#I’ve been constructing a story around her. I love her. she’s my everything.

[aria-greenhoodie]

HEY DO YOU GUYS EVER THINK ABOUT HOW ABIGALE BLACKWING, A VERY INDEPENDENT INVENTRESS, SUDDENLY WENT AND MARRIED A RICH MAN (implied to be a Northwest) AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE ANTI-CIPHER SOCIETY? DO YOU EVER THINK MAYBE THAT MARRIAGE WAS OUT OF A DESPERATE NEED FOR SAFTEY FROM BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED? DO YOU EVER THINK MAYBE ABIGALE FEELS SHE TRADED AN ASYLUM FOR FREEDOM OVER HER LIFE? HOW SHE’S STILL TRAPPED IN A CAGE BUT IN A DIFFERENT WAY? DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT THAT!? BECAUSE I DO!

Anyway uhhhh Click for Quality.

[somehowukook]

(On going) Jungkook fics that totally worth the wait. PT. 2. *:･ﾟ✧

I decided to share some ongoing FFs that I’m completely obsessed with. This is the second part.

Minors under no circumstances can interact with my posts.

Hey guys, 💞

Now I’m back with fic recommendations that are absolutely worth following in real-time.

Also, I’m planning to release a teaser of my own fanfic next week, and this is a way for us to get to know each other better until then!

Without further ado…

Let’s go!

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Dextrocardia by @jeonstudios

cop!jk x f detective!reader, undercover cops, fake marriage, e2l au, [a] [f] [s]

“She’s been moved to another operation to help out. This pairing is necessary because you’ll be undercover as spouses. I know you two can be professional about this.”

“What?!” It’s Jeongguk’s upset voice that sounds, and for once, you share his displeased opinion.

One of the best plots, one of the best themes, and one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had. Smart, essential, and full of layers—that’s the tone of this story. There was one chapter where I just couldn’t stop pacing back and forth around the house while reading. Dextrocardia is nearing its end, and I’m going to miss it so much! @jeonstudios is one of my favorite authors and has already written stories that rank in my all-time top favorites. It’s worth reading EVERYTHING! Her Patreon is worth every cent!

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Bad Decisions by @alphabetboyluver

Smut, fluff, a lil angst, bartender!jk, student!jk, strangers-to-friends-to-lovers (?), fwb, deal arrangement, undefined relationship (they’re just friends! just besties!!), miscommunication, idiots in love, emotional slow burn, bucket list (a.k.a. the birds)

It’s simple: write your deepest, darkest fears on origami birds and string them up on Jungkook’s ceiling. When they fall—which they inevitably will, thanks to his cheap Daiso washi tape—you have to face the fear. Set it free.

The issue? You have a fear of intimacy.

Jungkook, a fear of rejection.

And you both have the capacity to make some incredibly bad decisions.

I LOVE BD. I LOVE HOW THIS JK THINKS HE’LL DIE IF HIS CARNAL DESIRES AREN’T MET. He is the personification of my perfect man—everything he does is incredible, and I swear, I can’t even explain how BD is worth it. I LOVE HOW THE OC IS SO HEADSTRONG AND HOW I LEARNED SO MUCH ABOUT SELF-LOVE FROM HER. Look, I discovered Holly’s writing through Throttle (complete and incredible), and I was instantly enchanted by her work. Honestly, if I had money, I’d open a publishing house just to sponsor and publish her books. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing out!

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死 KKANGPAE by @jungkoode

enemies to lovers, slow burn, gang au, angst with smut, fuck buddies, forbidden love, secret relationship

When you join Kkangpae’s Seduction Division, you know the rules: no attachments, no relationships, no exceptions. The consequences are fatal—you’ve seen them firsthand. But rules become complicated when the Chief of Tactical Assassinations keeps looking at you like you’re his next target, and not the kind he takes out with a sniper rifle.

Alright, I’ve already made it clear in my first fic recommendation list that Kiki is brilliant, and you probably know it by now… Besides writing and creating incredible universes and deeply layered characters with impeccable psycho-behavioral construction, she’s also an amazing and kind person—and her fanarts, help!But enough about her, or I’ll never finish… Now let’s talk about this MASTERPIECE that is KKangpae! I am completely WEAK for Jeon, and this OC? Oh God, this woman can break me, and I’d still say thank you! This slow burn (Kiki’s specialty) is so sensual, so good, and so nerve-wracking that it makes you roll on the floor in a fetal position after every episode. Just read it.

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Stuck with you by @focusonkayjay

Computer sci major/shy/nerdy!Jungkook, econ major/popular/influencer!reader, college au, roommates au, roommates to lovers, friends to lovers, idiots to lovers, angst, smut, fluff

Jungkook’s a hopeless romantic—emphasis on hopeless more than romantic. From the moment he first laid eyes on you, he swore he heard bells chiming, like the angels from above were giving him a cosmic nudge. But he’s always been the awkward, nerdy guy—the one who blends into the background—while you? You felt like a dream way out of his league. Fate, however, had other plans and now, you’re his roommate and living with you—in all your effortless glory—is equal parts chaos and heaven. The only challenge? Keeping his ever-growing feelings in check. That is—until a cocky fuckboy with not-so-pure intentions sets his sights on you, and suddenly, just loving you from the sidelines might not be enough.

I found Chers page through one of my favorite fics, Between the Ride and the Roses(which I think you should read). Since then, I’ve been following her work, and this latest release—seriously, I was so happy I read the first episode before making this recommendation list because it’s TOTALLY worth it! This socially awkward JK, with the purest heart in the world (and some self-esteem issues), will win you over in the very first description, and I just hope this precious soul doesn’t get hurt because, honestly, I’d destroy the whole world if anything bad happens to him. Seriously, he is so precious. MY SHAYLA

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Server Room by @mister0ctopus

Smut (X), Office au, Mini Series

Your new IT guy is quiet and shy. But when you accidentally caught him doing something in the server room while moaning your name, you just had to pretend you didn’t see that, right?

How do I say this without sounding crude? Well, I hope you don’t think I’m crazy, but the server room scene is 🔥🔥🔥🔥, and it left me wondering for wayyy too long —what if it were me???? Well, I probably wouldn’t survive this JK doing THAT while moaning my name.

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Not Ideal by @koojks

Grumpy jk, slight angst and eventual smut. SMAU + Written

Jeon Jungkook has made one thing clear: he has no interest in working with you. He barely tolerates you in the friend group as it is. But with a project on the line, avoiding each other is no longer an option.

Through a Tumblr interest recommendation, I discovered Via and got completely hooked on Not Ideal. I’m OBSESSED—I need to know why this JK is so closed off, why he keeps picking on our OC, what he does when he goes out, what he eats, why he acts so nonchalant about everything??? Baby, I need to know!!!!!

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Hope you like it! And please, let’s keep in touch—I LOVE chatting with you!

[therebelcaptain]

While I enjoy seeing Cassian having a deep and intimate relationship with Bix as it shows his vulnerability in a way we've not seen before, it also feels at odds with the image of Cassian I’ve had since 2016—someone who had sacrificed everything for the rebellion. The impression I got from lines like “you’re not the only one who lost everything” is that he’d been virtually alone and isolated in this fight for years before we meet him in Rogue One, his only constant companion being K2. It felt like he’d been keeping himself in a prison of his own mind for the sake of the rebellion.

But in this season, Cassian seems more than willing to walk away for the sake of protecting Bix a mere two years before Rogue One. We're at the halfway point and Cassian is a lifetime away from the man we meet in Rogue One—he was honestly much closer at the end of season one. And maybe that's the point—that things like love can get in the way and hold people back from doing what they must in a revolution—but like others have already said here, making it the focal point of both Bix and Cassian's stories this season feels like a disservice to them as individual characters. Hell, it's not even something that hasn't already been explored in the show. Vel and Cinta's relationship in the first season already looked at how complicated it can be to fall in love while in the rebellion, so I'm not even sure of the necessity of doing the same thing with another couple, much less Bix and Cassian. It seems like the writers room decided an end point for the two of them—likely Cassian being forced to kill Bix, if his last conversation with Luthen is anything to go by—before working backwards to somehow make it feel earned instead of constructing a story that actually felt right for the characters.

While this is essentially what Andor is an exercise in, Cassian already has a specific end point that they need to work toward, but the majority of the main cast doesn't. The next batch of episodes picks up a year before the film, so Cassian's going to have to lose everything in one fell swoop in these next episodes otherwise I'm not confident that he will end up where he needs to be by the end. There are things mentioned in the Rogue One novelisation that could be explored in order show Cassian's further evolution into a fully fledged rebel who's willing to do anything for the movement. Jenoport is one such thing that comes to mind, but that probably won't happen given Cassian hasn't even met K-2 yet.

On the other hand, there is a lot more room to play with Bix as a character. Her end point isn't set in stone in the same way that Cassian's is. They could have explored a myriad of things with her character working through the trauma of being tortured and finding her own way to the rebellion as a result. While that is a factor in her story arc this season, it's frustrating to see her relevance to the story be tied so directly to her relationship with Cassian. At this point it's clear that she's only being kept around so her inevitable death can further galvanise his commitment to the rebellion. After everything she's been through as a character, Bix deserves so much more than being fridged for Cassian's story arc.

To those of you who think my opinion on this is because I'm a diehard Rebelcaptain girlie, it really isn't. Like I've said before, I actually like Bix and Cassian as a couple and would have enjoyed their scenes together more in a different context like maybe in a flashback to their youth. I'd always seen them as childhood sweethearts who still loved each other in their own ways, but had grown apart as they got older and their priorities in life changed. That made a lot of sense to me. What doesn't jive with me is that we're seeing this so close to Rogue One where Cassian is supposed to be living for the rebellion first and foremost and seemed to have been for many, many years. And at this point, the gap between these two men is the size of valley.

[puck-luck]

new beginnings | august 19 - 25 (+ epilogue)

hey! whoever thought this day would come! before the chapter, i just wanted to say some thank yous to you all. i am so grateful to each person who has read this series! it was such an undertaking, being over 300K and all, but we did it! we're at the end! i would not have been able to do this without y'all's support and love for characters like honey, bea, the litchton townies, and our boys (who kind of took on a life of their own throughout this story). i want to give a special shoutout to the person who first submitted this idea of tz going feral for a small town girl. you started something that has literally changed my life– before this, i had never completed a book. i would always get bored towards the end and let it die. but now, we've finished it! i'll also give a special shoutout to all the people who helped me out while reading this– looking at pics on pinterest, reading the rough drafts, even just talking about it with me... your influence helped me immensely. i will specifically mention two: cappy and mattias anon, who have left comment after comment and put up with my texts that make everything about stg. they are the real troopers.

i will not wax any more poetics. here it is: the final chapter (+ epilogue) of stg!

85:90 – TREVOR

“Trevvy, baby,” Honey whispers. She traces his nose with a featherlight touch until Trevor wakes. She’s laying in bed next to him, wearing the t-shirt Bea made of him, and Trevor turns into her chest.

It’s so warm there. Trevor groans as the soreness from yesterday seeps back into his bones. He didn’t know that farming would be so much hard work. He’s more sore than he was after his first NTDP practice, which is saying something. 

“I can’t believe I thought I’d be a construction worker if I wasn’t in hockey,” Trevor complains into the space between Honey’s boobs.

She hums and cards her fingers through his hair, planting a kiss on the crown of his head. “I know, baby. You’re built to play hockey and be pretty, not carry heavy things and use your hands.”

Trevor frowns. “I’m okay at using my hands,” he whines. She loves to insult him, even though she’s been known to fall apart on his fingers. He pushes his fingers past Honey’s waistband and goes to prove his point.

“Trevor, we don’t have time,” Honey chastises. 

“Honey,” Trevor patronizes. “We’re not even doing anything today. All we have to do is go to the fruit stand. We have time for me to finger you.”

“You slept ‘til lunch,” Honey says. “I want to get up, I’ve been so bored.”

“I’ll fix it,” Trevor tells her. He kisses her chest, then realizes that he’s kissing the picture of himself on her chest, and pulls back. He picks himself up and moves.

“You just realize that you kissed yourself?” Honey asks.

Trevor looks at her out of the side of his eyes before laying a kiss on the curve of her jaw. “Don’t be mean,” he says.

“Just teasing you, needy boy,” Honey replies. 

She rolls onto her back as Trevor pushes her into the mattress and traps her. His kisses become more consistent, landing in time with her pulse. Trevor won’t even pretend like he’s not the needy boy she claims. “We’ve only got a week, Honey,” Trevor says. “Not even. I wanna fuck you every day to make up for all the time I’ll be away.”

Honey sighs. “Don’t remind me, T.”

“‘ll make you forget,” Trevor mumbles, biting into Honey’s neck and lathing his tongue over the smooth skin. 

“Make me lunch after, too?” Honey asks.

“Mhm,” Trevor agrees. He snaps the band of Honey’s shorts against her hip. “I hate these shorts. We should burn them.”

Honey frowns and wiggles underneath Trevor. “I love them. They’re my favorite.”

“They’re Thomas’ old boxers,” Trevor replies. He pushes them down Honey’s legs, baring her lower half. Once the boxers are around her ankles, Trevor removes them and tosses them far, far away. “Don’t think I didn’t pick that up when you told me they belonged to an old boyfriend. You’ve only had one other than me and I hate him.”

“They’re comfortable and they’re barely even his,” Honey fights back. “I’ve had them for six years. They were brand new when I borrowed them.”

“‘Borrowed,’” Trevor parrots back. “Forever?”

“A fitting price to pay,” Honey says. “You jealous I’m wearing another man’s boxers?”

“Yes,” Trevor admits earnestly. “I want you to wear my boxers to sleep.”

“What will you wear?”

“Nothing.”

Honey snorts. “Lucky me.”

Trevor circles her clit with the pads of his fingers, moving methodically. He breathes in deep, nose nestled in Honey’s neck. “You smell good.”

Honey sighs lightly, humming out a thanks. She lifts her leg and wraps it over Trevor’s hip.

He replaces his fingertips with his thumb and continues circling, swiping the pad of his middle finger through her slick. Her chest rises and falls against his and Honey’s arms circle Trevor’s shoulders. He smiles into her skin and changes the angle of his hand. The heel of his palm covers her swollen bundle of nerves and his first knuckle disappears into her core, suddenly surrounded by warmth and her tight walls.

The sun is shining into Honey’s room, which casts a nice light on her body. Trevor just wishes that she wasn’t wearing a shirt with his face on it. His t-shirt self is staring at him and it’s making him uncomfortable. 

“You need to take your shirt off,” Trevor says.

“No,” Honey drawls. “So unfair. You already told me to take my shorts off because you didn’t like those. You can’t make me take my shirt off because you don’t like it either. Plus, you said that you’d be the naked one, not me.”

“We should both be naked.”

“We can both get naked after you make me come,” Honey bargains. She nudges Trevor’s chin and kisses his lips when he lifts his face. She pecks again and grins. “I’ll spit in your mouth, if you want.”

Trevor flinches back, shocked to his core. “What?” he demands. 

Honey cackles, throwing her head back into the pillow. “Gotcha. You really fell for that.”

“Fuck off,” Trevor groans. “I didn’t know you were that kinky, Honey.” He fits his finger all the way inside of her and curls it, tickling the gummy walls that squeeze him so well.

She clicks her tongue. “There are a lot of things I like that you don’t know about.”

That piques Trevor’s interest. “Tell me,” he says. 

“Not today,” Honey laughs. “I’ve got to keep some secrets to keep you on your toes.”

Trevor whines. “Not fair.”

“I’m thinking I’ll reveal them to you when you’re all the way in Anaheim and I’m still here,” Honey continues. Her hands run down Trevor’s back, then back up his spine. 

He shivers and brings his ring finger to her entrance, taking his time as he fucks into her hole. The two digits flex and twist inside of her, trying to coax the secrets from her mouth now rather than later. 

“That way you’ll get so frustrated over not being able to touch me,” Honey says. “And you’ll regret being so far away, won’t you?”

“When I play in Raleigh, I am going to keep you up all night,” Trevor threatens in a low voice.

“That’s assuming I come,” Honey tells him.

That’s what she said. Trevor lifts his head and eyes his girlfriend.

She hits his shoulder. “Do not fucking say that’s what she said right now, I know you want to.”

Trevor chuckles and lazily connects his lips with Honey’s instead. His fingers scissor inside of her, stretching her entrance until he can push a third past the rim. 

They make out as the minutes tick by. Honey isn’t as concerned with being “late” anymore, it seems. Trevor was right; they’re not doing anything today. He doesn’t know what she was talking about– the fruit stand will be open until the sun goes down. 

Joan told him all about her schedule while they worked on the farm yesterday. She sets up the stand when the store opens at 7, then she packs up once the sun sets. It’s a long day for her, but she gets her best sales on Mondays because of the stand, so she doesn’t mind. Plus, she gets to catch up with people in town and lounge, reading books or completing sudokus while her husband continues to work at the farm. It’s practically a day off work, in Joan’s eyes.

She truly put Trevor to work. He was there for about three hours, picking blackberries and grapes off the vines, lugging cantaloupes from their place resting against the ground to the back of Joan’s wagon that she’d offered to Trevor. He plucked limes, lemons, and peaches from their respective trees. He refused to touch the strawberry plants, lest he saw Honey last night, so Joan had worked on that section of the farm. She’d also picked pears. 

It was nice to hang out on the farm and get to know the lady. She tried to give him some money for his work, but Trevor had waved her off. She’d let him and Earl take that ugly couch from her back porch for free. It was a fair trade. 

Now, the couch sits above Earl’s garage. He’d been surprisingly nimble and strong for an old man. Trevor had gotten winded walking up the stairs before Earl did, but he was on the back end of the couch, so most of the weight was on him anyway. Gravity, and all that. Trevor refuses to be beaten by an old man. 

When he’d complained about being winded while Earl was breathing evenly, Honey had laughed and scratched his back. She told him not to worry, that Earl had lots of experience with manual labor– forty years of it at least– and Trevor shouldn’t feel put out that he was more out of shape than an elderly man. He realized only after that Honey didn’t know why he was hanging out with Earl, but she didn’t ask. If she had, he would’ve told her that he was helping at the hardware store. The lie probably wouldn’t have been believable. Trevor doesn’t even know if the hardware store is open on the weekends– it probably isn’t. Nothing is.

His bicep aches a bit as his fingers work inside of Honey. Her tongue is dainty as it licks into Trevor’s mouth, then retreats, teasing him. He’s still sore, but he’s determined to make Honey come on his fingers. Her hips have started moving against his palm, grinding on his fingers. Trevor lets her.

“Look at you, taking what you need,” Trevor says. He bites his bottom lip and rakes his eyes over Honey’s figure. She’s still in his shirt, so he can’t see the flesh on her chest, but he can see the way her tits heave under the fabric. He can see the way her nipples protrude and rub against the cotton. His eyes land on her neck, watching the column flex and bob as she gasps and speeds up, frantically fucking herself on his fingers. 

A spark passes behind Trevor’s eyes. 

She likes it when I touch her there, Trevor remembers. He hasn’t touched Honey’s neck while they were fucking… ever? Has he? No specific moments come to mind.

She might want to withhold her kinks from him until he’s far away, too far away to touch her– which he knows she’s doing so that she can hear him whine and lament being so far away, because she wants to hear him ramble on about missing her– but Trevor knows this one. 

His fingers squeeze Honey’s waist, pressing into the soft skin before leaving it. His hand traces up her front sensually. Finally, Trevor curls his fingers around her throat. 

Honey’s resulting hum is high-pitched, but confused. Her eyelids lift in a flash, pupils fixing on Trevor’s face, and he would be concerned if not for the frenzied movement that is starting to send an ache through his wrist. 

“I know you like that,” Trevor whispers. He noses Honey’s cheek. “I remember the sound you made when I first kissed you and put my hand right here.” He moves his entire hand quickly, like a pinch, squeezing Honey’s neck for a second then letting go. “I bet you like getting all breathless, huh?”

