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jensthwa · 7 days

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mountebank chem pt. one (JYH x reader).

part of the love's an uncharted path universe ★.

SUMMARY:

* 𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐤: 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐲. The first time you met Yunho, you knew he was going to be part of the biggest tragedy of your life: the loss of your freedom, of your free will. You didn't know why back then but what you did figure out is that you and Jeong Yunho were going to, eventually and very publicly, date each other at some point. Is that reason enough to hate his guts? Well, of course! Now, when the time comes to fulfill the prophecy, how the hell are you going to pull it off? And, most importantly, what do you need to do to not fall in love with him in the process?

PAIRING: rich!yunho x rich!reader.

GENRE: enemies to friends to lovers.

WORD COUNT: 9,7k.

WARNINGS: eventual SMUT ☽ (MINORS DNI) attempt !!! at comedy, crying, mentions of drinking and drug usage, mature language, petty behavior, insults, yunho and reader really hate each other i fear, pet names (princess), negative mentions of body image, panic attacks/panic disorder, negative??? (or so they think) tension. no smut on this part, it's an introduction to these two characters, their families and the chaos they bring to poor yunho's and readers life.

NOTES: hi everyone! i know i posted the hwa fic ten days ago or so, but i wanted to get started with this mini series that is PART OF THE LOVE'S AN UNCHARTED PATH / SHOW & TELL UNIVERSE. there's mentions of the last installment plot so, if you're new around here, you can always find the rest of the stories on my masterist! this is 100% self indulgent, as all fics should be, and i think i've re-read it so many times that if you find a typo or something that just doesn't make sense, you can blame it on english not being my first language i guess lmao. i hope you enjoy it and if you do feel free to send to my askbox/reblog/type in any feedback or thoughts! <3

POSTED: september 14th 2024.

permanent taglist: @hotteokkay, @potatomountain, @fairylover68, @e3ellie, @alsomimi

masterlist. / part two / part three.

A trembling finger is all you can see in the still dim light of the room.

It's quiet, very quiet. You haven't heard anything but your thoughts all night. It grosses you out, so you wait for the clock to turn to six and press the button you've been hovering on for, at least, half an hour.

Park Seonghwa is your only hope right now.

The conversation doesn't go as planned.

“No, I will not go to the party with you and no, I will not pretend to be your boyfriend.”

Not even your great pitch could've turned him around to help you. Sighing, you replay the conversation in your pounding head.

“This is very inconvenient for me but I hope you and the cool girl I saw yesterday are happy together… Even if it ruins my happiness forever!”

Your happiness was probably ruined the day you were born. Sighing again, you turn to the window.

It’s raining.

You didn’t notice until you ended the call that was, if you’re being honest with yourself, your last resource.

Brain rotting away the entire night, wine drunk and edible high, you didn’t even notice the rain accompanied you through your misery.

The sound of the droplets hitting your studio window and the sun trying to break through the gloomy clouds adds insult to injury: You’re running out of time.

Any time now, your mother is going to call you up to let you know you’re possibly getting promised tonight. Not engaged, but promised and presented.

Like you’re some sort of property your parents can give away.

Nails connecting with your glass desk, the noise syncs up with the rain pattering on your window sill and, to your tired mind, it also mimics the tic-tacking an old clock would make.

You figured, if you show up with someone on your arm tonight, they might finally leave you alone.

And not marry you off to Jeong Yunho.

There’s not enough hours in the day to plan a perfect escape, there’s not enough will left inside you to reach out to someone else and make everything seem genuine, organic, like you’ve known each other for years and kept it a secret all this time.

There's not enough time to save yourself.

Because there's this… unspoken agreement you’ve known about since you were eight.

Your parents and Yunho’s parents are friends. Your mom went to school with his mom and your dad met his dad when they were teenagers and they all got married off respectively because it was what worked for their families at the time so, after hearing the superficial love story at the age of seven, you knew you were going to meet the same fate eventually.

And the next year, you met Yunho.

He was an hyperactive little kid with a lot of energy and facts about the earth you didn’t care to listen to because the second you started playing with him in his huge backyard and turned to check if your mother was watching you, you realized that was not a casual playdate.

Smiling ear to ear, both your mother and his, it signaled to you that it has started.

Your planned love story with Jeong Yunho had sailed smoothly in their eyes and there was nothing you could do about it.

Naturally, you have hated him since then. But you were taught etiquette and were media trained since you turned three and could form complete sentences, so your hatred only really showed when you two were alone.

Turns out, he didn’t really care if you liked him or not.

He’s always been good at pretending as well.

That chirpy personality, kindness and humbleness he exudes in front of everyone else? An act.

And you were proud of yourself when you saw right through his bullshit when you were both eleven and left alone so he could show you around their new, bigger house.

Gone too soon was that child who wanted to teach you about worms in his backyard and in its place there was this distant tween who’s smile disappeared as soon as your mothers were out of sight.

“Listen, I don’t know why we’re being forced to hang out but I don’t like you.”

Dumb kid.

“Good, because I don't like you either but they can’t find that out.”

He scoffed, crossing his arms and frowning at you “I’m planning on telling mommy that you… chased me around with a knife or something, so she can see how psycho you actually are and stop forcing me to be around you!”

Eyes lighting up, that was the first time you saw a possible escape from all of this “You think that would actually work?”

Annoyed and a little freaked out, Yunho pointed at the smirk on your lips “See? That’s exactly what I mean: Psycho.”

And you both only grew hostile at each other since then. Sure, saving face in front of your parents and older siblings was necessary to not get scolded and revoked of your privileges (and you actually liked to be alone with him, only if it meant you could take a break from your mother and her judging gaze), but pretending to like Yunho proved to be more difficult than what you had imagined.

Especially when you both outgrew the phase where you tried anything and everything under the sun to piss the other off. Not so harmless pranks were pulled and the petty behavior got you both in trouble with your oldest brothers a couple of times but, no matter how hard you tried, it never “accidentally” got to your mother. Or his, for that matter.

So when you two stopped trying to get your point across and grew cold towards one another, that's when it got really ugly. Vile words cut through both of your egos harshly, family vacations that include his were uncomfortable and holidays were your personal hell.

December thirty-first and January first have always felt like purgatory. Christmas was always spared because you have family living on the other side of the world who you travel to see every year but it's never truly enjoyable when you know that, in the next couple of days after that, you'll see his dumb face.

But you have always smiled brightly at him and hugged him when he comes in with his unnecessary luggage at your home. You hold his arm and bat your eyelashes when you know your mom is watching from a distance and it all but confuses him every single time.

Remembering the time you both were thirteen and you went through very sudden puberty makes you smile. The look on his face when your kitty heels helped show how tall you got over the summer was fantastic.

“Look at what the cat brought in!” Scrunching your nose and squeezing his cheeks in fake affection, you noticed it took a lot for him to not swat your hands away.

But you also remember noticing that he was blushing when you pulled away.

“You look like a very ugly gigant,” he whispered with a smile, matter of factly and all “It doesn't really suit you.”

He was a pain in the ass. A manageable pain in the ass, but a pain nonetheless.

It all took a wrong turn when he caught up on your mothers plans by age fifteen. By that age, you've known for a while and the mercy you had on him, on explaining everything you believed to be true, was simply a way of keeping everything at arm's length from you.

The second he put two and two together, your guesses had automatically turned into a possible reality you couldn't cope with.

A reality that's about to hit you in the face and leave a bruise that doesn't really go with your polished image.

The rain picks up and you close your eyes in hopes of coming up with a new idea.

It only makes your headache worse.

You really should get going with your day.

There's appointments you need to get to, meetings you have to fill the space in because your brother is going to fail to show up as usual and you have to get your hair and make-up done for tonight.

You really shouldn't be crying right now.

Are you even allowed to cry?

Your fate was probably decided the day you were born, five months and a few days after Yunho.

“Shit.”

Sobbing is useless, so you get in the shower. You do your skincare routine and plan the outfit you're going to wear to the office while you cover your eyebags and try to make it look seamless, natural even.

If the struggle shows up in your face, you're going to get yelled at downstairs.

Living with your parents might be a bigger nightmare than getting presented with Yunho tonight but there's really nothing you can do about that, either.

Working in their company, gaining connections through them and being praised by simply having your last name attached to your first makes you completely useless when faced with a situation where you simply want to tell your mom to fuck off.

“Y/N, I hope you already weighed down the options for the dress you're wearing tonight,” is what greets you when you enter the dining room, breakfast laid out perfectly across the table both your parents sit at. She's glancing at you in warning “And I hope you know that the navy blue dress is the best option. It's on theme and it's classy, it shows your figure too.”

Fuck off.

You might've been taught a bunch of things while growing up in this tinsel bubble but never ever were you taught how to stand up for yourself.

It shows in the way you nod and smile and sit down on your designated spot next to your dad and in front of your mom.

“Navy dress it is, ma'am.”

The nod she gives in approval makes you nauseous. At least she's not saying anything about Yunho.

“Excellent choice, dear.”

You swallow the food on your pre-portioned plate with a tight throat and, after sipping your black coffee, you turn to your dad.

Feeling a little delirious on lack of sleep and a little bold, especially when it comes to work related matters, you take the opportunity to press on the other thing that kept bothering you the entire night.

“Father—”

He sees right through you.

“No, Y/N. It's not an open discussion, the deal is signed and sealed.”

“It's not a smart choice.”

“Kim Y/N!” slamming her utensils down on the table and making everything shake in the process, you barely flinch at your mothers warning “Are you calling your father dumb?”

“No, of course I'm not,” you defend yourself immediately, the softness in your voice hanging by a thread because all you want to do is scream at her to stop putting words in your mouth “All I'm saying is that he's too generous. That company is not profitable and he gave them half a floor in the building and an initial investment that's going to backfire,” you calmly explain to her what you told him the day before “There’s not really a market for physical media anymore.”

“And they're trying to bring it back,” your father returns, his eyes never straining from his food “I think it's a great idea. You said a couple of months ago that eighties and nineties style is coming back.”

“As a trend,” you remind him with a tight smile “And trends tend to die down rather quickly.”

“Soohyun approved it,” he finally looks up and his next words have you biting your tongue bitterly “You don't have a say on the final decision and you know it.”

Damn right you fucking know it.

“Are we clear on that?”

Glancing at your mother, you notice how she's picking on her food to try and avoid sticking up for you. Not that she normally would but you think, as the years pass, the mistreatment must give her some sort of guilty feeling she can only escape if she avoids your eyes.

Straightening your spine, you fix your face and smile with fake acceptance “Yes, sir.”

The tinsel bubble brings in unnecessary amounts of money and privilege, but it doesn't really save you from tradition and misogyny.

Soohyun is the firstborn, after all.

He's also a complete fucking idiot.

You love him a lot, but he's completely useless when it comes to this business.

Although trained separately and for completely different positions, you always paid close attention to the company.

You studied hard, you graduated early at the top of your class and went to business school as soon as you were able to. You even got to be valedictorian last year at your graduation and even then you knew you weren't getting your father's role once he took a step back from being the face of the company.

But you couldn't help but wish.

Wishing and imagining was your way of coping with it. What if you were born a boy instead? You surely wouldn't be in this predicament.

What if your brother wasn't pampered the way he was growing up? You surely didn't have to step in to save apparences with your employees.

Your day to day would probably flow so much smoothly if he actually wanted to do his job like he should.

Heels clacking on the marble floor, you strut the hallway into his office to aggravate your headache just a bit more: The space is a mess and when you glance at the tree you started to paint on his wall when he asked you to help him quietly turn the space around but never got to finish it brings your mind to the man who declined your offer this morning.

And the clock in your mind starts ticking again, faster and louder this time.

Soohyun’s voice comes out of a corner in the big office, behind some piled up boxes “Well that's not good.”

Snapping out of it and turning to him, you cock your head to the side “What is it?”

“You,” he comes out of his hiding spot, suit barely ironed and hair a little messy which makes you cringe “Usually, you complain as soon as you close that door,” he points at it with a tiny and concerned smile “So now I'm worried they cloned and replaced you, sis.”

“Well, you made a mistake yesterday and there's nothing I can do now to cover it up so,” raising your arms before tossing your purse on the free loveseat that serves as his lounging area, you sigh “Nothing to complaint about today, except—” you squint your eyes, making a show of pretending to be thinking about it “Oh! I'm probably getting married off tonight.”

The fake happiness laced in your tone makes your brother scoff. He walks to his desk, sitting down on his chair and shaking his head in disapproval.

“It's not an engagement, Y/N. It's more of a… Public relations matter.”

“Oh, so you agree with it?” Blood pressure skyrocketing, you quickly make your way across the space until you stand in front of him “You're fine with it?!”

“Don't act like you didn't already know this was going to happen eventually,” leaning back, he gives you an apologetic look. That's how you know there's nothing he can do about it either “Jeong Tech is the largest investor, or primary partner and basically the first big successful business we helped to launch here.”

The explanation is unnecessary. You know. You know he knows you know.

“And after the stocks falling over that little… Hiccup they had last year—”

“The selling clients information hiccup.” You recall with a tight smile.

Soohyun gulps.

“Yes, that, they need to rekindle their image with the press and, in the process, we gain a few reputation points in the market by association. You know how this works,” looking away for a moment, he bites the inside of his cheek before pressing on “And you two are loved and shipped by everyone online already. Grandmas swoon at the potential TVN drama they could make about your love story.”

What fucking love story?

It's more like a gruesome, slashy horror movie to you.

“Okay, is that why they don't marry me to Gunho instead?”

“No, Y/N, they don't marry you off to Gunho because he's in love and soon to be engaged to a complete nobody,” he responds right away with a shrug “Besides, you and Yunho—”

“We hate each other. We—”

“Now, I wouldn't say that—”

“—Completely and utterly despise one another. He's the unwanted dirt under my Louis Vuitton heel, he's the bee I want to kill but can't because they are needed for the environment,” you continue without taking a breath “He's somehow needed to this environment,” meaning the company “Although he's attending a public university and detaches himself from his responsibilities because he already has a brother who actually takes care of it all, unlike me!”

Soohyun doesn't seem hurt at that and you're annoyed he's not. That he knows you well enough to know you're trying to sink your claws into his pride because yours is flat lining as the minutes pass.

That does nothing but fuel your anger.

“Unlike me,” you repeat “Who has to take care of your responsibilities because you are too busy playing renovation simulator in your stupid office to attend your meetings! Because if you did attend them you would know yesterday’s decision was a mistake and—”

“There it is!”

“—You're going to cost us millions of won for nothing.”

Soohyun sighs and the way the scowls at the scattered papers on his desk lets you know he's not about to entertain this conversation any longer.

For the third time today, you are about to lose. And you're a sore loser.

“You're not getting engaged,” he reminds you, standing up and fixing his hair with his hand, his expression kind and sweet like you didn't just yell at him “You don't have to marry Yunho.”

You scoff “For now.”

“Or never, if you don't want to,” rounding his desk, Soohyun pats your head softly like you're a child “Just pretend for a bit and then let him break your heart publicly so that the media doesn't treat you like a stoned hearted bitch.”

“I am a stoned hearted bitch.”

He shakes his head “You're not but even if you were no one has the right to call you that,” your expression softens and you kind of want to cry at that, but you don't “Except me. Now, we have a meeting to go to, don't we?”

Duty calls, like it always does. Your brother steps away and rushes to the door.

Grabbing your purse and following him out, you fix your own hair in the reflection of the glass separating the cubicles from the hall “Do you even know what it is about?”

He smiles back at you “Nope but you're going to tell me on the way there anyway.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don't.”

The call comes after the meeting, when the sun is finally breaking fully through the clouds and your headache is starting to go away.

Only to come back in full force once you see Yunho’s face as soon as you make your way to your own living room.

Wearing a formal black blazer with matching trousers and a white shirt, the asshole doesn't even spare a glance at you even when you're sure he knows you just walked in.

The room started to fill with negative energy. He must have felt it, right? But he doesn't show it.

He's on the phone, eyebrows almost melting together as he pays attention to what the person on the line is saying.

“What do you mean he met this girl two days ago?”

Oh, he's gossiping. Your eyes almost meet the back of your skull when you roll them and, with a sigh, you throw your purse at him.

He catches it without making that much of an effort.

Asshole.

“End the call.”

“Wait, wait,” he covers the microphone with his hand and frowns at you instead “Shut it up, princess, this is an important call.”

“Princess? Who are you calling princess?” It's not hard to hear the person on the other line, a poor confused guy, talking back.

“My mother's friend’s daughter,” he shoots back and gives you a tired look, putting the phone to his ear again and signaling you to close your mouth “Anyways, is Seonghwa sure he wants to introduce us to her? Isn't it too soon?”

At the name, you perk up. Gears turn in your head, one by one because you're tired and your machinery probably needs another coffee to oil everything up there, but then it hits you.

That's where you knew Park Seonghwa from.

You were not proud of yourself for letting curiosity tickle you enough to check Yunho’s instagram page merely six months ago. On your burner account, of course, the one with a fake name and fake pictures so that people don't know you stalk them when you're bored.

There's this picture on his finsta where they're all sitting around a bonfire. It looked cozy, like they actually love each other which is a crazy concept for you.

All your friends are fake. Also, the concept of a bonfire is insane. Bugs? Acoustic guitars and careless laughter?

Insane.

But it seemed genuine the first time you saw it and it made you burn with jealousy of a life you could never have.

And in that picture, Yunho was hugging Park Seonghwa.

Huh. You wonder what would've happened if he accepted your proposal earlier today.

“Well, okay, uhm… I probably can't tonight. I know I said— Yes, Wooyoung, I know,” he sighs deeply as you sit down right in front of him, one leg over the other with rehearsed poise “I’ll see you all at Hongjoong's gig this weekend, yeah? Okay, bye… I love you too, oh my god,” he giggles and you frown, disgusted “Bye.”

You immediately go for it.

“Your boyfriend?”

“My husband,” his smile is fake and tight and it makes you want to punch him in the face “That's what I'm telling our mothers in fifteen minutes, by the way.”

Rolling your eyes again, you let out a tired breath “As if that would ever stop them.”

“So I reckon you know what's going on?”

“You don't?” eyebrow rising inquisitively and expression turning into a pitiful one, you wonder if that's why he seems so laid back at the moment “Please, indulge me and tell me you do.”

“Of course I know what's going to happen,” scoffing, he crosses his arms and looks at the living room double doors “Just trying to figure out if you're out of the loop so I can put you up to speed on our escape.”

“Oh, please,” you huff out a bitter laugh “If you really wanted to escape you would have been out of the country by now. Don't pretend you're not a people pleaser, Yunho,” looking back at you, that familiar wrath burns in his brown eyes and it makes you smirk “Passing the opportunity to hang out with Park Seonghwa and the rest of your public university crew is not usually what you do. You were probably given an ultimatum by your mother and that's why you're here, isn't it?”

Watching his expression shift from annoyance to confusion to anger in the span of seconds gives you the satisfaction your lost fights of the day took away from you.

“She's really pretty, by the way. His new girlfriend, the mechanic,” you smile, moving your eyes to the ceiling like you're trying to remember something “Didn't catch her name, though. Tell her I say hi when you see her. Oh, and tell Mr. Park I say hi as well. You don't really have to explain to anyone how you know me after tonight anyway.”

“How the hell do you know them?” he's full on frowning now and the corners of your lips twitch in amusement “Are you stalking me, Y/N?”

“Wouldn't you like that, hm?” clicking your tongue in disappointment of his guess, you rest your arms over your knees and lean your weight on them, like you're about to share your secret “I always know everything, Yunho. It's my superpower.”

He imitates your movements, jaw clenched and chest heaving “And here I thought it was being spoiled and annoying.”

Shaking your head, you lean a little further now “You're so silly, Yun, you know that's yours… When will you stop projecting your shit on me?”

“When you stop ruining my fucking life.”

Oh, he's so easy to mess with.

“Glad to know you think I have that much power over you,” you bite the inside of your cheek for a second and then sigh loudly and dramatically “Sadly, I can't control what my parents want me to do. Or do you really think I would choose you, the hypocrite who pretends to run away from his responsibilities, out of all the men in the industry?”

That cuts deep. His face lets you know it does, you also know it's hypocritical on your side to criticize him for getting the treatment you wanted to get to begin with.

He leans in a bit more “As if I would ever choose you, the most cold hearted snake out of the elite.”

Fuck him.

You lean in more, chin up “Mama’s boy.”

Doing the same, he griths out: “Spoiled brat.”

“Rakehell.”

“Psychopath.”

Laughing, you dismiss the fact that your noses are almost touching to shoot back “I hope you enjoy the way the media is going to tear you apart when it comes out that you cheated on me, asshole.”

“And I hope you enjoy when Dispatch digs up what you did at that party four years ago, princess. Falling off a table for mixing your drinks and your drugs and yelling at the staff as they tried to helped you out is quite embarrassing, isn't it?” he returns immediately and it fails to intimidate you but the fact that he knows about that angers you and it sparks in your eyes, so he smirks “Not that I would ever leak that information, of course.”

“You stupid fucking—”

“Ah, good! You're both here already.”

Pulling apart and standing up, you both try to regulate your breathing and conceal your flustered state as your mom and his walk straight towards you.

They're here early, you think. You couldn't possibly have argued with Yunho for fifteen minutes straight.

