so you don't get lost (steddie ficlet)
written for @steddielovemonth day 17
rating: T
cw: alcohol
tags: first kiss, clubbing, college au, platonic stobin
prompt: Love is about a hand reaching out to you so you don't get lost
“She’s totally into me, right?” Robin asks as they wait for their drinks at the bar, her smile a mile wide, and it’s been a minute since Steve’s seen her smile like that.
“Yeah, totally,” Steve agrees. The girl Robin’s been talking to all night is drifting back over to them even as they speak, the two of them like magnets since they first traded smiles on the dance floor earlier that night.
Robin glances back at her and bites back a wider grin. She bounces on her tippy toes and whispers to Steve, “If I make out with her it’s not gonna make you feel awkward, is it?”
Steve shakes his head. “Go ahead,” he encourages.
It had been a group effort to get Robin out tonight. Her university friends had enlisted Steve to help drag her out of the mopey funk she’d been in since getting broken up with two weeks ago, and it had taken an hour of Steve hyping her up while she kept crying off her attempts to do her makeup before she finally managed to make it to the club. He’s just glad it had been worth it.
“I don’t even know if I remember how to do this,” Robin mutters, a little nervously, as she and Steve grab their drinks and rejoin her friends on the dance floor. But it turns out, she has nothing to worry about. The two girls resume their orbit around each other, and the second the next beat drops and the lights strobe, the other girl finally pulls Robin into a heated kiss. Steve watches this, and he smiles fondly. She deserves it. He’s happy for her.
And he’s totally not jealous. Not necessarily of Robin, obviously, or the girl she’s kissing, but simply of the fact that they’ve so easily found a hot drunk stranger to make out with at the club and he…hasn’t. He can’t even remember the last time he’s had a decent kiss, much less scored at a club, though not for not wanting to.
Steve finds himself glancing at Robin’s friend Eddie, the tatted-up metalhead Steve’s felt a pull towards since the first time they’d met. He thinks about kissing him every time they’re out together, and maybe there was a time when Steve would’ve just gone for it, a time before he’d taken a few too many hits to the ego and developed doubts and insecurities, but now the thought just makes him nervous. Eddie makes him nervous.
He feels that nervousness now as Eddie catches him staring and he shakes those lovely dark curls out of his face and smiles at him. It bubbles in his stomach, flutters in his chest. Steve downs the rest of his drink and looks away. The alcohol floods heat through his veins and blurs his vision, but the ever-present thrum of anxiety just from being in Eddie’s proximity still isn’t dulled. He bobs numbly to the music, avoiding looking at anybody at all now, only staring at the floor or the wall or some super fascinating point just above everyone’s heads, sure he looks like an absolute freak.
It goes beyond just wanting to kiss Eddie; Steve’s not stupid, he knows the only explanation for this sheer amount of nervousness he feels around him is that he’s got an actual, proper crush. Because not only is Eddie super fucking hot, he’s also sweet. Steve is an outsider in this group and he knows it, the college dropout who only tags along because Robin insists on it, but Eddie never makes him feel like that. It’s always Eddie who makes sure he’s included in conversations, always Eddie who makes a point to loop Steve into the context of inside jokes and stories whenever Robin is too distracted to. Steve craves those interactions, gets a thrill every time Eddie so much as speaks to him. So he doesn’t only want to kiss him, he also just wants Eddie to like him, wants him to see him as a friend at the very least. But it’s not like they’ve ever even hung out outside of a group setting, and sometimes Steve fears Eddie’s just being nice and he doesn’t actually see him as anything at all.
Steve’s drifted so far into his own head he doesn’t realize his group is on the move, pushing deeper into the dance floor and leaving him behind.
“Steve!” Eddie’s voice calls out to him and snaps him out of it. Everyone else has been taken by the crowd, but Eddie hangs back, reaching his hand out to Steve.
Steve takes it, swallowing down the way his heart pounds as Eddie’s fingers curl around his hand. Eddie pulls him through the throng of jostling, sweaty bodies, and even though he maintains a tight grip on Steve’s hand, he still keeps looking back at him like he’s making extra sure Steve doesn’t get lost. Warmth blooms in Steve’s chest. Maybe he’s just drunk, maybe he’s just delusional, but all of the sudden he feels so very very cared for.
“Thanks,” Steve says, nearly shouting to be heard over the music.