Honey takes a huge breath in through her nose, head rolling back and revealing all of her throat to Trevor.

A smile crosses his face. “That’s my girl,” Trevor coos. “Come, baby.” He tightens his grip for a few seconds longer, watching Honey tremble. “Come all over my fingers and then we can start our day.”

“Tighter,” Honey breathes out. “Not for too long.”

“Okay,” Trevor agrees, his voice practically inaudible. He obeys, his fingertips curling into her windpipe. The rush of accomplishment doesn’t pass through Trevor because he completes the action of choking Honey, but rather because of the way she relaxes into the touch and lets it happen. Her eyes close again and her face is impassive and serene, mouth open in a quiet moan. That is a huge win for Trevor. When she bears down on his fingers and they overlap each other uncomfortably, Trevor feels the same rush he gets after he scores an OT goal. Honey probably wouldn’t appreciate a celly from him after she finishes coming, but the instinct is there. Trevor loosens his grip on her neck and lets her go, kissing the places where his fingertips were.

Honey snuggles into his side when he draws his fingers, covered in her come, out of her body. The moment is nice and comfortable, but only for a second before Trevor wipes his fingers on his own face adorning her shirt.

“Trevor,” Honey scoffs, rolling away from him and sitting on the edge of the bed. She holds the hem of her shirt away from her body and looks down at it. “You ruined your pretty face, Princess Diana.”

“I think you like that shirt more than you like me,” Trevor tells her.

“Hmm, probably.” Honey stands and walks to her laundry hamper, pulling the shirt over her head like she’s unwrapping a present.

Trevor faux-gasps. “You’re supposed to say, ‘No, Trevor, I love you so much more.’”

“And you are supposed to refrain from wiping cum on my clothes.” Honey plants her hands on her hips. 

Trevor makes himself comfortable on the bed and lays a hand on his stomach, the other cradling the back of his head. He licks his lips. She’s nakey.

Honey rolls her eyes. “This is the problem with you wanting me to be naked all the time,” she scolds. “We will never get anything done.”

“We could get a few things done, I bet,” Trevor replies, snickering when he says it.

Honey doesn’t even crack a smile. She’s back to business. “Would you put some big boy clothes on and wash your hands while I shower?” she asks. “Then you can make me that lunch that you promised.”

Trevor pouts, his bottom lip jutting out as far as he can push it. 

Honey shakes her head fondly and turns away, entering the bathroom and closing the door behind her. 

Trevor lounges in bed for an extra two minutes before swinging his legs forward and getting up. He dresses himself in some short Ducks-branded shorts and a plain black t-shirt. Instead of barging into Honey’s bathroom and and washing his hands there– after peeking behind her shower curtain, of course– Trevor goes downstairs and washes his hands in the kitchen sink. It’s then that he opens her fridge and surveys the options there. There’s plenty for him to cook with, but he’s not confident he’ll prepare any of it particularly well. He’s been known to burn things. Jamie used to get on him about that all the time when they lived together. It’s actually why they climbed onto the roof to eat dinner the first time, so that they could escape the burning smell in the kitchen from Trevor’s charred chicken dinner.

He settles on quesadillas. Honey has chicken that he can throw in a tortilla with cheese, plus some peppers that he can cut up and throw in the saucepan if she doesn’t want to eat them raw. It’ll be a nice meal. 

Trevor burns the first quesadilla. It isn’t a surprise. He’ll eat that one. Honestly, Trevor doesn’t mind the burnt food. He’s gotten used to eating overcooked food.

Honey leaves the shower as he’s finishing up her quesadilla and throwing it on a plate. She comes downstairs and hugs him, standing behind him and gliding her hands underneath his shirt to touch his stomach. 

“Do you want me to sauté these peppers?” Trevor asks.

Honey raises her head and pops up on her tiptoes, looking over his shoulder at the pile of sliced peppers on a plate. “No,” she decides. She pecks the back of Trevor’s neck. “I’ll get some ranch.”

Trevor automatically feels colder when she removes herself from his personal space to grab a half-used bottle of ranch from her fridge. He moves each plate to Honey’s coffee table, taking two trips so he doesn’t accidentally drop any food on the floor. 

Honey sits on the couch, pulling a blanket around her shoulders and crossing her legs. Trevor sits next to her and they start to eat their lunch together. Honey doesn’t have a TV in her living room– come to think of it, Trevor doesn’t think she has a TV at all. He’s never watched television in this house. Anyway– if Honey did have a TV, he’d put something on in the background. Instead, he listens to the rustle of the wind in the trees and the chirping of the birds.

You can’t hear the traffic from Honey’s house. You can’t even hear her neighbors, not that there are any close enough to walk over and ask for a cup of sugar. They’d have to drive. 

“Do you like being alone?” Trevor asks. The question is blunt as it falls from his mouth and Trevor realizes that it sounds rude. He doesn’t mean to say it like that and goes to apologize.

Honey shrugs. “Yeah,” she says. 

“Why?” He’s surprised she didn’t give him a second look for how his first question came out, so Trevor makes a concentrated effort to make this one sound more curious.

She waves a green pepper slice in the air. “It’s nice. I’m not really, like, alone. You know that. I’ve got my friends from Litchton, I’ve got Bea, I’ve got myself, I’m good.”

“I don’t know if I could do it,” Trevor says.

“Being alone?” Honey clarifies. “Hm. I think you could. You just haven’t had the experience with it. I struggled a lot my first few months in Litchton. So did Bea. We were used to a huge city. Charlotte has almost a million people and Litchton has two thousand. Until I moved here, I’d never been in a community that small. Even Myers Park had… 3,500 kids, I think.”

“Myers Park?”

“My high school.” Honey pops the rest of the pepper in her mouth and chews after dipping it in ranch. “I think you’re just used to a big city, babe. It’s, what, 25 miles from Anaheim to LA?”

“Yeah, close enough,” Trevor replies. “26.”

Honey glares at him for a moment. “‘Close enough,’” she mocks. “I was right on the money. Anyway, LA has millions of people and so many things to do. You’re used to that. I think you adapted well to living in Litchton this summer, but you also had six friends here. If it had just been you and– who’s your Bea?”

Trevor shrugs. “Jack, probably. We’re not as close as you two, but he and I are probably the closest.”

Honey laughs. “Okay, imagine you and Jack move to Litchton, just you two. I’m not even here. It’s just you and Jack.” She picks up another pepper. “What do you do?”

“I kill myself within a week,” Trevor deadpans. 

Honey squints at him, pursing her lips judgmentally.

Trevor leans into her space, draping himself over her lap. “I’m kidding,” he tells her. “But I still don’t know if I’d be able to do it.”

Honey brushes his hair out with her fingers. “I guess not. You’re too extroverted. My LA boy.”

“You still hate that I live in California?” Trevor teases.

Honey hums, affirming that she does while she nods. 

“I’ll convince you to like it when you visit.”

“If I visit,” Honey replies. “The hatred for Cali runs deep in my bones, Trevor.”

Trevor rolls his eyes and sits up again, polishing off the rest of his quesadilla. He always eats faster than Honey does. “Are we going to the fruit stand now?”

“Yurr,” Honey confirms. She holds up her quesadilla. “Can I take this in your car?”

Trevor nods. He goes upstairs to grab his keys, wallet, and Honey’s bag. While he was gone, Honey had moved all of their dishes to the sink. 

“I’ll do them later,” she tells Trevor when she joins him by the door.

The drive into town is quiet. Trevor’s hair is getting too long. Honey likes when the windows are down, so they’re down, but the wind is whipping his hair into his face and distracting Trevor from the road. He needs to schedule a hair appointment when he goes back to Bedford to hang out with his family before preseason starts.

They walk hand in hand to the fruit stand. There’s some commotion near the church, which is just visible from the grocery store, and Trevor watches the scene from the corner of his eye. There is a large group of people mingling at the steps of the front entrance– the entrance that Bea never uses, since the parking lot is behind the church, so they just enter through the back door. The front of the church is much more regal than the back. Picturesque.

Honey shops around, handing Trevor piece of fruit after piece of fruit. He bags them all, until the strap over his shoulder is heavy and the mesh fabric is bursting. Trevor tells Honey that they can’t fit anymore, which she frowns at, but concedes. She gives one last longing look at the blackberry cartons before they go to pay Joan.

Joan makes small talk with the duo, telling Honey about how hard Trevor worked the previous day and how helpful it was. 

“I wish I could bring him on every week,” Joan says. “Normally, my husband helps me, but he was able to start prepping the fields for our winter vegetables. We’re seeding tomorrow.”

“It’s a shame he had the idea so late in the summer,” Honey replies.

“I’m sore as can be, Joan,” Trevor complains. “I don’t know if I could do it every week.”

“Well, we’ll see how you feel on Sunday. Would you like to come help me out again? I’d appreciate it.” Joan has a soft smile on her face while she waits for Trevor to respond. He almost feels bad, but there’s no reason for him to. He can’t help that his time is up and he has to decline.

“We’re actually headed out this Saturday,” Trevor says. “So this is the last time you’ll see me for a while.”

Joan’s smile fades. “Well, isn’t that a shame. We’ve enjoyed having you in Litchton this summer, Trevor.”

Trevor’s heart thumps. That’s so nice– Joan expressing that the people in Litchton have accepted him as one of their own and liked having him here. “I’ll be back when I can.”

“No one who comes to Litchton can go very far for very long,” Joan confirms. “I tried when I was y’all’s age, but we all come back eventually.”

“Mr. California,” Honey adds jokingly.

Trevor’s retort disappears when he’s distracted by a cheer near the church. He turns his head, as do the other two, and they watch as a bride and groom burst through the door. The crowd raises their hands and whoops as they descend the steps and the groom dips his bride, kissing her.

Joan chuckles. “The new Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt Hensley,” she says. “Aren’t they just darlin’? Lila’s dress is gorgeous.”

“I didn’t know their wedding was on a Monday,” Honey says. “I guess that makes sense. Didn’t Wyatt’s parents have to come from Texas?”

“Oklahoma,” Joan corrects.

Trevor is still watching the happy couple. The woman looks like Honey. Well, they have the same hair.

“So close,” Honey sighs. “I’m always one off today. Alright– I’ll see you next week, Joan.” She bumps Trevor’s arm. “You gonna say goodbye?”

“We should do that,” Trevor tells her, staring as Wyatt and Lila parade through the group of people towards a car parked on the street.

Honey follows his gaze. “Do what?” she asks.

“Get married,” Trevor explains. The silence that follows is jarring. He turns to Honey to find her staring at him, expression nothing short of aghast. “What?”

She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, shaking her head. “Say goodbye to Joan, baby.”

“Oh, yeah,” Trevor says. He looks at Joan and holds his hand out for her to shake. “It was nice to meet you, Joan. Thank you for all the fruit all summer.”

“Thank you for all of the entertainment,” Joan replies. “I’m disappointed I won’t see how this conversation plays out. Have a safe trip home, Trevor.”

“Bye, Joan.” He moves Honey’s bag to his other shoulder and takes her hand. They start to walk toward the car. “So that’s a no to getting married?” he asks after they’ve walked a few hundred feet.

Honey takes another deep breath and holds it briefly before exhaling loudly. “We met three months ago, Trevor. We are not getting married anytime soon.”

Trevor frowns. “Darn.” 

Honey scoffs, starting to laugh. “God, you’re weird. This is why I’m always telling you to think before you speak.”

Trevor exaggerates an eye roll, starting to laugh to himself. It really was a crazy thing to say. “So you don’t want to marry me?” he demands, pretending to be upset. “So you hate me.”

Honey laughs louder. “Stop,” she tells him. “We are not having this conversation now. Plus, we’re too young to get married. Maybe if you were a military guy and I was a ‘ring-by-spring’ girl, we could talk about that, but I’m not getting married for at least four more years. How ‘bout you see if you can stand me that long before you ask again?”

Trevor grumbles under his breath, but really, he’s pleased. Four years, and then he can propose? No problem– with the way hockey season passes, the years will go by in a flash. He’s pretty certain they’ll make it.

86:90 – HONEY

They’re two hours from closing time when Honey decides that she can no longer ignore Bea’s attitude. The girl seems to be in a funk and Honey has a feeling that she knows why. Bea hasn’t been willing to listen to Honey’s opinion before now, but things could be different now that she’s moping around like a wet cat. 

Her attitude isn’t actually all that bad. Aside from not wanting to do any actual work and showing up two hours late, Bea’s been mostly normal. The only difference is that she’s quiet and lazier than usual. 

Honey finds her laying on the beanbag chairs in the cozier section of their store. There’s no one in the Nook right now and Ada is sitting behind the cash register, doing a crossword. Honey is free to lay with Bea until they hear the twinkle of the bell attached to the front door. 

“What’s wrong?” Honey asks. She sits on the bag next to Bea, looking down at the girl.

Bea shifts her eyes to the side, not bothering to move her head to look at Honey. “You know what’s wrong,” she answers.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Honey reaches over and fixes Bea’s shirt sleeve.

The girl throws her arm over her face and hides in the crook of her elbow. “I don’t know.”

Honey nods to herself and slides down the beanbag chair until she’s reclining. Her head rests against the bottom shelf of the bookcase and her feet are planted against the ground, knees toward the sky. She reaches her hand above her head and pulls a random book from the shelves, setting it against her thighs and opening it. She reads 38 pages of the historical fiction novel, set in 1580s England, before Bea speaks again.

“I feel like a stupid moron-idiot,” Bea nearly growls. The ‘t’ on ‘idiot’ is sharp coming from her mouth. She throws her arms down by her sides and Honey has to press her lips together to prevent a laugh from escaping. Bea looks like she just got petrificus totalus’ed. “I don’t like it here!”

“Okay, well, you’re not a stupid moron-idiot,” Honey tells her. “I’d say so if you were.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bea snaps. She narrows her eyes at Honey in annoyance. She sighs. “It’s just like… what the hell am I doing, you know?”

Honey prompts Bea to go on with a single hummed note. She closes the book she was reading.

Bea lifts her hands and talks with them while she explains– or tries to. “I don’t, like, ugh. Obviously, I know this isn’t– but I feel like…” she pauses, her fingers curling into half-formed fists. She whines in the back of her throat, frustrated. “This is so fucking stupid. I can’t even fucking explain myself.”

“Watch your language,” Honey murmurs, throwing a look over at Ada. The old woman hasn’t looked up yet, but if Bea continues to lean into this frustration, she’ll only start to swear more often and at a higher volume. 

Bea covers her face with flat palms and scrubs them up and down her skin. “I have never been the person to care, you know? Yeah, I go out with people, I have my fun, I have my friends, but I don’t ca-a-are,” she exaggerates the last word and shakes her hands out in front of her in time with it. Honey imagines she’s holding Christmas bells and has to stifle another giggle. 

This is serious. Not the time for an intrusive imagination.

“And now I’m out here caring! What is with that?” Bea exclaims.

“Well, I think it’s a good sign,” Honey says. “At least we know you have the capacity for romantic feelings now.”

Bea huffs indignantly. “We’ve always known that,” she sneers.

“Having a crush and actually loving someone are two different things,” Honey points out.

“Fuck off,” Bea replies.

Honey allows herself to giggle this time and shrugs. “I don’t know, Bea. I mean, it’s the first time you’ve felt like this. Do you really want to give it up?”

“No, I’m not sure, Honey, and that’s the fucking problem!”

The words explode out of Bea’s mouth and Honey physically draws her head back in surprise. “Wow,” she says.

Bea covers her face again. “I’m sorry. That was unnecessary. I’m just…”

“Frustrated,” Honey supplies. Bea shakes her head. “Confused?”

“Annoyed,” Bea corrects. She rolls her eyes, most likely at herself, and goes boneless on the beanbag. “I am practically at war with myself and it’s making me angry. So I would say that I’m more annoyed than frustrated or confused.”

“What are you fighting over?” Honey asks.

“I need to break up with him but I don’t want to break up with him,” Bea states. “That’s literally it.”

“Okay, so don’t break up with him if you don’t want to,” Honey says. “You guys can work through it. Quinn would be ecstatic to be all domestic and partner-y with you outside of the summer.”

Bea groans out loud. “I know,” she drawls. “But you don’t get it. I don’t expect you to, and I can’t explain it well, but I need to break up with him.”

“Why?”

“He’s not in my future,” Bea says. 

Honey blinks. It’s a simple and cryptic statement. Since when could Bea tell the future?

“It’s not fortune-telling, it’s logic,” Bea continues once she sees the look on Honey’s face. “I don’t see this ending positively if we continue dating outside of Litchton. He’ll go to hockey, I’ll stay here, our communication will diminish because he’s busy, I’ll get touchy and bitchy because I want attention, and then it all blows up and we break up and it’s a thousand times worse than ending it here.”

“How do you know that will happen?” Honey asks. “It sounds like a bunch of what-ifs to me.”

“I’m not emotionally mature enough for a relationship where my boyfriend ignores me eight or nine months of the year and then is all over me for the other three. The whiplash will be insane. If he played in Raleigh, or we lived closer to Vancouver, it would be different.”

It once again hits Honey that Bea has thought this through and won’t change her mind. She says everything so resolutely and has an answer for each of Honey’s remarks. Honey’s words can’t penetrate the iron armor of Bea’s decision and Bea’s explanations can’t seem to wade through the foggy confusion in Honey’s mind. They’re so different.

“I don’t know,” Bea resigns with a shrug. “Our lives are so different and he’s so far away. I think it would have been nice, and Quinn is damn near perfect, but my future isn’t with Quinn.” She shakes her head, breathing a laugh out of her nose in a self-deprecating way. “Is your future with Trevor?”

“Yes,” Honey decides. She means it.

Bea blinks and recoils in surprise, much like Honey did when Bea raised her voice. “Your future is with Trevor,” she repeats. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Honey replies. She thinks about how he genuinely suggested getting married yesterday, which was absurd, but didn’t feel wrong. When she was with Thomas, she knew that there was going to be someone after him. He wasn’t the end-all, be-all. Her gut is telling her that there’s nothing after Trevor. “Yeah. He’s– yes. My future is with Trevor.”

Bea looks at Honey until a prickle of discomfort starts to rise on Honey’s neck. She breathes out in relief when Bea looks away. She couldn’t read the look in Bea’s eyes, which increased the discomfort tenfold. Honey did not like what she saw. 

And she doesn’t think Bea’s eventual reaction matches the stare.

“Good for you,” Bea says. Her words seem shallow, brimming with surface-level congratulations. The layer of joy for Honey seems very thin. Honey doubts it’s because Bea disagrees with Honey’s decision. She thinks it’s because Bea still doesn’t know how to feel about her own.

The bell rings and Honey hears Ada greet a customer. She doesn’t want to leave Bea like this, but one of them has to work, and Bea doesn’t seem up for it. Honey understands that feeling better now.

She takes Bea’s hand and squeezes it tightly, then lets go. 

The encounter with her best friend stays on her mind long after they’ve closed the store. She invites Bea to come back to her place for dinner, which the girl accepts, but then they end up talking a little bit more and not making dinner at all. 

It’s hard to talk about this. Bea tries to explain her stance a little bit more, but she can’t find the words and Honey finds it harder and harder to read her mind with each suggestion that Bea turns down. Honey is doing her best to fill in the gaps, but for the first time in their lives, she and Bea are not even close to being on the same page. Usually, they can find some middle ground. This time, Honey feels like they’re throwing paper airplanes at each other over a canyon.

Bea leaves her house without eating dinner, after standing up and shaking out her body in an almost-violent wave that has Honey furrowing her eyebrows. “It seems like this is going against every instinct you have,” Honey wants to say, but Bea says “It’s now or never” and leaves before Honey can get the words out. 