“I beg you save the public displays of affection for later, though,” his mom says and with a hand on your back she directs you to sit on the sofa Yunho was occupying before. You sit and he does too and you both make sure to leave enough space for the holy spirit and all deities in between you “We're going to need them for the cameras.”

Uncomfortable, you fidget on your seat until the warning look from your mother forces you to stop. Yunho gulps beside you, probably just as uncomfortable as you.

Both women smile brightly like they're not about to lay on you the saddest news of your life.

“As you both know, tonight's gala is a celebration of the twenty years Jeong Tech and Kim’s Innovation have joined creative forces and built the empire we have the pleasure to see unfold today…”

Is your mother reciting your dads speech? It sounds robotic, rehearsed, fake and forced and it's not something new from her but you hate it either way.

“And in celebration of our families friendship, loyalty and alliance,” Yunho’s mom continues and you take in a breath “We're finally making your relationship public!”

Finally?

“Finally?” Yunho asks and you lick your lips “Mom, Auntie… We don't have a relationship.” He tells them plain and simple and you don't look at him when you nod in compliance with the statement.

“Oh, you two have been in love since forever!” His mother dismisses what she just heard “It's only fair to finally let everyone confirm it. This way, you can actually be seen together without our public relations team having to rush to cover everything up.”

That has never happened. You prefer to stay as far away from Yunho as possible when your free will is actually yours to live with.

“Mom, we—”

“We are friends, obviously,” you interrupt Yunho before he dives head first into the depths of hell and his head snaps to you, eyebrows creasing a bit “But it's very much platonic. I don't feel—”

“Yes you do,” your mother interferes, tone stern and fake smile falling for a second as a result before she composes herself “You have loved him since you both were kids and he saved you from falling in the pool at you tenth birthday,” that never happened and slowly but surely you realize they have a whole story planned out for you “And you, Yunho, realized you loved her when she stayed by your side when you had the flu at age thirteen. When she cried over your high fever and came over everyday until you got better. Right?”

The question floats in the air for what feels like eons and she has successfully shut you up for good.

You knew, when you first met Jeong Yunho, there was no way of escaping this.

And he, ever so hopeful and foolish, can't seem to accept it the way you do.

Standing up, he looks at his mother with so much hurt you wonder if you still have that amount of delusion inside of you “You can't do this to us!”

“Dear, do not raise your voice at me—”

“This is the stupidest idea you had yet! I don't care how many years you've been planning this, it's not fair!” He paces around the space and you sigh, looking down at your lap. His voice echoes around the living room and you can practically feel your mom scowl with annoyance at the recklessness “You can't marry me off to someone like it's the eighteenth century! This is ridiculous, I—”

“You'll do it,” his mother stands up as well, voice firmer than you have ever heard. She's a soft spoken woman, a sweet woman even. She's never raised her voice in your presence and you don't let it show how by surprise it takes you “And you know what happens if you don't.”

You don't know why you relate to the pained expression on his face. You really shouldn't because you two are, clearly, on two different ends when it comes to pleasing your family.

His family seems loving, the way his mother treated him growing up felt so genuine you always wished you could switch places with him. Even at times where they thought they were alone in the room and you hid to witness the cracks on the foundation of their love, it never happened.

Until now, when he storms off and she seems rather unaffected by his pain. What she gives off is annoyance, just like your mother, she's annoyed that this didn't go as smoothly as imagined. She moves to follow him.

“Jeong Yunho!”

After she leaves the room, there's screaming in the distance, probably at the end of the long hallway. And then, there's silence until your mother breaks it.

“Well that was an unfortunate mess.”

Your throat feels like it's closing up but you push through it, standing up when your mother does too.

“Mother, I don't really think this is the best way to—”

She frowns at you.

“What are you wearing? A suit?”

“W-what?”

Dumbfounded, you look down at your choice of outfit that she saw this morning and then back up at her.

“I understand there's really nothing that can be done about your body shape but wearing silhouettes like these makes you look very masculine, Y/N.”

She's doing that thing where she belittles you into submission. Vulnerable because of what you just lived and what you just witnessed, you stand there and take it.

“And are you wearing makeup? Your eyebags, darling… I can't believe you let Yunho see you in this state.”

If only she knew you stayed awake the entire night trying to sabotage her plans.

This triggers you beyond belief. It starts with your heartbeat picking up, with your inner child begging you to stand up for yourself and banging at the walls of the safe you locked her up so many years ago.

When you both hear footsteps coming down the hallway, she looks down at her watch and your chest starts heaving.

“You need to get your hair and makeup done in an hour and a half. No need to go to the salon, I arranged things and they're coming over,” she informs you camly, putting on her fake smile when Yunho’s mom sighs at the doorway and when she turns away from you to get to her and loop her arm around hers, you catch his eye as he makes his way to you “Now, how about I show you what they did with the garden, dear.”

They walk away from the wreckage with a giggle that only raises your panic.

The fire of it burns your pride, your self image and your capability of keeping it together in front of your sworn enemy.

It doesn't help that he comes in with full vengeance, ready to take out on you what he obviously couldn't take out on his mom.

“Why didn't you say anything?!” his voice fills the room once again and you physically recoil, which makes him reconsider. He looks you over once and then takes a deep breath before pressing “Why did you tell them that we're friends? We're not friends, Y/N! You should've… You should've told them that you hated me, that y-you were in love with somebody else, anything!”

Tears cloud your vision and you can only reply in a faint whisper that sounds far away “Yunho, shut up.”

“Are you seriously letting them get away with this?” his index points at the door and he looks at you like he doesn't know you. He doesn't but he does know what your family is like, so you don't know why it surprises him “Are you seriously going along with this stupid charade?!”

Air leaves you. You can't breath but you try to and you faintly hear him say something else but it sounds bottled up, like you're underwater.

“I c-cant.” You try again but it barely comes out.

Breathing in with your mouth, you close your eyes and focus on the way your head pulses. Migraine in full force, it only aggravates the feeling of complete loss of control over your body. But your feet move before you can think, to the couch, to look through your purse because damn it if he finds out.

He follows you.

“Is this some sort of sick revenge against me or—”

They're not there. Why didn't you bring them with you today of all days?

God damn it. Yunho is, somehow, still talking.

“Because if we don't go out there and let them know that—”

“Yunho, shut the fuck up! Stop it!”

Turning around with tears streaming down your face and hyperventilating seems to shut him up for good.

“What's wrong?”

He stops, breathing hard with a confused look on his face and his eyes follow you when you quickly move around him to get out of the room.

“Y/N, wait—”

You don't wait to see if he's following you upstairs. You only know he is because when you trip midway, his hands are there to catch you.

Physical contact with him is so strange and unfamiliar that you have to push his helping hands away and, quickly and still hardly breathing, you make your way to your room.

Neatly done by the staff assigned to ready it up everyday before you get home, the order gets destroyed by your panicked state. You look through your vanity drawers messily, full on sobbing and mumbling incoherently as you do and you slam your fist down on the thing when you fail to find your pills.

“Where the fuck is it?!” You sob out, hand hurting and shaking until you fall to the ground.

You try to recenter, pressing your shaky palms into the soft material of the carpet and sinking your nails hard in it until it starts bunching up beneath your fingers. Eyes closed, you can't see when Yunho knees down next to you but you do jump in fear when his hand touches your arm.

Looking at him, you see when he removes his hand until, hesitantly, he places it firmly on your shoulder “I need you to breathe with me, Y/N,” he starts demonstrating, breathing in once, holding it in for a few seconds and letting the air go next. You choke out a sob “Breathe with me so you can tell me what I can get you.”

You want to scream at him to stop pretending to care and get out but you can't.

Instead, you listen to him. You breathe in when he does, hold the air a second longer than him and let it out afterwards. You do a few rounds of this, just staring at him with tears still falling down your cheeks until the fog in your brain starts clearing.

It's agonizingly slow and it pains you to let yourself be seen in these circumstances, especially by him.

“Now, what were you looking for?”

Coughing uncomfortably, you attempt to get up the floor but he stops you from doing so “You can leave, Yunho, I can get it myself.”

“You're shaking, Y/N,” it takes for him so say it to look down at your hands, which are barely grasping the carpet now and just hovering above it as they tremble “What do you need?”

“My pills,” you tell him in a murmur after a few seconds, closing your eyes because, to you, this whole thing is very embarrassing “I don't remember where I put them, m-maybe in my nightstand?”

“Drugs?” he asks with a frown and you shake your head, too panicky to get offended at the insinuation “Ah, actual pills, I see, um…” He gets up and you open your eyes to him walking over to your bed, sitting down to open up the drawer of your nightstand “You have a lot of shit here. What do they look like?”

“Prescription bottle, not a blister. Translucent, white cap.” You're taking control over your own body now, breathing starting to normalize and mind syncing up with the situation again.

Your head hurts still, but it's better than five minutes ago.

“Here it is,” you hear him say and he's on his knees next to you a second later. You take the bottle from his hand, unscrew the cap as fast as you can and shake it to get a pill out of it “It was behind a bunch of stuff. I'll get you some—” putting the pill on your mouth, you crane your head back and force yourself to swallow it “Water.” He finishes in a whisper.

When you look back at him, he looks a little freaked out.

“What?”

“N-nothing… Do you still need some—”

“No. Thank you for getting me these, you can leave now.”

Your tone is cold. The memory of him yelling at you downstairs returns so now you're pissed off and still very, very vulnerable. He's not allow to see you this way or any way for that matter.

But he just did.

He stays still and you're about to ask him if he didn't hear you or what but then you follow his eyes and notice he's staring at the way you hands still shake a little while trying to get the cap on the bottle again. You presume he's trying to read the label on it, too.

“How long have you had them?”

“The pills? This is a new prescription, so like… A month or so.”

He sighs, closing his eyes and sitting fully on the floor next to you “You know what I'm talking about, Y/N.”

Looking away, you hate that the cat is out of the bag. If only your mother didn't comment on your appearance maybe, just maybe, you could've keep the secret to yourself and take it to the grave with you.

You hate that Yunho, out of all people, found out.

But he helped you, so you decide to please him with an answer.

“I started getting them when I was ten, I think. I didn't know what was happening for a while and then at fourteen I learned what a panic attack was,” you recall, tone sounding breathy and tired and a little annoyed. He nods “And then I got officially diagnosed with panic disorder at twenty, so not that long ago.”

Eyes back at him, you see him frown and then nod again as if the information you just gave him is hard to digest. It's not, it's actually extremely normal for someone like you.

It makes you wonder if he has ever felt the same.

Taking another calming breath, you speak again “I would appreciate if you keep this in between us. Not tell your brother or anything,” you clarify before he can respond “Because your brother is going to tell my brother who is going to tell my mom and that's a whole disaster I don't really want to deal with.”

“They don't know?”

“Of course they don't know,” a bitter laugh makes it past your lips “If they knew, don't you think I would be the image of a visibility campaign against anxiety or something like that?”

“They're your family, though.”

“Blood is thicker than water but I'm allowed to have my secrets,” it's pathetic, the way your vision clouds once more and tears trail their path down your face once nor3 “And you of all people know how exploitative they are, so don't tell them.”

What happens next takes your breath away again. Not for the reason you expect but it does and, for the first time in your life, Jeong Yunho is able to make your brain malfunction.

You don't really think he realizes his hand is on your cheek, thumb whipping away your tears so softly it turns to you to a puddle right away

The last time someone handled you with that much care was…

Never?

Unable to look away, you catch the second he notices what he's doing and, by the time he does, he already leaned in a fraction into your space.

Snapping out the weird, dizzy moment you two just had, he lowers his hand and you clear your throat to try and shake your feelings, all of them, off.

Off. Away. You need to get your shit together and work on depuffing your face before the makeup artist and hair stylist arrive.

“Listen, if you want to mysteriously disappear tonight and miss the gala you can totally do it and I'll cover up for you. I wouldn't blame you and I don't really care if our parents take it out on me,” your words are fast and your tone lighthearted. Like you're making a joke but, also, you're totally not “In return for you to keep your mouth shut about this,” you shake the pill bottle “I wouldn't do it out of kindness, of course, after all I am the most cold hearted snake of the elite.”

Scoffing, he closes his eyes and lets his head hang low for a few seconds “You’re so—”

“Beautiful? Smart? Outstanding?” You offer.

He looks back at you again “Insufferable.”

You squint your eyes at him before your lips turn upwards in a sardonic smile.

Yunho lets out a heavy sigh “I'll do it.”

“Run away to Timbuktu and change your identity?”

“Be there,” he corrects, clearly tired of your antics “I’ll be there tonight. We are up to our necks in this bullshit, both of us,” he reminds your “And I'm sure my mother wouldn't let me get far if I did try to run away.”

The ghost of a genuine smile curls in your lips “Pussy.”

He rolls his eyes.

“See? Annoying as fuck.”

Your smile fully widens at that. Finally, some sense of normalcy after whatever the hell happened a few minutes ago.

“What dirt does she have on you to make you bend to her will all of the sudden?”

“She—”

“I'm sorry to interrupt,” both looking up at your door way, you try your best to hide the pills under your thighs as you eye the staff member suspiciously at his interrupt “But misses Jeong is calling for Yunho downstairs. She says that you have to leave to get ready and misses Kim urges you, miss Kim, to get a shower.”

“Yeah, she smells kinda bad, doesn't she?” Yunho jokes but the staff member doesn't laugh at his quip. Instead, he earns a push from you before getting up “I'll get going then.”

The guy bows and disappears at that.

“Finally.”

You feel like you have to thank him again for what he did. With words, not actions. But he doesn't look like he's expecting it and the words hang on your tongue without making it past your lips because it's against your morals to thank Jeong Yunho for absolutely anything.

“See you tonight, Y/N,” he says and you make a face that makes him smile for some reason. He moves to the door but stalls and, as you get up, you see him turn to you one more time “Bring them with you,” he points at the bottle on your hand “Just in case.”

You huff and close the drawers of your vanity, stashing the pills in one of them “Don't tell me what to do.”

“I wouldn't dare,” mimicking the staff member, he bows dramatically and you groan “Goodbye, princess.”

You close the last drawer with a little more force than you intend to as soon as he's out of eyesight and then whisper and amused: “Asshole.”

Now that's a couple of hours later and your head allows you to lock back in, to focus on the matter at task and prepare for what's to come.

Sitting in the car, your chauffeur takes the hill up to the Jeong’s so you can pick up Yunho and show up together to the event.

Hair beautifully done and makeup beat to the gods, it irks you that your mothers have everything so planned out down to the last details. There's a tablet on your lap and you're rehearsing the backstory they put together for this made up relationship.

As they told you earlier, you have to pretend you two have been in love since childhood. There's some paragraphs narrating how you supposedly felt like you owe him your life after he “saved you” from failing into the deepest part of the pool when you didn't know how to swim.

Which is true, you didn't know how to swim at that age but Yunho never saved you from anything.

Except maybe today, only after aggravating the situation to the point you couldn't help but break down in front of him.

Pressing a finger down on your temple, you close your eyes and try to wipe the image of him helping you away. Instead, the way the washed your tears away pops into it and you groan, earning a curious look from your driver.

“Is this hill endless?” you ask in a way to cover up your true grieving and he laughs a little, which makes you smile before complaining again, as a joke. Kind of “That's why they usually come to our house, it takes a whole business day to get here.”

That seizes your driver's curiosity and you look out the window when their mansion comes in full view. It's majestic, it's modern and it looks really pretty from your balcony at night, when it's all lit up even when you know the probability of someone actually being there is scarce.

His dad and brother are always at the office, his mom is always at a meditation class or the gym or the mall with your mom and Yunho, well, you can only assume he's never actually there. He seems to have a very active social life and you don't think his mom would necessarily approve of his public university friends being there.

When the car comes to a stop in his driveway, you look back down and scroll to that part of the document: You're supposed to be supportive on his choice of avoiding a private education, call him humble and down to earth if the question gets asked but not praise the public education system because your dad endorses a really expensive school, the one he and your fake father in law graduated at.

The one you graduated at.

It was so freeing not looking at his face in the halls when you started uni and you, quite frankly, don't think about him often enough to wonder why he was allowed to attend the university of his liking and study what he pleases.

Now you're curious but, as you see him descend the stairs that lead to his massive front door, you're not sure you want to talk to him outside of business for too long.

He's all dolled up in a navy three-piece, color matching your dress and all. Hair done and out of his forehead, you hate to say it does more for him than the usual style he wears it in. You don't remember the last time his bangs didn't cover his eyebrows and now you're wondering if you pushed all the times you did to the back of your mind.

It'll be hard to pretend you don't think he looks good because he does and you don't want it to show in your face, so you stay focused on the tablet as he makes his way to the car.

The driver gets out and attempts to open the door for him but you hear Yunho telling him it's okay.

“I'll do it, thank you, thank you,” he opens the door and so you hear him more clearly now and he slides on the seat next to yours with ease, a disappointed look on his face when he notices you “Ah, you're here.”

“They didn't tell you?” sounding boring as hell, you scroll to the bottom of the document and pass the tablet to him, avoiding to look at him again “We're supposed to arrive together so the photographers waiting outside can start speculating and reporting to the media outlets that something might be going on.”

He grabs the tablet, looks at the document for five seconds in total and then hands it back to you “Oh, yeah, I didn't read that.”

Your driver gets in his seat and starts the car, maneuvering out of the driveway in seconds and so you have to brace yourself on the seat to avoid sliding down on it as you're driven down the hill.

“You didn't read it?” your head snaps back at him and he shrugs “Yunho, we're supposed to pretend we're madly in love with each other and you didn't study?!”

“We've been pretending to get along in front of our moms for over a decade, Y/N,” he deadpans “We're doing the same tonight, only at a bigger scale. It's not that complicated,” shrugging again, he looks out at the street for a second before looking at you again, a disgusted expression on his face “I hope you're not expecting me to be all over you because now that I can't fake.”

“Because you're never felt the touch of a girl in your entire life? I know that, loser,” he's about to retaliate but you stop him with your index finger “You've been away from the spotlight for way too long. You don't know how ruthless and scrutinizing the people attending are, I do. So sit pretty and study this.”

You shove the tablet back and he groans, looking through the document briefly again.

“And how do you know who's attending?”

“Page ten through twenty five. There's a detailed list with names, occupations and hobbies so you can have possible topics of conversation. I also took the time to highlight in pink the ones I want to avoid,” you point out and he moves his finger on the screen until he gets to the list, scoffing in amusement a second later “You should avoid them too. Especially the Hwang’s,” he gives you a look, asking for an explanation “They gossip too much, their friend groups are filled with snakes who can't take an NDA seriously and the girl is a little in love with you, so she'll flirt with you the entire night.”

“I don't even know her.”

“You don't have to, she's in love with the idea of you and your family's influence. Seriously, Yunho,” you let out an annoyed noise, crossing your arms over your chest “It's like amateur hour with you. You should know this.”

“I live a normal life, princess, I don't know any of this because it's not important to me,” he states as simple as that and you shake your head in disapproval “It shouldn't be important to you or to anyone, really.”

“Oh, but it is,” you return and when you look at him he's looking back. There's this electricity passing in the space in between you, something dangerous that's the tail tale of how different you both are and you start asking yourself how are you going to pull this whole thing off “And now, it is to you. You're about to enter a ballroom filled with people who admire you for simply being a Jeong, people who want to be you. It's hard and it’s pressuring but you declined my offer to not show up earlier today, so fucking own it.”

There's a pause where you see his jaw clenching, you see him shift uncomfortably and adjust his tie before presumably telling himself to relax.

“And study as much as you can, I'm not covering up your mistakes.”

The rest of the ride to the venue is silent and, when you get there, you exchange a look with your driver that's both apologetic and a request for discretion. You know your staff is discreet but you thank them every time you can because it's a lot of shit to handle.

“Here you go, honey.” The pet name almost makes you gag but you take the electronic from his hand, lock it and give it to the driver to safekeep.

“I prefer Y/N,” or even princess, because you're used to it “Don't try that inside.”

Rolling his eyes, he sarcastically lets out “Anything else your highness wants from me before we get off?”

“Yeah, for you to shut up and leave me alone forever after tonight but that's not really going to happen, hm?” You can see through the tinted windows how people gather outside to try and see who's inside the car and so you fix your hair with your fingers and then turn to fix Yunho’s tie. He makes a noise of disagreement but you shush him “Oh and for you to open the door for me?”

He levels you with his stare “Can't do it yourself?”

“Fucking do it and stop asking questions, Yunho.” You say under your breath and he smiles a little, triumphant like he just won something only for pissing you off.

Neither one of you want to lose the staring contest you suddenly have going on and it's, once again, electric. The tension is palpable and not in a positive way but you have to act quick when his brown eyes scan your face and linger where they don't need to. Hand still on his tie, it's tempting to try and choke him with it so instead you just tighten it a little more and it serves as a

“Now, Yunho.”

When he gets out of the car, you hear people gasp. He's not usually at these types of events because his mother must indulge him a lot. But also, he's usually seen with a frown whenever he does attend, so it must come to a shock to everyone he actually showed up.

It came with a shock for you too, you're not going to lie. You fully expected him to back out on his word and leave you hanging to deal with the shitshow yourself, no matter what he said this afternoon.

Rounding the car, he doesn't make the dramatic pause you were hoping for before opening the door and offering his hand to you. The gasps intensify once you elegantly get out, flashes going off and blinding you for a second before you take your surroundings in and loop your arm around Yunho’s.

