#I’m crazy I’m insane they are making me crazy

[its-stayville-forever]

I stared at my laptop for so long, not knowing what I wanted or needed to say. What do I say? What will I say that will do justice to this beautiful, intricate, detailed piece of art you’ve craved with your hands? Do I start with the tears? Or the smiles? Or the plethora of questions that I have for you?

(Yes. Yes I am taking this apart and reading through the lines, underneath the lines, along the lines, you name it, I’m doing it. I think you knew what you were bringing upon yourself when you started writing this lol)

-The Title.

Listen, I’ve had my fair share of duolingo lessons with French, and I know that the title translates to ‘Tear’. Not the salty droplets of water (that’s la larme, but you don’t need to know that), but the ripping into shreds. So I really, really am soooo curious as to why you chose that word for the title. Is it because both the characters have their hearts torn and shred apart or is it that you ultimately wanted to tear OUR hearts apart? Or is there a reference that just went over my head? 🤓

-The Characters.

To create characters with depth, with hurt and suffering flowing through their veins? And to make it seem so easy for their hurt to seep into you? You know you’re actually fucking insane right? You’re so crazy SAHAR. Coming back to the point ehm ☺️. To write about a character that loathes a dead body, and to write her so intricately broken from the inside, to write a character that hurts from death and loss and to put the two with each other in a GRAVEYARD!? You put a person who’s hurt because of their mother (and father but 🤷‍♀️ ), and another individual who’s hurt due to the DEATH of their mother. Similar but such different causes. I absolutely hated the mom’s character, but I LOVE the way you wrote her and kept her character as it is throughout. The loss of a daughter and the need to see her all the time in the other one, literally everything about her character made my heart throb. I don’t, GOD I really don’t know the way your brain works wonders like these. How long did you put into developing the movie? 

-The Story.

This is a personal preference but I’m a SUCKER for angst (you know that), and this hit alllll the spots. I shed so many tears, so many gasps, so many emotions all together, like you always do with your works. 

Anyways. The story.

You know what this reminded me of? A movie. Reading through this entire thing, i felt like i was watching a movie unfold. Although I did feel that the story was slightly rushed (just a bit, i would’ve LOVED if it was two parts or longer but i ate this up anyways), I think the way you wrote from the beginning, her wishing death, that is her name on the stone than her sisters, to hyune finally putting down the flowers on her graveyard. Red lilies symbolize death and loss (yes baby i saw you there 😞) and i am in so awe of how you took out even the minutest of details like that one. I absolutely adored the quote and its use throughout the entire story and the relationship the two had as a ballerina and a figure skater. NOW. THE SCENE WHERE SHE GOES TO WATCH HIM IN THE OLYMPICS!?!? It reminded me of all the cute scenes we witnessed at the recent Olympics and it was just so 😿 I reached my peak at the end, I burst out crying in the last few paragraphs.

You are in a graveyard once more. You watch as Hyunjin sweeps the name atop the tombstone gently. Prima ballerina assoluta, he reads, the swan of my heart. His weathered hands shake as they clutch a bouquet of fresh red lilies, and your heart still aches at the sight. 

It is late at night at the graveyard, the branches are still humming to one another, like a melancholic flute. You understand now that they speak to the buried ones. “Not so long now,” they reassure, “your loved ones will follow.”

You believe them, and you will wait. For now, you’ll find solace in the red lilies sitting atop your grave. 

They are now meant for you, at long last. 

THISSSSSSS OH MY GODDD 😭

Thank you sahar. Thank you from the depth of my heart for putting something out that I sort of relate to when I need it the most. Just like with this and the poem you posted when you visited Monet’s birthplace, you put it out when I needed it the absolute most. I hope the love and care you put out for others is given three folds back to you. Take care and a big kiss for you, mwah.

-your biggest fan

La déchirure 

You exist to mourn, to ache for what was and all that will never be. Even if happiness brushed against your fingertips, dazzling and radiant, you would not recognize its face, you would distort its features into the terrible grief you’ve always known.

pairing: figure skater!hyunjin x ballerina!reader.

genre: angst. slowwww burn. heavy and recurrent grief. healing.

warnings: mc has a bad relationship with her parents. grief is a prominent theme here so please be aware. some allusions to sex but no smut. description of injuries.

word count: 21.8k

author’s note: heyyyy…. haven’t posted anything in 3 months i feel so shy AJNSJD i say this about every fic but this fic is truly my baby it took me so long to get it done and i poured my heart into it. so please if you enjoyed reading pls pls pls let me know. it means the world and more to me. happyyy reading!!! also thanks to @hyunverse for indulging all my brainrots about this fic i LOVE YOU

Your bare soles are bleeding across the graveyard. You don’t remember when your sandals slipped away from your feet, nor when your body decided to bring you here, heels scratched from the tiny rocks littering the ground.

But the pain doesn’t register in your brain, not yet. You’re only paying attention to the last name written on the tombstone— your last name, to be exact. 

Right now, more than ever, you wished your first name was engraved beside it too. 

You’ve memorized this graveyard like the back of your hand, know what sound the tree branches make during spring— gently swaying, like a melancholic flute, aching because flowers refuse to bloom upon them. And during winter too— even sadder, angrier, perhaps to mimic the sound of the souls left alone in the graves to fend off the cold.

Though you’ve never approached this tombstone before. You always remained a few feet back, each time your parents brought you to your late sister’s grave— every Sunday, for the past eighteen years of your existence, without fault. 

You don’t know the person they’re mourning.

You don’t know the person they wish to mold you after. 

Somehow, in a sick twist of fate, the course of your existence was set in stone before you could draw your first breath into this universe. 

She looks just like her sister, your mom whispered in awe, tears brimming in her waterline as she beheld you close to her bare chest. 

That is what your grandmother recalls about your birth, the rejoice of you being an exact copy of your sister’s features. There was nothing in her, in everyone’s memory about you. Everything orbited around your sister, the way the planets chase after the sun. You were, after all, born to replace the void she left behind. 

You sometimes wonder, is your physique the first setting stone of your pain? Had your hair been lighter, darker than hers, your lips smaller, plumper, would your parents be forced to look at you, behold you for who you are, learn to love you for who you would be? 

The question first popped into your brain at age five— maybe less intricate, a feeling that pressed against your ribcage: your parents don’t love you a lot, do they? You are now eighteen, the question has yet to desert you. 

You’ve always been aware of this reality— there are more pictures of your sister than of you in your house. Your parents always spoke of her, the perfect little girl, whisked away by a terrible sickness, at age seven. 

And she loved ballet. 

So, you had to love ballet too.

You weren’t given a choice, per se. At age four, you were thrust into a ballet class with little oblivious girls; just like you. Flushed cheeks and glossy eyes as you all tried to follow the teacher’s instruction. It wasn’t easy, it never got easier, year after year, only more challenging, only harder on your body.

Bigger bruises, sprained ankles from time to time, you’ve lost count of the injuries this art has inflicted upon your body. But thankfully, you ended up loving it too. You loved how graceful it made you feel, how the music seemed to whisk you away to an enchanting world, how the applause roared each time you came first in a competition, all eyes on you alone. 

Or so you hoped, you prayed. You wished to dance better, harder until all your parents could see was you. Not the daughter that came before you.

It was hard to admit at times, certainly something you never said out loud. But surely, yes, you were jealous of your deceased sister.

How could you not be when it seemed like you were competing with a ghost, someone whose absence weighed more than your presence?

Snippets of your life flash before your eyes as you stare at her grave. Pirouette, arabesque, plié, tendu— those are words engraved within your mind, ones you breathe in more than oxygen. You hear them in the voice of your ballet instructor, Jihyo. She’s a woman in her forties, though she looks older from the harsh lines framing her face. 

Her voice is high-pitched, her hair always tied back in a sleek bun you’re sure pains her brain, her words are harsh each time she corrects your posture.

And she’s the only person who believes in you.

She’s not nice, she has made you cry more times than you can count. So, you knew when she leveled her eyes to yours when you were nine, when she told you, “I see something magical in you”— that she was telling the truth. 

You wanted to prove her right, because for once, someone saw something in you, not in a ghost, not in ground-up bones.

In you.

You feel an uncontained anger swell within you, waves of relentless hurt swarming you as you fall to your knees.

You worked hard. You worked so hard. Between classes and ballet practice, the days strung you by like a puppet and sometimes you didn’t have enough time to breathe. 

Your entire life revolved around ballet. spin, point well, adjust your posture, you can’t stop now. Suddenly it’s two a.m. and you only get four hours of sleep before your classes begin. You didn’t have time to socialize with your peers, to have a crush on the sweet guy in your maths class, to giggle at an arcade with your friends. Soon after you were in your ballet class, even more spins, points, arabesque. 

But all of your exhaustion dissipated today. All of it seemed okay, for the first time in your existence, perhaps, the breath that escaped your chest wasn’t heavy. It was light, it was airy, it was one that yearned for the next, for the days that will follow, tinted with happiness, for once.

“I got into Julliard” 

That is what you told your parents an hour ago, voice brimming with uncontainable happiness, tears dripping down your eyes in an uncontrollable flow. 

Your mother’s eyes became teary in an instant. You thought the past was past you now. You’ll forgive eighteen years of coming second in your mother’s heart. Surely, she will only see you now.

But then her eyes set on the portrait of your sister on the wall, her tone desolate when she whispered—“she would have loved Julliard too.”

You don’t remember what happened after that. What curse escaped your mouth from the years of barely contained bitterness, when everything lashed out like venomous poison on your parents. 

You remember screaming, lots of it, something breaking too, you don’t recall if it is you who threw the vase or your father. The latter seemed more plausible— he was always bound to these sudden bouts of anger. Effects of grief, consequences of your sister’s absence. Her, yet again, poisoning your life. 

You remember feeling like a stranger in your home, a nobody, someone they’d kill in an instant to bring her back.

It was no longer a feeling, though. It was a fact. Your father cemented it loud and clear for you— “I wish she never died so you would’ve never been born.”

A pin-drop silence followed. Your father was always bound to bouts of anger, you knew that. He always regretted it afterward too, just like he felt in that instant, scrambling to apologize, to cup your cheek and say he didn’t mean it.

For how long has this thought festered in his brain, taken root in his veins, and flashed before his eyes each time he looked at you?

For how long did your parents wish you were dead instead? 

You don’t remember how you got to the graveyard. You don’t recall when it started pouring heavily on you. You only register the rain because the earth is wet as you clench it between your fists, as you punch the ground under which your sister is buried. 

You are crying, sobbing, a hysterical mess, you don’t know what you’re yelling, who you’re calling out for, what you’re trying to achieve by punching her grave. 

Unearthing her body and burying yours there instead, perhaps.

“What are you doing?” a stranger’s voice startles you, cutting through the fog in your mind like a thunderbolt. 

You don’t reply, simply turning around to look at the man standing a mere inches away from you.

“Do you know her or are you just desecrating her grave?” he asks calmly, as he brings a pink umbrella over your head. You realize that you’re drenched from head to toe, your feeble pajama does nothing to fight off the cold filtering between the fabric and your skin. 

You are freezing. You fear there is no place warm enough for your soul, not anymore.

“She’s my late sister,” you say, voice raw, scratched like a broken record. 

“She died young,” he says, looking at the dates engraved on the tombstone. 

You feel so horrible, for a millisecond. 

She was only seven. 

Her grave is too small compared to your body. 

But the anger quickly comes back to blind you. You invite it into your heart, push away the sadness and welcome the rage instead. It is the only thing comforting you in that instant.

“Did she do something to you?” he asks, his voice contrasting nicely against the heavy shatter of rain. It reminds you of the intro of your ballet music, soothing. 

“No,” you admit, a bit shamefully. But all sense of guilt dissipates at his next question— “then wouldn’t she be sad seeing you do this?” 

“What about MY sadness? MY anger?” you shout, lips trembling like the branches above your head. the storm picks up with your rising voice, the rain’s pitter-patter mimics the chaos inside your brain.

He remains silent and you can barely grasp the expression on his face, concealed by the umbrella’s shadows. You imagine that this conversation must have bored him, so you turn around yet again, your heart pounding angrily against your skin. 

But then, he kneels beside you, his umbrella completely discarded. You don’t dare to tilt your face towards him, so you simply stare ahead, your breath caught in your throat— what is he thinking of your most vulnerable state?

“I am rage,” he says, his voice permeating your being softly, the storm seems to calm down too to follow the ebb of his voice. “It means I am alive, or better, I am life, according to Armand, a modern art painter. You are alive today, and you get to be angry. That’s not something anyone here can enjoy,” he points out, taking a fleeting glance at the graves surrounding you. 

“You get to do something with that anger. But this, this won’t cure it.” 

He’s young, roughly your age it seems, but he speaks as if he beholds a wisdom beyond his years. You wonder what he went through to understand rage doesn’t fix anything. You wonder if he has ever been this angry, too. 

Did he move past it? Or did he drown the anger deep within the wells of his soul so he wouldn’t confront its ugly face? 

The question roams in your head as you watch him place a bouquet of red lilies atop the grave. You didn’t even notice the flowers at first, your view was too distorted by tears to grasp anything beautiful. 

“You’ll catch a cold,” the guy points out, smiling at you, or at least attempting to since the grin doesn’t reach his eyes. His words come out slower, as if weighed down by a sadness only he can feel. 

He is in a graveyard after all, the flowers were meant for someone else than you. 

“Wait here,” he says, quickly getting up and jogging out of the graveyard. 

What a silly request, you think, it’s not like you would dare move. Your feet are aching and you have nowhere else to go. 

He returns a few minutes later, a hoodie in his hands that he promptly pulls over your head. The warm fabric engulfs you in a cloud of roses and musk. “I tried to warm it up with the car’s heating,” he says sheepishly, and you blink slowly at his kindness, a pink tint blooming across your cheeks. 

“Thank you.” 

His eyes fleet to your bare, bleeding feet, and you fidget in place, trapped by a bout of embarrassment. 

“I have spare shoes in my car. Do you want me to drive you home?” His voice is gentle, as if speaking to a wounded animal, too bruised by the hands of humans. Tears spring to your eyes once more, you wish the earth could crack open and swallow you whole. 

“I don’t want to burden you.” 

“You won’t,” he says, and as if sensing your hesitation, he adds, “I promise. Leaving you here is what would burden me.”

You are very tired as he drives you to your place. You speak once when you ask him if he wasn’t there to visit someone, he says that it’s okay, he can come back tomorrow. 

You only dare look at him at the last red light before you arrive at your address. He’s beautiful, black strands sticking to his forehead, a tiny pout pulling his rosy lips forward. His cheeks are flushed from the cold, contrasting beautifully with the mole on his cheek. Then, by his jaw. Another at the beginning of his neck. You wonder if he has a map of ebony stars trailing down his chest.

You don’t know why this stranger instills such safety in you. Why would you rather stay in his car than set foot into your house once more. You dread what will await you behind those doors, you don’t think your heart could handle another tear at its tender flesh. 

You don’t think you could handle looking at your parents and only seeing strangers. 

But you know this safety has something to do with the way he placed the lilies atop the grave; as if it beheld someone dear to his heart and not a stranger. How he made sure you got home safely, how he didn’t seem to care that you dirtied his front seat and the carpet below your feet. 

He looks like a good person. 

You wish to tell your good news to a good person. 

“I got into Julliard,” you quickly let out as soon as he parks. You don’t allow yourself time to regret your confession. 

A breathtaking smile overtakes his face, the thunderstorm outside pales before the sun shining in his features. 

“Really?” he asks cheerfully, and you nod, a tiny smile painting across your lips. “Mm. Really.”

“That’s amazing!” his grin further widens, his eyes disappearing into two lovely moon crescents. “I know I’m just a stranger but, I'm proud of you,” his voice softens, “I mean it. I hope you’re proud of yourself too.” 

It takes you a few seconds to answer, you wish to bask further in the sound of his voice, to store his words into your memory, to revisit his kindness on nights that are too cold. 

This was all you’ve ever wanted to hear. 

“Thank you,” you smile softly. A moment of silence passes, you find yourself missing this stranger before you even leave his car. You wish to carry a piece of his memory within you, a souvenir of who he is— “I'm Yn, by the way.” 

“Yn,” he repeats, his voice tender. “Nice to meet you, Yn. I’m Hyunjin.” 

Four years later.

“You need to work on your landing more, but the rest is good.”

“Thanks, coach.” Hyunjin gives Jihyoun, his lifelong mentor, a thumbs-up as he loosens the laces of his ice skates. A dull ache is throbbing through his legs, like the faint buzz of bees circling roses. 

His body is weary, every muscle reminding him of the sheer effort he’s poured into perfecting his routine for the upcoming figure skating competition— the most important one of his life, by far.

“Are you leaving now?” Jihyoun’s voice pierces the delicate silence and Hyunjin nods, resting his head against the cold concrete wall. “Just gonna take a breather.”

“I’ll head out then,” Jihyoun says, patting his back gently, “make sure you get some rest.”

Hyunjin waits till his coach is far out the corridor to release a relieved breath. A familiar silence wraps around the ice rink like a comforting cloak, the stillness sits beside Hyunjin like an old friend. It is here, amid the soft hum of machines and the chill of the rink that Hyunjin feels most like himself. 

A few minutes trickle by, slow and silent. An uncomfortable feeling nudges at Hyunjin’s rib as he remains as still as a statue; he knows he’s on a losing bet to make time stretch forth, hoping that the sun outside will pause in its descent— a few more moments before the darkness completely sets in Seoul. Because the night will surely string along with it the next day, and the next day is one Hyunjin isn’t ready to face. 

When does he ever? 

But the sun always sets and rises once more, even if you dont wish for it to. 

With a sigh, Hyunjin grabs his bag and slings it over his shoulder. He makes his way to the vending machine upstairs, in the dimly lit corner near the dance studio. He drops a few coins into the slot, punching the number for his usual drink. But it gets stuck—of course. 

“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath, pressing his forehead against the cold glass before frustratedly kicking the machine.

“I am rage,” a voice suddenly teases from behind.

Hyunjin is quick to distance himself from the machine, startled, and admittedly, very embarrassed. His shame morphs to surprise when he sees you standing there. 

Your lips curve into a gentle smile, and your eyes sparkle with quiet amusement— that light, however, dims slightly when he doesn’t immediately respond.

It takes all of Hyunjin’s will to act like he doesn’t recognize you.

“You get to do something with your anger, but this won’t cure it.” You quote, your voice softer now. “You know, you told me this, near the graveyard…” You point vaguely behind you, each word growing quieter as if you’re no longer sure if that scene was real or a figment of your imagination.

Hyunjin nods in recognition, and you relax, the tension lifting from your shoulders.

“Miss Julliard,” he murmurs, a hint of nostalgia in his voice. Your grin brightens at his words and Hyunjin notices faint smile lines tracing your lips and eyes. It seems as if you’ve laughed quite often for the past four years. The thought brings him a strange sense of comfort.

“What did the vending machine do to deserve this?” you ask, tilting your head with playful curiosity.

“Stole my money,” Hyunjin mutters.

“You’ve got to hit the side when that happens.” You show him, tapping the machine with an experienced hand. His drink clatters down, and he shoots you a thankful grin as he bends to retrieve it.

In those brief seconds, with his head bowed, Hyunjin begs his heart to slow its frantic beating. 

“What are you doing here?” you ask once he stands.

“I’m an ice skater,” he says, and your eyes widen with genuine surprise.

“Really? That’s amazing!”

“Yeah… I guess it is. Are you back from Julliard?” His voice is softer now, more tentative, reminiscent of the day you met. 

“For a little while. Just a few months. This studio—” you glance around, “—it’s where I used to train before I went away.”

“I see,” Hyunjin nods, “I train upstairs, in the ice rink. Because I’m an ice skater,” he repeats, before closing his eyes in embarrassment as your giggles spill forth. No shit Hyunjin.

“I’ll see you around then,” he quickly mutters, eager to end the conversation, before turning around and hurrying away. 

He’s almost by the stairs when your voice calls out his name, urgent, pressing.

