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lavenoon · 2 years ago

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Falling Into Orbit (~4.1K)

Bloodstain Fool by @naffeclipse, og detective au by sunnys-aesthetic

Menace4Menace first meeting - plays before the first comic. Also reminder/ disclaimer that this is not a Y/N, and pronouns used will be he/she

Next -> Conjunction -> Asterisms

“You’re going to draw attention, looking like that.”

You look up at the animatronic towering in front of you. For some reason, the comment offends you. Could be the fact that so far any passerby walking past has only spared fleeting glances your way, before looking up at your new friend and scurrying off with fear in their eyes.

In a way, you get it. Twice your height and cutting quite the imposing figure in his suit, Eclipse is no one to sneeze at.

Your nose still tickles.

“Are you sure anyone is even going to see me standing next to you?”

Got him. There’s a twitch to his expression as his fingers curl around nothing but air, before he abruptly rips them down to his side. Just as suddenly he turns, walking down the sidewalk.

You have to take two steps for each one of his. The most annoying part of it all is keeping your grin down.

Eclipse glares down at you just as you round the block. His eyes only narrow further, so perhaps you’re not doing that good of a job, hiding your amusement.

“You’re still here.”

… Where else would you be? He started walking, so you followed. Did he expect you to just shrug it off, and let him leave? Or maybe it’s wishful thinking, him hoping you’d turn out to be an apparition only. Too bad you have to disappoint him.

You blink, and tilt your head.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Again with the furling fingers. It’s not a really reassuring gesture, but mostly you wonder if this time has stress toys. Eclipse sure looks like he could use one. Some, actually - multiple spares, just in case.

The thought only intensifies when one hand wraps around your head, keeping your head fixed to where he leans down into your vision. While you’d love to say you’re fully focused on that probably faked cheerful smile,

That hand is big.

“I have work to do. I won’t babysit you.”

You pat the hand on your head, and it twitches.

“Lucky for you, I’m not a baby. You said you’d help me.”

“Because you were freaking out and drawing attention. Speaking of which, you calmed down really fast.”

The words come out in a snarl, and his grip tightens again. At this rate you’re going to get a headache. That won’t help you clear his suspicions, so you do your best to project nonchalance with your shrug.

“I got distracted. Not every day you meet a sentient animatronic after all.”

You look around, as much as your limited range lets you, and immediately realize that he won’t be able to sign off on that. There’s three other animatronics out and about, and that’s just from a quick glance around the busy street.

So you have to amend your statement.

“Well. I suppose that no longer applies.”

The pressure from your head lifts as Eclipse straightens, his optics covered by his fingers curled into claws. He tilts his face up, and just like that you can’t see his expression anymore. Quietly, he mumbles.

“Why did I agree to this?”

You’re not sure if you were supposed to hear that, but you decide to reply anyway. First with a hum, earning you another glare, and then you grin. Eclipse drops his hand again, not looking even an ounce happier. You’re not sure it would have made much of a difference - he’s quite a lot of ounces.

So you end up smiling for two.

“Because I’d go around and tell everyone I met you first. Think the police would enjoy my crazy story?”

For an animatronic with a fixed smile, he looks awfully close to having bitten into his first lemon ever. But then, for just a second, his expression shifts - too bad you can’t read it at all. His pupils flit to the side, then narrow back down at you, and he looks as hard as ever. Moment over, then.

“You are my punishment.”

You blink, unimpressed.

“You’re awfully sure you deserve to be punished.”

Ignoring your comment entirely, he turns to look past you. When he speaks up again, his tone radiates eternal suffering, and you bite your tongue before you comment on that, too.

“I know where you can stay. There’s someone who owes me a favor.”

He starts walking again, and you follow with a dreary sigh.

“Oh no, I landed in a time of ominous favors.”

Golden eyes with black pinpricks glare back at you for a moment, and then Eclipse accelerates. You have to actually hurry now to keep up.

“Word of advice, if you want to last here for more than a day, learn to keep your mouth shut.”

And so you do, if only because your sense of self preservation isn’t quite that eroded. Well, maybe also because jogging after him is enough of a workout, and you prefer not announcing that via embarrassing wheezing. Without lungs he sure has it easy. That, and legs as long as you are tall. You’re barely more than a tripping hazard for him.

That’s an impulsive thought you better don't indulge.

Instead you try to focus on everything around you, taking in all the sights without falling behind too much. Just once do you stop to stare at a very fancy couple and their just as fancy car, and get lost a little bit in the excitement they radiate.

And maybe the old car. Do you know the brand? Could you sneak back to steal a glimpse at the emblem? It’s a rolling death trap, even more so than the cars you’re used to, but if it doesn’t look cool…

Eclipse walks on, and when you look, he just rounds a corner. He nearly left you behind before. You hate running, but needs must. Rushing after him you nearly run into him - seems he waited after all.

He scowls, grumbling a quick “Hurry up,” and moves on.

This time you don’t let yourself get distracted. Getting lost in a city out of your time, without money or ID or anything else to your name isn’t your idea of a good time. Your little threat earlier was little more than a bluff - involving the police isn’t an option you actually want to consider.

When Eclipse takes a sharp turn into a building you stop for just a moment, looking it up and down. Just a little shop, from the looks of it, selling a variety of things.

The bell rings when you enter, and both Eclipse and the human shopkeep turn to you. The man frowns, and you instinctively smile - it probably does little to help.

“Hi!”

He turns to Eclipse again, thick brows furrowed.

“For her?”

“Do you have a room or not?”

Your smile turns into a small grimace at the hostility in Eclipse’s tone, but at least it’s not directed at you.

It gets worse, because the shopkeep does not seem to have a sense of self preservation.

“Since when did you fancy…”

Apparently unsure how to describe all of you, he makes a vague circular gesture your way, and what little you can see of Eclipse’s expression does not look happy. Maybe you can defuse the situation just a bit.

“Oh, we’re just friends!”

Again, four eyes are on you. Eclipse’s optics are dark with thin, golden halos staring at you in disbelief. The shopkeep glances from you to him before tensing, and promptly making his escape into the back.

“... I’ll go grab a key.”

You spare him a glance before looking back to Eclipse, who is currently strangling the air where you presume he would wish your neck to be.

“Why would you say we’re friends?”

It’s hushed, as much as you assume he can lower his voice. The result is more of a squeaky rubber chicken toned stage whisper, and your little smiley grimace twitches.

“Would you have preferred whatever he was assuming?”

Somehow you don’t think him “fancying” you is in any way the better alternative. You don’t really look like someone anyone in this day and age would fancy.

… At least your skirt reaches past your knees.

Eclipse’s fingers curl further, clenching into fists.

“I’d prefer to not be associated with you at all! I don’t have friends!”

That was not what you expected. You blink, scowling as well now.

“... Weird flex but okay.”

His voice shoots up half an octave in strain.

“What?”

There’s a small sound from the counter, and a stiff shopkeep slides a keyring with a small plated keychain and two keys over the counter. The way he keeps avoiding both your gazes makes you think he caught a bit too much of that conversation.

“Second floor, third room on the right. You still know the address?”

The keyring disappears in Eclipse’s hand, and then his coat pocket.

“Yes.”

From his voice, you'd think the furious voice crack never happened. You definitely don't trust like that.

And then the storm is coming your way. You scramble out of the shop, the doorbell ringing again, and not a second too early. Eclipse ducks back out right behind you, dark eyes still trained on you. For a second you duck, not exactly in fear, but certainly preparation. For what, you don’t want to think about.

But then Eclipse straightens, closing silicon lids over his eyes, and when he opens them they shine in gold again. He squints at you, and somehow that smile is much more terrifying than the one before.

“Let’s go.”

For a few blocks, you follow in silence, but then your curiosity gets the better of you (and your self preservation). Though a bit of it, the part you would like to not acknowledge, also is the looming realization that following a pissed off animatronic you have known for a few hours to an unknown tertiary location is currently your safest bet moving forward.

Can’t have you thinking about that.

“Do you really have no friends?”

You barely hear his reply over the noise of the street and his grumbling tone.

“What did I say about keeping your mouth shut?”

Well, the energy is certainly unmistakable, so you don’t think you’re wrong with your guesstimated perception. Who even needs to process full sentences? Definitely not you, as proven by your entire life so far.

Even though he can’t see, you shrug.

“That’s kinda sad, dude. Friends are cool - nifty. The bees’ knees even. The cat’s meow?”

Your brain sifts through months of fluctuating interests to scrounge up the brief interest in dated vernacular, with limited results. You’re not even entirely sure you’re in the right decade with those.

Eclipse still doesn’t grace you with even a look.

“Stop talking. Somehow, understanding you is worse.”

You press your lips together tightly, keeping down another snappy comment. Antagonizing him is not in your favor, and you need to remember that.

He doesn’t make it easy though.

You’re busy studying the old fashioned traffic lights when you notice the motion in your periphery. Eclipse looks away as soon as you look up, rather paying attention to the lights himself. At least it’s too busy for jaywalking, and even he has to wait. Spares you from having to run after him, but not the conversation he picks up again.

“I have a reputation to uphold.”

While you have no doubt that nothing about you is helping him with that, you also don’t know why he’s bringing it up. Are you supposed to apologize? Or -

The friends. He’s talking about having no friends. A fact which is apparently part of his broody loner reputation.

Your realization must show on your face, because Eclipse spares you another glance, and his expression flattens immediately.

“Don’t say it.”

You grimace, and look back to the lights. As soon as it turns red, you’ll have to hurry before the traffic rounding the corner gets its go. Pedestrians are car fodder still.

“I mean, you’re thinking it, I’m thinking it, I really don’t have to.”

Unfortunately, your shrug gets interrupted by Eclipse wrapping his hand across your shoulder, and dragging you across the street. You didn’t even notice the light turning red. The fumes of the last car are still whirling in the air, and you cough through that cloud of exhaust. Either he’s really impatient, or pissed off at your comment that you technically didn’t verbalize - maybe both.

He lets go as soon as you reach the other side, fortunately all in one piece, and at worst only slightly bruised from the fingers digging into your flesh. You rub the spots where his grip was tightest for just a moment before you have to hurry after him again.

At least you wait until you’re right behind him to pry a bit more.

“Seriously though, is your reputation just ‘loner who hates everyone’? People can’t do everything on their own, that’s madness!”

Eclipse stops abruptly, stepping back and startling you into a jump. His eyes are dark again, the golden rings within blazing.

“Not everyone. And what I can’t do, I arrange through contracts and favors. Friends are nothing but a pretty lie, none of it means anything.”

Well, good to know the guy really never had a friend. You’re curious about the emphasis - but right now you want to focus on a different point to make.

“So you do rely on other people! You know, sometimes coworkers can become friends too.”

The static crackle coming from above sounds awfully close to a choke, except then… He’s laughing. It’s not bad, honestly even kind of nice, except you have no clue what the joke is - which means it’s most likely you.

At least his eyes are golden again.

“No, absolutely not.”

You blink. Okay, maybe his coworkers suck, too. What do you know? But still, you huff - you’re not done yet.

“You know the saying ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’?”

The last of his lingering amusement seems to drain from him, a frown taking over. There’s a dark flash in his optics, just for a second, gone before you’d be concerned. Doesn’t mean his expression is in any way happy when he leans down just a bit. No, his grin is bitter, and you still have to crane your neck uncomfortably - you’re pretty sure he just wants to loom.

You wonder if there’s a craft store nearby. He might strangle you for real, but it would be a hilarious practical joke.

“If you haven’t noticed, I don’t have blood to mingle.”

Bonafide snarl, once again. You only cock an eyebrow.

“You do know how a metaphor works, right?”

As suddenly as he stopped before, Eclipse now straightens. Somehow, you’re glad you’re not shorter - he looks at you like you’re a particularly nasty bug, and you’re very squishy. Your still aching shoulder speaks for that.

In your endless wisdom, you decide to stick out your tongue and blow a raspberry.

“I’m just saying. You can choose a whole lot, and good friends are part of that.”

“I choose none. Let’s get you settled, before I do something you will regret.”

The remainder of the trek you stay silent. You’ve poked the bear enough for now - especially considering that this bear is very tall and very sharp, and currently begrudgingly helping you.

Except the silence means you’re lost in thought, and you nearly run into him again once he stops. You catch yourself just in time, and look up at a nondescript apartment complex. At least, you think it’s an apartment complex. It looks decent enough, not fancy or otherwise flashy but clean. Besides, right now some privacy sounds heavenly.

“This is the place?”

Narrow eyes meet yours again, as if daring you to complain.

“A boarding house. They’ll have meals, and you have your own room. You owe me for this.”

You pause, then look back at the building, higher and higher up past the rows of windows. The different curtains and various trinkets you spot make it fun, somehow.

“Currently, I can only pay with the power of friendship, which we established you don’t want. Can we go up and look at the room? My feet are killing me.”

Wordlessly he unlocks the front door, leading you past a few curious gazes up into the staircase. You barely get to take in the hallway and adjacent communal rooms on the ground floor, but it’s fine, really. You’re a bit out-socialed anyway, and tomorrow is another day to leave bad impressions. Or, well - impressions ahead of the time.

Second floor, the third door on the right. Nondescript just like the outside, and you don’t see any obvious scratches around the lock or frame when you duck to see past Eclipse’s hand. He scowls at you, then opens the door.

The room is small, no question. But there’s a bed, a desk with drawers, a quaint little closet and a chair. Together with the promised meals and presumably bathrooms you’ll have to find, you’re all set.

From the window ring the faint noises of afternoon traffic, and you step closer. Eclipse remains by the door, and a small part of you reminds you that he’s probably eager to leave. You just can’t help it, you have to look first. Staring through the glass, the same street you just walked past seems a lot smaller. Somehow, it makes reality sink in more.

“You might want to look into getting a gun. You look like an easy target.”

The words barely reach you through your daze. At first, you just hum - but then you realize just what he said, and grimace instead. Not looking away from the window, mind you, but it’s the thought that counts.

“I don’t like guns.”

“Let me guess, you prefer knives?”

As much as it sounds like a question, his tone is too dry to actually mean it. You turn with a frown, tilting your head in a silent question. Just as silently, he gestures towards your arm, expression flat. Unnecessarily, you follow the motion, and blink at your tattoo.

And just like that the dread pooling in your stomach disappears.

Unfortunately for Eclipse’s mockery in the making, you grin.

“Oh, yeah! I collect them. Only ever carry one, though.”

“You already carry a knife?”

Eclipse perks up too, suddenly interested. You don’t think that mild enthusiasm will hold. It’s not really anything appropriate for self defense, not even as a bluff. Still, you dig around your pocket, and flip open the little knife before proudly holding it out towards him. His pupils shrink as he looks.

“Yup! Professor Stabby McStabstab.”

You’ve never seen an animatronic this disappointed before. Sure, you’ve seen your first one today, but that doesn’t have to mean anything. Maybe disappointed isn’t the right word, either - maybe, he just looks defeated.

“I need to stop having expectations. You shatter each and every one.”

The cheeky wink you direct at him doesn’t seem to cheer him up in the slightest.

“It’s my specialty.”

Eclipse has tasted many a lemon today thanks to you, it seems.

“I’m leaving.”

He turns where he stands, expression still sour, and moves to open the door. That gets you moving, too.

“Wait, one sec!”

The door stays open at a crack as you dash over to the desk, hoping there’s something to write there. You end up in luck. A rough pencil, hidden in a small ridge and looking slightly chewed on, and some yellowed paper stacked in the corner.

Quickly, you note down a haphazard I.O.U., together with the date you’ve seen printed on some newspapers now. There’s little else to write - “thanks for making sure I don’t end up homeless after appearing out of thin air and screaming at you” seems a bit wordy - but you feel like he’ll appreciate having a physical favor to cash in.

Skipping over to the door does mean you nearly trip over the chair, and have to steady both it and yourself for a moment. Your leg and side complain where you’ve hit them against the wood, and you wince slightly. You’ll have to get used to the small space.

For now, you finish your step and wave the note in Eclipse’s direction. He takes it with a frown. Probably best to explain before he can somehow turn it into an offense.

“Here, for that favor. I guess I can only offer friendship, and the professor, but if you do ever need either you know where to find me. You can also show this to your boss, maybe, if they decide to make a stink over you being late.”

Because you did end up occupying a lot of his time today. You don’t know enough about his job, given that you never asked, to know how much trouble he got himself into just to stop you from spiraling. All your pestering aside, you don’t want him to regret that.

Eclipse stares. His expression keeps shifting, and you end up somewhat concerned before he settles on a mild frown. The note he pockets carefully - you don’t hear the paper crinkle as he slides it into his coat.

“You’re strange.”

Without a care for what could be considered an insult, you take the two steps to cross the room back over to the bed.

“Would be rather boring otherwise, no?”

You drop onto the mattress, doing your best not to mind the squeaky springs - gift horses, and all that. With a grin his way you let yourself fall backwards. There’s not a lot of room to spread your arms, and the angle is off, but after a day of stress and running after a cactus on stilts it’s soft as a cloud. You even end up closing your eyes in a sigh.

There’s an exasperated echo from the door.

“Right, I’ll get to work then.”

The dismissal is obvious, and you crack open one eye just to wave at him. If the lazy twitch of your arm even counts as such.

“Great, have fun! I’ll lick my wounds, or something.”

Actually, maybe your eyelids are still too heavy. Just lying there sounds great for now. Everything else can wait until after a nap, maybe.

You haven’t heard the door shut yet.

“Your what?”

Eclipse is granted a spectacular view of your double chin, given that you’re entirely too lazy to actually sit up. He doesn’t seem to care. The pinprick pupils aren’t a good look for him. They startle you into honesty.

“Uh, yeah, I mean I’m pretty sure you bruised my shoulder.”

That was… sure a way to go about it. A very, very blunt one, unfortunately.

Whatever goes on in his head, you wonder if the journey his facial expression takes you on depicts it all. His eyes flash darkly twice before he chokes out a response.

“I have to go now.”

And then he’s gone. The door shakes slightly at the force with which he closes it.

Because you mentioned the bruises? In bad taste, you’ll admit, after all the help he offered you, but it’s not like you mind them. You’re pretty sure your run in with the chair left you just as bruised, not to mention all the mystery bruises you already have. The shoulder doesn’t even hurt anymore either.

But it doesn’t feel like he was reacting to the bad manners. You don’t know him, really, so what was going on in that head of his?

Curious, you heave yourself back up, first on your lower arms, and then into a sitting position. Did he…

You narrow your eyes, and investigate. Tip toeing for no reason other than feeling like the pink panther, you make your way over to the door. From afar, it could have been the light, or a strange texture to the handle - but brushing over it with your fingers makes the dents undeniable. Your shoulder got off easy, then.

Something tells you that Eclipse wouldn’t take that as reassurance.

Your hand lingers on the dented metal.

On impulse, you turn and bound over to the window. It’s stuck, and you have to throw your whole weight into it, but it opens with a pop - and when you stick out your head to look down, golden eyes furrowed in confusion meet yours.

A fun perspective, seeing him from above.

You grin. Cheerfully, and loudly, you call out to him, waving the “injured” arm for emphasis.

“Hey! Big, scary Eclipse! Thank you!”

The startled expression morphs into something unpleasant again, but you don’t mind it at all. If he has no friends, you bet he’s not used to gratitude either. Even gratitude tinged with a tease.

He draws a finger past his thin neck in a choppy motion before he stalks off, pointedly not looking up. That’s just fine by you.

You’re pretty sure he can hear you laughing.

#post let luce #dcamv #bloodstain fool #menace4menace #my fic #the knife is real and is rose patterned btw #the point of this was just to have fun so will i ever explain shit? no!#isekai just happened and itll get worse lmao #i had a lot of fun writing this so have fun reading it too <3 #do not take it seriously though it is Silly; capital S

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formulateez · 2 years ago

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stillness-in-green · 9 months ago

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Hiya, rvg! I'm back with another volley of replies to your replies to my replies! This will probably be my last of these, as I can't imagine having much further to elaborate on and there's already a fair amount in your reply above that I'm just going to let stand, for reasons I'll discuss more in-text below. I did get your ask about helping villains, and I will answer it, but not until after some other asks that have been waiting, so it may be a bit yet. There's plenty of text here, though, in the meantime! XD

Everything's just in order this time, no rearranging for organizational flow. As before, italicized and colored blocks are from the post I'm replying to.

You're saying that when a choice is going to lead to a dead end, the heroes conveniently don't follow it, even though it would've been a logically sound decision and no one from the readership would've faulted them from making said choice, even though we the readers already know it's a waste of time (well, a lot of readers would give them shit about it, actually). Did I get it right?

Yep, that’s what I was getting at. I agree that there would likely have been reader critiques in some cases, because some readers have trouble with the separation between their knowledge and character knowledge, but that’s a problem with their reading comprehension, not something the writer should be handing the characters freebies for. Honestly, that’s part of the trick of balancing multiple perspectives: either lean into the tragedy of stuff your main characters can’t know or contrive a way for them to find out what they need to find out before the readership has time to get too annoyed with them for not knowing it. But for heaven’s sake, don’t just ignore it!

We saw this problem on into the final parts of the story as well, with Deku just never really trying to talk to Shigaraki for no reason I can make any sense of from an in-character perspective but which I can make lots of sense of from the perspective of the author.

Shigaraki has always been extremely chatty around Deku, so it seems like the logically sound decision Deku should have made was to just ask Shigaraki about his backstory (like Shouto does Dabi) or talk to him about his situation (like Uraraka does with Toga). I think Horikoshi already knew, though, that Shigaraki’s answers to any sincere attempts at conversation would be the wrong answers for where Hori needed the plot to go. Rather than having Shigaraki uncharacteristically stonewall conversation, then, Horikoshi just wrote Deku making a tiny handful of vague, declamatory statements that went nowhere because they didn't really offer Shigaraki any kind of foothold to reply. Then the story just pretended Deku had absolutely no other choice but to violently assault Shigaraki's psyche to get his answers, when it fact it had just marched him past every other viable option with a blindfold on.

What exactly is "crueler" about divide and conquer? I'm assuming that you're referring to specific beats in the story and not the strategy in itself. Because it is a sound strategic move. (…) Why should the kids have been opposed to the plan?

The main reason I dislike it—and you’re right; it is a sound strategic move—is that I don’t feel like it follows naturally from what the principal kids (here Deku, Ochaco and Shouto) actually want to accomplish. We get this idea that they want to deescalate; they want to understand the people they’re fighting. Shouto wants to share a meal with Dabi; Ochaco wants to understand Toga’s point of view. Deku is woefully inconsistent, but at the very least he wants to understand and soothe the pain in Shigaraki’s heart. None of these goals are well-served by the kids letting themselves get thrown into mass battles where they’re going to have a shitload of other people, frequently adult Pros, trying to violently attack and subdue the very Villains the kids want to save/understand. So why do the kids follow along with that battleplan despite it running counter to their goals?

My strong impression from the comic is that the kids just never talked about their goals to any of the adults involved in planning the combat. On one level, that makes sense, because all three of them are also wrestling with their feelings about all the harm their Villain foils have caused; they logically know the Villains have to be stopped! They do still want to try to help those Villains, though, so we have to ask: does the divide and conquer plan actually facilitate that? And I just don't see any way in which it actually does. Rather, the divide and conquer plan drives Dabi past the point of no return in his self-immolatory attempts to get to Endeavor and drops Shigaraki into a literal coffin in the sky designed to be constantly electrocuting him.

Putting Toga on an island is marginally better, but you’re still left with the issue that there are a bunch of Pro Heroes around who seemingly have no idea that the kids want to have a conversation at all, and are not remotely interested in facilitating said conversation. The story contrives to have the plan go off the rails so the kids can have their one-on-ones, but what would they have done if the plan had instead gone smoothly? I really have to wonder what e.g. Gang Orca or Edgeshot’s responses would have been to Ochaco or Deku immediately launching into attempts to deescalate the conflict via talking to their opponent about why they’re doing what they’re doing!

And that all goes back to a similar problem as above: the Heroes don’t behave like they ought to behave based on what they claim to want. Now, unlike Deku's lack of engagement with Shigaraki, I can come up with better in-character explanations for this case, but they still aren’t explanations that reflect terribly well on the students!

To me, the most probable explanation is fear: the kids are too afraid of the adults’ reaction to share their desire to understand the Villains they’re going to be made to fight. This in turn makes them look like they don’t have the courage to stand for their convictions. They’ve come to suspect that the Villains have a core humanity that needs to be humanely addressed, but instead of speaking up about it, they quietly and passively go along with battle plans that aim to separate the Villains from their own allies, relentlessly drive them into corners, overpower them and, in Shigaraki’s case, straight-out kill him. Cowardice in the face of cruelty.

To discuss more my use of "cruel," on the surface level, it's simply the case that the League are close enough that having to watch them be split up and made to fight alone (in an endgame with a huge focus on teamwork and mutual support!) just plain feels bad. To me, it was a strong enough feeling that I enjoyed a distinct schadenfreude when we later got Rock Lock reacting with dismay and panic to a disorganized mob of rioters he was expecting to quell with minimal difficulty turning out to be organized and disciplined enough to split up and isolate the hospital defense force. Tellingly, he didn't think to himself, "Well, it's a good tactic, so I guess I can't really hold it against them."

From a much more meta perspective, the plan “feels cruel” to me because I was very invested in the team dynamic the League had spent so much of the series building, so an endgame that ruthlessly broke up that team and led to them all getting captured or killed alone and without any chance of knowing each other’s fates feels out and out monstrous. Again, a sound strategic plan, but I didn’t come to My Hero Academia looking for it to validate the goddamn HPSC’s morality; I came looking for it to validate Deku’s morality, as personified in his “drive to save that surpasses all reason.” Deku does not demonstrate this drive to save by keeping his mouth shut about being made to fight Shigaraki in a floating death arena.

And what is that "hero" ideal, for you? Are we talking Superman levels of altruism, with complete lack of self preservation, or nothing that extreme? I already know that's not the case, but I just wanted to pose the question anyway to get your thoughts. Cause even though the story sells Midoriya's behaviour as "truly heroic", that level of self destruction just for the sake of others is deeply concerning.

I mean, as a baseline, I don’t think, “Refrain from commiting war crimes against your opponents,” should be too much to ask of government-backed Heroes. Even in MHA’s semi-realistic, pseudo-modern setting, the word Hero has to stand for something if the author is going to treat it as sincere. But for a fuller answer, I guess it boils down to the fact that I would want them to make reasonable attempts at de-escalation, understanding and compassion, rather than treating all of those things as admirable but exceptional.

Like, it’s fine for the adult Pros in the story to not be fully living up to that ideal when the story is promising to be about how the kids become the best/top/most amazing Heroes. That just means the kids will be the ones bringing about change to a stagnant and corrupt system, and that’s awesome! But the kids do then have to be able to live up to that promise, and they have to inspire those around them to actually change. I don’t feel they accomplish that by going along with war crime tactics, no matter what the epilogue is trying to sell me.

For example, when Hawks’s story ends with him getting a cushy government job where he’s framed as helping to improve the Hero System but he did absolutely nothing in the last war that was any different from what the Hero System had always done—most egregiously represented by his screaming about killing them now when confronted with Toga’s Death Parade—that is what I call an unsuccessful demonstration of the main characters’ power to inspire change.

Again, the kids didn’t have to get themselves killed over this (though in the medium of a shounen battle comic I did expect them to be willing to fight for it), but I just needed to see them attempt the high road first. It’s okay if they have to fight while they’re talking—it’s a shounen battle comic; I expect that sort of thing!—but I do want to see them prioritize that talking rather than treating it like a last resort when all the war crimes don’t work. Unfortunately, that’s just not what we saw the kids do, ever—not in the beginning, out of a native sense of heroism like Deku was stated to possess, and not in the end, out of a developed sense of heroism like Ochaco grew into. So I can’t help but judge the story overall as not only a failure at living up to its American superheroic inspirations, but also just a huge uninspiring mess on its own demerits.

What does "saving the villains" mean to you? (…) Does it mean they all get to go free and face no consequence for their crimes, and people act as if nothing happened? That doesn't sound sensible. And if they do face consequences. Doesn't that directly undo and oppose the whole "saving villains" thing? Or is it fine? Are you still saving them if they face justice, or is granting them complete amnesty required?

Well, I wouldn’t be hugely opposed to them going free, but that’s because I’m a Villain stan feeling extra-burned by the ending (not merely because the principal Villains mostly die but also because I’m so thoroughly unconvinced that society has meaningfully changed). Obviously that’s not realistic, and not what I would want in real life; that’s just me finding it difficult to muster much desire to punish Villains who have already been so exessively punished by the circumstances of their lives and by the story. And, admittedly, because I also think it’s kind of ludicrous that MHA is so harsh on its Villains when it runs in a magazine that has a long history of the most laughingly unrepentant mass murderers turning over a new leaf and being allies of the mains once a certain margin of fighting-to-understand-each-other has been met.