There's people screaming both your names, asking questions that you don't get to answer because it's not the time for that and this is not a red carpet you have to walk through.

You wave your hand at the cameras, bow to the photographers and smile brightly when a girl behind an iphone tells you how pretty you look.

That would be the first person to compliment you today.

You don't turn to see what Yunho is doing, probably handling the attention in his own weird, detached way like he normally does and when someone signals you both to get going inside, you follow the person until the doors of the venue closing behind you drown out the paparazzi noise.

In the solitude of the initial hall, you see how Yunho lets his posture fall and lets out a breath “Well, I hated that.”

Condescendingly, you smile at him “Poor baby,” you lean in a bit into him “We’re only getting started.”

The horror on his face as he stares back brings out a nervous feeling inside you, but soon you're dragging him by his arm and following the staff member down the hall.

And when she opens the door into the ballroom, you let the feeling overcome you for a second and you gulp because of it.

Only getting started indeed.

If you read all the way down here: THANK YOU SO MUCH. This is part one of three (possibly more if the story extends that far). Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

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moominsuki · 4 months

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✎ᝰ NAGUMO YOICHI ; — 18:04. heartbreaks are best served raw. cold. wet.

࿄ ! warnings - bruh none except juicy angst. exes to ?friends /. note i have been having nagumo brain rot and it’s taking over my life. pls help. pls enjoy. ofc there will be more. no proofreads ok byeee

“you still owe me, by the way.”

sighing, you throw your keys into the straw woven coaster on top of your shoe rack. of course he was strewn all over your couch, bare feet on your cushions, head resting on the arm rest, tv flashing in jest.

you roll your eyes. “sometimes, i have half a mind to tell my elderly neighbour that no, they’re not just seeing things when they keep telling me a big, lanky idiot keeps breaking into my home after i leave.”

nagumo gasps, hand grasping his chest through his loose shirt. “idiot? words hurt, y’know.”

you kick off your shoes, jacket and blazer - in that exact order - before wandering off into the kitchen, ignoring the dramatic cries emanating from your living room.

it’s not uncommon for nagumo to just show up in your house, uninvited, eating all your food and making a mess of all your things. you remember the first time it happened, almost a year ago. he had stumbled into your bedroom window, all bloodied and bruised and your reaction time was terrible to say the least, because while you were mindlessly scrolling through your phone, his figure stepped into your peripheral and you threw the phone square at his already bruised jaw.

in apology, you had tidied him up and made him dinner… though now you wish you hadn’t shown him mercy back then, because he just kept. showing. up. you suppose he’s not just to blame. you’re ignoring the fact that you both hadn’t seen each other in over 7 years (after your messy exit of the JAA and an even more messy breakup) and now that he’s back in your life (back used in negative fashion) you just can’t seem to get rid of the him.

nor do you have the heart to tell him to get lost.

nagumo ceases his whining, yelling after you. “by the way, what’s for dinner? i saw some chicken in your fridge so…”

your eye twitches. “…so what?”

“so…i was thinking you might want to use that… to make dinner.”

you make a loud noise in disbelief, practically throwing the fridge door off of its hinges, “i’m not making you dinner?! gramps next door said he saw you come in 4 hours ago! and you didn’t think to come in and make dinner?!”

it’s quiet for a moment, but you hear the rustling of clothes and the movement of feet, so you turn to lean against the kitchen counter expectantly. the dark haired man peers his head round the corner, sheepish.

“y/n? are you mad at me?”

“no. i just think you’re stupid. oh, and i pretty sure you live to bother me.”

dark puppy eyes bore into yours as he steps into the vicinity. “the first part’s not true in the slightest but the second is pretty much on the nose. though, i’m not bothering you. you like that i’m here.”

“what’s this now?”

nagumo steps closer into your personal space, tattooed arms on either side of you as you look up and away from him.

“47 times. that’s how many times i’ve shown up here. in typical y/n fashion, you’ll complain and act like you’re annoyed, but i don’t think you’ve ever told me to go away.” nagumo ponders for a moment, finger on his chin. “now that i think about it, you haven’t. not once.”

you’re speechless. you’re not sure what to say and when you open your mouth, nothing wants to come out. truthfully, the man has read you like an open book, flicking through the pages languidly, hands bruising the spine. he’s smiling like it’s the truest thing he’s ever said - the only thing he’s been right about when it comes to how you feel.

pride is a very funny thing. if things were different, you’d grab his face and kiss him till he would shut up - well, that’s what you used to do… before, you know… you know. but this is humiliating, at least to you. even after all this time… you’ve let it get too far.

you huff, pushing his arm from beside you and you stand by a miscellaneous cupboard, turned away from nagumo, arms wrapped around yourself. “well, for starters, you’re wrong. forgive me for trying to be a good friend and helping someone out.”

“someone? that’s a little harsh, isn’t it?” the playful lilt stays lingering in his tone and it makes your heart simmer.

“… i think you should go, nagumo.”

silence sits between the two of you. nagumo looks at the back of your head. he sighs.

“if that’s what you want. see you around, y/n.”

he exits, quiet as never. he’s never quiet or silent when he lumbers around your home, sweeping and lingering. he’s probably already left your home in similar fashion. the fact makes you grab your own face and groan.

you don’t think you can be normal about him. maybe it’s for the best.

#nagumo x reader #nagumo yoichi #nagumo angst #sakamoto days x reader #sakamoto days #nagumo Drabble #bye I hate this dpmo #anything to procrastinate #will there be a part 2 oh most def #✎𓂃⊹ monologue💬 .ᐟ‍。°˖⌕#very very self indulgent like #i have been eating nagumo in my sleep

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cyn-write · 10 months

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"Heaven's Light"

Summary: Rollo has been eyeing y/n since her arrival, seeing you as the diamond amongst coals. At the Ball, his feelings culminate into a confession, but he didn't expect her reply...

Pairing: Rollo×F!Reader

Warnings: Y/n is lonely and ignored by NRC boy, first love, possible OOC, not edited, Lots of Fluff, the Rollo brain rot is real

Note: This is a lot longer than I intended! I hope everyone going through Rollo brain rot enjoys and if you are interested in reading an SFW or NSFW epilogue, let me know! If you would like to read the other parts in what I am calling my "Glomas Series" I will put links below! "She Blazes Me Beyond all Control" ft. Azul, Idia, and Malleus "I Feel Her, I See Her " ft. Riddle, Deuce, Ruggie, and Jamil

"Who might you be miss?"

Y/n gave a kind smile and nodded her head in greeting "I'm y/n, it's nice to meet you," she stayed next to Trein as she was there as his assistant.

"Yuu is our magicless perfect of Ramshackle. She will be working as my assistant throughout the trip," Trein added.

She felt Rollo's eyes scan her, and, unlike his greetings to the rest, he held out a hand. Being poilet, she offered her hand as well, and he lifted it to his lips, grazing her knuckles quickly.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, y/n. I understand it must be difficult, being surrounded by mages every second of the day. I hope you get a chance to relax this trip." Y/n blushed at the motion and bit her lower lip. All the while she could feel some of the others glaring daggers at her and Rollo.

"I-I'll do my best..." Y/n replied. Throughout the entire trip, Rollo seemed to gravitate towards y/n and used every excuse to isolate her from the group. They chatted about her difficulties at NRC and at the festival. As they chatted, she felt more and more drawn to the Student Council President

This all accumulated at the Masquerade. Rollo had given Y/n a proper dress for the occasion instead of the attire his counsel had chosen. The red fabric decadently adorned her figure and stunned the NRC boys with its beauty. But before any of them could ask for a dance, Rollo stole y/n away. He whisked her to the dance floor, and they started chatting.

It all felt like a dream, a wonderful, beautiful dream. Even though Rollo had tried to destroy magic, he was also the only person during all her time in Twisted Wonderland that she felt seen. The boys had always pushed her to the side, even when she was the only one whom the fire lotuses couldn't hurt but instead of including her in the plan, she was put on babysitting duty. Even at NRC, she was the one who dealt with the overblots, yet never thanked or even recognized as a full student.

Then she met Rollo and ever since their meeting, he treated her like a person. He recognized all she did for the boys and thanked her for her contributions. He even set aside time to show her around. Y/n never believed in "love at first sight," but ever since Rollo's lips grazed her knuckles, she felt her heart do somersaults around the stoic 3rd year.

Now, he asked her to dance. She felt like the Glass Princess dancing with her prince and just like the Glass Princess, she knew this would only last until Midnight. By this time tomorrow, she would be back at NRC. Back to being invisible.

As the song came to a close, she thought her night was over, but he must have been thinking about the same thing.

"Y/n, can I show you something?" He asked as the music quieted for a small interlude before the next song began. His face may appear as stone, but his blue eyes quivered. He was nervous.

Y/n nodded, "Sure."

Rollo, being a gentleman, offered her his arm. Determined to enjoy the moment, y/n leaned into Rollo as he escorted her out of the ballroom and up to the empty balcony on the upper level of the ballroom. The sun was set and the night sky was stunning, but what Rollo wanted to show y/n was the city at night. It was like a starry night itself as the city lamps and lights twinkled. It was stunning.

"Rollo, this is beautiful..."

"Y/n, stay here with me." Y/n turned to look at Rollo in shock and confusion, "Those fools at NRC do not deserve your purity. They treat you like a ghost. And I-" Rouge graced his pale cheeks and he looked into her (e/c) eyes, "I-I... I can't bear the thought of you leaving. You belong here. with me." He places his cold hand atop hers, "Let this be your sanctuary."

Y/n's heartbeat rose into her throat and before she could properly think what he said through, her heart spoke first, "Yes."

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Rollo was prepared for her to shoot him down, uprooting her heart like they did his flowers. What he wasn't prepared for her to accept.

Nothing this Halloween went as planned. His plot to destroy magic failed, Malleus and the fools at NRC destroyed his flowers, and y/n waltzed into his life.

He had read about true love and deemed it poppycock. There was no such thing. Then he saw her in her NRC uniform and his heart felt like it leaped out of his chest and into the sky. She was a pure flame burning in his chest and distracting him. He tried to ignore it, but any time he saw her that plan quickly became impossible.

He reworked his original plan to ensure she would be unharmed and fall into his arms at the same time. The first part of his plan failed, but he couldn't lose her. She was the last flame he had left.

Rollo was so sure of himself at first. He sent her a new dress, a proper one that enhanced her beauty far more than the one his counsel chose, he fixed the ballroom himself, he made sure to be her first dance, he read up on how to court a lady, prepared what he would say to her as they danced, and how he would ask her to stay and be his. Though much like his original plan with the fire lotuses, the moment he saw her. She was stunning, so stunning that he almost forgot everything he prepared. Thankfully, he regained his composer before he asked her to dance.

Now he felt his nerves resurface as it came time for him to confess. All his confidence and preparation failed to calm his beating heart. Thoughts raced through his mind as they walked to the balcony. What if she says no? What if she rejects me? What if I misread all of our interactions? he thought as they went out into the cool night air. Should I just keep my mouth shut? Abandon ship before it sinks...

Then he saw her eyes light up as she saw the city at night. The lights aglow, the soft mummer of music coming from the ballroom, and he knew he had to try.

"Y/n, stay here with me." He blurted out before he could convince himself otherwise, he decided to let his heart speak for once and not let his head take control. ""Those fools at NRC do not deserve your purity. They treat you like a ghost. And I-" he paused for a second and felt the fire in his chest grow brighter and brighter, "I-I... I can't bear the thought of you leaving. You belong here. with me." He places his cold hand atop hers, "Let this be your sanctuary."

Silence. He averted his eyes and clenched his handkerchief in his pocket.

His doubts returned and he prepared himself for rejection. He started to form a retraction in his mind, but she, yet again, surprised him.

"Yes." She said, her (e/c) eyes glimmered like stars and her voice rang like the Bell of Solace. "I-I'll stay with you."

Rollo felt his heart stop. He looked her in the eyes again and squeezed her hand. "You mean it." He removed his free hand from his handkerchief and placed it tentatively on her cheek, "Y-you'll stay?"

She placed her hand stop his and leaned into his touch, "I do." He could see tears forming in the corner of her eyes, "I don't want to leave you either."

On pure impulse, he pulled her into a tight embrace. Half of him was convinced that she would disappear if he let her go, and the other half was relieved. She felt the same as him. She wanted to be with him.

"Rollo, you're shaking," She commented as she returned his embrace. He didn't realize he was shaking so much. It must be the relief of her accepting his proposal. She looked up at him and placed a hand on his cheek. Her skin was warm and comforting.

"I guess I am..." He said and placed his own hand on top, "This is just what you do to me, my Flame."

She giggled and her melodious laugh made him respond with one of his own. "Do I?" she responded.

"Yes," He gently moved a strand of her hair away from her face and his eyes landed on her lips. Those beautiful red lips beckoned his own, "You have set my heart ablaze and it makes me want to listen to my heart instead of my head."

"And what is your heart telling you to do now?" She asks in a teasing manner.

"To do this," He leaned in and kissed her. it was gentle, nervous at first. Then as he realized she was reciprocating, he deepened the kiss. They parted for a moment to catch their breath before claiming another kiss, then another. Solidifying their love above the City of Flowers.

Rollo may have failed to rid the world of magic, but he found his new Heaven's Light.

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lamentationsofalonelypotato · 6 months

Text

You Call It Madness But I Call It Love

Chapter 7: Are We Old Friends Or Old Enemies?

Pairing: Soldier Boy x f!reader, Reader POV

Summary: When the reader left Payback 40 years ago after a falling out with her childhood best friend she never looked back, but when two men show up to her apartment and start asking her questions about the past, the reader begins to think those things can’t stay hidden and starts to question what’s real and what’s fantasy. This is a re-telling of The Boys Season 3, where the reader is a supe who's known Soldier Boy since 1927. The chapters will fluctuate between past and present. This is chapter seven of my "You Call It Madness But I Call It Love" series. (I'm so bad at summaries please forgive me!)

Word Count: 5K

Warnings: I'm going to rate this 18+ just to be sure. References to Past Sex, Sexual Innuendo, Cursing, Blood, Guts, Graphic Death, (spoilers?), Soldier Boy might be, is, really, absolutely, a little OOC.

Note: This is told from Reader's perspective. Any references to the reader is made using you or your. There is minimal use of y/n. I tried my best to proofread, but nobody's perfect. Reader is described as "curvy" occasionally. If you don’t like, don’t read, but if you do like, you’re my favorite!

Internal Monologue is in first person and is in italics

Series Masterlist

Masterlist

*********************************************************

Present Day

Your motorcycle crunches loudly against the black gravel driveway outside of Crimson Countess' trailer. It looks worse than you imagined, shoved behind Vought-land, and sprouting out of the ground like a fungus. Not an unusual thought given it's ogre-like inhabitant.

You weren't looking forward to seeing her after all these years, because you knew it wasn't going to end well. Deep down you hoped that she had let go of everything that happened in the past, like you had tried, well, until Butcher and Hughie showed up at your apartment. Then again, you're not sure that you've really let go of everything that happened. Sometimes it felt like you just shoved all your feelings into the deepest darkest part of your brain where they’d been festering for the past forty years.

And ever since Butcher and Hughie showed up, those feelings had been clawing their way out like a banished Titan climbing out of Tartarus.

You think again about driving away. If you saw her, there wouldn't be any going back. You couldn't go in there pretending to be your daughter, you had to be you. Which meant the possibility of losing the life you'd constructed in the aftermath that followed your long superhero career.

Was it worth it? Was Ben worth it?

You sigh considering that thought. After the fight it was difficult to answer that question. If the answer was no, you might as well just leave. But the answer was yes. You hated that after everything that happened between Ben and you, the answer was yes.

And that meant you needed to know the truth, needed to see it in her eyes. Which also meant there was only one choice.

You look around the clearing where the trailer sits. It’s in a circle of trees that filter the setting sunlight through their lofty branches, making patterns on the gravel where weeds and patches of grass break through every few feet like an oasis in a desert. Further down the road to the right you see a collection of empty circus carts that rust onto yellowed grass, rising from the earth to tangle in the wooden wheels of the carts.

At least the trees are pretty. You think to yourself trying to focus on the positive. They were, after all, one of your favorite things to paint.

You consider your apartment downtown, the open floor plan and large windows, very different from how she chose to live her life. Your eyes trace the mobile home thinking back about the fungus analogy.

The trailer was covered with peeling white paint stained black and yellow in some areas where sticky mold had begun to fester against the structure. The rickety porch was rotted, so much so that when you walked across it, it creaked loudly beneath your feet and you stepped around several foot-sized holes, where others had fallen through.

She definitely didn't budget her money well. I wonder how much money she got when she was a hero? I know that my salary wasn't amazing. Ben definitely did better than me because of his films.

Then again, you were living off money from your father, and your grandfather's investments in real estate, not to mention your artwork was selling better than it ever had.

Your knock against the flimsy front door of the mobile home, not using your supe strength, but the entire house still shakes.

Probably wouldn't withstand a thunderstorm. Hopefully she's invested in an umbrella.

No one answers and for a moment you hope that she's not here or she's dead, but just like always you’re disappointed.

"Who the fuck is it?" You hear Countess' familiar voice shout from inside.

A swarm of memories flock across your mind at her voice, but you push them aside.

"Your best friend in the whole world." You respond, before you can stop yourself. Sarcasm was an easy fallback. If your mother was here she'd say that it wasn't ladylike.

Really just disappointing her in every century. The thought makes you happy.

"What?" Countess rips open the door so savagely that you wonder how the door didn't come off in her hand. You watch her eyes widen and her face pale as her gaze lands on you.

Well, that's certainly not a normal reaction to seeing me.

"Y/n?" You hear her heartbeat spike in her chest. "You're-" She sputters to look for the right word.

"Alive? Yes." You smile at her. "Well, aren't you going to invite me in?"

"Um-"

A flash of the last time you saw her comes roaring back. The smug look on her face when you caught her and Ben together, the way her face was flushed bright red, sweat dotting her hairline while he- You clear your throat to stop the memory.

You push past her into the small residence, not waiting for her to invite you, and your nose wrinkles as the smell of sweat and her rancid perfume invade your nostrils. It was barely two rooms, the small kitchen/living room was separated from the bedroom with a red beaded curtain that doesn't hide the unmade bed and clothes covered floor.

This was unusual given the fact that she was wearing her supe suit, complete with cape and mask. It was a little tighter in some places than you remember, her reddish hair reeked of cheap dye, her perfume like a cloud of sulfuric acid, and her pointed, cruel face was more wrinkled that the last time you saw her.

"I'd like to say that this is cute," You turn to look back at her from the small kitchen/living room, that was covered in dirty plates and take-out boxes. "But it's kind of a shit hole, isn't it?"

That was fast. So much for trying to be civil. Too much history I guess.

"What are you doing here?" She keeps her voice calm, but the tempo of her heart suggests otherwise.

Your eyes trace the lines of her face, the wrinkles, the subtle graying of her hair that the dye couldn't cover. "Just thought I'd check in. See how things are going. You definitely didn't age well."

"What the fuck do you want?" She snarls this time.

You can't help but smile at her. Something about this whole situation was utterly ridiculous to you.

She said Ben died. Why am I even here? What did she have to gain from his death? The thought swishes around in your brain. But then why was she afraid when she saw me? You think about all the times you spent watching her manipulate the others on Payback and all the other times you were around her, she never showed fear. Why now?

"I'm here because somebody showed up the other day asking me about Ben." You shrug, running one of your hands against the dirty kitchen countertop examining the tip of your finger as if looking for dust. "And it's funny, because as they were asking me questions I realized that you and I never talked about what happened that day. I mean I heard what you said through Stan and Legend, but I never heard it from you. Thought it was time we had a little heart to heart."

Her pulse spikes again, but she covers it with a smirk. "You want to talk about Ben?" Her voice drips with false sweetness. "Well I'll say this, he was a good fuck. But I'm sure you knew that."

Your entire body goes rigid, remembering the night that you found them together, the night after you finally told him you loved him and he pushed you away.

"I mean, after all, he popped your cherry didn't he? Made you a woman." Countess' smirk turns into a rueful smile. "You definitely waited long enough. Ben told me how long you’d been friends. He told me the sex was so boring, that you were so inexperienced, that he wanted a real woman who could actually please him. A woman who wasn’t quite so-." She sniffs, tapping a bright red fingernail against her hip. “Big.”

Her words are like a slap in the face and you feel the cold disapproval of your mother for the first time in eighty years. The anger that surges up underneath your skin flares hot against your cheeks.

Ben wouldn't have said that about me. He- he knew how special that was for me. He said that he wanted it to be special for me.

You remember how happy he looked when you woke up in his arms the next day, before you said the three little words that you couldn't hold in anymore, the ones that you had wanted to say to him since you were eight.

"Poor little y/n. You worshiped the ground he walked on for so long and finally he decided to pity fuck you. It’s so sad. You wasted your life pining for someone who will never love you. And you thought you could just come here and intimidate me? You’re still the same little girl who begged Ben to fuck yo-"

Her body flies forward telekinetically into your outstretched hand, that clamps down around her throat.

"But I do intimidate you." Your eyes shift to purple with your display of power. "Your heart rate hasn't dropped below 120 since I got here. So obviously there's a reason why you're afraid of me." She gasps against your hand, but you don't let go. "Tell me what happened that day." Your voice has slipped into a monotone, tinged with rage. “And I promise that I’ll let you live. In what condition, well, that's up to you.”