“Hyunjin!”

His body freezes before his mind orders it to—he’s not the only one who remembers, then. 

“Did you eat dinner?” you shout, a little out of breath.

“No,” he admits.

“There’s a place nearby that makes the best kimchi stew. Want to go?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“It’s my treat.” Your smile has slightly dimmed, and you’re unconsciously scratching the skin by your nails. Even from afar, Hyunjin can discern a shadow looming in your eyes, a plea unspoken. 

“Are you lonely?” Hyunjin’s question comes out before he can stop it, blunt and raw. He’s always been honest, maybe too honest for his own good. Time has taught him that every moment matters, that each second slips away faster than you expect, and that it’s better to speak the truth before it comes back to poison you. 

Your smile falters. “I just… don’t want to go home. not yet,” you confess quietly.

“So you’re using me?” he teases, leaning back against the wall with a smirk. You roll your eyes, muttering “Never mind” under your breath as you start to turn away.

“Fine,” he sighs, pushing off the wall. “But I’m craving sushi.”

…

Hyunjin’s eyes are more worn than the last time you’ve seen him. 

Four years ago, they were puffy, soft with exhaustion, their brown dulled like the last flower clinging to life as fall sets in. But now, the lights have gone out completely, like a bloom crushed underfoot, its color bleeding into the cracks of the pavement.

You steal glances at him between spoonfuls of kimchi jjigae (he silently followed you to your restaurant), watching for any sign of recognition. But he doesn’t seem to remember your name, nor the day at the graveyard as much as you do.

The thought strips you of embarrassment and clothes you in sadness instead.  

Hyunjin has written your name into his diary more times than he’d care to admit, even less so to you. 

He has always walked this earth alone, a stranger even to his own emotions, especially his grief— no one understood how his mother’s death consumed him whole.  

It is true that only one body was laid to the ground many years ago. But Hyunjin’s soul followed hers into the ground when he was just fourteen. 

His sadness made sense to his teachers, his classmates, and even the distant relatives who only came around occasionally. But no one grasped the depth of his anger—at the universe for taking his mother when he was still a child, at the illness that wore down her bones, at himself, mostly, for still breathing when she no longer could.

That rage had devoured him, tore through his flesh with its canine teeth. He only saw its reflection once—when he met you.

Hyunjin didn’t know who or what you were mourning that day at the graveyard. But he remembers your screams on his way to his mother’s grave, raw and stripped down to the marrow. It was as if he had stumbled upon his younger self, begging his mother to dig through the earth and hug his frail body once more, just once more. 

“How long have you been skating ?” you ask suddenly, your gaze flickering over his face. He blinks slowly, as if to bring his consciousness back to the present moment. 

“Since i was a kid, nearly two decades now,” he says. 

“Do you like it?” it is a harmless question, a natural succession of the one that came before it. But nothing was ever that simple with Hyunjin, because ice skating reminded him of his mother, and his mother was the wound that had yet to stop bleeding. 

“I do, I really do,” he speaks softly, a fragile smile curling his lips. He waits till you both finish the first bottle of soju to ask— how have you been? and it’s your turn to frown slightly. He notices the tightening of your fist around the spoon, the subtle tremor in your hand. You, too, carry an ever bleeding wound.

“I’m okay.”

The next question slips from him without thought, “are you still as angry?”

You remain silent for a few seconds, holding his gaze as the question settles between you. His cheeks flush, and he almost apologizes for his bluntness, but then you speak.

“Was I ever angry? I think I was just very sad.” 

Snippets of a younger Hyunjin flash through his mind. The numerous brawls he got in with his classmates, the way he pushed away anyone who tried to show him kindness— He was all thorns, keeping others from reaching the tender petals beneath.

Tears spring in his eyes, unbidden, and he bites his lower lip. He understands what you mean perfectly, you understand what he feels perfectly too. 

“I feel as if my heart is too tired now to bear such big anger,” you say with a smile. “Have you worn out yet? That’s what I’d like to ask.” 

“Aren’t you afraid of the answer?” he pauses, adding in a quiet whisper, “I am.” 

The chandelier above dances across his glossy eyes. You’ve never been optimistic—life hasn’t allowed you that luxury. But a small part of you wants to offer Hyunjin hope, to breathe life back into his weary heart, even though you no longer believe in hope yourself.

But no words of reassurance come. So instead, you offer something much simpler, much more realistic. “Let’s ask it another time, then,” you smile, pouring each other a new round of drinks. You quickly down three shots before laying your head on the table. 

“Are you sleeping?” Hyunjin asks with a quiet laugh, the sound light, like a melody played softly on piano keys.

“It’s fine,” you wave a hand in the air. “The owner knows me. He’ll wake me when it’s time to close.”

Both of you are running from home, or what’s left of it. Hyunjin watches you, your face softened by fleeting peace, so different from the grief he’s etched into his memories.

Far more beautiful, too.

“Then wake me up, too,” he sighs, resting his head beside yours.

His eyelids close instantly, lulled to a nice sleep by the buzz of the fridge and the soft hum of your breathing.

Many minutes pass by— quiet and uninterrupted. Hyunjin finds that the next day has come much slower in your company. 

…

The first time you saw Hyunjin figure skating, you were drawn like a moth to a flame to the music echoing from the ice rink.

You recognized the swelling violin of Can You Hear the Music, and paused by the entrance, torn between stepping in and turning back. What if it wasn’t Hyunjin? Worse, what if it was, and he didn’t wish to see you?

Still, your feet betrayed your hesitation, inching forward. You stood at the door, watching in quiet awe as Hyunjin leaped into the air, spinning with perfect grace. He landed effortlessly on one foot, the other extended behind him in a flawless arc.

The lights danced over his body, his flowing white blouse trailing his movements like a siren’s voice pulling in sailors. His black hair floated weightlessly with each spin, strands resting delicately against his forehead.

For the past four years, you had struggled to feel human. The world tasted bland, as if your heart had lost its ability to savor anything. You were afraid you’d lost the capacity to be amazed—by sunsets, by poignant art that once moved you to tears. So you chased after beauty, desperate for the feelings it could still stir in you, a fragile reminder of your humanity.

But watching Hyunjin skate— that gripped your heart more than anything else had in years.

“He’s good, isn’t he?” a voice startles you and you turn quickly, caught off guard by a man standing beside you, a bottle of water in hand and a kind smile on his face.

“Yes, he is,” you reply quietly.

“I’m Jihyoun, Hyunjin’s coach,” he introduced himself, extending a firm hand.

“Yn,” you hesitated, glancing at Hyunjin, who was still absorbed in his performance. “An acquaintance.”

Jihyoun nodded, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. You followed suit, unable to tear your gaze away from Hyunjin as he spun, cradling his chest as if holding a memory close, his body lowering toward the ground in a quiet ache. It was a pain you knew all too well.

As the music softened, Hyunjin stilled, closing his eyes, taking a moment to catch his breath. You were about to slip away, retreating like a shadow escaping the light, but Jihyoun would have found you weird, perhaps he’d think you were a stalker. So, you remained there. 

“Hey, coach,” Hyunjin waved, skating toward you both. Anxiety flickered in your chest like a match that refused to light up—you regretted coming now. You had shared a meal just days ago, but Hyunjin hadn’t asked for your name, nor did he seem to remember it. Maybe you held onto his memory more warmly than he held onto yours.

“Miss Julliard,” Hyunjin greeted with a soft smile as his eyes landed on you, and just like that, your worries dissolved like sugar in hot tea.

“Julliard? That’s impressive,” Jihyoun whistled, but you shook your head. You often forgot how prestigious your school was—perhaps because no one ever celebrated your acceptance in it.

No one, except Hyunjin.

“Have you eaten?” Hyunjin asked, gliding to the edge of the rink, his blouse clinging to his sweat-soaked skin.

“No,” you shook your head. He nodded nonchalantly.

“I’m craving kimchi jiggae again,” he tipped his chin towards you, “we can go again, if you’d like.”

“Sure, I’d like that,” you grinned.

“Okay. Wait for me.”

… 

Hyunjin’s routine has always been quite simple. 

He’d work out in the morning, the rest of his day lost in practice, his nights reserved for painting or reading, sometimes pouring his thoughts onto paper. It was a life untouched by turbulence, a pattern he rarely swayed from— until you wove yourself into it.

For the past two weeks, you always came to see Hyunjin at the end of his practice. Some nights you’d go eat dinner at your usual spot; sometimes you’d simply buy a drink and find a quiet refuge on the rooftop, watching the city lights twinkle beneath the stars.

There was a strange sense of comfort, he had found, in two bruised souls sitting with one another— an unspoken understanding of what your tongues had often failed to express.

But you hadn’t come to see him in two days.

It’s past one a.m. when Hyunjin finally exits the practice building. He pauses outside, turning back to see that the lights are still on in the dance studio. 

He hopes it is you dancing there. 

With a faint sigh, he takes the stairs two at a time, not wanting to dwell on the fact that, for the very first time in a while, Hyunjin, the ever lonely man, is seeking someone else’s presence. 

When Hyunjin pushes open the studio door, he finds you sitting on the floor, knees tucked to your chest. Your tutu encircles you the way petals would hug a stem— layers of soft tulle in pale pink, contrasting delicately against your sheer tights and pointe shoes.

You appear just like the water lily he sketched only yesterday—soft pastels and an unmatched delicateness. His cheeks flush at the comparison, and, in a hurried attempt to leave, he fumbles, catching his shirt on the doorknob and bumping into the door. 

He’s frozen in place, wincing when you call out his name in surprise. Does he have to embarrass himself each time he’s around you? 

He turns slowly, a sheepish smile creeping onto his face. “Miss Julliard,” he waves, and you grin in return, your eyes warm, “What are you doing here?”

The words are lost on him as you run over to him, stopping mere inches away from his figure. His fingers twitch for his sketchbook, a sudden urge seizes him to draw you.

“You didn’t come by yesterday so I came to see you,” he explains, voice soft like a summer breeze. 

Your grin brightens like the sun. “Ah, did you miss me?” you tease, and he rolls his eyes playfully, walking past you to sit on the floor. 

Did he miss you? no he didn’t, but his heart did ache, just a little, at your absence.

“Why did you look so defeated sitting on the ground?” he asks instead of replying, leaning against the mirrored wall.

You sigh, taking your place across from him, “practicing this dance is so hard, I got sick of it.” 

He nods, understanding the frustration that stems from being a perfectionist, always chasing ideals in your work.

“You know what helps me? Performing to a song I love. Reminds me what I love about the sport.”

You hum, before a mischievous glint sparks in your eyes. “There is this one song.. From a barbie movie.”

He blinks in surprise, laughing as you dash for your phone.

“Barbie?”

“Yes! The 12 dancing princesses. My mom made me watch it to convince me to take up ballet.” 

“Is that so?” he grins, placing his chin atop his palm. 

“Yeah, she wanted me to follow my sister’s footsteps,” you say, and he thinks back to the small grave you were both kneeling next to. “I wonder if I wouldn’t have become a ballerina if I didn’t watch it,” you muse, before clearing your throat.

“Anyways,” you force a smile on your face, as a whimsical melody streams through the loud speakers. Your grin turns childlike as you stand onto pointe, your raised foot grazing the knee of your supporting leg. 

You glide across the floor as if you are floating, your tutu catching the soft glow of the studio light. Your leaps are as light as air, and you slide to Hyunjin grabbing his hand to pull him up, drawing him into your orbit. 

You laugh, spinning around him, your movements fluid and free, yet your arms frame your figure with a rehearsed prouesse. He can’t help but laugh with you, the warmth of your presence filling the room, the music wrapping around you both like a spell. 

You’re a blur of pink and light, you appear like an angel dancing to the tune of childhood memories.

As the song reaches its end, you twirl one last time before bowing gracefully. Hyunjin claps, the sound echoing in the quiet studio.

“I haven’t danced to that in years,” you say, catching your breath. “I probably looked ridiculous.”

He shakes his head, his voice steady and sincere. “I think ballet would’ve found you anyway. It’s like you were born for it.”

Hyunjin is used to the cold bite of the ice rink, that is where he feels most like himself. But he is somehow drawn to the warmth of this particular studio—no, not just the studio. It’s the warmth you bring, the way your smile lights up the space at his words, that makes him feel, for the first time in a long while, that he could have a friend. That he doesn’t need to walk down the path of life alone.

…

You’re lingering at the doorstep of your home, keys gripped like a lifeline in your trembling fingers. It always takes you three heartbeats to open the door—one to shut your eyes, two to fill your lungs with air, and three to prepare for the tidal wave of hurt waiting on the other side.

You push the door open and slip inside, peeling off your shoes like a shadow trying to leave no trace. With each step, the house pulls you in, a black hole swallowing the warmth that once flickered in your veins, devouring any trace of light.

Dinner with Hyunjin still burns faintly in your chest, like the lingering heat of a fireplace after the flames have died. He makes you laugh a lot, because he’s clumsy, and a peculiar fan of weird debates. You had just spent an hour discussing whether humans have two buttcheeks or simply one.

But you wither down inside this home, your joy punctured like a balloon drifting too close to the sun.

The walls have permeated your sadness, they echo the killing sentence your father cast into your heart four years ago, a wound that festers no matter how much time has passed.

Hyunjin asked you a few days ago why you were back to Seoul. You told him you were competing in the Seoul International Ballet Competition, and he said that he was preparing for the Olympics selection. He then laughed, saying how strange it was that after a month of seeing each other every day, it was only now that you’d shared this. 

You tried to laugh with him, but the sound felt like a stone sinking in your throat. Guilt gnawed at you, not because it was a lie, but because it wasn’t the whole truth. The ballet may have brought you back, but something else called you home. 

At times you wonder if you had made the right call by answering it.

“You’re home,” your mother’s voice cuts through the quiet as you enter the kitchen. You nod, humming absentmindedly. 

“I made pasta, it’s in the oven. And I bought that drink you like,” she says, but her words are too sweet, too forced—like the artificial flavor of apple in fizzy drinks. 

“Thanks,” you whisper, barely loud enough to carry the word across to her.

“I’ll grab it for you,” she says, moving toward the fridge. But when she opens it, her hands falter, hovering over empty shelves. “That’s strange… I could’ve sworn I put it here.” You grip the counter tighter as she flits from cabinet to cabinet, her search growing frantic. 

“It’s fine, I’m not thirsty,” you murmur, but she continues, finally pulling open the dishwasher.

“Ah, silly me,” she says softly, retrieving the can with trembling hands. You keep your eyes low, unwilling to meet hers. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice as fragile as a cracked vase, “I forget so much these days.” 

And just like that, she slips out of the kitchen, leaving behind a gaping hole in your chest that threatens to swallow you whole.  

You hate it when she forgets in front of you, because it shatters the illusion. You see her now, as something frail, crumbling under the weight of time. Her mind, like a worn-out book, is losing pages faster than you can salvage them.

And the cruelest part is that it forces you to forgive her—to hold her in the softness of your heart, knowing that one day she’ll forget who you are entirely.

But has she ever known who you were to begin with? Has she ever dared to ask? 

Has she ever cared to? 

… 

The first time Hyunjin spoke about his mother, you were both lying on the grass underneath a starry night.

You had been rambling about a specific bagel from New York that you missed, while he hummed absentmindedly, his thoughts entangled in memories like marionettes tugged by invisible strings from the past.

He hadn’t meant to ignore you; so when you turned to him, playful mischief dancing on your lips—“Are you listening to me?”—he could only offer a sheepish grin in response. 

“What’s on your mind?” you asked, and he bit his lip, worry knitting his brow. 

Hyunjin had never had anyone to speak to about his mother; her memory resided in the pages of his diary, the strokes of his paintings, the rhythm of his dances—never out loud, never to another soul.

But he suddenly felt an insatiable urge to speak of her; thorns pricking his throat, his skin growing feverish as he fought to form the words he longed to speak. 

“What’s wrong?” you pressed, your tone shifting to one of concern. He thought you wouldn’t mind if he shared her memory, but what he would even say? There was so much to talk about, so much he admired, so much he missed.

“My mom…” he started, his voice tentative. He had your full attention now, he could tell by the way you fully turned around to look at him. “She used to make the best kimchi stew,” he confessed, closing his eyes in slight embarrassment. Is this really what he decided to speak about? 

Still, he pushed through. “She made it for me whenever I was sick. I don’t attach it to bad memories because it was delicious, and I could feel that she made it out of love, out of concern.” He pauses, sucking in a deep breath. “I hadn’t eaten it at all since she passed away. I couldn’t bring myself to. Until you took me to that restaurant.”

His eyes glistened as they settled on you, “So thank you for taking me there. I think you would have liked her kimchi stew.”

Your eyes widened slightly, dewdrops brimming in your waterline before you smiled softly. “I’m sure I would’ve.” 

He cleared his throat, somehow emboldened by the tenderness of your gaze. He thought that her memory would be safe within the confines of your mind. He thought that he wouldn’t mind sharing her with you. “She was the best figure skater I’ve ever seen.”

“Was she? Is she the one who inspired you to become an ice skater?” you asked, curiosity lighting up your expression. He nodded eagerly. “Yes, she was graceful with her moves; it felt as if she floated atop the ice. The media dubbed her the best figure skater of her generation,” he spoke, pride swelling within him as he noticed the admiration in your expression.

“It was always just her and me, so I’d stay late into the night watching her practice. That was my favorite pastime. She’d always buy me the food I wanted afterward, as a thank you.”

“She sounds like a good mother,” you said, and your words morphed into fingers pressing on his tender bruises. 

“She was. She is.” 

“Tell me more,” you smiled, and so he talked, and talked and talked. He shared everything he could recall: their weekly picnics beneath cherry trees, birthday candles they’d blow out together, the medals she dedicated to him, and her silly jokes that had once filled their home with laughter. 

He spoke of her kindness, her joy that lingered even until her last breath, the love that she beheld for this life and her art, and him. He didn’t mention her illness; it was a mere passing moment, never defining her, never stripping her from the passion that bound her atoms together. 

When he finished, he found his cheeks damp with tears, but his heart felt lighter than it had in years. The air around you was sweeter, for once, it wasn’t fourteen-year-old Hyunjin weeping over the memory of his mother. The ache had softened.

His last words hung in the air, echoing softly in the stillness of the empty park. You didn’t speak; instead, you gently placed your palm atop his. 

It is his very soul that twitched at your touch. 

“What are you doing?” he asked breathlessly, a foolish question, perhaps. 

Your reply was even more obvious, simpler.

“Comforting you.”

“I…” he hesitated, eyes darting furiously over your face, then your hand resting upon his, then your eyes once more, watching him patiently, leaving him the space to retract his hand or intertwine your fingers with his. 

“I’m scared,” he finally admitted, the shadows of his fears looming large. It terrified him even more to utter such words, yet he knew you wouldn’t use them against him; you understood what it felt like to be deprived of comfort— somehow that only saddened him even more.

“What if… What if I forget the coldness of her fingers wrapped around mine?” 

“Your mom loved you, Hyunjin. And someone who loves you would want your hand to feel warm.” 

Something shifted within his heart, atoms rearranging themselves to spell out a simple truth for Hyunjin— your mom would want you to be happy. 

He nodded, willing his fingers to slip in the empty spaces between your fingers. You squeezed his hand—once, twice, thrice—each pulse a silent invitation for your warmth to seep through his veins, to permeate his bones and sink into his heart. 

He could get used to this, he thought. He wants to get used to your warmth, he realizes.

What does that mean? 

…

Hyunjin has always known who he was, memorized to heart the architecture of his personality. 

He knew he loved art, that he found solace in learning about artists past who, like him, seemed to have sculpted their solitude into something lasting.

He knew he loved painting, he knew he hated egg plants, he knew he’d rather die than not achieve his mother’s dream, for him. 

But something within him was shifting—unraveling. 

His eyes are drawn to the entrance of the ice rink, like a compass needle to true north. His neck craned almost instinctively as the clock looms over 11 p.m.— the time you usually come by to the studio. 

