for them and want to help them, but I don’t think he’d ever say he “wants” someone he cares about to be sick. Would he nonetheless be more likely to get close to someone sick versus someone well? Well, maybe. Theo has a bit of a dependent streak, not in that he needs someone to dote on him, but that he doesn’t feel like he has any worth in a relationship unless he can provide protection or assistance. But someone could easily satisfy his need to be needed in other ways, too. Like someone being clumsy and needing their clothes mended regularly, or having a deadbeat husband they need murdered, you know, stuff like that.

He doesn’t know much, and never cared to ask much either, like you imagine. He mostly just knows they’re not nobility, they do have some mage ancestry and ability, and beyond that aren’t important (according to Jocosa). Besides, as a history nerd, he has little interest in learning about his father’s side when his mother’s side has biographies, tapestries, records of badges and achievements and personal spellbooks in such great measure that he couldn’t hope to go through them all in his lifetime. Does Leonard’s side of the family have even one tapestry? No? How dull.

For his part, Leonard isn’t close to or fond of most of his family and isn’t very candid about his past life before becoming successful, so he was amenable to not talking much about his childhood or ancestry. He would prefer if Jocosa was similar restrained and didn’t extoll the virtues and history of her bloodline constantly, but alas, no. One of the consequences of marrying into snotty nobility, I suppose.

Oh, you’re on to something there! :)

Now, with someone like Theo, whose brain is a Gordian knot of congealing gray matter basting in a cerebral soup of self-deception, neuroticism, and concentrated hatred, it’s hard to point to one thing as the sole cause for any of his many issues. At the same time, I don’t want to just dump the entirety of Theo’s issues with his family and how they impact him psychologically because I worry that I could write a thousand words about it and still have five thousand more in me, and we all have other things to do with our time than read all that. That said, to briefly (ha) touch on what you’ve mentioned…

Many of Theo’s problems with intimacy, with needing to feel useful, with fearing connections with others, and so on do stem from his troubled family history. At least some of his self-loathing is borne from him, at a glance, looking more like the man he most despises instead of being the same long, slim, elegant creatures that form the roots and branches of his mother’s family tree. Although, the irony in that is that all the “bad” genetics that cause him grief and suffering come from his mother’s side – but he alternately blames the cruel gods and himself for being a freak, not his mother or grandpa or any of his weaselly ancestors for that.

It’s also true to say that Theo’s self-sacrificing and self-effacing acts of kindness towards his mother and to others he cares for are done in part to make up for the fact of his own existence. The fact that his beloved mother had to couple with a disgusting, loathsome, degrading, unfaithful cur of a man (have I mentioned Theo really hates his dad yet?) in order to bear him weighs heavily on his mind and warps his self-concept. As much as Theo knows his mother loves him, he also knows – and despises – that he if he’s his mother’s son, he’s also his father’s spawn.

Jocosa doesn’t talk at length about her problems to Theo, or anyone – she wouldn’t want to make Theo feel responsible for her woes and she isn’t the kind of woman to whine about her life’s tribulations besides – but Theo isn’t so ignorant that he can’t pick up on the tension in other’s conversations, read meaning into words left unsaid, or work backwards from what he is told to deduce the rotten truth behind what little he’s told. He knows that everything involving his conception was hard for her, even if she doesn’t say it, and he feels he needs to do everything in his power to make up for the suffering bringing him into existence put her through. ...And I could go on but I think that’s enough to get the picture for now. Have I mentioned I can write a lot of words about Theo??

I think Hyden would know better than to say something like that – out loud. Hyden does try to push Theo into a personal valet role. But Theo has his limits and Hyden is smart enough to not press them (too much, right away). Being referred to as a kind of servant is one of those limits that really pisses him off and would be a one-way ticket to not getting any more pillow fluffing. Also, for as much as he helps Hyden with daily tasks and provides whatever dotage he feels is required of him as an apprentice, caregiver or host, there are tasks a manservant would be responsible for that Theo categorically refuses to do (even though Hyden wishes he would).

