#*and I say 'removed' but it's really the only word I can think of besides 'fucking bombed and harassed and terrorized into fleeing'

[carronpatrick]

Haven't found this here yet, so I wanted to share it with some links for education.

Found it from-

Twitter post by OmarSShakir

IG Post by visualizing_palestine

Created by-

AAANY (Arab American Association of New York)

Gaza Is Palestine

[neo-nomatrix]

CAN’T TOUCH ME LIKE GOJO

what gojo does when he’s jealous

cw - gojo uses red as a punishment, smut, jealousy, possessiveness, riding, teasing, kinda toxic gojo idk, bratty reader, rough gojo

Gojo was making you mad, beyond livid. He had brought you to this stuffy gala full of his balding colleagues and ditched you! You found solace in the bar holding an aperol spritz staring at your husband. He was beautifully dressed cream suit with a million dollar smile as he talks to his coworkers about business.

He hasn’t even thrown you a glance since he left your side. Normally you would still be next to him acting as arm candy but for whatever reason he left you to drink your sorrows. You assumed you would be stuck there for another hour or two with nothing to do. Until Hiromi Higuruma approached you. A man you had no idea was even distantly related to Gojos company.

“Mrs.Gojo, a pleasure seeing you somewhere besides with Satoru,” The man teases.

“Hiromi! Are you here to save me from this awful night?” It seems the lord has answered your prayers.

“You’re not enjoying yourself? Doesn’t Gojo normally keep by him at all times?” He asks, taking a seat next to you.

“Something’s up with him I guess, I’ve barely seen him all night and it’s horrible!” You complain.

“Oh sweetheart, how could he possibly treat someone as pretty as you like that?” He moves a piece of your hair out of your face and stares at you.

“I know! I mean he invited me here, and then has the audacity to leave me,” You pout to him.

“For the record, I would never treat you like that,” he smiles at you.

You look over at Gojo and he still isn’t looking in your direction. You decide to tease both the men a little more.

“Really? Do you promise ‘Romi?” You give him your best doe eyes and touch his bicep.

“On my life, sweetheart,” You both smile at each other.

In the corner of your eye you see a head of white hair coming toward you. Panic sets in but you can’t help but rub your legs together. You continue putting your hands on Higurumas chest to further instigate the situation.

“Babe, there you are! I’ve been looking all over for you,” Gojo pulls the back of your stool so you can’t touch Higuruma anymore and he wraps a large hand around your waist, “Higuruma, you’re also here.”

“I was just talking to your gorgeous wife Gojo. After you left her alone to talk to those gross executives,” Higuruma says.

Gojos jaw clenched and he squeezed your waist. His look of disgust apparent on his face.

“I think it’s about time my wife and I leave. Should I call you a cab Higuruma?” Gojo says.

“I’ll be alright,” Higuruma laughs.

Gojo pulls you away from the bar and quickly takes you away from the party. He ignores everyone asking where he’s going or trying to talk to him. Immediately as he reaches the car he opens and slams the door for you. He doesn’t speak a single word on the way home, despite your efforts to start conversation.

As you reach your home he’s immediately getting you through the door and up the stairs, he shoves you onto the bed as he removes his jacket. You hear him muttering swears under his breath.

“Do you enjoy being a slut who pisses me off? Hm? I mean really, what possibly do you get out of this?” He starts to undo the first few buttons of his shirt before he grabs your chin.

“I asked you a fucking question,” He growls at you.

“You left me! You left me all alone! I don’t know what you wanted from me, to just sit there twiddling my thumbs until you came back?” You argue at him, giving a big pout.

“What I don’t want is for you flirting with that piece of shit in front of everyone? You know how embarrassing that is, not only for me, but for you?!” He slips off his boxers to reveal his semi hard cock.

He pulls you up and puts you on your knees. He’s on his back and your face is inches away from his cock. But before you can wrap your lips around him something stops you. A force you can’t describe, red. He activated his repelling force to punish you.

You’re confused, upset, even angry at him. His usual punishment involves him overstimulating you but apparently not this time. You try to get past the barrier, using all your might to touch his cock. Yet nothing works, he’s the strongest after all.

“What did he call you?” He asks you, releasing red for you until you almost touch him, then activating it again.

“Sweetheart…” you whisper to him.

“And you fucking let him. That’s the part that pisses me off the most. I know he can’t have you, fuck, he knows it. But it doesn’t seem like you do,” He says back, piercing blue eyes scanning your face.

You crawl on top of him, the barrier between your pussy and his cock still apparent. You try desperately to grind down on him to no avail. Tears start to form in your eyes but Gojo doesn’t seem to care.

“You want it inside you, sweetheart? Or do you want ‘Romi?” He mocks you.

“YOU! I just wanted your attention, promise! I got so mad you left me by myself. See?! All i want is you,” You whine as Gojo smiles at you.

In a moment the red hue turns blue and you get sucked down onto his perfectly aligned cock. You’re stuck to him like a magnet. His size makes you scream and want to pull away, but you can’t. As soon as you pull away you’re sucked back onto him, you thought torture wasn’t supposed to be addicting.

“Fuck Higuruma, fuck him and all the stupid guys there. You thought i wasn’t paying attention to you? I wanted you so fucking bad I had to stay away or else you’d be on the floor with my cock inside you,” He grunts, hands gripping your waist.

“Toru! It’s too much!” You’re full on sobbing at this point, legs shaking and body sweaty.

“You don’t want him right? It was just to make me mad, right baby?” He asks you desperately, his hair falling perfectly in front of his eyes.

“Yes! I just wanted you to fuck me, I swear,” You squeal.

His hips rut into your sloppy cunt as both of you moan and pant like two bunnies in heat. His fingers expertly tease your clit and he sucks blue and red hickies on every part of your body. He’s holding you as close as possible. His thrusts get sloppy and his moans get slutty.

“Gonna cum inside you baby, gonna fill my pussy up everyone’s gonna fucking know you’re mine,” He says in your ear.

“I’m gonna-“ Before you can even finish your sentence you pulse around his cock cumming so hard you see black.

He follow not long after, spurting hot ropes of cum inside you. He gets as deep as possible to ensure nothing slips out. He releases the technique and you fall on top of his chest, breathing like you just ran a marathon.

“Holy shit baby, that was so good,” He says, smiling.

“Yeah… i wanna take a bath,” you look up at him.

“Okay my love, just promise me one thing. Never make me jealous again.”

[springtyme]

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐖𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐀 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲 ♡

afab!reader x König, Ghost, Price, Gaz, & Soap

warnings: Allusions to sex/sexual themes, some angst but mostly fluff, König picks reader up, unplanned pregnancy, references to Simon's past (I've tried to keep it very vague cause that is a really rough topic), implied ptsd, mention of painful (IUD-related) period cramps (18+ mdni!)

word count: 5k

part two

König ♡

Your hands instinctively find their way to König’s hair, as the kiss deepens, tangling your fingers in the soft strands as the intensity of the moment increases and the atmosphere around you grows more and more steamy. Despite your wish to fully emerge yourself in the euphoric feeling, something in the back of your mind keeps nagging at you.    

You have all evening had an underlying feeling that you have forgotten something, but without being able to figure out what, but as König’s hand starts to wander downwards, grabbing a handful of your arse it dawns on you. 

Condoms. You forgot to pick up condoms earlier…  

You have recently gotten your IUD removed, due to heavy period cramps. You had hoped and believed that it would get better over time but it had seemed like you had been one of the unlucky ones for whom it just didn’t get any better. 

You don’t regret your decision, your last period was way less painful than before, but after being on contraceptives and in a committed relationship for so long, you have still not gotten back into the habit of buying condoms again.     

“Fuck…” You groan out as you curse yourself out for your forgetfulness. 

 “What’s the matter, meine Liebe?" 

You sigh as you bury your face into his broad chest. He gently strokes your back and holds you closer. Taking a deep breath, you lift your head and meet his concerned gaze. “I forgot to pick up condoms earlier," you admit, your voice filled with frustration. “We're all out, and I didn't even realise until now.”

König's face softens, understanding the reason for your sudden frustration. He gently cups your face in his hands, his eyes filled with love and reassurance. “It's alright, Schatzi," he says, his voice calming. “We'll manage,” he lets out a low chuckle. “Besides, I'm skilled with my hands and mouth, no?”

You let out a sound, somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle, at his words. He is, truely, very skilled. But you have to admit that you haven’t been able to stop thinking about having him inside of you, to have him ravish you with his cock, all day. You’re currently ovulating, and like always, when you’re at this point of your cycle, your hornyness-level increases immensely.  

“Yes, you are skilled, my love,” you assure him, “Very skilled, I had just hoped that I would have been able to ride you tonight without worrying about you cumming inside me. You confess, “I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all day,” you feel a tiny bit embarrassed by your blunt confession - but only a tiny bit. You don’t think that you ever could feel truly embarrassed about confessing anything like that to him, you are too comfortable with him, too secure in your relationship for that. That is one of the most beautiful things about your relationship with König. He makes you feel so loved and seen and protected. The way he can look at you and make you feel like you’re the only woman in the world.         

You feel how he squeezes you a little tighter by your confession, but also how his bulge hardens even more by your words. The burning fire that has been smouldering in your abdomen the entire day is now fully ablaze, and you feel how your pulse is throbbing between your legs. 

The thought of bouncing on König’s cock, of having his mouth buried between your legs, of having him on top of you, of cuming on his cock as he fills you up till you’re leaking with his release, infiltrates your mind.  

“I’m not going to lie, that would have been nice to do, Schatz,” he says and you can only agree.  

But before you can voice your agreement, König continues, his voice filled with a mix of vulnerability and determination.“Would it be so bad if we said screw it and did it anyway?” 

Surprised by his suggestion, you pause, unsure of how to respond. The idea of not using protection has not been something you have seriously considered before. Curiosity gets the better of you, and you ask him, “What are you thinking?”

He takes a deep breath, his eyes filled with a mix of nerves and excitement as he meets your gaze. “I've been thinking a lot lately… Well, I have actually been thinking for a while now and I realised that I would really like to have a baby with you. That I’m ready to start a family together,” " he confesses, his eyes never leaving yours. 

His words catch you a little off guard, and you feel a flurry of emotions rushing through you. The idea of becoming parents together is not something you have discussed yet, you take a moment to gather your thoughts before responding, “Having a baby is a big decision.” 

“I know and I know that we haven’t talked or planned for this, and it may not be the ideal situation or timing, but… I can't help but want it, and I don’t know… this just feels like maybe it’s a sign.”

You're taken aback by König's revelation, a mix of surprise and uncertainty washing over you. However, his unwavering gaze and the love in his voice give you a sense of comfort and reassurance.

“I've seen how amazing you are with children,” he continues, his voice filled with warmth. “And I can't think of anyone else I'd want to start a family with. We may not have planned for it now, but I can’t help but want it.”

His words touch your heart, and you find yourself considering the idea. Despite the initial shock, a part of you has always known that you wanted to start a family with König, despite the two of you not having had a serious conversation about it yet. 

As you take a moment to collect your thoughts, you realise that this situation could be an opportunity to grow together, to embark on a new chapter in your lives. You look into König's eyes, a mix of hope and determination shining within them.

Now that it’s said out loud, and you have seen the want and longing in Königs eyes, the idea of starting a family with him seems right, downright logical. 

“Maybe you're right,” you say, a smile tugging at the corners of your lips. “Maybe it is a sign.”

König’s face lights up with joy, relief evident in his expression. He pulls you closer, his strong arms enveloping you with love and excitement. “Wirklich?!” His eyes now shining with unshed tears of joy. 

“Yes, my love, really.” You grin up at him, before letting out a surprised shriek as you’re suddenly lifted from the ground.

König’s spinning you around as he lets out a deep laugh of pure excitement. You feel how tears start to form in your own eyes. You lock your legs around his torso as he finally stops spinning, your hands cupping his cheeks and your gaze finding his again.  

“You really want a baby with me?” He whispers, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, the air filled with a thick tenderness. 

“I do,” you assure him, before kissing him softly. “Let’s make a baby.” You whisper into his lips.   

Ghost ♡

This isn’t happening…  

This can’t be happening. 

Simon doesn’t even know how to describe what he is feeling. Is shock a feeling? It doesn’t really matter–a feeling or not–shock is the only thing that he is feeling after the words have left your mouth. Or maybe, in reality, he is feeling so much all at once that shock is the only thing his overstimulated brain can register. 

Simon has been in situations that would leave any other person in a state of paralysing shell shock, more times than he will ever be able to count, but he always finds himself able to push through it, but not this time. No, this is about the most petrified he has been in years.   

His mind is running a hundred miles an hour and has gone completely blank at the same time as he tries to process what you just told him. He finally manages to pull himself somewhat out of his trance and his eyes finally find yours again. 

The look on your face pains him, and what pains him, even more, is the knowledge that he is the reason that you are pulling that face. His instincts, the protective side of him, scream to take you into his arms and comfort you but he is still too paralysed by the situation to do so.   

“Ar-are you sure?” He manages to say, his voice cracking. He sounds uncharacteristically frail, the usual husky gruff  of his voice weakened. 

“I took three tests, Simon…” You say.  

He just nods as the reality of the situation fully hits him, he feels how his heart sinks as he absorbs the weight of your words. The room feels suffocating, as if the walls are closing in on him. He takes a shaky breath, desperately attempting to maintain the little composure he had managed to gain.

“And you really want to keep it..?” He hates how the words sound as soon as they leave his mouth. You don’t deserve this reaction, but he had never thought he would be in this situation. 