“Don’t worry, she’ll drop by,” Jihyon’s voice cut through his trance. Hyunjin startled, his cheeks blooming with the soft pink of a rising dawn.

“What are you talking about?” he mumbled, but Jihyon only grinned knowingly. 

“Miss Julliard,” his coach teased. Was he that obvious? Did you notice it too? 

That nickname clung to you both since the first time he uttered it near the vending machine. You never corrected him, never offered your real name, and he never asked—though he knew it well. He had thought of you often over these past four years, wondered if you had been well, wondered if you had ever moved on or if you still carried the anger, the heartbreak as if it were your own spine.

He felt guilty that he had found comfort in your pain all these nights past. 

Did that make Hyunjin selfish? Or lonely? 

“Don’t stay up too late,” Jihyon said as he waved goodbye.

“Don’t worry about me.” 

Jihyon lingered by the door, as if wishing to say something else, but he simply sighed before leaving.

It feels odd now for Hyunjin to stand in the stillness of the ice rink, feeling like a hollow shell without you. The quiet is no longer familiar, nor comforting, not when he’s grown accustomed to your giggles spilling all over the place. 

What does it mean, he wondered, when the heart learns to beat to the rhythm of someone else’s presence? When the mind begins to archive every detail, every smile, everything that the other person has ever loved?

Like clockwork you jog into the studio, waving at Hyunjin from afar. He skates over to you, leaning against the railing as he smiles, it is natural for him to smile at you.

“How was practice?” you asked, and he shot you a thumbs-up, his fingers drumming against the railing.

“Isn’t your competition next week?” you ask and he nods, “Can I come watch then?” you say and his heart stutters at your request.

“You can, if you want to, if you don’t it’s okay too, you actually don’t have to,” he mumbles, his words rushing out, until you pressed a finger to his lips, silencing him 

“I’ll be there, I have to make sure everyone cheers for you when you win,” you grin, self-assuredly, as if you have never doubted that he’ll qualify for the Olympics. 

His heart grows limp at your words, his limbs losing their strength as your finger lingers upon his lips. He gently grabs your hand, moving it away, goosebumps rippling across his skin at how soft your wrist feels.

This isn’t normal. 

“Should I bring pom poms? Actually, should I make them from scratch? What’s your favorite color?” 

“Will you actually come?” he whispers. Hyunjin has never had anyone cheering for him in his competitions, except for his coach, but he was obligated to do so, in a way. He doesn’t remember what it feels like to smile at someone in the stands anticipating your win. 

Somewhat, you sense the gravity of hyunjin’s question, the vulnerability it entails, one he doesn’t try to hide. He has never attempted to hide his emotions from you, now that he thinks about it.

“Of course I will,” your voice softens, your playfulness melting away. “I promise. I…” you point your pinky to him and he chuckles quietly, “I pinky promise.” 

You kiss your thumb pad and signal for him to do the same, he shakes his head before following your lead, pressing both your thumb pads together. 

“There, sealed forever.” 

You quiet down, before giggling for a reason that eludes you both. 

“Have you ever tried ice skating?” he suddenly asks and you nod, “I know how to skate, but not how to do all those fancy spins of yours.” 

“Do you want to try?” he smiles and you lighten up, “Actually? What if I fall?” 

“I’ll be there to catch you.”

A few moments later, you were both on the ice, Hyunjin spinning around you as you found your balance. “This feels so different from ballet,” you chuckle and he grins, “do you like it?”

“Yeah, i do.”

“Come here,” he beckons, reaching for your hand, and you don’t hesitate, your fingers intertwining with his as he leads you across the rink. 

Can you hear the music starts playing on the loud speakers and Hyunjin laughs, turning around to look at you.

“I’m scared,” you giggle happily and he shakes his head, “Let go of your fears and hold on to me.”

And then, without warning, he spins you, the motion sending your hair flying around you like wings unfurling in the wind. he’s spurred by the emotions this song alone can bestow on him. Can you hear the music?, it asks. Yes, he can, now more than ever, is his answer.

He wraps a secured arm around your waist, lifting you off the ground as he traces wide circles on the ice. Your laughter can be heard over the music, shouts of exhilaration ripping through you as you lift your leg to a ninety degree, as if doing ballet on ice. 

He twirls with you in his arms, as the music hits its crescendo, before finally putting you down, his arm still around you, your chests almost brushing against one another.

You’re so close, closer than you’ve ever been, Hyunjin can decipher the specks of light in your eyes, can hear the booming sound of your heartbeat in his chest. Your hand wraps around his bicep as you catch your breath, and Hyunjin is wrapped in a cocoon of your scent. 

He doesn’t wish to break free, he wants to remain in the chrysalis woven by the notes of your perfume. 

It’s a few hours later, Hyunjin laid on his bed, a pillow tightly pressed to his face. He wasn’t a stranger to late-night thoughts strung along by the twilight, but he had never thought before of this—of your lips, how soft they looked inches away from his, how it’d feel to press them on yours, to move slowly, tentatively, and then ravenously, hungrily, achingly.

“Fuck,” he mutters, further burying himself under his covers. Hyunjin wasn’t accustomed to these kinds of thoughts, he had never pursued someone, never had the time nor the energy to do so. Never had anyone grab his attention, in the first place.

Until you.

“Do I like her?” he murmurs to no one but himself, before shaking his head forcefully. “Go to sleep, Hyunjin,” he mutters, willing his eyes to shut closed, sewed so tightly together images of you cannot slip through his eyelids.

But to no avail.

He groans, kicking the covers off before heading to his desk. There, he opens his diary, grabbing a pen as if to write a new entry. But his fingers itch for the buried notebook from four years ago, the one he eyes from the corner of his eye.

He sighs softly before digging it out of its place, his fingers expertly going to his entry the night he came back from the graveyard. The night you met.

He remembers coming home slightly distraught after dropping you off, he had lingered by the door a bit, hearing echoing screams, a door being slammed, then an eerie silence once more.

Hyunjin had been too immersed in his pain to afford absorbing others’ sadness. A sponge that is too saturated, unable to welcome the woes of any other being.

But you had managed to crack through his defenses, frayed yourself a passage through the small gaps forgotten, shed sunlight on parts of himself he had thought were rotten, lost beyond salvation.

He felt an excruciating sadness for you, for your anger, for your sadness, for the way it consumed you whole, because he knew what would follow—when a body burns up, all that is left after is ashes, scattered everywhere, mingling with specks of dust, meaningless, a heart that serves no purpose anymore.

He never told you, he is unsure if he ever would, but it was the fourth anniversary of his mother’s death when he met you. He had planned to spend the night in a willowing state of sadness, an incapacitating one that didn’t allow for his limbs to move, similar to the first anniversary, then the second, then the third.

But he had spent the rest of it sketching your tearful eyes as you looked up at him, as you cowered away from his words, as you relaxed in his car.

That is the image he finds in his diary entry. But now that he thinks about it, he didn’t skillfully depict the moles scattered on your face, the crease near your eyes, or the way your hair reflects the sun’s light. He didn’t capture the arch of your eyebrow or the way beauty seems to reside in every nook and cranny of your face, seems to pour out of your pores like the sun brushing against a waterfall the way timid lovers do—magical, beautiful.

He sees you in a whole different light, now.

Hyunjin runs a tired hand through his hair, before grabbing his sketchbook. In the hours that ensued, in which he tried to do your beauty justice, erasing and retracing the shape of you time and time again, numerous questions ran through his mind, racing against time to find answers.

Does he like you? No, too simplistic of a question, too dim to encapsulate what knowing you feels like.

Is his soul drawn to yours?

Perhaps. Yes. Most definitely, his heart whispered.

Would he be a fool if he ever confessed it to you?

It is his mind that answered then. A bit forcefully, in fear, in warning: yes, a thousand times yes.

…

There are places in your parent’s house that you always stray from, the way oil stirs away from water. One, the vicinity of their bedroom, two, the living room— the ones in which you are most likely to stumble upon them. Three, the attic, in which you will most likely brush against ghosts from the past.

But somehow you found yourself exactly there, tonight. 

It's 10 p.m. The sun has long sunk below Seoul’s horizon, leaving behind a sky awash in an exquisitely deep blue, so inviting you almost wish to disappear into it. Today was your rest day, no dance studio, no late night escapades with Hyunjin.

You find yourself missing his giggles and how they would linger in your mind long after you part ways.

The attic is still, the floorboards creaking beneath the weight of your feet as you fumble for a light switch, your hand sweeping along the dusty wall. It flickers on, weak and golden, and you squint as the air, thick with age, coats your lungs. 

Old furniture crowds the room, remnants of a life you left behind four years ago. You’re surprised they kept your bed untouched in your room, one last string tying them to your memory.

Your eyes sweep over old paintings, broken suitcases, and wooden shelves, a hand mixer—useless now. And then, you see it, the reason you climbed here. 

Your mother had once mentioned a box, in passing, filled with things your sister wanted to leave for you. Your mother wasn’t pregnant with you at the time nor did she intend to, but she’d entertain the idea to make her favorite girl happy. 

You kneel and pull the box to your lap, the cardboard soft and weathered under your fingers.

“She was so kind,” your mother had said, too many glasses of wine in her system, her words loose and unguarded. “She gave up her favorite toys for you, before you were even born.” You never asked why they were never passed on, deep down you already knew the answer. She never deemed you worthy of having them. 

Inside, you find a small doll with golden hair and big glassy blue eyes, its pink dress dotted with strawberries, a swan hairpin missing some crystals, and tiny, delicate ballerina shoes, pale pink, unused, small—so small. 

And then, a note. 

Your heart stumbles, the bile rising fast to your throat as you grip the worn paper in your hands. 

Your sister had always been a myth, a memory passed down to you by your parents. An elusive figure you have only seen in photographs, until now. 

You’ve never had words that she addressed to you. 

The paper crinkles as you unfold it. You can somehow hear the rush of hot blood in your veins—uncomfortable, deafening. 

The words blur together as your eyes skim over the paper. You catch fragments— to my future sister—then something about how she wants to play with you, urging you to hurry, come quickly, before I break all my toys.

Your vision wavers, the small, careful handwriting barely legible through the haze. I left you my favorite doll and hairpin. So simple. So kind. I also left you my new ballet shoes. You don’t have to like ballet but if you do that would be awesome.

I would love to dance ballet with you.

The note crumples in your hand as your heart lurches, body jolted upright as if struck by lightning. You stumble out of the attic, discarding the box as the walls close in on you. They press, like the past, against your ribcage until you feel like you might suffocate.

You’ve carried resentment like a stone in your chest, a tide pulled by the moon, ever present, ever rising. You resented her because her memory haunted you, grew larger than life as you did. But she never asked for that. She was just a child, a seven-year-old who loved you before you even existed.

How horrible are you? 

Guilt is bitter on your tongue, sour as acid, and you swallow hard against it, tasting the metallic tang of regret. You don’t think as you barge into your parent’s room, blinded by feelings too entangled like vines to tell apart. 

“What’s wrong?” your mother asks, sitting in a bed too big for her alone. You throw the crumpled note at her. 

“Why did you never give me this?” you demand, and her eyes widen as she skims the lines, a sheen glazing her pupils. 

“I…” she stammers, and you laugh—a hollow, jagged sound—as your hands press against your forehead, fingers digging into the migraine feeding off your pain.

“You know I hated her, right? I– I hated a child, my sister because I never felt loved by you,” you choke, voice fracturing, “how– my god how pathetic is that?” 

“i’ve always loved you,” she says, voice tentative. but it is too meek of a reply, too hollow before the depths of your abandonment. 

“I’ve never, NEVER felt once loved by you! YOU made me feel as if I was competing with a ghost. She wasn’t here but she was everywhere and I was never enough to fill her shoes!” 

“I was a grieving mother!” she yells, standing up to face you, her face flushed and her hands trembling. “Do you know how terrible it feels to lower your child into the ground? Do you know how horrible I felt covering her grave when she was scared of the dark, when she hated the cold? She–” her voice cracks like fragile glass, unraveling as tears spill over her face, “She kept telling me that she didn’t want to leave us, that she didn’t want to die. How am I—“ She sobs, the sound raw, torn, “how am I supposed to forget my baby’s last breath? how am i supposed to be a perfect mother to you when I couldn’t protect her?” 

“i never wanted a perfect mother.” you murmur, eyes shutting tight, chest heaving with hiccuped breaths. “I never said you had to forget her. But I was right here. I was alive. I was breathing, hurting, waiting for you to see me, to love me.” Your voice breaks, you sound like your seven years old self and you hate that. “Did I mean so little to you?”

You smile sadly before her silence, your shoulders dropping low. You are too tired for an offense, too tired to tear down her defenses. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t always a good child. I’m sorry that sometimes I threw tantrums. I’m sorry for all the ways I failed you. I know I’m not perfect. I hurt, I stumble, I make mistakes. I am filled with resentment. I choke with it, and sometimes I hurt others too. But I try. I always try to make things right. And I apologize if I do.” 

Silence thickens between you both like browned sugar, though this moment is anything but sweet. You remain quiet, hoping for your salvation to come in the form of two words, two simple words— I’m sorry—that is all it would take to soothe your heart a little. 

You wait, and wait, and more seconds pass as the silence stretches longer and your mother refuses to meet your eyes. And slowly, slowly the hope withers within you. You know she isn’t apologizing tonight. Maybe not ever.

“Forget it.” you whisper as you leave the room and hurriedly walk out of the house. You need something strong, something to burn away the ache, something to scald the memory from your bones, to forget.

It’s nearly midnight when Hyunjin finally steps out of the training building. The air is crisp, cool against his flushed skin, but his relief is short-lived as his eyes land on Sohee, the owner of the kimchi jjigae place nearby, hovering by the entrance. 

Hyunjin’s frown deepens—something feels off. 

“Ah, hyunjin,” the fifty something quickly jogs up to him. “The security guard told me you still hadn’t left.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Yn has been drinking for the past hours, she looks.. Sad. And I’m worried she can’t get home safely.” Sohee’s tone sets off the alarm in Hyunjin’s mind. 

His worry tightens into a knot in his chest as he steps into the narrow restaurant. His eyes immediately fall on you—your cheek pressed against the table, five empty soju bottles scattered around you

He crouches in front of you, his heart twisting as he takes in the dried streaks of tears on your cheeks. What happened?

“Hey,” he whispers gently, afraid to jolt you awake. You stir, blinking groggily, trying to piece together your surroundings.

“Hyunjin,” you breathe, barely a whisper, and his heart softens at the sound. He nods, offering you a small smile, though concern darkens his eyes. “What’s wrong, hm?”

His words unlock something deep inside you, and your face crumbles like a porcelain vase breaking apart. The tears come swiftly, welling in your eyes until they spill over, your lower lip trembling like fragile branches in a storm.

“I’m a—I’m a horrible person,” you choke out between sobs, your voice trembling as much as your body. Your eyes squeeze shut as your shoulders quake, and Hyunjin’s hands move instinctively, gently covering your tightly clenched fists.

“No, you’re not,” he murmurs, his voice soft and steady, as if trying to hold you together with his words alone.

But you shake your head fiercely, a sob tearing from your throat, raw and unrestrained. “I’m a horrible sister,” you manage to whisper, your words barely audible as you wipe at your eyes, only for the tears to fall faster, harder.

Hyunjin watches you break, his heart aching with every tear that slips down your face. He feels weird, feverish, as if your pain has somewhat transferred to his heart. He glances at Sohee, who quietly steps out of the restaurant, leaving the two of you alone in the quiet, dim light.

With a soft sigh, Hyunjin gently cups your face in his hands, his palms warm against your tear-streaked cheeks. His thumbs trace slow, soothing circles across your skin.

“You didn’t even get to be a sister, how could you be a horrible one?” 

“I hated her for so long when all she wanted was to dance with me. I hated a child for so long, I’m a-a horrible person.” 

Hyunjin tentatively licks his lips, thoughts jumbled in his mind like wires. His heart is beating so fast as he wraps an arm around your back, bringing your face to the crook of his neck. You seem to melt in his embrace, tension loosening off of your back as he gently pats your spine. 

“I don’t think you hated your sister. You hated how your parents treated you. Those are two different things.”

Your tears are unceasing, trickling down his skin as you sob more and more. He doesn’t mind the dampening of his shirt, he would never mind a lot of things when it comes to you.

“Humans aren’t straightforward lines, we bend and twist and stray from our paths because our hearts are too frail and sometimes we carry emotions too heavy for us to bear. Sometimes we are pushed to feel certain things when we’ve never wanted to go through them.”

He never stops patting your back gently, his hand traveling from the top of your hair to the base of your spine. “A bad person does not worry about being a bad person. I’m sure your sister knows you love her. You have nothing to feel horrible about.”

Your tears are unyielding and Hyunjin feels as if it isn’t enough— to press your body to his hoping the rhythm of his heart would calm down yours, to think of words of his own doing to soothe your pain. He has not had to comfort anyone in so long, he doesn’t know how to stop your ache. He wishes he could soak your sorrow into his heart instead— he’s used to it, he can handle your pain and his, at once.

He’s racking his mind furiously for things to comfort you. In his memory he stumbles upon the poem of Mary Oliver that has held his hand in the dark.

“Would you like to hear my favorite poem?” he asks, in a whisper.

He feels you nodding against his chest, and he peels himself away from you, painfully, like removing a bandaid from a wound that has yet to scab.

Hyunjin’s eyes are wide and glossy as he peers into yours, as he looks beyond your irises and gazes at your soul, as he recites to you, with a steady voice like a current that doesn’t fall prey to the hazards of storms— “You do not have to be good.” He smiles softly. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” The verb strikes you like a thunderbolt. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

It passes him like a vision, a flash of white that blinds him, him holding your cheeks but without tears, him cupping your face, in the mornings and in the nights, because it is you his soft clueless flesh aches to love.

It’s gone as quick as it came, his words come out much slower, much more disoriented as he continues— “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

“I want to tell you,” you hiccup, your cheeks are all rosy, delicate red veins protruding the white of your eyes. Your lips are all swollen from how hard you bit them to muffle your sobs.

“I will listen,” he reassures. Hyunjin stays true to his words. He drives you to his place, there, atop his couch, lit by a flower shaped lamp casting warm shadows on you both; you felt safe, a vanilla tea in hand, to talk, to tell Hyunjin everything, how you felt and how lonely, excruciatingly lonely you have been for the past years.

And he listens, he listens well, nodding, holding your hand when it shakes, wiping your tears when they slip from your face.

You feel a sense of gratitude swell in your heart, as if a hundred tulips bloomed in your chest at once. You feel safe talking about your biggest fears to Hyunjin, handing him your heart on an open palm, bruised, bleeding. He would wrap it in a gauze for you, he would keep it safe till you can heal it once more.

You doze in and off sleep on the couch, you can feel Hyunjin placing a warm blanket atop you. You swear he sat by your side for a long while, his hand gently patting your hair and threading through your locks.

You resisted the urge to pull his hand, to beg him to climb near you on the couch and have him encapsulate you in his hold once more. It would be too much for him to bear. Too much of you to ask. Too hard for you to handle a no.

Because even in your drunken state, with a heart weighed down by alcohol and ten thousand stones of grief, when Hyunjin cupped your cheeks in his larger, warmer hands, when he peered into your soul with his brown glimmering eyes, when it looked as if he could mirror your pain, as if he could understand the guilt, as if he could hold your hand through the grief— for one second, for a fleeting instant, it was all forgotten. 

The grief became a simple myth in your mind, a distant memory, something you could brush away as a bad dream slipping away with the march of time; simply because he was there for you through it.

… 

Hyunjin is beautiful.

This isn’t new knowledge for you, per se. You've known it from the moment your eyes met his, through a veil of relentless rain and the sting of unshed tears. Even then, you recognized it—he was the most beautiful human you’d ever seen. 

But somehow, you’ve managed to tuck this knowledge away, placed it in a forgotten recess of your mind. You had found other things to like about Hyunjin, things that wouldn’t be weird for a friend to admire— and Hyunjin made that an easy feat for you. 

