#*holding dieter up like simba* HE'S YOUR SPECIAL BABY BOY

[ravensmadreads]

TAYLOR -

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

i breathe you in (and it changes me)

rating: teen pairing: dieter bravo x f!reader word count: 2K summary: you've been here with him before - rock bottom. But this time, he gives you reason to hope for something new. warnings: alcohol use, mentions of drug use, physical fighting, blood, wounds, bruises, mentions of past toxic behavior a/n: your original ask @bitchwitch1981 got swallowed up by tumblr, so i had to create a new post :( but I wanted to say thank you so much for requesting this - it was more therapeutic to write than i initially thought!

1K ask:

Sweet Taylor, Congratulations on the amazing milestone! 💜 I have decided to go for astrology for The Midnight Seance. I have chosen the prompt “Hold my hand please?” “When you ask so nicely.” and my own darling Dieter Bravo.

🤍Masterlist 🤍 Dieter Bravo Masterlist

The damp heat of the night is made worse by the thick knot of chittering spectators by the back alley of the club. You can hear the fleshy blows, hear the flesh rip and tear the veins, the delighted groan of the crowd after a particularly sickening crunch. White lights of camera flashes flicker, the smell of blood acidic on your tongue, the metallic taste getting stronger the closer you get to the front of the crowd. You see the blur of an arm just as you shove aside a man recording the whole scene with his phone; how much will TMZ pay for even seven seconds of that video?

Across from you, a thick shadow with bloody knuckles paces like a caged tiger, snorting with rage, the spectators jeering and howling their approval. The man, twice as thick as you are, waits at the edge of the fight, his vision locked forward, massive hands itching to rip apart something alive. 

Whatever is left alive of the heap of clothes in front of you.

It shudders, arms and legs curling beneath it, and rolls backwards. The crowd lets out a disgusted groan at the sight of the bloody face. Your heart sinks to the sticky concrete.

Oh, Dieter.

Asphalt digs into your knees as you kneel down next to him, the sounds of the crowd fading as panic swells within you. He doesn’t even register that you’re there until you touch his cheek. One eye completely swollen shut, blood running down from his nose over his upper lip, he meets your gaze and flinches. 

“Sorry,” he slurs – either from his split lip or being drunk out of his mind, you can’t tell, “you look like my ex.” 

“Dieter, it’s me.” 

His collar is torn, blood speckles cover the front of his shirt, and his jeans are filthy. Judging by his own shredded knuckles, he might have actually gotten a few good hits in. Gonna hurt like a bitch in the morning. You put a hand on his shoulder, looking for any other open wounds, for more blood – and he shoves you off.

“Go away. I’m kicking this guy’s ass.” 

Groaning, Dieter staggers to his feet, the blood freely flowing from his nose now. He gets upright and immediately stumbles, hands going to his knees, much to the deformed glee of the crowd. They whoop and laugh and hold their phones higher. 

Even in heels, you’re several inches shorter than him and you intentionally didn’t wear that much clothing – you were going to club with your friends to forget – but you try to shield him from the camera lenses anyway. 

From the back of his throat, Dieter spits out a wad of blood. “Fuck, my head hurts.” The drool that slips from his mouth is pink and frothy.

“Dieter, c’mon, we’re going.” 

You drag his arm over your shoulder, shifting as much of his weight onto you as you can. His entire back and underneath his arm is drenched in what you pray is sweat. Behind you, you know the other man is yelling, shouting, something about teaching that fat mouth a lesson, but you do what you’ve alway done when it comes to Dieter: you put yourself between him and an oncoming car crash. 

Hoping a grown man won’t take a full swing with a woman in kitten heels and a slinky dress nearby, you half-push, half-carry Dieter back towards the way you came in, but you make it two more steps before he pushes you away again, his fingertips drifting down your shoulder. His face is twisted up in agony.

“Fuckin’ stop. I don’t need your help.”

You grab him by the bicep, twisting him to you again, and he stumbles, muttering a gruff sorry. Blood from his nose drips down onto your bare chest. He watches it, transfixed, his emotions crackling from one high to the next low. 

You cup his bruised, swollen jaw and his wet eyes meet yours and for an instant, no one else exists. His bottom lip trembles. 

“Dieter” you murmur, low enough for just him to hear, just enough for him to lean forward, to let himself be captured by you – briefly – just as he always had been. “We’re going home, okay?”

He nods, eyes shut, swaying, and lets himself be dragged away. 

Beyond the black partition, you hear music. Too soft to be distinct, too faint. Yet it sits between your teeth all the same, hums in the back of your jaw. Static noise. 

In your lap, lays Dieter’s head. Your skirt feels damp from where the blood from his nose gathers. It stopped dripping minutes ago but the spot still feels cold, still thick with it. Your hand curls in his hair, loose but weighted. Grounding. He always said this was his favorite spot in the entire world. 

You didn’t tell the driver to go east, towards Sherman Oaks, but the opposite direction, towards the rental property you kept by the beach. Before that, home had always been Sherman Oaks, but . . . in the after, you couldn’t even bear to see the name on the sign. 

Partially it’s practical. Given the swarmed mob, there most likely was another one waiting for him at the gates to his mansion. He doesn’t have his phone, you know, which is most likely a curse and a blessing. When it comes to moments like these, you’ve learned to deal with the problem right in front of you, one at a time. Or rather, the one in your lap. 