It has always been a secret wish of his, a wish he knew he never would be deserving of getting granted. It would be too pure, too good for someone like him. But it has not kept him from secretly dreaming about it. All those late nights over the years when he has laid in his bunk on employment and couldn’t sleep, with no distractions other than his own head. On nights like those, he has let his mind wander, let his imagination run wild, and dreamt about it. Something wholesome and good, so different from the stress and terrors that come with his line of work. 

On the worst nights when the nightmares keep him up or the adrenaline just won’t leave his body and let him get any rest, he lets himself indulge in the fantasy. It used to be more vague, but after he had met you they got clearer, more evident, almost tangible, which had scared the shit out of him. The fantasy of someday having a family of his own, of getting a chance to do everything right, of doing it differently from how he grew up himself.

But that was all it ever was, all it ever could be, a fantasy… How could it ever be anything else?! How could someone like him ever be a good dad?  It was a thing that might not be that unrealistic of a wish if he was anyone else but himself. 

He is too broken for that, has seen and experienced too much fucked up shit, and committed too many sins. But, fuck, now that it is actually within reach actually a real possibility he can’t help but yearn for it, even though it scares him shitless.        

“I know that we have never discussed this and that it was nowhere near planned and I’m sorry if this fucks up everything between us but…” You trail off, nervously fidgeting with your sleeve, your eyes have left him, as you chew on as you take a shaky breath as if you’re gathering courage to continue, “I think I want this, Simon,” you finally say, your voice low and shaky, close to a whisper, but you take another breath, this one deep and certain, as you again lock your eyes with his, “I want this baby, Simon.”  

Your eyes shine with a certainty that sends a rush through Simon’s entire body. You want this baby… His baby. It is like the entire world stops, a whirlwind of emotions runs through him in this moment and he can’t deny it anymore. He wants it too. He wants this baby, to become a family, to be the man that he always secretly has dreamed of being.

“I want it too,” He is still trembling slightly but a tone of determination has returned to his voice. 

“You do..?” Your voice close to a whisper, but a hopeful tone lacing the unsurety.        

“Yes,” and he does, he really does. “I want to be a family.” 

“Really?”    

“Yes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m scared shitless, but I do want this, sweetheart,” he reaches out a trembling hand towards you, wanting to offer some form of comfort, and to reassure you that he means what he is saying,  “I really do.” 

“I love you, Simon,” your beautiful eyes now shining with happy tears, “so, so much.” 

“I love you too.” His protective instincts fully resurfacing, overriding his initial fear. He pulls you into a tender embrace, holding you tightly against his chest. “And I already love our kid too,” he adds, as he squeezes you a little tighter, protectively holding you in his strong arms. You and the child you’re barring, his child.      

His own father had fucked him up so severely, taken so much from him, but this is not something his father will be able to take. As terrified and scared as he might be Simon knows, in this moment with you in his arms, that he will do everything to not become his father and that he will do anything to keep you and your unborn child safe, that he will make sure that they will grow up to know nothing but love and security and that he will do everything in his power to make sure that you never are gonna regret having him as the father of your child.      

Simon's heart swells with a newfound determination. He knows it won't be easy, that there will be challenges and sacrifices along the way, but he is ready to face them head-on. He has spent years battling his demons and overcoming his past, and now he has a reason to fight even harder - for you, for his family.

Price ♡

As you sit across from John in your usually so cosy living room, you can't help but notice the nervous energy radiating from him. You’ve noticed a change in your husband's behaviour lately, and it's left you feeling puzzled and a bit concerned. John’s been acting distant, withdrawn and  you can't help but worry that something might be wrong with him, that there might be something he isn’t telling you which is so out of character for him.

Unable to bear the uncertainty any longer you take in a deep breath, you have been gathering up the courage all day to confront him. 

“Jonathan?” You say, voice close to a whisper, but still strong enough to be heard clearly. He removes his eyes from his book, in which he has been staring down into for the last thirty minutes without turning a page, seemingly without reading a single word.  “Is everything okay? You seem different lately, and it’s been making me worried. Can you please tell me what’s going on?” 

His gaze shifts between you and the floor. Sensing that something important is about to be revealed, you lean in closer, waiting for him to speak. 

John hesitates for a moment, his eyes filled with a mix of emotions. “I'm sorry for acting distant. It's just that... I've been feeling nervous about something important, and I didn't know how to bring it up."

Your heart races as you anxiously wait for him to continue. "What is it?" you ask, a mixture of anticipation and concern in your voice.

“Darling,” he begins, his voice filled with both excitement and trepidation. He takes a deep breath, gathering his thoughts before continuing. “I've been thinking a lot lately, about our future, about the life we’ve built together."

Your heart skips a beat, you feel a little pang of fear in your chest but you’re also curious to know where he’s going with this. “What is it, John?” you ask, your voice filled with anticipation.

“love, I think I want to try for a baby.”

The words hang in the air for a moment, and your mind races to process the magnitude of what he's just said. A rush of emotions floods through you – surprise, joy, and a hint of uncertainty. You’ve dreamt of having a family with John, but the thought of bringing a child into the world amidst the challenges and uncertainties of his military career has always given you pause.

You take a moment to collect your thoughts, reaching out to hold his hand for support. "John, I…" you begin, your voice filled with a mix of emotions. "I've always imagined us having a family, but I worry about the dangers you face, the time we'd have to spend apart."

John's grip on your hand tightens, his eyes filled with determination. "I understand your concerns, darling, and they are valid. But we've faced countless challenges together, and we’ve  always persevered. I believe we can navigate this journey too."

His words resonate deep within you, reminding you of the strength and resilience you both possess. You find yourself nodding, a smile tugging at your lips. “You're right, John. We have overcome so much, and I believe we can face this too.”

The relief and joy that washes over John’s face is palpable. He pulls you into a warm embrace, holding you tightly as if never wanting to let go. “Thank you, darling,” he whispers, his voice filled with gratitude. “I promise, I'll do everything in my power to protect our family, to be there for you and our future child.”

In this moment, as you hold each other tightly, you realise that together, you can face anything that comes your way. The journey ahead will be filled with uncertainties, but with love as your anchor, you know that you and John are ready to embark on this new adventure – the adventure of parenthood, embracing the joys and challenges that lie ahead, hand in hand.

Together, you begin to discuss your hopes, dreams, and plans for the future. And as the evening unfolds, you find solace in the knowledge that love, support, and a shared vision will guide you through whatever lies ahead on this new and exciting path.

Gaz ♡

You wake up to the sound of your alarm blaring in your ears. Groggily, you reach over to turn it off, but as you do, you feel a sense of excitement bubbling within you. Today is the day Kyle is coming home from deployment for a short visit. It has been months since you last saw him, and the anticipation of seeing him again fills you with a mix of nervousness and pure joy.

You get ready quickly, making sure everything is perfect for his arrival. The butterflies in your stomach flutter wildly as you make your way to the airport. Finally, you spot Kyle standing amongst the sea of people, his eyes scanning the crowd. As soon as he sees you, a wide smile spreads across his handsome face, and you can't help but match his enthusiasm. You run towards each other, embracing tightly, cherishing this precious moment as you kiss each other deeply.

Over the next few days, you spend every moment together, catching up on all the missed conversations and stolen kisses. It feels like time has stood still, and the world revolves solely around the two of you. But one evening, as you're cuddled up on the couch, a casual conversation takes an unexpected turn.

Kyle's arm is wrapped around your shoulder, his voice low and comforting as he recounts some of the experiences he had while deployed. He talks about the sacrifices made and the hardships endured, his eyes filled with a mix of sadness and determination. In a moment of vulnerability, he accidentally says, "I hope our kids never have to go through any of that."

You freeze, the weight of his words hanging heavily in the air. The two of you have never discussed having children before, and the mention of it catches you off guard. mind races, trying to process his words. You turn to face him, searching his eyes for answers.

Kyle’s eyes widens with embarrassment as he realises what he just said. You can tell that he hadn’t meant to blurt out his thoughts so suddenly. He takes a deep breath, gathering his thoughts before he speaks. “I’m sorry, I've just been thinking a lot about thre future lately, you know, about what I want in life and all. And despite our age, despite everything going on, I can't help but imagine a family with you.” Kyle confesses,  reaching out, his hand gently caressing yours. “I don't want to rush anything. But I want you to know that I genuinely see a future with you. I can't imagine a life without you by my side.”

His honesty touches your heart, and you can’t help but smile, feeling a warmth spread throughout your body. You take his hand in yours, intertwining your fingers, the sudden image of a beautiful little baby with Kyle’s eyes looking up at you is filling your head, “Kyle, I honestly never imagined having this conversation now, but I can’t deny that the idea of starting a family with you is really tempting. We may be young, but if we’re together, I believe we can face anything.”

Kyle’s face lights up with relief and happiness. He pulls you closer, his embrace tighter than before. In that moment, you both realise that the love between you knows no limits, and that sometimes, life has a way of surprising you when you least expect it.

You know that this unexpected conversation has opened the door to a new chapter in your relationship, one that holds the promise of a beautiful future.

Soap ♡

You sink into the soft pillows with a content sigh, getting comfortable under the soft covers. You and Johnny had attended a family gathering at his parent’s house and now that you’re finally home and in bed you begin to reminisce about the day, recalling your favourite moments,  the cheerful atmosphere that had filled the air,  the delicious home cooked food and all the laughs and easy going conversations. 

But one conversation had taken you a little aback, a comment made by one of Johnny’s relatives had stuck with you. You know that it had been meant in good humour but it had weighed on you. You had tried to push it aside but now that you’re home the words keep ringing through your mind. You ponder over what had been said to you but you’re pulled out of your thoughts as the bedroom door creaks open. 

Johnny enters the room, a gentle smile on his face. In his hands, he holds a glass of cool, refreshing water. He knows you well, understands the little things that bring you comfort. A wider smile appears on his face as he approaches the bed and offers you the glass, his blue eyes filled with tenderness and care as he lets out a low laugh. “Can’t believe Rob’s having another boy!”  He gently shakes his head from side to side. You had learned earlier in the day that Johnny was having yet another nephew.  

You take the water from him, feeling the coolness of the glass against your palm as you smile up at him. The gesture touches your heart, a reminder of his thoughtfulness and love. Taking a sip of the water, you feel a sense of rejuvenation wash over you, as if his kindness has quenched not only your physical thirst but also your emotional weariness.

As you set the glass aside, Johnny slips into bed beside you, his presence a soothing balm to your soul. You snuggle closer to him, feeling the warmth of his body radiating against your skin. His touch is gentle, his embrace a source of comfort and security.

 “Yeah, seems like boys just run in the family.” You smile up at him.  

Johnny chuckles and jokingly comments, “You know, I think mam secretly hoped it would be a girl this time. I think she's secretly always wanted a wee girl to spoil since she only got sons.” 

“Well, Hannah seemed rather serious when she told me that this kid will be their last.” You chuckle as you recall the conversation you had had earlier with Johnny’s sister in law. But the topic also again makes you recall the comment said to you earlier by Johnny’s aunt. 

It had been amidst the cheerful atmosphere, when the news about Rob and Hannah expecting another boy had broken. The news seemed to ripple through the room, prompting everyone to offer their congratulations. You couldn't help but notice a sly smile from Johnny's aunt as she turned to you and said, "Well, now it's up to you and Johnny to bring a baby girl into the family!"

You had blinked from surprise, caught off guard by her comment. The weight of her words settled on your shoulders as you realised that the expectation for a future child had somehow fallen on you and Johnny. You had looked over at him, he was in the other end of the living room playing with his two young nephews. You couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sense of love and admiration for him by the sight of them. Seeing him interact with those little boys, his blue eyes twinkling with joy and his deep laughter filling the air. But you also felt very  put on the spot. "I... uh," you had stammered, searching for the right words. "We haven't really talked about all that yet."

Aunt Maggie chuckled softly, patting your arm. "Well, dear, there's no rush. But I'm sure everyone here would love to have a wee lass in the family someday and I’m sure you and Johnny would do a great job."

Her words had lingered in your mind for the rest of the day. You didn’t know if you should mention it to Johnny or not, you have no idea how he will react. But now as the two of you are in the secure atmosphere of your own bedroom you think that you might should. 

You take a deep breath, gathering the courage to bring up the topic that has been weighing on your mind all day. As you snuggle closer to Johnny, feeling the warmth of his embrace, you softly say, "Johnny, there's something I wanted to talk to you about."

He looks at you with concern in his eyes, sensing the seriousness of your tone. "What is it, love?" he asks gently, his fingers tracing soothing circles on your back.

You hesitate for a moment, unsure of how to begin. Finally, you gather your thoughts and speak from your heart. "It’s just… Maighread made a comment about us having a baby girl to balance out all the boys…” 

Johnny's eyes widen slightly, surprise evident on his face. He takes a moment to process your words

"Wait, she really said that?" Johnny's surprise is evident on his face as he takes a moment to process your words. He gently moves closer to you, his fingers still tracing soothing circles on your back. “I’m sorry if that made you uncomfortable, love. I guess my family has a tendency to be a little too brash sometimes.” He says in an apologetic tone.

“It’s okay, I love your family, it just caught me a little off guard I guess,” you assure him, placing your palm on his cheek, gently stoking your thumb over the rough stubbles of his beard. A long silence breaks out between you, both absorbing what had just been said between you.  

But Johnny finally breaks the silence. “It isn’t a terrible thought though," he whispers, his voice filled with a mixture of excitement, nerves and tenderness.

You pause for a moment, taking in Johnny's words, honesty and vulnerability shines from his eyes. 