You enjoyed the poems, all the ones he’d recite to you from time to time. You loved watching people’s eyes turn to behold him, and him unaware of this magnetic aura coating his porcelain skin. You felt warm hearing his bright and unrestrained giggles, seeing traces of happiness carved into his eyes, watching his lips stretch into a wide grin that seemed to swallow the world whole. 

But there are moments when it’s harder to forget. Like now—when Hyunjin stands before you, slipping on the finishing touches of his performance outfit. His sky-blue top clings to his frame, bedazzled with pearls and diamonds that cascade like teardrops, swooping around his small waist and hugging his broad shoulders. The fabric melts into his black pants, carving his silhouette like a chiseled statue.

There are only ten minutes left before his turn on stage. Last night, over quiet spoonfuls of miso soup, Hyunjin told you to please stay backstage with him, his voice so soft it felt like a secret only meant for you. And how could you refuse? Hyunjin wanted you close—Hyunjin asked for you.

He is nervous, you can tell by the slight tremble of his hands as he struggles with his earring, the delicate hoop slipping from his grasp. It falls, and before you know it, you’ve stepped forward, picking it up, your fingers steady as you help him clasp it into place. 

His gaze is heavy on you, and your heart beats a little too fast. You avoid meeting his eyes—he’s too close, too vulnerable of a setting for you.

You finish, stepping back, but Hyunjin’s hand finds your wrist, gently tugging you close again. He doesn’t let go, his fingers playing with the hem of your sleeve. He bites his lip, lets go of the plush flesh before biting it once more, then he confesses. “i’m scared.” 

Your fingers find his wrist, settle above his wildly beating pulse, a small part of you selfishly wishes it is because of your proximity. Your thumb gently swipes across his soft skin as you say, “you’ll do amazing. I’m sure of it.”

He nods, though something flickers in his eyes, something unsaid that lingers between you. He swallows it down, offering you a small smile. “Thank you. I’ll see you after.”

“Okay,” you grin back, “I’ll see you with a gold medal.” 

You’ve seen this choreography countless times before, memorized every twist, every subtle motion of his body. But watching him perform, under the harsh, burning lights, is like witnessing something new. 

Hyunjin moves with a grace that defies reason, a dancer molded by the music, his body bending to its rhythm, his face crumbling as the music swells. 

Hyunjin glides around as if he is one with the ice, he glows, like the sun on stage, mesmerizing, dipping low with the music and soaring high with its rhythm. Your hand is on your chest as you watch him deliver the killing move, a deep dip, head thrown back, his body a perfect arch on his knees. 

He finishes, under the roaring applause of everyone around. You’re first to stand on your feet and the entire arena follows, giving Hyunjin the standing ovation he deserves, the only one of the night. He bows deeply, a hand on his heart as he soaks in the praise. 

You feel like throwing up as you anxiously await the results to show up on the screen. One minute of silence passes by, then, you see it. His name comes in first. 

Hyunjin won. Hyunjin qualified for the Olympics.

He’s already skating towards you, and you’re moving, rushing down to meet him. You wrap him in a tight hug, feeling his chest rise and fall with quick breaths.

“How was it?” he asks, laughter bubbling in his voice. You find it to be such a silly question. 

How could he be anything but extraordinary?

“You fucking did it, Hyunjin,” you say, the words leaving you in a rush. He tips his head back, laughing, his happiness so pure it aches. You reluctantly pull away from him as Jihyoun comes to congratulate him, pulling him too for a hug.

“Proud of you son,” he says and you can see Hyunjin’s eyes well up with tears. you wish you could kiss them away, the tears and the sadness, will it to desert his heart, kiss his smile and happiness, learn the taste of his joys and sorrows. 

Oh god. 

The thoughts submerge you like you’re doused in gasoline, and being near Hyunjin is the crickling match that will set you on fire.

“There’s an afterparty to celebrate the man of the hour,” Jihyoun grins, patting Hyunjin’s back in a fatherly manner. You can feel the pull of the crowd, people waiting to shower him with well-deserved praise, like waves gathering to meet the shore.

“Are you coming?” Hyunjin’s voice is soft as his gaze lingers on you. You hesitate, and he pouts, a flicker of vulnerability crossing his face. “I want you to come, please.”

“Okay,” you smile, though your feet are already inching away. “But I left my phone at home. I’ll go get it and come back.” That is the truth, or maybe just a shadow of it.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

Hyunjin, ever the considerate one. His kindness cuts deeper than he knows, a dull blade slicing against your fragile skin. You hate how you pull his thoughtfulness to somewhere tainted with shadows. You hate how your mind cannot accept that someone could care for you. What if he pities you, still? It asks. What if he only sees you as the selfish girl sobbing at her sister’s grave? 

How could someone like Hyunjin, radiant as the sun pay attention to a mere rock floating in space, aimless, too unimportant to even be given a name? 

“No, it’s a quick drive. Enjoy your moment.” You flash a smile, hoping it covers the tremor in your voice. You quickly slip away before Hyunjin can notice, your pace quickening as his brow furrows behind you.

You’ve never dared to truly like someone. The harsh truth is that people like you, who were born sipping grief in their mother’s womb, only end up accustomed to its metallic tang on their tongues.

You exist to mourn, to ache for what was and all that will never be. Even if happiness brushed against your fingertips, dazzling and radiant, you would not recognize its face, you would distort its features into the terrible grief you’ve always known. 

It’s been thirty minutes since you left and Hyunjin’s eyes keep drifting toward the door, pulled by some invisible force. Jihyoun is talking, excitedly introducing him to someone new, someone important from the sound of it. He hears snippets of the conversation— Switzerland, the best coaching center, a guaranteed win, but the words are distant, like murmurs underwater. 

His mind is a whirlwind of paranoid thoughts as Hyunjin redoes the calculations: it was supposed to be a fifteen minute errand, at most. Where are you?

His heart feels tethered to a storm as he steps out, muttering a feeble excuse to Jihyoun, feet moving before his brain catches up. The air feels heavy like trying to inhale metal, only to end up crushed from all sides.

He searches the parking lot, scanning the faces mingling there, but he finds no sign of you. His feet keep moving, driven by instinct, by a chilling feeling pulling at his heart, desperate to glimpse you.

Then he sees it—flashing lights up ahead. His world dims as he watches a man on the phone, gesturing frantically toward a car. A car that’s all too familiar. Yours, crumpled like a piece of paper, flipped on its side, crashed against a tree. 

A loud ringing floods his ears akin to the buzzing of a hundred angry bees, at once. His legs buckle, his hand slamming against a nearby car for balance, but it feels like the earth beneath him is giving way. His eyes squeeze shut, his back turning away from the wreck. Not again.

Please, not again.

His throat burns with bile, and it feels like nails are clawing at his chest, ripping his skin open and exposing his heart. It’s pounding wildly, erratically, like it’s trying to escape the cage of his ribs and splatter on his feet. 

He can’t turn around—he’s too afraid of what he’ll see. But he has to. His breath comes in ragged gasps, his vision spotted with white as he stumbles forward. He taps the man’s arm. He struggles to find his voice as if it were never his to begin within. “Did someone get out of the car?” he whispers, broken, pleading. The man shakes his head.

Hyunjin rushes to the window, desperate to find you, to see you breathing, but the glass is tinted, hiding whatever lies inside. Without thinking, he throws his fist against the window. Once. Twice. Again. And again. His skin splits, blood dripping down his knuckles, but he can’t stop. He pounds the glass until it shatters, only to find nothing within.

“Hyunjin?” A voice, so achingly familiar, cuts through the haze. He spins around, breathless, and there you are—limping, disheveled, but alive. You’re breathing.

In an instant, he’s in front of you, his eyes wide, frantic, searching yours as if they behold the answer to every fear, every prayer he has ever uttered. His hand trembles as it cups your cheek, thumb brushing your skin, needing to feel your warmth. His gaze flickers over your body, checking for any trace of life-threatening injury, his heart lodged in his throat.

“Are you okay?” His voice is raw, stripped bare.

“I am,” you reply, and your words are his salvation. A sigh shudders out of him, pulled from the deepest parts of his soul, as if he’s been drowning and you’ve finally pulled him to the surface.

He falls to his knees, palms pressing into the ground. Tears spill from his eyes, hot and heavy, streaking down his face like rain in a storm. You kneel beside him, and his arms instinctively wrap around you, pulling you close. 

His fingers weave through your hair, pressing you to him, needing to feel you, needing to know you’re real. His body trembles as he buries his face in your hair, his tears soaking through your shirt, inhaling your scent, grounding himself in you.

“Yn,” he breathes, your name the only thing that could express the magnitude of his relief. He holds you tighter, the words tumbling out like a prayer, “I thought I lost you. My god, I thought I lost you.”

It takes a while for you to process his words, to understand the scale of his fear at the thought of losing you. Those are foreign notions for you, a sight you never thought you’d grasp one day. A sight you never deemed yourself deserving of. 

“You’d care this much if I died?” Your voice is a whisper, small, uncertain.

Hyunjin’s bloodied hand smooths your hair, his eyes red, chest heaving. “Yn, I…” He squeezes his eyes shut, voice breaking. “Yn, please don’t leave me.”

“I’m sorry,” your lower lip quivers at the sight of his tears, somehow seeing him sob leads to your own unraveling, as if your emotions are tied by one red string. “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to worry you,” you apologize, you the forgotten one, the ghost in your own home, apologizing because for once, your absence did hurt someone, because for once someone would miss you if you were ever gone.

Hours later, you’re in Hyunjin’s home, tucked into the safety of his bed. You’d refused to call your parents, not wanting them to know what had happened, how close their wish had become reality. 

The ambulance had taken you both to the hospital, where they patched Hyunjin’s wounds and checked you for a concussion. You repeated, over and over, like a broken record— “The brakes stopped working, and I jumped out of the car.” Hyunjin spoke for you when you grew tired.

“How are you feeling, Yn?” Hyunjin’s voice is soft, as he hovers over your figure. Your name sounds sweeter from his lips. It sounds as if it was always his to pronounce. 

“I’m okay. I’m sorry I ruined your night.” Your apology is quiet, but he shakes his head, pressing a lingering kiss to your forehead. Your eyes shut closed as his lips caress your skin, as if wanting to drown out all the other senses, useless, needing to focus solely on his touch. 

“If you’re okay, that’s all that matters to me.”

He goes to leave, but you catch his hand. You don’t overthink your next words, you think you’re long past that when it comes to him. “You called me by my name. I thought you didn’t remember it.”

“I never forgot,” he says, stepping closer. “I’ve known who you were since the moment I saw you. I… I thought about you a lot for the past four years, Yn. I think about you now too,” a pause, “for different reasons. Sweeter reasons.”

He remembered. He has come to know you and he still thinks of you.

“Me too,” you smile softly, “I think about you so much it feels as if you’re all I’ve ever known,” you confess breathlessly. Your eyes flicker to his lips, and his do the same.

Before you can think, you’re standing on your tiptoes, your lips resting on his, unmoving, driven by a desire so raw it blinded you.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry.” You pull away, stumbling back.

But his hands find your waist, pulling you back. “Can I do that again, Yn?” His voice is soft, and you nod, dazed. How could you ever refuse him?

His mouth returns to yours, slow and deliberate, like a melody reuniting with its refrain. Sweetness spills from his lips onto yours, a blend of honey and wildflowers and something that is entirely his. His breath surrounds you, intoxicating, pulling you into a world where all you wish is to melt into him, to slip beneath his skin and flow through his veins. 

Fireworks bloom behind your eyelids, explosions of colors you’ve never seen before, as if the universe itself has unraveled in the space between you both. His hands cradle your face, thumbs tracing circles along your cheeks that send a thousand butterflies flapping their wings throughout your being. Your fingers weave into the silk of his hair, a breath of relief escaping you as you touch him the way you’ve longed for. 

You’re still kissing him and yet you already ache to do it again, again and again, till you forgive the world every cruelty it has inflicted into you, if it allows you to hold his warmth a little longer, to keep your sun cupped between your palms. 

“Is this what happiness feels like?” he murmurs against your lips, a smile threading between your breaths, your teeth grazing his in the closeness. You laugh softly, your foreheads touching softly, “I think it is. It tastes so sweet.”

“Mm, I think I need to taste it again, to make sure,” he teases, his lips finding yours once more, playful and hungry. Time loses its meaning, minutes slipping away like sand grains between your fingers. By the time you part, your heart has memorized the rhythm of his breath and the weight of his lips upon yours, as familiar now as your own pulse.

… 

“So, how do we do this?”

Your laughter echoes softly down the corridor. Hyunjin has you pinned against the wall near the skating rink, his right hand braced above your head, the other hovering over your waist—yet, it’s that mere sliver of air between his fingers and your skin that ignites a wildfire within you, burning bright with longing.

“Wouldn’t it be strange if we just walked in, holding hands? I mean, Jihyoun knows me, but…” Your voice drifts away like chimney smoke, dissolving into the background of Hyunjin’s thoughts. He’s no longer listening—he’s observing. Memorizing. His gaze skillfully captures every curve, every shadow of your face, as if this is the last dawn he’ll ever witness. As if, by morning, he’ll be blind, and this moment is his only chance to engrave you into his memory.

“You’re so beautiful,” he breathes, his voice soft, almost reverent. Your words falter, fading like the final notes of a song only he remembers. He leans in, his lips brushing your cheek with a tenderness that paints your skin crimson red. 

He smirks, satisfied by the effect—perhaps, he thinks, that is how the sun feels as it kisses the horizon goodnight, leaving the sky a blushing mess. 

“You were saying?” he teases, and you roll your eyes, pretending to be exasperated. “I was saying that it would be—“ But his lips find yours once more, plucking the words from your tongue like petals from a flower. 

In the dim glow of the corridor, the world around you fades to an afterthought. It feels as though you exist only for this, only for him— to kiss and to be kissed by Hyunjin.

“Finally!” Jihyoun’s voice shatters the moment, ringing out like a bell, pulling you both apart. “Thank you for kissing him, Yn. Now he’ll stop with the longing stares at the door.”

“What stares?” you laugh, the sound bubbling sweetly up your throat. Hyunjin scratches the nape of his neck, shrugging innocently when your eyes meet, as if he has no idea what Jihyoun is talking about (though he knows all too well).

Hyunjin catches his coach’s eye over your shoulder, a wide smile tugging at his lips. Jihyoun once told him that he seems to bloom around you, like a flower starved of sunlight, finally nourished. The thought warms him—knowing that the people closest to him feel your presence like a balm to his soul. His mother would have loved you too, he’s certain of it.

“Will you stay with me tonight?” Hyunjin whispers later, as you’re leaving the practice building, his arm draped over your shoulder, yours wrapped around his waist. Natural. Familiar. Like two rivers flowing into one.

“I don’t have anything of mine there,” you pout, and Hyunjin stops, cupping your cheek, his nose grazing yours in a gesture so tender it makes your heart float within your ribcage. “That’s part of my secret plan—to get you in my clothes.”

“Oh, what a very secretive plan,” you giggle, stealing a quick kiss. “And what would we do tonight?” 

“Sleep together.” You raise an eyebrow, and he shakes his head, flushing crimson. “I mean—sleep, actual sleep, not that I wouldn’t want to make love to you,” Your laughter rings out, as his forehead finds its hiding place against your shoulder, embarrassed. “I just want to hold you close. That’s all.”

Your sweet Hyunjin.

“I want that too, Hyune.”

Hyunjin has never been much of a writer, his forté has always been to express himself with his body, spell out words out of the movement of his limbs. It is more evident as he opens the door to his apartment, with you trailing behind. As he looks at both your shoes sitting side by side near the entrance, your accessories resting next to his in the bathroom. 

He lacks the words to explain how right, how natural it feels for him to have you in his space, for you to fill it with the music of your voice and the fragrance of your perfume. As if it has always been his reality, to walk home with you, to watch you slip into his clothes, to brush his teeth next to you, to lay atop the bed with your warm eyes staring at him instead of a cold wall. 

“Do you believe in fate?” you suddenly ask, your thumb trailing alongside his neck, pausing right where his pulse beats. He has never been aware of the weight of life against his skin until he knew you. 

“I never did, I didn’t want to believe in something pre-written for me. Wouldn’t that confine who I am, who I could be?” he muses and you nod softly, inching closer to him. “But somewhat,” he trails off, lifting your hand to his mouth, peepering the sweetest kisses alongside your palm and wrist, like dewdrops caressing leaves. “I believe in it now, because of you.” 

“I think I was meant to find you that day in the graveyard. I think what I feel for you is too grand to be a pure coincidence,” he confesses. 

“And what do you feel for me?” you ask, your voice soft, curious. 

Hyunjin doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, he gently twirls a strand of your hair away from your eyes, before tucking it behind the cuff of your ear. He presses his forehead to yours, like two pages of a book meeting one another, then he exhales slowly, like a man who has found peace after a lifetime of searching. 

And in a way, he has. He can stop looking frantically for something that would stitch his soul up, he has found you, now. 

“I used to resent hearing my own heartbeat. At times it felt like a punishment, because existing felt like a chore. I wanted the sound to quiet down, I didn’t want to hear anything, nor feel anything anymore.” 

“But now,” he pulls you closer, your legs intertwining with his, like roots seeking comfort in one another, “it’s reassuring to hear, because it means there is still life within me to love you in it.”

Love. The word has long felt like a thorn ingrained into your skin. You have always recoiled from it, less from repulse and more in fear— if the people who were put on this earth to love you, didn’t, then weren’t you meant to remain unloved for the rest of your life? 

But looking at Hyunjin now, at the way the word rests gently on his lips, rolls off his tongue with such ease, with such certainty, you don’t want to run.

You want to stay. 

It is when Hyunjin traces maps along your skin with his lips, as you drift down the constellations of moles on his chest, as you find yourself lost within everything that makes up his being— his scent, his sounds, the weight of him pressed against you— that you find your words to reply, to breathe your first I love you to him. 

And in that confession, another realization comes, though this one is bitter, sour, like a chilling premonition: if Hyunjin were ever to leave, what would be left of you after? 

…

Hyunjin has never been fond of the concept of time, minutes seemed to march differently when it came to him— seconds stretching out like thin threads, nights unraveling in restless turns, sleep plucked right off from his eyelids. 

But with you, time softened, as the hours spun forward, swift and gentle. Around you, Hyunjin no longer felt the weight of passing days on his heart. 

Hyunjin didn’t feel the two months of happiness you bestowed upon him slipping from his grasp. 

He was lost, adrift in the gentle tides of your being—swept by the melody of your laughter, cradled by the softness of your curves. He often wondered if he was deserving of this happiness, yet never lingered long enough to find an answer. He selfishly accepted the joy you gifted him, for once. 

Your belongings filled the empty nooks of his apartment gradually, corner by corner—your satin pajamas settling just above his plaid ones, your skincare nestled near his on the bathroom shelf, your favorite mug clinking against his in the dishwasher. 

In some way, it mirrored how you’d seeped into him, like sunlight breaking through the longest of nights— threads of the sun illuminating what was once lost to darkness. 

He’d steady your chin to help with your mascara, your doe eyes looking up into his. You’d brush his hair, pressing gentle kisses along his shoulder blades. He’d do your laundry. You’d make his coffee each morning. He’d brew your tea each night.

You didn’t have much time to talk during the day, both of you engrossed in the practice of your respective arts. Yet, the knowledge that you were just a floor above him, close if he ever wished to see you, was enough to soothe his heart.

It was at night that you bared yourselves to each other, in ways that went beyond the tender grip of his hands on your waist, or the slow trail of your fingers down the curve of his back.

In the hush of the twilight, you’d unfold softly, revealing the hidden layers within—you’d share your dreams and hopes, and the moments that shaped you, letting the fragments of your pasts settle in the safety between you both. 

“I think I know my purpose now,” you whispered one night, and he hummed, pressing a soft kiss to the tip of your nose. “What is it?” 

“I think I kept ballet at a distance because loving it felt like surrendering to my parents’ dreams, like I’d be becoming what they always wanted me to be.” You paused, your voice a little softer, a little braver. “But I do love it, Hyunjin. I want to be the best at it. I want to honor my sister through it.” 