Overall, it hasn’t been a great day. She feels drained right alongside Bea, trying to share the load as best she can without fully understanding Bea’s plight. It’s terrible.

So when Trevor shows up at Honey’s door half an hour after Bea leaves, his presence is a welcome distraction from the weight on her shoulders.

There’s still weight. Of course there is. The difference is that this replacement weight is physical– Honey is being crushed under the weight of her boyfriend as she tries to read her book in the dying summer light. She wants to finish this one before she goes back and borrows the one she started this afternoon while sitting with Bea. Honey isn’t usually one for period pieces– that’s Bea’s thing– but this one seemed cool.

Trevor might be sleeping, for all Honey knows. She’s twirling a strand of his hair around her fingers, other hand holding her book in the air, and Trevor is breathing evenly in her ear. His mouth is pressed against her jaw and their legs are intertwined. His arms are wrapped around her middle, hips squarely in line with hers. 

He’d sat on the counter while Honey made her own dinner, refusing his offer to cook for her since she already has a bad taste in her mouth from Bea’s problems. He had stolen some of her food off of the plate while she ate, talking all about how, today, he and the guys had to break down the makeshift rink they built for the summer. He and Quinn had done most of the work building the rink and he and Quinn had done most of the work tearing it down. The most Luke, Jack, and Cole did was stack the wood for a bonfire. Trevor knows that Earl won’t take it back.

His impression of the elderly man had been surprisingly spot-on. “Boy, you better not’a come up in here tryin’ to return old wood,” Trevor had mocked in a thick southern accent. “I’m not a bank! I don’t give out loans.”

Trevor had done the dishes this time after Honey was finished eating. She’d reclined on the couch while he did so, head resting on the throw pillow propped against the arm of the couch, and cracked her book open.

When Trevor joined her, he’d crawled under her arms and kissed her lips before tucking his head to the side. That’s how they got to where they are now. Honey only has about fifty pages left of her book, but she has a feeling she won’t make it to the end. Her boyfriend, in the last five pages or so that she’s read, has started nuzzling her neck. 

“You’re distracting me,” Honey says. She turns to the next page, then back because she realized that she skimmed the last paragraph and didn’t actually read it. It’s further proof that Trevor is taking her attention away from the book in her hands.

“I’m bored,” Trevor mumbles against Honey’s skin. “Let’s make out.”

Honey pretends to think about it for a minute, humming and looking up to the ceiling. 

Trevor does his best to convince her, kissing and licking up her neck until he makes it to her lips. “Puh-lease,” he begs in a sarcastic voice, pouting at Honey. He looks like a puppy asking for human food and Honey laughs.

She sets her bookmark between the pages and closes the book, stretching to place it on the coffee table. Trevor doesn’t let her move much. Honey cocks her head to the side, matching Trevor’s pout. She cradles his face.

Trevor’s pout breaks into a smile and he leans forward, catching her bottom lip and claiming it. The kiss starts soft and insistent, barely demanding anything from Honey at all. Between kisses, he touches her sides and sends sparks up her body. Her lips part and Trevor’s tongue explores Honey’s mouth. She breaks from him and laughs when he tries to roll his ‘R’ like he’s in Spanish class, but inside her mouth. He must have thought it would make a fun movement of their tongues, but Honey has to push him away for all of five minutes while she catches her breath.

He can’t kiss her again for another ten without more giggles spewing from Honey’s body. 

Trevor nips at Honey’s bottom lip playfully, then her own teeth tug gently on his lower lip in return. 

Honey is pliant beneath Trevor, the kiss both intimate and lazy and filthy and plundering. She could stay in his arms, pressed into the cushions of her comfy couch and lost in the drugging sweetness of his kisses, forever. The rest of the world fell away when she was kissing him, until Honey’s front door swings open and hits the wall next to it.

The couple separates, although Trevor is still laying on top of Honey. He lifts himself up just enough to look over the back of the couch, at the person attached to the pair of stomping feet approaching them. Honey doesn’t have to look to know who it is. She recognizes Bea’s footsteps well.

“Get out,” Bea announces in a grave, serious, and stern voice.

She really did it, then, Honey thinks to herself, equal parts impressed and sad for Bea. It’s no wonder she doesn’t want Trevor here, especially not on top of Honey and making out with her like a bad reminder.

Honey places her hands on Trevor’s chest and starts to push him off, but has to shift her focus when Trevor starts to fight back, like he always does.

“What stick got shoved up your ass today?” Trevor snaps. 

“Get out,” Bea repeats.

“Trevor,” Honey jumps in, tapping his collarbone insistently.

Trevor eyes fall, not so far as to find Honey, but just to Bea’s midsection. “What is that?” he asks. “You brought a toy with you? Is that the stupid cow that Quinn wouldn’t let Jack cuddle when he found it earlier?”

Honey grinds her teeth together and covers Trevor’s mouth with both of her hands. “Shut up,” she hisses. 

His words have done enough damage. Bea pulls the coffee table out of the way and steps up to the couch, whacking Trevor with Moo-Moo and the flat of her other hand over and over, trying to make solid contact with his twisting body. He’s laughing, because clearly he thinks this is a joke, but Honey doesn’t find it funny at all. Neither does Bea, whose eyes are red, puffy and seething with ire and a fresh layer of mist.

“I hate you,” she tells him with absolute conviction. “You have absolutely no empathy for anyone ever and if you paid attention for more than two seconds, you’d realize that today is not the day to be a cunt to me, Trevor!”

“You’re fucking insane,” Trevor responds, curling up into a ball and hiding behind Honey as she sits up.

Honey catches Bea’s hands and holds them tightly. “Stop,” Honey says. “Stop. I know you’re upset, but stop it.”

“He started it,” Bea deflects tearfully.

“Baby, you told him to get out instead of asking him to leave,” Honey replies, tilting her head knowingly at Bea.

The girl’s bottom lip wobbles and her chest starts to lurch. “I don’t want him here,” she says through gulping breaths. “I need you to stay with me. Alone.”

Trevor has noticed Bea’s state and reacts with the appropriate awkwardness. “Shit,” he acknowledges. 

Bea squeezes her eyes shut and sobs, curling in on herself.

Honey stands and wraps her in a hug, one arm wrapped around Bea’s ribcage and other hand cradling the back of her head. Bea cries into her shoulder, arms locked around Honey’s body. She’s still clutching Moo-Moo’s ear between her fingers, a nervous habit that Honey hasn’t seen since they were in their tweens. 

“Trev, sweetheart, you should go,” Honey says softly. “Please.”

He rises from the couch and touches the base of Honey’s spine. “Sorry, Bea,” he tries. Honey can see that he wants to pat her on the arm, but she shakes her head and he refrains. “I hope you’re okay.”

It’s a really awkward goodbye from Trevor, understandably so, and Honey feels terrible as Bea continues to cry. Honey gets her upstairs and into her bed, which they’ve shared for plenty of Honey’s freakouts, but it feels so much different this time.

Honey positions Moo-Moo so that he’s right under Bea’s nose and his fur is touching her lips. She brushes Bea’s hair out of her face and wipes a little bit of the mascara off of her eyelids. “I’m sorry you had to do this,” Honey whispers. “It sucks.”

Bea hiccups. “It’s for the best,” she manages shakily. “I’d be ten times worse if this happened after… everything I tried to explain earlier.”

Long distance, Quinn’s laser-focus on hockey, Bea’s self-admitted need for attention, the way all of those things will compound until they hate each other and breakup in a much bigger blowout. Those are the bits Honey understood. It’s how Bea got from one point to the other, with all of those assumptions, that Honey didn’t quite get. 

“He thought I would change my mind because you and Trevor are staying together,” Bea adds in a miserable voice. 

Honey feels a flare of anger rise up in her throat. They’ve experienced this before– people always assume that she and Bea do the same thing, together, all the time. They’re best friends, but they’re not clones of each other. It’s their shared pet peeve– which doesn’t actually disprove the statement that they’re the same.

“He said he’d buy me an apartment in Vancouver.” A fresh round of sobs leaves Bea and she wipes them on the top of Moo-Moo’s head. “It’s like– I can’t uproot my life just for him,” she says desperately, as if she has to explain it to Honey. She feels the same way Bea does. Moving across the country with her boyfriend of three months (unofficially) would be a mistake. “He didn’t get it. He didn’t get it.”

Honey closes her eyes and touches her forehead to Bea’s. 

“I explained it to him at the beginning of the summer and he agreed,” Bea reminds herself more than Honey. “And I can’t, I can’t–”

“I know,” Honey murmurs. “Shh, it’s okay.”

Bea heaves in Honey’s arms and soaks her spare pillow with tears. Honey watches her, stroking her cheek and her arm and wiping her running nose with tissue after tissue. It’s hard. Bea used to do the same thing for her, countless times over, and Honey feels dreadful. Bea shouldn’t ever look like this or feel like this. Honey would do anything to change it.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats.

Bea takes a shaky breath, then another. “It felt like he didn’t understand me,” Bea explains in a far-away voice with a mournful frown. “I thought he knew.”

“Oh, sweet girl,” Honey sighs. “He was just hoping something would change.”

“Then he didn’t listen when I told him nothing would,” Bea sniffs. She averts her gaze from Honey’s eyes, down to the space between them. She sniffs again. “Is that Puppy?”

Honey looks down. Her monkey is between them, left on the middle of the bed when Trevor made a scene of returning him to his rightful owner. He did not return the Ducks shirt that magically appeared in her dresser drawer in Charlotte. “Yeah.”

Bea scrunches her face in confusion and breathes out either a laugh or a fresh set of tears– but she’s cried dry, so nothing appears. “Did he become sentient and walk here?” she implores, disbelieving. 

Honey almost laughs in relief at the change in subject. She knows Bea well enough to know that she’s deflecting and moving on because she doesn’t want to cry over her breakup anymore. They’ll come back to it another day, when she’s processed it a bit more. “Trevor and I went to see my parents.”

Bea is silent, mouth open in pure betrayal. “What the hell else have you been keeping from me?” she wails dramatically. “Are you moving to Cali?”

“No,” Honey exclaims. She laughs out loud. “I am not moving to California.”

“Good, ‘cause the West Coast is not the best coast,” Bea asserts stubbornly. 

“Have you eaten?” Honey asks.

Bea’s expression immediately turns into a scowl. She hates when Honey asks that, taking it as a personal attack and an insinuation that she can’t take care of herself. “No.”

At least she’s honest. “Stay right there,” Honey says. “I’m going to go make you something quick. You need to eat.” She kicks off the covers and shoves her feet into her slippers, padding across the floor.

“Make me a water bottle too,” Bea bosses in a grumble. “I feel like a raisin.”

She’ll be okay. Honey is sure of it. Even if Bea isn’t, Honey will be around.

87:90 – TREVOR

i’m sorry i attacked u. that was mean. can i come over later to apologize for real? Bea asks through text message. 

Trevor can’t shake the image of Bea crying in Honey’s arms from his mind. He still feels guilty about how he had provoked her and completely misread the room. It’s their thing, making fun of each other and being each other’s number one hater. Trevor hadn’t known that Bea would be so touchy yesterday.

Honey is coming over at 7 to help me pack

i know. i’ll drive her there and u can drive her to work toma

You won’t stay over?

Bea doesn’t respond to that one– not for another few hours. She texts once Trevor is finishing up his last load of laundry. He’s choosing which clothes he’ll keep out for the next few days when his phone vibrates.

i’ll explain later.

It’s a resolute answer that confuses Trevor. He moves his laundry into a massive pile on his bed so that he actually gets it done before he goes to bed, then leaves the room. He’ll do it when Honey gets here. He wants to prolong their time together, so he’ll fold and she’ll pack. She likes organizational things like that. Three weeks ago, the same day she accidentally called him her boyfriend, Trevor watched Honey take all of her books off of her bookshelves and reorder them accordingly. He doesn’t know her system. He does know, however, that she was very content with the repetitive action. There was a little smile on her face the whole time.

Trevor walks downstairs and finds the main level empty. He goes down the next flight and finds the boys. None of them have even started to pack, which is annoying because they still have to clean the rental house on Friday. At this rate, it’ll fall to Trevor to clean because all the guys are trying to locate their things. Cole will be trying to save his clothes from being stolen by the Hughes brothers, who just scoop up all the laundry as if it’s theirs. Trevor supposes that’s what happens when they share the Michigan house– he wouldn’t be surprised if the spare bedroom had been turned into a joint-closet in the time since he’s visited.

Luke and Cole are playing ping-pong and yelling at each other. Jack and Quinn are laying across the two couches, each with a book in their hand. Trevor almost wants to tease them for coexisting so peacefully, but he plops down on the recliner instead. He snatches the remote and turns the TV on, enduring Quinn’s side eye as he disturbs the quiet surrounding the seating area. 

“The girls are coming over in a bit,” Trevor announces to the group. 

He doesn’t miss how Jack’s eyes lift towards Quinn. Or how Quinn shifts on the couch. Or how the ping pong ball goes clattering to the floor and Cole sings, “Another point for me.”

“Honey’s going to help me pack,” Trevor adds. “You guys should really start packing, too.”

“Don’t be a killjoy, Z. We’ll get to it,” Jack says. “We’re enjoying the time we have left.”

Trevor pauses, gawking at the irony of the words. “You’re the one who didn’t want to come here in the first place,” he points out.

Jack just shrugs and flicks to the next page in his book. He adjusts the baseball cap on his head. “I changed my mind.”

“So you want to come back next year?” Trevor asks.

Jack curls his lip. “No. Not for the whole summer. I’d like to spend my free time in the house I own, thanks.” He reaches his leg toward the other sofa blindly and kicks Quinn. “Right, Q-Ball?”

“Yeah,” Quinn says shortly.

Trevor hasn’t heard his voice sound as curt as this in a long time. He leaves it alone, turning back to face the television and focusing on the episode of The Office that seemed to magically appear, as if this TV has memorized Jack’s watching habits. 

Luke and Cole sit on the big couch after their game of ping-pong ends. Luke puts his arms over the back of it, stretching his long limbs out over Quinn’s shoulders. Cole kicks his feet up on the coffee table and laughs at most of the jokes coming from the television over the next two episodes.

The day passed by quickly with all the laundry Trevor did. It doesn’t surprise him when he hears the front door open in the distance and two pairs of footsteps crossing the floor above them. 

“Hello?” Honey calls, stopping halfway down the basement steps and waving. “Nobody greets their guests at the door anymore?”

Trevor’s face splits with a smile and he laughs. He stands and walks toward Honey. Cole immediately takes his seat in the recliner.

“Hey, baby,” Trevor says. He climbs the first few steps and kisses Honey briefly. “You ready to pack up some laundry?”

“Is it ready to pack or is it in a pile on your bed?” Honey responds.

Trevor doesn’t answer, just looking at Honey knowingly.

She rolls her eyes and pats his chest firmly. “You’re the worst. I’ll go start folding while you talk to Bea.” Honey looks around Trevor’s body. “You okay, Q?”

Quinn hums. Trevor catches the tail end of a shrug when he looks in the boy’s direction. 

“Ask me how I am,” Cole chirps.

Honey’s thoughtful bite of her lower lip after Quinn’s response disappears after Cole’s input. She chuckles. “How are you, Cole?”

“Never better,” Cole brags. “Just won another game of ping-pong against the big guy.”

“By two points,” Luke jumps in. “It wasn’t that impressive. We were neck-in-neck for ages.”

“Well, you’ll get him next time, Lukey. Good job, Cole.” Honey slides her hand into Trevor’s. “C’mon, Trev. We’ve got chores to do.”

“Will you guys be here for long?” Jack asks. “Tell Bea to come down.”

“She has stuff to do tonight,” Honey lies. She tries to keep her face impassive, but Trevor knows that Bea never has anything to do unless she’s hanging out with Quinn. 

The fact that Quinn hasn’t moved at all from the couch since Bea got here is suspicious. 

Oh my God, they broke up, Trevor realizes suddenly. Oh my God. He stares at Quinn. The dark circles under his eyes make sense now.

“Come on, Trev.” Honey tugs his hand and leads him upstairs. Trevor is still looking at Quinn, scrutinizing him until Honey drags Trevor out of sight.

“What happened?” Trevor asks. He pads after Honey, entering the kitchen.

“Talk to Bea,” Honey replies. She brings a hand to Trevor’s jaw and kisses him softly on the lips. “I have to go do the laundry you left for me while you do. You’re a terrible boyfriend.”

“I’m not,” Trevor whines. “I wanted to fold them together.”

“That’s very sweet of you,” Honey tells him, only a slight air of sarcasm in her voice. “But you have to make up with Bea. I’ll meet you upstairs when you’re done. It shouldn’t take long.”

Trevor doesn’t dare sigh out loud, not when Bea or Honey could hear him. He agreed to this, but the thing is, Bea doesn’t need to apologize to him. It wasn’t a big deal. Now that Trevor thinks she and Quinn broke up, he thinks that he should be apologizing. Not that he will. Unless he feels like it in the moment.

He turns away from the stairs and looks for Bea, scanning the room. She’s nowhere to be found. Surely Honey would’ve brought him in here because this is where Bea is. Maybe she chickened out and couldn’t stand to be in the house, so she left.

“Over here,” she says, lifting her arm into the air. She’s laying on the couch in the living room, the one that they rarely ever use. 

Trevor rounds the couch and finds Bea laying there in a tank top and jean shorts, very reminiscent of Honey’s style. He supposes it makes sense– she probably stayed the night with Honey last night. Her hair is up in a bun, also like Honey. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Bea echos. She rolls partially off of the sofa and reaches for her bag in a half-assed way, waving her arm four times before snagging one of the handles and pulling it into her space. “I brought you a treat.”

Trevor sits on the ottoman near the fireplace. “Oh, yeah? What kind of treat?”

“Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies.” Bea pulls a tupperware out of the bag and underhand-tosses it to Trevor. “I need the container back when you guys leave. It’s from the Nook.”

“I’ll wash it tonight and give it to Honey so she can bring it back to work tomorrow,” Trevor says. “You didn’t have to make me cookies.”

“Well, I’m bad at apologies, so I wanted to make a gesture,” Bea says. 

Trevor feels sheepish all of a sudden. “You don’t have to apologize either,” he tells her with a grimace. “I didn’t realize you were having a bad day and I probably shouldn’t have poked the bear.”

Bea talks over him as he stumbles through the last part of his statement. “I do have to apologize. It seems like you’re going to be around for a long time, Trevor, and I don’t want us to be at odds.” 

A blossom of pride blooms in Trevor’s chest when Bea admits to him being around for a long time– absolutely he’ll be around for a long time. His relationship with Honey won’t be ending anytime soon. 

“It wasn’t cool of me to hit you and yell at you,” Bea continues. “You definitely weren’t nice, but I wasn’t any better.”

“That’s kind of what we do, though,” Trevor says. “Bicker.”

“Not like that.” Bea shakes her head. “I should’ve had more control over myself, so I’m sorry. I know you didn’t really mean to make a bad day worse.”

“What happened?” Trevor asks. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

Bea takes a deep breath and looks away from Trevor. She stares at the ceiling and a thick silence settles between them. 

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

Bea glares at him out of the side of her eye. That’s back to normal. “Obviously I’m going to tell you Trevor, but I am once again asking you to wait two seconds.”

Trevor looks at his fingernails and picks at his cuticles. “It’s been two seconds,” he grumbles. 

“You are so lucky that Honey is patient with you, I would be swinging on you in a second if I was her,” Bea argues back.

“Right back at’cha,” Trevor bites.

Bea pauses. She eyes him, then looks back to the ceiling. “We broke up,” Bea says with a shrug. “It didn’t go like I wanted it to. It didn’t go like Quinn wanted it to. It was a bad day.”

Trevor doesn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”

Bea looks at him, an incredulous squint adorning her face. Then, she snorts and laughs. “Okay,” she says. “Don’t go getting all sappy on me, Trevor.”