“No, it isn’t,” you finally say, finally letting yourself imagine it without any sense of fear or doubt about what Johnny would think of it. The idea of him holding a little girl, makes a smile tug at the corner of your mouth, and you suddenly feel like you’re about to cry. Just earlier today the idea seemed scary to you since you and Johnny never have talked about children, but now as you look into his eyes, your smile mirrored on his face, you aren’t that scared anymore.  

“It’s actually a little weird that she said that, because earlier when I was playing with Noah and Oliver I couldn’t help but imagine us having a wean of our own… It’s actually something I’ve been thinking about for a while now..." 

Your heart skips a beat at his confession, the weight of his words sinking in. You can see the sincerity in his eyes, and a wave of emotions washes over you. “Really?” you ask softly, your voice filled with a mix of joy and curiosity. “You want a baby with me..?”

“Yeah, I really do, love," he says softly. 

"I think I would like that,” you say, your voice filled with sincerity. Johnny smiles, his eyes reflecting his love for you. 

You lean in and press a gentle kiss to his lips, feeling the connection between you deepen. In that moment, you both know that this conversation is just the beginning of a new chapter in your lives. It's a chapter filled with love, hope, and the possibility of bringing a new life into the world. As you both cuddle in the warmth of each other's embrace, you feel a sense of peace and excitement wash over you. The weight of Aunt Maggie's comment no longer lingers heavily on your shoulders. Instead, it's been replaced with the knowledge that you and Johnny are on the same page. 

With a renewed sense of love and purpose, you close your eyes and drift off to sleep, knowing that the future holds endless possibilities for you and Johnny, both as a couple and as future parents.

Part two

[bunicate]

satoru helping his lactating big sister :]

yk I said nanami nd suguru , nd u have the nerve to send s*toru . . . jus so yk im most likely never writing for dis man again but i felt impulsive so here is 700 words . I did dis in like 5 mins . . dnt expect cwazy

⋆⁺₊❅ ⋆ 𐙚 ₊˚ warnings ꒱ྀི incest. lactation / 18+

“stop doing that.”

you’re careful to punctuate every word, hoping that it would somehow force him to sense at least an ounce of your desperation. you’d like to think that your misery would act as some sort of deterrent from his stream of jokes, but it only enables him.

satoru chuckles, flicking his thumbs over the raised skin.

“sorry, but no can do, sis.”

his pointer finger and thumb latch onto the hardened bud and he tugs it with a gentle force. he admires the ripple of fat before he’s doing it again. this time his attention to your aching nipple is careful but rough. it encourages a small spurt of milk that trickles down his fingers, staining your already damp blouse.

“shit,” he mutters.

he takes a few seconds to marvel at the mess before removing his fingers from the taut flesh. he places them in his mouth and lets out a deep hum. his eyes roll back in his head when the sweet coating of milk warms his tongue, but you’re utterly horrified.

“s-satoru ! you said you’d help me get the milk out , not drink it .”

he shrugs. “does it matter ?” he pushes you closer to the kitchen sink. “besides, it seems like such a waste to let it go down the drain.”

he’s seen all kinds of crazy things come from all walks of life, but just when he thought he’s seen it all, you come bustling down the hall near tears and breasts mysteriously leaking milk.

he should be concerned, he should be mortified actually, but he’s mastered the art of finding the good in the bad, the weird, and the crazy. nothing ever really surprises him anymore.

he handles this mess with such ease that it truly exasperates you. he’s unfortunately, just one of a kind.

satoru , however, believes he’s a good younger brother. after all, he’s relieving your tender breasts of milk. he’s been massaging them for well over 30 minutes, big hands groping and jiggling the plumpness, not for his amusement of course. it’s such a strenuous task, so he deserves some type of reward, right?

he gives your breast another squeeze until droplets fall into the kitchen sink, lips tingling at the sight.

“maybe you’re half cow or something . . .”

satoru flinches expectantly when your fist collides with his chest. he’s jostled backward, and he clutches his pectoral dramatically.

“it’s a joke !”

you clutch your exposed breasts timidly.

“well, it’s not funny ! I'm going through a midlife crisis and as your older sister, you could at least show me some respect , you ass !”

he doubles over in laughter, signaling his ever-growing amusement. satoru then attaches himself right back to your side, nuzzling into the side of your cheek. a snarky chuckle emits from his throat.

“as tempting as that may be, I don’t think you’re in the position to make demands.”

his hands roughly cup your breasts, pumping them while milk continually spills. his body is nearly inflamed from touching you. his chin rests on the top of your head while he tugs your fat tits.

his cock presses against his jeans, rubbing his groin against your perky butt.

“y’feel so good.”

you whine in pure defeat. how could this be going so wrong ? you’re supposed to push him away, tell him to stop, but arousal clouds your judgment. your cunt is throbbing, on the brink of an orgasm, and it only heightens when his erection slots between your ass.

“t-toru. . .”

he whistles lowly, “wow, you sound so pretty like that.”

he gradually increases his pace on both your sore nipples.

“let satoru-nii take care of you.” he bites back a wicked smile.

“say it. let me pretend to be your big brother just this once, please ?”

there’s a soft tinge in his voice that resembles a whine. the strength to resist slowly dissipates when his cock mushes against opening, and his pants fan across your ear

“satoru-nii. . .”

It’s quiet, but his sensitive ear picks up on your little cry. his mouth trails down your neck until he’s breathing over your puffy nipples .

his tongue grazes the milky bud, tasting your sweet fluid once more .

“alright, alright. I'll suck until the swelling goes down. how does that sound ? “

[dreamermonica]

—gender neutral reader, teen gojo x reader hence the preferred use of glasses, established relationship, slight cursing, just a fluffy scenario i had to post with my crippling gojo brainrot before i hibernate once again

“ah.” GOJO says flatly out of nowhere. “my head's starting to hurt.”

you subtly glance at him from the reflection of the opposing side of the train's tinted windows, watching the way he removes his glasses and rubs at his eyes. you inwardly sigh.

“i can't tell if you're being serious or you just want attention.”

gojo gasps dramatically from beside you, “why would i lie about something like that?”

“can you really blame me for being distrusting?” you say blankly, giving him and and his offended face the stink eye, “especially with the amount of times you've whined out to me like some child who wants to get uppies from his mother?”

you silently relish in the way he stays silent, pouting at you whilst a victorious grin rests on your lips, your gaze returning back to the novel in your hands.

“told you so.”

he whines your name in defeat and lays his head against your shoulder, “my head does hurt though...”

the way he said it urges you to think that he is, indeed, not kidding, and most definitely wasn't just seeking attention—voice stripped of any type of cheeriness, coming out hoarse more than anything.

you pursue your lips as your gaze quickly flits to his face, before dropping to the sunglasses situated on his lap, folded neatly as his eyes are closed shut.

right. the object reminds you of what is probably causing him the headache. six eyes.

your heart nearly cracks at the small grimace on his expression, jaw clenched as his arms are crossed, head still leaning against your shoulder as he focuses on heaving steady breaths. you immediately feel bad now. terrible. horrid.

“toru,” you say, alarmed, slightly panicking as you drop your novel onto your lap, hand situating themselves on both sides of his face as his eyes still remain shut. “i thought you said the glasses helped?”

“they do,” he croaks out, the grimace slowly disappearing as he takes in the warmth of your palms, “but they don't just block out everything, you know.”

“did you overuse your eyes again?” you're ready to scold him, he can tell from the way your tone is slowly turning into one of a nagging mother hen. “this is why you should use blindfolds.”

he only breathes a noise of contentment when you start rubbing circles on his temples, practically melting in your hold.

“well—to be fair,” he starts, one eye opening, and sarcasm still evidently present even with a headache, “we were up against a pretty tricky special grade earlier. i may be the strongest, but that doesn't mean i should let my guard down. you told me that yourself.”

you hold back the urge to roll your eyes, instead staring at him unamused. you caress his cheek gently, “close your eyes, idiot.”

your annoying boyfriend deliberately opens both as if to spite you, cheekily smiling as he stares back at you, “i can still see cursed energy even if i do, babe.”

you still aren't impressed. he chuckles at your expression.

“plus, my headache disappears faster when i see pretty girls.”

“oh, fuck off,” you angrily pinch his cheeks in response as he yelps out in pain, before opting to cover his eyes with one of your hands instead. you feel his eyelashes as he blinks in confusion at the gesture.

“does this help?”

“not really. i can still see cursed energy.”

“oh.” you move to remove your hand, “my bad—”

what you don't expect next is that he keeps your hand in place above his eyes with his own, feeling your knuckles under his palm as he moves to rest his head against your shoulder once more, his eyes still covered by your palm.

“i thought it didn't help?”

“it doesn't but i like you touching me.”

you blink, clearly weirded out by the way he worded that.

“...seriously?”

“yeah, darling. now, as much as i like your voice—i really want to sleep right now, so be quiet before i kiss you stupid right here in public.”

you immediately and effectively shut up at that, hearing an awkward cough from the man sitting across from you. you send him an apologetic look, before glaring at gojo, who's now snoozing his way to wonderland.

you have an inkling that he probably won't be wearing blindfolds anytime soon. especially with how he's grinning like a madman even in his sleep with your hand over his eyes.

you sigh—noting to bring a blindfold each time you go out with the man from now on, not wanting a sore arm everytime you take the train home. you can already picture him pouting in response.

“the child that you are, gojo satoru,” you murmur whilst leaning against his head, pressing a chaste kiss to his temple.

“...you're lucky i love you.”

extra:

donning his sunglasses as he exits the train, he cheerily says, “that was the best nap of my life!”

his headache is gone, which is a relief—but unfortunately, yours is still standing right in front of you.

you clutch your numb arm—already feeling the soreness that'll come after shortly.

“i take it back. i hate you.”

“aw, love you too, bae.”

Zzzz...

[kissitbttr]

“my baby” you murmur softly against his skin. hands cradling both side of his face gently. “my sweet, sweet baby”

toji hates to admit how that makes his heart tremble with pure love, and how the simple act is the sole reason for the crimson color risen within his cheeks,

“that, i am” he mutters with a small smile playing on his lips, tugging you close by the waist. “you love me?”

a small gasp escapes your lips, as if you’re offended by that question. “i can’t believe you have to ask! of course i do” another kiss presses against his temple and down to his cheek bone,

he suppresses a cute giggle from it, not wanting to be embarrassed if you ever caught him letting out such sound. it’s quite fascinating how you are the only person who has a way to make him feeling flustered. as if you’re looking at a teenage boy who finally scored a date with his first high school crush,

“just making sure” toji finds comfort against your naked chest, feeling himself melt under your touch while your fingers toy with his raven haired. he frowns and lets out a boyish groan when you pull away,

“noo, noo” he whines, taking your hand before plopping it back down on top of his hair. “don’t stop. keep playing it”

a confused yet amused frown make its way towards your face, a small giggle heaves out of your mouth,

“look at you. my big boy” the nickname just sends shivers down his spine, causing his grip around your waist to tighten. he loves it when you call him that. “touchy today aren’t you?”

he responds with a hum, letting his eyes close for a while as you continue to play with his loose strands of hair. he’s so comfortable like this. being with you is his favorite place. no large house nor king sized bed could ever compare if there’s no you in it.

he’s dreamed of this for far too long. when his wife was taken away from him years ago, he didn’t think that he could find a solace in someone else’s arm anymore. he had given up on love and pour his frustrations out in a very toxic way. drowning himself in alcohol and getting into fights was his way of coping.

then you came a long,

with your pretty smile, pretty aura, pretty hair, pretty voice… pretty everything. knocked the wind out of the man, he couldn’t even form the right words when you stood in front of him.

‘s-shit—wh-what were you saying?’ he laughed nervously when he realized he was staring at you for far too long,

it was an adorable sight. you really did have some sort of power to make men weak in their knees

his heart bloomed when he heard you giggle, ‘i said… did you come here with someone?’

‘oh! n-no! not at all’ he scratched the back of his neck while looking down on his drink, ‘all alone’

‘oh—well then’ you took a seat beside him at the bar, his eyes didn’t move an inch from you. ‘guess we can be alone together’

“my sweet big boy—wouldn’t even dreamed about leaving you”

and that’s enough to make him feel at ease. to let go of the fears he had been holding back. to let go of the past that had corrupted him in more ways than one. to finally say goodbye to his long gone wife and say thank you to you instead for being here. for being so patient. for being so stubborn despite the times he had pushed you away. for not backing down because he knew how much he needed you, he just didn’t have the guts to tell you.

what’s that saying about the song you had shown him? if life is a movie, then you’re the best part?

yeah. that’s the one. but he knows deep down that you’re better than a movie.

because after all these years, toji fushiguro had finally found you peace,

and may lord helps anyone to those who will try to take you away from him,

maybe toji will remove fushiguro from his last name and take yours instead in the near future

[everyonewooeverywhere]

PRINCESS

NSFW | MINORS AND AGELESS BLOGS WILL BE BLOCKED

summary: idk yuyu have big cawk & i wanna be his pretty princess

pairing: dom!yunho x female!reader

genre: smut | non-idol au | established relationship

rating: 18+

word count: 1.5k

content/warnings: female reader, sex toys (vibrator), daddy kink, dumbification, bondage (light), name-calling (whore, slut, stupid, princess, baby), creampie, squirting, unprotected sex, light exhibitionism (not really tho), aftercare (ofc 😌)

notes: shhhhh i'm ovulating

“Shhh, you better keep it down baby. Wouldn’t want the whole house to know what a little whore you are, right?” Yunho mused in your ear. The beautifully pathetic little moan you let out in response made him chuckle. 