That said, to try and give you an answer more in-line with MHA’s semi-realism, it boils down to restorative justice. The main reason the Villains won’t stand down is because they can’t accept the world they’d be living in if they did[1]—then, the way to save them is to give them reason to believe they could accept that world. No, they don’t have to be walking around free as if they’ve been given a complete amnesty, but neither do I want to see them rotting in MHA’s wildly inhumane-seeming prisons. Rehabilitation, community service, the ability to communicate with their friends, the ability to advocate for changes in the circumstances that created them: those are all things that, if the Villain in question was willing to do them, I’d happily take as signs of their being “saved.”

1: We see versions of this explicitly from Toga and Twice, it's clearly implied with Shigaraki and Spinner, and I’d say it includes any of the ideologically driven Villains as well.

Is it strictly realistic that terrorists and mass murderers would get off that light? No, of course not; I imagine pretty much all of them would be heading for the noose, maybe even Toga despite her being a minor. But again, I don’t require strict realism in my Shonen Jump Battle Manga, and indeed think that strict realism is an objectively absurd path to take in a series that contains Wishing Energy and *waves at everything about Bakugou’s heart surgery.* I think a series as concerned with ideals as MHA had a responsibility to allow some of its Villains the benefit of that same idealism. It’s not here to show us the real world; it’s here to show us the vision of a better one—so why does the better one involve so many dead victims of child abuse and discrimination?

As to your further questions about other Villains, ones like Hose Face who seem less likely to desire rehabilitation, or who the kids don’t have angles on talking down, I realize you can’t ask a handful of teenagers who don’t have enough screentime themselves to successfully talk down a bunch of Villains with even less. That’s just a consequence of having a 100K Villain army in your story! But I think the same basic guidelines apply: I’d want to see the kids try to ask questions and deescalate, fight in as humane a way as they reasonably can in a shonen battle manga context, and for the manga to include any dialogue (or a panel or two’s worth of visual implication) that deradicalization and rehabilitation are being attempted in prison. I mean, the MLA in particular are all cultists, many if not most of whom were likely raised from birth to those beliefs. And most of them certainly don’t have the League’s concrete body count! I think some deradicalization therapy could do them a world of good.

Mind you, I don’t really want to see them deradicalized when the story hasn’t convinced me that they’re wrong about Hero Society being so oppressive it borders on being a police state! But that’s not because I think they’re the secret good guys; it’s just because the story needed to convince me that the kids would see the changes that need to be made and actually try to make them. Neither the story nor the kids did so, so I can’t really get behind the Villains getting the punishments they would otherwise warrant.

(I will almost certainly wind up talking about this somewhere else in a more isolated way, but just to get it out on the blog: it is the most insidious fucking cowardice that the epilogue insists to us that Hero Society has changed for the better but did not have the balls to show us a single active Villain so we could see how Heroes are dealing with them in this bright new better future. Fuck off with that, Horikoshi.)

But I honestly just don't get how having the heroes be more flawed would make the readers like them more and root for them more. Like, in my mind, if people already don't care for them when they're perfect goody two shoes, then I don't see why if they had actual flaws or shitty personality traits people wouldn't be actively rooting against them. You get what I'm saying?

Like if Momo was your typical cold hearted, rich mean girl, or Mina was an annoying and disrespectful gossip that invades people's privacy and spreads nasty rumors, or if Todoroki was racist towards heteromorphs, I don't see how the fandom would like them more. I think they would despise them. Would you like them more? Would you actually find yourself rooting for them like that when they're facing adversity?

Not to sound too obvious here, but the point of flaws is for characters to grow past them, or at least for them to provide an interesting hurdle, so—yes? As a personal example, I hated Shigaraki when he first turned up because he came off as such a shallow nihilist—which, at the time, he pretty much was! But I prematurely assumed that the story believed that his ill-considered drivel was earth-shakingly meaningful and revelatory.[2] As it instead became clear that the story knew good and well that he was a shallow nihilist who couldn’t progress without changing, I instead wound up loving him—not for the shallow nihilist he was, but for the work he would have to do in becoming more.

2: In retrospect, this was pretty silly of me, given that All Might calls it out right there on the spot as shallow nonsense that even Shigaraki himself doesn’t believe. But I didn’t know at the time where that callout would wind up leading. In his own way, Shigaraki was revelatory, in that I had literally never seen a villain growth arc like his. What a damn waste.

You talk about Bakugou just after the above bit of your reply, and he’s a perfect example: he has to navigate improving as a person—being more aware of the suffering of people around him, becoming better able to operate within the social structures in which he operates—while also not surrendering his entire personality solely for marketing concerns or to make people around him better able to swallow him. While I have my issues with some aspects of his arc, and he falls pretty badly flat for me in the endgame, the fact that he has that arc of surly self-refinement makes him feel much more compelling than the bulk of his classmates.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my favorite non-UA student is Shishikura, the meatball kid, and it’s because his authoritarian little gatekeeping routine, combined with the fact that his father was a guard in the extremely authoritarian Tartarus, made him an interesting foil to the more easy “good” students around him. I think his scene commentating with Mic is extremely funny, but it’s his potential as a character who was so obviously aligned—and very self-righteously so!—with the more negative aspects of the setting that made him interesting. (So of course Horikoshi squandered him completely, but that’s another post.)

So, yes, Momo being a snobby rich girl and Mina being a malicious gossip and Shouto being (more openly) heteromorphobic would have made me like them considerably more as long as the story knew they were and was writing with an aim towards critiquing those behaviors. They could improve or not; a character facing some sort of meaningful-to-them Fall as a result of their flaws is every bit as valuable to me as a character who faces their flaws and strives to overcome them. In essence, a character’s ability to meaningfully reflect the world they live in makes them more likeable to me, even if it also makes them unpleasant or morally dubious.

Now, given that BNHA runs in a magazine rather infamous for the pressures exerted on its stories by popularity polls, the likeability of the characters is something that Horikoshi has to be concerned with. As you said, though, Endeavor and Bakugou are reliably very popular characters, and a large part of that is because of their flaws, so I’m unconvinced that it would be a net negative for the class to have fewer saccharine goody-two-shoes in it! I’m sure it would make those characters more controversial with the crowd that thinks you can measure someone’s moral worth by judging their taste in characters, but, uh, that particular bit of terminally online wrongheadedness is not something I want to see media pandering to, nor which I’m interested in bowing to myself.

Oh, interesting. So you would write the villains winning here? I have so many questions about that.

Gonna keep this one brief, but regarding this segment of your reply, the main thing is that I don’t think Shigaraki, if he’d been triumphant at that stage in the story, would have been trying to destroy Japan quite as comprehensively as Shigaraki triumphant in the endgame! That’s not to say it would have been some kind of socialist utopia, from each as their (meta-)ability allows, but we wouldn’t have required a complete personality overhaul to explain why Shigaraki didn’t bury Japan in magma within 48 hours of waking up, either!

I’m not inclined to delve much into my thoughts on it beyond that in this space because, to be frank, your response to my off-the-cuff story revisions last time was complaints, disgusted meme faces, and baldly expressed dislike. That’s fine; I’m not taking it personally or anything. We obviously have vastly different opinions and on desires about the story, so you’re perfectly within your rights to not like the story I wanted anymore than I’d like e.g. your version of a fight with Hose Face! But it does mean I’m going to have to turn down further requests to lay out hypothetical story revisions for you.

That said, I hope that some of my talk above about why I like flawed characters helps clarify that I don’t think Mina actually being shown wrestling with dark, vengeful thoughts and having some of her classmates notice[3] would further their development at the expense of her own, or would be making her “look bad” to make them look good. If anything, I think it would expand on her inner life in a way that would show their comparative lack of reflection in a negative light! You can think of that as using her as a tool to develop them if you must, but I prefer to think of it as just using everyone to develop everyone else, ensemble-style.

3: Male ones, yes, but only because those were the classmates on-scene she had pre-existing relationships with; if Tsuyu were there, I’d have mentioned her!

Mocking someone's death in front of their loved ones as a psychological tactic is less awful how? 🤔 Just wondering.

“Loved ones” is a bit of a reach when there’s no indication Midnight saw Mina as anything beyond one of her students and Mina only says she loved Midnight’s classes, but setting that aside, yes, I do think, “mocking someone’s death in front of their loved ones” is worse if you do it out of pure sadism, a power trip based on nothing but the petty thrill of being cruel to a kid who’s likely less than half your age, than if you do it as a demoralization tactic against a kid with a dangerous quirk who’s acting as an agent of the government you’re trying to bring down. I mean, they’re both awful, obviously, but at least one has a sort of strategy and reason behind it.

You’re welcome to hold that cruelty for its own sake is “better” because it’s less considered, though that strikes me as a position worth weighing carefully if one is also considering a position that the Heroes are “better” than Shigaraki because they have a strategic justification for torturing him with electricity. My side commentary aside, I can even see why one might make the argument! In a discussion purely about the ethics involved, either position boils down to arguing over whether Lawful Evil or Chaotic Evil is a “more Good” D&D alignment, which is a decades-old fool’s errand. In the context of a confrontation between fictional characters where the hero is being tasked with demonstrating the superiority of their side’s moral stance, though, I do think a sneering, self-satisfied sadist is considerably “more awful” than an ideologically driven evil-in-deed pragmatist, if for no other reason than that the latter is good drama while the former is a lazy and unchallenging shortcut.

So you think class B is better than class A?

The only one I actually like is Monoma, so take that as you will. XD But if the story’s going to explicitly tell us that they “advanced faster” than Class A, it’d be nice if it could give us some kind of explanation of what that actually, like, means? If nothing else, we get some perfectly adept on the fly teamwork from nearly all of the 1-A kids against ShigAFO in that last stretch of chapters, so why shouldn’t merely three 1-B kids be capable of the same?

I remember, back when Death Arms returned and helped after he had quit, you stated that you loved the premise, but that you were left disappointed that he solved a problem that he was suited for solving.

I don’t remember saying anything remotely like this, at any point, because I find Death Arms about as memorable as a math book. I’m not saying I have never expressed that his return was conceptually sound but flawed in execution, but I’m 100% positive I never said I loved it. XD Sorry, just quibbling. I mostly remember complaining about the whole sequence in the cube because I was so frustrated about how the material with AFO’s spies was handled.

Although, I'm gonna play devil's advocate here for a second. Wouldn't the 1-B students trapping the Sludge villain through teamwork still count as the right people with the right Quirks solving the problem they were meant to solve? Wouldn't it need to be a success from people whose Quirks aren't suited for the job at all, and don't even synergize well when put together?

Nah. Teamwork is a major theme of the manga, so I’m perfectly fine with teamwork working—even moreso when it’s impromptu teamwork rather than meticulously laid battle plans where everyone has specified opponents they’ve been tactically pre-assigned. That would be little better than everyone in Chapter 1 hanging back because they don’t have a perfect solution. But three people using only the quirks and equipment they happen to have on hand to come up with a solution no one of them could have executed alone is exactly the change I wanted the manga to show me in the next generation.

(This, incidentally, is why I still have only eyerolls for teamwork that exists only to prop up Deku. That’s only a marginal improvement from the teamwork on display at Kamino; it doesn’t count as evidence of a generational shift!)

What were you thoughts on that chapter, btw? And has your opinion on it changed with time?

Re: Chapter 280, I think it’s pretty bullshit, exactly the kind of thing you were complaining about in your own reply, a plot beat that kneecaps a female character so the male character can look cool instead. Like, the underlying conception of the scene is realistic; I can’t really critique it on that front. It’s just that, if it were a male student in that situation, they wouldn’t freeze to begin with, and even if they did, they’d manage to power through it and win somehow anyway.

Horikoshi can try to tell me all he wants via Kirishima that Mina had an important role in the ultimate takedown of Gigantomachia because Kirishima wouldn’t have had a shot to take without her (since he blew his own sleeping potion vial when he let it get sniped by Toga, possibly the single most effective female combatant in the manga), but it’s a bullshit excuse and I don’t buy it.

Now, I would have been more willing to roll with it if there had been some time afforded to really let Mina stew on it. Kirishima (in his backstory) nearly changed his whole career path over his own freeze! So even if I think it’s tiresome and annoying that she had to freeze up just so Kirishima could bring his character story full circle with no consideration of the hole it opened in Mina’s story, I’d be more open to it if it Mina had to bring her story around full circle likewise. But that’s not how this story operates wrt the stories and arcs of its women,[4] and Mina’s no exception. I’ve already talked about how Mina gets shortchanged in attention post-war plenty in these exchanges, so I’ll just refer you back to those if you want to go over my thoughts on it again.

4: Short form: women merely add shading and nuance to mens’ stories that are otherwise allowed to stand on their own two feet (see e.g. Rei and Fuyumi contributing different “valid responses to abuse” to the Todoroki Drama, Ochaco being an inspiration to Deku, Mina likewise to Kirishima, etc.) whereas womens’ stories are dominated by the men in them, to the point that any aspect of their lives that doesn’t revolve around men just gets off-screened (see e.g. Rei and Fuyumi being allowed a response to abuse that allows them to seek independence from the men in the family, Ochaco’s “Hero who saves Heroes” plot existing solely through the lens of her feelings about Deku, Mina having no internal life that doesn’t advance Kirishima’s story, etc).

Having you tell me how you would've written Mina's part differently makes me want to do the same. Would you be interested in that? I was actually planning on doing it all on this one post, but I've been writing for a while now (the whole day 😱), and I'm getting tired. I kinda feel like I should leave it for another post. Only if you would be interested in such a thing, of course.

I would read it if it was reblogged from here or if I was tagged in it, but I can’t promise a response. By all means, write it if you want to get it out there for other people to see, though! Especially now that the series is over so we finally have the whole scope of the story to judge by.

And that’s about all she (by which I mean me) wrote for this reply. Sorry for any questions I skipped over because I’ve done all the talking about them I want to in this particular space, and hope you have a good whatever portion of the day you’re on when you read this!

More and More on Mina, Machia and the MLA

For my readers other than @randomvongenerico, please have this peremptory list of this very lengthy post's contents to help gauge your interest:

Some more discussion on what is or isn’t, would or wouldn’t be blameworthy about various characters’ actions (or hypothetical actions) during the war arcs.

More discussion about Mina, chiefly about how (and why) her acid powers are handled compared to all the male characters with fire powers, and the way her plot points are poorly set up by the narrative, with the result of shortchanging her development.

Yet More Complaining About How The Story Is Handling Heteromorphobia, this time featuring a compare and contrast on quirk-based bias as it might affect Mina, Bakugou and Tokoyami, as well as a dissection of Shouji’s contention that the only possible way to know about the violent bigotry in the rural areas of the country is to be from them.

Some fairly extensive spitballing in response to questions about how I would have handled the scene at Machia’s prison compound if I were writing it, as well as why I have trouble conceiving of anything Hero Society could do to Hose Face for killing Midnight that would actually feel like justice.

A little bit of basic talk about Tumblr, its functionality and some relevant slang.

Buried at the very bottom, I stand up in front of God and everyone and explain in brief why Kaminari is a worse character than Mineta, with some particular focus on Kaminari as emblematic of the conflict between what the series tells us versus what it shows us about the legality of quirk use in careers other than heroism.

Hi again, rvg. Because it's been forever since our last post exchange, let me say again that I appreciate the apology and want to thank you for being such a good sport about it. Last time I had something like your initial response, that person told me straight out that they’d been condescending and antagonistic on purpose, though they regretted having done so after my reply. I appreciated the regret, but would have preferred they take a day or two to cool off in the first place! That’s the experience I was bringing to your comments, but I’ll keep in mind what you said about lack of experience with initiating chats and Tumblr in general.

For what it’s worth, yeah, there is a character limit on both asks and replies, so that’s the trouble you were running into there! You might also consider using a cut next time before a really long post, though if you’re on mobile, I recall that being a difficult-if-not-impossible feature to find, and it’s not as important as it used to be ever since Tumblr’s started adding default Expand drop-downs on long posts. That aside, welcome (belatedly) to Tumblr! I hope you find some good people to chat fandom with; I’m always open to some back and forth about things I know well enough to talk about, though I’m, er, decidedly unprompt with replies. And, as noted, definitely more of a villain fan, so probably not the most fun person for discussions on the kids.

That said, to your replies! Other readers should note that, while I wrote all this roughly in response-order to rvg’s points, I reorganized everything after the fact to group together the broad topics. I’ve tried to provide some bare minimum context for anything that would otherwise be too much of a zero-context non-sequitur, but if anyone wants to see rvg’s comments in their intended order and context, their reblog can be found here. Otherwise, hit the jump!

Would You Have Held It Against ___?

But would you hold it against Mina if she had actually done more substancial damage to Machia? Let’s say, not the face, but Machia’s fingers instead of his claws. Machia still doens’t feel any pain. Would you chastise Mina for it? Even though she’s actively saving Mt Lady by doing that?

It’s hard to say for sure, since I imagine that if Mina’s acid had hit Machia’s fingers instead of his claws, we probably would just have seen them abraded and singed, like how Dabi’s fire damage was drawn on Hawks, not with chunks of skin melting off and exposing naked bone. Physical damage in BNHA just doesn’t work like that, at least not against named characters. If Mina were doing realistic damage, I imagine everyone else would be too, and then I’d be criticizing all of them, because, holy shit, that is not okay to do to people, any people, and especially not when you’re acting as an agent of the state.

But hypothetically, no, I think I would be more lenient even if she did do concrete and permanent damage to Machia’s hands, and it’s because she’d be doing it to save Mount Lady. Shinsou could have taken control of Machia and then just had him lie still while whoever was in charge of this facility redrugged him,[1] and that would have been fine by me—disappointing, sure, but only because Machia’s interesting and I’d like to get more on him than we do, not because I’d be critiquing Shinsou’s actions.

It’s specifically Shinsou and the rest choosing to weaponize Machia against AFO that I object to. Mina harming Machia would be taking that action herself, to protect someone that’s right in front of her, risking no one’s life but her own in doing so. Shinsou throwing Machia up against AFO—which he’d made the decision to do before hearing Machia’s angry grumbling—is risking Machia’s life, without Machia’s consent. And it’s not even for the sake of saving anyone, at least not anyone that’s right there in that moment—AFO is fleeing.

Sure, he still presents a huge threat to lots of people, but given that we’d just seen proof that AFO did not know about Shinsou’s power,[2] they could also have used Machia to, for example, rapidly transport the heroes to some place they could set up a second ambush to trick AFO into responding to Shinsou. I mean, good god, AFO’s the chattiest villain in the comic; Hawks lured him into at least two extended conversations even after he’d resolved that he needed to leave. He’s a Demon Lord and thus categorically incapable of shutting up. And that would have been that, really. Take control and let the clock run out; end of problem.

It would have been anticlimactic as hell, so obviously that was never going to happen, but there’s no reason the heroes couldn’t try for it, you know? Instead of the bone-headed decision to just hand AFO his most loyal soldier on a silver platter on the thin chances that they could either prevent the brainwashing from being broken at all or that Machia’s upset would translate to both the capability and willingness to attack his master.

I’ve observed this problem in a few different areas, that Horikoshi sometimes writes the heroes, particularly Hawks, as not taking actions or drawing conclusions that, from their perspective, should seem sensible, well-reasoned, and with solid chances of success; instead, they simply disregard possibilities they should logically be considering but which the reader knows are dead ends, or they benefit from things they could not have known at the time they acted. That hurts immersion because it gives the heroes victories, both tactical and moral, that they simply haven’t earned. Shinsou’s control of Machia is a particularly egregious example.

Speaking of Monoma. Since we were talking about the morality of Shinso’s Quirk. Would you say Monoma using his Quirk to copy a villain’s Quirk and use it on him and his allies, would also qualify as something that should be criticized? I’m curious.

Nah, I don’t think so. Taking an opponent’s weapon and using it to subdue him is a perfectly valid tactic, especially since Monoma’s method doesn’t actually deprive his opponent of their weapon, just replicates it for his own use. It really all does boil down to Shinsou’s method forcing people to fight and hurt their own allies. Mina causing Machia physical harm, Monoma using a villain’s own weapon against them, even the heroes’ surprise attack: none of those are remotely on the same “holy shit that is a literal war crime” level as what the heroes planned in advance to have Shinsou do to Machia, and what he willingly agreed to do well before he found out that Machia was not as opposed as the heroes thought.

I mean, I get what you’re getting at. I’m just wondering. If the heroes hadn’t launched a suprise attack, and had left the villains do the first move and come to them, would you then be criticizing them for being irresponsible and incompetent instead? Sorry for going on a tangent, it’s just something I’ve noticed when it comes to readers criticizing the heroes. It’s either people complaining that the heroes are too ruthless, or that they’re too nice, naive or not pragmatic enough.

(This is in response to some discussion of the heroes' actions in the first war arc's raid on the villa+hospital lab, not the second war's divide and conquer plan.)

I actually don’t really have a huge problem with the surprise attack in principle—I might criticize Cementoss ripping the building in half when there could well have been people on those upper floors, but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine what else the heroes could generally have done to deal with the numbers they were dealing with. I mean, it’s basically just a scaled-up version of the attack on the Hassaikai base, and I don’t have any moral quibbles with the way the heroes and police handled that.

Rather, my problem with the raid is that I thought the heroes were too effective given the way their forces and those of the PLF had been set up. It’s not the tactic itself that’s the problem (though individual acts of worse violence within the attack, like Hawks killing Twice or the attempts to outright murder Shigaraki in the tube, are still an issue), it’s the finality, the totality, of how effective the attack was.

To be brief about it (because I’ve talked about this at length elsewhere), I don’t think the heroes should have known where all the PLF bases were, I don’t think they should have been as effective in disordered mass combat as the PLF, I think the advisors should have put up a better fight in all cases, and I think there should have been enough members of the PLF in significant positions of influence or power that the HPSC couldn’t uncover them all, leading to complications when those members realized their organization was under attack.

As it is, the heroes handily win every fight they have with the sole exception of Gigantomachia and Shigaraki. The PLF is neatly swept off the table save for a few “remnants,” with no attention given to the practical difficulties of detaining tens of thousands of combatants with no motivation to let themselves be quietly arrested, much less how the justice system is going to handle trying and sentencing them all. That has repercussions going forward, as well: heroes clearing the board of all the (named) PLF members save Skeptic leaves the bulk of villain forces in the subsequent arcs to be prison escapees, and man, if the PLF’s moral nuance has been squandered, the depiction of the prison escapees is even worse.

The raid is, of course, only the first of two big surprise attacks the heroes manage. I have significantly more issues with the second one, but most of that boils down to the fact that the divide and conquer/Tempt and Trap plan feels crueler, meaner, and much more openly aimed at extrajudicial murder. And like, that would all be fine and in-character for Hero Society in general and Hawks, the main planner, specifically, but with Deku, Shouto and Uraraka all starting to think Save Villains thoughts, and fresh off the traitor reveal, the kids should never have been as collectively okay with the second war’s tactics as the story has presented them as being. To echo an older complaint, good god, what universe is Horikoshi living in that he thinks the people that converted a place of learning into an arena they call a “coffin in the sky” are the heroes?

I was under the impression Midnight was off to the side from where the MLA minions were passing by, and the Skull Mask guy took a detour to kill her.

I’m not sure from this if you’re explaining how you read Hose Face’s attack on Midnight at the time, or if you’re maintaining that that’s an accurate read, so just to clarify, here are the panels in question:

As you can see, the PLF guys’ path through the woods has them coming in from directly behind Midnight. Hose Face calls out that he’ll take care of her once they get close enough for the reader to make out who they are, at which point he gets out in front of Scarecrow and hits Midnight from the same direction as their initial approach: directly behind. He most certainly doesn’t take a detour of any kind, but rather chooses the action that is going to get his group through the obstacle with the least amount of time and effort possible—entirely his prerogative as the highest-ranked member of the Guerilla Warfare regiment on-scene.

But if we classify this entire conflict as a war, wouldn’t that mean that both sides are free to use whatever tacticts and methods they feel like as long as it’s not a war crime?

If we classify it as war is irrelevant if the side aligned with the current ruling authority hasn’t done so themselves. I imagine the Japanese government is in no hurry to validate the terrorists on an international stage by acknowledging that they’re numerous and dangerous enough to declare actual, formal war against! Calling it a war drags in a whole pile of wartime conventions Japan has signed numerous treaties about; it grants the opposing side some legitimacy as a cohesive, organized force that will need to be negotiated with down the line. As long as you’re calling it a police action, you don’t have to negotiate shit until you get to the plea deals! Team Hero never declared war here, so yeah, I still expect them to carry out their plans and actions accordingly.

Also, in the thematic/meta sense, I expect the heroes to either conduct themselves as heroes—admirable, upright, heroic—or face the narrative consequences when they fail to live up to that ideal. The hyper-encapsulated version of this conundrum is the recurring idea that attacking Shigaraki never actually prevents Shigaraki from coming back worse and more dangerous next time; the heroes are never going to achieve a different result by attacking him again but harder this time, and that’s why Deku is set up to finally try something different.[3] I would just like it if what’s true on the micro-level could even be attempted on the macro-level. Or, in other words, if the narrative is going to tell us that saving villains is the correct path, it can’t only demonstrate that for the villains with known-to-the-heroes sympathetic backstories.

General Mina Points

Regarding your analysis about Mina’s acid being underpowered because it’s harder/less believable to downplay the effects of acid than fire/explosions/etc. in Shounen Damage Logic, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. I don’t see anything wrong with just showing the Nebulous Abrasion Damage that’s the ubiquitous, default mode of illustrating nonspecific injury in this comic for Mina’s acid the same way we get it for the boys.

I can see your argument, but like, just for example, when Endeavor first encounters a Noumu, he bathes it in fire under the assumption that it’s a normal villain and then says he’s surprised it’s still up because he’s never seen anyone stay conscious after that attack. Bathing someone in flames in real life is not a “knock them out” kind of attack; it’s a “severe burn ward for months” kind of attack. If Endeavor’s been throwing that around at random criminals for thirty years, we are plainly very far away from realistic damage, and I’d be perfectly satisfied with treating Mina’s acid the same way.

If I had to take a guess as to why Horikoshi’s so staunchly avoided letting Mina cut loose—other than regressive gender politics—I’d say it’s that acid simply feels nastier or more morally dubious than fire. Fire has positive as well as negative connotations; acid’s a lot more, shall we say, unilateral in the collective imagination, especially given what’s going to turn up if you run a web search for “acid attacks.”

To look at it in JRPG logic (and I don’t care if AFO’s admiration stems from a comic; that comic was clearly playing with Dragon Quest tropes), acid is pretty much the same thing as poison, and poison effects are chiefly the realm of enemy characters. It smacks of underhandedness or cowardice in anything more cognizant than roving toxic plants or venomous beasts. Certainly you see the occasional party member specialized for status effects who can inflict poison damage on enemies, but I can’t readily think of a main character that does.[4]

Perhaps, then, because readers are somewhat conditioned to think of acid as particularly dangerous and nasty compared to fire, and because there’s a limit to how morally dubious Horikoshi is willing to (consciously) write the students, especially the girls, Mina’s sharply limited in how she’s allowed to use her acid.

That said, I got a very hearty laugh from, “Just look at Dabi. He can’t even kill himself with fire,” so thank you very much for that.

It’s as if Horikoshi only ever figures out what to do with Mina retroactively instead of in the moment (e.g. there were no interactions between Kirishima and Mina until AFTER Kirishima’s backstory, we never got any hint that would connect Mina’s and Midnight’s characters until AFTER Midnight died, when Mina speaks about not giving in to vengeance she references SHOJI’S WORDS which happened in HIS FLASHBACK, and then this whole chapter is technically a flashback too when you think about it).

That’s a big oof, all right. I know about the Midnight non-connection and the issue of Mina’s anti-vengeance words having first been delivered by Shouji and relayed to the audience by Koda (it being his flashback, rather than Shouji’s), but I didn’t know there was no indication of Kiri-Mina connection until after his flashback. Wowzers.

But also, in one of my comments I had left a link to a post analizing Kirishima’s and Mina’s characters and their dynamic. I don’t know if you checked it out or not, but it was a pretty interesting read. If you did read it, let me know your thoughts on it.

Apologies for not responding to that; I hadn't clicked it because I just wasn't terribly interested in the topic. Having checked it now, I can say that I'm unlikely to read it because I've encountered this person's meta before and, even at a glance, found it to be flawed for reasons I am not comfortable gabbing about in a public space. I'm sure they make some valid points, but I will have to respectfully bow out of reading and commenting on it here.

But what about Mina telling Kirishima that “now they’re even” though?

(This is re: my contention that Mina saves Shinsou, not Kirishima, from the Sludge Villain, and that Kirishima was never in any danger from the Sludge Villain.)