"I don't have to tell you anything!" She spits, pushing her hands together and sending you flying backward as the ball of fire hits you just under the right side of your rib cage.

There's a high pitched popping sound, an immeasurable amount of pain, and everything goes black.

It wasn't the first time you'd died. You'd heard of other supes being able to come back from the dead, and of course the others like Ben and Homelander who were almost invulnerable to injury, but your gift was different. Yes you had enhanced senses, speed, and strength, which were the original powers that were displayed after you received the injection of Compound V, but there was more to it than that.

It took you the first two deaths to figure it out, and you could remember both clearly.

The first was a few weeks after you took Compound V, when you and Ben were on his tour overseas promoting the might of the United States. It was supposed to be safe. The shot fired from the crowd was meant for Ben, but you pushed him out of the way. It was before you figured out he was bulletproof. Your gut reaction was to protect him as it always was. He ripped the guy in half for what he did and turned back to you. You remembered how he looked, remembered the fear in his eyes he never allowed to break through the façade he wore as Soldier Boy as he held you across his lap, holding a hand against the wound where blood poured freely from your chest. You remembered gazing up at him for what you thought was the last time and then the darkness that followed, welcoming you like an old friend.

And then thirteen seconds later you woke up, gasping for air, the bullet wound healed leaving only a circular scar behind. You didn’t understand at first, it wasn't until you died the second time that you realized how powerful you could be. The second time was Ben's fault, a scorned lover, a telekinetic, with a bone to pick with him. When you got in her way she'd snapped your neck with her powers. But this time when you woke, it was different, you felt different. You could feel her powers stirring beneath your skin, and it wasn't until you flicked her away from Ben that you understood. When you died a normal way you came back after 13 seconds, but when a supe killed you, you came back in 13 seconds with their powers.

You didn’t know why 13 seconds. In fact it was Ben that told you it was exactly 13 seconds, why he knew that you didn't know. It seemed that for everyone else 13 was an unlucky number, but for you it was the difference between life and death, literally. You also didn’t understand why you kept the powers. Sometimes you wondered if when you were killed by a supe your body analyzed how you died, understood it, and then you came back with that forbidden knowledge like you’d just eaten the fruit off the wrong tree.

Ben was the only one who knew and when anyone asked, you attributed your sudden ability to move things with your mind as something you never used in public. Having that much power scared you. You weren't sure what people or Vought would do if they found out, so you kept it to yourself and so did Ben. Honestly, sometimes you think the reason why he kept it to himself was because he didn’t want anyone to be more powerful than him, but you didn’t care about the abilities. You didn’t think you were a god despite Vought’s constant worship and praise. If anything, you felt closer to hell and in a binding contract with the devil.

Exactly thirteen seconds later, you sit up from the floor completely healed while Countess stands there over you, a horrified look on her face. She'd never seen you die before.

"Did you just try to kill me Countess?" You ask.

She puts her hands together to shoot another fireball, but you make a motion with your hand to that flicks her away. Her body soars backward illuminated in the purple glow that manifests with your telekinesis, into the small hallway that leads to the bathroom on the other side of the mobile home.

"You know," You stand from the ground looking down at your melted motorcycle jacket. "This was my favorite jacket. Had it from the 80's it was vintage. Damn.”

“How-“ She groans stumbling to her feet and leaning on the wall for support.

“We all have our secrets don’t we? And I'd love to hear yours."

Her eyes flash to where the front door is, but you beat her to it, yanking her back towards you by the arm, crushing her right wrist in your hand. Her scream of pain quenches the anger fueling in your chest from the words she snarled at you earlier.

"You're pretty worthless, even with your powers." You sigh. “I was hoping for more of a challenge.”

She cradles her broken wrist to her chest, backing away from you. Fear flashes in her eyes when she realizes that she's made a mistake, but instead of it making you feel powerful, it makes you pause.

Being a hero was difficult. You watched how so many others abused their powers over the years, feigning to be pure and heroic but really succumbing to dark urges when no one was looking. It was also why you hated Herogasm.

You hated it because you knew what happened to the normal people, the ones that thought they would be safe with the heroes they admired so much. You'd watched Ben lose control more than once, knew stories of innocent people that were hurt, not that Countess was innocent. But you never liked to hurt people with your powers. Standing here in this trailer made you guilty and watching her cower away from you made you guilty despite your shared history and her harsh words.

"So I'm just going to ask one more time, what happened to Ben?" You force your voice into a snarl, shaking off the guilt.

Because it was necessary. It wasn't just about you settling something from years ago, it was about Ben.

She deserves this, she isn't a good person.

"Go to hell." She spits at you.

You grab her by the front of her red suit and throw her away into the small kitchen. Countess' body crashes into the lopsided brown cabinets with a solid thwacking sound smashing through the flimsy structures. Blood drips down the side of her face from where she hit the cabinet corner, blending into her reddish hair. She rises from the ground with an angry snarl, clutching a dirty knife in her hand.

"I don't want to get tetanus from that. I can't remember when my last shot was-" You begin to say with a sigh.

She swipes the air in a vicious arc, but you grab her by the wrist, dodging the knife. "You never learn do you?"

The wrist twists to the side in your hand with a loud snapping sound followed by Countess' scream that reverberates in your skull as you break her other arm. "Pretty soon you're gonna be out of limbs, so I'd start talking."

Countess drops to her knees as the pain begins to seep into her body. "Fine. I'll tell you-"

"Then do it."

"He's not dead."

As the world stops spinning a high pitched ringing in your ears takes over, filling the monotonous drone of seconds ticking past. The past forty years no longer matter, the next hundred wouldn’t either, because Ben wasn't dead. As much as you hated him, the thought chilled you to your core, because then where the hell was he?

"Or at least he wasn't when they took him." She mutters, holding her arms to her chest.

"What did you do?" Your voice comes out in a whisper because you can hardly speak let alone comprehend what she's saying. "WHAT DID YOU DO?" You scream, grabbing her by the front of her suit.

"They wanted him." She spits.

"Who did?"

"The Russians. They wanted him and they took him!"

"You sold him out to the Russians?" You roar, hauling her up into the air so close you can smell what she ate for lunch. "Why? Did they pay you?"

"No. We all hated him!" She snarls. "But you were always around." Her mouth twitches into a painful smile. "It was so easy to get him to fuck me. I knew it would drive you away, you'd wanted him for so long and he didn't give a damn about you. And then you weren't there to protect him!" She laughs through the pain that builds in her chest.

I was right. She fucked him to make me angry, to get me to turn my back on him. I wasn't there to help him and they sold him out the first chance they got.

"He always wanted me more than you, knew that I could satisfy him better than you ever could. You really thought that he could love you? Ben doesn’t love anyone!” Her eyes glint with malice. “And you’re still the same pathetic little girl who begged Ben for his co-“

Her head tears from her shoulders in you hands cutting off her next words, the explosion of blood from her carotid artery spraying your face, and soaking into your ruined clothes. The ringing is back, filling the void of silence in the air that followed the tearing of bone and sinew.

You stand there for a minute holding it, not quite comprehending what you've just done. You hadn't lost control in a long time, not since you had the fight with Ben about Countess, or when you threw your sofa through one of the walls in your apartment and then broke every piece of glass, windows included, and had to move when you found out he was dead.

Or not dead. The thought chills you. Payback handed him over to the Russians, where he's been for the past 40 years? Why? Just because he was irrational, angry, and a dick? There's got to be more to it than that. Stan would have never allowed that. Soldier Boy was his golden boy, his meal ticket-

You think about the last forty years of hating Ben, cursing him, trying to forget him, wishing that you'd never loved him. The night you fought washes over you, bringing the anger, frustration, and heartbreak roaring back. The head in your hands smashes into mush as the memories barrage your mind, surging over the dam you built to keep them away.

You and Ben had always watched each other's backs. It was the promise you made to each other before all of this started, on the night he asked you to come with him and leave everything you knew behind. You knew him better than anyone else.

And yes maybe he fucked me once and I told him I loved him and he immediately went out and fucked Countess-

Your heart cracks in your chest with the thought, the heartbreak coming back in a wave of sadness that makes you shudder.

But you couldn't leave him, because you knew he would have never left you. Ben may have said that he didn't care about you, but you knew in your gut that Ben would have torn anyone apart who hurt you. He's always protected you. Even before you became supes together.

You stare back down at the mush coating your hands and the front of your clothes.

Why the fuck is everything so complicated?

********************************************************

When you get back to your apartment you're covered in a thin layer of soot, from blowing up the trailer, and a layer of blood and brain matter from removing and crushing her head. You hoped that by blowing up her home and burning her body with your newfound abilities that it would be enough to cover your tracks, but you were uneasy. The buzz of killing her and the shock of her revelation had worn off, but was now replaced with a numbness when you think about what could have happened to Ben, what could still be happening to him.

The shower does little to ease your mind and sleep evades you, despite the exhaustion that pulls at your limbs for using your powers. Dying usually meant that you needed to replenish that energy, but you couldn't muster the enthusiasm to do that. You just felt listless. The last forty years felt like a lie, felt like a waste, because as you’d been living your life Ben had been trapped in Russia.

So you open your laptop on the counter, wet hair soaking through your sleepshirt, and begin to research flights to Russia leaving within the next few days.

I have no idea where I'm going. I go to Russia and then what? Where in Russia? The Kremlin? Yeah let me just waltz right up to that.

You lean forward with your head in your hands thinking about Butcher. He came here because he wanted to know more about Ben. Maybe he knew where he was. He was the one who mentioned Russia.

You pull the card he left behind on your counter towards you, rubbing your thumb over the number. Legend said he kills supes. So is that what he wanted? To find Ben and kill him? The thought makes a chill travel down your spine, immediately followed by the primal urge to protect Ben. But what had Ben ever done to him?

You look at the number again.

If I call him, he's going to know that I was lying. Not that I'm scared of him.

You finally pick up your phone and dial the number, but it goes to voicemail.

"Hey this is Y/f/n Y/l/n. I just remembered a few things about Soldier Boy and thought you'd like to discuss them. Just give me a call-back whenever you get this."

You hang up the phone and sit there for a minute, eyeing the coffee that sits untouched next to your open laptop.

I killed someone today. The thought should be chilling, but you feel no remorse, no guilt.

Is that because I think she deserved it?

Your mind goes back to what she said about Ben sleeping with you, what he told her about you. The urge to cry rises in your chest with the memory of her words.

You remembered that night. You had been so excited. Ben had taken you out to dinner for your birthday, despite your insistence that you'd celebrated enough of those. The restaurant was quiet, secluded, different than the flashy world the both of you were living in. It had reminded you of before you took the Compound V, when you were still normal. The food was good, there was flirting and hand holding at dinner, and finally a slow dance when he kissed you for the first time.

And when he took you back to your apartment and to bed, it didn’t seem like a quick fuck, it didn't feel like cheap sex. The way he took care of you, held your hand, said your name, looked at you, held you close to him after, and the soft smile on his face that he had only when it was the two of you- it felt special. He made it special for you because he knew how important it was for you.

Tears slip down your cheeks. It would have been one of your favorite memories if you didn't know what followed, what was going to happen the next morning or in the next 24 hours.

"Guess it was just a lie." You mutter to yourself, wiping the back of your hand across your eyes.

The next morning when you woke up in his arms you couldn't help but tell him that you loved him, whisper it to him, more happy than you'd ever been curled against his chest. You remembered the way he looked at you, like you were crazy and then he left for his movie premiere even though we were supposed to go together muttering flimsy excuses as to why he had to leave. And finally the image of him and Countess in the bathroom crashes over you, sending shards of glass back into your heart.

You thought that by now you'd picked them all out.

More tears drip down your cheeks, as your thoughts drift back to Ben and the years that followed that night. You sigh considering what to do.

I wish I could just forget, wish that I could leave him, but I can't.

But that didn’t mean you had to forgive him.

**********************************

After a night of no sleep, you stand poised over the wooden chest in the back of your closet. Packing for the flight that left in two days was turning into a bigger task than you'd thought.

Your current wardrobe wasn't suited for storm the capital city of Russia and kill everything in your path to find Ben, it was more suited for late night painting and art shows. The amount of paint stained overalls, oversized band t-shirts, sweatpants, and dresses in your closet was astounding and none of which screamed "fear me." You would definitely need to go to the mall to find more things that you could move in, if need be, and find things that hid your identity. All it took was one photo or video linked online and everyone would know that you weren’t dead.

You knew that no one would be willing to talk to you, give up the information willingly, not to mention if you really had to break into the Kremlin it was not going to be a walk in the park.

It wasn't that you were out of shape. You still trained during the week, took self-defense classes, and worked out to prevent yourself from going soft, but fighting Countess was the first time in forty years that you had faced another supe and you weren’t up to speed on the supes that the Russian government employed.

You also didn't like the idea that you were going in blind. There could be any number of men there, any kind of supes, and anything waiting for you.

But the truth was, deep down you didn't care. What the rest of Payback did had ignited something deep inside you. You knew that people were going to die if they stood in front of you, but the urge to protect Ben rose above all else. Because you still loved him, despite everything he said, despite everything he did, he was still Ben after all this time and you couldn't let him go that easily.

You hold up your supe suit in front of you. It was made specifically for you, designed of a breathable material that made movement easy, not to mention the hood and mask did a wonderful job of concealing who you were.

I really don't want to wear this again. You think to yourself, eyeing the smooth material. It wasn't that you hated your suit, it was what it represented. If you wore that again, you'd be Indigo and you'd spent the past forty years trying to put as much distance between you and your superhero career as possible. You would be recognized instantly.

Could I even squeeze into this thing again?

You look at yourself in the floor length mirror on the opposite side of your walk in closet. You looked the same as you always had. Countess’ jeer about you being big makes you flinch again, bringing another cloud of insecurity over your mind.

Maybe that’s why he never slept with me before that night. Maybe that’s why he ran to Countess.

The thought is immediately followed by the image of Missy Callahan at your 16th birthday and how Ben clung to her. Then followed by your mother’s constant attempts to hide your figure. And finally, followed by all the other women you had ever seen Ben with. None of the others had looked like you. You shake off the urge to cry and look back at the suit.

Maybe I can paint over the purple, make it only black? Would that really change it that much?

Suddenly your phone rings, shattering the still silence in your apartment. For a second you hope that it's Butcher returning your call, but when you lift the phone to your ear you realize that it's something much worse.

"Hello?"

"I need you." The familiar voice says.

Shit.

******************************************************

Thank you so much for reading! If you'd like to be added to the taglist for this series let me know :)

Taglist: @roseblue373 @anundyingfidelity @cheynovak @cassiecasluciluce @muhahaha303 @deans-spinster-witch @kayleighmeister @demodemo909 @fruitfacess @bobbobbobinogs @bughill126

#soldier boy x reader #soldier boy x you #jensen ackles soldier boy #soldier boy #soldier boy x female reader #soldier boy x y/n #soldier boy/ben #the boys amazon #the boys fanfic #jensen ackles #soldier boy fanfiction #the boys series #the boys tv #soldier boy fic #the boys season 3 #the boys s3

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intimacyequalsdeath · 11 months

Text

Bubz's Slasher Fictober Apple Crumble NSFW Alphabets Day 18: Harry Warden

Day 18 coming right up! As always I hope you all enjoy <3, I will be honest though and say it has been forever since I've actually watched my bloody valentine so I'll try my best to do harry justice here.

Notes: Minors DNI, Smut, NSFW.

A is for Aftercare (What they're like after sex):

Soft baby boy. Checks on you multiple times and makes sure you have anything and everything you need. A bath? done, A drink ? done, A snack ? done. Literally ask for anything and this man will run to the store if you don't have it at the house.

B is for Body Part (Favorite on them and their partner):

After years of working in the mines, Harry is pretty fit. I could see his favorite part of himself being a tie between his chest and his arms as both show all his years of hard work to put food on the table.

On you it's your smile, Harry's been through a lot, but with you he feels like he's at home. Your smile brings a comfort to him he hasn't experienced in forever.

C is for Cum (Anything to do with cum):

Harry wants babies (If you have the equipment to make them) so always inside you. If you can't get pregnant he'll probably still cum inside just to avoid a big mess to clean but if he does make a mess it'll be a cold day in hell before he lets you clean it.

D is for Dirty Secret:

If he could get away with it, He'd lock you up in the house and never let you leave. The people outside, the ones who let him sit in that mine and almost die, don't deserve to see you or have you in their presence. Your his baby and he wants you all to himself.

E is for Experience (How experienced are they?):

Harry... isn't the most experienced person. You might have to help him along the first few times. He knows what goes where, and how to make you feel good, But in the actual sex department he's a bit lacking.

F is for Favorite Position:

Even though he hasn't had the most experience Harry fucks like a dog. Doggy style is his favorite by far. He likes bringing you to your hands and knees for him. Knowing he can do that to you and no one else can thrills him.

G is for Goofy (How serious are they?):

He isn't the most serious but he's not really goofy either? He's more so just really soft and fluffy during sex.

H is for Hair (How well groomed are they?):

It's a bit unruly since during his time in the minds he kinda lost the will to care for himself, so you might have to remind him to continue with the upkeep of it. If it gets too bad he takes care of it without reminder but don't be surprised if it slips his mind.

I is for Intimacy (How are they during the act, romantic etc):

Very romantic, He's all about wining and dining you. He's really into foreplay just to get the two of you in the mood but its the most tooth rotting foreplay you'll ever experience.

J is for Jackoff (Do they masturbate and how often?):

He does it every so often. If you were with him when the mine accident happen then he definitely jacked off to the thought of you in the mines to keep himself somewhat sane.

K is for Kink (Their kinks):

Praise kink: Tell this boy he's doing a good job and he'll cum on the spot whether he's inside you or not. You've made him cum in his pants more then once with this.

L is for Location (Favorite places to have sex):

At home in the bedroom. Like I said your his, he doesn't want anyone that isn't him looking at you in any type of way. He would have to end them if they did and he doesn't wanna have to be killing people 24/7.

M is for Motivation (What turns them on?):

The thought of wanting nothing more then to please you is what gets him going the most. He aims to please and wants you to be as satisfied as possible.

N is for No (Something they won't do):

No degrading you, No hitting you or even being mean. He's just not into it and would never even think about hurting you even if it was for fun during sex.

O is for Oral (Oral Preferences):

Major giver. He'll let you give him a blow job here and there but he loves giving you oral. If you ask him what he wants to eat nine times out of ten the answer will be you.

P is for Pace (How fast or slow? Are they rough?):

Slow and sensual all the way. He'll get a bit rough when he gets desperate but he wants to make love and make the most of it.

Q is for Quickie ( Do they like quickies?):

He hates quickies. Why would he go for a quickie when he can give you the actual real full fledged thing. If you like them that's fine but don't expect him to like them.

R is for Risk (Are they down to experiment?):

He'll experiment within reason, Like if it's something that may hurt you or anything, it's a hard no. However if you bring something up he finds interesting then he'll be down to try it out with you.

S if for Stamina (How long can they go for?):

This man used to be a miner, he has all the stamina in the world from doing that for years. He will give you breaks and stop after awhile but he could literally go for hours on end.

T is for Toys (Do they use toys and do they like them?):

He doesn't have much experience when it comes to toys so if you bring up one night you'd like to try them he's all for it. He might not like every single toy but there are a few he does really like and a lot that he loves to use on you.

U if for Unfair (Do they like to tease?):

He thinks teasing is mean, and he's not about to be mean to his baby. If you wanna tease him just a bit to get him worked up then go for it he doesn't mind but don't be too terribly mean to him just some playful teasing.

V is for Volume (How loud can they get?):

He grunts but that's about it, Harry isn't a big noise maker in general and he doesn't talk much either so don't expect sex to be any different.

W is for Wild Card (Random things):

Soft Harry is soft, he loves cuddles and really anything where he can just hang out with you. So after he runs your aftercare bath expect him to sit on the toilet and have him just hang out with you, no talking, just you and him being together.

X is for X-Ray (What are they packing):

Harry's got a big thick dick, About 8 inches and a good amount of girth to it.

Y is for Yearning (How high is their sex drive?):

High as fuck but only for you. He's never felt this way about anyone before and as far as he's concerned the sun rises and sets with you and so does his sex drive.

Z is for ZZZ (How fast do they fall asleep?):

He waits awhile. He likes to make sure your entirely ok before even thinking about sleeping. He also likes to cuddle and just hold you for awhile too. If you had any doubts of his feelings for you, you won't after this.

#slasher fandom #slasher x reader #harry warden #harry warden x reader #my bloody valentine #Fictober #halloween

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spamgyu · 7 months

Note

hii !! it's my first time requesting to you but can I request for something like giving mingyu kisses with red lipstick on after he comes back from paris (I'm tryna distract myself from that dior fit but he still looked too good nonetheless 😔) thank you!!!!!

So what I'm hearing is you want me DEAD

Alright.... let's do this

Tweaked the request a bit .....

LA VIE EN ROSE – MINGYU DRABBLE

*NOTE: this is not edited sorry. Brain rot is so bad.

"Baby," The heavy door of their shared hotel suite shut behind Mingyu as he called out for you. "I'm back."

"Bathroom!" You called out.

It wasn't long before he appeared at the door way, leaning against the doorframe as he watched you wipe away your eye make-up – a soft smile on his lips.

"How was the show?" You turned to face him, putting a pause to your night routine.