This was just supposed to be a nice little vacation. All of you had just wrapped up your exams and were in a desperate need of a break, so you’d rented out a really nice house on the beach for you all to stay in. Relaxing at the pool and by the ocean was just what you needed. Except it wasn’t all you needed. And it wasn’t all Yunho needed apparently either. Because it was only your first night here and you and your boyfriend had been at it for hours at this point, and there was no sign of him slowing down anytime soon.

Your wrists were tied with a pretty pink ribbon (his personal favorite) and secured above your head. Leaving your soft skin so available for Yunho. Only the cute pair of pink lace panties you wore kept him from seeing you completely nude. 

And the best part?

The bullet vibrator in your underwear (only secured by the fabric and the squeezing of your thighs). You’d already come so many times, but both of you were so eager to see you released again.

“Yuyu…” you whined and rolled your hips a bit. Arching your back, falling to notice how he bit his lip to mask a groan brought forth by your beautiful tits. 

“Come on princess, give daddy one more and then I’ll give you what you really want.” He pet your hair and kissed your forehead. He sat beside you and caressed your waist, letting his fingers softly trail over your skin. Watching as goosebumps formed on your stomach due to his touch. “Can you come one for time for me, angel?”

You nodded, jaw dropped open, “Mhmm! Oh daddy!” You let out a little gasp, “‘M gonna come…”

“Yeah?” He tilted your chin so you’d look him in the eyes, “Oh my pretty baby. You look so pretty when you come.” He watched your face so intently as you came. The way your eyes rolled back into your head and how your tongue lolled out of your mouth. Giving him the perfect opportunity to do his favorite thing.

He slid his middle and ring finger over the wetness of your tongue. Pressing down and opening your mouth up wide. Wide enough for him to pass a wad of spit from his mouth and down your throat.

And he didn’t even have to tell you to swallow because you did it all on your own. “Good girl.” He whispered against your cheek. Reaching into your panties to remove the vibrator. 

You hummed and leaned into him, “Thank you, daddy.”

“Oh course, princess. Do you think you’re ready for my cock now?”

You looked deep into his eyes and nodded furiously, “Please, Yuyu.” Your thighs pressed together at the thought, “I want it so bad.”

He chuckled at your eagerness, “Ok pretty.” He climbed over you, pressing soft, wet kisses to your sternum and each of your breasts. Holding them in his hands and massaging them as he trailed kisses wherever he saw fit.

Delicately he trailed his fingers under the waistband of your panties, “I like these, baby.” He snapped the elastic against your skin, “They look so cute on you.”

You gasped at the way they stung, “Thank you, daddy.” You repeated like a mantra you’d been conditioned to use. “They’re just for you.”

“Of course they are,” he smirked, lifting himself up from your chest grabbing your chin with a lot more force than probably necessary, “Don’t say stupid stuff, baby. You know how much daddy hates when you act like a dumb slut.”

“I’m sorry Yuyu,” you pouted. And his eyes zeroed in on the way your lip puffed out. God, he wanted to ruin you.

“It’s okay, princess. You can make it up to me, right?” You felt him slide your panties aside, and the brush of his thumb along your swollen and overstimulated clit made you shiver with delight, “I’m gonna fill you with my cum, okay? And you’re just gonna take it like the good girl daddy knows you are.”

You moaned at the idea, “Please,” you whimpered, “I want that so bad. I want you to fill me up. I wanna be so full of come. Yuyu, daddy, plea—.” You were cut off when he rammed into you. With your wrists still secured above your head, you could only tug on the ribbon and writhe around as he fucked you so relentlessly.

Not another coherent word left your pretty lips. You burned with desire. Every part of your body just buzzed with pure pleasure. 

His cock nearly split you in two. But you would take it. You would take it because that’s what he asked you to do. And you couldn’t let him down. Not when he did so much to make you feel good. To make you feel like a princess.

And now, with his cock thrusting into you over and over and over again, filling every fucking inch of your cunt, you felt so grateful for him. He knew just how to make you feel good. He knew to grind against your clit with every thrust. He knew how much you loved when he fondled your chest when he fucked you. And perhaps best of all, he knew where your g-spot was, and he knew exactly what words to say to make you go insane.

He hit your sweet spot with his cock with every single thrust, making sure you felt as much pleasure as he was capable of giving you. He degraded you like no other, “Oh my dumb little slut. You're such a pretty princess until someone puts their cock in you,” the depth of his chuckle shoots straight to your pussy, and he can feel you tighten, “It’s just so easy, isn’t it, baby? To make you a dumb little bunny? A stupid little whore who’ll do whatever I want?”

And all you could do was nod, only forming incoherent little noises from the back of your throat. But you didn’t need to talk, because he knew exactly what was coming. He brought his fingers to your clit and gave it all of his attention. Pressing his thumb into it and making circles faster than you could comprehend. 

He pulled out just in time to watch you squirt all over his bed. You back arched and you cried loud (the house’s other occupants completely forgotten) as your pussy sprayed all over the sheets and all over your lover’s thighs and chest. “Oh fuck, there you go princess!” He ran his fingers through your folds, making sure to get his fingers extra wet. And he brought them to your mouth so you could taste yourself. “You’re such a good girl. Daddy’s so proud of you.” He kissed your forehead, “Just a little longer, okay? You still need daddy’s come inside you.”

And when he entered you again it was as if you were made perfectly molded for him. His baby. His princess. There was no doubt. You were his. This pussy was his. Your little gasps and moans were for him. You whimpering and begging was only for him to fuck you harder. And he knew that you would do absolutely anything just to please him.

And that’s the thought that pushed him over the edge. His come was hot as it filled you. Coating your walls. And his favorite part? The way it leaked out of your pulsing pussy when he pulled out. And he fucking loved pushing it back in with his fingers. “Oh baby~” he cooed, “You did so good.”

“Th-thank you…” you could barely mumble out.

He reached above your head to untie the ribbons the held your wrists captive. And almost immediately you wrapped your arms around his neck like a koala, pulling him down on top of you. He chuckled and rolled over onto his back, letting you stay tangled up in his arms. He hummed contently and kissed the top of your head, “Don’t get too comfortable, baby.”

You whined and shook your head against his chest.

“We need to go to the bathroom.”

You pouted, “Just gimme five minutes.”

He chuckled, “Okay baby, five minutes.”

[willowsnook]

Only one bed??? (LN)

lando norris x teammate!reader

a/n: anytime i saw this trope on wattpad back in the day i went feral so enjoy me reliving my past

Raindrops were quickly streaming down the plane window next to you and your hands were gripping on the handrests, knuckles turning white. Because of a post race meeting going way over time, you and your teammate were the last to leave Monza and had not made it past the storms that headed towards Monaco. The jet was silent, just you, Lando, and the plane staff but no words were spoken. You wouldn't necessarily say that you and Lando were enemies but you definitely weren't friends. More like awkward teammates.

It bothered you though. It seems like Lando had a special relationship with almost anyone he had been teammates with besides you. You had tried to be outwardly friendly when you joined McLaren but were met with indifference. After the first few months you gave up and settled into this routine. The team was disappointed too, they had expected Lando to mentor you as a rookie but that hadn't happened. The sound of the plane's speaker turning on brought you out of your thoughts.

"Sorry guys, we are going to have to make an emergency landing in the next ten minutes due to this storm."

You felt your pulse quicken and you looked over to Lando who gave you a worried look. Tugging your seatbelt tighter you closed your eyes for what felt like eternity until the plane landed. Following Lando out and down the stairs, you both rushed to a car that was waiting, piling in the back seat.

"There's a hotel a mile from here, I'll take you guys there and we should be good to go in the morning to Monaco," the driver said and you both nodded. The world was raging outside and you wondered if the car would even make it to the hotel. It wasn't a nice building, very standard for a small town you imagined but at the moment you'd be happy with anything out of the storm.

Dragging your carry on behind you, the clerk blinked up in surprise at the sight of you both walking in, dripping all over the floor. You gave her an exhausted smile.

"Hi, we need two rooms please," you said and she looked to her computer.

"Unfortunately, I only have one available," she said and you laughed, refusing to believe it. She raised an eyebrow.

"Are you serious?" You asked looking around at the dinky lobby wondering how it was even possible this place was filled up.

"Yeah, we had a lot of people stop to ride out the storm," she snapped back. "Do you want it or not?"

"Yes, we'll take it," Lando said, moving around you and laying down his card. He nudged you towards the hallway once she gave him the key. Taking the key from him you swiped it to the door pushing your way through. You stopped short once you saw the inside.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," you said and Lando ran in to the back of you. Things could really not get worse.

"One bed Lando," you said laughing hysterically. "One fucking bed! Amazing, just what I wanted."

You were losing it and you could tell he knew that by the wide eyed look he was giving you. A loud thunder crash boomed from outside causing you to jump into Lando who reached out his arms to steady you. You looked down at his hands and he quickly removed them before moving around you and unzipping his bag.

"What are you doing?" You asked warily and he didn't look up.

"Getting ready for bed," he replied. "It's one night, y/n, we will manage."

Sighing you kneeled down to unzip your bag, pulling out your pajama set and heading to the bathroom to change. Washing your face and brushing your teeth, you tried not to think about how awkward this whole situation was.

Lando looked up at you from where he had already situated himself and tossed his head back groaning.

"You can't be serious," he said and you gave him a confused look.

"What?"

"You can't wear that." he said and you frowned looking down at your clothes.

"Why?"

"I can see your whole chest in that top," he complained crossing his arms.

"Then close your eyes," you snapped pulling back the covers. You started moving the extra pillows in between you.

"What are you doing?" Lando asked.

"Making a pillow wall," you replied settling in.

"Are you really that scared of touching me?" He said irritably.

"It's more for your sake considering you hightail it out of any room I walk into," you bite back and he doesn't say anything, just looks away towards the window.

Snuggling into the sheets you watch tik toks on your phone for a while before trying to fall asleep. That task feels impossible due to the flashing lights and lack of heat in the room. Sighing you reach over for your phone to see that it's not even midnight. You let out a frustrated groan.

"What's wrong?" Lando mumbles sleepily.

"Nothing, I just can't sleep," you whisper back at him. The bed shifted and you turned to see Lando looking at you, propped up on his elbow.

"Are you cold?" He murmured, waking up.

"A little," you sighed and he started moving the pillows, scooting closer to you. "What are you doing?"

"Just come here," he said and you gave in, letting him slide behind you, his arm going across your waist. Warmth instantly flooded your body.

"You think the team would be shocked to see us like this?" You asked and he let out a little laugh.

"Yeah, I would imagine so," he said, tracing circles on your arm with his thumb.

"Can I ask you something?" You asked looking over at Lando.

"Yeah."

"Why don't you like me?" You whispered and he frowned.

"I do like you," he said looking sadly at you and you shook your head.

"I'm not stupid, I see how you are with everyone else," you said. "I just don't know what I did."

Lando sat up, pulling you with him until you were seated and looking in his eyes.

"It's not you y/n, I promise, it's me," he said and you rolled his eyes.

"Very helpful Lando," you grumbled and he shook his head.

"I got scared when they signed you because I knew the expectations that it brung for me," he said and you looked at him confused. "You are the rookie, I'm the veteran but I'm just not ready to be the veteran. I feel like I still have so much to learn but now I'm supposed to be teaching you."

"Why didn't you say anything? All of that is so understandable," you said, frustration growing. He looked down.

"It's just easier now to keep you at a distance," he said. "If you were a guy it would be so much better."

"Are you fucking serious right now?" You said angrily and his head snapped up, eyes filled with panic.

"No no I didn't mean it like that," he stuttered.

"Then how did you mean it?"

"Come on, y/n," he said gesturing his hands out. "You know you're hot, the whole grid knows you're hot. You distract me so avoiding you keeps me focused."

Lando looks sheepish as you glare at him not saying anything.

"You've made the first half of my F1 career borderline miserable just because you think I'm hot?"

"Yeah I guess so," he said eyes flickering down to your chest.

"And now you are blatantly checking me out," you whisper yelled at him and he put his hands up to cover his eyes.

"It's kind of hard when you are sitting here half naked next to me," he groaned.

You tried to move back to your side of the bed but another round of thunder boomed outside causing you to jump back. Your legs being tangled in the blankets threw you off balance and you landed down on Lando's chest. When you lifted your head up, your lips were inches from his lips.

He smirked and you tried to push yourself off of him but he held you tight against him.

"Lando," you warned and he smirked wider. "Don't even think about it."

He hesitated but you didn't move away. His eyes flicked up to yours questioning and when you didn't say anything he leaned forward meeting your lips.

The kiss started off soft but soon grew more aggressive. You slid over to straddle him and felt him harden under you, gasping into the kiss. You pulled back, breathing hard sitting back and he leaned up to kiss you again but you pushed him back.

"Promise me, things are going to change," you said and he smirked.

"I guess there are a few things I can teach you."

[desperate-gay]

Actions Have Consequences

Ingrid Engen x fem!reader

SMUT +18 (kinda)

a/n: honestly i was too lazy to write full smut and i don’t really like this but i wanted to finally update soo

“Ingrid, please, I didn’t know he was flirting with me.” You plead as you both walk through the front door of your apartment.

“Right, like you didn’t giggle or bat your eyelashes at the scumbag either.” The girl scoffs, slamming her purse onto the counter before making her way over and onto the couch.

You watch as your girlfriend rests her hands over her face with a loud sigh, showing her displeasure with your so-called actions. You truly didn’t flirt with the man. He was a sweet guy just wanting a good conversation to unwind after his job. Besides, it was only a quick chat. It’s not like you were fully engaging, he was just by the bar while you grabbed the drinks for you and Ingrid, so you began to have a bit of small talk with eventually caught the eye of your girlfriend.