I mean, she can say it, but that doesn’t mean I have to believe that she/Horikoshi are accurately portraying the stakes involved.

Just for the record, you’re not saying that Mina not giving in to revenge isn’t noble in and of itself. What she does is indeed good. You’re saying it doesn’t have any emotional weight because Mina has always been a morally good character, so you never thought she would ever give in to revenge in the first place. Correct?

Correct! As I’ve said, Mina has perfectly healthy emotional regulation: when she experiences negative emotions like anger, guilt, or grief, she doesn’t dwell on them; she vents them to friends and finds healthy ways to channel them into bettering herself and the world and people around her. She’s got a great head on her shoulders! But all of that means that her giving into anger about Midnight’s death was never a remotely convincing threat to me. Of course she wouldn’t; there’s never been a moment that foreshadowed that she was in the slightest danger of harboring that kind of obsessive, vindictive grudge.

That being the case, it feels unfair of Horikoshi to pin a big dramatic monologue on a desire for revenge which Mina was never shown to possess to any greater degree than any of her classmates. She’s one of the last hero-aligned characters I’d have guessed if you’d asked me who was going to get a beat like that in the endgame.

(To anticipate the obvious question, Aizawa would have been my first guess; he’s even been written for it properly in the way he and Mic have responded to Shigaraki—clearly holding a grudge for something that would have happened to their classmate when Shigaraki was all of six years old. Conversely, while plenty of the 1-A kids could have believably carried a “struggling with vengefulness” plot if they’d been written with it from earlier on, I don’t think there’s a single one of them who feels like a good match for it in their current incarnations. Iida’s moved on from his Stain days too smoothly to buy it from him, Bakugou’s only real obsession is Deku, and Deku already had a whole arc of being obsessively negative and driven by dark desires to find and deal with a villain. If any student was going to show up to the fight with bloody-minded revenge on the brain, it should have been Shishikura.)

But What About the Heteromorphobia, Tho’?

(Warning: Incoming off-topic harping about Shouji and the inane resolution of the hospital attack.)

I have even seen someone make a post on Reddit arguing that Shinso being discriminated for his Quirk makes no sense because it’s not villanous, and that it makes more sense for characters like Bakugo, Mina and Tokoyami to be discriminated because they have more villanous looking Quirks. I don’t really agree with everything that guy said. But he did bring up a good point. How come Mina doesn’t get side eyes from people due to her Quirk like Shinso does?

I will have to disagree with Reddit User That Guy that Shinsou’s quirk should be viewed as less villainous than Bakugou’s. It sounds like he was conflating heteromorphobia with the bias against villains/"villainous" quirks, and while there is overlap, they’re still distinct categories. Shinsou’s quirk inherently subordinates one’s physical body, allowing him to force his targets to act against their will, or potentially take the fall for things they didn’t willingly do. Of course people are nervous about it or think it’s more villainous than heroic!

Conversely, the Number 2 Hero has been attacking criminals with fire for decades now, so I think the BNHA general public is more than ready to accept a hero whose quirk lets him fire off explosions. The commonly accepted idea in the fandom is that “flashy and offensive quirks” are the ones most valued in heroes. I think that’s a bit oversimplified—Crust was the Number 6 Hero and his quirk was neither—but it’s certainly true that purely elemental quirks (fire, lightning, wind, earth-shaping), no matter how damage-dealing they are, don’t tend to get treated as villainous in nature. The real “villainous quirks” in the series tend to be the ones that are more creepy, dark, invasive, or impure. Even Dabi’s fire is that ethereal blue, like spirit fires, instead of everyday orange-red!

Bakugou’s quirk is much closer to the “pure elemental” category than anything very villainous and, indeed, when he got kidnapped from the training camp and that one journalist was suggesting that he might have turned to villainy already, he based that suggestion on Bakugou’s behavior, his conduct during the Sports Festival. Nothing was said about his quirk at all, but rather his recent public demonstrations of violence and “mental instability.” That’s perfectly consistent, I think, with the biases we see elsewhere.[5]

Tokoyami has the potential to get hit by both the villainous quirk bias and the heteromorphobia, but I think Japan seeing ravens as emblematic of wisdom rather than death and rot would mean his bird head is less ill-seen there than it would be in the West. I don’t think it would take much more than the proverbial One Bad Day to get him to a very bad place indeed, though—there’s a reason Mr. Compress judged him a good potential recruit! Tokoyami was rescued before it became an issue, but if he hadn’t been, I’m sure we would have seen the same journalist mentioned above making similar statements about Tokoyami and his dark quirk/mien.

Mina’s an interesting case study in not experiencing a lot of the same sorts of discrimination others in similar situations do. She has three distinct heteromorphic traits—her skin, her eyes, her horns—as well as having a potentially extremely deadly quirk which, as I discussed above, could easily attract judgmental side-eye because of the cultural view of acid. So why doesn’t she seem to face discrimination?

As I said in the post you’re replying to—and as you mentioned is a common headcanon—I think a lot of it boils down to her relentlessly chipper attitude. If she had, for example, Mustard’s personality, or Muscular’s drive to violence, would people be quicker to say that her Acid is a “villain quirk”? If she glared more, would people be more creeped out by her eyes? It’s possible, I think, that we would actually see her facing some of this if we spent more time with her, but the narrative doesn’t make that time, at least not anywhere Kirishima can see it.

Well, if I had to guess, I’m sure you would say that would make her a more interesting character. You might get to be interested in her character, which then would probably mean you would be even more upset and disappointed with this chapter.

Ahaha, very fair. Honestly, Class A would have benefited tremendously from more kids with bite to them. A Mina whose competitiveness had some real fervor to it, or a Mina who had some heaviness in her backstory she was faking her way through dealing with, would have been a good contribution to that.

It really sucks that Horikoshi had to justify Shoji being the only one to experience prejudice by clarifying that heteromorph discrimination is only still prevalent in small villages. I feel like it robbed characters like Tsuyu, Mina, Tokoyami and Koda of being part of an actual narrative and get more depth and development.

Before I talk about this, let me clarify something: Shouji’s line about what his classmates know about heteromorphic discrimination is an example of very crucial nuance being wildly different between translations.

The fan scanlation suggested that Tokoyami and Koda, who grew up in cities, must feel like such violent heteromorphobia resembles something out of a textbook, with the implication that the textbook in question is a history book. They’re presumed to think that blood-cleansing rituals and children with scars like Shouji are artifacts of a terrible past, not a modern-day concern.

The official Via release suggested that Tokoyami and Koda could know that stuff like this still happens in rural areas because they might have read about it in textbooks. They’re presumed to know that such rituals and scarred children do exist as modern concerns, but only out in the boonies.

Those are completely different propositions! Which one was accurate was far beyond my capability to judge, but the official translation did feel a little off to me, so, as I usually do in such situations, I brought it to my trusty Translator Sis. For possibly the first time ever,[6] she told me that Viz had this one wrong—that Shouji’s implication, to her eye, was indeed that T&K would think such violence was limited to the past, not that it was limited to rural areas.

That established, I was actually talking about that line from Shouji with a friend the other day! I was aggravated that the writing would portray city-born heteromorphs as so oblivious to the problems facing them in other parts of the country when that seems so counter to my (American) perception of the ways members of threatened groups communicate danger to one another.

My friend reminded me that silence is a much more common Japanese way of addressing (or attempting to address) minority discrimination: trying to make a problem go away by starving it of conversational oxygen, treating oppression like an infection that needs to be quarantined until it dies out on its own. In that light, it’s entirely possible that Tokoyami and Koda might not know this stuff because no one around them thinks it would be helpful to tell them if it’s not a problem they’re directly dealing with. A lot of people propose the same approach to burakumin issues in real life, for example.

Also, technically Shouji doesn’t say that Koda and Tokoyami don’t experience heteromorphobia at all, just that the idea of fear and hatred that extreme, that violent, must seem like something out of a textbook, rather than something that happens here and now in certain parts of the country. Also too, Tokoyami and Koda are teenagers; I can forgive them not having much understanding of life outside their own circle of experience.

That all said, it still feels more than a little telling that Horikoshi thinks everyone in Shouji’s whole class, including and especially all the other heteromorphs, could never have heard in their entire lives about acts of bigotry-driven violence against heteromorphs being carried out in the here and now.

While it’s true that silence is a widely accepted way to address these sorts of issues in Japan, they’re hardly universal! Activist groups are out there trying to raise awareness, trying to get their issues on the floor of the Diet in hopes of getting laws passed about them. There’s not some kind of media blackout on talking about it, and, indeed, I’ve read any number of articles from Japanese publications online covering such topics.

In BNHA, however, silence does seem to be universal.[7]

No one but Shouji is from a remote enough place that they knew about violent heteromorphobia. No one recognized it as a thing that e.g. disadvantages heteromorphic heroes in the public approval ratings. No one tripped over a magazine article about it and got curious enough to look the topic up online. No one’s heroic mentors or family members have talked to them about it (particularly egregious with Koda, given the fairly strong implication that his own mother suffered it). No one had a patch of morbid interests (Tokoyami) that led them to dabble in reading about real-life horror stories of human hatred, or an interest in how their society came to be that might have led them to reading about the CRC and realizing it still exists in the modern day.

They attend a hero school, and yet Shouji seems to be the only one with an inkling that there are heteromorphs out there who need, and have been needing, heroes.

That’s all a lot to ask of the reader, but what really pushes it past plausibility to me is what happened with the Ordinary Woman. How close to the surface must violent heteromorphobia be even in the cities if the current state of Japan brings it all right back into the open in a matter of weeks? That none of the students other than Shouji have ever even imagined that heteromorphs can still be victimized in this way represents an over-the-top ignorance that I have to read as either a bleak condemnation of the shallow focuses of heroes or reflective of Horikoshi’s own beliefs about discrimination and the understanding of it possessed by those who aren’t immediately threatened by it.

Whichever is the case, and with Spinner’s higher brain functions out of commission, it leaves Shouji carrying the whole plot on his back and he just can’t do it, both because the audience hasn’t had enough time with him to buy it and because the answers the series uses him as a vehicle to deliver are facile, victim-blaming nonsense.

...And here’s where I admit that even if the hospital attack had climaxed with a whole bunch of heteromorphs from Class A and B and the Pro Hero ranks acknowledging the mob’s feelings while pleading with them to not give into hatred and to stand down, I would still have issues if the resolution didn’t involve concrete suggestions and promises about how the heroes would address the mob’s grievances going forward. Which canon very much did not, and just adding more voices to Shouji’s wouldn’t have changed that. But my whole rant about that can be found in the relevant chapter posts, so I’ll not repeat it further here.

How Would I Have Done It Instead?

Let’s be real here for a second. Even if Mina had been the one to stop Machia. How would she even do that? I remember back when people were talking about when Mina would get her moment to shine, and that it would involve Machia again, I had serious doubts about that idea ever becoming true because I couldn’t think of a single thing she could do against him. I thought for sure Mina’s moment was going to be relegated to fighting Midnight’s killer, since that seemed more within her capabilities. In the end her shinning moment did indeed involve Machia, and no one really had a confrontation with Midnight’s killer. I actually want to hear your thoughts, if you happen have a thing in mind that you think Mina could’ve done to be the one to stop Machia. I’d love to hear it.+ Btw, since you brought it up, in what way could she have defeated the Sludge villain that would’ve been witty, or skillful? If you don’t have any ideas you don’t need to answer. It’s not that important. I’m just curious of the posibility.

Okay, so, this is the part that hung me up for the longest, because there are a few wildly different possible answers here.

The real truth is, if I had been writing this whole shebang from the start, this confrontation would never have happened this way at all. Just off the top of my head, I think there’s no compelling reason AFO couldn’t have sent Toga into the hospital to activate and retrieve Kurogiri weeks ago, and with Kurogiri back in play, getting Machia would obviously have gone differently. I would also never have disposed of the MLA as comprehensively as Horikoshi did; I would have had at least one or two instances where an MLA member who didn’t get uncovered by the HPSC in time was in a position to shift the balance in the villains’ favor—maybe one would have been with the police somewhere.

Barring a top-to-bottom rewrite of the whole arc, however? Well, I'd still say that, feeling as strongly as I do about how morally dubious this whole second war has been, even if I were telling this scene with the same components, I probably wouldn’t be writing towards a hero success because I don’t think the heroes have earned it. The baby steps the kids have taken towards Saving Villains don’t go far enough for me to want to see the villains defeated here. The biggest changes there would have been twofold:

1) Shinsou’s voice changer play shouldn’t have worked on Machia.

Machia has a sense of smell so incredibly acute that, if I were trying to logically explain how it worked, I’d make it a psychic ability that just happened to manifest as scent-based. We’re talking about a guy who could track down Shigaraki after a teleport of over 270 miles, who could smell AFO’s vestige stirring from almost fifty miles away. There’s absolutely no reason he should think for even a second that AFO is standing right outside his prison.

Now, we do know replications of AFO’s voice has an effect on Machia—we saw as much as the beginning of MVA! But I would contend that back then, he didn’t have a big loud response to the recording, just curled up around his radio and started loudly purring. In the scene with Shinsou, he actually responds as though he thinks AFO is there, but again, I don’t buy that Machia should have fallen for that, especially since he was woken by Hose Face’s device emulating AFO’s voice, which would have given his unbelievably keen senses enough time to register that it’s only the voice, not the man, that he's hearing.

But, with Machia up and not immediately prey to Shinsou’s ploy, the other big change I’d make with him becomes apparent. The series has proved willing and eager to shitcan everything Shigaraki gained in MVA, but not me. Shigaraki won Machia’s loyalty at the end of MVA, and if Machia’s cranky with AFO for leaving him behind again,[8] that doesn’t mean he couldn’t still have loyalty to AFO’s successor.

Given that his loyalty to Shigs is predicated on his loyalty to AFO, it might seem logical that AFO squandering the latter would free Machia of obligation to the former. That’s a fair take. But if it were me, I’d capitalize on Machia’s keen senses and what he was present for in MVA—Shigaraki saying that his followers should do whatever they want. Hell, if the endgame likes flashbacks so much, let’s have a flashback of Shigaraki and Machia actually talking in ways that would let Machia distinguish Shigaraki and AFO.

In other words, I think Machia’s loyalty should supersede his anger. If he gets free, his first reaction should be to go to Shigaraki, not to focus on his anger. That way, it’s not a hero win rewarding their gross sky coffin tactics, but AFO doesn’t get quite what he wanted out of it, either. This would be one part of focusing the narrative back on Shigaraki and his allies, rather than ruining Shigaraki’s hard work by letting AFO take over and piss it all away.

Incidentally, I will concede that, just because Machia shouldn’t have responded like a dupe to Shinsou mimicking AFO’s voice, that doesn’t mean Machia might not have responded at all—he could have rebuked Shinsou for trying to emulate Master, and that would have worked for Shinsou’s purposes just as well! So to avoid that, I would add one more element to a flashback showcasing Shigaraki and Machia’s relationship post-Deika: have Shigaraki showing Machia a picture of Shinsou and warning him to be on the lookout for this kid, and to not respond to anything he says.

Horikoshi loves to tie back plot beats to pre-established elements, and one such element is, as I footnoted earlier, that AFO and Shigaraki watched the U.A. Sports Festival together, so they should both know good and well who Shinsou is and what he can do. Knowing Shinsou’s SF-era capabilities doesn’t predict the voice changer, of course, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, if the heroes are pushed to a point of desperation and they have access to a brainwasher, even a non-licensed one, they will try to use that brainwasher on whoever they think is their highest priority target. Quite frankly, all of the higher-ups and key players should have known about Shinsou.

2) The kids shouldn’t have been tipped off that they were facing Midnight’s killer, or it should have come up in a different context.

Nothing interesting comes of the way the canon deploys it, thanks to Mina’s vengeful feelings having no grounding in the story, and the blunt way it’s brought up serves only to make Hose Face easy for the reader to write off. As I said in the chapter post where he brought up “that U.A. teacher,” there’s no real reason for him to be focusing on Midnight specifically unless he has a personal reason to think she’s emblematic of the things about Hero Society he hates, or unless he was tuned in enough to U.A. personalities (knew who was teaching there, watched the Sports Festival to get a handle on its students, etc.) to realize that he was facing students he could potentially rattle by bringing up their teacher’s death.

The latter would offer a less awful read on Hose Face’s personality: He’s not bringing up the death out of pure sadism, but as a psychological tactic. The former would give him some real characterization and motives while also giving the kids something to argue against, rather than the easiest possible reaction of, “Hay did u kno Might Makes Right iz bad?”

Alternatively, if Hose Face has nothing personal against Midnight at all, and doesn’t have an encyclopedic memory of hero wannabe high schoolers, he has no reason to specifically mention Midnight. Even if the narrative must see her death “answered” in some fashion, it still doesn’t follow that the kids must get emotional closure for someone they lost to the undeclared war they were drafted into. The audience can take some solace in perceived karma, but lacking a naturalistic way for Mina and the rest to connect those dots, the kids should just have to deal with him as they would any other opponent they come up against, because, surprise surprise, when you’re fighting in a war, you’re not guaranteed to see and know who’s on the opposite side of the gun that just shot down your best friend.

As another alternative, if we go with the idea that Mina was struggling with dark desires for revenge, maybe she should have brought it up! Not as an accusation—again, she has no way of knowing she’s facing Midnight’s killer without him saying it—but just out of generalized fury with her opponents as a group, the same way Aizawa and Gran Torino hold the pain of their loved ones against Shigaraki when Shigaraki is not the one responsible for causing that pain.[9] Maybe a more openly vengeful Mina could just freely state that her aim is to take down the PLF to avenge Midnight, only for the enemy in front of her to answer, “Midnight? You mean that woman I killed in the woods on the day of Liberation? Here’s your chance, then, girl.” (Or whatever.)

Of course, Shonen Jump is not in the habit of validating heroes craving revenge, so Mina in that scenario would fail because rage would make her sloppy, same as with Deku, Iida, and so on.

So, in a scenario where Machia is up and not falling prey to Shinsou, but rather prioritizing getting to New Master Shigaraki, and the PLF is likewise loyal to Shigaraki and not AFO, I’d just let it work, because I’d be slanting this whole combat towards an overall heroic loss. Give Mina a face to obsess over until next time but also let Kirishima get a good eyeful of it so he at least knows there’s a serious problem with his best friend and one of his hero inspirations.

Mineta would have a chance to weigh in, too, as he's a good middle ground: he's got his own anger about Midnight, who he adored, but he's also worried about how that anger looks on Mina. Mineta always worries about his classmates, but he's shared a pretty fair amount of incidental screentime with Mina specifically over the course of the series, ranging from her sweetly offering to put a harem moment into the band performance just for him to stuff like the Clockwork Orange gag, as well as more serious stuff like Mineta being the first one to ask aloud if Midnight's dead, with Mina warmly, and with a confidence it turns out she doesn't truly feel, reassuring him that Midnight's fine.

(I've said before that Mineta should have had more to do in the confrontation with Midnight's killer, but that's not just about his fondness for her. It's also about him being the first to question if the heroes didn't just make the whole situation worse, and, if Mina really took Midnight's death so hard it had her thinking about revenge, it should also have been about Mina and Mineta's shared experience surrounding that death.)

That all said, I suspect that what you really meant is, how would I have handled this scene if I had to use all the same pieces and be writing towards a heroic victory? So let me at least touch on that.

As far as Hose Face goes, I actually think Kirishima might have been better suited to talking to him? Like, Mina’s been friendly with people, sure, but I don’t really buy her most pivotal, “shining moment” scene being a bunch of talk about the strength of the weak coming together. As best I recall—though do correct me if I’m wrong—it's never been shown that Mina regularly struggles with feelings of weakness or inadequacy. It would be perfectly natural for her to do so after flubbing against Gigantomachia, to be sure, but the series doesn’t make the time to show it, so her lines about forming packs with others does not feel like a natural evolution for her arc.

Likewise, while she’s obviously been depicted as friendly and sociable from the beginning, her lines in 383 suggest that her sociableness has, and always has had, an ulterior motive: covering for her perceived weakness. The lack of focus on her relationships from her own perspective makes that impossible to verify or even predict, so it just feels like it comes out of thin air, grabbed almost at random by the author in his attempt to find something, anything, Mina could say that would give Hose Face even a moment's pause.

Kirishima, on the other hand, has had a focus on his relationships, places where they’ve been pivotal to his own arc and the greater plot. (I’m sure I don’t need to harp on this to you, rvg, but I’ll go over it to lay out my perception of these things.) His relationship with Mina—the ways he’s trying to live up to her example, as well as his desire to support her when she falters—is a profound motivator for him, something we see much more explicitly and from his own perspective than we do Mina's feelings about him. Meanwhile, while his relationship with Bakugou isn’t given that level of psychological exploration, it’s a critical factor in Bakugou’s rescue at Kamino, and we also get that bit of Bakugou specifically giving Kirishima some advice that leads to the latter’s Unbreakable mode.[10]

So like, we do get an angle on Kirishima and his sense of his own relationships with others. That awareness allows him to demonstrate what is, I believe, the first unabashed moment of empathy for villains that a hero demonstrates in the entire series! Specifically, I’m talking about that low-level gang mook he comes up against during his internship with Fat Gum. That guy does a bunch of yelling about things that speak to Kirishima—fears of weakness, desire to be stronger, a need to help his “bros”—and Kirishima tries multiple times, even after being attacked, to express his understanding and sympathy for the man.

That being the case, if anyone were going to be able to make an impression on Hose Face via appealing to his sense of camaraderie and desire for strength, it seems to me that Kirishima has the better groundwork in place to sell the moment, regardless of whether he could successfully “reach” Hose Face in the way that’s being attempted with Shigaraki/Toga/Dabi.

As to the Sludge Villain, I’d probably either not have him there at all, given how much he claims he just wants to pretend to fight for a minute before getting the hell out of there. He very much seems like he didn’t want to be here to begin with, so I can only assume that, despite AFO claiming the jailbreakers didn’t need to do anything for him but rampage, he very much did summon a bunch of them back anyway[11] for his final dramatic attack on Deku and Hero Society.

Assuming we’re stuck dealing with him, I’d probably let the Class B kids do it. Have Mount Lady—who was there for the Sludge Villain’s rampage using Bakugou, and therefore knows what Sludgey looks like and that he can possess people—yell for people to stay away from him. Let there be a moment of panic and confusion, where it looks for a moment like a repeat of the mess in Chapter 1 where no one had the exact right answer to deal with him, so no one’s willing to step up.

Then, in a 1-2-3 combo move that reminds everyone why Class B is said to have advanced more quickly than Class A, and just as Sludgey lunges for someone, have Yamagi use Poltergeist to manipulate him into a steel drum barrel being held by Yui, let her shrink it down to a good tight fit before dropping it, then have Juuzo soften the ground to half-sink it, top down, then resolidify the earth, trapping Sludgey for later removal. Ta da, a neat demonstration of the next generation outperforming the old generation when it comes to on-the-fly teamwork and decisive action even when no one individual has the perfect quirk for solving a problem.

…This, of course, is assuming there’s no good way to actually get the Sludge Villain to talk in more depth about why he didn’t want to be here from the beginning and had to be threatened into doing it at all. It would be nice if someone could broach that topic! Maybe a quick not-too-serious handful of lines from Mineta, who has his own history of running in terror from fights he doesn’t think he can win. But even with some sympathy, I imagine Sludge Villain would try to run away regardless, on the (well-grounded) suspicion that heroes are going to want him to go back to prison and finish his sentence, and that’s when B-tachi could step in.

So that just leaves Machia, Mina, and Shinsou. And honestly, rather than having to power through it, I’d rather see Mina, in particular, talk her way out of it. This draws on two things. First, there’s the fact that she’s one of the kids who failed her Final Exams, with her and Kaminari being unable to figure out how to utilize their strengths to get out of Nedzu’s rat maze. I’d love to see her demonstrate that she’s grown from having no plans but to brute force her way through obstacles! Second, there’s this sequence:

This is a bit exaggerated, obviously, but the quick demonstration of how quickly and smoothly Mina is able to approach, scold, bond with, then deescalate people in tense situations is rightly portrayed as remarkable. But where is that facility in real confrontations with villains? Nowhere, really, save that airless stab at remarking on common ground with Hose Face and the PLF.

I obviously don’t expect her and Machia to wind up breakdancing together when the stakes are as high as they are, but Mina would have at least a bit of an opening—her encounter with Machia in middle school wherein she lied to him about where the Springer Agency is. I don’t for a moment think that Machia’s forgotten her smell—I doubt he forgets anyone’s, though he may or may not care about them otherwise.

For this version of the scene, I’d probably play Machia as more ambivalent—tired of being abandoned over and over again by the people he’s tried so hard to be loyal for, so not immediately inclined to run off after them, open to a bit more dialogue. He doesn’t fall for Shinsou for the same reasons I outlined above, so Shinsou and Mina have to talk Machia into acting—or at least stop him from just rumbling off to bury himself under a mountain for the next decade or two.

I don’t know how they’d go about making that argument. Honestly, I don’t really think there’s anything in the story for Mina or Shinsou to fall back on (by which I mean earlier panels Horikoshi’s assistants can look up and copy/paste into the storyboard to accent a dramatic speech). Maybe they could ask him why he’s so loyal to All For One and find some commonality, either through heteromorph discrimination or bias against villains.

Maybe Machia is torn on his loyalty, betrayed by AFO one too many times to want to help him but not sure where that leaves him on supporting Shigaraki. Hearing this, Mina brings up that AFO is threatening Shigaraki right now, but also that a friend of Mina’s is trying to stop AFO/help Shigaraki,[12] so maybe Machia could help them with that and then decide? Machia doesn’t trust her due to the Springer Agency thing, but that same experience does lead him to believe her when she says she just wants to help people, not hurt them.

That last bit has the benefit of providing an explicit reason for why Mina uses her quirk nigh-exclusively as a watery defense barrier or to take out inanimate objects: She long ago made an active choice not to use her acid against sentient people. This would give her some room for a little motivation-establishing flashback of her own—maybe canonize that theory about her chipperness being at least in part a front!—and provide a nice alternative to the current state of Mina’s narrative, which has spent nearly 400 chapters refusing to allow her the same free hand people like Bakugou and Kaminari take with their quirks for no established reason.

This doesn’t give Shinsou much to do, but that’s okay: his moment comes against AFO instead.

I realize that Mina's fans want her to have a big badass moment, and simply talking down a confrontation is not the kind of thing that tends to get viewed as "badass" in a shounen battle manga. Sorry about that. She can still jump around and dodge a lot while giving her pitch? Maybe she could get a big badass moment later on? I dunno; that's just what I would do, and obviously my priorities for what it would be cool for the kids to do are not the same as the broader readership's.

I'm also not sure where that leaves the confrontation with Midnight's killer; I suppose that depends on how things go between him and Kirishima in this scenario. Maybe they leave without him when he tries to protest Machia accepting the temporary alliance, or maybe he's soldier enough to take the help where he can get it and worry about later conflict later. Obviously, at any rate, this is happening in a scenario where he hasn't immediately blabbed that he killed Midnight; that can come up as a nasty surprise later on.

But does that mean you think Midnight’s killer should totally get away with it scott free and suffer no consequences?

Hnnnngghh that’s a tricky one because I am an unabashed MLA stan and villain supporter and therefore deeply biased about this. Like, I don’t think soldiers should be put on trial for killing enemy soldiers, no, even high-ranking officer-types. Obviously it’s different if they attack civilians or are otherwise breaking the codes surrounding conduct during warfare, but I do think Hose Face killing Midnight was basically a soldier killing someone he perceived as another soldier, with no undue cruelty or misconduct.

However, obviously the series itself—and the state authority the PLF is openly trying to tear down in-universe—would disagree with me! In that context, I can’t even really call the guy “a high-ranking officer” because that would, as mentioned earlier, convey more authenticity to his position than his government wants to grant him. As far as they’re concerned, he’s probably more like “a key figure in the recent anti-government actions carried out by the terrorist group calling themselves The Paranormal Liberation Front.” People like that tend to get executed in prison a few years after their short, perfunctory trials.

I suppose the problem for me is that the series wants me to believe that the MLA is Very Bad and they all deserve to be Locked Up Forever, whereas I want more nuance from them than that? Even setting aside the probable cult upbringing, I have significant trouble unabashedly blaming the PLF for their actions because the series has done nothing to convince me that less drastic avenues for change are available or even survivable for them.

This was a huge issue with the hospital attack sequence, but it applies to all sorts of the setting’s problems: Other than, “Insist that victims of oppression should focus on providing a good example to future generations,” what methods for addressing inequality does Hero Society have? I want to know what the villains should have done, what they could have done, about systemic inequalities and repression that would have been effective against a government that employs agents like Lady Nagant and Hawks.