“Breakups suck,” Trevor says with a shrug. He’s not being sappy. He’s relating to Bea.

“I might’ve yelled at you for your shit empathy yesterday, but you really don’t have to do all that,” Bea snickers. “I don’t really want you to feel for me, Trevor. I’m happy with our relationship as is. You fight with me like Cece and Trix do.”

“Are you saying I’m a girl?” Trevor asks, making a joke of her sentence. It’s pretty nice, actually, to be compared to one of Bea’s siblings. It makes sense, considering how they fight. It’s how Trevor fights with Griffin and Ava.

Bea taps her chin and purses her lips. “Well, if the glass slipper fits.”

Trevor makes a face at Bea and stands up. “You think you’re funny.”

“I know I am.” She sticks her tongue out at Trevor and sits up, grabbing her bag and hoisting herself off of the comfy furniture. 

“Are you leaving?” Trevor asks when Bea follows him to the steps, toward the front of the house.

“Yep,” Bea confirms. “I can’t very well… stay the night, or anything.” She laughs self-deprecatingly and shifts her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow, though. We’re supposed to get dinner altogether. Did Honey tell you that yet?”

“No,” Trevor says.

“Well, we are. Tell the boys. We’re going to Mexico and having tacos and margs.” Bea opens the door and slips through. “Have fun with Honey.”

Trevor nods and heads upstairs, walking down the hallway into his bedroom. When he pushes the door open, the pile of laundry on his bed has shrunk drastically, thanks to Honey’s dutiful work. 

“How many loads did you do?” Honey asks as soon as he walks inside. 

“Like three,” Trevor says. “Three and a half.”

“I can’t believe you brought that many clothes for one summer,” Honey says. “I don’t know if I have enough clothes for three and a half loads. Maybe if I was doing my delicates and whites and colors separate.”

Trevor hums and takes his spot next to Honey. When she bends forward to grab another shirt to fold, he slaps her ass playfully. She stole a pair of his boxers, to Trevor’s delight. 

Honey rolls her eyes. “Can we get your laundry done before you start getting distracted by my body?”

Trevor scrunches up his face and pretends to cry, wrapping his arms around Honey’s shoulders and burying his face in her hair. 

“Stop being dramatic,” Honey chastizes. “Pick up a shirt and fold it or I’m going to make you do this all by yourself.”

Trevor is quick to get a move on after that. He fully believes Honey will make him do the chores all by himself. It’s not that he’s incapable, but he wants to do it together. It’s embarrassing how much Trevor likes the idea of folding laundry together, like they share a house and do their laundry together. Maybe next summer they will. Trevor could move in with Honey if she lets him. If she says no, Earl offered the apartment above his garage on Sunday, which might be the closest Trevor will ever come to hearing Earl outright tell Trevor that he likes him. 

He’s two for two. Both Earl and Honey did everything they could to remain grumpy and detached when it comes to Trevor, and look at how that changed. He’s just impressively charismatic.

When Honey asks what Trevor is smiling about, and he repeats his thoughts to her, she snaps a t-shirt at his thigh. 

She loves him. Definitely.

88:90 – HONEY

“Would you get us another round, Luce?” Honey asks, looking up at the dark-haired girl who has worked at Mexico since her family bought the building in her childhood. She clasps her hands together in praying fashion. “Then we’ll be done. I promise.”

“Scout’s honor, Luce,” Bea vows with a big smile. 

“You guys have already been overserved,” Lucía replies with a frown. “You know I don’t care, but my dad worries.”

“Quinn is driving,” Bea says. “Don’t worry. Tell Carlos that he doesn’t have to worry about us and that his Mole Poblano is perfect. He should never change the recipe.”

Lucía laughs. “Yeah, he’ll love that. You know how to work the system. So we’ve got beers for the boys now? Or are y’all still pounding margs like the girls?”

“I’m stickin’ with a marg, dude,” Cole declares. He runs his tongue over the salt rim and smacks his lips, smiling widely at their waitress. 

The Hughes boys decide to switch it up to a beer, as does Trevor. A nice, refreshing beer with a little lime doesn’t seem bad to Honey right now, but she’ll probably have to drink beer at the surprise party. Earl was in charge of the drinks and swore he’d buy enough for everyone they invited, but Honey isn’t certain he knows just how much beer the town can drink during a party. Luckily, Sarah is bringing her trailer-bar in case Earl underestimates things. At least there will be one experienced drinker and party-planner in Trevor’s backyard.

Bea orders another strawberry margarita, Cole orders a normal lime one, and Honey orders a mango-flavored marg, but her mind is elsewhere. The ladies swore on Tuesday that they have planned enough parties in their time to set this one up without Honey’s supervision. 

There are so many things that could go wrong. The alcohol was supposed to take the edge off. Honey wishes she was at the house and she’d left the dinner to Bea. That was the original plan, before the breakup happened on Tuesday. Now, Bea isn’t really that comfortable without Honey acting as a buffer between her and the boys. There’s definitely an awkwardness between her and Quinn, although they’re both trying to ignore it. Honey has seen Quinn watching Bea. Bea isn’t oblivious, either.

Other than the glances between Bea and Quinn, the dinner has been pretty good. The boys seem to believe that it’s their last hoo-rah together and they’re making the most of it. When she’s not worried about how things are going at the rental house, Honey is laughing at Jack’s stupid jokes or at the other boys’ comebacks and quips.

‘One more round’ turns into two before they leave. It’s normal for a Mexico trip to end in a few more drinks than expected, especially as the weekend approaches. By the time they’re walking out the door, the sun has started setting, and Sarah has texted Honey that everyone is ready for them to come back.

She and Bea are holding in their excitement well on the drive back to the house, sharing looks with each other and trying not to spill the secret at the last second.

“What the hell,” Quinn wonders under his breath, sounding confused as he pulls into the driveway and sees that there are more than a few cars parked in front of the house. 

The crowd of people in front of the house should be a dead giveaway to what’s going on. There are tons of familiar faces in the crowd, an impressive group considering Honey only had this idea on Tuesday morning while the ladies were in their knitting circle. 

Bea is bouncing in her seat, jumping out of the car as Quinn puts it into park. Honey exits after her and grins, hoping to find excitement and surprise on her friends’ faces. 

“Surprise!” shouts the crowd around the front of the house. 

“Welcome to your going away party!” Vera adds. She’s right at the front of the crowd with the other ladies, holding gift bags with the boys’ hockey numbers on them. “Come and get your presents.”

They’re all sufficiently buzzed, but Honey is glad to see that they can all pass a sobriety test; the boys don’t stumble or stagger at all on their way towards their respective present-presenter.

It’s really cute how Cole hugs Vera and Trevor accepts a kiss on the cheek from Scarlett. Luke hugs Gillian with one arm and looks over her shoulder at Emma-Kate while he does, sending her a playfully inquisitive look that Honey assumes has to do with the gift. Quinn accepts his bag from Sacha and Jack thanks Rosalind for his. It’s sweet– the ladies had dropped their current projects to create something for each boy, having only two days to craft a knitted item. She knows what each of them are and it’s a wonder that the ladies’ hands aren’t sore and laden with blisters and calluses. 

Vera knitted a sweater for Cole, her favorite of the boys. She asked Honey to see what colors Cole’s hockey team is, so she ended up knitting a navy sweater with red cuffs and a red hem to try and stay on theme as best she could. It was so precious.

Trevor got a sweater too, although his is a cable-knit conglomeration of all of the leftover half-skeins Scarlett has amassed over the past year. The colors change without warning and don’t follow a specific pattern, but Trevor is delighted with it. Honey snorts when he pulls it on over his clothes then and there. Of course he does, even though the temperature is in the high 70s. It’s warm and he’s out here wearing a sweater– maybe if they’re still out partying at two in the morning, it’ll pay off. 

The Hughes boys got beanies, since half of the pictures that came up when Honey looked them up for the ladies featured them walking through hockey arenas in suits and knitted toques. Quinn’s is dark green with a blue brim and Honey notices his tiny, quirked smile as he examines it. He hugs Sacha and thanks her again before tucking the hat into the pocket of his shorts.

Jack and Luke’s beanies nearly match, since each lady except Scarlett tried to match each boys’ team colors. They’re both black and white, although Jack’s is striped and Luke’s is a solid black with a firetruck red rim. There’s a patch on the brim of Luke’s that he seems particularly amused by. It’s black with white letters and a red heart– Honey can’t read what it says– but Emma-Kate is snickering to herself with her tongue poking between her teeth. It must have been her idea. Luke’s eyes tilt up to look up at her and he chuckles, shaking his head. Jack pulls his beanie on, just like Trevor did with his sweater, and Luke places his back in the gift bag. 

The party lingers in the front for a little while longer, with the boys talking to people in the crowd as Honey and Bea (and Earl) walk around the house into the backyard. It looks gorgeous– there are ladders leaning against the side of the house, which Honey assumed were used to hang the fairy lights that are twinkling along the balcony of the house. There are also poles sticking up in the yard, right at the edge of the concrete pad that the boys used as their rink, which allow fairy lights to freefall against the sky like a canopy of stars. 

Honey is glad that she dressed up today in her black, ribbed tank top and long, red boho skirt. There’s music playing through a speaker that Sarah brought with her and Honey wants to dance. The cicadas are out and singing along with the music, trying to screech over the lyrics. 

Bea also dressed up. She’s wearing a white bodysuit that ties in the back with a ruffly, dandelion-colored gingham skirt. She did her hair during her lunch break at the Nook, curling the strands into loose waves that make her look like she belongs on the beach. They need to get a picture.

Earl is stoking the bonfire in the pit that the boys made at the beginning of the summer, so the girls bother him to take their photo for a couple of minutes before he relents. They pose under the lights and hug each other, giggling when Bea turns her head and smushes her lips into Honey’s cheek. 

It’s then that the boys manage to migrate into the backyard. While other guests are heading towards the snack and drink table, or the bonfire, the guys are barreling into Honey and Bea’s photos. Jack grabs Bea’s waist and throws her over his shoulder, sticking his tongue out at the camera. Earl snaps a picture as Bea shrieks and laughs.

After minutes of wrangling, and convincing the boys to really smile, they get a couple of decent pictures together. Luke’s arm is thrown over Honey’s shoulder and Trevor’s arm is around her waist, holding her so tightly that their hips are touching.

Earl eventually gives up and hands the phone back to Bea, saying he’s not a photographer and he expects to be paid if they want any more pictures. Honey thinks he just wants to get back to the fire, which is every man’s happy place, it seems. There’s definitely a dichotomy here. So many of the men and husbands that came along to this party are mingling around the fire with their beer bottles in hand, while the women are all around. It makes Honey laugh, to be honest.

Trevor sticks by her side the whole night. Honey tells him that he can go hang out with Cole or dance around with Jack, but Trevor wraps his index finger around her pinkie and takes a sip from his beer instead. 

They talk with the ladies and with Joan, then with the guys from the Scruffy’s band. Honey challenges Andrew, the bass player, to a game of pool in the basement of the rental house. She still doesn’t win against him– maybe 2025 will be the year that she finally hustles Andrew. Arn, the lead singer of the band, takes her place and promises to “show her how it’s done,” which makes Honey roll her eyes and “hardy-har” at him. She and Trevor go back outside and join Bea around the bonfire.

The party started pretty late for most residents of Litchton. Honey and Bea didn’t meet up with the guys until after the Nook closed for the night, then they’d had about four drinks over two-ish hours, and then they came to the party. A lot of the older people from town, like Ada, have left the going away party with a final well-wish and a wave. Ada even offered to open the store tomorrow morning, so that Bea doesn’t have to leave early if she doesn’t want to. Bea had laughed and said she wouldn’t say no to that, but that she’ll have to make up for all the late starts during the school year.

They started with maybe fifty people, and that’s a generous estimate, but now they’re down to twenty or so. Sarah and Ethan are packing up the trailer bar for the night, but there’s plenty of beer leftover. Tyler ran out to go relieve the babysitter, while Jessie wanted to hang around a bit and talk to some of her old high school acquaintances that Honey has gotten to know over the years. Those four have probably been the oldest people at the party in the last half-hour.

Luke and Emma-Kate are chatting under the covered porch, feet in the hot tub. Jack and Cole are on the dance floor with a couple of Emma-Kate’s NC State friends. Honey doesn’t know how she convinced them to take a road trip to bumfuck western North Carolina during the first week of classes, but she has a feeling that the cute hockey stars might’ve played a factor. 

Both Bea and Quinn are seated around the fire with the townies. Lucía and her older brother Diego made it to the party and are sitting between Bea and Quinn, talking to the person to their side. Diego has a blunt between his fingers and keeps throwing looks at Griffin and his cop-buddy Joshua, who are also sitting around the fire. Diego is arching his eyebrow like The Rock towards the pair every couple minutes and making Griffin laugh to the point that he can’t even look in Diego’s direction anymore.

“You okay, sweet girl?” Honey asks, touching Bea’s shoulder. She’s staring into the fire and lifting her eyes to survey the group every once in a while or to look at Luce when they’re having a conversation.  

Bea puckers her lips at Honey and blows her a kiss. “Yeah, I’m good.” She pouts at Honey and continues to explain, “Coming down from the buzz, so I’m like hungover and drunk at the same time. I think I prefer morning hangovers. It’s also sad that the guys are leaving.” 

Trevor chuckles next to Bea and places his hand on the back of her folding chair. “You’re missing me already?”

Bea rolls her eyes. She knocks her head against his hand. “Not you, you take away my Honey time.”

“Here, Hon, you can have my chair,” Griffin offers, standing up and bringing the chair over to where they’re standing. 

“No, Griff, I’m okay standing and you had it first,” Honey says, waving him off. She doesn’t really want to sit, especially not if she’s taking Griffin’s chair. She’s just checking with Bea, and then she and Trevor are going to dance. Honey’s phone is connected to the speaker now, so all of her favorite music is playing. 

Griffin shakes his head and plants the chair next to Bea. “I’m going to grab another beer and use the bathroom anyway, don’t worry about it.”

“Griffin,” Bea sing-songs. “I know you’re trying to be gentlemanly–”

At that, Trevor’s hand slides around Honey’s hip possessively. 

“–but stop trying to force your chivalry on my best friend,” Bea finishes. A grin passes over her face after she ends her sentence.

Griffin laughs. He taps Bea’s forehead and she bites at Griffin’s finger when he pulls away. He leaves the circle and Bea shoots the hairband around her wrist at his retreating back.

Honey catches Quinn watching them, but he averts his eyes quickly when he sees that Honey is watching him. 

She feels like her stomach is sinking into the dirt. Honey tilts her head to the side, taking in Quinn’s shrunken posture, and sighs.

Trevor sinks into the chair Griffin left behind and pulls Honey onto his lap. She goes willingly, but leans forward and rests her elbows on the arm of Bea’s chair. 

“Are you going to talk to him?” Honey asks under her breath. “You’re both miserable.”

“I can’t,” Bea deflects in a low voice, matching Honey’s tone. She looks at Quinn and looks away just as quickly, biting the inside of her cheek.

Honey presses her lips together and blinks at Bea.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Bea complains, rolling her shoulder up and grimacing in blatant discomfort. “I feel bad, but it’s not…”

“Bea, you have to talk to him,” Honey tells her gently. “He’s not gone yet and you love him.”

Bea looks at her hands and rubs her thumb over the lines on her palm.

“He loves you,” Honey prods. She touches Bea’s elbow. “Finish the summer on a good note.”

“We’re broken up,” Bea reiterates to Honey, an unnecessary reminder of something Honey knows all too well. She was there with Bea before and after it happened. She knows.

“And that’s fine,” Honey says. “But neither of you want to be. You can’t just ignore him.”

Bea takes a deep breath and peeks at Quinn. “I don’t know what to say,” she whispers, still gazing in his direction. 

As if Quinn can feel the eyes on him, Honey sees him glance up and make eye contact with Bea. The corners of his lips turn up slightly in a reassuring smile before he looks away. 

She does the same. 

Honey tucks a lock of hair behind Bea’s ear. “You can do this.”

Trevor’s hands squeeze Honey’s hips and she gets the hint– he’s a little needy for attention. He managed to wait until the end of her and Bea’s conversation, which she’s happy about. It’s the bare minimum, and yet Trevor is impatient and bounces between one thing and another within minutes. He’s so sweet, and he gets rather restless quickly.

She wants to dance anyway. It’s time. Honey stands and pats Bea’s shoulder before she and Trevor approach the makeshift dance floor. She holds his hand and leads him there.

“You’re really good at crisis management,” Trevor says, turning Honey around so that they’re face to face. He puts his hands on her hips and holds her close. 

“I’ve had lots of practice,” Honey replies. She twines her arms around Trevor’s neck and knocks her nose against his. “Five years of it.”

Trevor hums and frowns, leaning in and stealing Honey’s lips a few times. “I hate remembering that,” he drawls. He pecks her lips again. “But you are very good at it. I like that you take care of people so well.”

Honey feels her cheeks go red and she shakes her head, looking over his shoulder at Jack and his brunette. 

Trevor kisses over Honey’s neck and her shoulder. They sway to the music, staying close and breathing in time with each other. 

Honey rests her temple against Trevor’s cheek. She laughs and corrects him when his hands fall from her hips to her ass. She can feel him smiling in a cheeky way after she tells him to move his hands back to a respectable place, although he obeys in an instant. 

A few minutes later, Trevor taps Honey’s waist with his thumb. “They’re dancing.”

Honey is confused for a minute, then her eyebrows lift towards her hairline. “Bea and Quinn?”

“Mhm,” Trevor hums. He spins them around in place so that Honey can creepily watch Bea and Quinn dancing behind them. 

Bea’s got a hand on Quinn’s shoulder, her other hand held in his out to her right side. They’ve got a relaxed-ballroom dance stance instead of the closer hold that Trevor and Honey have on each other. Quinn’s hand is on Bea’s waist and they seem to be talking, albeit in stilted conversation, as they move. 

Quinn’s fingers are tense, partially lifted off of Bea’s waist, like he’s not sure if he can touch her. They relax when Bea steps closer and lets her forearm rest on his bicep, faces close enough that they can probably feel each others’ breath. They look… happy to be like this, but hesitant.

Honey understands why Bea is so choked up every time she has to be near Quinn. After all, Honey doesn’t want Trevor to leave, but it’s inevitable. The same is true for Bea and Quinn. The summer and their time in Litchton was always going to end. Distance is a just a cruel snip of fate.

Honey gulps as they turn, catching the look in Bea’s glassy eyes, fastened on Quinn’s face. She’s biting her lower lip while she studies him. It’s like Quinn is telling her something, but she can’t hear him without remembering what it’s like to kiss him. She’s tormented by how much she likes him and taunted by the fact that it could never work.

Honey loses them in her sight as she and Trevor spin on the floor. Honey takes a sharp inhale and blinks, coming back to herself. 

“I don’t want to miss you in the fall,” Honey says suddenly, as if jolted awake. 

“What?” Trevor asks, thoroughly confused.

“When Bea and Quinn broke up, she said it made the most sense? I don’t think it makes sense for us,” Honey stammers, shaking her head. 

“What are you talking about?” Trevor asks.

Of course he’s confused, since they already decided that they’d be staying together after Trevor leaves, but Honey has to say what’s on her mind regardless. She distantly recognizes the song that has started to play– “A year from now, we’ll all be gone…”

“I never wanted to see Thomas again after we broke up, but I never want to be without you,” Honey says. “We can’t break up.”

“Honey, we’re not breaking up,” Trevor agrees. 

She understands what he meant now– when he came to the Nook for the first time, Trevor told her that he liked her name because it was like he got to call her something special, something sweet. It rubbed her the wrong way then, but hearing his tender tone now makes Honey want to weep. Her name only sounds right, like this, when he says it. “I’m in this. You’re stuck with me. God help you.”