The norwegian hasn’t bothered changing, instead, she remains on the couch with her black jumpsuit, an outfit you really admire on her. You nervously pick at your nails while slowly making your way over to your girlfriend.

“Please look at me.”

Her green eyes remain glaring at the black television in front of her, directly behind you. You decide to take a seat next to her and repeat your request. When she continues staring away, your soft hand gently touches the skin of her cheek and turns her attention towards you.

“It’s not at all what you think.” You say gently, trying to be careful with your words.

“Yeah right.” She scoffs, moving her head out of your hand to look the opposite way.

Sighing, you stand up but instead of leaving, you straddle her lap and place your arms on her shoulders. Although that still doesn’t get her attention, you begin to place soft kisses on the pale skin of her neck.

“I can make it up to you.” You suggest, continuing your trail of kisses on top of letting your right hand drift down between her thighs.

Ingrid’s hand quickly snatches your wrist from moving any further while her gaze is finally on you. You move out of her neck, stopping your previous actions, and lock eyes with her fiery gaze.

“If you want to make it up to me so bad, let me treat you and show you how much of a filthy slut you really are.” The brunette rasps, yanking your wrist toward her which makes your whole body follow suit.

Her free hand latches behind your neck, forcing your lips to crash into hers in a demanding kiss. You gasp against her mouth in surprise but quickly melt at her rough demeanor. The norwegian pulls back, moving her hand onto your throat, gripping it with a certain tightness you like.

“Lay down.”

Although you heard her, you sit there like a deer in headlights, causing her to stand up with you wrapped around her and toss you onto the couch.

“When I tell you to do something, you listen. Got it?” Ingrid asks in a stern yet warning tone.

When you nod your head, Ingrid hovers over you with her knee between your legs, just barely touching where you need her most. Her hair curtains around your face while she stares at you, running through ideas of what to do to you. Feeling her breath fan across your face makes you lean up to try to kiss the brunette, but the girl pulls back, preventing your lips from touching.

“I’m going to teach you that you are mine and only mine.” Ingrid trails the tips of her fingers from your hair, down to your cheek, and onto your lips. Her middle and index fingers begin to dig in between your lips, signaling you to do what she wants you to.

You obediently open your mouth wide, allowing her two digits to sink deep into your throat while your tongue swirls them and your head bobs up and down. Your eyes remain on the green ones above you as you continue your sensual movements, hallowing your cheeks to tighten around her digits.

After a few minutes, Ingrid softly removes her fingers from between your lips and without warning, dips into your pants and underwear to start making soft circles around your clit.

You roll your hips against her hand and let out a soft moan. When she notices you grinding into her, she stops her movements, making you whine in annoyance.

“You stay still. I get to go at my pace and you’re just going to have to deal with it.”

Although you want to object, you decide to stay silent in hopes of not making her more frustrated than she already is. She removes her hand from between your legs to grab the waistband of your pants. With a small tug, you take the hint and lift your hips to make it easier for them to slip off.

Ingrid discards your pants to the side but ultimately decides to keep everything else you’re wearing on, which is just a cropped tank top and panties.

“I can see how wet you are just from these.”

Her hand rubs over your clothed core, causing you to shudder in anticipation.

The brunette returns to her spot hovering over you and reaches her hand under the elastic of your underwear. She sucks along your neck while she reaches lower to gather all your wetness and spread it as much as she can.

Your breath picks up and small moans break out from your mouth when she touches certain spots. Ingrid kisses all the way up to your ear lobe, tugging it between her teeth.

“If only you were good today.” The two fingers that were beginning to push into you are gone in the blink of an eye, causing your eyes to snap open in shock.

Ingrid stands up, sucking your mess off her fingers, and walks away towards the kitchen to grab a bottle of water. You lay there in disbelief with an uncomfortable wetness remaining between your legs as you watch your girlfriend sip from the bottled water.

“Maybe if you’re lucky, we can fix that problem of yours tomorrow. I’m quite tired all of a sudden.”

Without another word, she walks into the bedroom to change and get ready for bed, leaving you in your sticky situation alone.

[hencheri]

18+. mdni.

pairing: mean toxic bf!haechan x fem!reader

warnings: noncon, toxic relationship, gaslighting.

wc: 1.2k

.

you're watching a movie in the living room, but you're distracted, focused on your thoughts instead of the flashing screen in front of you. it's 3 a.m. and you can hear haechan playing video games in your bedroom.

he hasn't talked to you for hours, hasn't said a word or even looked in your way. it's bothering you a lot. you have a constant knot in your stomach and your heart accelerates at the mere thought of haechan ignoring you.

you hate when he does this, it makes you feel bad. so fucking bad.

you get up from the couch, going to your bedroom. you push the door open, hesitantly walking in. you need to talk to him.

"hyuck?"

he stares at his computer's screen, pressing down on the keys of his keyboard, concentrated on his game. he has his headset on, maybe he hasn't heard you.

"johnny!" haechan calls into his microphone, "quick, come save me."

"hyuckie..." you stand beside him and you know he can see you from the corner of his eye. you bite down on your bottom lip, waiting for an answer that doesn't come.

he continues to play like you're not there. it upsets you so much, could he not be petty for once?

"we need to talk, please," you demand, still trying to get his attention. you know he hears you now since he's quiet.

a few seconds pass before he replies back, "we have nothing to say."

you sigh, exasperated. there are plenty of things you need to discuss about actually, and not just what happened a couple of hours ago. it makes you cringe thinking about the previous events, but you can't just brush it off, especially when haechan's still sour about it.

you were both in bed about to go sleep soon. he made a move, touching your hips up and down, pressing his crotch against your butt. you weren't in the mood, so you told him to stop. he didn't at first and you pushed him away, which really offended him.

he then turned on his pc before you could say anything and you went to the living room to watch a movie, a poor attempt to forget about this ridiculous fight.

"but-" you begin, a little annoyed, "we do."

your voice is covered by johnny yelling something to haechan, once again ignored by your boyfriend. "here, here, here! i need to heal you," he yells back, fingers hurriedly pressing down on the keys, "shit, these guys are rough."

"hyuck-" you try, placing your hand on his arm, but he grabs your wrist before you can and shoves your hand away.

you frown, hurt by his action.

"what? we won!?" haechan exclaims, brows shooting up in surprise. you hear johnny talking back without deciphering his words. "ah, they missed the base," he laughs, "yeah, it was close."

he removes his headset and puts it on his desk. but he still decides to not acknowledge you, even when his game is done.

"please," you beg a bit desperately.

"what's the matter?" he sighs loudly, throwing his head back against the headrest of his chair.

"haechan! you've just ignored me the whole night! you can't always do that," you explain to him even though he'll probably only understand what he wants as usual.

he rolls his eyes, "yeah and it's always my fault, right?" he says.

"what- no, that's not-"

"it is," he affirms. he turns his head to you, "every time we so 'need to talk' it's about how i'm wrong, how i shouldn't do this or that, how i should just agree to everything you say and shut my mouth."

you're agape. is this really what he thinks you do? that you only want to complain about him?

"that's not true," you deny, "hyuck, i just want us to communicate, it's important."

he scoffs, "no, you're always the one talking. you don't actually want to hear what i have to say." he looks at you like he's hurt and you start wondering if he might be right. are you really that self-centred? "that's not really what i call communication, you know."

"do you ever ask yourself how i'm feeling? how constantly being rejected makes me feel?" he questions, his gaze not leaving you.

"i don't constantly reject you," you rectify. "sometimes i'm simply not in the mood to sleep with you..."

haechan winces upon hearing your words. "because you are for others?"

your eyes widen and your mouth falls open. that's not how you should have said it. "no, that's not what i meant-" but your boyfriend cuts you off, rising up from his gaming chair.

"yeah, no," he shakes his head, "you know what? i've had this feeling that you don't love me like you say you do." he goes around you and you follow him, wanting to reason with him, but he isn't done talking yet.

"we haven't fucked in days and the only thing you let me do is jerk off with your hand. how- how should i interpret that, huh?" haechan sounds genuinely hurt and upset, but that was never your intention to make him feel this way. how could he even doubt your love for him?

"hyuck, please, sit down," you ask, wrapping your hand around his arm to pull him back against you, but he slips away from you.

he turns around and faces you. "are you seeing someone else? is that why?" he suddenly bursts out and you're totally shocked.

"what? no way, how can you think that!?"

he approaches you and this time, you're the one stepping back until the back of your thighs hit the edge of the bed. you look up at haechan, heart beating faster and faster.

"you're not denying it," he points out, now only a few inches separating you from him. "you're cheating on me... how can you be so fucking heartless?"

you shake your head from side to side, gulping down. this isn't true. you've always stayed faithful to your boyfriend, but the knot in your throat prevents you from speaking up, eyes swelling up in tears.

he clasps his hand around your bicep, digging his fingers into your flesh, pulling you flushed to his chest.

"i can't believe it," he breathes out, "my girlfriend is a fucking whore."

you're still in shock when he crashes his mouth on you, smacking his lips to yours and pushing his tongue inside. your whines are muffled, weak hands pushing on his chest to get him off of you, but to no avail.

you fall on the bed and haechan crushes you with his weight, trapping you under him. you squirm around, not liking the way he doesn't listen to your protests and how he forces himself on you.

his lips descend to your neck, planting quick kisses as if he's in a hurry, going down to the valley of your breasts.

"hyuck, please, stop," you cry, but he doesn't listen.

his fingers hook into your shorts, pulling them down with your underwear, too. your breath is caught in your throat, only exhaling when you feel the familiar push of his cock inside of your unprepared pussy.

"you're mine," he moans, the squeeze of your cunt around him making him frown, "when will you finally understand it..."

[aouiaa]

Check Up

Outline: Trouble in paradise? Go to marriage counseling! They’ll teach you the ins and outs! *wink wink*

Word count: 830

Warnings: MINORS DNI — SMUT AHEAD + Dom! Abby + Sub! Reader + Smut with little plot + Roleplaying + A refers to R as “Miss Harding” + Fingering

“You want me to be what?” you laugh nervously with some shock underlying it.

A sigh of regret mixed with embarrassment of her request caused Abby to sit down on the bed, bringing her hand to rub her eyes, “You know what, never mind.”

“No, no, I want to too but it was…just out of the blue.” you say while sitting down beside Abby and placing your hand on her shoulder.

It’s her request that brings back past events when your marriage counselor suggested that you and Abby should “explore each other’s fantasy, to better learn about one another” was a shocker to the two of you. Definitely not what you expected going into counseling, but here you are assigned with homework to, “explore each other.” God was the duration of your ride home lingering with awkwardness. All you could really think about was what the women said after assigning the homework, “Your partner can still always surprise you.”

When the two of you got home, words were barely exchanged until now. Confronting the elephant in the bedroom. Abby was taking her shirt off while you were taking yours off as well when she said it.

“You know what I was thinking?” she says, throwing her shirt in the hamper, leaving her in her undershirt.

An acknowledged hum comes out of you as you struggle to take off your blouse. “Hm? And what is that?”

“I was thinking…” she trails off, her voice sounding more prominent as she walks over to your side of the bed, lifting her hand up to help free the last pesky button which causes you to look up. “…about what the counselor said.” her voice sounding low and soft with every breath wasted on each word leaves a sudden shiver down your spine.

“About the roleplaying?” you inquire.

“Mhm, about the roleplaying. And I was thinking it would be really hot if you were a patient coming into my office for a check up.” she says.

And that’s how you ended up here, with your wife knuckles deep in your cunt. A moan slips your lips as you look up at her now darkened blue eyes. Her fingers pumping in and out of you deliciously which elicits your back to arch off the bed, “Oh abby—“

“Dr. Anderson.” she reprimands with a pause to curl her fingers into your g-spot which causes you to yelp, bucking your hips.

“Dr. Anderson…”

Her last name leaving your lips, the one you so proudly have now once you married her has her underwear soaked. Seeing you in this state because of her only worses it. “Yeah, I’ll have you leaving my office all better up, miss…Harding.” she says, kissing and sucking bruises into your neck which further your overwhelming pleasure.

“Or maybe I won’t. So you can keep coming back here. And be my favorite patient…Yeah?” She smirks, feeling your gummy walls hug around her fingers at the expense of her lewd words. “Yeah, you’d like that a lot, wouldn’t you?”

“Ye-Yes, Doctor Anderson.” you let out a shuddered moan, “Yes…I would love that.”

“Mmm, good girl.”

All her dirty words only bring you closer to the precipice of your climax. And with the way she knew your body like the back of her hand. You weren’t gonna last long with her heaven sent fingers stretching you out perfectly, pumping in and out, and curling into your g-spot. And don’t get yourself start on her carefully calculated movements, how fast she knows to go to make you see the stars. She is a doctor after all. Anatomy is her thing.

“Oh, Doctor—Fuck!—I’m—“ you’re cut off by your own release. Your head falling back on the plush of your pillow. Your heavy breathing followed by the soft ticklish smooches of Abby kissing your neck to your jaw while slowly removing her fingers which makes you whimper at loss and watch her bring her fingers to her mouth to taste you on her tongue.

She moans at the taste of you before looking back at you with a smirk. “Well miss harding..” she jesters with a chuckle. “You made quite the mess, but that can be addressed upon your departure.”

“Oh yeah?” you respond, breathy.

“Mhm, and how do you rate your visit today, miss harding?” she says, not able to contain the smile begging to spread, and leans down to kiss you.

“Quite a ride, Dr. Anderson.” you say in between kisses, giggling.