The picture Nagant paints is of a society waging a war against anyone who sought to change the Hero System, a war that many people who sought change never even knew they were already in. The examples she provides of her targets are, of course, corrupt heroes and would-be terrorists, but what her HPSC President said was even farther reaching: that the purpose of her killing was to “preserve hope and faith” in heroes.

The HPSC legitimately does not seem to believe that any system other than the current one is feasible for maintaining stability, and that any attempt to shake or besmirch that system is no different than throwing the country back into the chaos of the advent of quirks. What’s a few missing activists or tragic accidents compared to that?

Horikoshi seems desperate to have us pretend he never told us that the government his protagonists are defending actively grooms assassins to enforce the status quo, but that’s not a genie he can put back in the bottle. I see the current events of the series as, in some form or another, basically inevitable because of Hero Society’s active, even violent resistance to change. Midnight’s death for that cause is thus something I have tremendous difficulty thinking of as a crime that needs to be punished.

Does that mean I think Hose Face should get off scot-free? Eeehhhhhhhhnnnngh I hate to say it this plainly, but…

Maybe it does?

The thing is, I know that Hose Face is, canonically, a quirk supremacist trying to violently overthrow the rule of law. In real life, I have no sympathy for people trying to institute fascism, regardless of whether they’re using legal mechanisms or armed force. But in the fictional world of BNHA, I have nothing but disdain for the way the MLA has been turned into a caricature of themselves in this final arc. In that sense, my dissatisfaction with Hose Face’s treatment is really based on the ideal version of him and all the rest of the MLA I have in my head—the MLA that’s allowed to have nuance behind their extremism, the one overflowing with members motivated by their lived experience with the flaws in Hero Society, with a generous helping of radicalization from the fact that they’re a cult as much as they are an army.

BNHA has scrapped all that potential and left us with nothing but naked quirk supremacy to fill the void. In an endgame that’s trying so, so hard to sell the readers on Saving Villains, that’s just poison to the story’s themes, and my villain stanning comes directly from that issue: demanding consistent treatment for the characters whose tragic backstories we haven’t been permitted to see.

Hose Face is clearly a bad person—heck, I was headcanoning him as a hard-edged, ruthless killer even when all we had to go on was him killing Midnight, long before he showed up to espouse open quirk supremacy and gloat about killing a schoolteacher, so it’s not like I ever thought he was a super nice dude or anything! But I guess I just have trouble with the idea that the current system deserves to be the one to decide his fate, when it has, to all appearances, gone to extreme lengths to stamp out any perceived threats to itself, to the point that the narrative itself is now openly delegitimizing everyone who might otherwise offer cogent critique.

It would be different if we had never seen the dark side of the status quo and the villains really were all just shallow, two-dimensional monsters. It would be different if the narrative had shown us legal, nonviolent and effective avenues for protest and change.[13] It would be different if Hose Face had killed some rando uninvolved civilian.

As it is, though, Midnight was a combatant for a terrible, terrible status quo. She might not have been using lethal means herself, but she was defending a demonstrably lethal, openly acknowledged as repressive, system. I just can’t find it in myself to demand justice for the fact that she died for it.

But with all that being said, I also don’t think Midnight is a bad person. She never knew about the government assassins, after all; she’s a member of the system she grew up in, the same way the kids are. She presumably never saw the extent of the system’s flaws because she was never victimized by them. At the end of the day, she still deserved to be properly mourned and remembered and it is a crock and a crime that we never got to see her funeral.

If anything, I think Midnight’s funeral would have been an excellent setting for a scene where the protagonists start asking questions about how things came to this, what went wrong and where, that their teacher had to die. What is it about Hero Society that’s led to tens of thousands of dissidents, and why haven’t they ever heard of this discontent before now That would have given us considerably better set-up for a nuanced PLF, an opening to talk about Shouji’s experience of heteromorphobia, foreshadowing for Lady Nagant, and, to bring this back on-topic, the opportunity to really show Mina struggling with everything that happened as set-up for her later confrontation with Midnight’s killer.

Tumblr, How Does That Work?

Honestly I was expecting some sort of notification about your answers if and when you replied to me. Is that not a thing?

Making my reply a fresh post, or just posting replies in the comments section of the post you originally commented on, would not have notified you without me specifically tagging you, which at the time Tumblr wasn’t letting me do. This problem seems to have cleared up, so you should have gotten a notification about this post going up because of your name being tagged at the very beginning!

What you see for people answering asks depends on a few things. If you send asks anonymously, you won't get a notification if/when the person answers them; you'll just have to keep an eye on their blog. If you send them with your name attached, as you did originally for me, I could choose to answer those asks privately, sending my replies back to your Inbox, or answer publically, posting my replies to my blog. Either way, you'd be notified!

For this round of responses, if I'd just replied to your reblog in comments as you did with my original post, or reblogged your reply with a reply of own instead of staring a new post, you’d have gotten notifications about either! But I don’t want to put this much wall ‘o text on my followers’ dashboards without a cut, so I haven’t been responding directly, for which I apologize.

(Disclaimer: Notifications can be configured in your Settings menu; you can toggle them on and off for loads of stuff! You might wish to check what you currently have them set for rather than just taking my word for it.)

On the topic of cuts, I mentioned at the beginning that the cut option is hard to find on mobile, but just for reference, it looks like this in the post editor on desktop:

It's the same icon on the mobile post editor, it's just on the far right of the bar of icons along the bottom of the app. My screen cuts it off, so I have to scroll the bar over to find it.

Like I said, the Expand dropdown button Tumblr instituted a little while back has reduced the need for this somewhat, and you can certainly do whatever you prefer, but as I believe having the Expand dropdown automatically clip long posts is still an optional configuration in Settings, I'd feel better about reblogging from you directly if you put the bulk of your reply under a cut.

Don’t know what “blorbo” means. Kinda sounds like a demeaning term, but I’m going to assume it’s not.

Sorry, it’s not intended to be demeaning! It’s just a slangy affectionate term for “character you really like.” In my experience, I’d say it also has a connotation of protectiveness or self-identification, though I can’t speak for the whole of the internet. I like plenty of characters, but I wouldn’t call them all my blorbos, just the ones that I really and truly love and want to explore/share/defend their honor to the death.

Thanks...? Is, is that a compliment?

(Re: my telling rvg that we seemed to have similar issues with the way Mina was being handled, but they were more willing to do the mental legwork on her than me.)

It’s mostly just an observation, but not a critical one! As someone who’s very ready to read into the canon every little drip of information the canon will give me And So Much More, I have a tremendous amount of fellow-feeling for people of like minds, even if our taste in characters is different.

Buried At The Bottom, Why Kaminari Is A Worse Character Than Mineta, Yes I Said It And I’ll Say It Again

>>I have observably positive feelings for about a third of Class 1-A and only particularly negative feelings about Deku and Kaminari. What’s up with Kaminari?

My irritation with Kaminari boils down to two main things—and forgive me, I know you didn’t ask about Mineta, but Mineta’s pretty important to my feelings on Kaminari being what they are, so he’s a part of this answer. This is all going to be pretty openly dismissive of Kaminari, as a fair warning, on top of being based on not-exactly-rigorous familiarity with the student material, so apologies to anyone who likes him and finds him an enriching, valuable character. But man alive, that is not me. And but so:

1) Kaminari is a watered-down Mineta, with watered-down versions of all of Mineta’s flaws, but because he’s watered down, the growth he experiences stands out less than Mineta’s. More on this in a second.

2) Despite Kaminari being a redundant character who brings virtually nothing to the table that other characters don’t do better—with the only things that are unique to him going underdeveloped in canon—fandom loves Kaminari. (Disclaimer: I obviously don’t spend much time in the hero-fan circles of the fandom, so this is just my perception. I’d be curious to get your perspective of Kaminari’s relative popularity, rvg!)

To hit the second point first, Kaminari has a more conventionally attractive cute anime boy face than Mineta, so Kaminari’s pushing of his female classmates’ boundaries gets mostly ignored, while Mineta gets so many fics written about him dying that there’s a dedicated Dead Mineta Minoru tag on AO3 with almost 350 hits.

Fandom built a whole tottering edifice of fanon about Traitor Kaminari despite the howling absence of compelling evidence in the manga[14] for, so far as I can tell, the sole reason that people wanted the cute anime boy to have crunchy angst. Then, when the actual traitor reveals landed (first the fake-out and then the real one), fandom deemed Hagakure an ungrateful bitch and Aoyama a whining coward.

So like, the fandom discrepancy is what pushes me over the edge from the bottom end of neutral into active dislike. But I would be awfully close to it anyway for the whole “redundant-ass character who contributes nothing to this story we couldn’t get better from someone else” thing.

Kaminari being kind of leery and unpleasant about his female classmates would be a lot more glaring if it weren’t stacked up against Mineta’s actual sexual harassment, even though Kaminari is a frequent co-conspirator!

Kaminari has a brief tussle with fear at the beginning of the war arc, but it’s neither as sustained nor as convincing as Mineta’s frequent wrestling with cowardice, present from USJ all the way up through his terrified confrontation with All For One.

Mineta is frequently, openly envious of his classmates, a whole extra flaw that Kaminari never demonstrates in more than fleeting glimpses.

Kaminari’s quirk is redundant next to the other high offense types in the class.

Kaminari’s personality is not distinct enough to add anything irreplaceable to the classroom dynamic. That’s not to say he brings nothing to the web of relationships amongst the students or the ways the class as a whole reacts to the events of the series, just that what comes to mind for me is mostly extra layering to existing dynamics, not anything truly original and unique to him. Which would be fine—I love extra layers!—if he were contributing more as a character on literally any other fronts.

I can think of only two things that Kaminari uniquely brings to the table, but both of them are mentioned once and then never come up again. Firstly, he’s the only one in the class to voice open admiration for Stain, a willingness to admire cool traits in Villains that never leads him to any interesting conflicts with people (classmates or otherwise) who hew to the more standard flat refusal to consider that a Villain might have or express positive aspects.

The other thing is less about Kaminari himself and more about how he’s one of three places where the story brings up the idea of people using their quirks for non-hero jobs and then refuses to develop that premise.[15] It’s interesting worldbuilding, but as far as I’m aware, it’s never directly shown—everyone we see using their quirks (legally) in the series is doing it as a hero. We never get much sense of what other options there are for quirk use because heroism and villainy are the only contexts we ever see it in! This would be a little annoying on its own, but I also find it undermines a lot of other established facts and characterizations.

(Bear with me and I promise I’ll loop this back around to Kaminari.)

My interests being where they are, the biggest problem for me with the fuzziness about the legality of quirk use is that it leaves Destro and the MLA with no coherent cause. They want free quirk use, but are they really so incredibly averse to just getting a license that they’re willing to become terrorists over it??

You could argue that naked quirk supremacy is what the MLA is currently after, and that’s obviously incompatible with the laws as they stand, but Destro Classic is never really framed as a quirk supremacist, so why did he so virulently despise the quirk use prohibitions if all they really did was require people to get a license to use quirks in public, no different than a driver’s license or a permit to serve alcohol? Sure, you get small clutches of people sometimes with that kind of “any government oversight is bad government oversight” black-and-white thinking, but the original MLA was a powerful enough force to stand against the government for years, which doesn’t exactly scream “a handful of malcontents” to me.

Rendering the MLA’s cause mindbogglingly asinine is my biggest problem with the “other jobs can get quirk-use licenses too” tidbit, but there are also things like how totally invisible the entertainment or sports industry is. That would make perfect sense if quirk use is illegal in those fields—people want to see cool superpowers getting used, so industries that bank on public attention dollars but can’t have their celebrities use their quirks are going to decline when they can’t compete with industries/celebrities that can.

If quirk licenses can be gotten for all sorts of jobs, though, then why have sports and entertainment become so invisible? If “frivolous” fields like those are not aren’t seen as “contributing to society” enough for quirk use permits, then which fields do? Why does HeroAca!Japan still mostly look and behave like IRL!Japan if quirks are in use in “all manner” of industries? And if it isn’t the case that heroism—a dangerous job which sometimes gets people killed and which generally requires cultivating a socially demanding public brand/identity—is the only path to being able to use the special power you were born with to earn a livelihood, why does every single middle-schooler in Deku’s class and countless other classes across the country want to become a hero?

I just feel like the way the world looks and operates, the kinds of repressiveness described by even the heroes, the structures that drive people into heroism and villainy alike—the former because they don’t see any other viable way to achieve the happiness they’re looking for, the latter because they can’t become heroes but still have desires that their quirks could help them achieve—all of that makes much more sense in a world that has super powers but has tightly restricted their use to a single job class of person.

So, tying back, obviously that’s not a fault of Kaminari’s, but he is the character where that gap is most apparent. If there aren’t many lightning heroes because lightning is in high demand in other industries, it would shed significant light on who Kaminari is as a person if the manga would tell us what those other industries are.

What other paths could Kaminari have chosen? What’s so much better about those other industries that people with quirks tailor-made for heroism,[16] in a society that worships popular and powerful heroes, are so willing to choose those other industries instead? Why did Kaminari not make that same decision? What does heroism mean to him personally that he chose it when so many others in his situation did not?

Kaminari could present a huge in on that angle of the worldbuilding, but instead he’s a complete dead-end. Mineta’s motivations are base as hell, but at least we know what they are! Further, it tells us interesting (uncomplimentary, but interesting!) things that people like Recovery Girl and Deku hear said motivations from Mineta’s own mouth, and shrug and accept them as perfectly valid.

And that’s just his professed motivations! His final exam scene actually drops an early hint about the admiration for Deku he’ll later wholeheartedly declare in the 1-A vs Deku fight! I don’t remember Kaminari ever getting anything a fraction so revealing; he just coasts through the story contributing nothing unique or meaningful. He’s hardly the only 1-A character with that particular lack of depth—Sato, Sero, Hagakure and Ojiro are all similar blank slates in terms of their motivations or histories—but then, none of them are a fraction as popular as Kaminari is in the fandom as I experience it, either.

So to sum up, I dislike Kaminari because he’s a wishy-washy nothing of a character, a generically Inoffensive Anime Cutie Boy adored out of all reasonable proportion compared to more compelling and equally underdeveloped classmates alike. Mineta is, by any measure, more problematic, and it's even worse that U.A./Aizawa are so blasé about him, but, at least from where I’m standing, he’s still more layered, more compelling, more dynamic, and speaks in more interesting ways to the world around him than Kaminari ever comes close to matching.

(…Kaminari’s thing with Jirou is fine. Perfectly reasonable character relationship building material. I just don’t count it one way or the other because it’s a self-contained relationship dynamic that has no bearing on the way either character engages with the broader world/system the series’ overarching narrative is challenging. They motivate each other in small ways, but that motivation doesn’t lead them to truly grow or change as people, only to overcome modest internal confidence hurdles blocking them from things they already wanted to do anyway.)

And that's it! Thanks for forging through, good lord, over twenty pages of this, rvg and anyone else who did! I hope you were at least moderately entertained, give or take my blatant Kaminari slander. See you next time, and enjoy the Footnotes.

---------------- FOOTNOTES ----------------

[1] We’re not shown any personnel or drugs or anything, but I assume they’ve been keeping Machia drugged since Jakku, same as Kurogiri in between interviews. It’s the only thing that worked on Machia before, so why wouldn’t they have more on-hand?

[2] Despite watching the Sports Festival with Shigaraki, natch.

[3] I would like it if he would do that with a lot less insufferable power scaling bullshit, you understand, but I’m spotting the comic its plot arc here.

[4] Outside of, say, the Persona games, where the MCs can change ability sets by swapping out what companion spirit they’re packing, but even that doesn’t make them specialized for status effects, merely capable of using them.

[5] Interestingly, while Bakugou fought off the villainous sales pitch with as much verve as he brings to all his fights, if he had fallen off the righteous path there, we might have observed that his pridefulness was explicitly fostered by the people around him giving him excessive praise for his powerful quirk and ignoring his resulting violent arrogance. That is to say, Bakugou would have fallen under the same, “Villains are created by the failures in their society,” pattern that BNHA applies to all of its sympathetic villains.

[6] There was one other instance, but iirc it was an error in the translation C.Cook had done for the BNHA databook. It would not surprise me that he was being less careful or was more pressed for time when translating the reams upon reams of text in one of those.

[7] At least until the fifteen-thousand-strong mob shows up.

[8] Which frankly should be all he’s sore about. As others have pointed out, Machia’s anger about being abandoned is kind of incoherent. Yes, AFO left him on the battlefield, but he didn’t exactly leave him to rot in prison forever. The moment AFO made his big push, he sent people to spring Machia, so in what sense exactly does Machia think AFO abandoned him? If it was just the last straw after a string of abandonments from both AFO and Shigaraki, the manga could have stood to make that much clearer.

[9] AFO and Ujiko created Kurogiri out of Shirakumo—as a babysitter for Tomura, yes, but Tomura didn’t choose that. And as to Shigaraki’s very existence trampling on Nana’s memory and causing All Might pain, well, Shigaraki didn’t ask to be brought into the world, abused by his father, neglected by his family, and then raised by a supervillain, did he?

[10] And speaking of Unbreakable, compare how explicitly we’re shown Kirishima’s growth and the foundations of it with how the inspirations for Mina’s attacks are relegated to passing mentions, not direct depictions. She just casually tells Kirishima that his Unbreakable inspired her Acidman, and likewise only internally reflects on asking Bakugou and Todoroki to teach her their training method, which let her develop her Max Power Acidman Alma move, without so much as a single scrubbed in doodle depicting said training assistance.

[11] Somehow. The story is unclear on whether he disseminated threats, contacted them directly, or just used the combination of Search+Warping to drag them all back into his presence, and that last option in particular runs into complications given the limitations of both quirks.

[12] In this AU, we would have gotten to see the class have an actual discussion about Saving Villains, prompted by the way the reveal about Aoyama solidified Deku, Shouto and Uraraka’s desires to help their respective villain foils. The class would carry that resolve forward not only for those three villains alone, but also Shouji for Spinner, Kirishima when talking to Hose Face, Mina, here, with Gigantomachia, etc.

[13] None of the things I can think of that might be considered evidence of protest meet all the criteria. The original MLA became violent, Harima Oji was a lawbreaker and also ineffective in the long term, the small group that yells at Endeavor and the rest in Chapter 311 is not portrayed as linked to any broader efforts to unseat “fake heroes,” and the group that “condemned” the newscaster Miyagi Daikaku was ineffective and didn’t even seem to rise to the level of open protest.

[14] "His grades are poor but he namedrops a Hemingway novel! He must be concealing the fact that he's actually super-smart!" "He's doing a Liberation salute! He must be the traitor, even though the Liberation salute uses the other hand, and Kaminari has been using finger-gun gestures to fire off his lightning attacks since at least the License Exam if not earlier, and the League had no connection to the MLA at the time when the traitor was most active!"

[15] A blurb about Kaminari in, iirc, one of the volume extras, Suneater’s flashback to a teacher telling his class that they can “make fine use of their quirks at any number of jobs,” and Uraraka’s early mention that she’d considered “getting permission” to use her quirk to help with her parents’ construction business.

[16] See the previous discussion about the kinds of quirks that are popularly accepted as “good hero quirks.”

#long post #click that Expand button at your own risk #bnha #bnha critical #in this reply:#critiquing the kids' failure to critique the war plans #discussing the basic qualifications of the Heroic Ideal #what “saving Villains” might have entailed #character flaws as a form of worldbuilding #D&D alignment discourse in disguise #and a tiny bit of complaining about Horikoshi's shitty writing of his women's arcs #randomvongenerico #stillness answers more #bnha endgame

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shurisneakers · 4 years ago

Text

harmless (ix)

Summary: Bucky volunteers to go stop a small time villain, but nothing can prepare him for what exactly he has to deal with. (Bucky x villain!reader, drabble series)

Warnings: cursing, sex jokes, frustrated bucky, dramatic reader, anxiety

Word count: 3.9k

A/N: a lot of requests came in last week, so cool and thank you for sending them in!! i’ll try my best to write them if they weren’t originally what i had planned for this series bc they’re so cute kfjdghdf. also hey shoutout to @i-reblog-fics-i-like for suggesting the backstory thing!

here’s my ko-fi if you’d like to support my writing <333

Additional Scene || Previous Part || Series Masterlist

Hot single in your area! 😈 Find your solemate!

Somehow it bypasses Bucky’s spam folder and is in his primary email. SHIELD tech is too advanced to let fake mails like this reach him and this doesn’t make sense. Unless it was one of the stupid dating websites he signed up for.

Leaving aside the obvious typo in the subject, he clicks on it, hoping it doesn’t unleash a virus onto his computer.

He’s instead greeted with a poorly Photoshopped picture of you at a bar with a martini in your hand. He doesn’t have to look too hard to see that the martini is, in fact, an emoji. Off to a terrible start already.

Right beside it is an even worse image, an imitation of an early Internet chat box.

Harbinger of Doom just sent you a message!

Come to the empty lot near lair. Bring goggles. 😩💦

Decline/Accept

He wants to strangle you.

______

“Why did you curse my eyes so early in the morning?” He spots you at the top of the lair, speaking loudly so that it hopefully reached you.

“What?” you yell back down instead. “If you’re saying something, I can’t hear you.”

He rolls his eyes. He pulls his phone from his pocket and presses on your contact.

He watches the look of confusion morph into one of slight surprise when you reach into your pocket and pull out your call.

“Don’t ever send an image like that to me again,” he says directly.

“If that one image is too much for you, how will we ever make our sex tape?”

His mouth opens and shuts like goddamn fish.

He can hear your laughter even without the phone.

“First of all- stop laughing- first of all, a sex tape is never going to happen. Second of all, I have a debriefing to go to, we need to make this quick.”

He holds up a finger when he sees you begin to say something. By the look of trouble painted all over your face, he knows it’s going to be a dumb innuendo.

“Thirdly, why are you standing there?”

“I watched The Last Airbender,” you say once your cackling dies down.

“I like that show.” He did. Peter sometimes watched it when he came over and Bucky more often than not joined in.

“I know, you told me.”

Oh.

“Okay, what now?”

“Put your goggles on.” You take one step towards the ledge.

“What are you doing?” The goggles don’t do anything to shield him from the sun, considering that they’re not tinted. Maybe he could invest in those.

You send him a smile, taking a step further. His walk towards the building turns into a jog, then a sprint when you’re basically standing on the edge.

You spread your arms out like Jesus Christ himself before flinging yourself off the building. His stomach drops.

His phone falls to the ground, discarded to the side as he sprints to break your landing.

It never comes.

Instead, a gust of wind smacks him in the face, forcing him a few steps backwards.

“I am now an air bender.” your eyes shone. “Kind of.”

Just like that, the show was ruined.

He wipes the dust on from his glasses that he now understands why you made him wear. Considerate, for a person who nearly just gave him a heart attack.

“Why.” It’s not even a question, just a statement.

“You know how the Tower has a giant ‘A’ on the side?”

He stares at you.

“I‘m gonna spray paint ‘asshole’ on the side of it.”

Pepper would not like that.

“That’s not even evil.”

“Yeah, but it’d annoy your super friends,” You do a flip midair, testing out the repulsors that were tied around your palms, “and I’m the voice of the people.”

You’re too high for him to reach. He doesn’t have his tools, or anything useful on him considering that he never had to use them before. He couldn’t even launch himself at you from the side of the building because you’d just move out of the way. He could jump really high but it would just have the same consequence.

He could talk and keep you distracted but that worked once, it wouldn’t again. At least not for long.

Fuck, he really had only one option.

He leaves you to do your somersaults and turns, walking over to where he dropped his phone. It’s an upgrade from the brick he was using a while ago, but not a high end Stark model. A smartphone, but barely.

He sighs, punching in the number and holding it up to his ear.

“Who are you calling?” you yell from above him.

“Go back to your shitty aerobics,” he yells back.

You pause for a second. “Was that a fucking pun, James Bar-”

The dial tone ends when someone picks up. He diverts his attention back to the call.

“Hey man, I-

“No.”

“You didn’t even let me finish.”

“It’s probably something stupid,” Sam doesn’t even sound annoyed, just uninterested.

“I need your wings.”

“I was right. Bye.”

It was a long shot anyway.

“Fuckin’ hold on a second.” He sees you disintegrate a concrete block by having it drop from the air. “You come here and fix this, then. She’s air bending now.”

“...like Avatar?” Sam unsurprisingly got the reference.

Peter’s interests were usually shared by everyone in the Tower, just because they had to compensate for the teasing he had to endure. It led to a lot of geeky documentaries and occasional musicals. Bucky wouldn’t be caught dead humming songs from Thoroughly Modern Millie under his breath.

“Yeah.”

“You want me to come and fight your girlfriend,” he says slowly.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Bucky urges, “and yes, I need help. Can’t exactly reach her when she’s twenty feet above me.”

“We have a briefing in 30 minutes. Why did you even go there today?”

He doesn’t know how to answer that. Just looks up at you smacking one of the repulsors against your thigh when it sputters for a second. It’s tradition.

“Well?” Bucky ignores his question.

“Fine,” Sam’s voice is distant for a second as he agrees. “Clint’s asking if he can come too.”

“Fuck no.” One of them was more than enough and Sam was way better at negotiation.

He hears a faint profanity from who he assumed was Clint before the call cuts.

He takes a seat on the ground and waits.

“You’re not going to make any effort to stop me?” You have your arms pressed to your side, palms pointed downwards to keep you afloat.

“I could just throw things at you again.” He makes a mention towards the small pebbles.

“I will fuck you up if you even try,” you warn. He lifts his arms in surrender. “So that’s it. You’re just going to sit there.”

“To be honest, I couldn’t care less if you painted the building,” he says with the least amount of interest he could muster, not that that was very hard.

“Do you not like your team?”

“I do.” He isn’t lying. “But they’re little shits.”

“I can draw a couple of dicks on their window, no problem,” you say offhandedly.

He looks up at you through his fingers. “That won’t be required.”

Although it was appreciated.

“Cool, so then I’m gonna go.” You make a mention of the utility belt on your waist. He looks at the many spray cans that decorate it.

“What colour are you going with?” he interrupts quickly. Fuckin’ Sam. What was the point of wings if he couldn’t get here in 2 minutes?

“Red, probably.” You look down. “I got purple and white just in case.”

“Building’s dark, red is good.”

“You really don’t care, do you?” You lower yourself down to the ground, a few feet ahead of him. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” For fucks’ sake, Sam. “You really don’t like superheroes, do you?”

“I don’t have anything against them.”

“Then why do you do this every week?”

This was wading into personal territory and he did not like it.

“Well.” Your eyebrows knit together. “Because I want to. It’s fun.”

“No other reason?”

“Do I need to have another reason?” You push your palm downwards, sending you back up into the air. “Can’t I just be evil because I want to?”

“Sure,” he says. He’s heard worse reasons. “Why not?”

“Besides, if you think I don’t like superheroes then you should meet Jake.”

“Who’s Jake?” He hadn’t ever heard you mention him before because he’d remember if you had.

“My roommate.”

“I didn’t see him when I came over.”

“That’s because we’re not conjoined at the hip.” It takes you a second to stabilise. “Besides, he grabbed the water while I got the bracelet but he refused to come say hi.”

Bucky looked down at his wrist. It was still there. He found himself fidgeting with it more often than not.

“He hates superheroes?”

“He has a valid reason.” Your eyes widen in worry when your head suddenly dips.

“What is it?” He knows the height at which you’re at isn’t very dangerous but if need be, he’s close by.

“Come find out.” Your eyes shone mischievously. “But yeah, no reason for me to be evil.”

“Not even a tragic backstory?”

“None. But if you want it, I can give you one, Barnes.” You test the waters, seeing how long you can lie horizontally. “Can’t promise you’ll like it though.”

“Try me.” He has time to kill. He’s a good listener.

“Well, it all started with my family- a troop of gorillas.” You flip over to lie on your back. “They practically raised me, they did. Until my gorilla mother died and I was all but consumed by grief and-”

“Your mother was a gorilla?” He entertains the notion.

“Or was it my father?” you ask thoughtfully. “I don’t know, I don’t remember. Anyway, I met a-”

“Just to clarify, none of this is real, right?” he interjects.

You stare at him. He stares at you.

“Bucky, that’s the plot of Tarzan,” you say slowly, “or at least whatever I remember of it... which I’m beginning to realise isn’t much.”

“Just clarifying.” He leans back again.

“Anyway so then when my mother, the deer-”

“Gorilla.”

“Whatever. Was killed, I escaped to some place-”

“Where?”

“Somewhere. And I stayed with these seven men-”

“Why seven?” He actually remembers watching this movie with his sister when it came out. An early memory, a bit faded. He remembers how long he saved up for the ticket.

“Because character development. And then I realised the reason my life was so weird was because there was a rat controlling me by pulling on my hair-”

“What the fuc-”

“If you ask any more questions, I’m going to stop.”