His sincere words break a dam in Honey’s ribs, causing her to giggle. “You’re not going to make me beg?” She jabs back, grateful that he didn’t take her hurried words in a more serious, concerned, worried way. 

Trevor leans down to mouth over her pulse point. “Oh, every day of your life. Know how much you like it, gotta keep my girlfriend happy,” he mumbles along her skin. 

Honey lets out a contented sigh. She hugs Trevor closer. “Knew you were good for something.”

“That’s why you decided to keep me around, hm?” Trevor teases with a smile at the curve of her jaw. “The sex?”

“One of the reasons,” Honey teases back.

“Yeah? What are the others?” Trevor asks. He’s goading her into giving him compliments, but Honey is more than willing to comply.

Honey pulls him up to meet her lips. “I love you,” she says after the kiss.

Trevor grins, his chipped tooth that Honey is so fond of catching her eye. “I love you, too,” he replies and kisses her again.

“Holy shit, what did you two just say?” Cole demands suddenly from next to them. He’s dancing with Emma-Kate’s redheaded friend, to whom he bids goodbye with a squeeze of her hand and a wink. He turns back to Honey and Trevor. “When did this happen?”

“When did what happen,” Trevor asks, narrowing his eyes at Cole.

“The I Love You,” Cole explains, nodding between them pointedly. “Was that the first time?”

Honey blinks. She frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we’ve been betting on it for weeks,” Cole says. “If that’s the first time you’ve said I Love You, then Jack loses the bet and Quinn wins.”

Trevor scoffs. “That’s kind of funny. I wondered what those numbers on the back of the whiteboard were for.”

Honey’s jaw drops. The numbers that she noticed last week… they hadn’t meant anything to Honey, just doodles of something she assumed was hockey related. Now she gets it— it was their over/under on their relationship.

“He knows when we said I Love You for the first time,” Honey snaps incredulously, sucking her teeth. She looks out on the floor to find Jack. “He was in the room when I yelled about it to Bea.”

“Oh, cheater,” Cole complains, throwing a glance at Jack as well. He catches their gaze, then quickly pulls his brunette towards the hot tub with Luke and Emma-Kate. “That’s not fair. I thought you’d wait until the end of this year. Damn.” He whacks himself on the head gently. “I should’ve known, after all the sex dreams you had, Z. You said it first, didn’t you?”

Trevor is quick to change the subject. “So do we get a share of the money since you were betting on us?”

Honey turns to Trevor, on a completely separate page. “You had sex dreams about me?”

Trevor flushes red. 

“Oh yeah,” Cole laughs. “Why do you think he wanted to fuck you so bad on the boat on the Fourth of July?”

Honey cackles, throwing her head back. She smushes Trevor’s cheeks between her thumb and forefinger. “You’re such a boy. Sex dreams…”

Trevor groans in the back of his throat and takes Honey’s hand. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

Honey laughs again at his bizarre slang. Even though it’s a relatively common phrase, she somehow never expected to hear Trevor say it.

They go upstairs to his room, deserting the party and getting ready for bed. Trevor does his best to keep his hands on Honey as they change into their pajamas, brush their teeth, wash their faces, and climb into bed. Honey left her phone downstairs to keep playing the music, but she’s sure Bea will grab it when the party wraps up. She can still hear the music playing and some people chatting outside, their voices floating up over Trevor’s balcony and seeping through the sliding glass door, muffled to something intelligible.

They lay there, Honey pulled halfway onto Trevor’s chest so that she can listen to his heartbeat, for a while before dozing off. Honey almost falls asleep in Trevor’s arms, hearing him drone on and on about something that she stopped listening to a long time ago, when Quinn opens Trevor’s door without knocking. He’s lucky that they’re not in a compromising position. Honey is lucky that he’s not catching them in a compromising position– that would be humiliating.

“Honey,” Quinn says breathlessly. He stares at her and runs his fingers through his hair.

Honey sits up from where she was tucked against Trevor’s body. “What?” She asks. She's never seen Quinn like this, all flushed and frantic.

“It’s Bea, I don't know what to do,” Quinn tells her, tugging at his t-shirt anxiously. “Can you come?”

The fact that Honey is just in one of Trevor's big shirts and her panties doesn’t matter anymore. She has left Trevor’s side in a flash and goes down the hall ahead of Quinn, throwing his bedroom door open and not caring that it bangs off the wall. Bea is sitting in Quinn’s bed, wrapped in the sheets, face buried in her hands. 

“What happened?” Honey behests in a sharp voice, talking to Quinn while approaching the bed and brushing Bea’s hair with her fingers. 

“Just–” Quinn starts, but Bea’s voice leaks through the cracks of her fingers and Honey tunes the man out automatically, wanting to hear Bea’s side.

“It’s just not fair,” Bea whimpers. “How can it be like this and it still won’t work?”

“It can work,” Quinn insists. “Bea, I told you, we don’t have to–”

Bea’s shoulders start to shake and Honey wraps her arms around her. She narrows her eyes at Quinn. “You’re upsetting her,” she says. “You knew what you were getting into from the jump.”

“But I–” Quinn argues.

“No,” Honey states. She flashes him a look. “Quinn.”

“I didn’t mean to make you upset,” he says in a softer voice, directing his words at Bea. “Can we talk tomorrow?”

Bea lifts her head and eyes Quinn. It takes a moment, but she nods. 

“Are you sure?” Honey asks, wiping a tear off of Bea’s cheek. 

“We have to talk,” Bea says. “We… we have to talk.”

Honey nods slowly. “Okay,” she says tentatively. “Let’s go to Trev’s room.”

Still wrapped in Quinn’s sheet, they walk down the hall and go into Trevor’s bathroom. Honey gives Bea the shirt that she was wearing so that she can cover up, then goes back into Trevor’s room to grab a new one. She returns to Bea only seconds later and locks the bathroom door behind them.

“What happened?” Honey asks again after sitting in complete silence on the ledge of the jacuzzi for five minutes.

Bea takes a deep breath and scrubs her hands over her face. “Breakup sex,” she explains. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“But you wanted to,” Honey checks. “It wasn’t, like–”

Bea’s eyes grow wide. “God, no! No, Quinn wouldn’t do that. It was consensual for both of us and it was good sex, just sad, and I was overwhelmed afterward.”

Honey pinches her lips together, evaluating Bea. After a beat, she says, “You told him.”

Bea chews on a hangnail and avoids Honey’s eyes.

“Bea, look at me,” Honey says, then waits for her to do so. “You told him that you love him.”

Bea holds eye contact, then surveys the tile floor of the bathroom. Her voice is quiet when she speaks. “I shouldn’t have.”

Honey takes in a breath. “Bea…”

“Do you want to look into therapists with me tomorrow?” Bea asks, laughing lightly. She’s still got a sheen of tears in her eyes, but her question is genuine.

Honey lets a silence fall between them again, holding eye contact with Bea. She doesn’t know what to think, really. Honey thinks that Bea should go for it with Quinn, since they both care so much and are so happy when they’re together. They should see if they can make it. It’s the unknown and the chance that something could go wrong that Bea is afraid of, and Honey gets that. She feels the same way, but Bea is so dedicated to the things she cares about. If she wanted to commit to Quinn, they would make it, and if they don’t, at least they tried.

“I’ll see if Dr. Harris does online appointments,” Honey eventually agrees, referring to the therapist she used to see in Charlotte after Thomas leaked her nudes to the public. “We need to get these commitment issues in check, Bea. I want you to be happy. I want you to be able to be with Quinn, if that’s what you want.”

Bea’s smile is rueful. “That won’t happen,” Bea repeats for the umpteenth time. “If the Quinn thing wasn’t over before, it definitely is now. Crying after your ex-boyfriend just came inside you isn’t a very appealing thing.”

Honey covers her face. She’s at a loss for words. “Alright.”

Bea lets out a chuckle, but it trails off. “I don’t know what I’m going to say to him tomorrow.”

“Try not to have breakup sex again,” Honey suggests.

“Well, yes,” Bea agrees. “That… that probably wasn’t one of my better ideas. He’s just– I mean, you know how you kept thinking that you wanted Trevor, and then took it back, and the cycle kept repeating? Right at the beginning of the summer?”

Honey cringes. That seems so stupid, now. She was overthinking so much and it made her so anxious. “Yeah.”

“I just can’t stay away from Q,” Bea sighs. She forms the words slowly in her mouth. “I… love him.”

“I know,” Honey affirms. She offers a small smile at Bea, which the girl returns. “I’m here for you.”

“Wanna have a sleepover?” Bea asks, sounding almost like when they were children trying to scheme their parents into letting them spend more time together.

“Do we have to choreograph a dance to convince Trevor?” Honey teases.

“I think if you bat your eyelashes at him, he’ll agree.” Bea smiles and wipes her eyes one final time, some enthusiasm returning to her body.

Honey huffs out a laugh. “I’ll see what I can do,” she promises, standing and leaving the bathroom to ask Trevor for a sleepover.

Like Bea said, batting her eyelashes worked– plus a pouted bottom lip and a giggly “please.” All three of them sleep in Trevor’s king-sized bed that night, which might be the funniest thing Honey and Bea have ever done.

89:90 – TREVOR

Trevor’s final task of the day is to clean out the fridge. They split the house up into different areas for cleaning, although Jack is going to do the final run-though since he’s the neatest of all of them. Cole cleaned his room and the basement, Luke cleaned the bunk-bed room and the living room and balconies, Jack took his room and the hallways and stairwells and did a sweep of the outside, and Quinn had to do his room and the bathrooms. Trevor was left with his room, the kitchen, and the dining room. It was fair enough. 

Looking into the fridge, though, Trevor is intimidated by his final task. It’s no secret that the boys love to eat. They’re all in their early 20s, with Quinn finally turning 25 just next month and entering those frightening mid-20s where his frontal lobe will fully develop. Luke is a moose, the youngest of them and yet able to put away the most food, but the state of the fridge reflects all of their hunger and diet. 

Even though they’re leaving tomorrow, the fridge is still stuffed with food. There’s eggs and greek yogurt and a bunch of different kinds of cheese. They’ve got two gallons of milk on one of the shelves, one unopened and one half-drunk, which they’ve been throwing in protein shakes and fruity smoothies all summer. There are a couple of BlenderBottles near the milk, storing drinks that the guys never quite finished, and Trevor wilts at the idea of cleaning them out, not knowing how long they’ve been in there. 

Quinn has a bunch of uneaten meals he prepped last weekend, with quinoa and brown rise and whatever kind of meat he threw into the bowl that day. There’s chicken and turkey stuffed away in massive ziplock bags for the guys to take out and throw onto a sandwich or into a wrap whenever they feel like. There’s a tupperware of lean ground beef from when Luke made tacos a few days ago, which he’s been slowly picking at. They have stacks of boxes of cold cuts for sandwiches, none of which they’ll be able to finish. It’s a waste. Trevor realizes that they should’ve started thinking about how much food they have last week– and trying to eat it all until there’s nothing left by the end of the week– but they didn’t. Plus, they’ve got all the leftover food from the party last night, and a bunch of loose cans and bottles of beer on the next shelf, taking up space.

The boxes for veggies and fruits are no better. Quinn bought a bunch of vegetables for his salads and bowls– carrots, celery, cucumber, peppers, spinach, kale, lettuce, avocado… it’s a nightmare. Trevor doesn’t even know how they all fit into the bin. The next one with their fruit for smoothies is no better, packed to the brim, and there’s a thing of hummus sitting atop the carton of blueberries. It doesn’t belong there, but Trevor guesses that there was just no room anywhere else.

The shelves on the doors house a bunch of items that he can probably leave in the rental house for the owners to decide their fate. It’s a bunch of sauces, vingaigrettes and salad dressings, a jar of pickles and a couple of jars of jam, ketchup, mustard, and mayo. In a plastic cup, they’ve got a bunch of packets of soy sauce that came with the Chinese food they ordered months ago, and Trevor isn’t even sure you’re supposed to refrigerate soy sauce packets. He’s pretty sure those could’ve stayed in the pantry.

He wishes he could throw the meat and the fruit in the freezer, although that would only keep it fresh for so long, but the freezer is equally stuffed with items. Trevor won’t mess with any of that– the owners can eat the frozen pizzas or the frozen chicken and he doesn’t have to worry about that. It might be nice to come back to a relatively full freezer, knowing that you won’t have to go and buy more stuff anytime soon. Plus, the frozen food won’t go bad. It’ll be fine.

He kind of wishes that Honey had told him about the surprise party, although he loved how surprising it was. He wore his sweater from Scarlett this morning until it got too hot to wear in the August heat. If he’d known, he could’ve asked her to tell the people to use the items in their fridge. He’s sure that the ladies could’ve whipped something up with the random and nutritious items in their kitchen. At their base, the food doesn’t make for “party food,” but Trevor has faith in the ladies. They’ve attended decades of church potlucks and homecomings and can make something out of nothing, like grandmother magic. 

Ugh. But now he has to clean.

His only consolation is that Honey and Bea are coming over for dinner tonight, so they’ll be able to put away two more servings of food than if it was just the boys in the house. Unfortunately, Bea won’t be able to help Trevor toss food in the trash since she’s supposed to have a big conversation with Quinn– they’re still not going to stay together when the boys leave, to Trevor’s knowledge– but Honey will be around to help. He gets to spend more time with his girlfriend doing domestic things. This must be where the phrase ‘domestic bliss’ comes from.

He’s not looking forward to the months that he’ll endure without seeing Honey in person. His game schedule came out a little while ago, back in July, and he’s been trying to pinpoint which games Honey might want to come to. At the very earliest, he could see her at the end of October, when he plays in Jersey for the first time this season. He thinks that she, and Bea if she wants to come, might get a kick out of seeing Trevor and Jack and Luke on the ice together. Quinn comes to California in the first week of November, so maybe she’d want to come to that. She could come to Montréal with him in early December to face off with Cole, but Trevor doesn’t know if Honey has a passport. He needs to ask before he gets tickets for her. He’ll definitely see her over Christmas, since he promised to see her parents again over the holidays, and he’d love to spend New Year’s together. The Devils play in California on the last day of the year, so they could spend that time together. At the very latest, Trevor will see her January 12th when he plays in Raleigh for the first time this season.

If it takes that long to see Honey, they would spend about five months apart. Trevor detests that. He sees what his teammates mean now when they talk about how it’s hard to be apart from their girlfriends and wives and families.

They play the Canes again in March, but in Anaheim. Trevor will certainly ask Honey to come out for that one. Who knows, she might become a die-hard Canes fan now that she has a reason to pay attention to hockey. Her parents are big NC State fans, having both gone there– and wanting their daughter to continue the tradition– so the family has a stake in Raleigh. If Honey doesn’t learn to love the Ducks for her boyfriend, because of her hatred of California, then she ought to become a fan of her hometown team. 

Who knows? Maybe, a couple of years down the line, if Honey isn’t willing to move to California with Trevor… he’ll try to broker a deal with the Canes and get a trade. He’ll be a free agent again in 2026. Anything is possible.

Trevor closes the fridge and takes a lap around the kitchen. Once he makes it back in front of the refrigerator, there’s nothing left to do but open the doors. 

He takes another lap.

He rolls his neck back, trying to crack it the next time he makes it in front of the fridge. He jumps up and down and stretches his body, focusing on his arms and shoulders. Trevor isn’t exactly sure why he’s so intimidated by the idea of cleaning out this fridge, but he is. He lets out three quick, harsh breaths, and sets his hands on the door handles.

“Why are you so weird?”

Trevor jumps, his shoulders flying up towards his earlobes. “Jesus,” he curses. “You can’t fucking sneak up on me like that, Bea.”

She’s got a perturbed look on her face, looking at him judgmentally. Her hair is in two messy braids on either side of her face, sunglasses sat atop her head and keeping her flyaways out of her face. She squints at him. The judgment is whatever, but Trevor is more concerned with the fact that she’s alone.

“Where’s my girlfriend?” he asks.

“Our girlfriend,” Bea corrects snarkily.

“You’re not dating her,” Trevor sneers. He goes a bit farther than he’s supposed to without thinking. “You’re not dating anyone.”

Bea rolls her eyes and sticks out her tongue. “She’s upstairs, talking to Quinn before I go up there and talk to him myself.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh,’” Bea mocks. “What are you doing?”

“Cleaning out the fridge,” Trevor answers her. 

Bea makes a face. “Why?”

“Because we leave tomorrow?” Trevor sasses in the same tone.

“Don’t get rid of this shit,” Bea tells him. “I’ll take the milk and bring it to the Nook for our shitty coffee maker. Ada will take your ripe fruit, or Honey will. I’ll put the deli meat in the fridge at the Nook too, I forget to make lunch all the time and I always need to improvise with the nothingness we have. Sarah will take the rest of the unopened cheese so she can pair it with wines at tastings. Earl will take just about all of the meat you have.”

She says it so simply and Trevor stares at her. 

Bea starts to laugh. “You didn’t think about the people around you? Did you think you’d be able to throw all of this food away and get away with it? Honey would’ve killed you for wasting so much.”

Trevor scowls and looks away from the girl, focusing his attention on the refrigerator again. 

“Come on, Trevor, don’t be a pouty baby,” Bea giggles. “At least you don’t have to be the shame of Litchton, throwing away all of your groceries like the spoiled, rich, professional athlete you are.”

“You’re kind of a bitch,” Trevor tells her. 

Bea shrugs. “I don’t have to take the food if you don’t want me to.”

His scowl turns into a glower. “You can’t take it back now.”

Bea smirks to herself and watches as Trevor opens the fridge and starts to sort through all of the old protein shakes and fruit smoothies that need to be removed. Trevor sees her perk up in the corner of his eye and she steps forward, reaching past him and grabbing a slender aluminum can and sets it on the counter. “You might want to keep that for yourself.” She’s got a stupid little smile on her face.

Trevor shoos her away and snatches the bottle back, moving it to the counter on the other side of the fridge. He sneaks a peek at it when Bea has dropped onto the couch in the living room and thrown her feet up on the freshly-cleaned table. He rolls his eyes– it’s the can of Reddi-Whip Cole bought last week after Vera gave him a peach cobbler for his help with inventory on Tuesday. Bea thinks she’s hilarious.

“He’s ready for you,” Honey’s voice says, floating down the hallway. Bea jumps up from the couch and goes down the hall, seeming to stop in front of Honey so that she can add, “Don’t have breakup sex with him again.”

Trevor snorts and closes the fridge door on his head as best he can to hide his laughter. Honey nudges his knee forward until it buckles once she nears Trevor, a reproachful frown on her face. “Don’t laugh at her. Things are hard.”

That’s what she said. Trevor sucks on his teeth and makes eye contact with Honey, trying not to laugh even more. 

She moves like she’s about to bop him in the balls, so Trevor instinctively covers his junk with his hands and distances himself from Honey. She scoffs a laugh and takes his spot in front of the fridge. “What are we making for dinner?”

Trevor takes it as an invitation and plasters himself to Honey’s back, pressing his soft cock against her behind. “I dunno,” he says, wrapping his arms around her waist. “I know what dessert is, though.”

Honey makes a surprised sound that comes out more like a squawk, mouth dropping open and body squirming in Trevor’s arms. “You horny motherfucker,” she rebukes.

Trevor tightens his grip and laughs under his breath, weaseling his way closer to Honey and kissing her neck. “It’ll be fun. C’mon, sweet girl, I leave tomorrow. I need to have you in my bed after dinner.”

She rolls her eyes but goes lax in Trevor’s grip. “Well, when you put it that way,” she concedes sarcastically. Her hand comes up to Trevor’s hair, scratching his scalp, and he hums into her pulse point, leaving peck after peck on the beating vein. “Let’s get this fridge fixed and make some dinner, then we can do… something sweet.”

Trevor is too busy hearing the consent from Honey to fuck all night to hear the lightbulb going off above her head. He’s smiling into her shoulder.