“‘Course.” Eddie smiles as he turns around to face him. They’ve caught up to their friends now, but he’s still holding Steve’s hand. “I’d never just leave you stranded.”
Of course he wouldn’t. He never has before. Steve just smiles back and squeezes Eddie’s hand.
They’ve only just let go of each other when Robin and her girl, still kissing clumsily and staggering about the dance floor, stumble straight into Steve and knock him off balance. “Woah!” Eddie reaches for him again instantly, looping an arm around Steve’s waist to keep him from toppling over or careening into the crowd.
“Ah! Sorry!” Robin giggles before she’s whisked away again.
Eddie laughs. “Good for her, right?”
“Yeah, good for her,” Steve says, watching his best friend spin out of sight, and when he looks back he startles at how close he and Eddie are, suddenly very aware of Eddie’s arm around his waist and his hands on Eddie’s chest.
“You okay?” Eddie asks, his grip on Steve tightening like he means to steady him.
“Yeah, thanks again.” Steve regains his footing, but he doesn’t pull away. There’s something there, he thinks, in the way Eddie’s always reaching out to him so he doesn’t get lost, literally and figuratively, in crowds and conversations. It could just be friendly, it could just be nothing, but for the first time, Steve lets himself hope. He even thinks about leaning in right now, but then he thinks about it too much, and he doesn’t.
Instead, there’s a weird moment where they’re both just staring at each other. Eddie’s got this confused little smile on his face like he’s waiting to see what Steve will do, and when Steve doesn’t do anything, Eddie’s smile abruptly becomes more playful as if he’s trying to break the tension, and he starts theatrically swaying them to the music, even though it is most definitely not the swaying sort of beat. Steve laughs, his racing heart making it come out giddy and giggly, especially when Eddie drops his waist to grab his hand and twirl him around.
Eddie pulls him in close again then, and this time Steve doesn’t think at all. In fact, it’s unclear which one of them leans in first; all Steve knows is that their lips finally, finally meet in the middle and he finally, finally gets to tangle his hands in Eddie’s hair, and it’s sweet and it’s hungry and it’s absolutely perfect. Steve holds onto Eddie and he gets lost in him.
When Steve meets back up with Robin outside after the club closes, they exchange a celebratory, congratulatory high five, the both of them with matching kiss-swollen lips and dates set for next week.
395 notes
·
View notes
Lucid Dreamer (2/2)
part 1
Gepard stalls almost a week before he finally goes out to the safehouse, and it takes him a couple days to find it because Sampo didn't have the time left to be wasn't super specific about the location. But he does find it.
It's pretty bare bones, really. Gepard knows that was probably to be expected, but… It feels crushing, when he realizes there are so few personal things here. It's nothing specific to Sampo. Just some food, some medical supplies. A cot and a heater and a lot of mismatched blankets. Nothing to remember someone by.
But he does find the letters, in a metal box stashed away under the bed.
There are two for him. Three for Natasha, and two for Seele. One for Hook, one for Serval, one for Pela, one for Bronya.
Bronya's is mostly business. They knew each other from the whole Stellaron incident, but not much beyond that, and the incoming catastrophe is a more pressing matter. Seele's is actually two copies of the same letter, and Gepard realizes why when Seele is so angry she rips the first one up without reading it. He gives her the copy a couple days later, and she slinks off without a word.
Pela seems completely normal after hers is delivered, but Gepard knows better than to trust that. The next day, he finds her asleep in bed with Serval, bottles abandoned on the floor, both their eye makeup smeared and running and Pela's glasses horribly smudged and crooked on her face. Serval doesn't read hers in front of him, but she's clingy with Gepard, Pela, and Lynx for quite a while after. She throws herself into her work a lot. She insists the heater from the safehouse is busted and she needs to keep it. It's too dangerous for use by someone who's not an engineer. Might burn their house down or something. Gepard doesn't argue.
Hook's letter is short, with easy to read words. The rest of it is actually a treasure map, and she and the moles spend the next several days running through the Underground, finding hidden candy and toys. Hook asks them when Sampo is coming back, because one of the marbles she found from his map looks green, just like his eyes, and she wants to give it to him. Natasha shoos Gepard out of the clinic before he can even begin to think of an answer.