"Crazy," He let out a soft chuckle, recalling to the crowd that had showered him with love just outside the venue. "I wish you could have seen it."

Upon hearing that he had a schedule in the city of love, Mingyu didn't think twice to bring you along – convincing his managers that you needed to be there for your own work purposes.

Which wasn't much of a lie, attending shows of your own favorite brands for research purposes.

It was a silly excuse all that mattered was that it worked and you were there with him. More importantly, looking quite beautiful in the all black attire you had managed to put together; a leather mini skirt with graphic hoodie that seemed to swallow your frame, paired with knee high boots and trench coat.

And even more the better that you were wearing his favorite shade of lip color – a matte red, bringing all the attention to the soft pillows he loved the most.

"I think I saw a bit of it on twitter." You smiled, walking over to him – slinging your arms around his neck. "You're drooling."

Mingyu laughed, reaching up to wipe the corner of his lips as his other hand rested at your hips. "How was yours?"

"Great, the marketing team loved the collection." Your gaze mirroring his – the two of you may have been conversing about your day but both of your minds were on one thing and one thing only.

Each other's lips.

"So how long do I have to keep this up before you let me kiss you?" Mingyu hummed, his head dipping dangerously close to yours.

"Do what?" You asked playfully, brushing your lips against his before pulling back – earning a pout from him.

"You're so annoying." His grip tightened, pulling you against his chest – a little too rough, you may add, causing you to stumble and your lips landing on the collar of his shirt.

Leaving a faint mark of your lips behind.

"Babe!" You gasped, knowing that he had to return the shirt by the end of the trip.

"You're right, I'll be in deep shit. Probably get an earful and I'll most likely be so sad." He feigned the same reaction as yours. "I think a kiss will make it better."

Giggling, you knew there was no winning – not that you cared. You had left the hotel before him earlier in the day and did not get the chance to see him when he had been in full Dior clothing and beauty.

And maybe it was for the best, because had you seen how gorgeous he looked, he might have not made it to the show without traces of your red lips all over his face... and neck.

You remembered sitting in the hired car, scrolling through social media and seeing all images of your boyfriend roll in – looking absolutely breathtaking in the midst of the crowd.

"Is that so?"

Mingyu nodded, his bottom lip jutted out.

"Well then, I guess" You sighed, your nose brushing against his. "I just have to."

"Maybe even make out, I don't know." He mumbled against your lips, before taking your bottom lip between his – smiling briefly at the thought of the color messily transferring on his skin as your lips and tongues slowly moved against each other.

PERMANENT TAGLIST

@thegirlwhoimagined @forcheol @ohmygodwhyareallusernamestaken @f4iryjjosh @akeminy @yonabutnotyuna @tacosandbitch @aaniag @bettybotterboughtabitofbutter @xbaekcult @alwaysalmostthere @ashkuuuu @morkswatermelonnnnn @isabellah29 @lottogyu @bubbly-moon @lllucere @bo-fairykim @pluviophile-xxx @daegutowns @jenoxygen @niktwazny303 @aahvii @fragmentof-indifference @leah-rose03 @haolistic @eclliipsed @joshuahongnumbers @gyuguys @yaaaridk @christinewithluv @yoonzinoooo @livelikejinki @watercolureyes @whoa-jo @primoisellerose

#..........well.... now i need to go kiss him #or maybe kill myself #mingyu drabble #mingyu x y/n #mingyu x you #mingyu x reader #spamwrites #mingyu fic #spamquest

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seasonsbloom · 2 years

Text

all the love (under a mistletoe) . benedict bridgerton

pairing ; benedict bridgerton x female!reader

synopsis ; modern!au. you have been in love with your best friend's older brother for years. on Christmas eve, things finally come to a head.

wc ; 6k

warnings ; explicit lanugage, some allusions to reader having a shitty family, christmas angst, pining, one mention of margaret thatcher

note: i'm not british (english isn't even my first language) so pls excuse any inaccuracies in any slang etc etc... also this was supposed to be a smutty thing and no instead it's exclusively tooth-rotting fluff so I'd like to apologize.... merry Christmas??? if anybody does want a steamy part two... well, hit me up I guess!

i stole the title from britney spears' my only wish (this year)!

You never thought something like Christmas at Aubrey Hall could exist outside the hour-and-a-half runtime of Hallmark movies. They've got it all - the stockings above the merrily crackling fireplace, the Christmas crackers twinkling on a long table, the boughs of holly climbing up doorways. It's like a Selfridges on the 21st of December just vomited all over the place.

"Seriously," you say, blinking in a mixture of awe and fear, "how big is this thing?"

Eloise, much more accustomed to her family's display of wealth and Bridgerton harmony, shrugs without looking away from her phone screen. "No idea. Benedict is like 6 feet, and that thing is twice his size, so, like… 12 feet? I don't know, it's Christmas. You do the math."

She turns away, still glued to an Instagram page plastered with pink graphics informing about various social issues in carefully-designed typography, and leaves you standing alone in the entrance hall. If you didn't like the Bridgertons so much, you'd be the first to say their Christmas tree is obnoxious. It's a ridiculous thing, wide enough to commandeer half the room. It's covered top to bottom in tinsel, dark blue ornaments dangling from every branch and reflecting the light until the thing looks less than a tree and more like a hallucination one might have two hours into an LSD trip.

The London townhouse you've crashed at more than once after a night on the town gone to shambles is impressive enough, but the Brdigerton's ancestral home in the countryside is a whole other beast. From the sprawling gardens to the sheer endless rooms, from the stucco ceilings to the servant stairs, from the life-size portraits of nineteenth-century family members to the white marble busts, you half expect a tourist group to round the corner at any moment. You're pretty sure you saw a hedge maze on your way in.

Sure, you've known your college best friend Eloise Bridgerton was loaded, but you didn't expect this. Then again, her sister is married to a Duke and shows up on the Sun's front page semi-regularly, so maybe this one was on you.

"So what do we think? Sufficiently Christmas-y or too much?"

You sink your teeth into the tail-end of a scream, letting out a strangled sound instead. Benedict Bridgerton really is six foot tall, and fuck him for that. Couldn't he at least have been some sensible height? Five reasonable feet and seven nice inches? Has he got to be perfect? Has he got to be the six feet you've been dreaming about for the past four years in increasingly more frenzied fashions?

He stands with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, with his hair tousled and his face relaxed into the same friendly, good-natured smile he always gives you.

"Uh… What?" Immediately, you curse your lack of eloquence. And earlier on the ride over, you'd sworn to yourself that, for once, you wouldn't act like an actual idiot in front of him.

Benedict, grinning, points forward. "The tree."

"Oh." You crane your neck back to look at the star mounted to the top, floating somewhere above the marble railing hugging the walkway to the second floor. "Well. It's very… big."

Benedict chuckles. "Yeah, I agree. I did tell Mom it was excessive, but she insisted. I'm pretty sure Hyacinth would mutiny if she ordered anything under ten feet."

You hum, faintly wondering what it must feel like to get a tree, let alone one big enough to get put up in front of the Rockefeller center. "Hyacinth can be pretty persuasive," you acquiesce, thinking with a shudder of the time the prepubescent girl stared you down until you gave her your brand-new Charlotte Tillbury lipstick. Sort of like being bullied out of your lunch money.

"You can say that again."

Benedict falls silent, and for a moment, you just stand there, side by side, staring up at the tree. Dean Martin drifts over from the dining room. Your stomach is on the most terrifying rollercoaster ride of its life.

Then, out of nowhere, Benedict says, "You're wet, by the way."

"I…" You splutter. "What?"

He nods down toward the floor. "Your shoes, I mean. You're soaking the rug."

You follow the line of his eyes down to your boots, still caked in the snow and sludge you drudged up on the way up the ten-mile-long driveway. A grey puddle has accumulated around you.

"Bugger," you mutter. "Eloise did say I could leave the shoes on…."

A conspiratorial grin crosses Benedict's face. He says, "Remember when you and El caught me smoking that joint in the study? I won't tell if you won't."

This is the thing: Worse than Benedict's six feet, worse than his messy hair and blue eyes and dimples, worse than all of that, is that he's actually nice. A genuinely good guy who talks to you like you're more than just his little sister's best friend, more than the annoying girl that gets invited to family holidays because her home life isn't the best, who moons over him at every turn. That's the thing that keeps you hoping, stubbornly, stupidly.

"Maybe you should go change for dinner," he suggests. "I'll take your suitcase up for you."

"You don't have to!" you protest, even as he's already bending over to retrieve it, even as you're secretly glad you won't have to try and lug that thing up all those stairs yourself.

"It's fine." Benedict waves you away, then tests the weight of the suitcase. "Jesus. I thought you were only staying for three days. What the hell did you pack in here?"

The sight of your bedroom floor at home, every inch covered with discarded clothes and toiletries and last-minute Christmas present purchases, overcomes you like a war flashback. "Uh… Books," you say, falling into step beside him as you climb the stairs together. "I brought a lot of books."

If Benedict knows you're one of the worst liars in England, he doesn't let it on. Instead, he hums Wham! 's greatest hit while ascending the stairs two steps at a time. You try your best not to stare at his butt when he overtakes you and focus instead on the plush velvet carpet and the actual footsteps you leave on it, cringing.

You follow him down a long corridor, past decorative Chinese-style vases filled with out-of-season greenhouse flowers. "This is your room," Benedict says, pushing the door at the end of the hall, somewhat separate from the others, open with his hip. "Eloise is just down the hall."

Like everything else in Aubrey Hall, the room is so tasteful you're scared to touch anything. Held exclusively in shades of pastels, in the softest blues, pinks, and creams, a huge four-poster bed is pushed to one wall, flanked on both sides by nightstands. The opposite side of the room is covered in floor-to-ceiling French windows that offer a spectacular view of the grounds, powdered with snow. Somebody lit a fire in here too, and above the mantle…

"Oh, God," you squeak, staring at a huge oil painting depicting perhaps the most miserable-looking man you have ever seen. Margaret Thatcher and her iron lady posturings have nothing on this bloke.

"Right, that's Uncle Barnaby." Benedict deposits your suitcase on a stuffed armchair. "Us kids just call him Uncle Fester."

"Yeah," you say slowly. "That checks out."

Benedict laughs. "Sorry, you got stuck in this one. All the other guest rooms are in the West wing, and Mom figured you'd be more comfortable not being that far away from everybody else."

The West wing. You get the sudden, spectacular image of yourself in an ankle-length lace nightgown wandering down stone hallways with nothing to light the way but a single, flickering candle. If you can fantasize about Gothic romances set in your own home, you decide, you should start thinking about downsizing.

"Right." Benedict runs a hand through his hair, and you track the movement, watching the muscles rippling in his forearm. He's wearing a grey cashmere sweater, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The sight could make a stronger woman swoon. "I'll let you get settled in."

You don't want him to leave. All your time spent with Benedict is stolen, clipped, bookended by family dinners, or movie nights with his sister. The closest you've ever gotten to him was when you all crowded into the back of a cab on your way to a club, his thigh pressed against your own and his arm awkwardly angled somewhere behind your neck. Just half an inch of space between you, but your ribcage cracked open like somebody wedged a crowbar in there.

"Where are you sleeping?" It's a desperate attempt to prolong the moment, to keep him in this room alone with you for just a little longer, and you regret the question the moment it's out. Either he now thinks you're a stalker or, even worse, that you're secretly trying to draw up a layout plan of the estate to prepare for your inevitable heist. You wouldn't be surprised if there were several million pounds in cash stashed in a vault somewhere in Aubrey Hall, and rent in London has reached astronomic heights. Who could blame you for indulging?

But Benedict doesn't look concerned. Instead, he pauses just a step or two from you, close enough that his shoulder brushes yours, and answers, "I'm right next door. Just knock if you need help with anything."

For a split second, Benedict's hand finds the curve of your spine, fingertips pressing through the thick knit sweater and painting a shiver down your back. It goes through you like a bolt of lightning.

Then he draws back as if nothing happened, gives you a crooked, curling smile, and leaves, pulling the door shut behind him.

You drop down onto the mattress with a groan, bury your face in the 400-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, and pretend you're not actively trying to strangle yourself.

"Well," you mumble, voice muffled by the pillowcase, "Happy Christmas to me."

Christmas dinner with the Bridgertons is a bizarre experience. Everybody talks over each other, Hyacinth and Gregory chuck spoonfuls of peas at each other, Colin spills a whole ladle of gravy across the tablecloth, Anthony and his wife Kate spend half the meal whispering to each other and the other half stealing kisses, Eloise starts debating politics with Simon (who isn't half as stuffy as you expected a duke to be) at the top of her lungs, and Benedict drinks at least five glasses of sparkling wine before his mother takes the bottle from him.

You watch the whole thing with a feeling in your stomach like a bullet wound.

After a dessert of indefinable mush Hyacinth swore up and down was her homemade plum pudding, you move to a large sitting room. There is a second tree in here, this one a little less obnoxious and covered in homemade ornaments, the exploits of eight children and countless pre-Christmas arts and crafts sessions. The crackling fire paints flushes into the family's cheeks and gives the whole room a homey, rustic atmosphere that seems at odds with the overall elegance of the house.

Everybody is allowed to open one present. You think you see the instantaneous regret on Violet Bridgerton's face when her youngest son unpacks his new portable speakers with a whoop of joy loud enough to bust several eardrums. Watching the pandemonium unfold before you, you sit squished into a corner of the sofa beside Eloise, your hands trapped under your thighs, and try not to feel out of place.

Maybe this was a mistake, you think to yourself. Maybe you shouldn't have intruded on a family holiday as you are, regardless of Eloise's invitation. It must have been a pity thing anyway, what with you saying you were just going to stay in London for Christmas, in your shitty flat with the broken radiator and the leaking pipes. You pretty much guilt-tripped her into that by mentioning the frozen curry you were planning to get from the Tesco frozen section, now that you think about it, and God, you were definitely forcing yourself on them, weren't you, and they were all just way too nice to mention it and…

"Here," Violet's voice tears you from the downward rollercoaster ride about to plunge neck-deep into the pond of anxiety. "Merry Christmas."

She places a flat present in your lap, wrapped in deer-print paper.

"Oh," you say softly, and your chest feels tight like somebody is pulling a cord taut around it, "you didn't have to…."

"It's just a little thing." Violet has the kind of smile so warm you suspect it could melt ice cubes within seconds. "We're so happy to have you for Christmas."

You feel self-conscious as you unwrap the present, aware of all eyes on you. The paper reveals a picture frame, simple yet tasteful dark wood that feels smooth and supple against your skin. Behind the glass is a watercolor painting, a study of a tulip. The pink petals seem almost life-like in their detail as if a drop of dew should drip off the edge and roll down the picture any moment. You can practically feel it, wet and cold against your fingertip.

"Eloise said you're very fond of flowers. I thought you might find a place for it in your room."

For a head-spinning, gut-wrenching moment, you think you're going to cry. "I… thank you," you choke out. "It's… lovely."

Violet smiles and pats your hand. "It wouldn't be Christmas without a present. You didn't think we'd forget you, did you?"

They move on to Colin, who tears at his wrapping paper with such eagerness he gets a papercut, but you feel stuck. There is a lump in your throat, and you clutch the picture too tightly. Somehow, you realize, you did think they'd forget you. Only that's not really right. To forget you, they'd have to think about you first, and you can't imagine any of the Bridgertons wasting a single thought on you, apart maybe from Eloise. Sure, you spend more time at their house than in your own flat, but that doesn't mean anything, does it? It's not like your own family misses you much this Christmas. You've gotten more than used to being invisible.

"I want this one," Benedict says and, to your horror, lifts one of the presents you left there earlier. "I like the sustainable vibe."

Feeling obliged to get presents for everyone, you'd spent yesterday running through a department store for at least three hours. Mostly it's boxes of chocolates and a book for Eloise, stuff that diminished your already meager savings more acutely than you'd planned for. And then it had come time to choose something for Benedict, and you'd spent an embarrassing amount of time agonizing over possible presents. By the time you'd made it home, only to realize you'd forgotten to get wrapping paper, all the stores were closed. So you'd wrapped everything in the newspaper the ancient couple living next door hadn't picked up off their welcome mat yet. They're in Cardiff visiting her sister for the holiday, and you're supposed to be watering their plants while they're gone. Which is a task that might be a bit hard to accomplish, seeing as you're currently several hours outside of London.

"Oh, that's… that's mine," you pipe up, then immediately clear your throat. You've somehow managed to sound like a cartoon mouse. An especially squeaky, pathetic cartoon mouse.

Benedict glances at you, gives you a smile he most certainly inherited from his mother, and says, "Perfect."

Whatever that's supposed to mean.

He has a similar approach to unwrapping presents as his younger brother, but at least he doesn't injure himself in the process. As you watch him, your heart beats somewhere in your throat. Suddenly you're right back where Violet picked you up, on the verge of anxiety about to perform one of history's most spectacular dives.

It might be dramatic to say that your whole life depends on whether your best friend's older brother likes the gift you picked out for him, but apparently, that's where you are now. In the most pathetic turn of events of all time, you're pretty sure the trajectory of your future hinges on this moment.

The improvised wrapping paper floats to the carpet like that plastic bag Katy Perry immortalized in her magnum opus Firework. For a moment, Benedict says nothing, staring at the gift in his hand.

"I can… If you don't like it, I can just return it," you say, even as you start frantically searching your memory for where in the world you put that receipt. Your heart is pumping blood through your veins at a pace that makes you dizzy. "It's not a big deal. It's fine, it was…."

Benedict holds the box of watercolours in front of his chest like some sacred artefact. He opens the lid and peers inside, examining the different shades wordlessly. Then he closes it, looks up, and right at you. A beat passes with him just looking at you, with your heart fluttering its feathery wings against the cage of your teeth, with you squirming in the spot. And then Benedict smiles, wide and bright and honest. "I love it," he says, "thank you. It's fantastic."

Your chest caves in.

"Oh," you whisper, half deaf over the rushing of blood in your ears. "Okay. Cool."

For a second, it looks like Benedict will say something else, like there are words forming on the tip of his tongue, and you feel like you're clinging to a cliff's edge by the tips of your nails. But then Hyacinth pulls the box from his hands to look at the paint, to run her fingers over the shades, and the moment passes.

If somebody asked you later, you wouldn't be able to tell them how the rest of the unwrapping goes. It's all a blur, a mirage of different exclamation and laughter and more or less well-thought-out presents that passes in front of you like a supercut, all of it accompanied by a playlist consisting mainly of Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé. You stay in your spot on the couch, still sitting on your hands, trying not to think about the way Benedict looked at you. Trying not to dream.

When the younger kids rope Colin and Anthony into a game of charades that requires an exorbitant amount of physical movement, you help the others clean up the abandoned shambles of the dinner table. Benedict is doing the dishes in the kitchen when you enter carrying a pale of plates so high you see nothing but the dried gravy Jackson Pollock sprinkled all across the edges.

"Careful." Benedict's fingers brush yours as he takes the plates from you and places them gingerly on the countertop.

"Thanks," you mutter, then spend just one second staring at the broad expanse of his back, holding your hands uselessly in front of you, before turning back toward the dining room, intent on finding something else to occupy yourself with.

Benedict's voice stops you. "Do you want to help me?"

You whirl on your heel embarrassingly fast, clearing your throat when you find him smiling at you. "Uhm. Sure."

He nods toward a dish towel on a rack and asks, "I wash, you dry?"

"Yeah. Sounds amazing." For a second, you genuinely consider slamming your head into one of the kitchen cabinets. Since when has drying dishes ever sounded amazing?

Benedict gives no indication that he thinks you might be the weirdest girl he's ever met, though, so you take that as consolation. He's rolled up the sleeves of his dark blue button-down again, his arms elbow-deep in the sudsy water of the sink, and you pretend not to notice the droplets running down his skin. Outside the window, snow falls in thick ribbons, covering more of the grounds. The faint sound of the Bridgertons enjoying themselves drifts into the kitchen's silence.

You accept the pan he was washing and start running your towel over it. A wet stain soaks into your dress where you press the Teflon-coated edge to your stomach.

"We can put the plates in the dishwasher later," Benedict says, filling the silence gaping like a canyon. "But I think the big stuff we should do by hand. Pots and pans and all that."

Unsure how to answer, you nod. Your mind is whirling, reeling, somersaulting. For so long, you've wanted to be alone with Benedict, have imagined it, dreamed it, conjured it up in your mind. And now here you are, and you can't seem to open your mouth. And it's not even like you have nothing to say, quite the opposite. You have so much to say you don't know where to start.

Like: You look great in that shirt. I hope you like my present. I think you're a great artist. If the Torys keep passing that PM cap around instead of letting us vote, I'm going to scream. I think capybaras are criminally underrated, and I'm glad they're having their moment on social media. How do you feel about turnips? I might have been half in love with you since the first time I met you.

Benedict, putting an end to your spiral, says, "It can be a lot, right?"

"Sorry?"

"The whole thing." He jerks his head in the direction of the dining room, an indulgent smile on his face that tells you all you need to know about Benedict's feelings for his family. "The whole Bridgerton Christmas chaos."

You shrug, lowering your head so he can't see your face, can't see whatever emotion might betray you. "I like it."

"Even Hyacinth's plum pudding? I think that could pass for a murder weapon."

"Yeah," you say, and find that your voice is much too sincere. "Even that. It's not… I've never had this." You cut yourself off immediately, not even sure why you said it in the first place. It's much too easy to be honest with Benedict, and it scares you in ways you can't describe.