“A good one?”

“Uhm yeah! A ‘we should definitely try this again’ one.” you chuckle, cupping Abby’s face to kiss her once more.

A soft laugh leaves Abby’s lips as she looks down at you, her expression seeming to soften. “I love you.” She speaks in a quieter tone.

And maybe in that moment, you can thank your counselor instead of constantly insulting her, in your head of course. Because she was right about one thing. Your partner can definitely still surprise you.

“I love you too, abs.”

a/n; Got this idea in the shower. Yeah, I’m 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 like that…

Like what you read, and want to tagged? Follow @aouiaarchive and turn on notifications to be notified when I post!

[fatesundress]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He evidently does not.

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

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

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

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

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

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

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

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

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

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wonder why.”

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

“What, Tom?”

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

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

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

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

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Curiosity—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

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

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

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

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

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

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

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

“A professor?”

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

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

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

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

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

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

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

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

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

“So?”

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

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

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

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

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

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

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

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I —”

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

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

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

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

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

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

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

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

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

“Tom.”

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

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

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

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

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

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

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

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

Tom has cracked the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have no need.”

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

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

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

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

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

“Why would he lie?”

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

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

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

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

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

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

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

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

“Should I?”

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

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

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

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

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

Summer blisters when it comes.

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

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

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You always are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are regardless. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

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

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

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

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

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

You’re almost positive you did not.

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

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

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

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

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

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

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

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

It happens again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You take to the library.

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

The third sign is the end. 

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

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

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

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

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

He’s something else entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve been good at it.”

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

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

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

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

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

He sees all of you.

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

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

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

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

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

“I cannot.”

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

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

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

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

“Do you want me to lie?”

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

“Her death is the first step to —”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“...What?"

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

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

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought I would have time.”

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

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

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

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

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

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

“You have lost me, Tom."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

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

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

Be well.

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

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

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

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

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

You find that to be true.

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

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

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

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

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

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

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

Due February.

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

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

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

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You drink, and don’t look away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I take that back.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

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

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

“Am I?”

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

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

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is Mari?

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

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

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

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

“Well then —” 

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

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

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

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

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

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

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

“I haven’t protested.”

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

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

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

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

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

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

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

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

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

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

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

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

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

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

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

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

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

My door is always open.

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

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

It’s a tempting door.

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

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

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

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

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

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

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

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

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Renauld?”

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

“Well, yeah —”

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

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

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

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

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

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

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

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

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

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

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

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

And… he does.

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

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

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

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

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

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

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

But something about it itches.

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

You are green, through and through.

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

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

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

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

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

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

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

“Yes.”

“Right.”

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

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

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

You’re incredibly daft about it.

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

The itch exacerbates.

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

You wake up and he isn’t there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.R

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

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

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

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

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

But you do, because he told you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes."

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

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

“I earned this,” you hiss.

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

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

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

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

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

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

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

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

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

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

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

“Yes,” you agree.

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

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

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

He was your first in everything but this.

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

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

“How long?” he asks thickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“N-no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A finger presses inside and you moan.

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

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

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

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

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

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will you give me more?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe you already do.

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

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

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

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

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

You whimper.

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

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

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

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

“You can — uh — you can — ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[abbyromanoff]

Heyyy there would you mind writing wanda x femreader where r dreams of wanda cheating on us with vision so when r wokes up she's mad and grumpy and wanda doesn't know why, now she's sad and confused. Fluff at the end though

VISIONS

PAIRINGS: Wanda Maximoff x reader

WORD COUNT: 862

WARNINGS: allusions to smut, talks of cheating, jealousy, anxiety, groping, small angst, fluff, think that’s all :)

NO ONE IS PERMITTED TO STEAL, COPY, OR REBLOG MY WORK AS THEIR OWN!!

“Baby? Can you please stop ignoring me?” Wanda asked with a hand on your shoulder. You shook it off, rolling your eyes as you threw the blankets further over your body. She sighed, trying to leave a kiss to your exposed skin until you shrugged her off once again.

She didn’t know why you seemed so upset, but she assumed from previous experiences that you simply were having a bad morning. It could be a dream, it could be your period, it could just be an irritating mood. In reality, it was the sight you saw in your deep sleep. It woke you with a sudden cry, your head tossing to the side to instantly try and spot the woman. In the dream, you had just walked in on the pair sharing an intimate moment that was meant for only you and Wanda. The witch tried to explain herself, but you woke up before you could make your final decision.

When Wanda woke, she tried giving you a morning peck on the lips, but you denied. She was confused but let it slide, until you ignored her clear request for sex. Your body was bare, only holding layers of hickeys that you usually would’ve admired, yet she still was - which only seemed to anger you further.

She gave up after nearly half an hour of trying to persuade you into talking and grabbed her book, placing her reading glasses over her eyes and sitting silently. You’d mumble quiet annoyances, but refused to form a normal sentence.

“Can you at least tell me why you’re so mad at me?” No response was given besides a huff. “Please, my love? C’mon, don’t make Mommy sad.” She teased, sensing from your sudden stillness that she hit a nerve. You sucked in a breath, removing the covers as you walked towards the bathroom. She groaned, copying your actions with a shiver as the cold air hit her.

“What are you doing?” You stood under the warm water, letting your hair soak as your body erupted with goosebumps. She tore off her shirt, only stopping when your voice was heard.

“So that’s the first thing you’re going to say to me?” Your eyes fell to her naked chest as you licked your lips, forcing yourself to turn away from the trap.

“What? Can I not take a shower with my partner?” She stepped behind you, venturing her hands to your waist as she rested her chin on your shoulder. She kissed the skin softly, leaving hints of her scent behind as you shuddered.

“This…this isn’t fair, Wanda, I’m supposed to be mad at you.” She let her lips linger, trailing her hands up and down, squeezing your breasts before one traveled to your lower region.

“And why is that?” A frown took over your face, and you lowered your gaze. She paused, turning you around so you would face her. You refused to meet her eyes until it was forced out of you, her finger below your chin guiding you to fit her needs.

“Can you please tell me what I did so I can apologize? I’d really appreciate it, love.”

“It’s stupid,”

“It’s not stupid if it’s upsetting you.” She frowned, stroking your cheek softly as she pulled you in, leaving a peck to the skin before trailing to your plump lips. She hummed against you, allowing herself to soak in the warmth of the embrace you ridded her from.

“I had a dream,” You bit your lip, groaning as she pressed on. She rubbed your arms soothingly, furrowing her brows as she waited for your voice to rise once again.

“And in that dream, I caught you…sleeping with…Vision.” She chuckled lightly, causing your frown to grow.

“Oh, love, how could I ever do that to you? Look, you didn’t hear it from me, but I know a girl with the most beautiful, and most wonderful partner. She loves them with all her heart, and she would never, ever even consider breaking their own sweet little heart.” She smiled, brushing her fingers through your hair when red threatened to cover your skin.

“But,”

“Shh, and I don’t want you to think any different, alright? I love you, I love you so much and that will never change.” She assured, and you grinned to yourself, muttering a small statement that she asked for you to repeat.

“Especially not for a red robot?”

“Especially not for a red robot.” She smiled, pecking your forehead slightly and cradling you with her arms. The soft skin sent a sigh of gratitude your way, and you cuddled closer into the woman.

“I love you so much, Wanda. I’m sorry for being mean, I know you’d never do that.” She hummed, trailing her hand lower once again. It fell upon your bare ass, her palm squeezing with a giggle.

“So soft,”

“Wanda! You pervert!” She shook her head, nuzzling her nose in your neck as she continued to poke at the area. You bit your lip, leaning into her as instinct.

“Now, why don’t you let me make it up to you and show you just how much I love you?”

[bloodykora]

I Meant It

I finally wrote an actual one shot for Buggy :)

Summary: You 'babysit' Buggy while he's only a head.

No use of y/n however reader is referred to gal and very feminine pet names (I normally write gender neutral but this was very self serving). I had to write this on my phone so if the format is different from my norm, that is why.

“I think his nose is cute.” A voice breaks out for the first time in the conversation, the other two slowly turning towards you in shock and judgement.

“I beg your pardon sweet thing?” Sanji is the first to break the moment of silence, you raise your shoulders at him.  “I don’t know, he's like. Okay, you know those cats who have a limb missing and they go to scratch with that limb and everyone’s like ‘awww’. That’s kinda how I think I am with him right now, look at him. He’s just a head, a little kitty who can’t scratch behind his ear and needs some help.”

“You seem to forget about the village he destroyed, the one that offered us the rest of their food after we saved them because of what him and his crew did.” “Zoro, you out of everyone has no right to judge considering you took that random dude’s brother’s head.” You stare at the Buggy in front of us with a cloth in his mouth, watching this whole conversation about him go down.

“I do not need to be around this.” Zoro states before leaving, huffing to himself right before he goes out of ear shot. 

“I never knew you out of everyone would be into the clown type but then again, all women are a mystery.” A laugh comes out and you shake your head at Sanji’s words before replying. “I think I just like them to be outgoing.” You slowly and dramatically look Sanji up and down before connecting gazes with him. 

Before he has the chance to respond, a loud bang erupts from a part of the ship which catches both of your attention. Sanji sighs before looking at me. “Things can never be calm around here can they?” A smile appears on your face as you nod. “You go check that out, I think Zoro has had enough of me today, I’ll stay here with him.” You cock your head to the side, pointing at Buggy. Sanji nods and begins to walk away. “Be safe sweets, holler if you need anything.” He looks back to say before continuing on. 

You look back at the clown, his eyes wide watching. Taking a few steps in his direction, nearing him before bending down to him. “Don’t make me regret this.” You quietly say out before gently removing the gag in his mouth. “Ahh toots, that feels so much better." He states while stretching his mouth and licking his lips. “You have no idea how dry my mouth was getting, I was almost debating having a sip of sea water!” You roll my eyes before sitting beside the barrel he was on.

“I think that would not be beneficial cause then you’d have the opposite problem of having too much water.” You pause for a second before questioning. “Can you drown? I mean like now, as just a head? You have no lungs attached to you currently.” “I’ve never tried, I would assume yes though.” “Well, don’t do it then. I wouldn’t wanna have to be the one to save you, or maybe I’d send Sanji to do it for me.”  “That blondie would let me die, I’d be a lot better, mentally and physically, if it was you.” He winks at you. “Mmm, I think anyone of us would do it begrudgingly. For Nami.” He huffs beside you, it was a little funny as just a head. You could imagine his body’s chest moving along with it.

“What is with you and that cook anyway? It’s like you two wanna jump each other, I say just get a room and do it for the sake of me and the crew.” A snort comes out at his words. “Buggy, I don’t think Sanji is actually attracted to me. Yes, he is good looking. However, he flirts with every woman he sees. In front of me too. Ya know, you two kinda remind me of each other in that regard.”

“Oh darling, I would treat you so much better than he ever could.” His words are filled with honey, sweet and dripping. You look at him, face in a ‘really?’ gaze. “I don’t know, he is French. And you know there is a kiss named after them.” He scoffs at the retort. “My head detaches, do I have to say more?”  Your face drops in realization and your cheeks begin to heat up at his words.

“Slut.” The word flew out of your mouth before you could process it. He sits expressionless before breaking into laughter. Your hand raises to your forehead, half covering your face as you laugh.  “I never admitted this but I think I like spending time with you more than Zoro.” “I don’t know, it’s hard to compare his death threats to your sugary laugh.” He flirts again,  You shake your head at his faux forwardness. “If you do that again I’m going to flick your ear I swear to god.” He grins ear to ear like a cat luring in its prey, his face then slowly rests like he was actually thinking for once.

“Earlier, you called my nose cute.” “Yes I did.” “Did you actually mean it or were you poking fun like the others?” I glance at him, his tone serious and his eyes almost pleading. “I meant it.” It’s silent, for the first time ever since you've met Buggy. It seems he takes a breath before speaking up.

"You know, you'd be a good second in command. I could pay you handsomely, far more than these schmucks are."  "They aren't really paying me." His eyes bulge out a bit at the answer.  "You won't realize it yet, considering how they have treated you however," You pause, choosing your words carefully. "They are the closest thing to family I have gotten in forever, meanwhile your crew feared you. That is all the swaying I need." 

"Its cause that Sanji is taller than me isn't it?" You scoff and crack up at his wit. Laughing to the point of your shoulders visibly shaking.  "Oh yes, that is absolutely it." You respond teasing, laughter still in your voice. He shakes his head in disappointment. The pair of you continue to stare out as the sun goes down over the horizon, the warm orange creeping into an umber and then its usual royal blue. The stars peering down at the pair. 

"I think it might be time to head in." You say out loud, mostly to yourself while your hands rub over your arms to retain some heat. You could hear the buzzing begin of the mosquitos.  "What doll, can't handle a little breeze?" You shake your head, you could begin to feel the tip of your fingers cool.  "I've never been good with night time on the water." Buggy sighs beside me as I sit up.

"Let's head in then." He looks up at you, a small smile on his face. You pick him up, avoiding uncomfortable placement of your hands or a tight grip. His skin was warmer then expected, that was the stereotype though. The men being hot blood and bodied creatures.

"Where am I staying tonight? Barrel, in a window, random box?"  "I think you're gonna stay with me." Buggy's eyebrows furrow in confusion. You begin to walk quickly to your small corner of the ship, descending down a small flight of stairs. The blue haired head clutched in your arms almost like the way you'd hold a newborn. 

The blue cot you were well acquainted with was already strung up, ready for you to rest in. You put Buggy up there in it before talking up to him.  "I'm changing so don't try anything okay?" The jester was already too shocked and flustered to speak. Making a mental promise to himself not to break your trust. 