Honey is good at organizing– Trevor has said it before, but he has to repeat it now. She manages the refrigerator so well, creating sections for each person that will receive the food. Honey says that she’ll borrow Earl’s truck tomorrow and his big cooler to store the food, trucking a load to the Nook while the boys pack the cars. She promises that she’ll be back by the time Trevor leaves, not that he’d leave without putting off the goodbye as long as he can. 

He really has to leave by 11, since that’s when checkout is, but Trevor might have to get lunch with Honey if Cole allows him to. He’s flying out of D.C. pretty late, around 9 o’clock, and it’s about a six and a half hour drive. Surely he’d be okay with grabbing lunch. It’ll be tight, but they can make it with time to spare. In his heart, Trevor knows that lunch is unlikely, but he’s trying to convince himself that it can work logistically. 

Honey gives him all of the used dishes to clean while she handles the food, until there’s nothing left for Trevor to do but help. Even then, she hands him leftovers to dig into and finish off before she trusts him with sorting items in her system. Trevor doesn’t mind– he’s not as bottomless as Luke, but he can put away a good chunk of a buffet.

Bea and Quinn join Honey and Trevor downstairs as they finish sorting food. Trevor manages to read the room this time and he shares a look with Honey. There’s a thick tension between Bea and Quinn, but they’re shouldering their way through it. Trevor catches both of them casually touching each other as the foursome moves around the kitchen to prepare dinner. There’s a hand on the small of Bea’s back to squeeze behind her and a hand on Quinn’s bicep when Bea leans past him to grab a knife from the block to chop up a cucumber for the salad. They must’ve come to some conclusion– or a middle-ground that worked better for them than the original breakup on Tuesday.

The boys wander into the kitchen at different intervals. By the time dinner is served, they’re all cramped together in the tiny space and chatting like this isn’t the last time they’ll have a night like this for… who knows how long.

It’s bittersweet. While Trevor is having the time of his life eating pounds and pounds of food with his best friends, his girlfriend, and Bea, he’s also anxious to go upstairs. Honey is in no rush to leave the table. 

They sit there for hours, long after the food has gone cold. They continue eating this whole time and manage to get rid of a lot of the food Trevor was stressing about. Honey holds his hand on top of the table and strokes the back of his fingers with her thumb. 

The guys and Bea leave Honey and Trevor to clean up the kitchen again after cooking and eating– “The kitchen was your realm, dude, why should we have to clean up your shit?” was their argument– and they go downstairs to watch a movie in the basement. 

Honey sits on the counter and kicks her feet, watching Trevor dry the dishes and put them away. When he’s done, and about to grab a beer from their supply, Honey beckons Trevor over. “C’mere, Trev,” she requests, leaning forward to kiss him when he steps between her legs. Her hands fist in the hem of his shirt, tugging. “You should take this off.”

Trevor’s stomach swoops. “Yeah?” He lets his hand trail along the neckline Honey’s tank top, caressing the soft skin of her breasts. 

“I had a funny idea,” Honey divulges sneakily. 

“Mm, that sounds fun,” Trevor hums. He slides his left hand down to palm Honey’s tit and gives it a squeeze.

She laughs. “I didn’t even tell you what it is yet,” she says.

“All I know is that you want me to take my shirt off and we’re kissing,” Trevor says. “No matter what your idea is, it’ll be fun.”

Honey mutters something that sounds suspiciously like ‘horndog’ before taking things into her own hands and pulling Trevor’s shirt up and over his head. Her hands brush over his bare skin, fingers dancing along the tattoo on his ribs before her thumb brushes his nipple. One of her hands leaves him, but Trevor is shivering from the gentle touch on his chest.

Her tongue is flat against his and Trevor moans before there’s a hissing sound and something cool touches Trevor’s stomach.

He pulls back from Honey and looks down, starting to laugh breathlessly when he sees the dollop of whipped cream on his sternum. “That is a funny idea,” Trevor says. “But I think you already had your chance to cover me in whipped cream.”

“So long ago,” Honey points out. She juts out her bottom lip and blinks innocently at Trevor. “You don’t want me to put a little cream on the tip of your dick and lick it off?”

Trevor is bombarded by an image of Honey on her knees, cheeks hollowed and lips wrapped around his cock. He struggles to wade through it and make it back to reality. “That’s… after my turn,” he stammers.

Honey pouts deepens, but Trevor will not fall for this. When Honey first licked whipped cream off of his body on Cole’s dare, the images of that plagued Trevor for days. He thought of all the ways he could get her back and now that he has the chance, he wants to make it even. He takes the can of whip from her hand and takes the appendage with his other, helping Honey off the counter and leading her upstairs.

“Get strippin’, Charlotte,” Trevor jokingly commands once he has his bedroom door locked behind them. He leans back against the wood and sprays a mouthful of whipped cream onto his tongue, swallowing the sweet treat as he watches her bite her tongue and drag her tank top up her body. She pops the button of her daisy dukes and lets them drop to the floor, stepping out of them and marching over to Trevor.

She kisses him against the door, her fingertips digging into his waistband like they did all of those weeks ago. “Don’t call me that,” she tells him after kissing him stupid. 

Trevor’s head is hazy from the movement of her lips, so he nods an agreement before she even finishes talking. 

Honey walks backward, pulling Trevor forward by the fabric around his abdomen, and kisses him over and over. 

Trevor can smell vanilla, Honey’s signature scent, on her skin and can almost taste cherries on her lips. He shakes the can of whipped cream absently, his palm splayed over the tattoo above Honey’s behind. He should cover that in whipped cream. 

It’s tempting, but he has something else he’d rather cover in the delicate white dessert. Her nipple piercings have been healed for years, and she once licked this stuff off of his nipples, and he wants to repay the favor. It’s his first order of business, actually. 

He goes down with Honey when she settles onto the bed, laying on her back. Trevor parts her lips with his tongue and nibbles on her bottom lip, making sure there’s not a part of her mouth that he hasn’t explored before he pulls away and tries to decide what pattern he wants to draw on Honey’s body.

He must take too long, since Honey opens her mouth and resumes her normal sassy, borderline bratty bossiness. “Maybe we should do my idea first, since you can’t seem to think of anyth–”

Trevor leans over her and sprays a mouthful of whip onto her tongue. “Quiet, you.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Honey replies, a little muffled. She swallows and licks some whip off of her upper lip. 

Trevor takes to decorating her body before she can tell him to hurry up again. He draws two arches over her breasts, then laughs to himself and connects the arches to make a heart, the base of which reaches her belly button. He draws two eyes on the heart– two dollops of the white substance on her nipples– and a curved line that is the heart’s smile. He adds two little legs to the heart and sprays a line above Honey’s waistband, creating a ground for the heart to stand on. 

Honey watches him with a tiny smile on her face, fond and sweet. “You’re a goof,” she eventually says when Trevor places the can on his nightstand. 

“I’m an artist,” Trevor corrects. He carefully makes his way on top of Honey, trying not to ruin his masterpiece before he can lick it away. He decides to start with the heart’s smile, sucking up the treat there as a precursor to the more erotic zones he decided to cover. 

Honey laughs when he moves to the heart’s legs, bracketing the pudge on her stomach that he likes to rest his head on so much when she sits on the couch and reads a book. “That tickles,” she tells Trevor. 

He digs his fingers into her sides at that, making her squirm and giggle. All the while, he continues licking the cream away.

His tongue trails along her hips, dangerously close to her pussy, cleaning up the line that he placed there. Honey’s breath gets a bit deeper when he laps at her skin so far south, yet too north for her liking. He can tell that she’s feeling it, understanding how sexy it was when she did this to him at the beginning of the summer, just because of the way her squirming morphs into something more subtle and needy. 

He ignores the twitch of her hips upward, just placing a hand on her hip and holding her down with gentle pressure. He goes back up to the body of the heart, kissing just below Honey’s belly button before licking up the left side of the heart. He goes up her torso, around her boobs, forcing himself not to indulge in the dots on her tits just yet, and back down to where he started. 

Slowly, achingly slow, Trevor kisses the middle of Honey’s stomach, up the line between her boobs, and to her clavicle. His thumbs rise from her waist and hip to her ribs, pressing into the thin skin mere millimeters from the curves of her breasts. 

“Gonna fuck you after I finish cleaning you up,” Trevor tells her. 

“Hm, you’d better,” Honey muses. “Feels like I’m about to explode, Trev.”

“Imagine how I felt after you left me hanging,” Trevor teases. 

“You rubbed yourself raw, didn’t you?” Honey asks.

Trevor laughs and nips at her neck. “Mean.”

“But true?”

“Mean,” Trevor repeats.

“Definitely true.”

He doesn’t respond, although she’s on the right track. If the boys hadn’t been on stakeout after the dare, he probably would’ve jerked it until his dick fell off. That’s how hot it was when she dropped to her knees and made her way up his body. Instead of answering Honey, Trevor hovers with his mouth just above one of her nipples. He flicks his tongue and takes off the top of the dollop of whipped cream, avoiding contact with Honey’s peaks. He does the same thing to the other, waiting to hear Honey open her mouth to tell him what to do before he covers her nipple with his mouth and damn near bites down, sucking and licking all the whipped cream off of her sensitive skin until there’s nothing but sweetened saliva cooling against her piercings. Even after cleaning both of her nipples off until they’re pristine again, Trevor alternates between them, showering them with attention and hearing Honey grow louder and louder each time he bites down.

“Trev, get your cock inside me,” Honey requests, twirling his hair around her fingers and stroking his neck. She stifles a snort, although Trevor hears it anyway. “Put your cream inside me.”

Trevor muffles his own laughter in her neck. “Good one,” he tells Honey sarcastically. “Very sexy.”

Honey giggles and scratches her nails down Trevor’s back. “It was, wasn’t it?”

“Totally.” Trevor nods in an overexaggerated way. He throws himself down on the bed next to Honey, laying on his back and lifting his hips to pull his sweats and underwear down. 

Honey rolls onto her side and pushes herself up onto her elbows, kissing the side of Trevor’s face before throwing her leg over his lap and straddling him. 

“Ooh,” Trevor muses, bringing his hands to Honey’s behind and palming her asscheeks. “You gonna ride me?”

“Just for the first round,” Honey replies. “Then I’m laying down and you get to do all the work.”

Trevor’s retort fails to sound from his mouth when Honey rolls her hips against his, her wet folds molding around the length of Trevor’s cock. His eyes probably grow bigger from the spark that ignites in his belly when her entrance drags along the ridges of his shaft. 

“You look pretty like this,” Honey compliments. She plants her hands on his stomach and grinds down again. “Under me.”

“You look prettier under me,” Trevor one-ups her, digging his fingers into her ass and spreading the cheeks. He bucks his hips up and makes sure his cockhead brushes her swollen clit. “But I love how you look on top.”

“You like seeing my boobs bounce.”

Trevor grins, showing his teeth to Honey. 

She laughs and hovers above him, wrapping a hand around Trevor’s cock and lining him up with her core. She lowers herself, biting her bottom lip and letting out a sigh as she fills herself. 

Trevor loves the weight of her body settling against him. It makes him feel even more surrounded by Honey, even more under her thumb. When she’s on top of him, the gravity of their position makes him feel so much better. Her insides are hot and gummy and Trevor can feel her slick pooling around his base once she starts to move. 

Her eye contact is insane, making Trevor squirm against the mattress. Her eyes almost affect him more than the grip her pussy has on his cock– evaluating Trevor, scrutinizing him, watching his every move. Trevor’s heartbeat only increases as she rocks her hips and milks the precum from his member. 

“You’re so beautiful,” Trevor mumbles.

Honey lets a sweet smile pass over her face and she tilts her head. “Aren’t you a sweetheart,” she says, pinching his sides gently before leaning forward to kiss him. 

Trevor’s hands travel from her ass to her waist, her back, and her tits. He moves her hair out of her face and touches her jaw as she sucks on his bottom lip. 

“I love you,” Honey breathes into Trevor’s mouth. 

A blurt of precum travels up Trevor’s cock and leaks into Honey’s insides. He has a physical reaction to her words– he’s so down bad, but God, he wouldn’t change anything. “I love you too.”

“I’m sad you have to go,” Honey says.

“I wish I could stay with you all the time,” Trevor replies. 

“I’m glad you came.”

Trevor groans when she clenches down on his length and starts to bounce faster. “Fuck,” he grits out. “That’s what she said.”

Honey closes her eyes and rests her forehead against Trevor’s. “If I weren’t so close to coming, I’d be so mad at you for ruining this moment.”

Trevor chuckles and lifts his chin so that their lips align. He thrusts his hips up in time with Honey’s movements, trying to match her rhythm as best he can. He soaks up the sounds that Honey makes, muffled and longing for more. She’s so tight and Trevor can feel how badly she wants him to fill her up.

He doesn’t make her wait long– once her tongue fills his mouth rather than his tongue entering hers, Trevor feels his balls tighten and he can’t hold back any longer. His cum spurts from his slit, cock twitching inside Honey as his pleasure explodes inside of her. 

Honey’s hips slow and she perches atop him. Her thumb sweeps across his lower lip, cleaning it of her saliva. She smirks at Trevor and removes herself from his lap, laying against the pillows and reaching for the can of whipped cream on the nightstand. 

Trevor watches her with curious, but confused eyes. She didn’t come yet. What is she doing? He picks up his head in surprise when she turns the can of whip on herself, spraying a bit of the cream onto her pubic mound.

Honey sets the can aside and grins at Trevor, proud of herself for her idea. “Dessert?” she asks.

Trevor laughs out loud and rolls onto his stomach, between her legs, and presses a kiss to her clit before licking all of the whipped cream away. He’ll get to the other kind shortly.

90:90 – HONEY

Honey sits on the edge of the tailgate of Earl’s truck, legs swinging beneath her. The polaroids in her pocket are a dead weight, burning a hole against her side. She’s nervous to give them to Trevor, so she decided to wait until the last minute, which is approaching any second. She’s just waiting for the boys to return from their final sweep of the house, making sure they didn’t forget to pack anything, which Honey is sure they did. There’s got to be something in that massive house that one of the boys forgot. 

Bea sits next to her. She twiddles her thumbs. They’ve already done the food-drops that Honey promised yesterday, stuffing fridges full of the boys’ food. They had to use both of their bodyweights to close the fridge in the Nook, since it was filled to the brim. 

The boys have packed up both of the cars. The Hughes boys are taking the big car to Charlotte and flying out from that airport, checking their many bags and landing in Detroit sometime this afternoon. Cole and Trevor are driving to D.C. tonight, where Cole will fly out, and then Trevor will drive the rest of the way to his hometown in New York tomorrow. He’ll spend about a week there, hanging out with his family, before he heads back to Anaheim. 

They stayed up late last night, talking and making out until two in the morning. Honey just didn’t want the night to end, since it meant that Trevor would be leaving when they wake up. They showered together this morning, having one last round before Trevor goes. He’s a horndog, but Honey is just as bad. She’s about to be without her boyfriend consistently for nine months and now that she’s got sex back– and she’s enjoying it very much– it’s not fun to give up. 

The front door opens and Jack leads the way out. He has a plastic bag in hand, which holds a bit of leftover laundry. Honey bets he’s going to try and stuff it in his backpack, which really can’t fit anything else without the seams ripping. Cole has a pair of rollerskates draped over the back his neck, the laces acting like a loose scarf. 

Honey swallows hard, feeling a lump in her throat grow. It was so nice to have them here this summer. She got really close to each of the boys and she’s sad to see them go, devastated that a summer like this probably won’t ever happen again for them. Of course, Trevor plans to come back next year, but the Hughes boys will stay in Michigan and Cole might do the same. She hopes that he will come to visit, but Honey knows that Quinn won’t unless he and Bea get back together, and if Quinn won’t, then the other brothers won’t visit. It’s sad. 

Bea hops down from the tailgate and Honey follows suit. The air is heavy as the boys approach.

“So this is it,” Cole says. He’s smiling, but there’s a twinge of sadness written into the smile. He reaches for Bea and pulls her into a hug, then pulls Honey into the mix. He squeezes them tight, an arm wrapped around each of their shoulders while the girls hug his waist. “You guys are the best. If you ever want to visit Montréal…”

Honey pulls away and tweaks Cole’s cheek. “Thanks, Coley. You’re always welcome back, you know. If hockey doesn’t work out for you, I think Vera would hire you on the spot, even if Earl thinks you’re too little to work in hardware.”

Cole puffs out his chest and kisses Bea’s cheek before she reluctantly lets go of him. “Earl would be lucky to have a spring chicken like me on board.” He grows more serious. “But really,” he says. “This was a great summer. I’m glad we met you both. I don’t think we would’ve made it a month without you.”

“I don’t think you could’ve made it a week,” Honey replies and squeezes his hand one more time before he heads over to Trevor’s car, opening the trunk without all of the bags spilling out and tucking his skates away.

Luke comes up to Honey next, bending down to encircle his arms around her waist and tuck his face into the crook of her neck while he hugs her. “You have to come see us when we’re in Raleigh,” Luke says, his voice bordering on distress. 

Honey pets through Luke’s hair, relishing in the way the curls feel against her fingers. “Just send me a text and I’ll be on my way,” Honey promises. 

Luke tightens his arms around Honey’s waist. “I never had a big sister, but if I did, I think she’d be a lot like you.”

Honey just about bursts into tears on the spot. “Oh, Lukey,” she simpers miserably before hiding her face in his shoulder. “I would have loved to have a little brother like you.”

Luke exhales shakily and pulls back. He sniffs like he’s welling up, but there isn’t any mist in his eyes, unlike Honey, who is nearly spilling over. He kisses the top of Honey’s head and pats her shoulder with a clumsy hand before Jack switches places with him.

His goodbye hug is energetic, sweeping Honey off of her feet and spinning her around. “Stop crying,” he tells her. “It’s not like we’re dying. You’ll see us again, especially if you keep this idiot around.” He jerks his head in Trevor’s direction and grins widely at Honey. 

“Hey,” Trevor complains just for the principle of being annoyed, since Honey can tell there is no heat behind it. 

She chuckles and fixes Jack’s baseball cap. “I expect you’ll be texting me?”

“Every time I miss you,” Jack replies. 

“So as soon as you get in the car,” Honey teases. She tucks a strand of hair behind Jack’s ear and presses a loud smooch on his cheek. “I’ll miss you too, J.”

“We play the Canes like four times before January,” Jack says. “Once before Thanksgiving and once after Christmas. You’ll be in town for both, right?”

“‘Course I will. I never go anywhere,” Honey says. “Send me some tickets so I don’t have to pay for them and I’ll go to the game for you guys.”

“Cheap-ass,” Jack accuses. He pulls Honey in a second time and rocks back and forth on his feet, swinging them from side to side. “Thanks for being my buddy this summer.”

“You guys are all thanking me and Bea like we did anything at all,” Honey says with a crooked smile. “All we were was nice to you.”

“You didn’t have to be,” Jack tells her. He squishes her cheek. “But you were. I’ll call you soon, okay?”

“Text me when you land in Michigan.” Honey offers her pinkie to Jack and he takes it with his. He kisses the tip of his thumb and tells Honey to do the same. She complies, then she lets him go. 

It seems like she and Bea have the same idea, leaving their respective boys for their last goodbye. Trevor and Bea go around the side of the truck, talking quietly, and Quinn leans against the end of the tailgate with Honey. 

They stand in silence for a few moments, aware of each others’ presence but not feeling any pressure to speak– until Quinn does.

“I’m jealous that you guys have chosen to stay together,” Quinn says quietly.

Honey sighs and takes Quinn’s right hand in both of hers. “I’m sorry that y’all aren’t.”

Quinn inhales and presses his lips together. He looks down at the ground and scuffs his shoe against the gravel in the driveway. He forces a smile onto his face and lifts Honey’s hand in his to kiss the back of it. 

Honey takes one arm and wraps it around Quinn’s waist, resting her head on his shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger, Quinn,” Honey murmurs.