"What do you mean?"

It feels like an impossible task to look at him, so you don't. You're too afraid of what you'll find - pity, maybe, or incomprehension. How could someone like Benedict possibly ever understand?

If you turn on a TV around Christmas time and watch a commercial or a movie, if you walk down a shopping street and look at the advertisements playing on screens or smiling from posters, if you pick up a holiday-themed novel, there is a certain feeling being sold to you: of warmth and joy and community. Of smiling grandparents and colorful sweaters. Of presents heaping like molehills beneath gleaming trees. Of roasts and mashed potatoes and peas and carrots and Christmas puddings and beaming families devouring them in perfect harmony. It's the same feeling you encountered right here in this house, in the perfect rooms populated with perfect Bridgertons. In those images, people are always happy.

Christmas, to you, has always been terrifying.

"It's not…." You hesitate. "In my family," you say finally, and hope your voice sounds steadier than it feels, "it's never been good. It was just a lot of yelling, and… I've never had this. The laughing together and enjoying each other's company and all that stuff. The love. And I… I look at it, and I can tell, you see? That it's just so normal to you guys, I think maybe you don't even notice it. But I do. And it just… it doesn't really seem fair."

You don't wait for an answer, instead turning away from him in a way you hope makes it clear that this is not an avenue of conversation you want to pursue. It's like you've just stripped yourself bare in front of him, exposed yourself to his ridicule and his gaze under the unforgiving kitchen lights. It's like you have handed him a map to the innermost parts of yourself. All those ugly, pathetic parts you've spent your life hiding.

Benedict seems to understand because the next thing he says is, "Thank you again for the present."

For a beat, you close your eyes. There, you think. You've got what you wanted. He's ignoring it. He's looking away.

You chance a glance at his side profile, at the furrow between his brows as he scrubs at a particularly stubborn bit of charred carrot sticking to the pot. "You're welcome," you answer. "I'm glad you didn't think it was shitty."

"Why would I think that? It's perfect." When you chuckle, shrug, when the self-deprecating note sneaks into the sound, Benedict ceases his scrubbing to look at you. "I mean it. It's really special."

"It's not even…." You hesitate, wondering if maybe you're fishing for compliments here. Whatever, the validation feels nice, and Benedict seems willing to give it to you, even if he probably finds you annoying. "It's not even a very creative gift. All things considered, you know?"

Everybody knows Benedict likes painting, even though there was some botched stint with the Academy a few years back. He eventually dropped out, but you don't think his aspirations changed.

He shrugs and turns back to the pot. "It is to me. My family all seem to think I'm not serious about the whole art thing, so it's nice to be acknowledged. It doesn't happen that often."

You pause to glance at him. Thrown into relief by the golden spill of the light, bracketed on one side by the winter night, for a moment, he's so pretty you feel your stomach clench.

"But you're so…" You break off, swallowing. Your mouth is so dry your tongue sticks to the roof. "Everybody sees you."

"What do you mean?" Benedict looks at you with real confusion scrunching up his face, and you feel almost stupid.

Helplessly, you shrug, dry the last drops of water off the pan, and put it down on the counter. "Just… People always notice you, you know? When you enter a room or when you go somewhere. I just thought… I thought you must feel really acknowledged. Like all of the time. I don't know."

Your heart is beating so furiously that you wonder if he can hear it. Embarrassment leaves a bitter taste on your tongue as the words escape you. Now he really should file a restraining order, you think. It would be perfectly justified, with you exposing just how much attention you've been paying to everything he does. God, you're a freak, aren't you?

When he smiles at you, there's something sad to the expression. "I've noticed," he says, forming the words carefully, "that what most people acknowledge about me is my family. But that's not the same as acknowledging me. That's not the same as seeing me."

For a moment, you imagine what it must be like. There was such warmth in that room earlier, such joy and love, but there were so many people, too. All of them loud and charming and lovely. All of them wonderful. All of them captivating in their own way. How easy must it be to get swallowed up by the sheer force of all of them? How easy must it be to feel passed over as the second of eight children, always surpassed by somebody else? Always somebody cleverer or funnier or more lovable? Sometimes, you think, it must be a lonely thing to never be alone. Sometimes, you think, he must feel invisible.

"I do," you say, and your face feels hot, your voice sounds far away, your palms are sweaty. "I see you."

Something in Benedict's gaze changes, something transforms, and then he whispers your name, holds it in his mouth like something precious. "I think you…." He swallows, and his eyes rake over your face as if he's searching for something, as if he's hoping for something, and finally, he pushes on, his voice as uncertain as you feel, "I think there's so much more here than you realize. Because I do, too. I see you. And I know you're lonely, and I know you're scared, maybe even as scared as I am, but I think... I think maybe you don't have to be."

It's like being on a frozen lake, right in the middle, side by side, moving step by step, nothing solid in the world but his hand in yours.

He takes a step closer to you at the same time that you move forward, his hip bumping yours, his gaze on your mouth, his knuckles knocking against yours, your breaths hitched, your hands shaking, your head spinning…

"I've got more dishes," Kate chirps, stepping into the kitchen. Immediately, you and Benedict jump apart. You busy yourself with drying the pot furiously as he accepts the new pile of tableware, eyes on anything but you. Then, completely ignoring her brother-in-law, Kate wraps an arm around your shoulder and leads you away. "I'm supposed to tell you guests don't have to do dishes. And that's coming from the hostess herself."

If Kate noticed anything off between you two, she doesn't comment. But you could swear you see her casting a long, searching look at you when she deposits you on the couch.

You spend a little longer enjoying the overall Christmas charm of the night. You and Eloise pull apart a cracker together, put the paper crowns on each other's heads, and sit on the rug by the fireplace for hours, chatting, ignoring the general mess around you. When Violet starts making people sing Christmas songs whether they want to or not, you excuse yourself. You've been hiding yawns in the crook of your elbow for the past half hour anyway.

On his way back in from the bathroom, Benedict almost bumps into you in the doorway.

"Oh," he says, steadying you with a hand on your shoulder, and then you both say sorry simultaneously. By now, the eggnog and the absolute shame of whatever passed between you in the kitchen have caught up to you and you giggle like a school girl, staring at the bit of skin exposed where his shirt is unbuttoned.

"Off to bed?" Benedict asks. His voice is gentle enough that, for a moment, the yearning resonates somewhere in your bones.

You nod. "I'm tired."

"Okay." It might be wishful thinking, but he sounds almost disappointed to your ears. "Sleep well, yeah?"

It's definitely wishful thinking. Right?

"Hey, Ben!" You glance over your shoulder to find Hyacinth grinning at the two of you with something in her eyes you can only describe as the glint of the devil. A dawning sense of horror sends a shiver down your spine. "You're, like, right under the mistletoe, you realize that, yeah?"

Following the line pointed out by her finger with your eyes, you feel the dread pooling in your stomach. And lo and behold, above your eyes, fixed to the doorway, is an unassuming twig of mistletoe.

Have you mentioned that you feel like you're in a Hallmark movie? One with an exceptionally uncreative screenwriter?

When you finally tear your wide eyes away from the mistletoe, feeling helpless, you find Benedict already looking at you. "Ignore her," he says, smiling the smile of the long-suffering. "Hyacinth just wants to stir up trouble. It's fine, nobody's going to make us…."

"Well." From her perch on the arm of Anthony's chair, a saint-like expression on her face, Kate looks once from you to Benedict. "It is tradition."

And then, to your horror, she winks at you. Your stomach plummets down to your feet.

Benedict stares at Kate like she just told him she thinks the moon landing was faked. "I… I don't think…."

Anthony, after exchanging some private glance probably only decipherable to spouses, shrugs and leans back in his chair. "I agree," he says. "It is tradition."

"And a very nice tradition, too," Daphne affirms, crossing her legs and taking a dainty sip from her wine glass. No wonder not even the gossip columns ever have anything bad to say about her. She's perfect. "It would be a shame to let that opportunity go to waste."

With a look on his face you can describe only as aghast, Benedict turns to you. “I… uhm… Is it… okay?"

If you lived in the nineteenth century, you'd be asking a servant to bring you your smelling salts by now. Slowly, you nod, even though you're so dizzy, you're not sure you don't completely mess up the movement. "It… it's fine, yeah," you agree.

Benedict's hand finds the side of your face. You're so aware of all the eyes on you that, for a moment, you think you might be sick all over Benedict's shoes. He's so close you can feel his breath on your face and smell his cologne. Your toes are going numb.

"You sure?" he mumbles, leaning even closer, only an inch separating you. He has very kind eyes. If you said no now, you know he wouldn't even be mad.

Beyond words, beyond any thought past oh god I can't believe this is really happening oh dear god he's about to kiss me, you just nod.

"Oh, for god's sake!" That's Simon. "Just kiss the girl and be done with it, Benedict."

So he does. It's little more than a quick press of dry mouth to dry mouth, but your heart almost beats out of your chest. You feel his fingers tighten against the side of your face, feel his slightly-chapped lips, taste the eggnog and the chocolate and the wine. Then, when he pulls away, just for a beat, he lingers, his exhale a gasp, and for that instant, it's like you're the last two people on the planet, like he's the only thing that matters, like nothing existed before you and nothing will after you're gone. Suspended in time.

"Great!" Eloise calls, throwing her hands into the air. "First, Colin starts going out with Penelope, and now Benedict is snogging you. Will you people ever leave my friends alone?"

A collective burst of laughter travels through the room, and then the chattering returns, the paused music resumes, and you stand there, unsure what to do with yourself, unsure how to continue on when it feels like the whole world just shifted an inch to the left and nothing is where it's supposed to be anymore.

Benedict's hand is solid against the small of your back. "Will you… will you stay a little longer?" he asks, his voice hesitant.

It doesn't sound like he just means tonight. You don't think he just means tonight.

You swallow, exhale a shaky breath. And then you say, keeping your eyes on nothing but him, "Yeah. I'll stay."

Benedict beams. It's a sight that lights up his whole face, rivaling that ridiculous Christmas tree out in the Bridgerton's entrance hall. "Lovely," he says. For a beat, his eyes flicker back to your mouth, but then he just grins. "Merry Christmas."

You can't help it - you laugh. There's relief in the sound, the kind you haven't felt in a long, long time. Here, with the fire crackling and Gregory and Francesca delivering what could perhaps be the worst rendition of All I Want for Christmas Is You the world has ever known, it feels a little like maybe, just maybe, being seen isn't half as scary as you thought it was.

"Yeah," you agree and slide your fingers into the spaces between his. "Merry Christmas, Benedict."

You never thought something like Christmas at Aubrey Hall could exist outside the hour-and-a-half runtime of Hallmark movies. But, God, are you happy you were wrong.

#bridgerton #benedict bridgerton #bridgerton imagine #benedict bridgerton x reader #benedict bridgerton imagine #bridgerton x reader #bridgerton fluff #christmas #mine #f:atl

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knowledgeabletrash · 1 year

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I have so many feelings about the first Hunt and it’s aftermath from 2x08 & 09! Apologies for the word-vomit below this.

I never thought it would happen, but dare I say, Travis has become one of my favorite characters this season.

As an older sibling, I was right there with Travis these last two episodes. His guilt and grief in Storyteller hit very close to home for me and I just.

Right after the crash, everyone looked to Travis to take care of Javi, even when he was still trying to process the fact that he had just watched his father fall out of a fucking plane. He dug up his father’s rotting corpse in order to get a ring to help Javi grieve and remember their dad. He spent months walking 7 miles in every direction every day looking for Javi. And after all that, Javi still died. Not only did Travis lose his father, but now he’s lost his brother for the SECOND TIME. To make it worse, Javi was safe, he wasn’t picked! But then Travis decided to protect Natalie, and from the looks of it, he was ready to take her place; he threw himself in front of the door behind her and stood with a knife at his throat (for the second time oh my god these girls). I missed it before, but Travis looked to Javi and whispered his name after the Hunt went after Nat, he asked Javi to protect Natalie when he couldn’t. And doesn’t that make it so much worse? Up until then, Javi had been running away from the violence. Travis asked him to step up and take care of Natalie, someone they both grew to love. Javi became just like his big brother, and he died for it.

Side note: Travis is a better man than me because if that was my sister trust and believe I’d have done more than send them on a guilt trip, even if I was starving!! Not to soft quote Queen Ramonda here but HAS HE NOT GIVEN EVERYTHING?! His dad died while helping the girls put on their oxygen masks during the crash, Javi died so that the rest of them wouldn’t starve. His whole family died saving the Yellowjackets! Ben didn’t eat Jackie OR Javi and he’s still alive and kicking and burning down cabins, our girls SICK AND TWISTED (said with love). Even in the Donner Party, they made sure they ate in separate groups so that families would not have to eat each other or watch as their loved ones were eaten.

Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of people harping on Travis for telling Van that they should all be ashamed of what they did, and god it makes me so upset. Y’all can excuse hunting your friends and cannibalism but not a grieving teenage boy lashing out after the murder of his little brother??!! Like, the first thing Travis did when he saw his brother’s body was try to untie his hands because he’s not an animal he’s just a kid, and then cradled him like a baby, only to have his body taken from him moments later to be dismembered and butchered.

As the youngest of the survivors, Javi was someone who, by normal conventions, should have been protected by the rest of the group. Of course Travis needs them to be ashamed of what they did, he blames himself for Javi’s death just as much as he does then, if not more!! Travis was supposed to protect him and he failed him!!

I understand that Travis is not a fan favorite by a long shot and Van is one of the most popular characters in the show, which might be skewing the perception of this scene a bit, but I think the people who are dunking on Travis here are missing the point a little? Yes, Van gave him some brutal honesty and was well within her rights to do so. However!! Travis also gets to be pissed at the Yellowjackets. The fact is: they absolutely SHOULD be ashamed, but they’re not. They fully COULD HAVE saved Javi, but they didn’t. Javi was not the one who drew the card, but he died anyway. Why was Javi’s life worth less than Lottie’s, who might have died on her own? Because they liked her more? Because he was more expendable? No matter how much you justify it, Javi did not NEED to die. None of it was fair. That’s the point, that’s the tragedy of it all!

Lottie Matthews really dropped the thesis of the show: “Is there a difference?”

It doesn’t matter if there was some supernatural entity out there who “chose” Javi to die, it would have happened anyway. It’s much easier to stand by and watch a boy drown than to do the killing yourself. They were starving, he was there. Even if the Wilderness chose, the Yellowjackets chose, too.

Circling back a bit, I also want to talk about the difference between the two instances of cannibalism on this show: how they’re similar and different.

When Shauna and Travis discover their loved ones bodies (both frozen might I add), they assume very similar positions, kneeling by their heads and touching their faces. Both of their death’s were caused by the collective inaction of the rest of the group. The person who takes the first bite was the person who loved them most, thus giving permission to the others to eat and spurring on the feeding frenzy.

Jackie was an accident, Javi was on purpose. When Shauna found Jackie, she screamed and was in denial, trying to shake her awake. Travis was almost completely silent, only whispering “I’m sorry” and cradling Javi’s head in his lap. They held onto Jackie’s frozen corpse for months so Shauna could grieve her, but they took Javi away from Travis after what couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. They ate Jackie whole like vultures, but they butchered Javi like an animal. The process of eating Jackie took a long time, almost three months from her death to consumption. Hell, she was slow roasted. With Javi though, “it all happened so fast” he was dead, cleaned, and eaten all within a few hours.

Shauna ate Jackie’s ear first. Jackie was driven into the cold by Shauna’s words. Travis ate Javi’s heart first. Javi went after Natalie because Travis loved her and because he loved Travis.

I’ve seen people say that the progression to the Hunt was too sudden and a result of bad writing but I’m going to have to disagree! Just from the parallels between Jackie and Javi’s deaths alone you can tell these writers know their shit. The Hunt has been teased since Doomcoming back in S1, the bloodthirsty side to the Yellowjackets has long been set up (Not!Tai eating Jackie’s face, Misty pushing Crystal, Shauna beating up Lottie). All season, we have seen various characters talking about eating another person multiple times (Misty and Crystal with the bone broth, Gen and Melissa about Crystal’s body, Mari and Misty both threatening Coach Ben), so they’ve had cannibalism on the brain for a while before they decided to Hunt. I’d go so far as to say the first signs of the Hunt were back in 1x01 with the girls icing out Allie for the greater good so they could win nationals. Them shunning Jackie solidified that the Yellowjackets were more than comfortable singling out and dehumanising one of their own, so long as the rest of the group deemed it necessary.

Cannibalism also is probably one of those things that gets easier the more you do it? Like they definitely would have Hunted and eaten Travis during Doomcoming if they had already taken the first step into cannibalism before then. Once they ate Jackie, all bets were off. The Wilderness “refusing” to let Lottie die was just a convenient excuse, they were hurdling headfirst into hunting their friends for sport looooong before then.

All this to say the Season 2 finale destroyed me and these are only Some of my thoughts about it. I’m not even TOUCHING the Natalie stuff yet.

#yellowjackets #yellowjackets spoilers #travis martinez #van palmer #yellowjackets season 2 #shauna shipman #jackie taylor #javi martinez

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terras-domain · 10 months

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(Thanks)Giving Season

Characters: Kang Seul-gi (Seulgi), Male Husband (Reader), Husband's Brother

Tags: Cheating, Cuckold, Kitchen Sex, Blowjob, Watching, Caught, Condom, Rough Sex, Forced Submission, Thanksgiving, Cum in Pussy, Abs, Cum Eating

Words: 2941

Author's Note: Hi Hiiiii terra here!!! Been a while since I posted, sorry for that. Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. Personally I don't celebrate it but I hope to those who did, you guys enjoy it <33 As the tags show it's gonna be a cuckold smut so if it's not your thing, oh well. Enjoy <33

Reader's POV

Thanksgiving. Not the best holiday to be honest, never understood the hype behind it but at least now I have a day off from work to spend some time with my wife, Seulgi. Work has been brutal for me so our time together is precious to me. Opening the front door with a smile to greet her that I'm home, only for me that smile to slowly fade away. "Oh hi, honey!" Seulgi smiled, waving at me as I see her talking to a guest. "Oh hey lil' bro, long time no see hm?" My brother, a person who I haven't seen in years actually. I actually don't bond well with my family in general, which is why my personal time is mostly dedicated to my wife Seulgi. "Hey...what're you doing here?" I asked, an eyebrow lifted as I start to make myself at ease, putting my stuff down and joining my wife and my brother around the living room.

"Awww don't be too cold, lil' bro. Just wanted to see my family for Thanksgiving you know." He gave a big grin, a face that makes me feel so annoyed for some reason, always been all my life. "Now now boys. Let's not be like that, okay? We need to get things done for Thanksgiving" My breath got stuck through my throat. She's right, it's not like I have much time to spend with Seulgi, and I'm not gonna waste the time I get now by arguing with this dumbass. She had planned to cook something special for tonight, so she brought us both to the kitchen, showing the turkey she planned on roasting, only to find it rotten. "Oh fuck! Nooo that fucking butcher lied to me." Now with no turkey, we can't have the so called Thanksgiving spirit. My big brother can't drive, which means there's only one thing I can do now. "I'll go buy you a new one hun. Don't worry about it" Seulgi's eyes sparkled and hugged me tight, euphoric as now her problem has a solution. "Awww thank you sweetheart. I love you." A kiss on the lips I received from my loving wife, followed by her warm smile that just melts my heart. I got myself ready, grabbing my keys and look back to my wife and wave. "I love you Seulgi. And take care of my wife okay?" I looked to my big brother, I don't really like him but I'm sure family still care for each other. "Oh no worries lil bro. Your wife's safe with me."

Seulgi's POV

I'm glad my husband is around to help me with the turkey. It was silly of me to not realize it was rotting. Oh well, I just have to start prepping food for now. My husband is a big fan of Italian food so I thought making him some fettuccine alfredo might make him happy. Dropping the pasta to boil them while I prepare the sauce was pretty much light work for me, I'm used to working alone in the kitchen since my husband isn't often in the house anyways. I checked around and notice my brother-in-law looking deep into my eyes, sometimes shifting to my cooking elsewhere. "Smells good Seulgi. My brother must be happy to have you." His low voice echoes the kitchen. I didn't know how to respond to that but only smile awkwardly, what a weird thing to say I thought. "Oh come on beautiful. Don't be shy. Live a little we're family right? Nothing wrong with a little compliment, especially if it's for a pretty woman like you~" he kept on going with his praises and weird antics, which start to make me get goosebumps. His footsteps felt heavy but firm, slowly inching closer to me as he started to lean towards me, looking at the pot of fettuccini I'm preparing followed by a sniff, trying to smell the food, or so I thought. His face was closer to my hair than it was to my cooking which made me feel a little uncomfortable and insecure as the thoughts in my head start to turn into a reality. He's groping me!

With his hands reaching under my apron and gripping my chest through shielded by the cloth of my clothes, it was hard to push him away since he's so big and muscular. "W-wait. Please don't do this, your brother won't like this." I mumbled, squirming a bit as I'm overpowered, my whole body held tight as my brother-in-law completely gropes me for his pleasure. "Oh no worries beautiful. Your husband ain't doing shit on me. Now let me see how good you feel." His wide grin send shivers down my spine, but when he started to pull my face for a kiss, I felt unreal. My whole life I've only had intimate relationships with my husband so this felt so bad, but not like my brother-in-law cares about it.