You take a bit of time before he sees your arms come over the side and lift yourself into the hammock. You settle yourself, pulling up the blanket that laid at the end over mostly you. There's a few thuds down the stairs before Sanji appears before you both. 

"Ahh, just the gal I was looking for. How did babysitting go?" He asks, putting an arm over the side of the bed. Standing on a piece of board under you to boost himself up.  "Still here cook boy." Buggy's voice bellows out, you smile at the cook while he gives you a confused glance.  "I got worried that the mosquitos will affect his brain and stuff." You put on your best innocent smile and Sanji shakes his head.  "You are the most mad pirate I think I've ever laid my eyes on." He gets a shrugged shoulders and rolled eyes back.  "So, what was it that happened earlier?" You lean up to peer over the side at him. His face was always a comfort even when it felt the most safe.  "Apparently Usopp knocked something over and then Luffy couldn't remember if it was Nami's or something else. You know him, if its not food related then he's not fully paying attention." You nod, agreeing with the blond. Sanji leans in close to you, looking over your shoulder at the head eavesdropping. 

"Are you going to be okay with him? Cause you know I can very much find a different spot for him." He says in a hushed tone to you, a small smile appears on your face. 

"I'll be okay Sanji, he's just a head. The most he could do is bite me and I think I'd wake up before he could cause real damage. However, if anything goes sour. You will be the first one I call to come help." You place your hand on his shoulder, rubbing it quickly before putting it back under the blanket. Sanji nods at you before he steps down.  "Well sweet, you have a goodnight. Don't dream of me too much okay?" You wave to him and wish him a good night. 

"God he's annoying." Buggy says as you cuddle into your bed, eyes closed in a peaceful manner. "Just look at it like this, you're in my bed. He's not." That shuts him up fast, you peek an eye open at him. He seems speechless and you let out a quiet giggle.  "Please do tell me if you snore." "I should be saying that to you, you can roll over or move. I'm just stuck here." 

You let out a mhmm, the luring sleepiness now very present in your body and brain. Buggy stares at you, blanket tucked up to your chin and face relaxed.  He laid there and listened to you breathe for a bit. Making sure you were well into your slumber before muttering out.  "Sleep well love."

[multi-kpop-fanfics]

Hotel Voluptas: Check(ed) In (You)

voluptas (latin; noun): pleasure, satisfaction, delight

pairing: idol!Mingyu x fem!reader

genre: smut, strangers to lovers!AU (sorta) - minors dni.

warnings: hotel sex, oral (both receiving) protected sex, mean dom!mingyu, degradation, mild jealousy (reader is a carat and her bias ain't gyu lmao), spanking, rough sex, multiple orgasms and positions, fingering, squirting, pussy slapping, dirty talk, use of petnames, mentions of threesome, mentions of panic attack (it's not actually happening dw)

word count: 4k

summary: you're just a regular tourist in Seoul who visits a regular hotel to spend your nights. except the hotel isn't your regular one - let alone its patrons and needs.

Author's note: this is an altered version of a mingyu dream i had a few nights ago msdnfsmnfs thank you to @playmetheclassics for coming up with the title and @idyllic-ghost for beta-reading this fic 💕

nsfw taglist: @rosecult​​ @bibinnieposts @ovai @littlemisssarcastic21 @tinkerbell460 @romromthedeer @y00nzin0 @llsiriusminorisll @booyouwhore17 @lovelyhan @luvv4svt @novalpha @wonderfulshinee @foxinnie8 @sstarrysshit @threedalla @enhacolor @seuomo @spk93 @snoozeagustd @strawberryya

unable to tag: @kkakkameori @patisseriam @0717luv @coachukaishairband

©multi-kpop-fanfics, 2023. No reposting allowed. No translations allowed without permission.

“Good evening, sir Lee. The usual?” 

“You know me, Hyun,” the man clad in total black clothing whips out his credit card to slide over the machine, the familiar sound of the accepted payment ringing like music to his ears.

“We’re all good! Here’s your key, sir.” The receptionist hands over the key to the unknown man and the latter heads off with a slight nod. A couple of bills is all he leaves behind for the receptionist - a thank you gift for his continuous discretion.

Lee Saejin. That was the registered name for the room reservation.

But it’s obviously a fake name - besides, nobody would really care if a random guy was staying over in a hotel surrounded by oddly well-kept rumors. 

But the idol Kim Mingyu spending his nights off in this hotel, sleeping in the arms of a different person every time he visits? Press scandal worthy, to say the least.

So he settles with a silly fake name and escapes through the danger exit doors - not that he minds, when he gets much needed sexual relief after hellish weeks of tight-packed schedules.

All of the stressful thoughts are discarded once he steps into the room and he’s met with a gorgeous lady, sipping on what seems to be expensive champagne.

“Hey there,” Mingyu greets the woman as he discards his coat and takes the hem of his shirt to remove it.

“Let me do the dirty work, mister,” she gets up and holds his wrists, gently peeling them off the fabric so she can take it off herself, “Can’t have you doing more work than you already do, right?”

“As if you haven’t been working your pretty ass off, sweetheart,” he smirks and pulls her flush to his body, his hands kneading her ass over the silky dress.

“I think we should do less talking-”

“And more fucking?” 

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Ugh, why is it so hard to find a decent hotel at a decent price?!”

You want to slam your laptop on the table and crush it into tiny pieces. You have one chance to go to South Korea and the only thing that’s stopping you is finding a damn hotel to stay in.

It’s either an over-the-top super expensive hotel that you need to sell both of your kidneys to afford a couple of nights or it’s a very dingy motel in a suspicious neighborhood.

“No….Not this one….Definitely not this one….Not this one either….”

Suddenly your eyes fall on a neat-looking hotel, with a very good score in reviews.

“Oh? Perhaps?” You scroll through the pictures of the site, the hotel rooms looking exactly like what you’ve been looking for - it almost feels like it’s too good to be true.

You check out the reviews and a few giggles escape from your lips while reading them.

“You will not regret staying in this hotel ;)”

“10/10 would go visit again, spent the best nights of my LIFE”

“you’ll literally spot celebrities in there I’M NOT FUCKING KIDDING”

“Celebrities? Wow, people have a lot of humor,” you chuckle, “But it’s a pretty good hotel - Got nothing to lose, right?”

You don’t hesitate to book a room with a double bed (a girl just wants to lay like a starfish) and pay with your credit card, the booking confirmation arriving in your mail inbox shortly after. You proceed to book your flight tickets with a beaming smile on your face, excitement coursing through your entire body in the forms of jitters.

I’m gonna have so much fun.

You feel like you were put in the blender and got splattered on the floor.

Maybe it’s because you haven’t traveled by plane in a long time, maybe it was the duration of the flight, or a combination of the two - either way, you just wanted to faceplant in the mattress of the hotel bed.

You feel very grateful to the taxi driver who offered to carry your suitcase until the entrance of the hotel. You thank him for the ride and hand over the corresponding amount of money, bidding him farewell.

You walk through the glass doors of the hotel and you suddenly feel very much awake.

The whole place feels so luxurious yet not intimidating, as if it’s calling you to explore its deepest parts. You look around you and see people waiting at the lobby, the majority of them wearing face masks and you feel conscious for not wearing one.

You timidly approach the reception counter, dragging your suitcase behind you. You ring the bell on the marble counter and wait for someone to appear.

“Good evening, miss. What can I do for you?” The receptionist appears and you’re blown away from how dashing he looks.

“Um, hello, I’ve booked a room under the name Y/N L/N? I-It’s one with a-”

“A double bed, yes, I am aware,” the man chuckles, “It’s not like we have single beds in this hotel.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said that the rooms in our hotel do not have single beds.”

You blink twice. Is he serious right now?

“Um,” you scratch your cheek, “May I ask why?”

“Miss Y/N, are you aware of the services we provide here?”

“What is that supposed to mean? Isn’t this just a regular hotel where people spend a few nights to rest after visiting Seoul?” 

He takes a quick glance left and right and moves his fingers in a ‘come hither’ motion and you inch closer, purely out of curiosity.

“Do you see all those people waiting here?” 

You nod in agreement.

“They wear facial masks because they don’t want to be recognized in public.”

Your eyes go wide and your brain recalls all of the reviews you read online - they were fucking true.

“Are you saying that they come here to fuck?!”

“Shhh! Don’t be so loud!” he shushes you in a panic, “But yeah, that’s what they’re here for -  that’s what this hotel is for, technically.”

Just your fucking luck.

“There was none of that crap on the website!” You whisper in a state of panic.

“What did you expect, miss? To write ‘hello we have rooms for you to fuck your brains out with other people’?” He deadpans with a straight face.

“Okay fine, you have a point,” you huff in annoyance, “But isn’t that, like….Illegal?”

“Illegal? Oh no no, there are no sex workers here, only people of high social profile who want to have a good time,” he clarifies, “We’re just the confidential party who run this hotel.”

“So, um..” you trail off, “Does that mean I’m obligated to share a room with someone here?”

“Of course not! You did book a room for one person, after all.”

“Okay….” you answer and think for a while, but your thoughts are as clear as a cobweb.

“You can call me Hyunjin, by the way.” The receptionist introduces himself after a long time.

You give him a quick smile and go back to the ordeal of putting your thoughts in a coherent order.

“Hey, Hyunjin?”

“Yes?”

“Do idols come here too?” 

The man licks his lips before smirking.

“I am not allowed to disclose such information, my dear.”

“So they do,” you narrow your eyes at him.

“Again, I am not allowed to disclose such information.”

“Fine, I’ll find out for myself, then.” You muster up your confidence.

“Excellent,” Hyunjin smiles and pulls out a piece of paper and a tablet, “Want me to hand you over a pen?”

“Yes please,” you answer without lifting your head from the papers you’re reading, quickly realizing it is indeed, a NDA. Of course they would have those.

You carefully check all of the pages (including the footnotes) and you sign the NDA without a fuss, Hyunjin’s signature following right after.

“What’s that for?” You look at the bright screen, filled with a list of names and X marks.

“This is where we store the information of our regular clients and the rooms they usually stay in,” he explains, “The X marks next to the names you see indicate that these people are already with someone…If you get what I mean. Also, there are the gender symbols to indicate...well, their gender.”

A notification comes up in your phone and you slide it out of your pocket, mumbling a quick sorry to Hyunjin, so you can text your friend back that you made it safely to Seoul. The man takes a quick glance at your phone case, pursing his lips tight.

“Okay, where were we? The clients, right?”

“Yes. That is, if you want to try meeting one of them - You can always keep your reservation as it is and quietly spend your nights here on your double bed.”

“Well,” you bite your bottom lip, “I’m a single girl in Seoul to have fun, might as well get laid with someone hot, right?” You tilt your head in a cheeky way.

“As you wish, miss - Have you decided on who you’re gonna pick?”

“Hmm, let’s see…” 

You carefully check the list with all the unmatched names and your eyes fixate on the name Lee Saejin.

“This one.”

Now it’s Hyunjin’s turn to be surprised, but he’s only allowed to nod and do the reservations.

“You just had a really weird expression on your face.”

“Who, me? Nope, definitely not!” He defends himself while trying to put down the necessary information to complete the process.

“What’s wrong with the name I picked?”

“Nothing at all,” he bites back a smile, “On the contrary, you picked a really good one.”

“Okay….” you side eye him, “Can I go now?”

“You’re too eager for someone who looked like splattered jam on the floor not too long ago.” He hands you over the card key for the room.

“You’re one peculiar receptionist,” you take the key and drag your suitcase on the smooth floor.

“Hope you enjoy your stay in Hotel Voluptas, miss!” Hyunjin yells before you disappear behind the elevator doors, which earns him a few irritated glares from other guests. He clears his throat and absentmindedly smooths over his hair and clothes, going back to his business

“Hoo boy, she’s in for a real treat.”

You feel like a lunatic.

If anyone else was in your shoes, they would have run the fuck out of this place and take the first flight back home. 

But you feel excited. Almost ecstatic.

You never thought the reviews/rumors you had heard about Hotel Voluptas were actually true but now that you’re one step away from finding out who Lee Saejin truly is.

You take a deep breath before opening the door and check underneath your shirt to make sure you’re wearing a pretty lingerie set - just in case, you know.

You slide the card key over the electronic lock and the door opens. You enter the room and you quickly realize there’s nobody inside.

“Huh? That’s weird,” you close the door behind you and set your suitcase next to the wardrobe. You take a look around the room, noticing how neat and pristine it looks. You sit on the bed and touch the sheets, your palm gliding over the silk.

“Damn, that’s real luxury right here.” You let out a low whistle.

“You should see the jacuzzi, that’s peak luxury.”

The unknown voice scares you so much you end up falling down on the carpeted floor with a thud.

“Ouch…”

“Shit, I’m sorry! Are you okay?” The stranger bends down to help you stand on your feet, your ass slightly stinging from the sudden impact.

“Yeah, I think so-” you raise your head and look at his face, any coherent sentence dying down in your throat and any rational thought disappearing from your brain.

The man standing in front of you - the half naked man - is Kim Mingyu.

Kim fucking Mingyu of Seventeen.

You cover your mouth in shock, sitting on the bed to realize what the fuck is going on.

“You must be Y/N, right?” Mingyu speaks.

“No, I’m not.”

“What? But I’m sure Hyunjin sent me the correct info…”

“Wait, my info?!”

“Um, yeah. For the NDA, y’know?”

“Oh. Right.”

You don’t know if you want to jump out of the window or jump his bones right this instant.