His gaze softened, as a tender smile blossomed in his lips. “You already do.”

Some nights were less sweet, tangled with heavy grief and unshed tears, yet it felt easier to walk through them if you were there holding his hand. 

“Would you go into her room with me?” he asked quietly one night, his gaze locked on his mother’s bedroom, its door sealed for a decade. He had never dared to enter it once more, afraid it would further cement the notion that she was gone.

That truth felt easier to confront with you near.

“Of course,” you replied softly. “Whatever you need.”

The room was just as he remembered, only stuffier with dust and heartache. Time hung in the air, dense and unmoving, clutching at her last moments alive, unwilling to let go. 

He looked to the bed, and he could almost see the shape of her there, frail and thin, her clothes too loose over a body worn out with sickness.

You held him close, steadying him as he took in each familiar corner: their photos framed with gold on the desk, her countless medals hung on the wall, her perfume and hairbrush untouched on the vanity, her rings resting in a small seashell container.

He walked slowly to the vanity, his fingers reaching for the ring he had loved most—a thin band of gold, crowned with a small emerald, dulled by time. Gently, he wiped away the dust with his shirt, before turning to you and slipping it onto your finger.

“Keep it,” he whispered. “It will live again through you.”

In the days that followed, you helped him breathe light and air into the room once more, sweeping dust from the framed certificates and photographs, polishing the medals until they shimmered as they once had. You washed the linens and her clothes, packing them carefully for a donation to cancer wards—something he never found the courage to do, until now.

Grief no longer felt like a knife lodged into his heart, its metal rusting with the passing of time. He saw its true face now—a soft ache, a quiet longing, a thicket of thorns that can only grow from the roots of love.

Your voice floated in his mind that night, echoing like the bells of a long standing cathedral. “your mom loved you, hyunjin. And someone who loves you would want your hands to be warm”— would want you to be happy.

Happiness swept into Hyunjin like an endless, gnawing hunger—an insatiable ache that demanded to be fed. He was ravenous for joy, longing to sink his teeth into it, dip his tongue into its sweetness and let it spill all over him. 

When an exoneree tastes freedom after decades of longing, it is the small breeze, the waves lapping hungrily at his bare feet that make his heart twitch. So it was with Hyunjin: the small joys swelled within his ribcage, vast and boundless. His heart strained against his chest, eager to burst free and feel it all. 

Somehow, Hyunjin’s biggest joy came from watching you dance— the principal dancer of your competition team. Whenever he had a break, he’d choose to slip away from the ice rink and climb the stairs at a hurried speed, slip into the dancing studio and sit in the corner. 

There, he’d watch you, leading the group of dancers you’ll perform with. You stood in the center, beckoning the attention of everyone around. Beautiful, so beautiful.

How foolish of him it was to try to deny it. How foolish of him to think that there was any outcome but to fall for you.

You always caught his eye across the mirror, your face breaking out in a wide grin, as you waved shyly at him, the strictness melting off your features and morphing into something warm. He felt special in a way, to be the sole recipient of such a breathtaking smile. He felt as if he could write hundreds of poems about that alone. 

That smile feels even more precious as you stand on stage at the Seoul International ballet competition, seconds before the light would turn on and you’d begin dancing. In the split second of darkness, it is him your eyes sought after in the crowd, it is him you wink at, before switching into your professional mode.

You aren’t as nervous as he expected you to be. Somehow your facade only slipped when five minutes before the stage you beckoned hyunjin in for a hug. “Do you need anything?” he asked as he kissed your temple softly, tightening his hold on you.

“I just need to hug you for a minute. It helps me calm down.” 

Hyunjin had always known you were a stellar ballerina. You were humble with your achievements, speaking of your art as if you don’t have years of practice to attest to your expertise, as if you hadn’t gotten acclaims nationally and internationally.

Still, seeing you on stage made a different pride bloom in his heart. You are the rightful star of the night, the swan of ballet as the media had dubbed you— delicate with your movements, spreading your arms like the unfurling of their feathers, spinning delicately into the air with a grace that made his breath catch in his throat. You were mesmerizing. 

You didn’t simply move, or dance, that would be too simplistic to encapsulate how you breathed life into this art. Into him. 

And it is hyunjin’s arms that you run into, scurrying down the stage steps, an overflowing bouquet in your right hand and a gleaming trophy held tightly in the other. 

“You won, my love,” he shouts, ecstatic as you throw your arms around his neck, as he cradles your waist, spinning you around like how he always orbits around you. 

He puts you down, leaning in to kiss you with no second thought, your eyes closed as you savor one another, as your lips move as if commanded by the stars, to part only to meet again, and again. Till your cheeks are both flushed and all he can taste is the strawberry in your lip tint. 

Your eyes lock on his, your pupils widening till they swallow your irises, mirroring your breathtaking grin. Hyunjin felt as if the sun had left the sky and lodged within his chest.

But what Hyunjin failed to understand is that, for souls like his, happiness is only a fleeting passenger. Even then, it isn’t meant to be swallowed whole; it is to be eaten bite by bite, back hunched, hidden from the harsh glare of the universe. Perhaps this is the price he pays for defying the sadness that shadows him—his own eager canines sinking into joy, ultimately tearing it apart.

…

“I think I’ll go to Switzerland.”

It takes a few seconds for Hyunjin’s words to settle into your mind, for the syllables to unfurl slowly, like a wave gathering its strength before inevitably crashing on the shore. 

Once, Hyunjin had spoken of a figure skating center in Switzerland, one that Jihyoun praised endlessly—the pinnacle for skaters reaching toward gold.

“Will you go?” you’d asked, and he’d only shrugged. “I’m thinking about it.” The conversation had dissolved then, lost in the press of his body against yours, in the paths his fingers traced down your stomach— dizzying enough to make you forget the sound of your own name.

But you should have known—some things cannot be buried beneath the covers. They always resurface, haunting, inevitable.

You draw in a deep breath, your gaze settling on your congratulatory bouquet. The flowers have started to wither now, despite the sugar cube Hyunjin dropped in the water. 

Were they a trigger for the slow withering of your relationship, too? Did the fall of that first petal set the course for your own undoing?

“Okay,” you nod, biting your lip anxiously. “When will you go?”

“In three days. Or else I’ll miss the deadline to join.”

Oh.

You remain silent, feeling as though barbed wire coils around your throat, each metal spike pressing deep into your flesh. He steps closer, his warm hands cradling your cheeks. It takes you a few seconds to meet his gaze.

You suddenly imagine a life untouched by him. The thought fills you with a horrible urge to weep.

“I know it’s sudden,” he murmurs, voice low, “I tried to delay it as long as I could, but Jihyoun kept insisting, saying it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I don’t want you to feel abandoned.” 

You shake your head, as if to push that thought away, as if the notion itself is meaningless.

“I’ve always known we wouldn’t stay in the same place forever. I have to go back to Juilliard soon, too. I just… never thought it would happen this fast.” You sigh softly, a tender smile slipping across your face as you bring your hands up to cup his cheeks. “But you’re meant for grand things, Hyunjin. If Switzerland is where you’ll find them, then I couldn’t be happier for you.”

“I love you,” he whispers, his nose brushing against yours, a gentle, aching gesture. “We’ll make it work, right?”

He searches your eyes, pleading, his brows drawn into a worried knot.

“Of course, we will.”

It is the first time you lie to Hyunjin. 

“I love you,” he repeats, gripping your waist and lifting you onto the counter.

“I’ve only known love thanks to you,” you murmur. That much is true.

Hyunjin kisses you with hunger, his hand tangled in your hair, his body moving with a fierce rhythm—passion and love dripping from each one of his touches, each one of his spilled i love you’s between broken whimpers and moans. 

He loves you tonight like he has something to prove. As if his fingertips must be etched upon your skin, as if his name should be the one carved deep within you, the one found if you were split open to your soul.

Lying against his bare chest, you feel his breath rise and fall beneath you, the tip of his fingers sketching aimlessly upon your skin. Yet, you sense as if there is already a rift between you both. As if the news of his living has seeped between your bodies— the distance has already laid its claim, separating you both.

… 

You’re back in New York, slipping into the rhythm of your classes like a puzzle piece wedged into place, not quite fitting, yet you force it to. You spend each waking moment practicing your final dance at Juilliard—The Sleeping Beauty—the ballet that will close this chapter of your life.

Your apartment has remained unchanged; the conversations with your classmates are as futile as ever. And your heart still pulses, aches for Seoul, for the warmth you found there, in Hyunjin.

Winter settles in, snow gathering in quiet drifts along the streets. Two languid months slip by, time dragging its feet, as if too wishing to remain right where you left Hyunjin. You lose yourself in the pursuit of a perfect performance. And yet, the praise of your professors and peers no longer fills you as it once did.

It all feels hollow, empty, when you can’t remember the last time you and Hyunjin spoke, actually spoke, the way you used to.

You’d already seen this scene unfold in your mind the day he broke the news—more vividly still as he walked away in the airport. You had known the first few days would be good—frequent calls and texts, sharing the smallest details of his new life and of your familiar one.

But then, the silence would settle in, as it has. Because you and Hyunjin are both perfectionists. Because without your art, both of you are left with nothing but shadows of yourselves— hollow shells calling out in agony to what truly pleases your souls. 

You’re afraid to say it out loud, but Hyunjin’s face is blurring in your memory, details softening as though sketched by an impressionist’s brush. All that remains clear are the shadows under his eyes on your last video call, dark circles carved deep into his soft skin, his exhaustion bleeding through the screen as he struggled to stay awake for you.

There is no one to blame, and somehow, that only hurts you even more. You could sacrifice your hours of practice, and so could he. But then the guilt would come, ravenous, gnawing at your soul. And guilt is a hungry being, soon enough it won’t be satiated by you. Soon enough it will turn to your love for Hyunjin. 

And you couldn’t afford that. 

You miss him most on days like this, when nothing seems right from the moment you open your eyes. The city’s chill feels sharper, as though mocking you, reminding you of the warmth you left behind.

The wind bites as you step into the night, wandering aimlessly, your feet carrying you to nowhere in particular. Tears hover at the edge of your lashes, but you refuse to let them fall.

There’s no grace in the way you don’t allow yourself to cry, no mercy in how you hold yourself together. You've always been a performer, haven’t you? Even your pain feels like a scene you must perfect. Is it tragic enough? Does it carve deep enough to justify being felt?

You bite your lip, numb fingers pulling out your phone. You type out Hyunjin’s contact— my love. Your last message to him was two days ago.

With a sigh, you press call. He answers on the final ring.

“Hi, my angel,” he says, a bit breathless. Probably mid-training.

You force a smile, hoping he won’t hear the tremble in your voice. “Hi, baby. Practicing?”

“Yeah.” He hums. “Are you outside?”

“Im going for a walk.” Your voice quiets as the lump in your throat tightens, a chain wrapping around your words, binding you.

“Are you okay, my love?” he asks gently, and you nod though he can’t see.

“I am,” you lie. “I just miss you.” The confession slips out before you can stop it, and the weight of it crushes you. You miss him so much it’s killing you.

“I miss you too,” he says softly. You feel like throwing up. You have to make it quick before your courage betrays you. 

“I think we should end things,” you say quickly, biting down so hard on your lip that blood beads up, sharp and metallic on your tongue— just like your words.

“What?” he whispers, and you hear his faint apologies, the rustle as he moves to someplace quieter, someplace where you can break his heart without an audience.

“Why do you want this? Don’t you love me anymore?” His voice is small, fragile, and you feel the tears welling in your eyelids, but not yet.

“You know there’s no one I love but you,” you say, drawing in a breath that doesn’t wish to be trapped by you. “But we’re both so busy it barely feels like we’re together anymore.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, baby, I’ll try to text more, I promise. I’ll cut back on my training for you, I’ll—.”

“You know I’d never ask that of you.” You cut him off, smiling sadly and he falls quiet.

You see him then, in a haze of memory—Hyunjin’s head resting in your lap, your fingers lost in his hair. You hear his voice again, soft and raw, “My mom’s last wish for me was to win that gold medal. I’m terrified of letting her down. Just thinking about it—” He’d let out a humorless laugh. “She isn’t here, and yet I still feel this debt to her. Isn’t that strange?”

You know it well—the pain of failing those you love, even those who don’t love you back.

“Your mom wanted you to win that medal, didn’t she?” you say softly. “I would never come between you and that.” A pause. “But doesn’t it hurt more to wait for a message that never comes?”

“I…” he stammers, a sniffle slipping through the phone, and it nearly undoes you.

“Yn, I- you know that I love you.”

And in that instant, you know he understands. It’s because Hyunjin understands that you love him.

“I love you too, my Hyune.”

“Then don’t say this,” he chokes out, “say something cruel—something that’ll make it easier not to miss you so much when you’re gone.”

You can hear him crying, and the sound permanently breaks a rib within your heart. It sounds so raw, so painful that you wish to abandon everything and run to him. Had life not been this harsh to you, perhaps you would. Perhaps you’d have enough courage to believe that love can suffice for everything. 

“I came back to Seoul because my mother was sick. I thought…maybe it would bring us close again. But I think now that I came back just to meet you, Hyunjin.” His name falters, slipping from your lips in a stuttered breath.

“Thank you,” you whisper, voice cracking, “thank you for making me happy.”

The call ends, and you fall to your knees in the snow, finally surrendering to the grief tearing through you. Sobs wrack your body, raw and relentless, so fierce it feels as if your heart might just stop, as if you’ve become nothing but an ache, a bruised, throbbing mass of memories, pulsing with each thought of him.

Is this enough for you? you want to scream at whatever cruel hand pulling the strings of your fate. Has my suffering finally paid the debt of my existence— for both me and him? 

… 

You’ve come to understand that the expanse of human emotions is boundless, as vast and unknowable as the space that holds the universe. And with each passing day, it feels as if another star dies within you, its light dimming slowly, far from rebirth.

You once thought your heart had grown accustomed to grief—your life spent in mourning: parents you wished you had, love you wished had dared, even just once, to find you.

But mourning the happiness Hyunjin brought is something else. It’s a different kind of ache, not like the eruption of a volcano that fades into a quiet resigning. This pain lingers, dull and relentless, day after day, a wound that refuses to close, a pulse that never stills.

It has been a month since your fateful call. Hyunjin first sent you a bouquet of white roses, with a note nestled within—To the one who made me find love again, I will love you until my last breath.

You didn’t reply, but Hyunjin kept sending bouquets, each one arriving with a message that tore at your heart a little more than the last. I am thinking about you often; please think of me, too. As if you could do anything but that. If I am to exist in only one place, let it be in your mind.

You’ve hung each note on the fridge, their words staring back at you every morning as you make your coffee, exactly the way Hyunjin likes it.

Sometimes, you’d let the water run, overflowing in the coffee maker as you read his words again and again. Then, you’d catch a glimpse of your own distorted reflection on the water’s surface, wondering what it would feel like to drown in the sea, to let the liquid fill your lungs and wash over you.

But you never let the thought linger too long, chasing it away with the hum of a song. You know it will only lead you somewhere scary.

After three, maybe four months, the bouquets eventually stopped arriving. Hyunjin had surely grown tired of your silence.

The heart is no rigid thing; it doesn’t stay frozen in one place. It stretches and contracts, bleeds, then patches itself together again. But you hadn’t done much to heal it—truthfully, you hadn’t believed you deserved to feel good once more.

Then month five came, and there was no time left to dwell on anything. A strange relief, you thought, for a mind like yours, that never quite stops turning, even in sleep. Graduation loomed on the horizon, and you were terrified of your efforts going to waste, of them somehow never being enough to set you apart.

But one night, your professor placed her hand on your shoulder, her gaze warm as it met yours. Suddenly, you felt seven years old again. “I think you could be this generation’s prima ballerina assoluta, she said—absolute first ballerina, the best of the best. 

“Really?” you whispered, hardly breathing, and she nodded. “Yes, if you keep going this way, you will be.”

You thought about calling Hyunjin to share the news, but quickly brushed the thought aside. Instead, you spent the night picturing his reaction. It was pathetic, maybe, but you liked to believe he would’ve said he was proud of you, called you angel, kissed the tip of your nose, his eyes crinkling into half-moons. You fell asleep with his words murmured on your lips, as if they’d been real.

Month six rolled in, then seven. You had been keeping tabs on Hyunjin’s name as the Olympics approached. There has been news of him wanting to attempt a quadruple axel spin— forty-four years after the triple one. An automatic win, some would say.

You knew that if anyone could do it would be hyunjin.

You wondered if he too read the articles released about your performances. Did he smile at them, his sweet dimple surging forth? Or did your name sting him, like droplets of acid falling into an open wound? 

Month eight arrived, genuine joy weaving into your life once more. You took your final bow on the polished stage of Juilliard, the roaring applause ringing in your ears for days to come. You had the highest performance score of the history of the institution. Your professor’s eyes then searched yours— “where do you see yourself now? where would you feel happiest?”

Hyunjin’s arms. You almost said. Barely holding yourself. 

“I don’t know. I think I’ll try at operas. I want to perform the white swan there.”

“Then go to opéra garnier in Paris. I have a friend there. Talk to him, feel it out.”

You had almost kissed her cheek right there and then. Not only because the Opéra Garnier had been your childhood dream but because now, Paris was where the Olympics would be held.

You now had an excuse to be there. 

You kept looking for Hyunjin in every monument you visited. In the hush of night by the Louvre, along the quiet flow of the Seine, in the gentle strokes of Monet’s paintings at Musée de l’Orangerie. What would you do if you met him on a random street in Paris?

Thankfully, or unfortunately, you still hadn’t decided, you never had to find out. You didn’t see him.

It is the men’s singles day at the figure skating Olympics, and somehow, you feel more nervous than in all your own performances combined. You’re seated close to the ice, close enough to feel the chill radiating from it, close enough to capture every detail of the performances.

Then Hyunjin steps onto the ice. If not for your seat, you might have collapsed, your knees a mass of useless ground bones. 

He’s dazzling—achingly, excruciatingly beautiful. His hair falls longer now, delicate strands brushing his forehead like a prince out of a fairytale. His outfit is pure white, adorned with emerald diamonds cascading like droplets of light. Instinctively, you reach for the emerald ring on your finger too. 

Your gaze follows him everywhere, drinking in the sight of him tipping his head back in laughter, his nose crinkling as he talks to Jihyoun, every stretch, every step, every quiet act of his being. 

He was still as lovely, still as beautiful as you have always known him. 

You wonder if he’s thinking of you, too, as his eyes flutter shut before his music begins. What image knits behind his eyelids in that instant?

It has always been his face for you. 

The air buzzes with anticipation, thick with belief and doubt alike as everyone knows what Hyunjin is attempting tonight. All eyes follow him as he skates, tracing wide circles across the ice, bending low to the ground, spinning in perfect arcs.

Then, he launches into the air.

The seconds seem to trickle by as slowly as blood droplets rushing to a dying heart. You see it— one spin, planets orbiting around the sun, aching to inch closer to the warmth. 

Two spins— seconds marching forward to catch up with the next ones in a ticking clock. 

Your breath freezes in your throat, your hands grip the chair so much your knuckles turn as white as the roses hyunjin sent you after you parted ways.

Three spins— fireflies dancing around the light, drawn to it like milky stars.

And then he does it.

His fourth and final spin— your heart orbiting around Hyunjin as he achieves his dream, as he breaks the world record he long yearned for.

You fall back in your seat, a rush of relief loosening the tension in your body as the crowd erupts into thunderous applause. Unbelievable is the word on everyone’s mouths. 

But not on yours.

Your Hyunjin did it, like you knew he would. 

Tears gather in your eyes as he stares at the scoreboard, his gaze fixed, waiting, breath held alongside every other skater. 

Hyunjin’s name comes first. 

He collapses to his knees, the weight of his victory pressing down his body, finally breaking him open. Jihyoun rushes over, cradling him, shaking him, laughing, “You did it, Hyunjin! You did it, son!” The tears won’t stop rushing down your face; they have a life of their own now.