You swore you’d never be here again, you swore that you’d learn to unremember what here even feels like, and yet you ran to him all the same. This is not the first time you wonder if leaving him bleeding and drooling into the concrete would have been the right thing to do. 

The car drives you both towards the rental because you want him there. You want him to fill up that empty space in your bed, smear the too messy sink in the bathroom with uncharged electric toothbrushes and toothpaste that tastes like cotton candy, and bring a sense of wonder back into your increasingly dark days. But with all that, comes this. The black partition ahead of you blurs, your eyes grow hot and tight, submissive to the beaks of birds, and the back of your fingers not caught in his hair press harshly to the back of your mouth. You fight a shudder because you know he can’t bear to see you cry. 

“I didn’t want you to see me like that.”

His apologies always start like this, a little broken, a little roundabout way of getting to the heart of things. You sniff, your hand slipping to his shoulder and grasping it tight. “We don’t have to talk about it right now, okay, baby?”

“I didn’t want you to see me take pills.”

Your head bumps the back of the seat, as you swallow a sob and a laugh all at once. You squeeze him – no, no, of course not, you never mean it, you never mean any of it — 

“My therapist said they would help. And then they did. But I couldn’t get you back.”

He mutters something, rubbing his face slowly in your lap, like a blind kitten, his big hand over your knees, but you’re too stunned to parse out his babbling. 

“You went to therapy?” 

“Still in it.” He wheezes through a bruised rib. “She’s gonna be so pissed about this.” 

“You’re not high?” 

He shake-rubs his head again, the curls at his forehead catching against the sequins of your top. “Just drunk. I fucking hate being drunk.” 

He babbles some more, the words looped on tangled string, but you sit up, and gently turn his face towards you. The bleeding has stopped, but the swelling has set in. His right eye is black and blue, the skin puffy and tender. There’s a cut across his left cheek and his lip is split down the middle. Fuck, if these don’t heal right, that could be the end of his career. 

Goddamn it – and why would you care about that? It’s not your job to care anymore. 

You reverently trace a finger over his black eye, his cheek, his lips, to the blood on his temple. Tragedy always looked so good on him. 

His hand catches yours. You think his good eye might be filled with tears.

“I tried to get better . . . for you. For us. I took all the right pills, instead of the wrong ones this time, and I thought I was better.” Dieter shifts, so his back is against the seat and he’s looking straight up at you. He holds your hand to his chest, his other rising up to cup your cheek. That single touch cracks your resolve, your rule against letting him affect you, and you cry. He watches the silent tears roll down your cheeks, over his thumb. You think he looks remorseful. “I tried to get better and you moved on without me.”

It only just now occurs to you that he had most likely been inside the club when you had, had probably seen you and never said anything. He watched you dance and drink and try to forget him with other sweaty bodies and he never said a thing.

Bruised anger, the kind that melts off your ribs, flares bright within you and you jerk your face away from his touch.

“You don’t get to blame me for your shit anymore, Dieter.” 

His fingers curl and he swallows, the dried blood around his mouth cracking. “No, baby, I’m not. I’m not. I’m sorry I ever did. I didn’t mean it, I never mean it – never meant to hurt you. But I do, don’t I? I hurt you all the time.” 

Your anger throbs. “Then why? Why, Dieter, would you wait to get help until after I was gone? Didn’t you want to try . . . to salvage something, anything between us?”

His hand drops to his chest. 

“I didn’t want you to see me take pills.”

You suddenly recognize the weight of his head on your lap, the density of his shoulders against your lap, and you, in a cycle of regret and love, want to scream at him. Want to shake him. Instead you brush his sticky curls off his forehead and a single tear escapes the corner of his eye, down his temple. 

“You silly, silly boy.” You sniff, tears freely flowing, and curl a strand of his beautiful hair in your fingers. “I would have been there for you. I’m glad you got help, and I hate that this was a relapse, but I would never have judged you for trying to get better, even if you failed. You were the one who didn't want me to see that side of you, Dieter. I never stopped loving you.”

For a moment, he goes still, the darkness of the night street obscuring his face, blurring him into one dark shadow that wheezed and sighed. You’re about to seek out his hand in the dark, if not his face, not his wounds, when he lets out the most broken noise you’d ever heard come from anyone. 

It’s a noise that will haunt you in nightmares for years to come.

“Oh,” he says. 

The car rolls to a stop, the faint music barely heard over the rush and crash of the waves on the other side of your rental. The radio goes silent and the partition rolls down. 

“We’re here, miss.” 

You wipe your eyes, mascara streaks turning your finger tips black, and cough to clear the knot in your throat that beats in time with your heart. Hands curling under his shoulders, you move to lift him up off your lap.

“C’mon, Dieter, we’ve gotta get you cleaned up–,”

“Wait.” He visibly swallows, nothing else on his face so clear in the dark. You feel a faint drop on your skirt. “I mean, I’ll go but . . . hold my hand – please?” 

Despite yourself, despite him, despite your tear-drenched lips, you lean down and kiss his forehead. Your shared shaky breaths are trapped between your chest and his.  “Only when you ask so nicely.”

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