I am greatly amused by the thought of someone trying to get a flower crown on Theo. I can’t imagine it’d ever go much better than people trying to put shirts on their cats. He just really doesn’t like situations wherein Stimulus I Have No Control Over Is Happening To Me.

He does tend to flip from fury to (relative) calm depending on the circumstance and the source of annoyance, so you’re spot-on with the variable reactions he could have to a floral intrusion. I would say he isn’t likely to use “witch” as an insult for the same reason as he wouldn’t use “harpy” or “ice queen” as an insult, which is that any kind of derogatory comment his mother was ever called might as well be a compliment in his books. “Harlot” is completely fair game, though.

Thanks a bunch for the kind words on my weird rat guy. So happy you like him!

(Also “dark fantasy rose type flower” made me laugh. God. He’s such an edgelord. Emphasis on the “lord”, with a title and arms and everything.)

Glad you like seeing him! I guess one of the benefits of me not getting particularly exotic with the colors or markings on my furry designs is that you can find associations to actual animals like this! I hope your pet rat had a better temperament than Theo does, though.

…Which sounds a little stupid considering quite a lot of these answers involved me talking at length about Theo being sad and self-sacrificing and crap like that. I swear to God he’s a nasty little bitchboy most of the time. I need to draw him biting someone on the face or insulting someone for being poor or eating someone’s eyeball or something again to balance the scales here.

Note to self.

[dbnightingale24]

Love Me or Just Let Me Go

A Jonathan Crane Love Story

~~

~~

Look who's back and trying to find her footing again 🙃 sorry for the delay, but between my mental health and personal life, things weren't going well and I needed a break. ANYWAY, I'm back with a new series (as well as ready off a few others), and I hope you all enjoy it! I really missed posting.

Just in time for Halloween, Dr. Jonathan Crane. I just figured (as I start to branch out) it's time to write about my favorite Scarecrow. I'm sorry this is so damn long (I really am), but I hope you all enjoy it! Since Tumblr is still on its bullshit, I can only post part of it here, but the full post will be on AO3 (I'll leave the link). As always, thank you @fuckingbye for the amazing moodboard. I love you!

Word Count: 56,703 (I said I was sorry)

Warnings: SMUT (Minors DNI), Swearing, Drinking, Degrading Kink, Car Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Smoking, Arguing, Family Drama, Angst, Mentions of Abuse, Fluff (ish), Childhood Trauma, Self Hate, Revenge, Loneliness, Trust Issues, Mental Health (or lack thereof)...I think I handled everything?

Song(s) That Inspired This Chapter: Man, You Make It Easy For Me. So, Why Can't I Make You Love Me?

~~

I do not give permission/consent for my works/stories to be posted elsewhere. I do not condone this kind of behavior or relationship, this is for entertainment purposes only.

~~

“Doctor Crane,” you smile sweetly as your favorite patron makes his way to the counter.

Your smile may be sweet, but you know your eyes show the same thing they always do whenever he shows up: pure desire and lust. The coy smile he always returns lets you know that he’s very well aware of the effect he has on you.

Effect.

“Same as always?”

“Coffee, black, please,” he smiles as he pulls out his wallet.

“New admittance at Arkham?” you ask, turning and starting on his second usual

At least three times a month, he orders a black coffee.

“No, but it is late night for work.”

“When isn’t it in Gotham?” you scoff, placing the lid on his drink.

“How about you?” he asks, handing you a twenty.

“What about me?”

“Another late night?”

“I’m the only one brave enough to close the store, so yeah. I always have a late night,” you laugh softly, taking his money while typing the amount into the register.

“Gotham doesn’t scare you?”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve met my Mother already, and I witnessed what drove her to madness, because I saw my Father’s death, so no. Gotham doesn’t scare me.”

“Your Mother...” he trails off as he looks you over, “Y/M/N?”

“I’m surprised you’re just figuring it out,” you laugh handing him back his change. “Everyone always said I look just like her, but I’m guessing the piercings, dyed hair, and tattoos have changed my appearance a bit.”