You watch as Hyunjin circles the audience, waving at the crowd cheering his name. He drifts closer to your section, his eyes scanning the sea of faces until, finally, he finds yours. 

The world stills, you force the earth to stop spinning to have this one moment with Hyunjin. You lock onto his gaze, holding it, savoring the way his lips form your name.

Then, as if pulled by a force greater than either of you, he climbs over the stands, moving swiftly across the seats until he reaches you. In an instant, his arms are around you, his head buried in the crook of your neck. “Yn, I…” he chokes, and you nod, whispering, “I know. You did it, Hyunjin.”

“I did it, Yn,” he echoes, his voice trembling. He pulls back to look at you, his hands resting on your shoulders, both oblivious to the flash of cameras, the seas of people flocking around you. 

No one here could ever understand what this moment means to him. No one but him—and you.

As he takes his place on the podium, tears shimmer in Hyunjin’s eyes akin to the reflection of the sun across the sea. He bites his lip, struggling to hold it together as the bronze and silver medals are awarded. Then the official steps forward, gold medal in hand. Hyunjin extends his shaking hands, watching as the ribbon drapes over his head, at long last. 

Suddenly, the past eight months of heartache are justified. You would endure it all again, twice over, if it led to Hyunjin having this moment. 

“Miss Juilliard,” Hyunjin says softly as he meets you by the door. He had asked Jihyoun to tell you to wait for him. Jihyoun seemed happy to see you once more. 

Hyunjin is different now than he was twenty minutes ago, when he threw himself into your arms, overcome by emotions too vast to name. Now, he stands before you, more composed, more guarded, though his gaze remains tender. He’s never been able to hide his eyes from you.

“Congratulations on your win,” you say.

“Congratulations on your graduation.”

He knows.

In that moment, you see it all—the two paths unfurling before you. You could smile at him and he would smile back. Then you would part ways. And you would meet again, in a ceremony of some kind. And he would have grown only more beautiful, and the ache would have not softened. And his loving gaze would set on someone else but you.

Or, you could speak now.

“I made some tiramisu back at my Airbnb,” you say, your voice tentative. “Would you like some?”

Hyunjin’s shoulders stiffen, a debate flickering in his eyes. Then he exhales softly. “Of course.”

You sit side by side in the uber. His phone keeps lighting up with congratulatory messages until he switches it off.

“I’m sorry,” you murmur, feeling the need to break the silence. He tenses beside you.

“For what?”

“For stealing you away.”

His shoulders relax. “Don’t apologize. I wanted to come.”

The apartment you rented is small—studio-sized, really, but near Montmartre, where you’ve loved taking nightly walks by Sacré Coeur. Hyunjin slips off his shoes, placing them next to yours by the door.

For a moment, you both pause, staring at the sight of your shoes, side by side, once more.

He clears his throat as you gesture for him to make himself comfortable. He moves to the window, gazing at the city below, while you retrieve two plates, carefully setting a slice of tiramisu on each.

“Thank you,” he says softly when you hand him his plate. But neither of you takes a bite. It’s as if opening your mouth would lead to a torrent of words escaping, ones neither of you can contain. 

He yields first.

“You came,” he whispers, glancing over at you.

“I couldn’t miss seeing you win.”

“I missed you,” he says, biting his lip. Hyunjin has always been honest, especially when it comes to you. “It hurt a lot to miss you, Yn.”

“I’m here tonight.” 

Your words settle into the air as the hum of the world outside fades away. Hyunjin’s gaze, sharp and knowing, meets yours—those piercing eyes that have always stripped away your defenses, reading between the lines of your every unspoken thought.

He holds your gaze for a beat too long, and you fumble for your fork, needing something—anything—to diffuse the weight of what lingers in the silence between you.

Then, suddenly, his lips meet yours.

Kissing Hyunjin again feels like breathing in after being starved of air, like a cool breeze caressing your skin on a scorching day. A shiver spreads through you as he gently lowers you onto the couch, his body a pressing weight above you. Your hands find their way to his back, moving with the instinctive ease of muscle memory, while he kisses you with the fierce urgency of someone who’s finally tasted salvation. 

You wish to never part from him. You wish for your body to liquefy and morph into the hot rush of blood within his veins— anything so you wouldn’t have to part from him once more. You don’t think you can handle it. You don’t think you can lose Hyunjin again. You know you can’t.

When he pulls back, his cheeks are flushed a soft pink, like fresh dahlias, his eyes glossy and filled with something unspeakable as they trace over your face. “Tell me, Yn,” he breathes, “do you still love me? I need to know, please. It’s been tearing me apart.”

“I love you,” you say, with every bit of honesty you can muster. “I loved you before I even knew what love is, and I will love you, Hyunjin. Whether you are near or not. I will always love you.”

A breathtaking smile unfolds across his face, warm enough to thaw every frozen corner of your heart, to make decades of loneliness melt away. You would endure it all again, face the heartbreak and the grief. Fall at your sister’s grave and repent once more. You’d do it all if it means your path will cross with Hyunjin.

“I was always ever yours to love.” 

Epilogue. 

Hyunjin has always felt as if he has lived many lifetimes at once. Like a serpent, shedding its skin, he had lost parts of his being in various places. Some he managed to retrieve, others not. He had a lot to learn, overwhelmed by certain things past. His thoughts weren’t always kind. His hands didn’t always sweep gently against his skin. 

But on days like those, you were there to love him. He had learned and unlearned many things with you. Hyunjin had found that love wasn’t a sharp emotion, it didn’t slice away at the heart, it didn’t puncture. There were no sharp edges when it came to you. Even if he lost you along the way, he would round up a corner and find you there. 

And he did. Hyunjin found you, even when you didn’t wish to be found. You scurried from place to place, set foot into Paris to Seoul, Alexandria and New York. The distance lessened then widened. But it never tore you apart once more. Your souls were satiated in a way. You could rest side by side now. 

And you did, as you settled in Seoul, decades down the road. Where both you and Hyunjin built a new training center. Figure skaters on the first floor, ballerinas on the second. The days passed by in happiness, laughter and giggles. There was no curse. No punishment. Not anymore. 

You are in a graveyard once more. You watch as Hyunjin sweeps the name atop the tombstone gently. Prima ballerina assoluta, he reads, the swan of my heart. His weathered hands shake as they clutch a bouquet of fresh red lilies, and your heart still aches at the sight. 

It is late at night at the graveyard, the branches are still humming to one another, like a melancholic flute. You understand now that they speak to the buried ones. “Not so long now,” they reassure, “your loved ones will follow.”

You believe them, and you will wait. For now, you’ll find solace in the red lilies sitting atop your grave. 

They are now meant for you, at long last. 

[wlfchnlv3r]

I had a lapse about a fan of bangchan, who has a boyfriend, and he knows how crazy she is for him. And as some reward or gift, he can contact chan to take his own girlfriend. Is he watching? Chan sounding like "my girl likes it that way, do you see?" As if the boyfriend didn't know how to play.. that sounds so good to me

I like it

Dom!Bangchan x Fem reader x Watcher!Boyfriend

Synopsis: Banchan is an old friend of your boyfriend, he is also an idol you admire. What if your boyfriend asks his friend to fuck you?

Word count: 1.8k

Note: writing this was a wild ride, but it’s not my first rodeo, baby

You and bangchan are sit next to each other on the bed, you don’t know what to do, in the other hand he has already a smirk on his face, and moves his hand right on your tight.

Your boyfriend is in the room, standing in the corner, watching every move you and bangchan make.

Bangchan doesn’t need to wait, he knows how impatient you are, so he just start to undress you, freeing you from your t-shirt, your short and finally from your panties.

You are a nervous wreck “I-i never did…such a thing” you just say.

“Don’t worry, doll, I’m gonna take care of you, I just need your pretty body to stay still for me” he speaks, pushing you down on the bed and bending over you. “Can you do it for me?”.

You nod, watching every move, how his hand gently caress you hips and tight before he steps back and removes his tank top and sweatpants along with his boxers, that he pushes away; You are both naked now.

Your boyfriend eyes narrows a little watching you and Chan, curious to see what his friends is going to do to you.

Bangchan spreads your legs and positions himself between them, leaning to kiss you.

You immediately kiss him back and his tongue slips into your mouth exploring it as much as he can; You melt into the kiss, letting him do anything he wants.

His big hands caress you body finding their way to your pussy and his finger starts to rub your clit making you squirm

You are already so wet, feeling his long fingers drawing circles on your swollen clit is enough to make you go insane; It’s just like a dream, your boyfriend never touches you like this, anyway.

He suddenly stops and pulls his finger on your lips and as you open your mouth he

You see his hard cock against his stomach and in this moment you realise how big he is, and wonder how the hell Is he going to fit in you.

He chuckle lightly at your expression “we will make it fit, doll, don’t worry” he starts to rub his thick tip on your tiny hole, and slide it into you making you moan loudly.

He continues to slip into you “you are doing so good, just another inch, doll”; you gasp feeling him stretching your walls.

Bangchan begins to thrust in you at a normal pace, making you adapt to his length; The room starts to be filled with his moans, your loud whines and the sound of wet skin.

Your boyfriend is still in the corner, and he raises his eyebrow as bangchan thrust in you, thinking about how you are enjoying this a little too much.

“C-chan…” you call him.

“Yeah?" Bangchan asks, breathing heavily, slowing down a little.

“Please- please more”, you plead.

He looks at you with a slight smile, his hands moving to hold onto your hips and speeds up, his breathing a little heavy as he does.

You moan and whimper at every thrust he gives you and your eyes immediately shuts from the enjoyment.

Bangchan holds your hips, moving faster in response to you trying to close your eyes

You try to suppress a loud sob “c-chan..”

"Yeah, doll?" Bangchan eyes are now on you, his breathing is a bit heavier with the pace he's going but he slows a bit as he talks; he knows the effect that he has on you, he knows it too well.

“Don’t- don’t slow down please” you beg.

"Okay princess, whatever you want" Bangchan says, speeding up again, giving you what you want. He keeps his hands on your hips, holding onto you to keep your body still.

You just let him do whatever he wants with you as the sensation of his cock rubbing your walls overwhelms you.

He slows a little, loving the whiny mess that you are and wanting to tease you a little.

“M-mhh…no please-“ your voice comes out as a whisper.

Bangchan slows more, teasing more. He watches you closely, his breathing is slower, more controlled now.

Your boyfriend raises his eyebrow, impressed by the way Bangchan is teasing you, his eyes narrow slightly as he watches you being so lost in his friend.

"No? Then beg." Bangchan says, completely still.

“P-please- just- please” you whines with an unsteady breath.

"Please what, doll? Use your word." He asks, wanting to hear you beg for him to continue.

“ ‘want- need more…” you try to move a little, desperate to feel full again.

He smiles, liking that answer, leans down near your ear and murmurs “If you say so, doll." He press one of many sloppy kiss into your neck, still hovering over you. The he moves to whisper again into your ear, completely still “Are you sure about that princess?".

Your boyfriend stays still, not happy as he watches, but also amused at Bangchan's ability to control you.

You just nod, you really need more, just more of him.

Bangchan kisses your neck once more before pulling back, a smirk on his face "You're going to regret that princess" he says smugly with his hands leaving your hips.

He sits back on his legs, waiting a moment "On your hands and knees, doll” he commands after a moment, his voice firm.

You are take to reality by his order and slowly do what he pleases, positioning on your hands and knees.

"Good girl" Bangchan murmurs, admiring the sight in front of him before reaching out and grabbing your hips, his grip gentle but still possessive.

He seems to be trying to decide what to do first, his grips tightens a bit as he looks you up and down for a moment before one of his hands leaves your waist to grab your hair. He grabs your hair lightly, pulling your head back so your facing him.

You are just so drawn to him that you would do anything he wants you to do.

Chan just smirk in direction of your boyfriend before slipping into you with a firm thrust, that makes you choke a scream.

Your boyfriend still watches starting to feel jealous that Bangchan is in complete control of you, a thing that he is never been able to do.

Bangchan continues going, his hand moving from your hip to your throat gripping it with a tight clench.

Bangchan goes on with his rough pace, his hand still on your throat as he does. He is clearly enjoying the feeling of being in complete control over you.

Your boyfriend is impressed at how quickly and easily you submitted to Bangchan's command to break you, his eyes focused on the sight in front of him. He slightly glances at Bangchan's hand around your throat, almost wanting that to be him doing that to you.

Meanwhile you close your eyes and your legs start shaking from the pleasure, you know you are close. You can feel your walls tightens around his dick.

He glances down, noticing your legs shakes a little “Is my doll getting close already?”asks with a mocking tone.

“Can- I need-“ you cannot speak properly.

"Can you what, princess?" Bangchan asks, his pace slowing a bit while the hand on your throat slightly tightens.

“C- channie- please..can- can I come?” You finally ask without breath.

“Good girl for asking first, but no" Bangchan murmurs, his pace still slow and his hand still around your throat, before he slows completely, completely stopping with his grip still tight on your neck.

Your boyfriend’s jaw drops, completely taken back by the way you're listening so obediently, wishing he had control instead of Bangchan.

“C-chan- please, I’m so close”

Bangchan is still for a moment before responding "Okay, doll" he replies, his grip on your neck loosening a bit so you can breathe easier but he doesn't move.

You pout not feeling him moving inside of you turning your head in his direction.

"Something wrong, doll?” He asks while acting innocent but has a smirk on his face as he glances at you.

“Fill- fill me up- please” you don’t even care your boyfriend is in the room anymore, you just want to fill full of him.

"Are you sure about that?" Bangchan asks, pretending to be a bit more hesitant, his hold on your neck still just loose enough for you to breathe but tight enough to feel it.

Your boyfriend anger is taking control of him completely by now. He wants to be the one controlling you, instead of his friends, this is not what he asked Bangchan to do with you.

“Y-your cum- please I want- want it” you plead again and again.

“whatever you want, doll" Chan says, a smirk on his face as he releases your neck, and glance at your boyfriend saying “my doll likes it that way dude, she wants to be filled up with my seed so badly”.

You aren’t following his little talk with your boyfriend anymore, you don’t actually care to be honest “m-more chan- I want more”.

“You sure about that, doll? If I'm rough I wont be gentle" Bangchan says, still slowly moving, his eyes narrows watching your reaction.

Your boyfriend clenches his jaw, his eyes narrowed, his jealousy, bangchan’ shade and the scene in front of him are driving him crazy.

“I-I know- please” you whine.

"Okay, doll, but don't say I didn't warn you" he just says, he increase his pace again; Tears of pleasure start running down your cheeks, u never felt this way, it was so overwhelming and without warnings you come undone and your walls thighen around his throbbing cock.

Bangchan keeps going, his pace increasing as he hears you whine. "You want me to stop, doll?" He questions, a slight smirk still on his face.

“N-no…” you say as you grips on the sheets thigtly.

"Are you sure?" Chan asks as he moves slower, watching you grab at the sheets under you.

You just nods, letting out a chocked moan.

Your boyfriend is slightly surprised that you're still holding on, his jealousy even stronger, but he can’t look away.

After a few deep thrust you squirt on the sheets because of the overstimulation and no, your boyfriend never lets you feel this good, never.

Bangchan smiles and with a shaky breath he releases into you, looking down at you clearly satisfied. He pulls out and wraps his arms around you, letting you rest on the bed, beside him.

Your boyfriend lets out a small sigh as Bangchan cums into you, wishing it was him, his knuckles white from how hard his nails are digging into his palms before speaking “what the hell did just happened? This wasn’t what I asked you, dude”.

Taglist: @felixleftchickennugget @kiwininja35 @sweetpickledjins @slmnheart @elqivxstxr @catffeinexo-xx @multistancheck @justwonder113 @mylittleponeypinkrosieposie @hello-stranger24 @raptorbait529 @cocofia143 @minniesverse

(Comment to be added to the tag list🎐)

[aliesbienish]

A study of wolves: part six

chapter one ✩ chapter two ✩ chapter three ✩ chapter four ✩ chapter five

“I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen Lauren. I’m not interested in you like that,”

“Are you kidding?” She hissed, “and you’re interested in her?” Pointing a sharped clawed finger in your direction.

You prepared yourself for a polite no, but when Paul opened his mouth you thought you had misheard him.

“Absolutely.”

“Absolutely?” You queried as Lauren gaudy heels clicked away. “You didn’t have to say that, I’d have understood if you wanted to see her. We’re done with dinner anyway,”

“Trust me I didn’t say it because we’re busy, my answer would have been a no regardless.”

“And the other part?” Paul cocked in his head in confusion. “Telling her you’re interested in me? Was that just to get her off your case?”

It was amazing how insecure you were feeling, but you couldn’t help compare yourself to the blonde who just departed. The girl, while maybe a tad over the top, was clearly your typical small town beauty queen. Her platinum blonde hair, shiny clothes and pointed nails were of a stark contrast to your mud covered khaki and plaited hair littered with twigs. It felt like you were back in high school and that thought made you nauseas.

Normally you were more sure in yourself, but despite knowing Paul only a few days he seemed to destroy your sensibilities. For some reason your heart, despite your brains best logic, seemed to think that Paul could change the course of your future. You weren’t sure you were ready for the answer.

“Sorry, sorry. You absolutely don’t have to answer that. We can revert right back to before Lauren came over and pretend none of this happened if you like! I totally understand I’m probably not the type of girl you are usually in to, so don’t worry no need to let me down gently,”

“[Y/n],” he stated ending your panicked rambling. Grabbing onto your hand, he used his other to turn your blushing face so you were making eye contact. “Why wouldn’t you be the girl I’m typically interested in?”

“I know you don’t know me very well but this is it. I don’t have a girly, giggly side. I’m not the typical girl guys go for, especially guys like you.”

“Like me?”

“Well yeah. Attractive, smart, funny guys like you. I’m not their go to type,”

“You are assuming a lot about me, while simultaneously undermining how amazing you are. You aren’t doing either of us any favours.”

“What assumptions am I making?”

“My type in woman. Why did you think I was lying? I said nothing but the truth to Lauren.”

“But that means you’re…”

“Absolutely interested in you.”

“Oh. Can I ask why?”

“You can, but just know that it hurts me that you think it’s a valid question. I am interested in you because you are amazingly witty, so much so prior to the last five minutes I haven’t wiped the smile from my face. I’m interested because you are so insanely intelligent and passionate about what you do. I’m interested because you are openly kind and caring, and I can see how interested you are while still carefully respecting my boundaries. And I’m interested because you are the most beautiful woman I’ve seen, mud and all,”

“Right, is that all?” You gulped trying to make a joke, but instead your voice came out shaky and high pitched.

“Not even close. So now that I’ve made it abundantly clear how I feel, just tell me if I screwed up by clueing you in.” It was Paul’s turn to look anxious as he tried to pull back his hand still locked in yours.

You grabbed onto it, linking your fingers together. “No, you didn’t screw up. Quite the opposite really. I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind since we meet. But don’t you think this is crazy, we have known each other for a few days? I’m not sure we should be feeling like this,”

“Just because it seems fast doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“I can’t imagine this ever feeling wrong,” You declared, biting your lips in anticipation.

“Me either, so who cares if some arbitrary rules say this is too fast. At risk of sounding like a cliche - if you know you know - and it sounds like we both know,”

“So does that mean we’re all in?”

“Absolutely,” Paul muttered as he placed his hand on the back of your head, gently pulling you towards him while giving you ample time to stop. Instead you leaned in pressing your lips gently to his. You could swear you felt sparks, and somehow kissing over discarded plates of chips in the corner of a small dinner was the best moment of your life.

“Well let’s hope we follow our subject matter.” You muttered as you reluctantly pulled away, “did you know wolves mate for life?”

Paul chuckled, you have no idea he thought.

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

"That's hilarious," Jared chuckled moments after Paul shifted for parole and his day came spilling out through their connection. "You couldn't even make it a day without falling head over heels in love with her"

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

Hi all, sorry for the delay - but I hope this absolute sap will get me back in your good graces! I am finally finished with uni so actually have some time on my hands now.