Bucky blinks at you. “So that’s your backstory.”

“Raw and uncut, baby.”

“Just to get this straight, your mother, the gorilla deer-”

“Witch.”

“Huh?”

“She was a witch who stole my hair.”

“Wha-”

He’s interrupted by the giant shadow cast by something that flies overhead.

Fucking finally.

He doesn’t even have to look up. Sam does a small glide to the ground, landing gracefully beside him.

Bucky finds you speechless but straightened up from your earlier posture.

“Buck,” Sam greets him.

“Sam,” he says in return, getting up from his place.

A grin spreads across your face. “Mr. Sam Wilson. No way.”

“You’re Y/N, I’m assuming?” Sam offers, posture relaxed. He clearly wasn’t here to fight.

“The one and only.” You tear your eyes away from Sam to glare at Bucky. “Barnes, if you had told me we were expecting guests, I would have dressed better.”

Bucky furrows his eyebrows in suspicion at you. You’d dress up for Sam.

You dressed up like a suburban tourist dad for him. He was feeling the offence incoming.

“Can’t count on him to be useful in any situation.” Alright, he did not call Sam just to have the both of you team up against him.

“Normally I’d agree with you but he did just invite you here, so...” you trail off, looking at Sam expectantly.

What the shit.

Sam smirks. Bucky switches rapidly back and forth between the both of you.

“I see why Buck keeps coming back every week.” It doesn’t take long for him to catch on, enlisting a feeling of triumph from you.

“I can’t see why he doesn’t just stay at home everyday if this is the view.” You gesture to him.

This is not what Bucky wanted.

“Okay,” Bucky interrupts, “what is going on here?”

“Pure chemistry, I’d say.” You’re half tempted to bite your lip to seal the deal.

“I agree.” Sam just nods, completely and utterly serious.

You think that you’ll give him a gift basket just for playing along despite meeting you for the first time at that moment.

“Get a room.” Bucky rolls his eyes.

“Maybe we will.” You tap your finger against your lip in thought. “How do you feel about Indian food, Sam?”

“Very positively.”

Bucky grits his teeth. “If you’re not planning to spray paint the Tower, can you just hand over the repulsers so we can go home for the day?”

You let out a small tsk in disapproval. “See what I have to deal with?”

“Can’t imagine how you do it every weekend,” Sam says dryly, not wasting a second in replying.

“Hello?” Bucky waves his arm around. “She’s the villain here.”

“Your face is the villain here.” You tear your eyes away from Sam only to glare at him. “He won’t even wear a cape. Why am I the only one who brings their A-Game every week?”

“Sam just get the damn-”

“You should wear a cape, man.” Bucky’s absolutely sure that even Sam knows it’s a ridiculous idea.

“I’m not wearing a fuckin’ cape,” he grumbles.

“What are your thoughts on swords, then?” Your finger finds a place under your chin in deep contemplation. “You’d look great with a sword.”

Bucky buries his face in his palms. “Sam, for the love of God.”

“Okay, alright.” Sam finally gives in with a small chuckle. He runs a few steps to get a small head start before launching himself into the air, whizzing past your levitating figure. He does a neat little flip midair before matching your height.

Showoff.

“How difficult are you gonna make this, Wilson?” you ask, a smirk on your face.

“Jesus Christ.” Bucky exhales, looking at the both of you through his goggles.

“What’s your play here?” Sam calls out loudly.

“Was gonna spray paint ‘asshole’ on the side of the Tower.”

“After the ‘A’?”

“After the ‘A’,” you confirm.

“Now that’s too small,” Sam tutted. “You gotta think bigger. Paint the whole Tower.”

“Sam!” Bucky looks horrified.

“Hmm.” You look like you’re considering it. “Don’t have enough paint for that though.”

“You’re an evil genius, right?” Sam casts a small glance at Bucky. “At least that’s what he tells me.”

“You talk about me?” You grin at the disgruntled man on the ground.

“I don’t,” he mutters, shaking his head. A lie.

“Yeah, so build something,” Sam points out. “Get some more paint. I’ll even tell you the best vantage points to spill it.”

“No, he won’t,” Bucky shouts from below.

“He’s just cranky because he didn’t get his prune juice this morning, ignore him,” Sam dismisses him.

Prune juice? He was a young 100, not ancient.

“What’s your favourite colour, Falcon?”

“I like red.”

As annoyed as Bucky is right now, he stores that away in his memory for later. He also knows Sam loves seafood and a good pair of shoes.

“A couple of gallons of red paint it is, then.” You lower yourself to the ground, Sam slowly follows suit until he lands beside Bucky.

“You know we can’t let you go without taking those, right?” Bucky tilts his head towards your invention.

You narrow your eyes at him. He doesn’t budge.

“I’ll tell ya what,” Sam pipes in instead. “I’ll keep them until you finish getting the paint and once you’re done, we’ll make an evening out of vandalising the Tower.”

Bucky may not enjoy his company all that much but he admires Sam’s diplomacy. Of course, you would never make it this easy while reasoning with him.

“That a promise, Mr. Wilson?” You raise your eyebrow at him questioningly but are already in the process of removing the things from your hand.

“Wouldn’t ever lie to you, doll.” He holds up his hand in a mock swear.

You walk towards Bucky and him, rotating your wrists to get rid of the soreness. “Bold claim for a man who met me ten minutes ago.”

“Feels like it’s been longer.” He sends you a wink and you can’t stop the laugh the escapes from you finally.

Bucky holds his hand out for the gadgets. You shrink away from him with a click of your tongue.

“Technically, he takes this round.” You send a nod towards Sam, dropping off the repulsors into his hand. “So he gets it.”

Bucky rolls his eyes.

“You gonna keep ‘em safe?” you ask Sam, this time a little more earnestly.

“Guard it with my life,” he says seriously, pressing his lips together in a line to avoid smiling.

“You’re both ridiculous,” Bucky cuts in.

“You’re going to be late.” Sam tucks the devices into his pocket safely. “You know how Steve gets when people walk in on his speeches. Do you even have a ride?”

“Got the motorcycle.”

“See you there.” Sam nods.

“Save me a place,” Bucky says to him.

“No.” He doesn’t even hesitate. “Y/N. It was a pleasure.”

“Still holding you to that evening, Sam.” You send him a smile.

“I’m countin’ on it.” He gives you a small three finger salute before taking off, leaving you staring after his retracting figure.

When the dust settles, Bucky awkwardly clears his throat. “Right. So that was that.”

“Dude,” you let out an exhale. “he’s so hot.”

He murmurs something unintelligible. It vaguely sounds like a series of threats but mostly a list of complaints.

“Don’t you have a meeting to get to?” You turn your attention back to him.

“Yeah.”

“Aren’t you going to be late?” You glance at the clock on your phone.

“I’ll just tell them I was on a mission.” Well, sort of. “Besides, what are they gonna do? Kick me out?”

“Fair enough.” You shrug. “Have a safe ride back.”

From what he knows of you and Sam, the both of you were kidding around. But he could never be too sure. He can’t even ask if you were serious about the entire thing because it’s none of his business.

Were the implications of having his mortal nemesis and other mortal nemesis date important enough to overrule that?

“Are you planning to skip your meeting, or?” you ask when he remains freezes in his spot, eyes glazed over like he’s thinking about something. “Because if you are, I know this great Thai place-”

“Don’t do that again,” he says instead, shaking his head to jolt him out of his thoughts.

“What?”

“Flinging yourself off roofs like that.”

“Why?” Because it scared the hell out of him, for one.

“Just don’t.”

“Oh please, like you’ve never done dangerous shit like that before.” You narrow your eyes at him, reading his face. “Are you telling me you care about me?”

“No.” His nose twitches. “Just don’t throw yourself off buildings when I’m around.”

“What about when you’re not?”

“As long as I’m not there to witness it.” He shrugs, spinning on his heel to leave. Technically he preferred if you didn’t do things like that at all.

“Fine. I’ll just have my clone try out all the dangerous stuff for me.”

He stops in his tracks. “You have a clone?”

“Well,” You squint, “no. But I’m working on it.”

He scoffs, shaking his head. “Bye Y/N.”

“You know, it sounds an awful lot like you’re saying we’re friends.” Your whole demeanour changes and he already knows what’s coming.

“I never said that,” he argues vehemently. “All I said was that I can’t have your murder on my hands.”

“Thus implying that we’re friends. In a fucked up, enemies kind of way.” You positively beam at him. “Aw, Barnes, that’s adorable.”

Adorable? Adorable?

“I hate you.”

“I love you, too, bestie,” you gush, dumb grin on your face. “I’ll make us friendship rings next time. What are your thoughts on matching tattoos?”

He wants to cry.

______

By the time Sam walks into the meeting room, the session’s already begun. He shoots an apologetic look to a monologuing Steve before taking his place at the nearest chair available.

Something sharp pokes his thigh. His wings are off and in the backpack beside him, but then he remembers your little inventions that were still in his pocket.

He tries not to make much of a noise while he pulls them out, giving them a look over to make sure they’re not broken.

“Watcha got there, Big Bird?” Tony asks lowly from beside him.

“Something that Barnes’ enemy made.” Sam holds it up slightly.

“The one he’s been rendezvousing around town with every weekend?”

“That’s her.” He’s about to put it in his backpack when Tony stops him.

“Pass that here for a second.” He recognises it immediately for what it is, interest piqued.

Sam hands one of them over while he puts the other back in the bag. It’s a metallic circle, not bigger than Tony’s palm, with a thick leather strap to tie it around your palm.

“She made this?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Sam mentions towards Bucky who silently slips into the conference room, standing in the corner near the potted plant since there were no more chairs left.

“The balance has gotta be off on this thing,” he mutters to himself, wholly ignoring the brooding man standing in the corner like a Christmas tree.

“She seemed to be manoeuvring it fine,” Sam catches the eye of a lower ranking agent who makes the mistake of glaring at him for talking while the meeting was going on. A few seconds later the agent hastily looks away and doesn’t turn around for the rest of the hour.

“Could be better.” He uses a much more intricate model for his suits, although this isn’t even half-bad for a homemade version. “Do you know how long she took to make this?”

“Buck says she comes up with a new one every week, so I’m guessing that long.”

It had a few glitches but it was incredibly refined for a week’s worth of work.

“Interesting.” He gives it a quick overlook before handing it back to Sam who drops it into the bag.

He casts a swift glance at Bucky, noting how he wasn’t even paying attention to the meeting but rather to whatever he had tied around his metal wrist, fidgeting with it with his thumb.

Tony has an idea.

And that was generally bad news.

Next part

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #mcu fic #bucky fic #bucky barnes fic #bucky fluff #bucky barnes fluff #bucky angst #bucky barnes angst #harmless fic #winter soldier x reader #Winter Soldier #bucky barnes #bucky

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kiyosamu · 4 years ago

Text

painful reminders

(part 1/3)

——— ♡ ———

pairing: suna rintaro x female reader

genre: angst to comfort

cw: brief mentions and descriptions of assault (not from suna, not domestic violence), reader experiences post-traumatic stress, panic, anxiety

——— ♡ ———

“hey, i’m here now. you’re safe.”

the words echoed in your mind for a few seconds too long. you were hardly able to register their meaning while under the influence of your deep fear. you felt nothing but dread; impending pain and horror that you were sure was coming at any moment.

——— ♡ ———

suna slumped his body on the window of the train, trying to contort his larger than average build into a position comfortable enough to get a few moments of rest before arriving at his stop.

“attention passengers. there is a situation and we need to make an emergency stop at the next station. please gather your belongings and file out of the train as soon as we arrive.”

weird, he thought. must be another petty robbery. maybe someone refusing to get off of the tracks, or something exciting, like a mass murderer.

suna caught himself just as he had the thought, stopping his process immediately.

he shook his head, unimpressed at his ability to appear removed and disinterested no matter the situation. not to mention the scenarios running through his mind; scenarios that would terrify any sane person with an ounce of emotion no matter who they were.

suna scoffed and sat up to grab his bag.

of course, he knew it was nothing like that. that’s probably why he didn’t stay in his head and scare himself with anything further. why bother upsetting yourself by simply letting your mind run away from you? stupid, he thought. he never understood overthinkers. not only was it not productive, but it was exhausting.

thankfully, this station was only about a ten minute walk from the next, the one he was supposed to get off at. even though he was coming home from a tiring practice, the athlete never seemed to run out of stamina.

suna squinted as bright blue and red lights lit up the dark streets. rain began to pour and suna cursed his odds. the forecast predicted only a 10% chance of rain, and he just so happened to be getting caught in that unlucky percentage when he had to walk even further just to get back home.

he groaned and pushed his hair out of his face. the rain soaked his clothes, his sweatpants and shirt clinging to his body. suna felt disgusting and suddenly the thought of a hot shower was even more appealing than the leftover onigiri he had waiting in his fridge.

just as another thought of self pity was about to cross his mind, another police car flew by him.

must be pretty bad, wonder what happened..

that thought was as far as his curiosity went. if it was major, he’d probably hear about it on the news or in the paper. if not, well, it really was none of his business.

as he turned down the next street, he saw four police cars all blocking off the station. police tape sectioned off the area and officers stood with their arms crossed and chests pushed out as other vehicles pulled in.

he blinked a few times, taking in the scene for a second before realizing he’d stopped walking. suna brought himself back to reality and stared at the ground with his hands in his pockets. while he was shamelessly nosy as a teenager, he’d grown into quite the reserved young adult who knew how to mind his business.

unfortunately, that new trait flew out the window the second he heard a familiar voice.

——— ♡ ———

“officer, please. he said he’d come back for me, i don’t feel safe going home… i don’t have family here, i don’t have anywhere else to stay-“

“look. you’re just scared, but you’re not injured.” the man stared down at you with an emotionless glare. “there’s nothing more we can do for you. the suspect assaulted two other women and they’re cooperating. why are you asking us for more when we’ve done everything we can so far?”

his voice was as cold as your quickly declining temperature, the rain soaking through your t-shirt and causing you to shiver.

“he.. he held a knife to my throat. there’s-“ you lifted your hand to lightly trace the marks on your neck that had been squeezed in place only an hour before. “he said he was going to kill me but…” you trailed off, the night’s events playing over and over in your mind with no indication of stopping the endless repeat. “but then he saw the lights and ran. he said he’d be back for me…”

the officer sighed.

“criminals often utter threats to make their victims submit to their words and give in. they want to commit their crimes as quickly as possible. we’ve gone over this, you didn’t know him. he doesn’t know anything about you-“

“but what if he does?!” you shouted, tears streaming down your cheeks before you’d even realized you were crying.

“listen ma’am, you need to calm down-“ the officer grabbed your wrist and you ripped it away from him, covering your mouth and staring in disbelief at the officer. you were in shock. you couldn’t process what was going on, let alone what had happened. you didn’t know what to do.

you froze as you felt an arm around your shoulder. a familiar voice spoke your name with tenderness and a low, empathetic tone that you’d never heard from him.

“i’ll take her home, officer. she’s my neighbour.”

while that was true, you were still surprised at the gesture. rintaro suna had been your neighbour for 3 years. the two of you were friendly; you’d been to each other’s homes a handful of times and sometimes would share a meal or drop off some food that was too much for one person.

you were both single, living alone in your apartments. although you weren’t super close, you always felt like he was a friend. a slightly distant, reserved, quiet friend, but a friend nonetheless.

the two men exchanged words for what felt like an eternity before suna squeezed you closer to him, guiding you out of the area and walking you towards your apartment.

you opened your mouth to say something. anything. even just a greeting, a thank you for the escort home.

when you stopped walking, he stayed close to you and looked down at your expression.

you opened your mouth to say something but the moment you did, you relived the traumatizing situation once again and fell into a deep panic.

“i-i-… no-n..” your words broke as you felt your body shaking. the cold rain was doing nothing to help your condition, and if you could describe it in any way, it was like losing control of your own sanity. you felt the panic wash over you as the phantom pressure of the knife pressed against your windpipe - your mind quite literally putting you in a choke hold.

“hey. i’m here now, you’re safe.”

suna wrapped his arms around you protectively. he didn’t know why, he didn’t even really know what was going on, but he knew that all he wanted to do in that moment was to prevent anything further from hurting you.

you clutched at his hand and dug your nails into his skin. you didn’t mean to, you didn’t even realize you were doing it. suna would be lying if he said it didn’t hurt, but he ignored it and held you close against him until you felt like you were okay to walk again.

when you caught your breath, you pulled his hand away from your face.

“i’m sorry… i don’t know what happened.” you choked out.

“you had a panic attack.” he said quietly. “we don’t need to talk about anything right now, though, okay? let me get you home. you went through something horrible and you’re freezing cold. it’s just a little more up the road, can you make it?”

you nodded, dropping your hands to your side and suna instinctively held onto the one closest to him.

“i’m scared to stay in my apartment… alone…” you whispered.

“you can stay with me.” suna said this with more certainty than suggestion. if anything, it was a statement. he was planning on having you stay over or even him staying at yours. whatever worked, he just didn’t want you to be alone and he knew you had nobody else to call.

he had never planned to get involved in your personal business like this. he didn’t want to be the weird neighbour, and he already worried if bringing you food some nights would make you uncomfortable.

those thoughts were always put to rest whenever you smiled at him and graciously accepted his gestures. your warm smile and the way your cheeks made your eyes squint when you were really happy was an image he’d always have trouble shaking out of his head for the following days.

suna snuck a glance at you as the two of you started to walk again. your smile that he swore could light up an entire city was nowhere to be seen.

he would do anything to see that smile on your face right now.

you looked like a shell of what you once were. he knew that you’d experienced something traumatic, but seeing you like this made him feel something hard in his chest.

you didn’t deserve that.

a painful squeeze developed deep inside him when he thought of what your face must have looked like when it had happened. a sweet girl who seemed to always bring out the bright side in any situation. you’d made him sweets (that he secretly broke his athletic diet for) when he’d lost an important game, and always made him smile whenever he saw you.

it was different right now. he felt anxious. he squeezed your hand in his and you didn’t even flinch, didn’t even seem to notice as you looked ahead with a blank stare.

on the other end, his touch alone was enough to give you the tiniest bit of comfort. it wasn’t much, and you were still scared, but it was enough to get you home.

——— ♡ ———

part 1 | part 2 (in progress) | part 3 (in progress)

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gallifrey1sburning · 4 years ago

Note

Hi 👋 a prompt you can take or leave: Draco is very unsure whether he is being flirted with or this is an extension of their office rivalry that he doesn't understand (or the reverse!) Ty!

@skeptiquex and @ihavesomeideawhatimdoinghere, I read both of your prompts back to back, and they worked really well together, so I squished them into one. I hope you enjoy! Thank you both for sending me things, and thanks to @mxmaneater for the fast beta ❤️

—

The Tally

“One more for me!” Harry crowed, scratching a new tally mark next to his name on the chalkboard behind Draco’s head. “Better luck next time, Malfoy.” The board had a partner behind Harry’s desk, and the tallies recorded on one would reflect on the other, but Harry took great joy in invading Draco’s space and rubbing his victories in his face at every opportunity. Not that Draco was any better. It was part of the fun.

“Please, that one hardly counted,” Draco objected reflexively. “You only caught him because you tripped, for Merlin’s sake. Hardly an impressive arrest.”

Harry shrugged and grinned, perching on the edge of Draco’s desk. “An arrest is an arrest.”

“Whatever,” Draco grumped. He and Harry had been playing this game for over a year now, and the margin was always extremely close. Harry was just barely ahead, at the moment, but Draco would catch up to him soon. He and Parvati had a potions ring bust coming up that Harry and Weasley weren’t involved in. Once that was done, he’d have overtaken him, and the smug expression currently gracing his colleague’s face would disappear along with his lead.

“So, any big weekend plans?” Harry asked, ignoring Draco’s pout.

Draco dropped the expression when it failed to produce the desired reaction. “Nothing too exciting. Yourself?”

“I’ve got tickets for the Puddlemere game on Saturday, actually. Ron was supposed to come, but something came up, so I’m trying to find someone else who might want to go. It would be a shame for the ticket to go to waste.” Harry was biting his lip and looking hopeful, and for just a moment, Draco thought— but no. If he’d wanted to ask, he would have asked, he told himself firmly.

Taking care to keep his expression light, Draco pondered for a moment before saying. “I think McCutcheon is a Puddlemere fan. Maybe try him?”

“Oh, right.” Draco almost thought that Harry looked disappointed for a moment, but on second glance, his expression was clear and friendly. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll see if he’s free. Have a great weekend, Draco. Parvati.” He knocked his knuckles against the desktop twice before straightening and walking off, hands in pockets. Draco watched him go, sighing as he rounded the corner. It really was a pleasure watching him walk away.

He was brought back to reality by his partner smacking him in the back of the head with a stack of paperwork. “Ow! What the fuck, Patil?”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she hissed, looking even more exasperated with him than usual. “Every time he’s over here, you spend the rest of the day mooning, and he finally asks you out, and you say NO?!”

“I do not moon!” He did moon, and he knew it, but he wasn’t about to say so. He still had his pride. “And he didn’t ask me out, either.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“He didn’t! He just said he had an available ticket! He very clearly had an opening to invite me, if he wanted to, and he very clearly didn’t.” There had been a number of moments like this, in recent months, and Parvati kept insisting that Harry was flirting with Draco. For his part, Draco kept insisting that she mind her own business, because she obviously could not read Harry Potter at all if she thought he was interested in Draco.

“You are an absolute moron.” Parvati shook her head in disbelief, but let it drop.

—

They made the bust on Tuesday. Monday had been a rush of preparations and contingency planning and final logistics, and the stakeout had lasted all day, but in the end, it had been worth it—they’d brought in six players in one sweep and were confident that at least one of them would give up the rest in exchange for sentencing leniency. Draco had dropped into bed exhausted but elated.

He was still riding high when he sauntered into Harry and Weasley’s office on Wednesday. He leaned ostentatiously over Harry’s desk, stretching almost directly over his perpetually-tousled head to grab a piece of chalk and carefully add six perfectly straight tally marks to his own side of the board, giving him the lead by three.

“And that’s how you do it,” he gloated as he straightened, smirking smugly down at Harry. “Suck it, Potter.”

Across the office, he heard Weasley groan and mumble something that sounded suspiciously like ‘he wishes’ under his breath. Harry looked a bit pink, but still smirked right back up at Draco, so it was probably just the heat. “Played that one close to the chest, didn’t you? But don’t worry, I’ve got something in the pipeline. I’ll be back on top before you know it.”

In Draco’s peripheral vision, he saw Weasley bang his head against his desk. “I’m getting tea,” he announced, stalking out of the office. Draco raised an eyebrow at Potter, who shrugged.

Now that he was here, Draco didn’t quite want to leave yet, so he searched for something else to talk about. “How was the game?” he finally asked.

“Huh? Oh, the Quidditch game. Yeah, I didn’t end up going, actually.” Harry rubbed the back of his neck, not making eye contact. “Wasn’t really in the mood.”

Draco wrinkled his brow, not really sure what to make of that, but then Harry asked a question about the potions bust, and Draco forgot about it, instead focusing on a dramatic retelling of his glorious victory.

—

Harry’s next arrest came after a particularly brutal double homicide. It was all anyone was talking about when he arrived that morning, but, despite Draco’s expectations (and perhaps anticipation), Harry didn’t appear at his desk to brag about it. He was feeling a bit anxious by the time he finally saw him passing by his door in the late afternoon, and the feeling only grew when he did. Harry had bags under his eyes, and his usually confident posture was slumped. He didn’t look as though he had slept. He also didn’t look like he was going to stop.

“Hey,” Draco said, rising from his desk to catch him before he passed by completely. “Haven’t seen you today.” Are you okay?, he didn’t say, but he thought it was probably audible in his tone anyway.

“Oh. Hey, Draco.” Harry looked up at him, seeming a little lost. He looked hollow behind his eyes, and Draco could feel his eyebrows furrowing in concern. “Yeah, I’ve been…” he trailed off and glanced past Draco, into his office, to where the chalkboard hung prominently on the back wall. He seemed to curl even further in on himself. “I don’t want to count this one, okay?” he said, finally. “It doesn’t really feel like a victory.”

“Yeah, of course,” Draco said immediately, and he suddenly felt completely helpless. “Can I—” he hesitated, and then put a tentative hand on Harry’s slumped shoulder. “Do you need anything?”

He was half sure that Harry would pull away from his touch, but he didn’t. If anything, he seemed almost to relax into it. “I’m okay,” he said, and it wasn’t convincing, but Draco didn’t want to push it. “Thanks, though.” He reached up and gripped Draco’s hand where it lay on his shoulder, so briefly that his hand was gone before Draco could even fully register it, and then stepped back, continuing on his way.

Draco stood and stared at the chalkboard for a while when he got back to his desk. Then, he picked up his eraser and carefully removed one tally from his own side.

—

Their next bust, they were on together. A small Neo-Death Eater group that the department had been keeping an eye on, but who hadn’t done much of anything until now, had suddenly decided to make a grand statement by threatening a large-scale attack on Diagon Alley if their (entirely insane) demands weren’t met. Needless to say, the Ministry was not interested in negotiation, and the whole Auror force had been called out en masse.

Somehow, Harry and Weasley had ended up working in tandem with Draco and Parvati, and now Harry and Draco were back to back in a dead-end alley, dueling a pair that seemed to be the last desperate stragglers, while Parvati watched the street, ready to block anyone who might try to interfere, and Weasley stood to the side, clutching his ribs and sweating but still managing to hold a fairly steady shield charm. There was an unconscious, Incarcerous-ed body on the ground near him; his Stunner’s aim had been true, but the assailant had gotten off one last hex before it hit. He wasn’t in imminent danger—Draco had been hit by the same spell before, and it was extremely painful but didn’t cause any lasting damage once reversed—and although that would be easy enough to do, they didn’t have a wand to spare at the moment.

Harry and Draco worked together like they’d been born to it, and if their respective partnerships hadn’t been working so well for so long, Draco might have considered it a waste that they weren’t paired together. Spells flew around them like fireworks, and they cast and dodged and shielded and attacked without speaking, without pause, until, suddenly, it was over.

“Ron!” Harry cried as soon as his wand dropped, but Parvati was already by his side, countering the spell, and Ron’s body relaxed almost immediately.

“I’m fine, mate. Great work.”

Harry breathed out a sigh of relief and then turned to Draco, chest still heaving with exertion. Draco couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face even as he tried to catch his breath. He could feel sweat tracking down his face, his neck, his back, and he was streaked with dirt and—he suspected—blood; but they had won, and no one had died, and he was almost high on the rush of it. “I’m not sure who those count for,” he said, half laughing. “It happened too fast. Did you catch who took them down?”

Harry was grinning now, too, the buzzing energy of their win almost visibly coursing through him. He beamed at Draco, and he looked so fucking beautiful, even though he was just as dirty and dishevled as Draco was, that Draco couldn’t help but glance, just for a second, at those lips that he’d surreptitiously observed for so long as they stretched wide with joy. When he snapped his eyes back up, however, it was clear that Harry had seen, because the smile had morphed into something that Draco couldn’t put a name to, and his eyes were searching Draco’s for something. And then—

“Fuck it,” he heard Harry say, and then there were hands on either side of his head and he was being—quite thoroughly—kissed, right there in the alley. He melted into it immediately, pulling Harry closer to himself almost instinctively. There was an iron tang of blood as their tongues met, and Draco wasn’t sure whose it was, but he didn’t particularly care. He didn’t care about much of anything, right now, besides Harry’s hands, and Harry’s lips, and the press of Harry’s chest and hips against his own, and whether Harry might want to reenact this moment later but somewhere with a bed and a lot less clothes.

“I TOLD YOU!” Parvati yelled triumphantly in the background.

“Fucking finally.” Ron sounded both amused and exasperated.

Draco ignored them in favor of sliding his hands into Harry’s birdsnest of hair, pulling lightly and making him groan into the kiss. He supposed this one counted as a win for both of them.

Also on AO3

#drarry #drarry fic #drarry fanfic #draco malfoy #harry potter #my writing

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wxlfbites · 2 years ago

Text

Judaism probably was a terrible example, I’ll give you that. It was the first thing that popped in my head.

But again, you still misinterpreted me. I didn’t say they couldn’t identify as a therian. I said that they can’t identify as a therian JUST BECAUSE of that. There needs to be an identity established. Which you’re literally saying yourself. But for some reason also contradicting in the same sentence.

I feel like I’m being extremely patronizing because I’m having to like try to explain in such simple words to get people to stop twisting my words or just otherwise ignoring what Im saying to further their own narrative. But. “I identify as a wolf therian because my soul is that of one” is the statement I’m going to use:

My identity as a therian is not defined by HOW I am a wolf but purely by the fact that I AM a wolf. I could wake up one day and go “I don’t think me being a wolf is spiritual after all”.. does that mean I can’t identify as a wolf therian anymore because the cause has changed? Or am I still a wolf therian because I still identify as a wolf? I can not dumb this down any further.