“I know this is sudden, but that’s how things work in here,” he flashes his signature smile, his perfectly white canines shining brighter than your future.

“Is this even real?”

“You can always touch me, y’know?”

“NO!”

“No?”

“Wait, I mean yeah- Shit, I-”

“Do you need some time alone? I’m kind of worried right now,” Mingyu admits with a nervous look, “I don’t want you to panic right now.”

“I just- Hyunjin did tell me that celebrities come here, but I didn’t expect to see YOU of all people!” You admit with a wheeze.

“I mean, I am a guy with sexual needs as well.” He lets out a chuckle.

“But you were supposed to be at your dorms and resting!”

“Says who?”

“The news channel live…..You left the airport with the members in the cars….So I assumed you….” You trail off, your voice getting quieter.

“So you’re a fan, huh,” he smirks, “That makes it even better.”

“Y-Yeah, hence the shock….”

“You’re really cute, you know that?”

“Oh, so now you’re gonna pull the shit you do at fansigns, huh?” Your demeanor changes as you sit up on the bed.

“Is it working?” He towers over you, adjusting the towel around his waist, your eyes zoning on the water droplets cascading from his beefy chest all the way down to his v-line.

“Maybe.” You admit and you feel your cheeks flaring up as he climbs on the bed, his body frame hovering above yours.

“Good, that means my game is still going strong.”

“Or your fans are way too whipped for you.”

“You’re not a gyuldaengie?”

Fuck, wrong move.

“Who is it, darling?”

“Not telling you.” You challenge him.

“No need to tell me, I already know either way.” He grins like an imp as he stretches his arm to pick up your phone from the floor.

“Wonwoo hyung, huh?”

“Hey, give that back!” You try to take the phone back, but he pins your wrists above your head with his hand.

“You wish he was here instead of me?”

“And what about it?”

“Too bad he’s a fucking loser who does gaming lives for his fans.”

“Shut up, I love those!”

“Of course you do - It’s just that fucking pretty girls like you is way more fun, don’t you think?”

You let out a shaky breath at his words -  Kim Mingyu just called you pretty and it has you melting on the spot.

“Can I kiss you?” He asks you with a whisper.

“Please.”

It’s all Mingyu needs to put his lips on yours, his hands now perched on your clothed body, fingers dancing dangerously around the hem of your shirt.

“Just take it off already!” You squirm underneath him.

“So demanding, tsk…” He takes off your shirt and unbuttons your jeans, leaving you only in your lingerie.

“Demanding yet dressed for the occasion, I see.”

“It was coincidental!” You defend yourself, “I just like wearing pretty underwear, is that bad?”

“Not at all, darling,” he licks his bottom lip, “I always appreciate pretty things on pretty people.”

He presses a chaste kiss on the column on your neck, and another one on your collarbone, and a lot more scattered over your chest and abdomen, paying extra attention to your lower stomach, just above the hem of your thong.

“G-Gyu-”

“Oh so we’re on a nickname basis now?” Mingyu hooks his fingers on the thin elastic band and slides it down your legs, letting out a whistle when he spreads your thighs all the way to your hip bones.

“Not that I mind you calling me Gyu, obviously.”

“You’re so insufferable, oh my God, just lic- AH!”

You moan out loud when he parts your lower lips with his thumbs and starts sucking on your clit. 

You thread your hands in his silky black hair, pulling it each time he presses his tongue a bit harder on the spots that make you squirm beneath him. 

You always knew Mingyu had very attractive lips, but feeling them making out with your pussy in such a sloppy manner makes your head spin.

You let out a particularly loud moan when you feel his thumb stretch your hole, all while he spits on your clit just to lick it even harder than before, followed by a particularly harsh suck.

“Fuck!” Your thighs squirm and almost close around his head, but he keeps them open with his arms, his chocolate eyes staring at you.

“You’re really squirmish, aren’t you?”

“It’s not my fault-”

“That I’m eating your pussy so good you don’t want me to stop?”

God, you really want to slap him. But he’s right.

“Aren’t you going to say anything, darling?”

“You stopped eating my pussy.”

Mingyu clicks his tongue in annoyance and flips you around, lifts your ass and goes back to eat you out like a starved animal. 

“Oh my- Fuck, it feels so fucking good, Gyu!”

“Oh yeah? Would Wonwoo hyung eat you like this?” He smacks your ass.

“Mmmfh-”

“Answer me, pretty girl.” He smacks your ass again, a bit harder this time.

“I won’t fucking tell you!”

“Bratty little bitch,” he clicks his tongue in annoyance and gets up from his place, circling the bed to stand in front of you, finally dropping his towel.

Big would be too little of a word to describe what hangs between his legs.

You gulp audibly, mouth salivating at the sight of his deliciously thick cock, your insides jolting at the thought of his length splitting you in half.

“What, you see a nice dick and turn all dumb and drooly?” He pumps his cock with his fist right in front of your face.

You crawl a bit closer to him and slap his hand away to wrap your lips around the fat tip, pushing his cock deeper in your mouth. 

“You’re so much more eager than I thought, sweetheart,” Mingyu groans and puts his hand deep in your hair, “Would you suck Wonwoo’s cock like that too, darling?”

“I’d suck it harder,” you take out his cock and stroke it with your hand, a shit-eating grin on your face, “Does that answer your question?”

He pokes his cheek with his tongue and slaps your cheek with his cock twice before he’s pushing you on your back again.

“Well too bad he’s not here now.” He opens one of the nightstand drawers and pulls out a condom, ripping the packaging with his teeth to roll the latex over his cock.

He climbs on the bed again and throws your legs on his shoulders, tapping his dick on your slicked cunt a few times.

“I’ll just fuck you to oblivion instead.”

“Now I know why everyone calls you an overgrown puppy,” you giggle, “You’re all bark and no bite, Gyu.”

Your lips morph into an ‘O’ shape when Mingyu slams his dick inside you, knocking the breath out of your lungs.

“I’ve had enough of you running your mouth all evening,” he grits his teeth and tugs your bra down, letting your breasts out of the lace, “For someone who was so shocked to find out that people fuck in this place, you’re awfully bratty.”

“Then fuck the attitude out of me, big guy,” you taunt him, “Just like you’ve been boasting all evening.”

“With pleasure.”

Mingyu folds you in half and starts drilling his cock in your pussy with a newfound hunger, all the exhaustion he had accumulated from the flight gone in the blink of an eye.

“Your pussy is so fucking good, taking my cock like a fucking champ.” He moans and gropes your tits, his big hands squeezing the soft flesh.

“Your cock fucks me so good, Gyu, you’re so good to me, fuck!” You grip the sheets, nails digging into the silk.

“Oh yeah? Dick so good you’re not thinking about that bias of yours anymore?”

Your pussy clenches around his shaft, Mingyu’s eyes turning hooded.

"You greedy little slut," he juts his hips a bit more forcefully, "You would love to fuck Wonwoo, wouldn't you?"

Yes, you definitely would - you can't even bring yourself to count the times you've thirsted over the cat-like man in glasses for the most dumb reasons.

"Of course a pretty slut like you cannot be satisfied with one dick," he speeds up his thrusts, "Need something to fill your bratty mouth with, right?"

"F-Fuck, yes!" You cry out, thighs starting to tense on his shoulders.

"Maybe I should take a picture of you sucking my dick like a lolly and send it to hyung," he taunts you, "Show him what his fans are actually doing in their free time."

"Shit, Gyu!" You scream Mingyu's name and your back arches off the mattress as you cum around his cock, giving him the green light to fuck you through your orgasm, while he chases his own.

It doesn't take him long to tip off the edge and reach his own climax, filling up the condom with his cum. He quickly discards the soiled latex in the trash bin under the nightstand and lays right next to you, a wicked smile playing on his face.

"Why are you smiling like th- Oof!" You gasp when he pulls you flush to his chest and throws your leg over his hip, burying two fingers knuckle deep in your cunt.

He rapidly fucks his digits in your spent hole as he grinds his palm on your clit, trying to force one more orgasm out of your body.

And he does.

He watches your body shake harder than before and you squirt all over his hand and thighs, eyes nearly rolling at the back of your skull from the intensity of your orgasm.

He pulls out his fingers and licks them clean with his mouth, letting them go with a lewd sound. 

"W-What….was that for?" You pant.

"For good measure." He grins.

"....Manwhore." You curse under your breath and Mingyu lands a smack on your pussy, making you yelp from the impact.

"Says the girl who wants to fuck two idols of the same group."

"And what about it?! A girl can always 

dream!" You protest.

"Some dreams can become a reality," he says, "That is, if you ask the right people."

"You're not actually thinking of sending him a post-sex image, are you?!"

"Are you crazy? Of course not, that NDA has my signature too, missy," he deadpans, "I just said that to rile you up."

"Of course you did." You roll your eyes at him.

"So….how long are you staying in Seoul?"

"A week," you reply, "Why do you ask?"

"I was thinking…." Mingyu trails one finger on your collarbone.

"Yes?"

"If I convince that loser of a hyung I have as my roommate to get out of his gaming chair, maybe you'll get to live your dirty little fantasy."

"Are you- Is this a joke? Because if you're fucking with me, you better drop it."

"I'm 100% serious, love," he dips his finger on the valley of your breasts, "As long as everyone consents to it, I'm down to share. If you behave as well, of course."

You don't hesitate to nod affirmatively and climb on top of him, giving him a passionate kiss as a thank you.

"There's something you need to know though." 

"What is it, darling?"

"I have an IUD and I'm clean, got checked last month."

Mingyu blinks twice and purses his lips in a thin line.

"You better prepare yourself for next time, sweetheart," he grips your ass, "And don't worry about our little playdate getting out of here." He presses a kiss on your neck.

"What happens in Hotel Voluptas, stays in Hotel Voluptas."

[moonstruckme]

I used to be a camp counselor and I just know James is the exact kind of guy the little kids would fight to sit next to at activities. And! He tells the most dramatic campfire stories

Hi! I realize this wasn't really a request but it gave me an idea, so thank you lovely!

camp counselor!James x fem!reader ♡ 751 words

“Then,” James says in a low, solemn voice, “Timmy heard the monster getting louder. Do you know what I do with my giant red mouth and my long purple fingers?” 

All around you, campers sit with bated breath. When the last counselor to go had told her story, they’d all been whispering to each other, giggling and messing around as they tend to do whenever anyone is speaking. Anyone except James, apparently. 

“Timmy ran to the only place left to hide.” He walks slowly around the logs you and the kids sit on as he talks, the orange glow of the fire casting his face in a merry hue despite his foreboding tone. You can tell he’s trying his best to play the part, and James isn’t the worst actor in the world, but anytime he looks at one of the kids’ faces the twitching of his lips betrays him. 

He crouches next to an apprehensive-looking girl and says to her, “He squeezed into the closet in the basement and made himself as small as he could. Just like that.” James pokes the girl’s curled up form teasingly, drawing a smile out of her. His lips twitch again. 

“For a minute,” he stands, beginning to circle again, “it was quiet. Then, Timmy heard the monster coming down the stairs.” James stomps his feet on the dirt, making dull thudding sounds that have you smiling and your camper next to you gripping your arm apprehensively. “The monster got closer and closer. Timmy was trapped.” 

James is nearly behind you, and the girl holding your arm whispers, “Does the monster live close to here?” 

“No, no.” You keep your voice low, bending your head towards hers with your most reassuring smile. “This monster’s all the way in Florida. Don’t worry.” 

“And when Timmy could hear the monster’s breath just outside the closet,” James goes on, though you’re not really paying attention, more focussed on comforting the poor girl beside you, “it asked again, Do you KNOW—” His voice rises to a shout, and big hands grab your waist, making you squeak loudly. James’ hold is the only thing that keeps you from flinching fully out of your seat, and you can hear him snickering quietly behind you as the kids erupt in laughter. 

“Do you know,” he tries again, amusement coating his tone, “what I do with my giant red mouth and my long purple fingers?” 

He lowers himself onto his haunches, speaking to the girl next to you. “And do you want to guess what Timmy said?” he asks her, both hands still on your waist. 

She shakes her head, giggling. 

“Well, he said no, obviously.” James grins as if this is a joke you’re all in on together. “How would he know? So the monster said, I’ll show you.” 

James gives your waist a teasing squeeze as he lets you go, but his face smooths into seriousness again, one hand coming slowly up to his mouth. The kids near you are craning their necks to see him. 

Lightning quick, James sticks a finger in front of his lips, flapping up and down as he blows out and makes a vibrating sound. 

The silence breaks as the kids either laugh or boo or a mix of both, one of James’ campers shouting, “That wasn’t even scary!” 

“It was too!” James feigns offense, setting a hand on your head and banding his forearm across your collar protectively. “Don’t say that, you’ll make y/n feel bad. Poor love,” he says sympathetically, resting his head on your shoulder, “she was really terrified.” 

“Did you pee yourself?” one of the campers near you asks. You turn to her, making a silly face. 

“I think maybe a little,” you whisper loudly, causing the kids to devolve into giggles again. 

“Oh, ew.” James makes a show of removing his hands from you and wiping them on the back of your shirt. The campers eat it up, your small clearing in the woods a cacophony of laughter and cricket sounds. You catch some of the other counselors rolling their eyes, some exchanging knowing smiles. 

“Well, I suppose that’s fair enough,” James goes on. “I nearly peed myself, too, when I thought you were going to fall off your log there.” He shoots you one of his winning smiles. “Good thing you had me to catch you, yeah?” 

You feel your face warm, and you’re grateful for the glow of the campfire as cover. “Mhm,” you say, “good thing.”