Quinn nods. “Love you, Honey.”

“Love you too, Quinn. You’re a really great guy. I’m glad you were Bea’s first boyfriend.” Honey pats his side and distances herself from him. “Have a safe drive.”

“Next summer, you guys should come to Michigan,” Quinn offers. “We’d love to show you our town, since you showed us yours. You can stay as long as Ada will let you.”

Honey nods. “I’ll let you know closer to that date,” Honey informs him. “But I’m sure that would be nice. You have my number. Like I told Jack, you can text or call any time you want.”

“Not sure if Bea would like that,” Quinn responds with a shrug. “But I’ll keep it in mind. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

Honey chuckles. “I know too much about you to never see you again.”

Quinn has a funny look on his face, somewhere between bemused and sorrowful. He nods and pulls Honey in for a long hug, nose pressed against her hair. They stay like that until Trevor breaks it up. 

“Alright, alright,” he says with a haughty, macho tone. “Break it up. Get off my girlfriend, Hughes.” He pulls them apart with play force.

Bea stands behind him, laughing quietly. Her arms are crossed over her chest and she’s definitely been crying. She’s a sensitive girl, which Honey loves about her. 

Quinn notices almost immediately and goes to her, taking Bea’s hand. “Let’s get this over with,” Honey hears Quinn say. It makes Bea huff out a little laugh and they go to the side of the truck again, where Bea just was with Trevor.

Trevor touches Honey’s waist and pulls her close, their lower halves touching. “I love you,” he says earnestly. He peppers kisses over Honey’s face until she’s giggling and trying to get away from him. 

She squeals and puts her hand between their faces. “Stop,” she laughs. “I love you too. It won’t be too long before we see each other, you know. I don’t think you’ll make it a month without asking me to fly out because you miss me.”

“I’m going to injure myself on purpose so I can come back here and have you take care of me,” Trevor jokes.

Honey slaps his shoulder. “Don’t joke about that, I don’t want you to get hurt,” she says. “It would make me sad.”

Trevor’s smile softens. “Well, I wouldn’t want to make you sad.” He looks at Honey for an extra beat, then cradles her face in his hands and kisses her gently.

It’s really sweet. They’ve never really kissed like this, soft, chaste, and savoring it. Honey fists the fabric of Trevor’s t-shirt in her hands, focusing on his taste and how he moves. Yeah, they probably will see each other in a month, but she will probably forget how he kisses by then. It’ll be like new when she goes to California– ugh, she has to go to California of all places to see her boyfriend because he has an intense job– and Honey can’t wait.

When his hand goes to her butt and gropes her asscheek, she breaks their kiss. 

“Come on, one last feel,” Trevor requests. He’s got a shit-eating grin on his face because he knows that Honey will let him. 

“I have something better for you, you freak,” Honey tells him. She shoves her hand into her pocket and curls her fingers around the polaroids, fishing them out and pushing the stack into Trevor’s chest. 

He’s excited at the prospect of getting a gift, delight written on his face. He covers Honey’s hand, which covers the polaroids, and takes a peek at the first picture in the stack. His mouth automatically drops open and his face goes slack. He stares at the picture, looks at Honey, and doubles back down on the picture.

Honey feels a creeping shiver pass between her shoulderblades, whispering doubt into the back of her mind. You’ve given these pictures to him and it’s the start of the end, the voice purrs. Honey pushes it back, watching Trevor’s reaction instead. He’s terrible at hiding things on his face and Honey believes that if he’s going to abuse the boudoir pictures she just gave him, she’ll be able to see it in his expression.

“Holy shit, Hon,” Trevor says. He shoves the pictures back into her hands. “I can’t take these. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

It’s not the reaction Honey expected. She furrows her eyebrows together and asks genuinely, “Do you not… like them?”

Trevor’s eyes are wide. “No, God, no, you look so good and I like them, like, a lot, but because of what happened with Thomas–”

“Oh,” Honey says. “It’s– I wanted to show you that I trust you,” she explains. She pushes the pictures back at him. “I made them for you, I want you to have them.”

“I don’t,” Trevor struggles to say what he means, it seems. He looks at the pictures again, unable to help it, and lifts his eyes to the sky. He hides the pictures against his chest. “I don’t need them, if that’s what you think.”

“No.” Honey puts her hands on Trevor’s lovehandles and kisses him. “I want you to take them. They’re yours. Please take them.”

Trevor grinds his teeth, but weighs her words in his mind. After a moment, he shoves the pictures in his shorts pocket and wraps his arms around her shoulders. “You’re so special to me, Honey.”

“You’re overwhelming,” Honey replies, unable to find a word to describe how she feels about Trevor except for ‘overwhelming.’ He is. It’s not a bad thing, not at all. Honey adores Trevor.

Trevor’s mouth touches Honey’s forehead and stays there. She burrows her nose against his clavicle and breathes in deep. 

Trevor’s car horn sounds twice by Cole’s hand.

Trevor takes a deep breath and sighs. “I have to go,” he whispers.

Honey loosens her grip around his middle and kisses him one more time. “I’ll see you soon.”

It feels momentous when Trevor lets go of her and steps away. She’s not crying, but she feels like she could start any second. 

Bea joins Honey at the top of the driveway. Trevor’s car leads, honking far too jubilantly for the sadness weaving between Honey and Bea’s bodies like a cat brushing against their legs. The Hughes boys’ car follows after, and then they’re gone. Honey still feels their presence like a ghost, even as she and Bea push up the tailgate of Earl’s truck and head out themselves.

EPILOGUE – TREVOR

He thinks about her all the time. California is warm, but Trevor finds himself wearing Scarlett’s mismatched sweater more days than he doesn’t. It’s comfortable, and for a while, it smells like Litchton. He sits on his ugly couch, the one that Colangelo and McTavish make fun of, and watches the sunset through the windows of his house. It becomes a familiar routine. It’s usually too late to call Honey once he gets back from games since she’s three hours ahead, so Trevor finds other ways to express the things he wants to say to her. He’d text them, but that’s too brazen– he wants to speak to Honey and then let the words disappear forever. 

So, he sends letters. Out of sight, out of mind– once the letter leaves Trevor’s hand and makes its way into his mail carrier’s bag, the words are gone. It’s intimate and Honey has told Trevor many times over how much she likes receiving his letters, so much more than if she received the same thoughts over the phone. She always sends something back in a colorful envelope and Trevor traces her handwriting when he really misses her. 

With her permission, he’d included her in his summer dump on Instagram. He saw a few comments wondering who she and the other girl were, “the other girl” being Bea, but he never saw anything mean. He’d have exhausted all of his resources to hunt down any cyberbully who decided to take out their own insecurity on his girlfriend. He’d reported back his findings dutifully, telling Honey that everyone thought she was so pretty and out of his league. Honey had agreed.

Trevor had dutifully reported on summer dumps two other times: when Jack included the picture that Earl took of them at the going away party, Bea slung over his shoulder, and when Quinn quietly included a picture of Bea asleep on the couch in the basement, her hand wrapped loosely around his first two fingers. Her face was mostly obscured, but Trevor wasn’t sure if he should say something or not, so he’d asked Honey. Her face had gotten stormy– which was pretty cute, if Trevor is allowed to say that– but the picture had stayed up. Trevor is sure Honey and Bea handled it and he has a feeling that Bea might’ve felt a semblance of nostalgia when he’d screenshotted and sent the photo to her when she asked. They’re still broken up and not talking, but Trevor doesn’t know how long they can hold out. Honey says that Bea misses Quinn badly, but she’s still too stubborn to do anything. Trevor knows that Quinn is too stubborn to go against Bea’s wishes.

About a month into the season, Trevor wears the sweater to a game. Honey still hasn’t made it out to visit yet and Trevor is getting restless. He has a great game– greater than great– so it’s no surprise that he’s pulled for media after he showers and gets dressed, pulling the sweater on once again. 

Aly, the rinkside reporter, pulls him aside for a more one-on-one chat. Trevor expects that it’ll get clipped and thrown on the Ducks’ socials. They get all the way through the interview before she asks about his fashion choice. “This sweater is clearly handmade, so chic,” she adds on the side. “Where did you get it?”

“A friend made it for me,” Trevor replies. “This summer. It was a going away present, actually.”

“Well, it was a real good luck charm here tonight. You got your first career hat trick– do you think this luck will continue for you for the rest of the season?”

Trevor nods, only half-listening. He just caught a whiff of bonfire from the sweater, a scent memory that is accompanied by the creaking trees that shaded his balcony from wandering eyes. They didn’t make enough use of it. “I hope so,” he tells Aly. 

“It’s a wonderful start, given the rut you fell into last season after your injury. What are you doing differently?”

Trevor tries not to balk at the blatant mention of his broken ankle, the Jamie trade, and his struggles to come back from those events. He rubs his right eye with a closed fist and forces a tight smile on his face, speaking more honestly than he normally allows himself to. “I told my girlfriend that every goal I score this season is for her, so I have to score a lot. Keep me on her mind, you know?”

Aly chuckles. “You’ve got to find motivation somewhere,” she says good-naturedly. “Thanks, Trevor.”

“Yeah, thanks, Aly,” he replies. He walks back into the locker room, ready to grab his bag and his keys and book it out of the arena so that he can crash on his bed, when he feels his phone buzz in his pocket. He slips it out, catching his favorite contact name on the screen. He can hear the eye roll as if she’s talking to him, right next to his ear.

🍯:

Don’t fucking bring me into thisI don’t want crowds of famous Trevor Zegras’ hockey groupies in Litchton when you come back next summer

Then, a few minutes later:

Nice sweater ;)

THANK YOU FOR READING!!! I LOVE YOU!!!! XO, ANDY P.S. See you in Beaquinn's book ;)

[bengiyo]

Peaceful Property: How I Yearn For a Good Procedural

I was originally excited about Peaceful Property because I genuinely like following BL actors into their other work to show that we are a loyal viewer base. Following Nishijima to Drive My Car (2021) was one of the best decisions I made that year. I’ve been thinking about the experience of watching Peaceful Property and why I felt so frustrated by the show. I wanted to write out my thoughts on procedurals, BL bait, and fandom so that I can move on from this show. 

The Loss Case-of-the-Week in Favor of Unearned Home Sympathy

My biggest struggle with this show was losing its case-of-the-week format around the midpoint. I was really intrigued in the early stories by how Home’s family’s business practices led to the terminal situations affecting some of the ghost stories. Like @lurkingshan I had hoped to see the show develop a common theme with its focus on stories about poverty. I also saw some potential in the read from @/maybe-boys-do-love after the episode focusing on Ride. No one was alone in this early read (@valentinaonthemoon). 

Through the end of episode 6, I had a ton of excitement about the show handling its themes around justice and forgiveness. We knew that Home was the one responsible for Peach's current predicament, and that Home’s grandfather and uncle were in on the cover up. Home knew what he had done to Peach, and fretted over it throughout episode 6. After five weeks of them focusing on completing a final act and providing closure for ghosts, I had hoped they’d give Home the chance to sit with the horror of the consequences of his own action and cowardice. I wanted the show to reckon with how Home, completely sober, left a stranger for dead, and only now cares about it because Peach is helping him feel less lonely.

Unfortunately, much of this frayed after the reveal that Home ran over Peach and the push to make Peach forgive him in the episode with the ghosts at the site of that camp. I didn’t share @respectthepetty’s read on the situation, but I did respect it and see how she got there. However, like @my-rose-tinted-glasses, it felt like the show started to rely on the inherent goodwill of shippers to overcome a major relationship break rather than deal with the underlying issues. 

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with having the show turn to focus on how Home deals with Peach and Pangpang after the reveal that he left Peach for dead on the street, but I really struggled with the show not letting Home process the horror of what he did. This carries forward as we deal with the way Home’s family stole land from locals, and did not accommodate them through construction: something that had direct impacts on Kan and her father. By the time the show is forced to reckon with this, it handwaves it through Home with “You guys win! No problem!” (@twig-tea) It then goes on to give Home ghost sensing powers so he can rely Kan’s father’s final words which are just ‘get some friends?’ Now, I do think you need strong connections to survive activist work, but it felt really shitty to have the rich kid whose family caused all of this be the one to deliver this message. As with everything after Home’s biggest mistake is revealed, the show values the feeling of sympathy and forgiveness over the real work required for genuine reconciliation. 

Finally, the show jumps to the internal struggles of Home’s family in the final third of the show to focus on the destructiveness of their greed and its internal effects as well, but this feels like yet another unearned copout. The show works hard on the back half to pretend like the grandpa was just a silly old man, but there’s no way he doesn’t know what his people did to those communities, and he also knew exactly why Home was sent to America. The entire bit about the “family curse” in the last few episodes completely soured the show for me. It feels like the show even knows that, because it calls itself cringe through Pangpang when Home says he’ll “listen to those we’ve ignored.” Way to undercut the premise after giving Home the ability to hear ghosts. 

In the end, I found myself frustrated by the show turning to Newwie’s inherent charm to get us to want sympathy for Home rather than writing a genuine crisis in Home, and forcing him to grow. It feels poignant to me that the show thought it was funny to have Peach be mistaken for the help in Home’s house, and then later have Home and Peach independently decide to stay in Bangkok without talking to each other about it. Not talking about anything important was the big theme of their relationship after the hit-and-run reveal. The show did not reward any of us paying attention to its early themes on class (@lurkingshan).I never got the closure I needed here, and it’s the big sticking point of the show with me. 

BL Bait Kinda Sucks

As many of you already know, I don’t currently like what GMMTV is doing with branded pairs, and I think their shows are giving a warped view on found family narratives. I enjoyed following Off and Gun into The Trainee because they were playing a gay romance inside of a show that allowed for stories about a wider ensemble. I am really struggling with the conversation around the ways we apply queer readings to Peaceful Property because almost all of it relies on familiarity with Tay and New exclusively, and not anything the show did on screen. 

With this show, I’m struggling with the found family aspect and the moving goal posts. I don’t think Home agreeing to reinstate an onerous contract on Peach and Pangpang is a kind move from him. I also don’t know that the team basking in the glow of Home’s goodwill as the final shot is a great look either, and feels kinda paternalistic. We had a whole movie about people stuck sucking from the teat of a rich guy and how shitty that goes two years ago.

GMMTV creates its branded pairs so they can literally be used as a brand. They have these people working almost every day to sell something on socials, or at a fashion event, or appearing at an event. I wasn’t bothered by Tay and New working together outside of BL after the fantastic work they did in Cherry Magic earlier this year. I don’t mind them using their most popular actors to attract a viewer base that will follow them almost anywhere to ship them. 

I also actually like stories about the bonds between men. Currently, GMMTV is adapting School 2013 (2012) with High School Frenemy (2024). The broken relationship between two of the male characters there is incredibly well done in School 2013, and I do not think that show would be improved by making that an actual romance. I think they’re both fertile ground for shipping, but the show’s primary focus on the state of life in a failing school for the students and faculty is better served by the intensity of feelings over the broken bonds between men. People are still shipping Goblin and Reaper from Goblin (2016), but again, that story is actually better without an actual sexual or romantic connection between Kim Shin and Reaper. With Peaceful Property, I don’t think they finished the work of building and resolving this friendship between Home and Peach, and it leaves me wanting.

I share a lot of @italianpersonwithashippersheart’s general concerns around the commerce around BL with GMMTV. That being said, I don’t begrudge @respectthepetty and others having fun calling the show gay. What I’m struggling with is the difference between the shipping being satisfying versus the show being satisfying. I lost my emotional connection to this show when it failed to resolve the break in the middle. The back half of the watch is hollow for me, and I just can't let my willingness to ship Tay and New make up for that failure. 

I Need a Good Procedural

What I realized the most from watching this is that I need another good procedural in my life. The first half of Peaceful Property gave me some of that, but the back half did not. I enjoyed the performances everyone gave on this show, despite my lingering qualms with what the show chose to prioritize. I’m happy that everyone seems like they had a lot of fun working on this show, and I’m glad that the viewers clearly responded to that. This was actually a genuinely pretty show to look at, and I’m glad that GMMTV continues to embrace color in their shows this year (with a few glaring exceptions). 

With that, I will put this show to rest. This show ended up not being what I thought it was giving, and I’ll be moving on. I’ll see you all much later on future GMMTV works. 

[yuheartss]

𝐂𝐎𝐓𝐓𝐎𝐍 𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐘 𝐇𝐀𝐈𝐑

IN WHICH — saiki k meets a girl with a pink afro, she reminds him of cotton candy …

౨ৎ WC? 742 wordss

౨ৎ warnings! - fem!reader, fluff, unedited , lowercase intended!

౨ৎ a/n: I think I made him a little ooc but I hope not.. if I did please tell me! constructive criticism is welcome js don’t b mean₊ ⊹₊ ⊹

you always hung out with Kaidou, not because he was your only friend or anything— it’s just that he was just one of the people who didn’t give you weird looks about your skin or hair, you moved to Japan when you were in junior high and been here ever since your mum got a job transfer

today, kaidou was going to introduce you to his friends from his class, of course, you were very nervous you thought of the worst possible situations ever. What if they make weird comments about my hair?? You thought, twisting some of your curls around your finger

Kaidou seemed to notice your nervousness and patted you back, “don’t be nervous! My friends are great- not saying you aren’t, your like really great but- it’s just- you know..” you laugh at his attempt to cheer you up “thanks kaidou” you chuckled now getting up from the bench you were on

his friends finally showed up, a big guy with a strangely enormous butt chin, a pink haired boy who looks like he’s so done with everything, three girls (one which was glowing somehow??) a boy with red hair, and two other purple haired boys

“You sure do have a lot of friends Kai…” you muttered as he awkwardly chuckled, you stood up straight as a foot shorter yet glowing girl approached you with a brunette and orange brown behind her, the glowing girl took your hands in hers “your so pretty! I love your hair! What’s your name? I’m teruhashi kokomi!”

Teruhashi gave you a smile that blinded you for a bit but you could just see that her face screams not as pretty as me but your still good looking you gave her an awkward smile “hi.. I’m l/n y/n nice to meet you teruhashi and thanks!”

Teruhashi introduced the shorter girl as Yumehara and the girl to her left as chi sati she waved at you while she was scarfing down a double cheeseburger now this this is what impressed you she had a whole bag full just waiting to be devoured

Then teruhashi introduced the red haired boy, which everybody called him hairo so you will too then both of the purple boys greeted you themselves the firsts name was koboyasu and the second was Toritsuka; almost immediately they began to share both of their life story with you

You stood there with all your weight on your right leg slowly tuning out the boys and the rest of the gang why are they telling me their life story!?! I don’t care! You thought, whining softly underneath your breath someone nudges your arm softly you looked up at the also pink haired guy he nods his head at you and walks off “follow me” you hear a voice in your head

You turn back to the crew then at kaidou then you look back at the guy you hesitantly take a step forward “good grief..we’ll be back they won’t even know we’re gone” you pause for a sec and mutter an ok before walking away with him wait what if he kidnaps me?! What the hell am I doing—

“Don’t flatter yourself” he says, walking in front of you, your eyebrow twitched in annoyance to which a faint smile lands upon his lips “so where are we going?” You ask now walking side by side

“I was going to the convenient store before they showed up and dragged me along, so that’s where we’re going” he informed you looking at your hair, he must’ve been staring for a while because you noticed “what?” You questioned him getting a little defensive

“Your hair…” he began as he opened the door to the store for you “what about it?” You say following him as he went to get his snack of choice, he picked out some coffee jelly that came in three

He didn’t answer, you sighed and went to get a dessert too “you know…I’ve never even asked for your name..” you say just know realizing that you’ve been with this teen and never asked he turned to you as he payed for both of your treats “Saiki”

“Okay saiki, tell me what you were gonna say about my hair” you semi demand and quietly thanking him for buying the treat, you can clearly see him hesitating “just say it man” you hurry starting to get impatient

“….it reminds me of cotton candy”

[baby-yongbok]

Poetry

Chapter Two - It's a Date

Hyunjin x Fem!Reader

Genre: Fluff, dare I say slow burn? The type that tickles your heart.