"Mmmh Seulgi. You're quite the curvy babe aren't you?" He chuckled, now biting my lips as he has full control over me. I can't escape and just let him use me, hoping my husband can come just in time to save me from this creep. His hard bulge is pressing on my ass cheeks and it's disgusting, having another man than my own husband using me for pleasure. After a few minutes of making out, he pulled out and gave a big grin. "Well time for the real thing bitch. Get down there." My in law now guides me to be on my knees, facing his stifling bulge before he pulled his pants off, showing his erection pointing straight at me. It's huge. Bigger than anything I've ever seen, it made me nervous since I know what's next.

"Well what're you waiting for hoe? Get to it." His thick length started slapping on my face, making me whimper in inferiority. My husband did tell me how much of an asshole he is, and how violent he can be, so I have no other choice. My mouth slowly opened up as I slowly accepted his cock, taking it in inch by inch. It felt so wrong, the way is thick meat makes me choke just by putting the tip in, the way his hands rub on my cheeks and how I'm actually cheating on my husband right now. "Good girl Seulgi. Just need a little bit of...enthusiasm." As he kept his dominant persona going, his wishes are all coming to a reality as he uses me as he please. His hands are on the back of my head, plunging his cock inside as he thrust his hips back and forth. It hurts. My husband isn't as big nor as rough as his brother so this is all new to me. "ghhhh GAAAAK-!" My mouth just kept on making weird noises and choking sounds as he continues his barrages of mouth fucking on my throat, drilling my mouth and using me as a sex object.

Reader's POV

Phew! That took a while. turkey secured, and it's fresh from the oven. Too bad traffic isn't really on my side today, man why does life hate me so much. But all that complaining will soon end as I reached home, excited to see my wife. Creaking the door open I was greeted by nothing by a strange noise, a woman who sounded like she was choking over something. I went to explore my own home, looking for the source of the odd sound as I reached the kitchen. Just like the turkey, my heart fell. Seeing my wife sucking on my brother's cock, bobbing her head back and forth just made me feel sick. "Oh, you're finally here lil bro. Gimme a sec!" He grunted as he pulled out, stroking his 8-inch length while looking down at Seulgi. "Open your mouth, beauty, I wanna cum on that face." He ordered, which my wife seems to obey despite taking a few seconds to follow. I can hear a few sobs coming from her. is it shame, is it resent, or is it just the aftereffect from a rough face fucking she just went through. Regardless, it seems my brother enjoyed my wife a lot when he unloaded his load all on her face, splattering everywhere from her forehead to her chin.

Seulgi's face turned away, looking very shy and scared. "Honey..." I tried to approach her, wanting to know what's going on when my she stopped me in my tracks. "I'm sorry baby. He...he made me do this." She sobbed, looking down to the floor as cum dripped down her face. I had a dead stare to my brother, my face inclining so our eyes exchange eye contact. In those few seconds, memories of how much my brother overpower me in any way came back. How he's physically, mentally and even academically superior to me, which makes him so much better than me. I want to confront, I want him to pay. But with what has happened my whole life, it may be best to just give in, I don't have a choice. I could only walk towards Seulgi, holding her tight and give her a gentle soft kiss. "I love you, Seulgi." the kiss ended, interrupted by the after taste of my brother's semen on my lips. After that I just wiped my wife's face with a clean cloth before walking away cowardly. I need to take my mind off of this, and staying in the kitchen won't help me. I took one last look at my brother, sighing. "She's yours." A defeated frown sticked to my face face as the words flew out of my mouth, and my feet drags across the room.

My words seem to influence my brother for some reason. As soon as I sat on the couch, I couldn't distract myself no matter what is on the TV. My mind still wanders in the kitchen where my brother shreds my wife's clothes off, completely taking advantage of the situation where both me and Seulgi are mentally lost. I could hear banging noises coming from the sink, making my lewd mind imagine how Seulgi looked getting fucked by another man, it made me hard. My penis pitching a tent from my imaginations running wild from the voices that both Seulgi and my brother make aroused me and made me touch myself while fully clothed. A pathetic loser touching himself through his pants while his wife gets fucked rough that is me. Soon I can see the pair walking out of the kitchen both half naked. Seulgi seems to have less resistance towards my brother and just embraces him now. "I'm sorry honey." i stared at the floor, ashamed of my incompetence. Seulgi didn't reply with a single word, instead her facial expression is more than enough to show the disgust she had towards me for giving in too easily.

Seems like they weren't done. No, seems like they were just getting started. My brother sat next to me on the couch, butt-naked while Seulgi climbed up on him, riding his bigger cock as her tight pussy gapes open for her. "Nghhhh ahhh~! Yeah daddy, fuck me, fuck my tight little pussy!" Seulgi's moans and words were like a knife to me, humiliating me as I just looked at my unintended tent, with nobody but myself to please it. I could only resist so much. The bounces Seulgi made, the sheer size of my brother destroying my wife's vagina, the way I was completely ignored. It was degrading me, but at the same time turning me on more, I eventually gave in to my urges and started jacking off, stroking at the site of live porn acted by my wife and my brother. And they both seem to ignore me, it's as if I'm not even there and they just fucked like they've been doing it together for years. "Nghhh fuck Seulgi you little bitch! You love this cock huh? You love it more than you love your husband's? My cock is better than my brother's isn't it?" The questions he asked showed how they both can see me, I'm not invisible, at least not literally. "Nghhh~ yes daddy. Daddy's cock is just too good. My husband feels like a shrimp compared to yours daddy." That single line from my own wife broke me, made me lose myself as I screamed while rubbing my shaft so fast and uncontrollably. It made me cum, splashing drops of dilute cum on my pants. It made me huff and puff for some reason. I've had sex quite some time with Seulgi, but none of them drained me as much as this. I felt like I could pass out, so I retreated and moved to my bedroom to find clarity.

When I thought being alone in the bedroom was enough, it wasn't. My brother crashed in with Seulgi, holding her in his arms carrying like newly weds. They were making out which made me slightly irritated. Again they ignored my existence and just jump on the bed, forcing me to lay on just a small fraction of the mattress. Their make out session broke up and Seulgi now traced back to my brother's long hard shaft. I could've sworn he came a few times already and yet he's still rock solid and raring for more. Seulgi's pretty mouth enveloped his cock, slowly lowering her head before moving back up, and a slow cycle continues as she sucked my brother's cock. What's worse is how I can see our wedding rind on Seulgi's hand, shining to me while her fingers wrap around my brother's shaft. My wife's head game kept on as she went faster after a while, only for my brother to stop her and lift her face up. They made out, making me feel uncomfortable yet so turned on before changed positions, Seulgi's pussy directly above my face.

"I'll fill you up, bitch-" My brother grunted as a tight smack echoes the room, leaving a red handprint on Seulgi's ass. It made Seulgi scream out a submissive moan too and a drop of cum dripped down her pussy and onto my face. It seems like they didn't want to waste any time and went straight to business, with their two bodies connecting, my brother's cock penetrating my wife's pussy and I got the best, or worst view to see it happening. "Ngaaah~! Aaaaah aahhh yessss~!" Seulgi's moans became vocal, the opposite of her behaviour a while back. She's just lost in lust, just like me it seems. "Harder daddy pleaseeee~" She plead, her head twisting back to face my brother acting like it's only them in the room and I'm nowhere in the scene. "Fuucckkk shut the fuck up slut. I didn't tell you can order me around." With a rough yank on her her, Seulgi's moans became only louder. With precum from both of their private parts leaking on me, I couldn't have felt more humiliated, but somehow I'm happy. It made me feel content to listen to my wife's sweet and loud moans, even if it's not from me.

"Mmmh~ Daddy's cock is getting bigger in me oh god!" Her pussy bulges as she finished her sentence. He's about to cum, isn't he, I thought. "Nghhh yeaahhh...fuck I'm gonna fucking fill you up Seulgi!" He grunted, digging his nails into her hips as my brother starts to buckle his hips harder until eventually he came, bursting inside my wife. There's so much cum inside it was up to a point where the cum from the pair drips down on me, covering my face with cum. It was embarassing, having them cum on me in my bed in this manner and cuck me. After all that, Seulgi finally looked at me. "Do you want to cum baby?" Her words are still as sweet as ever, but her expressions sure seemed cold, of course I'd say yes. I was so eager to put my cock in her until she stopped me, handing me over an S size condom.

Of course, it was a bit too tight for me but I don't feel much physical pain. I ended up finally getting to fuck my wife, despite only by wearing a small condom. My thrusts were clear to be ineffective, as Seulgi's fake moans just makes me so humiliated and degraded. "Fuuuck hunny! It feels so good!" I screamed, getting closer to my climax despite only being a few thrusts in. "Mhm, okay sure. Cum then baby" Her replies seem to be short and uninteresting. It just fuels up my self-degradation which made me cum so much sperm in the condom, filling it up. "Aaaaah, nghhhh~" My whimpers were so weak, it sounded like I could faint any moment. But my wife wouldn't let me yet, not after being a coward and not standing up for his wife. She pulled off the condom from my cock and spilt it on her stomach, making her abs more defined. "Eat it" She ordered, and I had no choice but to oblige. Licking and cleaning my wife's fit body, cleaning her abs from my worthless cum felt both horrible and amazing at the same time, most probably because of how fucked my mind is at this point. I felt defeated and lay on my back beside Seulgi, before hearing her whisper. "I love you honey~" followed by a sweet giggle before my brother joins back in bed with her. Sure she still says she loves me, but for some reason I believe she loves his cock more.

#kpop smut #red velvet smut #seulgi smut #cheating #gg smut

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catwalkvivi · 6 months

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well hey, since hardly anyone's looking at this corner of the website anyway I might as well take the opportunity to vent (it's annoying to do it on twitter with the character cap)

Man, social media is hard.

I see so many people posting regular content consistently for years and years without even seemingly breaking a sweat, while it's always been so difficult for me... Calculating engagement, deciding the best times to post, or, hell, even just sharing what they think/feel/made/fucking ate that day just seems, like, so easy and second nature for pretty much everyone around me. It's genuinely incredible to me that somebody can share what they've learned about idk shitty impractical tanks made in WW1 on this website and make it such an interesting read that hundreds of people engage with it!

But I've tried keeping social media accounts for art and stuff so many times now, on here, on Instagram, on Artstation, on Xitter, and eventually it just- kinda- fades away, it just feels so exhausting to keep track of all the things necessary to Chase the Algorhythm™ if you wanna have any relevancy. Is it a charisma thing??? Where do I grind to get a stat boost on my Cha???

I'd love to say it doesn't matter to me, since I've been drawing shit for myself for years now, but unfortunately artists do need social media presence if they wanna get work. Not to mention, well, I wanna reach people with the stuff I do! I want people to react to what I made, to say what they liked about it, or how it made them feel, and then when I post something I worked on for hours only to get, like, almost zero visibility? idk, man, it just kinda hurts. It's probably selfish and immature for me to say it, I know that it takes time and effort to build an audience and all that, but damn I get happy when people show me that something I've made has affected them positively. I like the connection, I like the conversations, I like meeting people who enjoy the same nerdy trash that I do!

(I was very fortunate to have an art post of mine reach a lot of notes here years ago, which was amazing, but it's such a rare thing)

God, and, like, there's all these weird unspoken rules about interacting on social media too.

The other day a friend of mine came up to our friend group and was like "oh my god this girl liked my stories on instagram it means something does she like me" and I was SO confused and then they were like "well, when somebody not on your friends list likes your stories, it means they're interested in you"

Then some time later another friend was telling me that somebody stopped liking her posts and unfriended her and how that is a horrible offense and my fucking brain hurt, like- okay I get the unfriend part kinda but there could be a hundred reasons for it??? it's not like you have a deep personal connection to all 300 friends you have on your account???

Then I see so many people out there simply sharing something they think or did only to have some rando twist what they said and come at them like they're the shittiest person on the planet that deserves everything bad in life actually (except the ones that are willingly spouting/promoting hateful shit to begin with. Those can rot in hell and I shall not mourn their demise)

Like??? It might be the Power of Autism™ in me but it always feels like I'm one step away from either making a fool of myself or offending twenty different people or both. It's both the fear of having hundreds of thousands of eyes on me and the fear of having none at all. And that makes it really difficult to share anything on the internet for me. I already have to deal with my entire existence as a trans woman making some cunts around the world mad, it sucks that I have to risk it in places where I just wanna post dumb drawings and talk about dumb things that make me happy with others.

I dunno. Word vomit I guess. Social media is hard. Interacting with humans is hard. Sharing stuff is hard. I prefer Pokémon

#venting

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starr-fall-knight-rise · 2 years

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Thank You and Goodbye

Hello everyone, I suppose you have all noted that the Empyrean iris stories have finally ended. I sincerely hope that all of you enjoyed what I had to offer and that I helped to bring some enjoyment to your life. In return I thank you all for everything you have done for me, and thank you most for the people who interacted with the story with questions comments and likes. Some of you have private messaged me, and said the nicest things that have helped me to keep going through the years. I cannot say how much I appreciate you.

A few things before I leave, I am leaving the Empyrean Iris universe on this blog for anyone who wishes to read, start reading or keep reading. You are free to play with the Empyrean Iris universe all you wish, as well as with its characters and locations. As long as credit is left where credit is due.

I will not be writing for this series again, though I may post some art if the thought takes me. I will still have access to this blog to answer questions and interact, so PM me here if you want, I will most likely be available.

The past few years have made me a much better writer.The change in my skill from beginning to end is incredible, but one of my greatest regrets is I never got to show you all what I could really do. These short form stories, written early in the morning before school sometimes lacked the quality I know that I can produce, maybe not grammatically, but at the very least you all never got to see my true writing abilities at their full potential: writing abilities I gained thanks to this series and thanks to you.

So with that in mind I have made a decision. I want you all to see the fruits of my labor, and what this series has done to its author (if you care to look, I wont force anyone :). But down below I will post chapter 1 of two independent side projects I have worked on during the time of this series. The first is a book I worked on sometime during the middle of the series, and that I finished more than a year ago which I plan on posting online to wattpad and A03 in the coming months, the second is the first chapter from my most recent project and which I hope to traditionally publish some day. I hope that at least one or two of you might read them and see the change in me that has resulted from this series

Chapter 1

Children of the Affliction

The Outbreak moved up the street in a wave of fetid flesh, their feet shuffling in an uncoordinated, stilted shamble as they dragged their diseased bodies through the ankle-deep filth of Veerus city.

As they walked, they moaned softly, their rotting vocal cords shivering with every breath they took.

The outbreak was not a quiet thing, and Eli was thankful for that as he pressed his back against the desiccated crumbling wall of the rotting city, as desiccated as its occupants.

He crouched low, but didn’t allow his hands to touch the ground and the filth that rested there. He closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath before peering out from the crack in the wall.

And so they continued on their shuffling, staggering way, their red decomposing flesh peeling back from rotting bone. A tidal wave of rancid air fogged up the lenses of his glasses with a stench so vile he had to swallow to keep from gagging. It was the kind of smell that burrowed its way into your nose like hungry maggots,leaving a sour penetrating taste behind on your tongue.

Eli wiped his glasses silently with a hand, and immediately regretted his ability to see as he watched a pale worm wriggle its way from the rotting folds of what had one been a nose, only to twist wetly before turning back to slither between ragged, purulent lips..

Eli turned away from the hole pressing his back against the wall and covering his nose and mouth with a hand. He forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply, an action which he immediately regretted as the filth rose up to seep into his nose and mouth.

Their groaning grew distant, and a small voice hummed in his ear.

“I thought you said you weren’t afraid of the Outbreak.”

His mouth was watering, a sure sign he was about to throw up. He let the saliva drip from his mouth and onto the ground, where it couldn’t cause him to vomit.

“Just because I’m not afraid of them doesn’t mean I want to give one a hug.”

“And all of this isn’t fear?.”

“This isn’t fear, this is nausea. Those things are disgusting. Why anyone would willingly serve Affliction is beyond me.” He looked down to where a large baleful eye peered out from under the flap of his satchel.

The Eye blinked wetly once and then twice before “The same could be said about people who willingly visit affliction.”

Eli sighed, “You of all people should know that our visit here is hardly willing.”

The eye rolled at him, “Still going on about your father are you.”

Eli’s shoulder’s stiffened slightly jaw tightening even as his fingers went white around the strap of his bag, “This isn’t just about that and you know it.”

“Your Hope,” the eye said, his voice a high pitched reedy quaver through the fog “Your little obsession always seems to bring us to the most loathsome cesspits: hiding under rocks or in the bowls of trees.”

Eli adjusted his glasses, “This entire world is a Cesspit, Wink. and it isn’t hope it’s research. Hope is blind without action, research might just be able to help me before ....” Eli trailed off then not entirely willing to voice the concerns that had become so pressing in the proceeding months. Instead, adjusted the shoulder strap of his satchel and stepped down from the crumbling building and onto the street below. He tried not to think about how his feet squished through the filth or how his weight seemed to depress against the soil, as if he was walking across great slabs of meat.

A pallid mist rose up around them, and he was thankful for the protective shroud he wore over his face. It didn’t keep out the smell, but he was at least relatively sure it would keep the Affliction at bay,

He stepped over a small creek of cloudy water, and tried not to think about the strange spongy chunks that bobbed just under the surface.

Wetness squished under his feet as he walked, and he stopped, reaching into his bag for a pen and notebook.

Wink moved to the side as he passed his hand in and then out, coming back with a faded leather-bound journal -- once his father’s journal now his, bound with something that might possibly have been human skin, though he did his absolute best not to think about that, and flipped open to an inner page, past pages and pages of spidery writing and jagged sketches until he found a fresh page. He allowed his hand to rest momentarily on the familiar course paper, taking comfort from the journal: an item that represented the only piece of his family he had left: his father’s research.

Wink stretched up from inside the bag, his long, gelatinous body elongating and stretching like a string of black slime , “What are you writing?”

“Just a reminder to throw away these clothes when we get back.”

“Afraid of getting sick are we?”

Eli tapped his chin and passed the notebook back into his bag, “out of all the Dreads, Affliction is, admittedly, one of my least favorite.”

“That implies you have a favorite?”

“I think that is generally the whole point, don’t you think? Why else would anyone choose to Serve the Dreads? You have to pick a favorite .”

Wink settled back into the bag, filling it’s contours like some sort of inky black puddle, “I feel like there is a distinct difference between having a favorite and having a, I dislike this thing the least.”

“I thought semantics was my thing.

Wink wiggled a little bit inside the bag, “Just getting back at you for all those times I had to listen to one of your pretentious lectures on the nature of fear.”

Eli adjusted his bag one more time, “That is assuming you even listen to me, which we both know you don’t.”

“No, no I don’t.”

The two of them lapsed into morose silence as the outskirts of the city passed away, and the twisted trees of the nearby swampland faded into the backdrop of fog. Up ahead, looming in the half illuminated mist, he could see the outline of Veerus city, less like a city and more like a cancerous growth on the face of the world seeping corruption and disease into the brackish feted bog that surrounded it.

He could see it now, canals of pollution leaking out from inside the city by way of giant corrugated pipes, which dumped cloudy water into the bog. The smell was indescribable, like a thousand rotting corpses. It came in gusts and waves steady one moment and then a sudden wall the next.

His mouth began to water again, and he stopped in the street to bend over and gag.

He wouldn’t allow himself to throw up, simply wanting the comfort and relief of expressing his disgust with this place. His hands tightened around the straps of his bag, the leather of the black gloves he wore creaking slightly as he moved up towards the looming shadow.

Overhead a black bird croaked, and Eli traced its stilted path through the sky, watching as a feather drifted down from above.

He was surprised the creature had enough feathers to fly.

Approaching the gates of Veerus his eyes fell on a pack of mangy dogs --with rotting skin and eyes so encrusted with yellow discharge he wondered how they could even see. They were huddled by the roadside, surrounding something that lay unmoving on the ground before them, tearing at it with their rotten teeth.

It looked like it had once been a cat.

Or maybe a rat.

He heard the rats in Veerus were almost as big as cats, but either way it didn’t matter. The thing was so diseased it had probably expired right there in the street so unrecognizable it didn’t matter what it HAD been once upon a time.

He made sure to keep to the other side of the street, eying the mangy mongrels as they chewed on their meal, not relishing the idea of what a bite from one of those infected things might do to him.

As he came upon the gate, he found himself held up at the back of a long line of people all crowding around the entrance, in a long line of hunched shoulders and ragged clothing. Looking at the mass of flesh before him, he found himself purposely distancing himself from the filth of bodies.

By the looks of them, he could see that most were peasants from the outlying marshland. They had that look about them, with scaly red skin, and bare feet with yellowed nails overgrown such that they were twisting back upon themselves. He grimaced as he imagined how it must feel to walk these streets, the rot squishing up between their toes. Their hair was lank like swampy weed and hung about their shoulders like wet moss while their skin hung loose and baggy around their faces.

Even despite all that, none of them were repulsive enough to be mistaken for one of the outbreak, or even one of the city dwellers, who were characteristically marred by leperous pockmarks and spongy patches of skin.

Granted, the swamp peasants lived on the land the affliction held dominion over, and many of them served the being in some way or another, but none of them were directly subject to it, so they had a little more safety than did their city dwelling brethren

Unfortunately for them, that meant they were still subject to disease as a natural course of things, as evidenced by their jaundiced skin. Just ahead of him, he saw an elderly woman hunched over a bundle of rags. peering out from those rags was a face, a feverish red face swollen and puffy with dark blue bags encircling the eyes.