Ali x

[redvexillum]

OH. MY. GOD. I AM LOSING MY MIND. 😱💘

So here you are, the underappreciated, overly devoted assistant to the iconic Vox, who’s made “emotionally unavailable yet irresistible” into an Olympic-level art form. Your little heart is on this insane tightrope walk between yearning and self-delusion. Like, you’re in this maybe-he’ll-love-me limbo, balancing the tiniest flickers of hope on a freaking cobweb as he teases and toys with you.

AND THEN, you end up on a "date" (if we can even call it that??) to see a movie, and for one fleeting second, you think, This is it. Maybe he’s going to acknowledge the emotions that are basically clawing their way out of your chest! But, alas, nope. Instead, he’s out here being the king of mixed signals and absolutely wrecking you in the back of a dark theater, like he’s got this simmering need barely veiled by his professionalism. He’s got you melting under his touch, one heartbeat away from completely unraveling right then and there.

And don’t even get me started on that moment when he’s got you standing there, in his jacket, utterly exposed and vulnerable in the most deliciously dangerous way! He is ruining you, all while keeping this maddeningly calm exterior, as if he's not completely aware of how he’s been invading your mind, your body, your everything.

The power dynamics, the hopeless longing, the sheer rawness of it all is like a lightning bolt to the fangirl heart! 💥💓 The tension is absolute FIRE, and you can’t help but ache with the reader, feeling every flutter and pang of want mixed with that brutal awareness that, in Vox’s world, everything is blurred but nothing is truly yours. 💀

AND don't get me started on Vox is out here pulling this deliciously sadistic, "watch your movie" thing, and you’re just sitting there absolutely coming undone with every little move he makes. And Vox knows it—he can feel every tremor, every little sound you’re trying to hold back. The sheer command he has over you, especially in a public space where he’s not supposed to have his way with you, is just TOO GOOD.

And the build-up, OH LORD, the slow, agonizing tease! Vox draws it out, knowing exactly how it’s driving you crazy, using every single one of your vulnerabilities against you. I mean, the fact that he has you keep still, totally filled up, while he toys with your control is just DEVASTATING. Every time he stops just as you’re about to tip over the edge?? SADISTIC BASTARD - but fuuuuuuuu how hot is that?

But then, when he finally gives in and lets you fall apart? The whispered "be quiet" and then silencing you with a kiss to catch your moans—it’s just perfect. He’s taking everything you have, but in this protective, possessive way that just makes me MELT.

The way you two are so lost in this moment, it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t even exist. And that final, “Good, keep me warm and finish your movie”? I'm DEAD. Vox is done and satisfied, while you're left trembling, completely undone, like he hasn’t just blown your mind and your heart to smithereens. 🥵🔥

I’m 1000% unwell over this masterpiece.

Quiet In The Theater (Human!Vox x Reader)

CW: Power dynamics (Boss/assistant), Public sex, public fingering, public cockwarming, edging. Rated: Adult Requested by: Anon Summary: As a reward for years of diligent service, your boss rewarded you with a movie date. Except, it wasn't a date and you watching the movie was more of a chore... Follow up to: Dressing Room but not required to be read together

You were eager to accept when Vox had asked you to accompany him to the cinema. It wasn’t often you got to go out to see a new movie and even less often that you got to go out and do anything with Vox. The wage you earned as his personal assistant simply wasn’t enough to allow for it. 

You were even more eager to step out with the handsome man that employed you. It had been a long few years, working first as a lowly assistant, running coffee for anyone who needed it and getting yelled at for things that were far from your fault. 

All it took was one unique and rather scandalous encounter with Vox and your life slowly set on a course that would change your life. You had been tasked with delivering him an updated script, changes made to the show at the last minute and facing the wrath he was known for. Instead, he sought comfort in you, or at least that was how you choose to define what had occured. The result was three years of watching his career skyrocket with you standing just behind him. 

Along with it came blurred lines. 

You were not Vox’s girlfriend, though that didn’t keep him from holding you even when he had girlfriends. They came and went, some lasting only a few short weeks at his side. He wasn’t a man that settled down; you knew that but you couldn’t help but hope that one day he would notice you as more than just a quick way to relieve stress. It was a childish dream that he would see you for your loyalty, nothing more than a girlish hope that he would take you as his partner in reward for your unwavering dedication to him. 

You had fallen in love with Vox. 

Maybe tonight was the night where he would tell you he finally realized he had feelings for you. Maybe tonight he would tell you he loved you. Maybe tonight was the night you got to live your storybook dream. Maybe tonight. 

It was always ‘maybe tonight’ in your heart. 

It was a disappointment when he did not take your hand as you walked through the theater. There was no soft kiss on your cheek, like he would sometimes give you when you both worked late into the evening. The most he did was rest his palm of his hand on your upper back as he led you to your seats. 

That was alright, you told yourself. You had wanted to see this movie, a romantic comedy that had great reviews, anyway. It was alright, you’d make the best of it. It was alright that once again your heart was breaking ever so slightly in your chest. 

There would be other nights for Vox to see that you loved him. There would be other nights for him to decide he loved you, too. You had the rest of your lives for him to realize it. That was alright. 

The movie had been out for a while and while it was well loved, it wasn’t surprising to find the theater failed to fill up, with less than half the seats being spoken for as the last of the lights dimmed. Vox led you up and up, making his way to the back row of the nearly empty theater.

That was alright too, you told yourself. It meant fewer people standing, blocking the view while they made their way to bathrooms or couples necking, distracting from the film. You’d have a good view and not have to pay for it with the distracting of other people. 

Vox set the popcorn down in the seat next to him as he folded his seat down. The dark room ensured few people could see anything at all as the preshow screening started. You tried to step over Vox’s outstretched feet and could have sworn you were going to clear them. 

Somehow, you still tripped over his long legs. Strong arms caught you as you crumpled down, not letting you fall to the dirty floor or worse yet, over the seats in front of you. 

That was how you ended up in Vox’s lap just as the movie began. His fingers dug into your sides, holding you in place. 

“Vox,” you whispered, turning to him, “let me take my seat.” 

“You picked your seat already,” Vox said. “Now settle down, get comfortable. It’s a two-hour movie.”

Vox didn’t give you much of a choice but to do as he told you to do. Even as he slipped the jacket from his shoulders, he kept a hand around your waist, ensuring you didn’t get it into your head to slip over to the unoccupied seat next to him. You knew better than to disobey, but that didn’t stop him from keeping you rooted in place. 

He held you in place as the movie started, hand quickly begining to caress your waist. It was an idle action; you told yourself, nothing more. A shiver ran down your spine as you sat forward, hoping no one noticed your perch. 

“Cold?” Vox asked, leaning forward to whisper the word in your ear. His breath washing over your neck caused a shiver to run down your spine anew. “Poor thing.” He pulled his jacket around, fluffing it out in the air in front of you before draping it over your legs.

“Thank you,” you said, as Vox wrapped his arm around your waist, just below your breasts, and pulled you to lean back against his chest. You could feel every thump of his heart against his ribs. Each rise and fall of his breath in his chest took you along with it.

“Watch the movie,” Vox said as his other hand ran down your thighs, making it terribly hard for you to do just that. 

The movie played, and Vox had intended to watch it. That was before you ended up tucked in his lap, against his chest. It was hard to focus on the dull romantic plot as you shifted, body rubbing against his cock in his pants. Vox watched as a couple started falling in love before deciding it was more fun to entertain himself with the show in his lap.

You shifted and twitched, trying to scoot away from the caressing hands that helped themselves to your body. It was a matter of your time before he was slipping his hand under the skirt, running it up your thigh, taking in the soft skin hidden away just for him. 

“Vox?” You whispered as he pulled your leg to hook over his knee. 

“Hook your other leg over my knee,” Vox directed. You moved to listen, bringing your thighs together only to have his voice in your ear, stopping you. “My other knee. Spread them.” 

“Sir?” Your voice quivered as you did as he said. “This isn’t appropriate.” 

“It’s appropriate for you to watch your movie.” Vox answered, fingers running up the inside of your thigh. “And it’s appropriate for me to entertain myself through a boring movie.” 

Fingers caressed the gusset of your panties, hand pushing the skirt up around your hips. The touch was light, tantalizing, as his fingers ran over your covered slit. His knees spread, pulling your legs further apart, ensuring the only thing that kept your modesty was his jacket in your lap and the theater’s darkness. The tips of his finger passed over your clothed clit, first ghostingly light as he caressed your core. 

The pressure built as he worked your clit through the fabric. Once he could feel the hot wetness begin to build in your panties, he smiled against the back of your neck. It felt good to know he could get to you, work you up in such a way, no matter where you were. 

“Stand up.” 

“What?” You struggled to keep your voice even, struggled to ignore the way you felt Vox’s cock throbbing against your ass. 

“I said, be a good girl and stand up. keep ahold of my jacket when you do.” 

You did as he told you. That was your job as his assistant, after all. He ignored your whispered protests as he pulled the panties down your legs. They fell to the floor as shame burned through your face, leaving a trail of wet slick smeared down your thighs. A polished shoe hooked the fabric and pulled them to the side, urging you to step out of them. 

“Hand them to me,” Vox ordered. “Keep those knees locked.” 

His hand ran up the back of your bare thighs as you bent at the waist. While the movie played in front of you, Vox pushed your skirt to gather on your lower back, just draping over most of the swell of your ass. He could see your glistening folds, wet but not yet sopping as you bent down at the waist, putting your cunt on display for him.

The clicking of his belt was soft, nearly missed over the sound of the movie as your fingers grazed the fabric of your panties. You were not the world’s most flexible woman and so reaching the small pile of cloth on the floor took a few tries. Each try pushed your cunt into Vox’s view, framed by the slight coverage of your shirt. 

Each time you bent down, bobbing a bit as you reached the limits of your flexibility, Vox ran his fingers up your naked slit. You gasped, fingers snagging the fabric as his fingers sank inside your opening before slipping back out agian, having just had a taste of your wetness. 

“Sit down, just as you were,” Vox ordered. 

His hand pushed his cock down so he could trap it between his thighs for the time being. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, not with the way his trousers bit into his sensitive flesh, but it kept you from realizing what he had planned for you as you sat back on his lap, legs hooked on either side of his knees. 

As soon as you settled, he spread his knees apart, spreading your thighs and allowed his cock to spring up, slapping the wet folds of your pussy. You gasped as he trust up, running his length through your folds as his hand wrapped around your hips.

“Vox what are you-?” 

“Up, just a bit.” Vox ordered, and you knew you couldn’t question him. Doing what Vox said, without fail or question, was how you stayed in your position. It’s how you kept your job. It was how you kept your bed open to Vox. 

You gasped as the head of his cock nestled against your wet entrance. Vox had made you wet, but not wet enough for him to push easily inside you as he let you sink down. 

The burning stretch of him as he pushed inside you stole your breath. Deeper and deeper he reached as you sank down his shaft, walls dragging along his shaft. Your breath caught in your lungs as you struggled to get enough air, fighting to keep his name only a whisper on your tongue. He pushed your hips down, forcing you to take him deeper until you nestled on his cock, sitting in his lap. 

“Lean back,” Vox whispered against your neck, lips moving against the soft hairs in a way you wanted so badly to be a kiss. He reached up, grabbing your breast and pulling you back to him as his other hand ran down your thigh. 

“Vox, we can’t be doing this, not here,” your voice trembled as he spread his legs wider, opening you wider. 

“We already are,” Vox whispered as you sat, stuffed full of his cock in a movie theater with other patrons. “Now watch your movie while I entertain myself. Oh, and don’t make a sound.” 

You tried to do what he told you to. It was a battle to follow the plot, the characters, as his cock twitched inside you. Your walls rippled and clenched around him as his finger lazily ran over your clit, bringing you closer and closer to the edge. 

Every time you thought he may bring you over the edge, send you spiraling down in a sea of pleasure, his fingers would leave your clit and spread your slick around your folds as your body slowly unwound around him. Soft fingers ran around where your body swallowed his cock, collecting the slick that was pouring from your stuffed opening and spreading it up to your clit. 

You panted, trying to swallow back the soft moans that fell from your lips. Sometimes you hid your face within Vox’s neck, begging for him to give you mercy in a harsh whisper only to have him issue the same order, again and again. 

Watch your movie. 

You sat, holding his cock inside you as you struggled to do as he told you to. Plot moved on without you keeping up, far more focused on every twitch of the heavy cock lodged tightly against your cervix. He held your hips tightly, hot breath washing over your shoulder as you twitched and squirmed. 

“Do you want me to fuck you?” Vox whispered in your ear, only to hear you whimper in response. It wasn’t like he needed a verbal response, anyway. Your body betrayed you, clenching around his shaft tight enough that he groaned softly. “Make you cum on my cock in this theater, where anyone can see the slut you are for your boss?” 

“Please?” You whimpered as the characters on the screen kissed passionately, locked in an embrace that resulted in the shedding of clothes. “Vox, it’s too much.” 

“You’ve kept me nice and warm for the last hour,” He whispered in your ear. “You’ve been so good for me. Want me to make you feel good?”

“Please, Vox?” you struggled to think as the couple on the screen fell into bed. “Please?” 

“You’ve got to be quiet,” Vox whispered in your ear. “If you want to cum on my cock right now, you better remember we’re in a theater and what do we do in theaters?” 

“Be quiet,” you whispered, walls fluttering around his cock as he ran his fingers over your clit. “Be quiet in the theater.” 

“Good girl,” Vox thrusted up into you, fucking into you as he pushed you further and further. The chair creaked slightly as he fucked up into you. His balls slapped up into you as he drove you closer and closer. 

“Vox,” you whined, face turning into his neck as his hand gripped your breast, pinching your nipple between through the layers of fabric. “Vox, Vox, Vox!” 

“That’s right, Dollface,” Vox was chasing his own release as your walls fluttered around him. “Cum with my name on your lips.” 

Your body clenched around him, gripping him like a vice as you came with a whispered cry. His name was on your lips as you tried to keep your voice low. As your cries climbed in volume, Vox slotted turned your head to face him. 

He fucked into you, watching for a moment as your dazed eyes struggled to focus on his face. Curling around you, he slotted his lips over your parted lips, so pretty and pink as they chanted his name. He swallowed your cries, controlling your volume when you failed to. That’s alright, he would forgive you, this time. 

“Good girl,” Vox whispered, fingers digging into you as your orgasm pulled his from him. The tight waves of contractions through your walls milked him of his cum as he buried himself deeper and deeper inside you. 

Spent, he stilled, leaving his cock lodged in your over sensitive hole. You twitched around him as you took deep, gasping breaths. 

“Better?” He asked and you nodded. “Good, keep me warm and finish your movie.” 

Join us at VoxTek for a Vox themed Hazbin Discord where we talk Vox, Hazbin, writing, reading, art and who knows what else. You may even catch some exclusive sneak peeks at upcoming fics from some of your favorite writers!

[6esiree]

𝟐.𝟑𝐊 𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐆𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲

(𝐒𝐮𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐞! 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐀 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭)

Hey, y’all! So, I just wanted to say thank you to each and every one of you in a crazy little way for the amount of love and support you’ve shown me—and continue to show me—since April. If it weren’t for you guys, I probably would have gone insane a while ago. Seriously, y’all keep me happy with your lovely comments and creative tags you add to your reblogs 😭🫶

Anywho, this giveaway I had in mind is more of a contest because I have less time to write and whatnot. Plus, I’m sure some of y’all would just *love* to return the favor by writing a story for me! (I’m joking, LOL) I regret to inform y’all that there’s only one winner in this situation, but the prize is fantastic, especially for my fellow Alastor simps. I’m giving away a 8 x 10 streamily Alastor poster signed by Amir Talai himself, and it comes with a certificate of authentication, too!

So, if you’re interested, all you have to do is:

⊹ Follow me. I am celebrating my followers, after all!

⊹ Upload an original x reader story to tumblr that’s at least 2.5k words long and tag me so I can see it. You’re free to surpass this amount! Oh, and if I find out it’s AI written you’re immediately disqualified from the contest.

⊹ I was going to say that it can be about any of the character’s I’ve expressed interest in on my blog, which includes Alastor, Vox, Lucifer, and Adam, but honestly, I recommend you write for Alastor, Human Alastor, or Vox. I love them to bits :P

⊹ It can be fluff, smut, or angst—I do not mind. I’m not really picky about what I read, but if anybody would like to know, I’m a freak who loves tropes and x Gen Z reader stuff.

⊹ I ask of you to not write anything too graphic, though, like gore, vomit, or scat. (If I think of anything else, I’ll add it to this list)

Important: If you have any questions or want to make sure if what you had in mind is okay with me, you’re more than welcome to ask! Also, you have approximately 2 weeks to write your fic. I have a lot on my plate and I’m sure lots of y’all do as well, so I don’t want anyone who decides to join to rush themselves!

The Deadline to upload your fic is 11/21/24!

[hausofanya]

“wasn’t she sweet? she really set the tone for the night.”

cléo’s smile is easygoing as she talks to the camera, essentially making small talk with the viewers before someone catches her eyes off camera. she immediately breaks into a wide grin, turning back to the camera. “you guys are gonna love this one.”

it’s not long before another figure appears in view, cléo unable to contain her happiness any longer as she’s quick to extend her arms towards her. before she greets the camera, she lets out an excited squeal at the sight of cléo. she wraps her arms around the girl tightly, beaming as she pulls away, tossing her long black hair over her shoulder.

“hiii~” baebi waves to the camera with a beaming smile, “i’m venus’ leader and main dancer, baebi!”

“you look so good, what the f—oop. edit that out. hi! it’s good to see you after so long!” cléo’s excitement is infectious, practically spilling over. “you need no introduction to me, though. we need to hang out soon. maybe you can dress me up, too? you seriously look amazing. what are you wearing?”

“i am proudly wearing archive bob mackie from 2001,” baebi tells cléo as she puts her hands on her exposed waist, “it's cher inspired. i love cher. beautiful gowns, you know what i mean. i like how it makes me stand out. it's very baebi, if you know what i mean.”

“beautiful gowns is an definitely understatement. what are three things you absolutely cannot live without?”

baebi looks up in thought, her whispy lashes nearly touching her eyebrows as she does so. she hums, glossy lips quirking to the side before she nods slowly, coming up with her answer in her head.

“so, i can’t live without my lipgloss. i don’t care what lip gloss it is, i just need my lips glossed at all times, like, i’m pretty sure that’s how they retain their moisture at this point so...lipgloss, one. two, probably finn lee–i’m just kidding, oh my god–” baebi laughs as cléo instigates silently with raised brows, covering her mouth her hands before playfully hitting cléo’s arm and resting her hand on the other girl's arm as she continues.

“but, seriously, two, would totally be a weighted blanket. my ex-boyfriend got me one and i will say that was the most beneficial thing he’s ever done for me. life changing shit. and three, probably...music! i can't live without music, obviously!”

“what would the world be without music? a soulless chunk of rock, i’ll tell you that.” cléo sends a pointed look to the camera before continuing. “let’s hear about the most insane thing that happened to you this year, hm? was it good? did it make you miserable?”

“well, you know, we did lose a member,” baebi says bluntly with a nod, looking into the camera before making a 'yikes!' face, turning her gaze back to cléo with an awkward laugh. cléo’s gaze turns sympathetic. “that was honestly very crazy. it was a very... dramatic thing...” she puts her hands on her hips taking a deep breath trying to find the right words to describe what it was like for venus to suddenly become four.

“it was a good thing but it wasn’t a bad thing. it was just how things were supposed to go and... they went. hell, and so did bliss!” baebi jokes with another awkward laugh, throwing her hands up and shrugging. “but, we’re trucking along and doing great. hopefully she is too. we haven't spoken since she decided to stay with angelico. so—” baebi shrugs again, looking a bit sadder in her gaze even if her smile never falters.