I am literally running laps around myself at this point trying to talk any sense to people that just have it made up in their minds that they are the victims of gatekeeping and anyone who does tries to explain things in a way that is anything other than what they want to hear is just a big old dumb meany.

I literally don’t understand. I have made post after post today reiterating the same exact shit. Over and over. In different ways so people can try to understand it in a way that makes sense to them. And still. I get these responses of being an asshole for one reason or another. I’ve got other therians lined up around the block agreeing with me and saying how malicious it is that all the people disagreeing with me are doing so because you’re ignoring or twisting my words just because you want a gotcha moment. I’ve got other therians agreeing with me that it’s pointless to continue to argue good points because it’s clearly not doing any good when the people I’m arguing with just wanna throw the victim card no matter what I say. “You’re gatekeeping my fun” “you’re excluding me from using a word that was never meant for me anyway so you’re mean”.

I’ll just go be a grumpy old boomer and watch ya’ll paint your own “rules” over the old ones. That’s fine. I gotta get a new lawn cause these kids wont stay off this own. 😤

Since we're seeing TikTok therian discourse again, here's our response to some talking points:

"They're conflating therianthropy with doing quadrobics/ wearing gear, etc"

Just because a lot of therian tiktoks involve these things, that does not mean that the actual individuals in the videos are equating the two. And even if they did outright say "being a therian is when you do quadrobics" - so what?

"But that's not what being a therian is"

There is no one singular definition of therianthropy and there never will be. You cannot possibly define it in a way which perfectly includes all therians and perfectly excludes all non-therians.

If a 12 year old on tiktok thinks being a therian is running on all fours and wearing a tail, then thats what being therian is to them. And you have absolutely no business telling them that their experience with therianthropy is incorrect.

"But it's spreading misinformation"

Misinformed teen therians on TikTok are not our enemy. The best way to combat misinformation is not to diminish their self expression, but to share your own experiences of therianthropy. That way they become exposed to more forms of it and learn about it!

Trends are always going to change and evolve. Therianthropy and other related experiences are going to take on new shapes depending on the time, place, and the people expressing it.

The reason there's so much focus on quadrobics and gear is because it's fun. It's fun and novel and is a very physical and loud form of self expression. It also fits the platform far better than long-form personal essays.

Sure, some of these kids will eventually stop caring and no longer identify as a therian after the trend dies down. But more still will develop a more complex relationship with their therianthropy, and seek out communities like this one where they express themselves in more in-depth ways.

Trying to create a separation between older, more "serious" communities and the tiktok therian will only create a rift, and make it harder for those who do want to explore other experiences and self expression.

So tl;Dr the Kids are alright. Nobody is the authority on therianthropy, how it's defined, or how it's expressed. Times change and so will the subculture around being a therian.

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cheekygreenty · 4 years ago

Text

I Know You part 2 - The Darkling x Reader

I knowwwww I took my time writing this but I think it deserves another part? Let me know 🥰

Read part 1 here.

You missed the warmth of the Little Palace and you hated that you missed Aleksander's warm embraces even more. As the tracker led you further up north, Alina and Mal reminisced on old memories and ultimately you stopped listening and kept to yourself, leaving you at the mercy of your own thoughts which were solely devoted to your intense betrayal. How could I of been so blind? You loved this man with your whole being and up until a week ago you would've gone to the ends of the earth for him and he had the audacity to lie to you. My Aleksander never existed, he was a figment of my imagination.

'Let's set up camp here.' Mal said putting his pack down with a wince. His shoulder was still badly wounded, your poor patching up did little to soften the pain. You pulled out your provisions and shared them with the others, thinking back as to whether selling the horse was a wise decision for mere hardtack.

'What do you think the General will do once he finds you with me?'' Alina never mentioned Aleksander's name and you guessed it was to avoid being questioned by Mal.

'Probably brand me a traitor and kill me.' You faced the truth head-on 'He was about to lock me away before I escaped and I'm guessing he's even angrier now.' You blurted as you chewed on the flavorless biscuit.

'Why are you here then? You can get away from Ravka, go to Ketterdam and never look back.'

'He'll find me, Alina. I might as well do something meaningful before I die.'

'What if he won't kill you?' Mal spoke up.

'I'd rather he did.' The thought of being Aleksander's prisoner struck a somber note in you and not for the reason they assumed. You didn't trust yourself enough to keep up your broken heart in Aleksander's presence for too long, that kind of love doesn't fade and around him, you were a slave to that emotion.

'We'll find the Stag and I can defeat him Y/N.' Alina sounded hopeful but at her words, you recoiled. Firstly, you knew she would fail, possibly killing Mal in the process but secondly, her statement ignited a brief spark of anger in you, a feeling of protectiveness for the man that was willing to take your life away from you. Stop being foolish. The man has killed countless times and will continue to commit atrocities in the name of power. You're better than that.

The rest of the night carried on as usual, Alina applying a salve to Mal's wound and you sitting against a tree, contemplating your life. Perhaps you should go to Ketterdam. You have connections there that would hopefully prevent you from becoming an indenture, but those connections could be used against you, a way for Aleksander to find you. Perhaps Novyi Zem would work for you. Alina and Mal had spoken about escaping there if she failed to defeat the Darkling, but you knew it was pointless. You had been by his side long enough to know there was truly no way you could hide and survive.

You know the parts of me that I showed you. His words echoed in your head as you tried to settle to sleep. Although you had uncovered his true face, you clung to his words like a lifeline. He showed you his loving side, he told you his name and his complicated relationship with Baghra, his mother. He trusted you with those things and he loved you, so he said. I do love you.

The tears came once again like they did every night. You had quickly come to understand that Alina and Mal were blind to your waterworks and were under the impression you hated Aleksander and wanted him dead as much as they did. If only they knew you fell asleep dreaming of his arms around you, whispering sweet nothings like he always did.

The snow was a thick blanket now as you approached the Fjerdan border. Mal was certain the Stag would be found any day now and with each passing moment spent dredging through the snow, you cursed your decision of coming with them. You haven't been of much use to the pair on the journey anyway, except letting the wind carry the smoke away when the fire was burning or blowing snow out from the trees when you settled for camp, but Alina insisted you were necessary. From Mal's behavior, you gathered he felt uneasy around two Grisha, so maybe Alina wanted you here to know she wasn't alone and her powers weren't strange.

You listening half-heartedly as she explained to Mal she was the one who needed to kill the animal but stopped when you heard a rustling in the distance.

'That way' Mal noticed too

'Hang on'

'What are you doing'

'I need to get closer to it' You blocked them out, your senses wholely devoted to watching the magnificent Stag. Saints, it's even more beautiful than I imagined it.

You saw her reach out and touch its snout, a light dome so bright erupting from their contact you shielded your eyes away. In doing so, you noticed the faint outline of a blue kefta in the trees, quickly heading for you.

'NO' you tried to block the shot but it was too late, the dome fell apart.

'The animal is not meant for you' Zoya bellowed as she fought to secure the stag.

You fought her in return, desperately attempting to knock her and the others off their feet but two strong hands caught you, restricting your movement.

'Take her' You heard his voice before you saw the contrast of his black attire against the snow. You fought against the soldier keeping you trapped, thrashing and kicking with all you could muster, completely ignoring the screams and shouts erupting from Mal and Alina.

He came to face you, eyeing you up and down, as if searching for any injuries. Even in the dark, you noticed the tiredness evident in his eyes with a hint of desperation. But no relief or love directed to you.

'Ivan, subdue her' was the last thing you registered before your eyes closed shut and deep sleep came over you.

***

You woke with a start, having felt no time pass in your dream-lacking slumber. The snow from earlier was replaced by lavish silks and drapes in a warm tent, his tent. You would recognize the eclipse sign from a mile away, especially on the embroidered cushion beneath your head or on the buttons of the coat you were donning. His kefta. He must’ve put it in you while you were passed out.

There were no cuffs around your wrists or restraints around your ankles as you lay in his comfortable cot surrounded by the sound of a crackling fire in the stove that always brought some level of comfort to you.

There was nobody in the tent with you, but you suspected a guard was posted by the entrance flap to ensure you didn't try anything stupid. You hesitated to get up. Will he be waiting for me? You didn't want to face him or fight him. The thoughts of a civil conversation with him withered away the more you reflected on your throbbing feeling of betrayal, but there was still that small voice in the back of your head, or rather your heart, that wanted to forget about everything and just lay with him like you did every night. The conflict caused you to cry yet again that night for exactly the same reasons as before.

You finally got up once the last tears dropped, your light footsteps carrying you over to the small fruit bowl sitting by the lamps. It was rewarding to taste the sweetness of a grape after so much time spent eating hardtack and hard cheese, all Saints willing, you'd never have to look at those things again. You heard the tent flap open and slowly, you turned to face Aleksander.

'You've been crying.' He observed and took off his heavy cape, laying it carelessly on the cot you had just slept in and standing away from you, keeping his distance although his own heart dropped to see you in such a state.

'Do you blame me?' Your voice was strong despite your appearance,

'I hope you are well-rested. The journey here mustn't've been very kind to you.'

'It was better than being your prisoner and rotting away in a cell in the Little Palace.'

'Do you really think so lowly of me Y/N?'

'I don't know what to think Aleksander.' You hugged his huge kefta closer to your body, enjoying being enveloped by his scent. Another thing that brought you comfort.

'I never lied when I said I love you.' His voice grew softer but you willed yourself to ignore it. The small voice told you to run up to him, kiss him, hold him and tell him you loved him too, but the logical part kept you firmly planted in your place.

'If I recall correctly, you said 'I love you but'...'

'You never stuck around to what I wanted to say next.'

'I doubt it would have fixed this.' You gestured to the lengthy space between your bodies and he took it as an opportunity to walk closer to you.

'Is there anything we can do to fix this?' He asked desperately and your heart leaped in your chest but it didn't last long as his hand caught your attention, The Stag.

The realization flooded over you with a jolt of pain for the second time in two weeks. Unable to hold it back, a bone-shattering sob erupted from you at the impending doom he was about to unleash on Ravka.

His eyes followed your own with anguish so obvious it hurt him, but he had to avert them fearing if he watched your pained expression any longer, he would rip out the amplifier himself without a second thought just to stop the heart-breaking sobs shaking your body. He reached out for you but stopped himself, the last thing she needed was his comfort of all people, he thought.

But you yearned for him despite the situation, so when he stepped closer once again, you rested your head on his chest still uncontrollably crying.

‘Why are you doing this’ your hands now held a deathly grip on his shirt, but all he could think about was the fact that you sought his touch out first, maybe there is some hope left.

‘For Ravka, for all Grisha.’ The answer felt automated and scripted but it was all that remained of his goal. There was nothing else, no one else, that would benefit from this except him and her.

He wrapped one arm around you and when you didn’t pull away, his other arm went to your waist, pulling you close and pressing his lips to the top of your head in an attempt to soothe you. Ironically, it had the exact opposite effect as you cried even harder because despite everything he’d done and everything he was about to do, you didn’t want to leave his side.

The conflict was rampant in your head and part of the shed tears were in an effort to calm your mind.

‘I’m going on a skiff journey across to Novokribirsk in a couple days. I wish for you to go back to the Little Palace.’ He spoke but didn’t loosen his comforting hold on you.

‘Why?’ You managed to croak out.

‘You want to come with me?’

‘I don’t know’

‘Let’s sleep. You’ve had a long day.’ He only briefly let you go to take off the kefta he placed on you earlier, but he was right back at your side as you settled against his chest on the cot. Although you had only just woken up from Ivan's induced sleep, your mind was tired from the self-hate your logical side spewed at you.

‘This is wrong. They’ll hate me for this.’ I hate myself for this.

‘If it is so wrong then tell me to go away. I’ll listen.’ You knew he would but you wanted him here with you.

‘Were you ever going to tell me?’

‘Yes. But I stopped myself after seeing how happy you were. I couldn’t bring myself to stop that.’

‘And look where it brought us. Look at me now.’ You raised your head from his chest and looked him in his onyx eyes. They radiated affection and forgiveness, both of which you were ready to give him. I’m a fool for this.

‘And I will spend the rest of my life trying to make you happy Y/N.’ The determination in his voice pulled at your heart, for the next thing you knew your lips were on his, kissing him as if there was no tomorrow.

-----

Taglist (tell me if you want to be added !!)

@aleksanderwh0r3 @theonelittleone @searching-for-gallifrey @lostysworld @0-artemis @exo-1204 @staradorned @bookfrog242 @simp-for-ben-barners @keepdaydreamingbb @acciorudolphx @pansysgirlfriend @pansysgirlfriend @justmesadgirl @theriveroftruth

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kaistarus · 4 years ago

Text

Caught In The Act

Pairing: HinataxReader

Words: 3K

Summary: You don’t really plan out the consequences of hooking up with your roommates best friend until she walks in on the aftermath and everything spirals into disaster

A/N: I don’t think this is NSFW, but it’s heavily implied/referred to throughout? It does however have Yamaguchi being a little shit which is *chefs kiss* my favorite kind of Yamaguchi

Masterlist

The worst melody you’d ever heard sounded throughout your room, dragging you from a peaceful dream you’d already forgotten. Groaning, you attempted to block out the sharp ringing with your comforter, but scowled when your tugs were made useless by an unusual weight. You blearily peeked down in search of the problem and froze, your heart's acceleration jolted your brain into alertness.

What you discovered to be holding your blanket down was a whole ass arm across your stomach with a whole ass person attached to it sleeping beside you.

You tried to keep your breathing even as you grasped the reality of your situation-disheveled autumn hair brushed lightly against your shoulder and soft breaths tickled your arm. It’d be easier to admire Hinata’s content features if you weren’t having numerous flashbacks involving embarrassing noises, words you didn’t think possible coming out of your mouth, and several explanations for why your legs were so sore. Your face burned as you stared at Hinata’s peaceful expression in horror and jumped when the back-up alarm began ringing.

At your sudden movement Hinata’s nose wrinkled and he began squirming uncomfortably. He furrowed his brow, opening his enough to peek at you holding your breath beneath his arm. You could see the cogs turning behind his amber eyes as they darted around the room and took everything in past their sleepy haze.

Finally, they landed back on you and he gave you a lazy smile, “hey.”

Your heart picked up its pace at his morning voice’s low rasp, and rather than having any normal reaction to your situation you flung your limbs at him to shove him as far away as possible. Hinata yelped as he tumbled over the side of your bed, hitting the hardwood floor with a solid thump.

“What the hell?” He poked his head over the side of your mattress with a half-assed glare, punctuating his question with a deep yawn. It was hard to take him seriously with his wild bed head and half-lidded eyes.

“Your alarm keeps going off,” you answered lamely, trying to fight down the amusement at how even after he combed his fingers through his hair it remained a chaotic mess.

“Oh,” he used your bed to push himself up, stumbling a bit as he began searching for where his pants ended up. Your eyes widened when all of him was in sight and you pulled the comforter up to shield your eyes. “Sorry, I forgot that I have to-what’s wrong?”

“You’re not wearing clothes.”

“Obviously,” you heard the creaking of your dorm’s shitty floorboards as Hinata moved around the room. “Is that bad? I feel like at some point you saw my-”

“But now we’re in the daytime,” you looked at the floor around you and sighed in relief when you found a t-shirt nearby to put on. Now you just needed pants… “Everything is completely different when the sun is out.”

Hinata was silent for a while and if it wasn’t for the hardwood flooring giving him away you would’ve thought he snuck out. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s hard to explain,” you said, coming up for air after you heard Hinata stand beside your bed. He held out his sweatpants to you with a lopsided grin that made your heart do a weird flip. “Thanks.”

He shrugged it off, sitting beside you on the mattress as you wiggled into his sweatpants. “I have to practice with Kageyama in an hour. Do you wanna go to the dining hall or something?”

You raised a brow at his nonchalance, sitting beside you just scrolling his phone like things were completely normal. “You want to go get food?”

“Yeah, I’m hungry.” He gave you a quick once-over and smirked. “Why did you wanna do something else?”

“No,” you put your hands in front of you and ignored the slight pout on his face. “I just figured you would want to talk or something.”

“Oh,” he fiddled with his cellphone and stared at anything that wasn’t your eyes. “No, we don’t have to make it a huge thing if you don’t want to.”

“Okay,” you nodded to yourself. “I mean, it isn’t a big deal anyway. We’re friends and this stuff just happens sometimes.”

Hinata now faced you completely and he was giving you his classic sunshine smile. “Exactly, this is definitely normal for friends.”

“Right, so why even waste energy worrying about something that meant absolutely nothing.”

Hinata’s smile faltered a bit and you were too aware of how his eyes had drifted to your lips. “Uh-huh, totally nothing.”

“It’s probably best if no one finds out though,” you nodded to yourself, warmth creeping up your neck from the growing intensity of his stare. “Just because it would be annoying explaining this to everyone.”

Hinata hummed, tilting his head with a curious look that had you fisting your comforter. “So, hypothetically, if it all means nothing and no one even knows about it…” Hinata had at some point scooted himself a little too close for your liking, his face inches from yours. “There would be nothing wrong with doing it again, right?”

You narrowed your eyes at his challenging smirk, “I feel like there’s some logic missing there.”

“But the end result is pretty good,” he said, barely above a whisper, pressing his forehead against yours. You couldn’t argue that. Not with how your heart was beating sporadically in your chest and your fingers were already itching to be tangled in his hair.

“Careful,” you whispered, trying to match his overconfidence, “keep acting like this and I might just start thinking it means something.”

Hinata rubbed his nose against yours lazily while forcing down a smile, “is that a no?”

You answered by placing a hand against his cheek and slotting your lips together. The pace he set was much more languid than last night and you felt a soft smile grace his lips as he cradled the back of your head, beginning to lower your head on to the mattress. The moment Hinata decided to hover over you was when you heard the door to your dorm creak open.

“Hey, sorry I’m back so early. I forgot about our exam tomorrow.” Yachi shouldered passed the door with her back facing you carrying a hefty duffle. You and Hinata reacted in the only logical way-staying completely frozen and hoping for some reason she wouldn’t see you. “Did you and Hinata actually study without me or did you… forget…”

When she looked over her shoulder, eyes finally locking onto the comical scene you’d presented, her jaw went slack and face turned a deep red.

“Wait, Yachi,” you tried stopping her before she dropped her bag and quickly hurried out the door. “It’s not what it looks like!”

Hinata looked taken aback by your statement, “what else could it possibly be?”

You glared at him, kicking him off you and chasing after Yachi-before leaving the room you heard a faint ‘again?’ shouted from the opposite side of your bed. Yachi hadn’t sped-walked too far and you thankfully managed to catch her at the end of the hall.

“Yachi, wait,” you tugged her hand to slow her down. “I swear it wasn’t what it looked like.”

That made her pause. She looked at you dumbfounded with both hands on her hips, “what else could it possibly be?”

“That’s what I said!”

You spun around to find Hinata, standing in the center of the hallway with arms crossed and staring at you quizzically as if you were the weird one in this situation. You gave him a quick once-over to confirm that yes, he was still wearing nothing but boxers.

“What are you doing?” You asked him frantically.

“Helping.”

“Why would you think-” You pinched the bridge of your nose and took a calming breath. “At least put some clothes on, Hinata.”

“You’re wearing all of my clothes,” he said, gesturing to all of you.

You pulled your t-shirt out while glancing down with a raised brow. Huh, well look at that.

“I really don’t care if you guys are dating,” Yachi put her hands up defensively. “It’s not a big deal and it’s really none of my business any-”

“That’s just it,” you pointed at her. “We aren’t dating. Not even close. I would never date Hinata.”

“What?” Hinata looked down at you annoyed. “Why not?”

“Because you’re…” You furrowed your brow, trying to search for any of the reasons that normally would be easy to find, but for some reason your mind was blank. “Because you’re Hinata.”

“If anything that’s more reason to date me,” Hinata gestured to himself. “Look at me. I’m the whole package.”

Yachi’s eyes flickered between you before she hid a sly smile behind her hand, “oh, I see.”

Hinata cocked his head to the side, “what do you see?”

Your cheeks warmed. “You don’t see anything. You put that face away right now.”

Hinata began prying Yachi for answers while she continuously turned away from him with a mischievous smile. You let out a relieved sigh that it was basically over when a door at the opposite end of the hall creaked open and you were faced with a yawning Yamaguchi.

He carried his toothbrush and toothpaste loosely in one hand while the other rubbed sleep from his eyes. He raised a brow at you three, slowly working to process the scene before him in his still foggy state. Yamaguchi’s head tilted idly as his eyes darted between everyone, eventually lifting his toothbrush and pointing it in Hinata’s direction.

“Why is Hinata wearing boxers in the middle of our dorm building?” He narrowed his eyes further and moved the toothbrush to point at you, “and why are you wearing Hinata’s clothes?” Yamaguchi aimed the toothbrush slowly toward your door that still hung wide open and you could practically see the lightbulb go off in his mind before the devious smirk crossed his lips. “Holy shit. Did you guys actually f-”

“Shut up,” you slammed your hands over your ears. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“Ouch,” Yamaguchi mockingly grimaced at Hinata. “That’s not a good reaction dude.”

“What do you-that’s not what-” Hinata stomped his foot. “It was a great time. Probably one of the best ones ever.”

“Whoa, let’s not get crazy.” You rolled your eyes. “You were alright, but definitely not-”

“Wha-alright?” Hinata threw his arms up. “The hell do you mean ‘alright’?”

“I think she means mediocre,” Yachi piped up from behind you with her hands still covering her smile.

“A little above mediocre, but…” you weighed your hands back and forth to signal that mediocre was just about right and Hinata stared at you completely baffled.

“Ouch,” Yamaguchi snickered.

“I can’t believe you thought I was mediocre,” Hinata furrowed his brow with a half-assed glare.

“Well, do you want me to lie to you?” You scoffed, crossing your arms. “Hinata, you almost came in your pa-”

He slapped a hand over your mouth with pinkening cheeks, “you know what? I think we all are mediocre sometimes at things, but with practice… uh… we get better.”

Yamaguchi raised an amused brow before another lightbulb went off. “Holy shit, so that means you guys were the ones who-oh my god, Tsuki’s going to be pissed when he finds out.”

“Pissed about what?” You asked after prying Hinata’s hand off your mouth.

“I woke up to a bunch of texts about how he couldn’t study because people were banging too loud,” Yamaguchi shrugged. “I’m a heavy sleeper, so I didn’t notice but he was not happy.”

“Holy shit, are you serious?” Hinata asked, sounding borderline giddy at the discovery. You scowled, smacking on the stomach to knock him down a peg.

“Hinata, that’s humiliating.”

“Oh, right.” Hinata forced a frown. “I am so embarrassed.”

“Think about it,” Yachi tapped her chin. “Doesn’t Tsukishima always wear headphones too?”

Yachi and Yamaguchi stared at you both quietly with wicked smiles before you groaned dramatically into your hands, your face was on fire while Hinata just laughed beside you, planting a hand not so comfortingly on your head. You knew in that moment your life could not get any worse.

Which was why that was the moment Tsukishima stepped out of his room a few doors away with his backpack slung over his shoulder. You almost thought you’d be lucky enough that he wouldn’t notice you, but luck wasn’t on your side as he glanced up, doing a double take at your group in the center of the hall.

It took him seconds to dissect the scene before his glare became piercing, “you mother fuckers.”

“What are the chances we all just pretend this never happened?” Hinata chuckled awkwardly while Tsukishima stomped menacingly toward him.

“What are the chances I get the sound of you moaning out of my head without someone killing me?”

“Slim?” Hinata squeaked.

“Do you think I wanted that bull shit taking up useful space in my brain?” He asked, towering over Hinata as he gulped and shook his head no. Tsukishima turned to you and you stiffened, immediately shooting your stare to your feet, “and you, forcing me to learn every one of Hinata’s kinks. I should take both of you outback and-”

“I don’t have kinks,” Hinata scoffed, turning to you to back him up, but you just looked away. “Oh fuck, do I have kinks?”

“That is not the point of our discussion, you pint-sized-”

“But aren’t kinks like a psychology thing?” Hinata looked back at you concerned. “It’s not pee, is it?”

“Why would that-I don’t know,” you looked at him warily. “Did you want to pee on me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean ‘i don’t think so’.”

“I don’t give a fuck if you’re peeing on each other,” Tsukishima pinched the bridge of his nose. “Just do it at Hinata’s dorm building next time.”

“That won’t be a problem.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty confident it’s not pee.” Hinata nodded to himself. “I really like volleyball… is that a kink? I don’t know if that’s how it works. Wait, can you combine sex and volleyball? That sounds like a kink. I want that one. Can that be it?”

“I would love to study your mind, dude.” Yamaguchi nodded in approval and Hinata just smiled back as if he’d been given a huge compliment.

“That’s not what I-” You took a calming breath. Hinata was going to be the death of you. “I mean, me and Hinata aren’t happening again, so no one has to worry about anything.”

“Wait, you guys aren’t secretly dating?” Yamaguchi gestured between you both with a raised brow.

“No, they’re hooking up.” Yachi rolled her eyes.

“Oh, fuck off.” Tsukishima scoffed. “Hinata keep your volleyball sex out of my dorm buiding. Got it?”

“Yes sir,” Hinata saluted before a melodious tune came ringing from your dorm room. His eyes darted to a wall clock and his body stiffened. “Shit, I was supposed to be at the gym already.”

“I should probably give you-” Before you could finish Hinata was jogging down the hall. He returned with his backpack and you opened your mouth to point out you were still wearing all of his clothes, but he already had his lips smashed against yours in a chaste kiss. You had your eyes wide, staring at him dumbfounded before he pulled away with a sunshine smile.

The moment he processed what he’d done you saw his brain shut down as he stared blankly-Yachi’s giggling made a perfect background noise for his malfunction.

“What the hell was-”

“We’ll talk about that later,” he chuckled awkwardly, giving you finger guns while walking backwards down the hall. “I’ll text you or call you or something.”

“I won’t answer,” you called after.

“You will,” he said before he turned away. “Because I’m gonna offer you food and you love free food.”

Dammit. He had you there. You were a sucker for anything that wasn’t dining hall food. “Well, I won’t be happy about it!”

You heard his laughter chime before the closing of a heavy door told you he was too far to keep up the argument. You huffed, crossing your arms and glaring down the hall.

“How long till he realizes he’s in his boxers?” Yamaguchi piped up.

“He’s probably more nervous of (Y/N) than walking around campus in his underwear,” Yachi reasoned with a hand on her cheek.

“He should be,” you snorted.

“You guys wanna get breakfast?” Yamaguchi asked, “all this making fun of Hinata has made me hungry.”

“I’m going to the library.” Tsukishima left down the hall without a glance back at you and your shoulders sagged.

“He’ll get over it,” Yachi placed a comforting hand on your shoulder while pushing you forward. “Just give him time.”

“Okay,” you murmured.

“Hey, so what is Hinata’s kink?” Yamaguchi asked, leaning into your vision.

You rolled your eyes, “praise.”

“That makes too much sense,” Yachi hummed.

“Hinata would get off on being told he’s great,” Yamaguchi shook his head, throwing the door open at the end of the hall and welcoming the fresh air. “Well, next time you get to have volleyball-sex. Whatever the fuck that is.”

“I don’t think even Hinata knows that.” Yachi giggled.

As you tried to keep up with Yamaguchi and Yachi combining the actual logistics of volleyball to sex you found yourself admitting in the back of your mind that you really were all talk. You kind of liked that people knew about you and Hinata and maybe… maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if spending time with him became a regular thing.

Unless it involved whatever this volleyball-sex thing was, then you’d be fine without him.

#hinata shouyou #hinata shoyo #hinata x reader #hinata x you #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu!!#haikyuu #yamaguchi tadashi #yachi hitoka #tsukishima kei #hinata shouyou x reader #hinata shoyo x reader #hinata shoyo fluff #hinata smut #hinata shoyo oneshot

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demonsandco · 4 years ago

Note

Oooh for the NSFW one, 1 and 8 with Levi or "let me hear you"

Prompts : 1. for one muse to give the other oral and 8. to undress my muse

Pairing : Levi/GN reader (no mention of sex for reader)

Warnings : Top reader. monster dick Levi

Word count : 1.2k

Leviathan wasn’t sure how he got into this situation, pinned down in his tub with you on top of him, your knee pressed between his legs and your mouth on his neck, but he knew that there was nowhere else he’d rather be at the moment.

“This is getting in my way. Why don’t we take it off?” You whisper into his ear and nip at his lobe, as you slide your hands across his sides under his shirt. The shirt’s collar is much too high for your liking, blocking his torso from view. What better way to fix the issue than simply pull it off? Levi nods eagerly in response and arches his back to let you reach behind him and pull his shirt up. You make sure to slide your hands over every new inch of skin that you expose until you can take it off all together.