He doubted the child had long to live.

Anyone who managed to grow up in a place like this and survive until adulthood was a miracle on their own.

The gate approached now, and just as the gate guards came within sight, the man before him collapsed suddenly convulsing in the filth of the street before going still. Barely anyone stopped to look. Eli barely flinched, watching as a group of leprous individuals hurried from an opening in the gate hauling a hand cart behind them.

The body was lifted by liver spotted hands and tossed into the back of the cart before being dragged away, to be tossed into one of the plague pits, the contents of which drained from those massive pipes and out of the city.

As he waited for his turn at the gate, Eli reached into the bag and pulled out his notebook and pen scratching a quick sketch of the scene before him

The men standing at the main gate were less diseased than the others: the only suggestion of their sickness being the pallid nature of their skin, and the glossy sheen of clammy sweat that acted as a constant veneer over their bodies.

He couldn’t tell if they were bald on purpose, or if the sickness had taken their hair.

“State your business.” One of them said, and Eli followed the man’s eyes as they ran up and down his body. Eli shrugged off the crawling sensation that ran a course over his spine as the man’s eyes paused to linger on the unblemished skin of his face….. Almost hungrily.

“State your business,” The second man repeated, voice raising with impatience.

Eli clenched one hand around the strap of his satchel, “I am here in the capacity of my work, as an information broker.”

One of the men snorted and hawked a thick filmy wad of phlegm onto the ground, “And what information do you have to broker?”

Eli looked the man in the face, the corners of his mouth turned slightly down, “What kind of information are you looking for. I have information on the safest trade routes, weather predictions, medicinal recipes-“

He was cut off.

“Let us see your identification.”

Eli nodded, dropping a hand into his bag to retrieve the little booklet of papers which he then passed over to the first man who looked it over with the same suspicious gaze..

In the end, it was his eyes that gave him away, running across the page too quickly and in such a strange pattern that he couldn’t have been reading. So either, he was lazy, or he couldn't read.

The man waved a dismissive hand, “Let him through.”

Eli was quickly sent on his way as the first man moved quickly onto his next subject.

As soon as they were out of hearing range a grumble rose up from the depths of his bag “He lies.”

Eli resisted the urge to brush a hand through his hair, “ It wasn’t totally a lie, besides What would you rather I had done? Tell them why we are really here?”

Wink stared at him from the shadow of the pouch contemplating his words before, “You are hardly likely to find your father here, and we both know it.”

Eli set his jaw forcing himself not to take Wink’s comments personally, “I know, but this isn’t about that, this is about…. Me.”

Wink hummed, “About that, what makes you think you are worth saving anyway. I thought you were erudite enough to know a lost cause when you see one”

Eli snorted “Big words from a wad of goo I might have just scraped from the bottom of my boot….. do you even know what it means?”

“I know plenty of large words, because unfortunately the only reading material I have in here during our long journeys just so happens to be your creepy journal and Cripman’s Thesaurus fifth edition. The least you could do is drop in some decent reading material every now and again.”

Eli huffed, “Yeah, perhaps, perhaps something with lots of pictures and very small words.”

“You cheeky bastard.”

“That’s me.” He looked up at the pale sky above and sighed. Besides, the wink was only half right. This wasn’t about stopping fear anymore; This was about saving his life. Eli only had so many days left, and those days were numbered.

He turned up another side street, following the map he had memorized earlier towards the center of the city. As he kept going, evidence of rot and sickness became more evident. More and more of those hand pulled carts trundled down the streets hardly even bothering to cover their gruesome cargo, all a mass of limbs and flesh melted together until it seemed to create one massive creature rather than just a pile of human bodies.

A metaphor, Simile or perhaps a close facsimile to the physical avatar of Affliction itself.

His mind was brought back to a page in his father’s Journal, where in was written an excerpt from one of the many books he had read, before leaving the journal to Eli. , “The Dreads and their incarnations” He could almost see the page upon which its description had been written, penned neatly in his father’s steady hand.

The creature lies within a pit in the ground-- a strange place for a god, though it is somehow fitting. The pit is filled a tenth of the way with brackish feted water, and flies churn in great wheeling circles overhead. When the creature moves it shifts with a great squelching sound that rips and rends like diseased flesh being peeled from bone. The pit itself is wide, almost unfathomably so, stretching out for what must be miles, and inside rests Affliction, a god of sickness, disease, and plague.

To look upon it is to understand unfathomable corruption and disgust as its great amorphous blob of skin seems to churn and undulate below. Its outside are bruised in the many colors of a rainbow, sour and perverted into this strange and unholy facsimile. It cannot be fathomed from where it starts and where it ends, and the limbs that wave above its head could be hands or feet or tentacles.

Not many but the Outbreak have seen the creature’s true form, for the power it holds, means that, to look on its body is to embrace the sickness, be permitted by it to become one with it.

To rot right down to the marrow of one’s bones.

Eli had some pity for the writer, for if he had seen what he had described, it was likely he was either one…. Dead, or two, a shambling corpse labeled as one of the Outbreak

He couldn’t say he felt entirely sorry for the man, as his first hand account saved Eli the curiosity of having to look at himself….. and the horrible boils that likely would have resulted. Overhead the sky had turned orange as the sun disseminated through the fog of corruption which shrouded the city.

It was a horrible place, and if it wasn’t for the Outbreak, the people would likely have fled long ago. but the Affliction had claimed them, and it wasn’t likely to let them leave any time soon.

Eli was close now, maybe a few blocks away from the library, and overhead, a rolling bank of clouds was passing its first shadow over the city.

Looking at the library, he could only hope that it would be cleaner on the inside than it was on the outside.

It would be best for him to keep his head low lest he attract the attention of one of the Outbreak. He didn’t want to become like these poor trapped souls, subject to their dark god.

It was never a good idea to catch the eye of one of the dreads.

Things tended to go generally very poor once that happened.

For everyone involved.

He was only delayed once on his way to the library, cutting behind a low stone archway as a contingent of the outbreak moved up the street, shambling and moaning like the deadmen that they were. He couldn’t tell what they were doing, but had suspicions that they were out hunting…. Looking for someone like him perhaps to bring into their fold, or to infect , their dark offering of fear to their hungry waiting god.

They passed up the street, and he slipped out from his hiding spot, hurrying forward to the one building in this place that seemed somewhat clean.

He said somewhat but there was still something about the building that didn’t sit right with him.

At one point, it had probably been constructed out of large blocks of white marble, though the city had stained the pure stone with yellow over the years, like

He paused just outside the door and took a long deep breath, looking up at the words that hung before him.

The Parvus School of Learning.

And then he reached out with two gloved hands and pushed the doors inwards.

Chapter 1

Oculus

He scurries through the streets like a rat, his feet trailing whispers behind him as he goes, and even from here I can see the drops of salty, sweat condensation clinging to his skin like a dancer’s paste on jewels.

I know this man, though he doesn’t know me.

But even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t want to.

A curtain of fog rises in a slow undulating wave from the Swampdark [may change this name] below, like the ghosts of the damned leading a procession towards the stars. When the fog touches me, I can almost feel the lifeless caress of those ghosts, the souls of all those the Swampdark has claimed.

The man turns a corner and I follow him, were it not for the midnight mirth echoing down from the upper city’s pleasure tier, he might have been able to hear the warning hiss of my mechanical joints. Luckily for me, the city humms, and my body hums with it, and in that hum I disappear.

Music drifts languidly down from above pulsing with a slow, mindless beat.

The man walks past a line of rickety storefronts, their windows and doors barred, and the message is clear: this city quarter bears no welcome for strangers. As he walks, his profile is painted by swatches of glowing blue neon, and now I can see the bottle in his hand more clearly. Neon light scatters through the container’s glass, and the light it refracts follows him down the street as a pale spector, his only companion in the night.

I slip closer, stealing strides of distance between us, a luxury he doesn’t even know he has.

I know this man.

I know him the way I know the thousands of men just like him, He’s got an iron lung, and it clings to the side of his bare torso like a bulging Nightleach, it's skeletal appendages burrowing into his body where it keeps anchored, The iron lung’s bellows spasm and pulse, struggling against the slow buildup of corrosion and rust, fighting to filter stagnant air into something the blood can use.

It looks painful, the eternal weight of the iron lung acting as his ball and chain that adds a perpetual twist to the man’s spine. Dying early might have been preferable to dragging around a botched suborgan.

I know this man.

He drinks hoping to abandon his pain in a bottle, he chews the bitter fungi to hang up his soul for the night, but when the ecstasy leaves him, abandoned like a one night lover he seeks to give his anger away: A gift no one asks for.

And who to give it to, but his starving, skeletal wife, and their seven, ghostly children.

Why would it matter to him? They'll all be corpses soon anyway, who will care if he speeds up the process, gives himself some relief.

I know this man.

And I am here to return his gifts.

The man pulls to a stop, lifting a desiccated hand to his pale, cracked lips. He coughs, and an unnatural sound is birthed from between his rotting teeth: wet and filmy, with saliva blackened by decay and rust.

He turns another corner, passing silently into the lurking darkness. A path waits there, beckoning us downward until the city is lost above us behind miles of desperate metal and concrete.

We step off the path, enfolded at once within an oppressive forest of towering iron

stilts collectively called the hands of salvation: baseless rhetoric streaming like piss from the mouths of upper tier clergy. I doubted a single one of those godless men had ever even laid eyes on a support pillar, less like a saintly hand lifting its inhabitants towards the sky, but more like a diseased arm, holding a plate cruelly above child’s grasping fingers

I am behind him now, no more than a few precious feet of feted atmosphere occupies the space between us

If he turned now, he could reach up and pluck away my eyes.

Overhead, the support beams creak and chitter, as if conversing among themselves.

The swamp dark is never silent.

The man’s steps are slow, plodding out the beat of his own funeral dirge against the hard-packed pathway.

Those unfortunate creatures that dwell here in the Swampdark are never without sound or even light, rocked to sleep by the tittering lullabies of rusted metal, and bathed in the malicious green glow of the trinity fields.

Wobbly, stilt legged hovels huddle together in lopsided clusters over the uneven ground of the Swampdark,desperate to avoid coming within close proximity of one of the pillars.

Despite living in truth’s overwhelming shadow, the people of the swamp dark still refuse to look her in the eye.

We are halfway to the first rickety settlement, and I don’t know what it is he senses first. The man doesn’t have many natural senses at his disposal as, One by one, a lifetime of hardships has robbed his bodily coffers clean of taste, smell, and touch. But still, I watch the chill as it licks down his spine, alerting him to my presence and causing him to turn.

Robbed of his taste and smell, life left one parting insult on its way out the door, and the man is shorter than me by almost a foot, but despite all that he is lacking, he still has the good sense to be terrified.

He backs away jaundiced eyes as wide and pale as the cryptcap mushrooms beneath his feet.

I know this man.

And now, he knows me too.

Knows me by my mechanical augments, my wire implants, my external regulator, and the large silver eye that blinks at him from the upper right side of my chest.

A word condolences from thought and forms as a word on his lips

Oculus

But he never gets the chance to speak it as my hand cuts off whatever piffling speech he was about to make, but

I know this man.

And I have heard his speech before muttered, screamed and pleased from a hundred quivering lips. They all offer the same excuses, passed between each other like an unwashed pair of socks.

And when the excuses fail to soften me, please and promises, empty and echoing like the bottles in their hands.

I lift the little man into the air kicking and struggling. He is heavier than he looks, iron lung dragged ever downward by the crushing weight of gravity, but my augmented limbs whirring to life with a hungry hiss.

Yun Johnov

I am here to equalize your sins.

I start with a headbut to the face, the cruel ridge of my mask biting into the delicate cartilage of his nose, which snaps without much protest. He howls, blood escaping eagerly from his nose to trace a getaway down his lips and chin.

With his feet back on the ground, I reel back and punch him hard in the gut, brutalizing his already corroded liver.

He doubles over retching.

I knee him, this time in his chin, and he reels backward, tripping over a huddle of mushrooms and staggering to one knee. His iron lung screeches in protest, but I’m not quite done just yet.

I step forward, casting the dim impression of my shadow over his quivering body. He casts his hands high, shielding me from his sight.

But I want him to look at me.

I kick his hands out of the way, feeling as one of his brittle bones crumbles beneath my kick.

His face is open and uncovered now, chin and mouth glazed in blood, thinning hair slick with sweat.

I pull back one more time.

He falls to the ground a moment later, bearing my signature, signed with the judicious application of my open palm. My mark will last for days, the broken nose for a few weeks, but the memory of my intervention will remain until the bellows of his miserable lung stops choking in air.

“An eye for an eye.” I say, making my pronouncement to no one in particular as I stand over his battered body.

We are close enough to the nearest cowering settlement for the occupants to have heard us, but they are unlikely to come to the man’s aid. Either he will negotiate his way back upright, or he will decay there in the mud, fertilizing the trinity fields with his juices, leaving only an iron lung as his headstone.

I bar thoughts of the man from my mind as I turn and trace my way up the pathway and into the lower city.

The lower city isn’t really part of the city proper, but a minefield of ghostly shanty towns, stacked in dangerously unbalanced heaps in the shadow of the upper city. The people here aren’t well off, but at least they are blessed to sit cupped in the palms of salvation, or at least that’s how some try to justify their miserable existence.

In reality, people in the lower city aren’t much better off than people in the Swampdark, in fact the only real difference between the two groups is a matter of a few IQ points and a false sense of superiority.

Despite the abundance of ramshackle dwellings, I don’t see many people here, and I don’t expect to. Generally, I am the first person most people see, and the last person most people want to see, and as a result, my very existence tends to thin a crowd.

I pass through the ghost shanties, as much as a ghost myself.

From there, I find my way up to the pleasure tier, its streets glazed with candy-bright colors spilling down from vibrant neon signs, and refracting through grimy panes of glass.

The music crawls its sinuous way down into the street and vibrates up through the souls of my feet, stopping to pulse, and dance to the beat of the blood in my ears.

Men and women writhe and dance before me, bathed together in the neon light. I can sense a few wary eyes turned my way, but the vast majority of people hardly notice me. The tang of trinity hangs heavy on the air, its presence announced by the thick, sweet smoke, and the bitter taste that makes itself manifest on the back of my tongue. A young woman staggers past me, the white underbelly of her eyes on full display, and her arms are flung out to either side as trinity guides her through fields of ecstasy for the night.

Curvaceous shadows dance low, and slow beyond a red-shrouded window.

“Over here, Oculus.”

Tangled between strands of real human hair, delicate fibrous cables lift themselves from my scalp tugging me towards the origin of the sound.

The owner of that voice, does not attempt to hide, quite the opposite in fact

She stands in a nearby doorway, allowing glowing neon the privilege of kissing her skin as she stands. A ruby red gown blooms from her body stretching in languid curves down her legs and towards the floor. A wave of long dark hair spills down the side of her face and onto her shoulder, which is bare, and open to the night air.

I am surprised to see she is mostly organic, none of her curves borrowed, leased or welded on.

She motions me over with a finger, “You look like someone who could use some company.” The same rote phrase trails from her lips, like it has from thousands of lips just like her since time immemorial.

I raise an eyebrow, and the fiber optic cables in my hair rise with it, “Is that so?

She smiles, and I am almost impressed to see she has all her teeth, either that or an excellent set of dentures, “I believe it is.” When she breathes, a gentle fog of steam obscures the clear plastic of her external regulator, her only non-implanted augmentation.

I tap my wrist, and her corresponding hand lights up. She looks down and then back to me, “That’ll get you an hour.” But even as she begins to speak, I have already waded my first few steps back into the flow of the crowd.

“Hey! Where are you going! You know, I don’t do third party locations.” she says shouting to be heard over the music.

I turn my head internally, dialing down the background noise so I can hear her more clearly, “Keep it.” I say allowing the crowd to flow around me on either side.

St stands, resting her hands on her full hips. Somehow, even her hands are beautiful: long and slender against the ruby hue of her dress, “I don’t accept charity, Oculus.”

“It’s not charity.” I say, calling back over my shoulder.

She tosses her hair, which whips itself into a proud mane around her shoulders,“Then what is it!”

“A thank you.”

That response seems to catch her off guard. She stands, a pillar of stillness in a sea of flashing lights, and stares at me through the ebbing tide of the crowd, “For what?”

I turn away from her, and when I finally give her my voice, it is a quiet offering falling from my lips like shredded paper fluttering down from the upper city, “For being the first person to talk to me like a human tonight.”

I make sure to be gone before she can answer, allowing myself to be swept away by a torrent of light and noise, bodies pressed around me filling my nose with the sulfurous odor of sweat, and the bitter tang of trinity.

Leaving the pleasure district, I shed neon and sweet smoke like water, the night air of the manufacturing district scrubbing my skin clean of revelry only to apply its own unique perfume.

Industry.

A distant line of massive, black smokestacks cuts a violent edge across the diffused, blue glow of the city skyline, huffing great clouds of rancid black smoke into the already hazy blue air. Lines of steel cables, electrical wires and bridges cut an impressionist pattern between the towering buildings.

The trinity factories are never quiet, run perpetually by ghostly night shift laborers fed with a steady stream of liquid stim. Some with company- subsidized ports directly into their bloodstreams for easier dosing. I’d seen it close up on several occasions, once as a boy when I was briefly employed on the refinery floor: employed until a steel hatch severed three of my fingers, and I was made redundant.

I flex my hand at the phantom memory of pain, before abandoning the memory on the streetside, though it would inevitably follow me home and find its way back into my head.

Until then, I would force peace upon myself.

The industry district occupies a long, single stretch of road that cuts like a scar through the central stacks of the city, always no more than a few miles from any possible origin point, offering no excuses for workers who found themselves running a few minutes late. Beyond this, only the trinity fields stretching for miles of back breaking labor beneath the city offer any consistent source of work.

I make my way past these buildings, hunching gloomily against the perpetually dark sky, and finally find my feet plodding along more familiar paths.

My place of work sits sandwiched somewhere off and to the side of both the industry district and the administration/government district ostracized from the bulk of the city by high concrete fences topped with a thin, blue electrical field. Additionally, the outer perimeter is surrounded on three sides by a murky perimeter of marble black water serving as a secondary deterrent to anyone already stupid eough to get to close to begin with.

I approach the front gate, a massive slab of silver metal with a barely visible hairline seam running a track down the middle.

At the center of the gate, the large, silver mockery of an eye blinks open, its external sensors connecting to the eye on my chest.

It blinks once issuing a series of robotic sounds followed by an inhuman mechanical voice.

Oculus Ailanthus 3

The gate cracks open, splitting the eye in half to invite me inside.

The courtyard and training fields lie silent and abandoned this time of day. My footsteps echo in protest to the silence as I lead my one man procession up to the grand double doors, which slide open for me without a sound. A thin beam of green/yellow light pours in a torrent from the open door, sweeping me up in a blinding spotlight as I step through the doors and into the grand atrium.

My eyes shed a small torrent of tears as they adjusted to the light, pouring down from our one greatest symbol of power and glory.

The tree.

Tall enough and wide enough, to take up the entire far wall of the large atrium, the plant stands proud within its environmentally controlled glass enclosure. A shroud of golden light filters gently through the emerald leaves and onto the ground where a curtain of lazy grass sways slowly in an artificial breeze. As far as I know, the tree is the largest of its kind, at least thirty feet tall, with a trunk as thick as a man’s thigh, and a tangle of branches forking out like the delicate veins and capillaries of a man’s heart. The leaves that sprout from its branches are smaller than my palm, and shaped like gently tapering spades.

As usually, the tree robs me of both my breath and attention, but I’m not one to complain.

“Oculus…”

Everything inside that class container is so clean, and gentle, even the lacy patterns of golden light cast onto the ground seem so much brighter than the grungy blue neon that paints the walls of the city.

“Ailanthus!”

Reality makes its unwanted appearance, barging in on the back of our front desk administrator’s nasally voice. I turn my eyes on the little man, no larger than five foot four, fighting with an aggressively retreating hairline, in a losing battle for his scalp. The son of some mid level administrator, he had been granted little enough power, and an even smaller amount of respect.

He glares at me expectantly, his small black uniform hanging in bags around his armpits and chest.

Usually, I might have had a little sport with the tiny man, but not today.

I walk up to the counter, and stand still, while the little man, can’t remember his name, unlocks the Observer from my chest, unplugging the bionic eye with a pop. He turns in his chair, plugging the camera into a waiting port, “Report?”

I rest the palms of my hands flat on his countertop, smudging its polished surface with the imprint of my fingers, “I have completed three sanctioned beatings, two retaliatory robberies, and returned three truancies. It must be noted that one retaliatory robbery resulted in compulsory amputation when no item of equal or greater value could be provided.”

Behind him, the observer unit blinked and chimed a long, low note.

The small man gave an aggressive stamp to a sheet of paper and handed it over.

“Bring this to-.”

“The records office, I know.” I held up the paper, eyes scanning lazily down the page as I made my leisurely way from the room, red ink glistening like a smear of blood on the white paper circular red letters reading.

Government of the Coladium: Department of the Seer Collective

Oculus 336 Ailanthus.

Certification of case completion.

I dropped my hand to the side, letting the piece of paper fall with it, turning only once to look back at the tree glowing like a beacon in the atrium behind me.

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