“Your Mother is quite the character.”

“You’re putting it nicely.”

“Keep it,” he says, gently pushing your hand back.

“The coffee was only two dollars.”

“Your company is always worth much more than that,” he laughs. “If you don’t mind me asking, how were you able to handle it so well?”

“If I tell you that, there will be no reason for you to come around for your afternoon tea, will there? Besides, you’ve got a late night of work ahead of you, and I’ve got ungrateful customers to tend to,” you smirk, cocking an eyebrow.

“Guess I’ll just have to ask again tomorrow.”

“Play your cards right and you may just get an answer,” you shrug and he laughs.

“You have a good night, Y/N.”

“You too, Dr. Crane.”

“Jonathan.”

“Jonathan Crane,” you smile as he grabs his coffee, nods, and walks away.

And just like that, he was gone. It’s the same conversation every day, today a little more telling just because he knows a bit (or a lot depending on how you look at it) about you. It’s always the same amount of small talk, flirty eye on your part, and him looking as if he’s interested but knows better. Smart on his part.

Sure, he deals with crazies, but he’s never dealt with you.

For the rest of the evening, you live in the feeling of that little exchange. Yeah, the man looks like he can’t carry a bookcase, but you know it’s all an act. You’re not dumb. You’ve heard whispers about Dr. Jonathan Crane, and most of it isn’t pleasant. It’s most definitely in your best interest to stay away, especially considering that your Mother is a patience at his place of work, but you can’t stop yourself. Beside, you live in Gotham.

It’s not like you have a ton of “good guys” to choose from.

You can’t pin down exactly what draws you to him, but you know that you can’t turn it off. You’ve tried multiple times. From the first time you laid eyes on him, you wanted him. No, you needed him, in the most unnatural way. Maybe it’s from living in Gotham all your life but, for whatever reason, you feel a sense of security when he comes in.

Yeah, you’ve definitely been in Gotham for too long.

“You’re sure you’re okay to close up all by yourself?” your co-worker Michael asks as he grabs his backpack off of the coat rack, while the last customer scurries out.

“I do it every night, Mike,” you scoff, wiping down the counter. “Get home safe.”

“Ya know, working with you is hard,” he sighs and you start laughing. “What?! It’s true! You’re the only one ever willing to close up shop-”

“It gives me a thrill,” you smirk with a cocked eyebrow. “Go home and tell Josh that you fought off a mugger, if it’ll help your ego.”

“He’d kill me if I ever tried to stop crime from happening,” he laughs softly. “You sure you’re okay, babe?”

“I promise. Get home safe.”

“You too,” he nods before walking out. 

You lean against the counter, pull out your phone, and scroll through all the evening news you’ve missed. 

Another raping, another stabbing, another kidnapping....it’s all just another day in Gotham. You don’t even bother to look up when you hear the front door open and close.

“If you want coffee, you’ve come to the right place. If you want anything else, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong damn shop,” you mumble as an article about Arkham Asylum catches your eye.

You may not see your Mother often, but that doesn’t mean you don’t care about her.

“How about a cup of tea?” a familiar voice asks.

You look up to see Dr. Jonathan Crane standing at the counter, small smile tugging on his lips, but his hair is out of place.

“Rough night, Doc?” you question, pushing yourself up with your foot, making your way over to the kettle and setting it up. 

“What makes you say that?”

“Your hair is out of place and there’s a bit of blood on your glasses, and the lapel of your shirt.”

“You’re more observant than I thought.”

“You’ve thought about me?” you tease, pulling out his his favorite tea powder.

Ginseng.

“More than you think.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you’re a mystery.”

“I’m sure you’ve met far more interesting subjects than me. You’ve already met my Mother.”

“While she is very much a fun case to study, now that I know she’s your Mother, you’re much more...complex.”

“I’ll choose to take that as a compliment,” you laugh, finishing up his drink before pouring it in a to-go cup. “That’s the nicest way I’ve ever been called insane.”