The moment he’s shirtless, you take him in, admiring how far down his chest his blush reaches. Your view is abruptly taken away by Levi bringing his arms up, as though trying to hide his face and chest from your view.

“D-don’t just stare at me!” Levi pouts while peaking out at you through his fingers, trying to gauge what you’re thinking.

You grab his arms with a tsk. “None of this now, Levi. I just wanted to admire you. Now be a good boy and keep your hands up above your head,” you intend for your last statement to be an order, but with how quickly his arms shoot up you doubt the pact even had a chance to take effect.

With his arms pinned and torso bared, it was clear for you to see how excited Levi already was from the way he squirmed, desperately trying to grind against your leg. You choose to ignore his movements for now in favor of teasing him further. Soft gasps and high pitched whines grace your ears, as you return to assaulting his neck and heading down to his chest with kisses and nips, leaving behind a trail in your wake.

It isn’t until Levi’s whimpers turn into shy pleading that you finally pull back and look at him. You had barely done anything to him so far, yet he already looked like a mess with his eyes glazed over and drool dripping down his chin. The weak wiggle of his hips as he searches for any sort of touch brings your focus back to your original goal: make Levi feel good.

You place your hands on his pecs and start sliding them down with your nails against his skin to draw more breathy noises from him. Stopping at the hem of his sweatpants, right above his very prominent bulge, you glance back up at his face.

“Help me get these off for you?” Before the words even finish leaving your mouth, Levi is already raising his hips, letting you pull his pants down past his hips.

You don’t waste time in getting them all the way off and toss the pants to the side where they join his earlier discarded shirt on the floor of his room. Now left in just his boxers Levi pleads at you with his eyes. His mouth hangs open as he sucks in a breath in anticipation for your touch. With how patient he’s been, you decide it’s about time to reward him and slide your hands up his thighs to cup his bulge. You can’t help but smirk at the large wet spot on his boxers before you lean down to press your tongue flat against his erect cock through the fabric and slip your fingers under the band, preparing to pull them down.

“W-Wait!” Levi looks like he suddenly remembered something important, “You can’t! I- it’s not- I’m not, you know… normal.. down there. You’ll think it’s weird!”

Curious, you continue pulling down his boxers and break eye contact with him to see what he meant by ‘not normal’, only to gasp in surprise. Instead of one cock, Levi has two. Both of them look painfully erect and shine wetly from the copious amount of precum leaking from them.

“See! I told you! It’s weird and gross! You probably think I’m nothing but a y-yucky pervert now-” Levi’s rambles are cut off by a sharp keen. While he was busy worrying, you’d taken the initiative to wrap your lips around the tip of one of his dicks and started sucking. Not wanting to leave the other one out, you wrap your hand around it and start stroking. He’s already dripping so much that your hand has no problem sliding over his skin. You take your mouth off of him briefly and blow on the tip to get his attention, causing a shiver to shoot up his spine.

“Levi, look at me. Let me hear you. Show me how good I’m making you feel.”

An embarrassed whine leaves his mouth, but he does as he’s told. Pathetic little noises leave his mouth and they get louder as you start working both his cocks. You slide your thumb over the tip of the one in your hand, earning yourself a squeal, as you work on taking the one in your mouth deeper. While working your tongue against the underside of it, you start humming softly while bobbing your head up and down. The mixed sensations from both his cocks bring Levi close to the edge alarmingly fast.

“S-so good… mn… I’m gonna- can I... ah… please let me-”

His words are slurred and interrupted by gasps and moans, but you understand what he needs. You pull off of his cock and start jerking them both off with your hands instead.

“Go for it, baby boy. Cum for me”

Now that he has permission to cum, Levi’s hips seem to gain a mind of their own. He thrusts up against your hands with increasing desperation. It only takes him a few thrusts to reach his peak, his hips stuttering and freezing in the air, as broken moans leave him before he cries out your name. His thighs quiver and twitch, as you stroke him through his orgasm. His cum spurts across his stomach and chest while you keep touching him, not stopping until he tries to twist his hips away with a pathetic whine.

Levi’s chest shudders as he pants for breath, but he looks just about ready to fall asleep, despite still the sweat sticking to his skin and the cum painted across his abdomen.

“I know you’re tired, but we need to get you cleaned up, Levi,” you prod at his sides gently, encouraging to sit up and lean against you.

“Could we… take a bath? Together, I mean…” He asks hesitantly while refusing to meet your gaze. You make sure to quickly agree before he can take your silence as a rejection.

“Perhaps then you can return the favor?” You offer teasingly.

Levi seems very keen to take you up on that offer, and it doesn’t take long for you to realise just how much stamina a demon can have.

#obey me #obey me shall we date #obey me leviathan #smut prompts #lime time #its been years since i wrote an actual story hnn #ive never written smut before so i hope its ok!!#obey me smut

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hardskz · 5 years ago

Text

a penny for your thoughts.

pairing — han jisung x female! reader

genre — trope inversion of the soulmate au, college au, enemies to lovers, angst and fluff-ish, smut; oral, possessiveness kink, praise kink, safe word, size kink, first time

synopsis — life isn’t easy when you belong to the 1% of the world population that has a soulmate, know who your soulmate is and happen to be utterly in love with said soulmate’s best friend. alternatively, jisung can hear all of your unfiltered thoughts and has heard enough of your horny fantasies to the point where he wants to throw up, so he takes matters in his own hands.

note — i think i’m gonna cry this work is my 11k word BABY i’ve never been THIS invested over a fic. this is purely self-indulgent and an emotional rollercoaster ride if you ask me. this fic is all over the place it’s chaotic and i apologize in advance for many italics you are welcome i hope you CRY and SUFFER with me because completing this bitch was a midlife crisis in itself. that being said, i appreciate any form of constructive criticism so pls go ahead and rip my baby apart sdkjl

“You’re staring again,” Hyunjin notes. Seungmin and Jeongin stifle a burst of laughter while Felix, whose head is resting on Hyunjin’s lap, sends you a look that resembles Candace from Phineas and Ferb whenever she finds her brothers creating some whacky futuristic shit, laughs like a madman and then resumes to call her mother with an ear-splitting MOOOM! because she’s so certain that her brothers are busted this time.

“Am not,” you huff as you tear your eyes away from the guy just sitting a little bit farther away from you, basking in the warm glow of the sun. Today he’s sitting in the perfect angle, giving you the best view on his side profile. His signature cap is perched right on top of his head but even then, you can see how his eyes brighten up and how the corners of his lips tug upwards as he laughs at his friend’s joke.

“You’re a worse case than the Mary Sue protagonist of every romance anime ever.” Seungmin snorts before he playfully nudges your side with his shoe. “Just say you want Seo Changbin to bang you and go.”

“Hey! We have a child present!” Hyunjin chastises, to which Jeongin rolls his eyes.

“I’m not a child. We’re all in fucking college.”

“Fine, not a child then. The baby has been corrupted! Don’t swear, it sounds so wrong coming from you!”

“Shut up. It’s called freedom of speech!”

“It’s ‘shut up Hyung’ to you!”

Felix groans in distress and is probably rethinking his life choices. Seriously, what does Felix, resident hopeless romantic, see in Hyunjin? Sure, he’s good-looking and a great friend when he’s not bitching around or hovering over the nearest trash can after taking too many shots. But a romantic? Please, Hyunjin can’t even eat without making a mess out of his shirt.

“I don’t want him to bang me,” you mutter and receive a collective ‘yeah sure’ look. “Fine, I don’t want him to bang me only. He’s nice,” you retort before your eyes flit back to him for a millisecond. By now, Changbin has put his hands on the grass and is leaning back, enjoying the sunlight while listening halfheartedly to the other guy blabbering.

“And hot. We get it. Now get dicked,” Seungmin deadpans, earning flabbergasted looks from everyone and a smack from Hyunjin.

“Show a little more empathy, you dickwad. She’s whipped.”

“Anyway—“ Felix sits up, earning a pout from Hyunjin but he blatantly ignores it, and directs the conversation back to the previous topic before the other two bump heads, “(y/n), you have his number. You’re not strangers, so why don’t you just make a move?”

You glance at him with horror in your eyes. “What do you expect me to do? Ring him up and ask him to hang out with me because I find him cute?”

“Uh, duh? Last time I checked, that’s how you ask someone out.”

“Absolutely not.”

“New idea.” Seungmin butts in. “Why don’t you ask Han Jisung—“

“No.”

“Agreed.” Hyunjin shoots you a nod of approval before Seungmin can start yet another interrogation about your bitter hatred towards Jisung. Jisung, who happens to be said friend of Changbin that is laughing beside him right now. “He must think he’s so much better than us because he’s hanging out with the senior geniuses of the music production major. Then again, Seo Changbin and Bang Chan are on a different level than us commoners.”

“Speaking of Chan,” you quickly say to steer the conversation away from the personification of everything you hate. “Where is he? It’s so weird seeing the trio incomplete.”

This time, Jeongin chimes in. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Chan and that one language major — you know, the one who collapsed a while back?” When all he’s met with are clueless faces, Jeongin sighs. “Seriously, you guys should keep up with campus news. I swear, everyone and their mothers already know by now. But anyway, they’re soulmates. It’s also the reason why Chan has been pulled out of the boxing team until the end of the semester and had to cancel their training camp as soon as she broke down.”

Felix does a double-take. “But Chan’s the ace of the boxing club!”

“It is what it is.” Jeongin stretches his legs out, shrugging. “What else is to expect when you have the proximity link and need to be around your soulmate within a certain distance unless you want death?”

“Poor guy. Must be a smack in the face for him, now that he’s got a soulmate and happens to have the worst link one could have.” Seungmin says.

“The tattoos are worse though.” Hyunjin fires back. “I mean, you’re literally born with a tattoo of your soulmate’s name and then grow up knowing that you have one? And even if you never meet them, you won’t have better chances with others if you want some romance. Who in their right mind wants to have a lover who’s got someone else’s name tattooed on them since birth?”

“No one.” You chuckle. “Absolutely no one.”

In another lifetime, another universe, you and Jisung would probably be on better terms. He’s sunshine on legs and looks decent from an objective point of view.

In another lifetime, another universe, you’d like to believe you’re childhood friends and have been neighbors ever since your first shit in your diapers. Perhaps you would be clowned from being inseparable once in a while, but you’d go with it and then shrug it off as if it was nothing.

In another lifetime, another universe, you’d like to believe that being soulmates doesn’t equal the downfall of two people. Sure, the fact that people are bound to each other and the danger of growing too dependent on that person remains, but it probably won’t be so frowned upon. Probably. Hopefully.

However, as much as you want to twist it, another lifetime is not this lifetime, the reality.

In reality, you and Jisung are only neighbors because the universe has some kind of inexplicable hatred towards you. Seriously, you must’ve done something wrong in your previous life to be punished in this one. And because the universe has sadistic tendencies and loves to make you suffer, the laws of the universe are just as equally fucked up.

The concept of soulmates is a lot of things, but most of all, it’s a mystery. There are endless possibilities for soulmate links, not all of them discovered. And unlike popular belief, soulmates do not have to necessarily share the same link. So voilà, even more fuckery from the universe.

There’s only one reason that justifies your wholehearted, unfiltered hatred towards Han Jisung. Well, only one reason that seems justified in this lifetime.

The tattoo is simple; just fine black characters under your collarbone that are nicely hidden under high-cut shirts.

But the fact that it’s his name tattooed on you since birth remains.

“Let me crash here for the night.”

“No.”

“Let me crash here for the night, please.”

“My answer is still no.”

The exasperation is plastered on Jisung’s face as he tries to keep his temper in check. Truth be told, it’s damn satisfying seeing him wanting to rip your head off but refraining to do so. Perhaps you’re enjoying this more than you expected at one o’clock in the morning. For the past five minutes, Jisung has been asking you to let him stay over for the night. You’d save him out of his misery and help a neighbor out who locked himself out of his apartment at this hour — well, if he wasn’t Han Jisung.

By now, he’s growing more impatient with every further rejection. “Oh come on, all my friends live on the other side of town and you can’t expect me to ask the old grandma next door! At this rate, I’m gonna freeze to death overnight!”

“Then go break a window or something,” you deadpan, ignoring the dramatic hand gestures he’s making to accentuate his words.

“The fuck? I’m not going to break into my own place.”

Not wanting to draw out the pointless conversation any longer, you’re about to slam the door shut when he blocks your action with his foot. “C’mon, just this one night. Please.”

He’s not budging anytime soon. His bullheadedness reminds you of Seungmin, who always tries to get Hyunjin wasted whenever you attend those Greek frat parties. Seungmin, who always succeeds in getting Hyunjin wasted, followed by Hyunjin hugging a bucket for the next few hours as he tries to get over the hangover. With a defeated sigh, you gesture Jisung to come inside and don’t wait for him until he’s taken his shoes off at the entryway.

“Look, I know you don’t like me—“

“Well, ‘don’t like’ is putting it very lightly—” you scoff once he’s caught up to you in the living room. It’s not exactly spacious; the couch takes up most of the room and college assignments are spread all over the minuscule coffee table.

“You could at least treat me like a decent human being.”

That statement is enough to get your ears flaming. You whip your head in his direction, voice getting louder. “How can I when your existence is making my life worse than it already is! And I mean it literally! Just seeing your name whenever I look at myself through the mirror sickens me!”

“Stop acting like you’re the only victim here.” Jisung snaps back in the same manner. If there was a little bit of etiquette in the first place, it has all vanished now. “I’m not having it easier when all I hear from you is the dozen ways you want Changbin to fuck you dumb!”

You freeze.

“Cat got your tongue? It’s already bad enough that you have those kinds of thoughts about my best friend every single day.”

“But I thought— y-you had the proximity link?!” This has to be a joke. A very bad one at that. His proximity link is the very sole reason why you lived next to him. His soulmate link is the only reason why you’ve been stuck together like glue since you could walk.

Jisung taps his foot impatiently, running his hand through his hair. “That’s what I thought too until I started hearing things that nobody said around me. First, it was just a few thoughts every other day, but now you’re like an annoying radio that I can’t switch off.”

“Why didn’t you tell me then? I would’ve—“

“Stopped fantasizing about Changbin’s dick? And then you would’ve jumped to the next person. I don’t care if you like him or not, it’s none of my business. Changbin’s hot, anyone with eyes can tell. Besides, it’s not like you have a chance anyway…”

You feel your blood boiling at his underlying message and cross your arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jisung doesn’t bat an eyelash and says in a mocking tone as if stating the obvious. “No doubt that Changbin will make you feel good. But could you return the favor?”

That’s a low blow. Even for Jisung, that’s a low blow.

“I get that you’ve got a dirty mind. But those are just fantasies. Could you really execute them just the way you had in your head? You don’t even have experience in the first place.”

“If I sucked you off right now, you wouldn’t even be able to speak properly!” God knows what went over you when you countered. At this point, rage has taken over your brain and you don’t even realize what you just said right away. Not that it matters anyway; all you see is red.

Jisung just raises a brow, clearly unimpressed by your outburst. “Prove it,” he challenges casually and then flops himself onto the couch, legs spread wide. It’s an open invitation. “Go ahead, make me see reason with your oh so mind-blowing skills.”

The only thing you’re able to do physically is gape at him. He is joking, right? As if he actually means it—

“I knew it. Shameless in your head but too flustered to say it out loud, let alone following up with your bold statements.”

That seals the deal. You’re fuelled by anger and the desire to prove him wrong as you drop on your knees and are on eye level with his crotch. However, your spirit dissolves the longer you silently stare and realize that you have no fucking clue on what to do. Jisung is painfully aware of that too.

“I’m more terrified than turned on seeing your angry face.” He lets out an exasperated sigh before he pulls you up and directs you to sit on his lap. “Obviously it’s not working when neither of us is in the mood. You gotta get in the mood first,” he mutters, hands settling on your hips.

The look in his eyes is more composed now, but you can tell he’s being observant. As if you have clues written all over your face, he keeps you under his stern gaze. Then his eyes droop lower to your lips and he slowly leans forward.

Not even a second later, you firmly plant your hands on his shoulder and push him back. “No lips.”

If Jisung is judgemental about your sudden stunt, he doesn’t comment on it. “Anything else, your royal majesty?”

You’re too tired to react to his mockery and roll your eyes. “No marks.”

“I can work with that,” he mumbles more to himself rather to you. Then he leans forward again and buries his face in the crook of your neck. Surprised by his actions and new to the unfamiliar sensation, you tense up. Jisung seems to take notice of that too.

“Relax,” he orders, rubbing circles on your hips to help you loosen up.

Well, that’s easier said than done. It’s already bad enough that you’re gradually exposing yourself as the complete amateur you are, and out of all people who could’ve been the first to do any form of sexual advances on you, it just had to be Jisung. Perhaps you shouldn’t have rejected that one kid in high school who was the only one who ever had a crush on you. Even if that kid wasn’t your type and not a serious commitment anyway, maybe you would’ve at least some sort of experience with dick.

“A-ah—“ your breath hitches when he nips on the patch below your earlobe. He smiles against your skin as if he just made some scientific discovery and swipes his tongue on the same spot, eager to make you squirm. Not wanting to slip up anymore, you clamp your mouth shut with a hand.

“Let me hear you, baby. Just relax, I got you.” When the fuck did his voice start to sound lower and raspier? Where did ‘baby’ come from? All rationality and resistance leave your body when he wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you closer to him.

The cologne of musk lingers strong on him, almost intoxicating even, and you can’t form a cohesive thought anymore. The only things you are painfully aware of are an arm forcing your chest flush against his and his hot breath all over your neck.

You’re so far gone that you fail to notice that you’ve started grinding on his lap. Jisung moans softly into your neck as he encourages you to move with his hands.

“On your knees, baby,” he whispers after a while. A rush of disappointment runs through your veins once he detaches his lips from you and slides you off his lap, but all of that is forgotten once you see the prominent bulge in his pants.

Right. There’s a reason why you ended up in this predicament in the first place.

Jisung urges you to touch him with a simple nudge. “C’mon, baby. Take it off.”

You don’t waste time discarding his sweatpants. Just when you’re about to tug his underwear off, you notice the wet patch on the fabric. A surge of mischief washes over you as you boldly cupped his hard-on over his boxers, causing an obscenely loud moan from him.

He flinches, definitely not expecting that brashness from you, and throws his head back. “S-stop teasing me already and take that goddamn thing off or God help me what I’m going to do if you push my buttons.”

That. That was a threat. That dealt much more damage to you than you like to admit.

As much as you want to watch him break and see if he’d make his threats come true, you decide against your feelings and hook your fingers under the waistband and tug the fabric down in one swift motion. A groan leaves Jisung as his cock, fully hard and leaking precum, is exposed to the cold air. He’s certainly above average; on the longer side probably, and you’re conflicted on whether to think fuck, I want him in my mouth right now or fuck, how on earth is that supposed to fit into my mouth?!

You don’t get far with your inner conflict when a hand grabs a fistful of your hair and slowly urges you closer. The next thing you know, something is tapping your lips and before you fully register it, the tip of Jisung’s cock lies heavy on your tongue.

You carefully look up and meet Jisung’s hooded eyes. His shirt has ridden up a bit and flashes just a little bit of his toned stomach. That’s just enough of an indicator to see that Jisung is holding himself back, in case his irregular breathing hasn’t been a dead giveaway.

Jisung opens his mouth, about to say something, when you give an experimental suck on his dick. “Do something— f-fuck, a little more, baby.”

That’s enough to build your confidence up. You slowly take in more of his dick, sucking carefully and making sure to cover your teeth. The rest that doesn’t fit in your mouth is barely covered with your hands, and you messily try to coordinate your hands, switching between rubbing the base of his dick to cupping his balls.

“Mmh, use more pressure,” Jisung whispers, not trusting the stability of his voice when you fondle with his balls. A groan leaves him when you suck harder on his cock and switch back to swirling your tongue around. For a total beginner, you are holding yourself up better than he expected. Fuck.

“Focus on the tip fir— hhh- aa-ah...” His brain blacks out for a moment when you swirl your tongue around his tip and dare an experimental hum, the vibrations going straight down to his dick. The grip on your hair loosens, but it’s still firm enough to experience a sharp tug. “You’re doing good baby. So good.”

The combination of his sounds, the decent taste of precum on your tongue and the way his adam’s apple bops is enough to send you into sensory overload. You notice the way Jisung tenses his thighs, as to keep them still. You’re about to pull out completely to prevent your drool from getting on your face. However, before you get the chance to complain, he forces his length back on you that it grazes the back of your throat, nearly making you choke.

“Fuck, I— I’m gonna— s-soon—“ he hisses and you take it as a sign to speed up. At this point, your jaw hurts and a mixture of drool and precum drips down your chin. It’s borderline disgusting if you think about it, but the delectable sounds leaving Jisung compensates for it.

He sharply tugs on your hair, ordering you to pull off, but you slap his hand away. “I’m going to spill in your mouth if you don’t pull off right now—“ Jisung chokes on his words when you interrupt him with a hum as if to say so what? It doesn’t help that you’re looking up at him with teary eyes and a lot of conviction, even though you’re visibly struggling to keep half of his dick in your mouth.

When he cums, it’s accompanied but drawn out moans, and you forcing yourself to swallow the horrible texture. It’s not horrible per se, but you’d gladly refuse to swallow a second time if you were given the choice.

Jisung looks down at you with flushed cheeks and is about to wipe off the drool or cum or whatever liquid is staining your bottom lip, but you quickly block his hand. “I’ll clean up by myself.”

For a minuscule second, he looks defeated; he looks borderline disappointed, but before you can pinpoint his feelings for sure, his expression changes. “But what about you?” he asks, eyes raking down your body and stopping at the waistband of your pants.

“I’ll deal with it on my own.” You shrug, avoiding his eyes. All of sudden, you find it hard to breathe in the room as the realization settles into your brain. You just sucked off Jisung. Jisung, out of all fucking people.

“You sure?” Your eyes flit to him who looks like he’s been observing you the entire time. His breathing has calmed down, his lips look a little bit plumper than before and his hair sticks out in all different directions. Looking at his current state makes you feel sick, and your undying hatred for him starts growing again. It’s your fault that he looks so fucked out and—

Why the fuck did you even do that?

“Yes. Now stop asking before I change my mind and kick you out.”

Before he can have the last word, you turn on your heels and rush into your bedroom, ignoring the fact that your underwear is practically drenched.

You wake up to the smell of pancakes emerging from the kitchen. “What are you doing?”

“I’m making breakfast?” Jisung throws you a questioning look and then plates the last batch of pancakes from the pan. “It’s the least I can do after you were friendly enough to let me crash on the couch.”

Your eyes wander to the countertop to the two plates stacked with pancakes. Jisung finishes up the second plate and hands it out to you.

You stare dumbly at the plate. It’s too early for your brain to mouth filter to work, so the first thing you spit out is, “How do I know you didn’t poison it?”

“Are you fucking serious—“ Jisung squeezes his eyes shut, mutters something inaudible under his breath before he puts on the fakest smile he can muster. “I can take a bite if you really insist.”

“Give me that plate.” You point to the other plate on the counter. Presentation-wise, it looks the same as the one Jisung is offering you, minus the visible steam.

“There. Wanna switch again or can I finally eat?” he scoffs when you walk past him to get cutlery and sit at the dining table; it’s essentially a round wooden table where one of the legs is about to break. Two plates and a pitcher at most take up the entire surface. You really should consider buying a new table, but you have better things to spend on rather than that.

From your peripheral vision, you see Jisung rolling his eyes. Perhaps you were making an entire unnecessary circus, critically cutting through the pancake and inspecting each and every side before stuffing it in your mouth. But again, in your defense, it’s too early in the morning to show basic etiquette towards him out of all people.

You have to admit that visually, the pancakes look good. What you didn’t expect were the pancakes to taste just how they look. It looks like you couldn’t contain your surprise in you, judging by the amused smirk that finds its way onto Jisung’s face as he claims the chair across from you.

“As if you could actually cook,” you splutter because there’s no fucking way you are giving him that satisfaction of the day.

However, it seems to bemuse him even more. “You literally eat this every day and know the recipe by heart. With the excessive number of times you recite the ingredients a day, obviously, something got stuck in my brain,” he explains while cutting through his own portion.

The rest of breakfast is spent in silence. You both finish at the same time and while you’re washing the dishes, he’s stayed put in the chair, mindlessly checking something on his phone.

“You didn’t have to cook, you know. You could’ve just left.” you start. It’s already awkward enough that he’s still here. Bloody hell, you should’ve just waited with the plates and ushered him out of your place instead of just getting away as fast as possible from the table. Now that you think about it, this was probably the only time you two were somewhat amicable at such proximity. (Even if you didn’t talk at all. Still, it’s progress.)

He drops his phone on the table with a soft ‘bang’. “It’s the least I could do. Besides, I was starving too.”

“In other words, you’re taking advantage of my fridge?”

“Exactly.”

Just as you’re drying your hands, he’s about to leave. “I’ll get going, lecture’s starting in a few. And, uh, thanks for letting me stay here.”

You just shoot him a weird look. “You already thanked me once. How often do you wanna repeat yourself?”

Jisung rolls his eyes. “Fine, next time I’ll just leave without a word then.”

It’s when he’s finally out of the door that his last words sink in.

“Yo, I have pics of sweaty Changbin in a jersey. How much do you wanna pay for those gems?”

You nearly choke on air. “What the fuck?” Really, that’s the only appropriate reaction.

“Hyunjin, this needs more context.” Felix looks like he’s seriously second-guessing his taste in men before shaking it off with a sigh and elaborates. “He’s been trying to find out some scoop about Chan for the campus blog and caught him in his angry boxer mode and Changbin was also there assisting him. Hey, did you know that Chan doesn’t tape his hands before punching the bag? Fuck, that’s so intimidating but so hot at the same time—“

“Yah! I’m your boyfriend! How can you say that in front of me?!”

Changbin. Changbin in a jersey. Changbin in a jersey and drenched in sweat. And Hyunjin seriously has HQ pictures of that Changbin.

It really, absolutely shouldn’t have been the first thing that crossed your mind, but the idea of that Changbin — bonus if he still has anger pent up in him — barging into your place and instantly throwing you on the bed—

“I’m not a perverted creep who’s gonna buy pictures of him that he doesn’t even know exist. Besides, isn’t that a violation of his rights? He never consented to those pics. This is college, you’re only working for the campus blog, not fucking Dispatch.” you deadpan.

“So you don’t even want to take a sneak peek at a picture?”

“No.”

You barely stepped a foot into your apartment when Jisung storms out of his own place and stops in front of you. “You fucking liar.”

“Excuse me? What the— hmph!”

The next thing you know, Jisung forces his way into your hallway, slams the door shut and crowds you against it. His face is invading your personal space, eyes enraged and jaw locked. Even though his anger is far from justified as you haven’t glanced at him ever since he stayed over, a tiny part of you believes that you pissed him off for good. It's not the first time you witness him angry. However, it's the first time you witness him look as if someone murdered his family and was trying to get revenge.

“I thought you took care of it yourself!”

“Took care of what?”

“Did you already forget that I can read your mind?!”

You scrunch your nose, trying to connect the dots in his words. It doesn't take long for you to realize that there’s no point in trying. A frustrated groan leaves you. “Why are you getting so riled up? I just breathed and you stormed into my place!”

“‘Bullshit. You weren’t just breathing,” he snaps, and you flinch when his hand lands a few inches beside your face with a loud pang. “You were thinking of Changbin again! And I mean that in the thousand sex positions and locations you want him to bang you kind of thinking! And also—“

“Also what?”

“I know you’ve been pent up for days. Seriously, why don’t you just get off like every other sane human being?”

His brutal delivery leaves you flabbergasted. How the fuck does he know that? No. No. No. He doesn’t know. He can’t. Just because he can read your mind doesn’t mean that you didn’t pleasure yourself after giving him that blowjob. Jisung’s probably bluffing — he has to be bluffing.

“W-why should I answer you?” you stutter. Suddenly the walls look much more interesting. When was the last time you painted the walls? Maybe it’s time to switch things up—

“Are you really about to get all cocky with me? Give me a break.” Jisung chews on his bottom lip after little deliberation. “You wanna know why? Because one of my best friends is going through a hard time that can utterly destroy his entire future thanks to the fucking universe! If that isn’t stressful as it is, I also see and hear all kinds of things you want Changbin to do to you. And your fantasies are also affecting me.”

You stare at him as if he sprouted eight new legs. “So you’ve also been…?”

“Sexually frustrated? Fuck yes. And it’s all your fault. So take responsibility and do something against it before I do.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“So what if I am?”

A cold shiver runs down your spine once you meet his stone-cold gaze. Frustration is displayed all over his features, from his labored breaths to the raised brow. He’s not playing mind games this time, he’s actually frustrated.