Natasha refuses to let him see what's in her letters, which ok, fine, he'll respect that. He hears from Bronya who heard from Seele who heard from Natasha herself though that one of the letters was a map and the other a catalogue, with all of Sampo's hidden "warehouses." Gepard promptly marches himself back out to the frontlines, where he can turn a blind eye. If a ton of stolen goods suddenly enters the black market, and if the orphanage and the clinic suddenly have new supplies, well, technically that's none of his business.
Gepard goes to bed, curls up under mismatched blankets and closes his eyes.
He doesn't dream.
One of Gepard's letters was also business, like Bronya's and Natasha's. He and Bronya follow everything meticulously, down to the letter, because there has to be some good to get out of all this, there has to be. Gepard can't let it all be for nothing, it would bury him.
And so the catastrophe passes. Not without casualties, and not without a lot of damage and destruction. But Belobog survives.
And after that, time just kind of…goes on. Gepard has been a part of the Silvermanes since he was old enough to enlist. The Fragmentum had gotten so much worse in the years before Welt sealed the Stellaron. He knows the statistics, it is literally his and Pela's jobs to keep track. He knows when he sees a face everyday in the camps and then it's suddenly gone. He's not unfamiliar with things like grief and loss.
He still catches himself checking the trashcans and the supply crates and soldiers' footprints sometimes, though.
But there comes a night where Gepard goes to bed, holding the mismatched blankets to his face, and he dreams. And it's strange, it's off, it sticks with him. Sampo doesn't look the same. He's thinner. His muscles have atrophied. He looks like how Gepard has seen soldiers after months in the hospital.
The most unsettling difference is there's a scar across the left side of his head, Gepard can see it over his ear, peeking out past his hairline, carving towards his cheek. Sampo is always careful about his face. Gepard once saw him dodge a Fragmentum monster and literally let it cut across his neck just to keep his face clear. He wouldn't let that happen for nothing.
Their actions in the dream itself aren't new. Sampo seems tired, run down and worn out, but he announces his presence with aplomb by lobbing a bunch of smoke bombs off the rooftops and sending his soldiers scrambling. Same shit, different day.
The new part is what he says when Gepard chases him out to the edges of the camp, tackles him into the snow. Gepard pins him to the frozen ground to detain him and Sampo doesn't even fight it, just looks up at him like he's seeing sunrise for the first time in months.
"I'll be home in one week."
77 notes
·
View notes
tags: fluff(?); lyney x gender neutral reader; very vague spoilers for the motifs present in lyney’s story quest (no plot points spoiled)
there's a little bit of magic falling in love with lyney. every day he has a new trick to show you—a sprig of baby's breath miraculously tucked into your collar before you head out the door, an elegant watch magicked onto your wrist right before your disbelieving eyes. When you ask him what his secrets are, Lyney just laughs, like a bell in the light spring breeze, and kneels down to kiss your hand. "A magician has to keep some of his secrets, my love! After all, you already know a fair few of them." Oh, what a tease—just as silver tongued and charming as the first time you met. “Aw- please, Lyney, don’t you trust me with your truths?” You half smile and half pout, arranging your features into your best pleading expression, and you can see your great magician giving in.
"Ah, alright," and he's tapping his chin in mock thought, eyes twinkling, "since you asked so nicely, I suppose I can show you a couple more tricks, as an apology for my insincerity." Lyney winks, his serious act dropping in a flash, and you laugh as he pulls you towards the plush velvet couch. After he’s sure you’re comfortable, Lyney grows serious again, and you know the real show has begun. He pulls chocolates out of prop cards, bouquets from his hat, and, at your request, promises to pluck the stars from the sky to decorate your dreams, as a reminder of his love. His breezy solemnity makes you laugh, but you wouldn’t doubt Lyney’s word. It’s so easy to love him, and almost as easy to believe his magician’s world of dazzling stunts and marvelous tricks. But underneath all his glamorous charm and beyond the brilliant light of his performances, the hand that holds yours is quite warm, quite solid, and quite real. So too is his quiet admiration when you talk excitedly about your passions, and his eagerness to learn about your world. When you're together, there are no facades obscuring his earnest fondness for you—it’s one of the few truths of Lyney’s life. He hasn’t yet told you many things, but you don’t seem to mind as much as he expected. Smart as you are, you’ve already guessed at some of his secrets, yet you still place in him all your faith, all of your affection. Someday, maybe he can also learn to give himself wholly—without reservation. After all, you are one of his unwavering truths, and him? He’s your fantastical, wondrous everyday magic.
134 notes
·
View notes