“all of you deserve a vacation, truly…” cléo narrows her eyes at the camera, seemingly in jest—then turns back to her friend with a smile. “the next vacation i have, you’re coming with me. let someone try me. i dare them.”

shaking her head is disbelief, she moves along to her next question. “here’s something a bit more fun to talk about—what are you thoughts on any of the nominees?”

baebi blinks at the question, thinking for a moment before leaning in to cléo like she's going to tell her a secret, the camera zooming in as well. “i don’t know a lot of people here. i gotta be honest...” the two of them laugh, baebi covering her mouth before regaining her professional demeanor, shrugging her shoulders cutely.

“um! i don't know! you deserve everything you get tonight,” cléo winks at the camera, “and, umm, i think deepdive is pretty deserving. sourcandy kills it every time... um...”

baebi looks up as she tries to remember the other nominees, is stupid cupid nominated? truly, guys, i only know what my girls are nominated for. i’m sorry,” she says truthfully, giving an unapologetic look to the camera with another laugh.

“what about the weirdest thing a fan has done to get your attention? i’m sure you definitely have to have a story for this one.”

“one time, a man got my face tattooed on his chest and he—” cléo’s eyes widen before she snorts, her hand moving to cover her mouth. “okay, honestly, he was pretty ripped so this wasn't that bad for me–he was at a venus fansign and he stands up, takes his shirt off, and shows me my face tattooed in the center of his chest and i was like woah!” baebi puts her hands up with a suprised look on her face as cléo laughs, giggling as she retells the story. she lets out a dramatic sigh, looking at cléo with a raise of her brows.

“men.” baebi shrugs again, chuckling dryly, clearly fighting off the urge to laugh again. cléo raises an imaginary glass to that.

“what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever googled? even in secret!” cléo raises her brows, interested in her answer. baebi looks to the side as she thinks the question over, shaking her head slowly.

“i don’t google weird things...” she starts, staring at her friend’s face for a moment before laughing at herself. she hits cléo's arms playfully. “i've actually googled bang chan happy trail before, i won't even lie to you.” baebi covers her mouth as cléo short circuits, laughing at herself as the tips of her ears turn pink from embarrassment.

“girl—?!”

“he's so dreamy! i’m sorry!”

cléo pretends to gag, shuddering for dramatic effect as she immediately changes the subject. “maybe i shouldn’t have asked that. moving on! what’s your dream role?”

“i want to be angelina ballerina one day,” baebi says with a fond smile and nod, the atmosphere soon softening. “she's a mouse that does ballet... i deeply resonate with her and have since i was little.”

“that’s so cute…” cléo pouts at the camera, placing a hand over her chest to show how touched she was. “hopefully they don’t consider your search history if a film or series comes about about.”

cléo laughs as baebi halfheartedly swats at her arm. “cléo—”

“one last question!” the taller grins in good nature. “kind of horrible timing considering two questions ago i got an answer i didn’t expect—hi chris, if you’re watching!—but to be honest, i’m nosy and i don’t care if fans lose their heads over this. anyone special you want to let the public know about?”

baebi laughs nervously at the question, raising her brows at cléo as if to silently ask her, ‘why would you do this to me?’ before tucking her long hair behind her ear. cléo offers what could only be described as a shit-eating grin.

“everyone would hate the answer, so let's say no!” baebi answers cheekily, giving the camera a finger heart to distract the viewers from the question she just dodged.

cléo boos the non-answer and sighs, shaking her head. “well, i tried. thanks for hanging out~!” she waves as her friend says her goodbyes and walks off, blinking a few times before she makes a face upon remembering her shocking answer.

“of all things to google…”

you can find baebi @venusvity ! thanks so much for joining the event !

[icarusredwings]

A review of Puppys pen By Panties on boys

Ive done a previous reviews on

Nasty Dog and Domesticated Wolverine and was heavily impressed so here we go.

Firstly I would like to mention that good gravy. 8 THOUSAND words!?? For a one shot? Holy hell. Props.

"Wade squints in the dark, against the yellow halo that hugs his ankle, as he steps through it." I dont know what this part means but I want to assume it means the Tva door thing for when hes traveling and hes just now stepping into a new dimention.

"Are you there god?" No. Not at all.

Ooohh fangy wolvie!

"What time is your dick appointment sir?"

I love the little note of. "That would be dyscalculia" like uhm actually you little shit- Numbers is dyscalculia and you're aboutta get your ass smashed so its not like that matters

"Sorry daddy" As if you didn't just meet this man 2 seconds ago. But same-

"You're late. Thats rude"

Wade: *dies of horny*

Awww! When it says he was vibrating on the floor like that it makes me think of a really excited puppy with his tail going crazy.

Oh my god. We got a collar. Repeat we got a NICE collar at that.

I like how you describe things but in my brain I can physically see him tripping and struggling to get up so quickly.

I didnt read the tags (why would I, I trust this author not to do anything too uncomfy) but if he dosn't get a tail plug im gonna be a bit disappointed.

Puppy play has to be one of wades absolute favorite things by the way. Do you KNOW how many military brats are pups??? Do you see is ex wife over here?? She definitely was making this man bark.

GUYS! WE GOT COMFORT SMUT

“I don’t want to kill the mood.” Wade replies. “I’m not as pretty as you.” Shut the fuck up right now.

"slowly, so slowly, so Wade can stop him if he has to. “I know who you are, idiot. And what you look like.” AYO!? Does this imply that in this universe Logan gets to be dommy toppy to all his lovers and wade is a usual playmate?

Oh my gooooddd

"horrifying thought, I feel like I belong here.

He should probably run." AAKDNSIDJS And literally as a man who has felt like he never belonged anywhere !?? And he ussually does end up running from people who are kind to him? Jesus christ guys.

Chat are you seeing this shit?

Not only does he know him already, hes kind to him, respectful, and LITERALLY says "my clients dont get to touch me" and then INSTANTLY kisses him and tells him BY NAME that he can touch him.

Im going to explode if we find out that theyre actually together in this universe.

“Realized where you are, huh? Who you’re with, huh, baby?” youre gonna kill me.

"Scared sweetheart?" im dead.

HAS HE HAD HIS RABIES SHOTS? Im deceased.

No because wade starting to ramble absolute nonsense while waiting for Logan to stab him in the guts is so accurate. Bro is like "treat me like a half priced vaccume and let me suck it up!"

And logans just sitting here like ???

TEHEEHEHE the flirting is insane

Oh nooo.. i know those indications. The instant familiarity, the testing, the teasing. It's as if Logan had lost his deadpool. Lost his favorite chew toy and now that he got it back he misses him so much. Between knowing exactly what he likes, knowing precisely where to kiss, telling him he knows him, telling him about his pretty eyes, talking to him as if he knows him on a deep personal level... im gonna cry.

Im sitting here talking about how encouraging Logan is to Wade but wade is laying here with multiple injuries telling Logan to keep going. Telling him to bite him. Telling him that its okay to hurt him because hes into it. Telling Logan that hes allowed to LET GO. To go absolutly nuts.

Nooo because its so sad and cute when he gets up and just.. leaves him there. The way I KNOW wades brain instantly went to "oh no he dosn't like me anymore. I messed up" as hes naked as hell, bleeding everywhere as he sits there.. alone. Only to immediately be told theyre going somewhere else.

"Stop humping me" is top tier comment.

HOLY SHIT HE TOOK HIM HOME.

Like.. HOME home. 🥹

Aww what a good boy. Sitting there like that. "Good mutts get rewards" im seriously going to start deteriorating.

GUYS 😭

Wade: I get wolvie dick so this is heaven

Logan: say something nice about yourself

Wade: Chat im in hell actually. Satan himself was tricking me.

"Be a good boy. Don’t you want to?” and he just CANT say it oh my lanta

"He hears them before he registers that he’s the one saying them, and then his lips drop open wider. Who the fuck just said that?" Its your head room mates <3 dont worry they just want you to be a good boy for mr. Wolvie here.

Oh man the biting. These are love bites. These are not agressive biting this is territorial. This is claiming. This is... god its BEAUTIFUL is what this is.

The way he encourages him. The way Logan tells him that he wishes he could mark him. The way Wade keeps going limp knowing damn well if he squirms then logans prey drive will absolutly destroy him.

"He fucks Wade’s own blood into him as lube." Ofc. Ofc.

Hes litterly fucking him so hard that hes crying and wade is having the best day of his life.

Daddy kink logan>>>

"They sit there for a few more moments before Logan asks, voice rough, tired, spent, but amused, “You dead?”

“Yeah.” Wade answers.

“Shit.” Logan huffs a laugh."

Me fr. My wife asks if im dead sometimes and ill tell her yeah and she'll be like "damn. R.i.p."

AAahh and he brings him home!? Its decided. He brought him home to Al and poor Al suffered the consequences for ever.

This entire fic is just "Wade goes shopping for the wolverine with the biggest dick and heart" and found him.

Im not kidding this was SOOO fucking sweet. Would love to read what happens next and perhaps if wade DOES try to get away from him, a bit of primal play and physically hunting down your boyfriend never hurt anyone.

Im genuinely very happy after reading this, my heart is full my chest is warm, My head is full of things it wasn't about 20 minutes ago. And now if you don't mind Im gonna go take a nap.

Solid 10/10. Thank you Kensy.

Anyway @bougiebutchbinch will love this.

Puppy’s Pen

[Deadpool’s voiceover]: You’d think that finding a new Anchor Being would be easy.

I mean, big dog should be effectively immortal, no…? And yet one is dead, one is Henry Cavill—sadly uninterested—and one’s shorter than Woody Allen… on second consideration, I might go back for him, actually. He was cute. Besides, he held quite the fucking candle to the Logan variant that was crucified on a giant, unforgiving X, which was erected on a mountain of human fucking skulls, so. You know. There’s that thing that I witnessed today.

Fact is, it’s been hard.

This whole multiverse idea, it’s honestly just really confusing. The author doesn’t get it, I don’t get it… Do you get it? If you do, hold onto your fucking socks, because I’m about to shatter your entire understanding. Open your mind, okay? This fic is not for prudes, mind the tags.

[a-bad-case-of-the-stephs]

THIS!!! The fact that Steph repeatedly instantly jumps to cheating whenever she gets weird vibes from Tim isn’t random. she’s not like being absolutely crazy. Her trust issues are a genuinely unhealthy pattern of behavior with her, but a pattern nonetheless and a pattern worth examining from her point of view . As you mentioned, Stephs utter lack of good men in her life absolutely plays a role in this. I also totally believe a huge factor in this is Stephs self esteem.

There’s actually good evidence for this reading.

Way back during Stephs pregnancy arc (long pained sigh), when Tim has to move out of Gotham and he says goodbye to Steph.

She insuates that she would understand if Tim had cheated on her, due to how "disgusting" she feels she has become.This is so deeply sad, but also important. It’s a great example of how Stephanie Browns low self esteem seems to tie directly to her thoughts about being cheated on and left behind.

It also implies that someone cheating on her is something Stephanie finds acceptable to a degree, she gives Tim an easy out, she tells him that she understands why he might want someone else.

Robin #62

Importantly, All Tim says before this is that he's moving due to a personal decision. Steph immediately takes this to mean he found someone else and is leaving her. There is literally no pause between this conclusion and Tim's sentence, even once Tim explains that it's not a decision he made, her first and immediate thought is that he found someone else and is leaving her.

The swiftness that Steph arrives at this conclusion makes me think she's been cheated on before.

Even when Tim and her first get together there’s evidence for this. Like the literal VERY first thing Steph is talking about when she gets together with Tim is the hypothetical situation where he “runs off with supergirl”. She’s obviously joking, but this is a huge indicator of where he mind goes when she’s entering a romantic relationship.

Robin #56

I would not be surprised at all if she’s dealt with being cheated on before.

I’m with you that Tim is just not really too much at fault for how low grade toxic their relationship could be, it really seems like he tries his best, and while he doesn’t always stick up for her, he’s there for her in a lot of important moments and they can be cute together.

I don’t think their relationship was as big a push into war games and then Stephs death but I’m open to the idea. I can see where you’re going if we’re looking at The original reason we are given for Steph becoming robin, her anger at Tim for his “cheating” which was just a misunderstanding. However I personally hate the og explanation, I find it weaksauce and lame and it makes Stephs time in Robin all about Tim and her spurned romantic feelings, which is just less interesting to me. I tend to stick to the explanation we get in Batman: 15 Cent Adventure about why Steph wanted to become Robin.

I totally could do a deep look into how Stephs approval complex for Bruce comes about, because she was Not always like that, she didn’t always gaf what Batman thought about her. To me this need for approval is the main factor which kicks off both her tenure as Robin and then also the actual events of War Games. I also find it rly interesting lol. Thank you duskdog for your as always wonderful insights and info, Stephanie needs as many insane people willing to defend her on the internet as possible, and your service is definitely appreciated.

It’s been one of those days. It’s Time for me to violently defend stephanie brown on the internet beyond what should be considered reasonable or good.

I saw an older anti stephanie brown post which blamed Steph for Robin #87 (when Bruce reveals Tim's secret identity to Spoiler and offers to train her) and all the comments and reblogs and whatever were ragging Steph and it pissed me off and it made me sad so I'm going to break down why being mad at Stephanie for something Bruce Wayne did is insane, why Stephanie is genuinely in the right, and why having the same opinion as Alfred "boy mom" Pennyworth is embarrassing.

This ones gonna be more rambly and less analysis like than my other Steph posts for the record, I just kinda need to get this off my chest.

Let's break it down.

When Batman first brings Steph onto the team as Spoiler he tells Steph Tim's secret identity. When Tim finds out his secret was told to her, he freaks out. Tim's perspective is super understandable. He feels betrayed by Bruce, because he didn't even consult or ask Tim first, a clear betrayal of Tim's trust and the supposed equality of their partnership. Especially in light of how much Tim feels he has sacrificed to keep Bruce's secret.

But lets look at the situation from Stephanies perspective. Because she is just NOT at fault here.

Here are the facts: Stephanie is approached by Batman, who has in pretty much every interaction beforehand been cold and dismissive, and who she expects to tell her to quit being Spoiler again.

This man has only ever shown an ounce of approval towards Steph's vigilantism one time before this, for like one line in Stephs very first appearance. For him to be asking her for help sets off serious alarm bells. Steph is "really scared" when Batman asks for her help to find Robin.

Robin #84

Furthermore, its important we don't take Batman at his word here. Bruce is withholding information, something he does with Steph a LOT. He says "no one" knows where Tim is, and in Robin #87, he clarifies that Robins transmitter went dead.

Robin #87

"No one" is an exaggeration of epic proportions, given that Batman has not checked Tim's boarding school, or contacted Alfred, the location which it is overwhelmingly likely he is at, and the person who would be able to check extremely easily.

Robin #87

Because Bruce didn't want to go to Brentwood himself and run into Alfred, or have to speak to Alfred, on account of their fight in Officer Down, he sends Steph.

While the fear and worry Steph is portrayed with in Robin #84 doesn't really carry over to #87 (one of the numerous inconsistencies between these two issues) the fact of the matter is Steph is misled by Batman about the stakes of Tim being missing, which she is led to believe are much higher than they are.

In addition to this, Stephanie was under the impression that Tim was only ever holding back his secret ID soley because of Batman's wishes, that Tim was just waiting on Batman to change his mind.

Robin #56 #75 #82 #62

Tim will assert this is true later, and he certain says this is true beforehand.

If he's telling the truth, he doesn't have an issue with Steph knowing his identity. He has an issue with Batman telling her without checking with him first.

How is Steph supposed to infer this?

Steph has no reason to think it's important that Batman checks with Tim, because Tim has made it abundantly clear to her that he does want her to know but has just been waiting on Batman's approval.

Let's look how Steph acts when she meets Robin knowing his identity for the first time.

Robin #87

Steph enters the situation seeming to believe Tim will feel happy for her and relieved that their relationship no longer has to be as one sided as it has been. She still leaves room for Tim potentially having conflicted feelings, by mentioning she "hopes" that it's okay with Tim that she's finally on the main team. Tim, as mentioned early, freaks out.

Again, Tim's frustration is understandable. But let's look at Steph's dialogue for a second.

Robin #87

She says "we can be together now". This is weird and really interesting choice, because Tim and Steph have been dating for the entirety of No Man's Land and over the course of her entire pregnancy. This is a substantial amount of time. So what does Steph mean by "now"? There are two explantations.

Steph and Tim were not on speaking terms before this, because Steph was under the impression Tim had been cheating on her. He isn't cheating, but it surprisingly never gets resolved. Like the many other threads which were brought up in Robin #84, it gets completely ignored in Robin #87 and onward. Steph could be referring to the fact that she believes they couldn't be together because he was supposably cheating, but now that she knows his secret identity, he has no reason to cheat anymore. This is a super flimsy idea however, and given the fact that no character brings up how Steph believes Tim was cheating with Star after Robin #84, the logical conclusion is that it was either resolved off screen, or retconned.

The second explanation is much stronger. Steph says "now" because despite the fact that they have been dating for so long, their relationship has been extremely unbalanced. She's been closed off to half of Tim's life, something she agrees to when they first get together, but clearly has taken a toll on her. To the point she says "now" because, to her, the relationship never really truly started.

Robin #80

This isn't a stupid or petty complaint, for the record. Tim has seen her at her worst, he was there for there immediately before and after childbirth, but she doesn't get to know anything about an entire half of his life. This is especially true when you consider much Tim was in control of their communication.

He can show up at her house anytime, but if he doesn't initiate contact Steph's on her own. In Robin #80 for instance, Steph is presumably just hopping around rooftops hoping to bump into Tim, because she has no other way to find him.

Robin #87

And after Steph expresses excitement that they can finally be in the balanced relationship, a real relationship, she is rebuked with a violent "No!" that she seems to lean away from. And in the next panel, she asks, confused: "What?" in a small speech bubble which gets entirely ignored. In fact, neither Batman or Robin speaks to, or even addresses directly Stephanie for the rest of the encounter.

When Robin storms off without even a look to Stephanie, Stephs reaction is (big Shocker) to blame herself. Batman uses neutral language to place the blame on Tim, stating that Tim feels betrayed. In direct contrast, Steph actively disagrees, clarifying that Tim was betrayed, and more than that, she directly places the blame on both her and Batman's shoulders.

Robin #87

But Stephanie is a prop in the plot. Tim doesn't yell at her, he runs from her. Because she isn't Stephanie Brown, his girlfriend who has been in a massively unbalanced relationship, who is overjoyed at finally getting to be in a "real" relationship with him, she's the person Batman told Tim's identity to. He's not angry at her, he's angry she knows his identity and Bruce didn't bother to ask if Tim could tell her. He's angry at Batman. This conversation, this whole drama, is about the partnership between Bruce and TIm.

Stephanie Brown, who believed Tim was just waiting for the Batman go ahead, had no reason to think Tim would be anything but as happy as she was. Importantly, Stephanie Brown is seriously just not to blame in this situation, even if she blames herself (which as I've discussed before, is a running theme with her characterization, her low self-esteem and occasional tendancy to blame herself for the actions of others).

Not to mention, Tim doesn't blame Steph either. So if you're reading Robin #87 and somehow coming to the conclusion that Steph is a monster, please reassess.

Robin #92

How does Alfred factor into this? I'll make it quick.

Robin #88

Oh no Alfred, I'm so sorry that your loyalties to Master Timothy run so deep that you HAVE to yell at the teenaged girl who was more of a prop than anything in that encounter and had no reason to think Tim would be hurt. Oh no, really that must be so hard for you. Well, at least we know he's consistent, I'm sure if he's this mad at Stephanie, he's fucking fuming at Bruce Wayne, right? Right? Right?

No, of course not. Alfred Pennyworth, hypocrite extraordinaire is out there actively defending Bruce to Tim. Which no one asked him to do.

It's all "in his defense" and "you knew the perils" and "master bruce's crusade ill afford the delicacy of privacy required in affairs of the heart" and "stop feeling sorry for yourself"

I cannot believe he has the gall to yell at Steph for this. Talk about wounding Master Tim deeply bro, just wait until its Tim's 16th Birthday Party and Alfreds applying his stupid latex mask with a smile on his face. Sorry Alfred, you’re not always wrong, but when you’re wrong you’re really wrong.

That’s all. Goodnight 🌙