There are a billion red flags, a billion blinking signs saying NO DON’T YOU EVEN THINK OF DOING THIS! DON’T BE A FUCKING IDIOT in your mind. There are so many countless reasons why you should listen to your head, but the way Jisung is lusting after you is terrifyingly attractive.

You don’t trust your voice to respond verbally. Instead, you look down at your trembling hand and tug at the hem of his shirt. It’s just then when you also realize that your thighs are clenched. Fuck.

Jisung takes the hint. In the blink of an eye, he’s yanking you to your room, kicks the door shut with a loud ‘thud’, and manhandles you on the bed. You’re too stunned to react, and gulp when he hovers over you and strips off his jacket, leaving him in a white shirt that doesn’t hide his toned arms.

“Use the color system, alright? Green when everything is alright, yellow when you want me to slow down, and red when you want me to stop for good?” he asks.

“I know what the color system is,” you mutter, tearing your eyes away from him.

“That’s not an answer to my question.” he presses.

“Fine, color system it is. There! Happy? Now get on with it—“

Jisung pins your wrists above your head vigorously. “You don’t call the shots here. I do.”

Your stomach swoops. You really should’ve listened to your brain. This Jisung isn’t comparable with the Jisung you sucked off a few days ago. That Jisung was cocky — he’s always cocky, what are you even saying — but he still gave you room to breathe. This Jisung is downright scary.

“Good thing for you, I know exactly what you want me to do—” he starts sinisterly as his thigh settles firmly between your legs, pressing up against your clothed core. You suddenly regret wearing a skirt. “—and trust me baby, even if I couldn’t read your mind, I would do all those things because that’s what I plan on doing to you regardless.”

The look he gives you should be illegal. He shouldn’t be in the position to look down at you, as if he’s the king and has free reign over the consequences you are about to bear. Your head suddenly feels dizzy, and it’s way too hot in the room. It’s as if your bedroom has morphed into some vacuum as you’re desperately trying to breathe. Your system ceases to function once he presses his thigh even harder on your cunt, and all you manage to make is a pathetic whimper.

A menacing grin makes its way to his face. He’s clearly thriving on this ego-boost and continues to grind his thigh on you until your hips start to sway along. It seems like you found your voice again once he leans down and nibbles on your neck. Your moans are barely audible at first, but they slowly turn into drawn out mewls and labored breaths.

Your eyes snap open when he suddenly retreats his thigh and holds your hip in a vice grip, stopping you from moving. “W-what the fuck? Why did you stop?”

“Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Huh?” You squint at him. “But you can read my mind!”

“I want you to say it out loud.”

There’s no way in the universe that you’ll do that. You’ll gladly wipe off that shit-eating grin out of his face whether he likes it or not, but with his hold on your wrists, that is deemed impossible.

You should say something out loud though. Yellow. That would save you from the humiliation. You could regain at least an ounce of control, not feel so pathetic anymore. It’s a simple word, just two syllables, six letters. The tables can be turned to your advantage. It’s easy.

You don’t.

“You’re embarrassed, aren’t you? You can’t say all those filthy thoughts in your head out loud because you’re ashamed, huh? Not when you love feeling so powerless, subject to anything I do to you. Face it baby, just admit that you’re a needy little bitch who wants to get off on my fingers so bad, and I’ll give you what you want,” Jisung growls in between hot, wet kisses he leaves on your neck.

“I—“ you whimper after some difficulties, “I’m your needy little bitch w-who wants to get off on your fingers.”

Jisung’s head pipes up, his face just hovering a couple of inches away from yours. With that little distance between you, you know it’s not a trick of the light and that his eyes are blown up with hunger, hunger, and more hunger. "Not just any bitch, but mine? Do you like it when I call you mine?"

You nod. From there on, it’s a chain reaction.

He wastes no time slipping his fingers past your panties, mindlessly trailing along your folds. You throw your head back in pleasure, bucking your hips into his touch. A cry leaves you the moment he slips a finger inside you, his thumb simultaneously flicking your clit. It’s sensory overload, rendering your rationality to a standstill.

Your utter downfall is marked once Jisung adds a second finger, never slowing down. He groans at the way you clench around him like a maniac, and the sounds he makes send jolts all over your body. You’re writhing under his grasp at this point, overstimulated by everything yet at the same time, you feel your arousal slowly fading.

“Does my baby feel good? Are you close?” Jisung asks, nipping on your earlobe.

“I don’t know,” you whisper.

“What do you mean, ‘you don’t know’?”

The pit in your stomach grows. You’ve never experienced claustrophobia, but right now, it’s like everything’s suffocating you. “A-as in I don’t fucking know!” you exclaim shakily.

Jisung stops his movements. The weight on your wrists is lifted, and he looks at you, face unreadable. “(y/n), color. What’s your color?”

“Green. It’s just...” your trail off, avoiding his eyes.

“Just...?”

“I’ve never come before,” you confess in defeat. You really can’t believe that Jisung out of all people is the one to make the call of judgment. “I mean it! I’ve tried getting myself off but I never managed to... so cut me some fucking slack because I’m trying my best here and am still new to everything!”

Jisung stays silent. He stares at you in… confusion? disbelief? You really have no clue how to read his expression. Something negative for sure, though. He’s Satan’s spawn, for fuck’s sake. He’s probably thinking twice about going down on you, thinking about the gravity of a mistake he’s dealing with this time. He just has no clue how to articulate his irritation—

“You’re so cute, fucking hell,” he whispers.

You do a double-take. What? What did he say?

A small chuckle escapes his lips. As if he doesn’t mind. Wait. He doesn’t mind. “I’ll take good care of you. Trust me on this,” he says.

“That’s a little late coming from you, your fingers are literally up my vagi— h-ha-aah—“

“Just shut up and let me do the work.” Jisung rolls his eyes as he works you up again, fingers moving at a slower pace this time. Within minutes, he’s reduced you into a panting, stuttering mess. “You look so tiny and helpless underneath me. How adorable,” he coos, to which you just whine.

“Yeah? You like it when I call you tiny? Like it when your tight cunt already feels stuffed with just two fingers? Maybe we should stretch it to a third one, think you can handle that?” he presses on. That’s when he rams his fingers into a particular spot, making you arch your back. A knowing smile makes its way onto his lips. “Found it.”

“N-no, fuck— t-too much—” you babble, but he continues to abuse your sweet spot without remorse.

An unfamiliar pressure builds up in your abdomen, threatening to burst. Your whines grow louder, breaths shallower. You squeeze your eyes shut as you thrust your hips into his hand, desperate for more friction. “Jisung, I think I’m gonna—”

“Oh no, not like this,” he growls. “Keep your eyes open. I want you to look at me when you cum. So you’ll remember that it was me who made you cum for the first time. It’s me who’s making you feel good.”

That is easier said than done. You manage to open your eyes, though with a lot of difficulties. Scratch that, your eyes are barely open. Jisung is a blurry image, and you’re unable to register everything he says, the sound of his fingers squelching in your heat blaring in your ears.

You deem it fucking impossible to keep your eyes open when your orgasm hits you hard, body spasming from the sensation. But you keep on trying, keep forcing to set your eyes on him.

It’s all worth it though when the reward you get is a proud smile on his face, as well as streams of praises coming from his mouth.

It’s a continuous pattern that goes as follows:

1. You spend your days glued to your friends.

2. At least one of them (usually, it’s Seungmin) preaches how you should get your shit together and ask Changbin out.

3. Somehow, Changbin manages to leave a strong presence in your fantasies and you end up daydreaming about a scenario that stars him, you and a bed (if you’re feeling more daring, any other kind of surface or object he could pound you into.)

4. Jisung notices and forces the horniness out of your system.

5. You tell yourself that it’s the last time Jisung has such control over you.

And then the cycle repeats.

But here’s the thing: you find yourself doing no. 5 you with less conviction the more it happens. No. 5 is a formality at this point. You don’t know when you went the wrong path, but are you really in a position to complain? Jisung is good with you, he’s good with his fingers, even better with his mouth.

But then there’s this side of Jisung after he’s ruined you. He knows what you want to eat after you’re all cleaned up, knows what show you want to watch, knows if you want to just drop dead in bed or need someone to force you to finish your uni assignments. In short: Jisung is good. If you ever said that out loud and someone caught wind of it, they might assume that you liked him.

But Changbin. You like Changbin. You like Changbin you like Changbin you like Changbin—

You like Changbin, right?

“You’ve been looking at me as if I had the word CLOWN written over my forehead. Do I have something on my face or what?” you cross your arms and are met with your friends quickly averting their eyes from you.

Felix is the first one to break the silence. “Is that a new dress?”

“Not really. I recently found it when I cleared out my closet and decided to give it one more try. Why—“ you pause, and your expression turns grim once it dawns on you. “I look ridiculous in this, don’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“No!”

“You look like a clown.”

“Seungmin-Hyung, did you really just???”

If your crippling self-esteem hadn’t reached its all-time low before, then it definitely did now. “Geez, thanks,” you deadpan.

Jeongin is panicking, trying to provide some damage control as Felix snaps at Hyunjin and Seungmin. “Nobody cares about your two cents!”

“Well, but she asked for our opinion!”

“Nobody cares about your honest two cents!”

“Let’s just have lunch at the burger place and talk about this later, Hyung!”

You’re still dazed, chuckling dryly like those cartoon characters usually do when their soul leaves their body after someone dragged them. The entire situation is downright sad to witness. Is this a sign that your period is coming soon? That’s it! That probably explains why you’re acting so uncharacteristically sensitive today—

“The dress suits you, (y/n). You should wear it more often,” Changbin says.

“Hah?” you flinch and you’re sure your soul actually left your body when you turn to face Changbin smiling genuinely at you. Out of your periphery, you see Jisung and Chan behind him, but that’s not the point.

What? The? Fuck? Did he really just? Did Changbin just… compliment you?

You don’t realize how long you’ve dumbly stared at him until Jeongin nudges you. “Uhhhh, thanks!” you squeak out, cringing at how your voice just went up by an octave. You can feel Jeongin facepalming internally at your response, but you don’t blame him; you’d most likely do the same.

Changbin just smiles before he turns away to get to his next class, tugging Jisung and Chan with him.

Nevermind. Wearing this dress was the best decision you’ve made in your entire college career. The way you suddenly beam almost gives Felix whiplash — it’s obvious in the way he stares at you as if he ended up watching a comedy instead of the melodrama he was expecting. Hyunjin seems just as flabberghasted, Jeongin is still cringing from the secondhand embarrassment, and Seungmin just grins.

“Ah, so lover boy is the reason, I see.”

You roll your eyes at him. “Oh my god, just shut up, Seungmin.”

Jisung is eating you out with such fervor that has you sobbing and thrashing around. He’s merciless in every literal sense, keeping your hips planted on the couch with his hands to the point where veins are bulging out, and lapping up your juices with his tongue, continuing even though you already came. He only pulls away, lips glistening in your release, once you tug on his hair despite his orders to not do that.

“Already spent now? But baby, we just started.” he pouts. “Or is it because it’s me? Would you defy if Changbin was the one eating you out?”

You stare at him with blown out eyes. Why the fuck is he bringing up Changbin now? The words hang heavy in your throat and are threatening to burst, but the death stare he delivers stops you from doing so.

Something’s not right.

“Don’t tell me... you’re wet again because I just mentioned Changbin. Changbin this, Changbin that, huh? It’s always only Changbin, Changbin, Changbin. And I thought I was doing you good all along,” he rages, making you flinch. He can be terrifying when he wants to be, but this time, he seems completely out of it. “You know what? I’m fucking done with holding back. You’re mine, got it?”

With that, he dives back into your cunt, sucking harshly on your clit as he slides a finger in you. You try to pry him off, but his weight is restraining you to the sofa.

“Jisung, it hurts— ouch—“ Panic starts to rise in you when he finally detaches himself from your nub, but instead, moves down to your thighs and starts sucking on the skin with a force much harder than you’re used from him. “What are you doing? S-stop—!”

“You’re mine, you’re supposed to be mine. I am literally written on your skin. So why can’t you just wish to be with me? Do I have to mark you up so that you’ll finally get it?”

It hurts. It hurts. Once you feel teeth on your skin, you burst into tears. “Red, Jisung, red!”

As if it was the spell to break the cast, Jisung finally snaps out of it. His features break once his eyes meet yours. Regret sticks onto him like a second skin, and he slightly moves his hand in an attempt to reach out to you. Your muscles react faster though, and you instinctively pull your legs towards yourself and shy away from him. The way his face drops by another layer of remorse tugs at your heartstrings, but the impending fear overpowers everything else you’re feeling.

“What’s going on? What went over you?” you ask.

Jisung’s breath is shaky. He feverishly opens his mouth several times, but no sound is coming out. He’s struggling to find the right words, maybe trying to find a somewhat reasonable justification for his behavior. In the end, he lets out a defeated sigh. “I can’t do this anymore without having feelings—” his voice is weak and vulnerable and you’ve never witnessed him break down like this before, “—I like you. I like you the way you like Changbin. I just...”

Silence.

“Leave,” you whisper, but in this silence, your voice rings out loud and clear. This is… too much weight for your heart to carry.

Jisung complies. He grabs his belongings from the floor, slips on his shirt, and leaves with his head hung low. His footsteps grow more and more distant, but then he stops.

“Are you really in love with Changbin?” His voice cracks.

You don’t muster up the courage to face him. “Just read my mind.”

It’s silent again. Too overwhelming. You’re waiting for yet another outburst of him, waiting for his “I want you to say it out loud”, because that’s how the conversation always goes.

The last thing you hear is the front door falling in its lock with a soft click.

You like Changbin. You like Changbin you like Changbin you like Changbin you like—

You like him, right?

Things have changed.

You and Jisung haven’t crossed paths ever since, not even passed each other by in the hallways. It’s weird since you’ve grown used to seeing him every day outside of your apartment complex. You’ve never really acknowledged each other’s presence with a wave or something in the sorts; it was just a second where your eyes met, and then your days went on.

That being said, you run into Changbin quite frequently. If you ever exchanged words, it’s nothing more than friendly small talk and the one or other compliment about his music. Talking to Changbin is nice; he makes you smile.

You know a little bit more about Changbin now, like his favorite ice cream flavor or the fact that he has a pokemon plushie named Gyu. It’s cute, and you chuckle when you think about how you’d pay good money for that information a few weeks ago.

Changbin is nice, and there’s nothing more to the story.

The chaotic quartett you call your friends however, doesn’t seem to buy it. They are loud and nosey and have eyes, so it was set in stone that they’d tease you about it sooner or later. It’s all fun and games, and you played along with it at first, because that’s how you guys are. But as time went on, when the banter became so repetitive and blown out of proportion to the point where they have made clowning you about your small interactions with Changbin the pinnacle of their entertainment, you’ve begun to be fed up by it.

“Will you finally stop bringing him up in an indecent manner every single lunch break? Or even better, stop bringing him up altogether?” You snap, which shocks everyone at the table because you never snap.

Nobody has time to react as you quickly stomp away to grab some fresh air. You mutter out every curse under the sun, not intending to let your anger take over you this much. You’ve only made it past the door when Felix catches up to you, placing a hand over your shoulder.

“(y/n), what’s the matter? Clearly, something’s bothering you. And I know it’s not because of just Seungmin.” Concern is woven in his smooth voice.

You have to admit, it was a smart and calculated move from your friends to send Felix your way. He’s always been the compassionate one out of your little friend group. Like a pillar, he’s the one who keeps you all grounded (and he’s the one to drive your asses back home after the wild Alpha Beta Gamma frat parties).

“I don’t like Changbin that way, I realized. So it’d be very much appreciated if you asses didn’t allude to that every time,” you huff.

Felix sends you an understanding smile. “We can work that out. You know that Hyunjin and Seungmin in particular can be insensitive and sometimes don’t realize they’ve taken things too far..”

“Fine, but that’s not the main thing that’s eating me up alive, Felix.” you sigh. The words seem to flow out of your mouth like a waterfall. “I’ve realized I’ve never really liked Changbin. Okay, fine, he was just a crush I had but I don’t like him.”

He nods slowly, his brain processing your ramble. “So you like someone else.”

“Yes. And I don’t know how to fix it because we got into a huge fight.”

“Talk to them. That’s the only thing left to do.” His response is immediate, and he says it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Every relationship has its ups and downs, and if you want to be committed, you have to fight for it. If you were made for one another, you’ll make it.”

The last part makes you laugh internally. If only he knew.

“Let me guess, you expect me to barge into his place to sort things out,” you say.

Felix gives you the look of judgment. “I mean, you could also show some human decency and text him in advance so he’s also prepared. But that works fine too.”

Come to think of it, you’ve never been to Jisung’s apartment. That’s about to change when you knock on his door sometime in the evening, shortly after sunset.

Jisung’s face immediately drops once he opens the door. “What are you doing here?” His voice is soft, drenched in regret.

It’s not that his appearance has reached rock bottom. He still takes good care of himself; however, you pick up the dark circles under his eyes and his complexion seems a little paler. Not sickeningly pale, but in a sense that he hasn’t seen the light of day for a few consecutive days.

You shift your weight on one leg and fiddle with your fingers. “Can we talk?”

Jisung gulps. “Yeah, sure,” he mumbles after a moment of hesitation before inviting you in.

“I’ve thought a long time about this. Everything, really,” you start awkwardly as soon as you’re both standing stiffly in his living room. “I, um…”

You cringe inwardly as your voice trails off. Truth be told, you’ve rehearsed what you wanted to say many times a few hours ago. Even wrote down the entire speech. Then threw the draft away, only to compose a new one. And then again and again and again. After what felt like an eternity, you had polished your final speech and memorized it from top to bottom, even making sure that your flow sounded natural. But now that this is the real deal, your mind goes blank. Of course, of fucking course, your illiterate brain had to give up on you in the situation that mattered the most.

Jisung purses his lips. “Do you want something to drink first? No need to rush—”

“I don’t like Changbin!” you blurt out. Jisung stares at you in confusion. “I mean, I used to like Changbin — I still do, he’s a nice guy! Don’t get me wrong — but that’s all he is. He’s… nice. I like him, as a friendly guy. I had a crush on him, but now it’s just, uh, like. Platonic! Yeah, platonic.”

Despite him nodding slowly, you know that he is still lost. You would be too if you were on the receiving end of this painfully clumsy delivery.

You give yourself a mental slap as you take a deep breath. It can’t get any worse than this. Definitely impossible. You’ve already proven to him how bad your public speaking skills are. Might as well get over it with the bluntest words. “I miss you. And not because of the sexual things we did, but everything else. I miss you coming over, miss the movie night, and all that. I miss you, Jisung.”

He stares at you silently. Your eyes search his face for any sign of emotion, and for one too many times, Jisung is impossible to read. Okay, perhaps you did manage to tell him what you wanted to tell him even worse than whatever the fuck your initial attempt was.

But then his blank armor cracks. Little by little, his eyes soften, disbelief and remorse on display for you to see. Jisung is looking at you as if his world has fallen apart even more. He’s looking at you as if he’s clinging to the last threads of reason, trying to make sense of the situation. He’s looking at you with eyes that could hold stars behind them, stars that were supposed to burn out yet shine brighter than the universe.

“How can you say that? I hurt you. I made you cry! I was being a selfish asshole who put out his anger on you!” he exclaims, voice breaking towards the end. Pain clouds his red eyes, and he’s fighting to keep the tears at bay.

You slowly prod closer to him, testing the waters. He doesn’t react once, not even when you stand directly in front of him. Not even when you gently place your hands on a shoulder each. Not until you say, “It’s alright. I’m alright. No hard feelings.”

That’s his breaking point. Tears stream down his face, while quiet hiccups jump out of his throat. “How can you be so nice to me?” His sobs are muffled as he eases into your touch, hiding his face in the crook of your neck. Instinctively, he wraps his arms around your waist, clinging onto you as if you’re his lifeline.

The answer is simple, you say to yourself, as you thread a hand in his hair. “We’re soulmates.”

The weight of the words hangs in the air, shattering the previous tension and all the worries in your heart. It’s liberating, finally being able to say it out loud without feeling like an abnormality for saying those words with happiness. You’re soulmates. You’re soulmates, and that’s okay.

Jisung’s sobs resound throughout the room, and so do his countless, tiny yeah, we are’s. You need a moment before you register the wetness on your face. It feels like an eternity standing in his warm embrace, even after there are no more tears left to cry.

“Can I kiss you?” Your voice is quiet, barely above a whisper, but Jisung catches it. two fingers gently lift your chin so that you’re facing him. You almost melt when your eyes meet, his gaze filled with adoration that makes you want to burst at the seams.

“Yeah. I’d love that.” Jisung smiles.

It costs you your willpower to tear your eyes away from him before they flutter down to his lips. Despite his bottom lip being a little cracked, they look inviting and you wonder what they taste like. You expect him to nudge you, expect him to tell you to hurry up and do something because you’re pretty sure you’re staring at his lips for far too long.

He doesn’t. The grip on your chin is loose as if to tell you to take your time and go at your own pace. But the longer you wait, the more reluctance builds up. It’s a lot of power he’s given you; hell, it’s the first time he hands the reigns to you.

“Can you… uhm… I’ve never done this before, so yeah…” you look at him with a crooked smile.

The breathless chuckle that leaves him sounds like music to your ears. Jisung moves his hand to the back of your neck before closing the distance between you.

The kiss is short and sweet, but that alone suffices to make the butterflies in your stomach burst. The faint taste of coke lingers on him, and before you know it, you’re kissing again. Jisung’s lips are like an addiction, reeling you back in for another one. Somewhere along the way, the kisses change. Innocent presses of lips are long forgotten, replaced by teeth playfully tugging on your bottom lip, and Jisung kissing you deeper to the point where he steals all oxygen out of your lungs.

Your hands slide down his chest, tugging on his shirt. Startled by your bold actions, he pulls away, but you catch him back into another liplock that leaves the two of you breathless. All you can think of clearly is Jisung Jisung Jisung—

This time he forces himself away from you. Gasping for air, he places his forehead on yours. “If we go farther than this, then I don’t know if I can control myself.” His warning is barely above a whisper.

“Then don’t,” you whisper back.

That’s all the reassurance he needs before leading you to his bedroom, all the whilst latching onto your lips once more. He doesn’t let go of you until your back hits the soft mattress and he’s on top of you. Warm, slightly calloused hands trail from your cheeks to the hem of your shirt.

“Color?”

“Green,” you respond, smiling up at him. The sun has long vanished at the horizon, replaced by the dim moon and stars. Despite only a little light surging past the blinds into the room, you can see Jisung’s features crystal clear. The endearing smile is cast into the back of your mind, so is the delicacy in his touch, fingertips lightly grazing your skin as he sheds all your clothes off until you’re left in your underwear. After hearing your complaints, he discards his own clothes with an amused glint in his eyes.

Jisung takes his time pounding every single detail of your features into his memory. His hands roam all over your body, inciting goosebumps. You lean into his touch with a sigh and flit your gaze to him once he stops on a particular spot.

The look on his face is unreadable, but the hesitation in his voice speaks for itself. “Does this bug you?” he asks, uncertainty laced in it as he runs his finger over each character of his name that’s inked under your collarbone. You shake your head with a hum that turns into a soft moan once he leaves kisses on the spots his finger burned before, one for each letter. Eventually, his actions spiral out to sucking lovebites and rutting his bulge against your heat, enticing louder whines out of you. Your vision morphs into blurriness as you move your hips in sync with his, locking your arms around his neck to pull him even closer to you.

“(y/n), baby…” Jisung heaves for air, “Is it okay if I…?.”

“Please,” you mewl, “want you inside me.” Your desperation must’ve shone through your tone, as Jisung presses a loving kiss on your forehead before he reaches over to the nightstand for a condom, grinning like a lovesick idiot.

In books and movies, this is the part where the virgin would reach peak nervousness. Too many fears would be inhabiting their mind; the fear of pain, fear of not fulfilling their partner’s needs, fear of the entire situation, essentially. Whatever they depict in those books and movies, it doesn’t match up with the warmth and want pumping in your veins. Even after Jisung slipped your and his underwear off and slid the condom on his leaking cock, there’s no sign of fear bubbling in you. It’s rather the opposite; you nudge him to finally slide into you.

“So impatient,” he tuts playfully, and because he can’t help being a bit sadistic, he teases your dripping entrance with the tip of his cock. Tears begin to form in your eyes from the frustration of clenching around nothing. You feel like crying for good once he slowly pushes into you. The stretch feels unfamiliar and completely different than what you’re used to from his fingers, but it’s not unpleasant as you throw your head back. While you’re adjusting to his girth, Jisung observes your every expression, faltering whenever you scrunch your eyes shut.

“You still there?” he asks in hushed tones, caressing your cheek.

In awe about his concern, you nod. “I’m fine. It’s just… new. I’ve never done this, but I guess you already figured that out.” It takes you a moment to catch your breath, and then you give him the green light to continue.

The way Jisung has your hands firmly against the bed lacks the usual roughness; he isn’t gripping your wrists as if he’s about to cut off your blood circulation. This time, he has intertwined his fingers with yours as if he doesn’t ever want to let go of you. A firework of colors and stars is all you see as he thrusts into slow and deep and with all the passion he has to offer. His lips don’t leave space for a breather either; he kisses you with so much fervor that it swallows your heart up whole. At that instant, you realize that he’s claimed your heart and isn’t going to give that up any time soon. You don’t mind, because you know that you’ve committed the same crime.

It’s not long after until you feel the orgasm building up. Jisung brings one hand down to flick your clit, and just like that, you unravel beneath him. His own release follows suit, a muffled groan coming from his lips as he spills into the condom.

It’s quiet for a moment, no words spoken between you except for harsh breathing. Eventually, Jisung slides his softening dick out of you and disappears for a moment to clean up, returning with a damp towel for you to freshen up a little, as well as a glass of water.

“I think I won’t be able to walk tomorrow,” you say after you gulped down the drink in one go, voice devoid of emotion. A laugh leaves Jisung. The way you deliver it is so casual as if he didn’t just have his dick in you minutes before. “Also, isn’t this the part where we should cuddle?”

“So bossy, your royal majesty.” He even takes a bow before he climbs back on the bed, pulling the covers over your bodies, and scooting up to you. He says something else, but you don’t register what exactly. All you care about is being wrapped in his warm embrace. The stench of sweat isn’t prominent on him anymore. Instead, it’s a huge cloud of Axe overpowering your senses. You would complain, but you’re too blissed out to bother.

Jisung must’ve noticed at a certain point that you’ve wandered to daydream paradise. “You’ve been quiet for a while. A penny for your thoughts.”

“But you can read my mind.”

“I want you to say it out loud.” His answer comes like a shot while his hand is brushing through your hair. “That, and your thoughts are too jumbled and my head is going to malfunction if I try to decode everything running in your head right now.”

The corners of your lips quirk upwards. “I’m just thinking about how we did everything in the wrong order. It’s just now that we kissed, before that I only sucked you off or something. We’re so fucked up.”

“If you word it that way, we definitely didn’t follow the book.” Jisung laughs in agreement. The vibrations from his chest causes you to bubble up in warmth.

“I don’t mind, though. That’s not the point. I’m happy.” You don’t have to look up to know that his eyes lit up. “Jisung, I’m happy that you’re mine.”

The hold around your waist tightens, and you feel a soft kiss being pressed on top of your head. “And I’m happy that you’re mine.”

In another lifetime, another universe, you probably wouldn’t have to go through these struggles. Society would normalize having someone that completes you. You wouldn’t go through countless stages of denial, countless stages of frustration, and countless stages of doubt.

In another lifetime, another universe, you potentially could’ve been on even worse terms. Just like in those cyberpunk movies, maybe you two would be enemies, one fighting alongside the government, the other assisting the villain who tries to overthrow the system. Star-crossed lovers, that’s what you two would be dubbed as.

In another lifetime, another univer—

No need to fantasize about what could be. The only lifetime that matters is this lifetime, this universe, your reality. In reality, people like you live in hiding. In reality, society is doubtful towards people with soulmates. In reality, people like you are destined for a tragedy. It’s taken you a long time to wrap it around your head.

That’s alright though. You’re alright. You’ll always be alright. The universe might have not played in your favor in this lifetime, but you still found each other. Perhaps, the universe will be more forgiving towards you in your next lifetime. Or the one after. Who knows? Whatever happens, at least you know you have one person you’re bound to meet wherever you are, whenever you are. One person who won’t ever let go of you. One person you won’t ever let go of.

“Yeah, I’m yours.”

#i'm never writing a oneshot again this is too stressful for my heart #stray kids smut #skz smut #han jisung smut #jisung smut #stray kids dark hours #dom!jisung #sub!reader #jijiri.txt #smut.mine #i winged the ending so pls go easy on me dlskjflkjsa

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