“Far from insane, Y/N. Very far. More like-”

“Troubled?” “Not that either...a to-go cup?”

“You’ve never been one to sit and stay since you started working at the Asylum.”

“A good point. What else do you know about me?”

“Nothing.”

“What else have you heard about me?”

“Things I’m sure you don’t wanna hear about,” you promise, looking him over as you lean against the counter. “No charge. You get home safe.”

“You see blood on my glasses and my shirt, but tell me to get home safe?”

“Who am I to judge?”

“You know, this day has been very telling about you but, at the same time, I feel like I know you less than I did before.”

“If I’m not keepin’ ya guessing, what’s the point of our lovely little chats?”

“Who says that I need these little moments to keep me interested?”

“Show me that you don’t.”

“Have a drink with me and I will,” he smiles coyly, mischief in his eyes.

Every red alarm in your brain goes off, but you’ve never bothered to listen to them before, so why start now?

You poured yourself a cup of coffee and slowly made your way from around the counter, ignoring the the sirens as they grow louder and louder, and sit across from him at the small table. 

“Jonathan,” you smile, mischief dancing around in your own eyes as you take a sip of your coffee. “Take your best shot.”

“What do you fear?” he asks with a cocked eyebrow and you scoff. “What?”

“What do you think I fear?”

“I can’t get a read on you.” “That’s fair, I guess,” you shrug, swirling the coffee in your cup around a bit. “I’ll tell you what I fear if you tell me something about you. I’ll know if you’re lying, so don’t try it,” you proposition, meeting his gaze with a devilish glint in your eye.

You really shouldn’t be playing this game.

An evil smirk spreads across his face before he responds with, “I’m the one who created the fear toxin.”

‘Will you stop fucking playing this game?! Tell him you need to get home!’ your brain begs, but you’re just starting to have fun.

You’ve never been good at doing what’s in your best interest.

“That tracks,” you shrug before taking a sip of your coffee.

“It tracks?”

“You work at the Asylum, no one in this city really has a good and clean record-”

“Oh? What’s on your record?”

“I put laxatives in drinks of customers who piss me off,” you tell him nonchalantly and laugh and when he practically chokes on his tea. “What? I don’t seem capable?”

“For some reason, I thought it would be something along the lines of murder.”

“No, I’m afraid the only thing I’ve ever really broken is hearts.”

“Why’s that?”

“I learned very early in life to never get too attached to anyone in Gotham. Never works out well for me.”

“Your parents?”

“Parents, first real love, last serious relationship. I fuck until I’m bored and then I leave.”

There’s a flicker of something in his eyes, but you can’t tell what it is. It’s not disdain or disappointment, but more along the lines of...shock? Confusion.

“So, you have fear of abandonment?” he asks as your timer goes off.

“Well, it’s time for me to close up shop, Dr. Crane,” you smile, getting up making your way back behind the counter with your half full cup of coffee.

“I didn’t take you as someone who’s a liar,” he comments and you don’t miss the irritation in his tone.

“I never said I wouldn’t tell you, I said it’s time for me to close up shop. However, I do like having this effect on you.”

“And what effect is that?”

“Rattling your cage.”

“Oh, you do much more than that, and I think you’ve known that for quite some time.”

“Oh, but Doctor Crane, this is the first time you’ve ever had the balls to court me,” you smirk over your shoulder and he laughs.

“How long does it usually take you to close up shop?”

“As long as I want it to. Why do you ask?”

“Do you have any plans tonight?”

“Do you want me to?”

“I figured we could...take a walk around the city.”

“You’re a very confident man, Dr. Crane.”

“No one’s gonna touch me out there.”

“And what on earth would we talk about on this little walk?”

“You.”

“Your obsession with me is cute. I like it a lot.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s an obsession, more like...fascination.”

“And what’s so fascinating about little old me?” you ask, covering the tops of all the different syrups. 

“Like I said,” he responds softly right behind you, causing you to jump, “because you’re a mystery.”

Oh, you’re fucking in it now. 

~~

You can read the full story here

~~

tags: @autumnrose40