Word Count: 2,661

A/N: Ya'll voted for a part 2 but I honestly would've probably made this a mini series regardless 😭. I love this story with my whole heart and I hope you do too. I decided that I'll be uploading the chapters for this series on Thursdays at 6pm EST. Anyway, Enjoy! Any and all feedback is appreciated!

Summary: That cute stranger that you met at your favorite bookstore cafe is anything but a stranger now.

Part One

✧Poetry Series Masterlist✧

✧Main Masterlist✧

(Reading part one before reading this is highly recommended)

“Six o’clock on the dot. We should start paying you for coming here.” Amanda, the cafe owner, joked as you walked through the doors of the small bookstore. 

“Yeah? I think I’d like that, I could use the extra money.” You smiled at her as you clutched a stack of books to your chest. “Oh, these are donations by the way. All brand new, my brother is cleaning out his office and business management isn’t exactly my cup of tea.”

You place the stack of books neatly on the counter in front of Amanda and she flashes you a genuine smile. “This is why you’re my favorite customer. Here, your next drink is on us.”

Amanda hands you a coupon that you gratefully accept. You’ve learned a long time ago that declining her offers is futile. “Oh and I think that someone is here for you.” 

She wiggles her eyebrows teasingly and you furrow yours. You turn around and a soft smile spreads across your face. Your eyes land on Hyunjin’s tall frame sitting cross legged at one of the free tables in the nearly empty cafe. An iced americano in one hand and a book in the other. 

“He’s been here for thirty minutes.” Amanda whispers over to you and your smile spreads wider. 

“Of course he’s early.” You shake your head, chuckling a bit. “Thanks for the coupon.” 

You wave your goodbye to Amanda and start to make your way over to Hyunjin who seems to be completely engrossed in his book. You steal a glance at the cover and raise your eyebrows at his current literary choice. 

“Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.” Your voice catches his attention causing him to sit up straighter as he takes you in with a smile. 

“You’ve read it?” He asks, referring to your quote as he places his bookmark and closes the novel. 

“I’m a bit of a Charlotte Brontë connoisseur.” You reply with a shrug. “I did my thesis on that novel for my senior year of college.”

“I’ll have to pick your brain about it once I’ve finished it.” 

You watch him as he stands and stretches a bit. You take a second to drink in his appearance, his orange and black crocodile print sweater and black slacks fitting his frame perfectly. You have no doubt that it’s expensive just like everything else that he’s worn during your Thursday evening meetings. Once he’s satisfied with his stretch he pushes in his chair and circles the table to stand in front of you. He holds a hand out to you and you slip your fingers over his slender ones. He brings your hand up to his mouth and kisses the back of it gently, a grin pulling at his lips. 

“You look lovely tonight.” He looks you over slowly, taking in the form fitting glory of your black pencil skirt and the contrast it has to your baggy maroon sweater tucked in just in the front. 

“You say that every Thursday.” You playfully roll your eyes and Hyunjin smiles, shaking his head in agreement. 

“Because you look stunning every Thursday. I can’t wait to see you on a Monday or a Tuesday.” You blush a bit, looking away from him in an attempt to hide your reaction. 

The two of you have been meeting at this bookstore cafe, Adore, for two weeks now, today being the third. You’ve found yourself planning your outfit for this day of the week as soon as you wake up on Friday. Each time that the two of you say goodbye you can’t help but to think about the next time that you’ll see him and all of the questions that you’ll ask him. Hyunjin was no different, he found himself thinking about you like a teenager who just asked their crush to prom. His roommates started teasing him for the extra work that he’d been putting into his appearance. Every Thursday he’d spend an extra thirty minutes in the bathroom making sure that his hair looked just right since you complement it every time you see him. He’d gone on for about an hour asking his roommate Felix for his opinion on different colognes even though he normally doesn’t bother to wear any. He even took on an earlier work schedule so he’d be available for your meetings. Anything to see you again. 

“Thank you.” You whisper and he nods in response. He grabs his bag from the back of his chair and packs his novel away before grabbing his drink. 

“Shall we browse?” You nod your head, lacing your fingers together behind your back before taking a step forward. It seems that you both had the same idea since the two of you bump into each other softly. You both chuckle lightly and Hyunjin moves his free hand to the small of your back to guide you in front of him. “Ladies first.” 

His words come out in such a whisper that you could barely hear him but that could also be due to your heart thumping in your ears as a chill runs over you. You shake your head trying to play off your reaction to the small physical contact but you can’t help it, his touch is electric. The two of you trail off into the poetry section and you know exactly what you’re looking for. 

“I take it that you have someone in mind?” Hyunjin asks with a curious glance as you browse the shelves. You nod, your gaze never leaving the organized spines lined up on the shelves. 

“There!” You reach forward quickly, plucking the book from the neat stack and holding it up to show Hyunjin. 

“Rupi Kaur, I can’t say that I’m familiar with her.” Your face twists in disapproval causing a small chuckle to fall from Hyunjins blushed lips. “Why don’t you introduce me to her work.” 

“ If you like R.H. Sin then you’ll love her.” You look down the aisle both ways to make sure that no one is around before kneeling down and sitting on the dark carpet. Hyunjin looks down at you with furrowed brows as you take off your bag and place it next to you. Once you’re settled you look up at him returning his confused expression. “Are you coming?”

You pat the carpeted floor next to you and Hyunjins confused stare quickly melts into a gentle look of admiration. He nods his head before joining you on the floor, sitting next to you with his back resting lightly on the book shelf. He glances over at you as you study the hardcover book in your hands, your fingers tracing over the embossed words. He takes in the steadiness of your breath and the way you hum ever so slightly when you notice a new detail on the cover. He doesn’t notice the grin that’s creeped across his lips until you look up at him, he looks away quickly as a blush creeps across his cheeks. You mimic his actions, blushing a bit yourself. A few seconds of quiet surround the two of you before Hyunjin breaks the barrier. 

“May I?” He asks, gesturing towards the hardcover in your hands. You let out a deep relieved sigh and nod at him. You hand the book over to him, the tips of your fingers brush lightly against his and you both still momentarily at the contact. You both had to have felt that shock run up your spines right? The two of you decide to shake it off quickly, concluding that it was merely a case of static electricity. Hyunjin looks down at the book in his hands, turning it over and taking in the words on the back cover. He clears his throat a bit before reading the text on the back.

“This is the recipe of life, said my mother as she held me in her arms as I wept…” You listen closely to each word that his voice carries. Sinking into your own little bubble, this time that the two of you reserved every Thursday served as a calming ground for the both of you. Nothing else mattered right now, the only thing that exists is the two of you and the poetry that you shared. 

“The sun and her flowers.” Hyunjin read the title as he flipped the book back over to its front. “I have to admit that I’m very interested.” 

He opens the book to its contents and reads off the name of each section. “ Wilting, Falling, Rooting, Rising, Blooming.”

You nod as you look over the grayed out page with him. “Which section do you think you belong in?”

Hyunjin looks over at you, a bit taken back by your question. Your large doe eyes stared back at his shining narrow ones patiently waiting for his response. “Uh, I don't really know.”

You nod, catching on to his hesitance. You look forward for a second, your eyes mindlessly scanning the spines of the books in front of you before you do what you wanted to do last Thursday. Slowly and carefully you lean your head to the side gently resting your temple on his shoulder. You feel him tense a bit at the sudden contact but he quickly relaxes into your touch even leaning over a bit to give you better access to his shoulder. 

“I think that right now I belong in falling.” You watch as Hyunjin silently flips through the pages before landing on the first page of the section you mentioned. He licks his lips before reading the poem. 

“I notice everything I do not have and decide it is beautiful.” He lets out a deep sigh that he wasn’t aware that he was holding before shaking his head. 

“I think that maybe I belong here too.” 

His fingers run over the picture placed under the poem, imitating pencil strokes as he studies it. You turn slightly to look up at him, studying his slow blinks as his brown orbs focus on the page. The gentle air escaping his nose tickles your lashes as he exhales but you don’t dare blink, too afraid that you’ll miss a moment of him. What is this that you’re feeling? 

“But I don’t think that I can say that everything that I don’t have is beautiful, not yet.” His eyes don’t leave the page as he continues to imitate the abstract strokes. “Well, there is one thing that I don’t have.” 

His words come out in a whisper and his gaze suddenly shifts over to you. His brown orbs are looking deep into yours. Your breathing picks up slightly as you will yourself not to look away.

“And it’s definitely beautiful.” His gaze is intense yet soft as he looks over your features. You notice that his eyes wander over your lips a bit longer than everything else before meeting your eyes again. “I guess I have to convince myself that I deserve beautiful things.” 

He lets out a light sigh and you can’t help but to bring your hand to lay on top of his. 

“You are more than worthy of beautiful things, Hyunjin.” He grins down at you gently before tearing his gaze away from yours. 

“Perhaps I am.” He whispers more to himself than to you. Suddenly he lets out a deeper sigh as he closes the book. “Have you eaten yet?”

You return his sigh as you lift your head from his shoulder. You can’t help but to wonder what he meant, why would he think that he doesn’t deserve to indulge in beauty? You shake the thoughts from your mind, not wanting to ruin your Thursday night with him. “I haven’t”

“Would you like something?”

“I can make something when I get back to my place, money is a bit tight for me right now.” 

“My treat.” He hums out simply as he studies the spine of the hardcover in his hands.

“I’m alright.” You chuckle and he looks over at you with a bit of concern drawn on his features.

“Really it’s no problem. I know that I pay every Thursday but it makes me happy that I can provide you with something as small as refreshments every week. It gives me peace of mind.” You blush a bit at his confession, so he does think about you as much as you think about him.

“Well if it means that much to you..” He smiles down at you with a nod.

“It does.” He shifts suddenly as he moves to stand. He holds his hand out to you and you take it, allowing him to help you up. “They make an amazing tomato caprese sandwich here.” 

“I’ll try it.” He nods at you happily before taking the lead out of the aisle. You follow closely behind him when suddenly you remember something. “Oh!”

You catch Hyunjin’s attention as you walk up a bit faster to stand beside him. You rummage through your bag until you find what you’re looking for.

“I have a coupon for a free drink!” You muse excitedly and Hyunjin can’t help but to laugh at your sudden elation. 

“Keep it, I appreciate it but I’ve got this.”

“Oh come on! Let me help.” You pout a bit as the two of you reach the register and Hyunjin puts in the order for the two of you, he’s already memorized your drink order so little discussion is needed. Once your order is placed and paid he turns to your pouting face with a warm smile.

“You know what? There is a way that you can help.” He slides his hands into the pockets of his slacks and you perk up a bit as you listen to him. 

“Anything.” You smile up at him, wide eyed and eager to be of use. 

“How about next Thursday we… meet outside of this place. Maybe I could take you on a date?” 

A deep blush creeps onto your swarthy cheeks as his question sinks in. Your lips pressed together in a thin line and you shift the position of your feet slightly. Hyunjin looks down at the dark tile nervously as he waits for you to say something, anything. His nerves began to creep up his spine, spewing doubt into his mind. Just as he was about to retract his offer and apologize you let out a breathy chuckle. 

“I’d really like that.” A toothy smile spreads across his face once he hears your response and you instantly wear one to match once you take in his reaction. 

“Uh, great! I’ll text you the details.” He takes his hand out of his pocket, offering his phone to you. “I can’t believe we haven’t exchanged numbers yet.” 

A shy chuckle escapes him as the two of you exchange phones and input your numbers.

“There you go.” You hand his phone back to him, your giddy smile still present on your red painted lips. 

“Alright, well um, I’ll text you everything you need to know once I plan it.” He says as he stares down at your contact for a second too long, he bites his lip slightly to try and hold back his smile. 

“It’s a date.” You both stand in front of each other smiling like enliven children at an ice cream parlor. “I’ll go grab us a table.” 

Hyunjin nods at you as you turn on your heels and make your way to your usual booth. He watches you as you walk away from him with awestruck eyes. He allows himself to smile now that you aren’t looking, his eyes turning into shining crescents as excitement builds inside of him. He glances down at your contact one last time before locking his phone and stuffing it back into his pocket, He glances over at you before turning to face the cafe counter and whispers to himself.

“It’s a date.”

← Previous Chapter ♡ Next Chapter →

[katiemcsuper]

some very disorganized thoughts about the agatha all along finale to scream into the void:

- if there is a second season/a continuation of agatha’s story, i really like the ending. i think it concluded the overall arc of the season well while leaving things open to be further explored. i feel like agatha is a complex character and change/growth for her would be much more satisfying over a longer period of time; to me that seems more realistic/satisfying. similarly, i think the story between her and rio needs to play out with more time. i think the season played out the arcs of the other coven members well and i think it set billy off onto the next stage of his life/story

- i really want to delve more into rio and her relationship with agatha. from what we’ve seen, particularly in these last two episodes, she really did nothing wrong. she was, as she said, doing her job with nicky and even then she broke the rules for agatha. and it is so heartbreaking and tragic love story for her to do all that and for agatha to hate her despite/because of that. i don’t remember the specifics, but there were a few lines where rio expressed disappointment and, to an extent, confusion over agatha’s treatment/rejection of her. in many ways she seems resigned to the fact that agatha will have this element of hatred towards her that can’t be avoided

- agatha is just such a juicy character and kathryn hahn plays her so incredibly well. she is so straight-up awful and also so tragic and also just obnoxious but charming. i love the way all of these traits coexist. and, to my earlier point, this is why i feel like it would not really be satisfying to have her arc be fully resolved in the time available in this season

- if aaa is indeed just a miniseries and these characters don’t show up again/agatha is around only to support billy’s plot then that will be very disappointing. at the same time, though, i thought the show was really well-constructed and well-executed, but as it stands, billy was ultimately the main character instead of agatha. and i don’t think that negates the value of the show or its depiction of agatha, particularly in regards to lesbian rep, but it is nevertheless a bummer. but i am holding out hope for more

- i’m very interested to read jac’s episode recap interviews and see what all she says

- i so much enjoyed the experience of watching this show. i’ve been so engaged and excited to watch it and it’s lovely to feel that way, especially for a marvel show on disney+. regardless of how everything plays out it is so cool (and also shocking) to have a show at all that is centered around middle-aged women and queer characters, especially from these companies. and i love love love kathryn hahn and she makes the character and the show and it is so lovely that she is getting her flowers.

[candycandy00]

Roses in the Sky - An Original Alien x Reader Story Part 3

In a future where humanity huddles in decaying domed cities controlled by alien invaders, you and your best friend Anna work as make-shift nurses in a tiny clinic run by the young doctor Terrian. The city is ruled by the aliens' violent, half-breed offspring who serve as brutal overseers. You and Anna have always tried to avoid these overseers at all cost, but your life is changed when one of those same terrifying offspring is brought into the clinic, injured and unconscious.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

This is an original Alien (well half alien) x Fem Reader story! I hope everyone who enjoys my fanfiction will give this a shot! Any feedback whatsoever would be loved! I’ve already written this story so it’s not going to delay my fanfics. Just thought I might post chapters of this between fanfics if anyone is interested.

Slow burn, as this is a novel-length story, but there will be smut in later chapters! Also: violence, blood, rape attempts, death of side characters, etc.

You stood outside Anna's door the next morning, holding the little girl's hand. When the door opened, Anna looked curiously at her. "Who's this?"

"This is Miranda," you told her. "Her parents were attacked by half-breeds last night and she ended up with me. I thought you two should meet."

Anna stared down at the little girl, who was looking at her feet as she squeezed your hand. "Oh," Anna said, then dropped to her knees beside the girl and wrapped her arms around her.

Miranda's hand slipped free of yours and her little arms went around Anna, struggling to return the hug. Her body began shaking with sobs and she cried loudly into Anna's shoulder.

"It's okay, honey," Anna murmured, tears forming in her own eyes. "I'll take care of you now."

You stood back silently until Miranda stopped crying and Anna led her inside, then you followed the girl into the apartment.

Anna's place was cute and quaint, reminding you of the pictures you once saw in old home improvement magazines Terrian used to keep lying around the clinic. You didn’t know how she kept it so clean. The walls and furniture were faded, but had clearly been very bright and cheery at one time. 

"So how did Miranda survive?" Anna asked, sitting down at the table beside you and handing you a cup of weak tea.

You took a sip. "Remember the half-breed Terrian brought in yesterday? He was the one who killed her parents."

"I told you he was dangerous!"

"Yeah, but he let Miranda go because he owed us for saving him."

Anna sat her cup of tea down. "You mean you interfered with a punishment? And a half-breed actually listened to you?"

"I was surprised myself," you answered, taking another sip. “I was so scared, I was crying like a baby. But I took a chance and it worked out.” 

“You better not try anything like that again,”

Anna warned you. Then she glanced at the clock on her wall. “We’d better get to the clinic.”

After Anna showed Miranda around the kitchen and told her to help herself to anything in the refrigerator, she locked the door and instructed the girl to keep it that way until she came home.

"Sorry to dump her off on you," you said as you and Anna walked together toward the clinic.

"No problem. It'll be nice to have someone around. The nights are pretty lonely, you know."

You nodded. "I know." You turned your eyes toward the giant mechanical tower that stood in the direct center of Gallica. It was visible from every single spot in the city, as it loomed over everything as a symbol of the Pagoda. You frowned at the menacing construct. "It's too bad we can't just blow it up."

Anna followed your gaze to the tower and immediately held a finger to your lips. "Shhh! You know better than to say something like that in public!" she whispered furiously. "Do you wanna get ripped up by the half-breeds?"

You pulled Anna's hand away. "I know, I know. But it's like they're mocking us with that stupid tower."

"That stupid tower keeps the dome up. If we blow it up, we all freeze to death."

You looked down an alley toward the wall of the dome, where you could faintly see snow blowing wildly around on the other side. You sighed and kept walking. There was nothing you could do, nothing anyone could do.

Walking by the various alleyways and streets brought back painful memories. You could almost see yourself as a teenager, huddled under a streetlamp with Anna, eating whatever you could steal.

But you could also still see Terrian reaching out his hand to you both. You pushed the negative thoughts to the back of your mind and walked the rest of the way to the clinic with Anna.

It was a couple of days later when the front door of the clinic swung open and the half-breed you and Terrian had fixed up returned. He was back in his uniform, topped off by a dark beret that pressed his black hair down over the lone green eye. You stared at him as he walked toward Terrian. He was no longer the wounded young man in polka-dot pajamas, but an unfeeling monster in black.

There was a knot in your stomach, and you looked over at Anna, who was frozen stiff. "Anna, come on, let's tend the other patients," you told her, taking her hand.

"That bastard killed Miranda's parents," Anna whispered.

You nodded. "I know, but there's nothing we can do now. Let's go."

Terrian stepped out from the bedside of a nearby patient when the half-breed neared him. "Ah, Mr. Vartan! You came back for your check-up!"

The half-breed, who had apparently signed his patient form as Vartan, nodded.

Terrian led him through the swinging doors and into the back room. Some of the patients who were conscious drew in sharp breaths as Vartan walked by them, looking at him with terror written across their faces. You felt bad for them.

Just when you thought things had calmed down, a few minutes after Terrian and Vartan had left the room, Terrian poked his head through the swinging doors and asked you to bring some more bandages. You frowned to him, but gathered up the bandages and walked through the swinging doors.

Vartan was sitting on a cot, his jacket and shirt discarded and his torso again exposed. At least this time he was wearing pants.

He looked young as he sat there, a little younger than the twenty-three years of age he had written on the patient form. Shirtless and wearing the beret made him look strangely like some sort of male stripper. Dare you even think it, he almost looked cute.

Terrian removed the bandages and examined the wound. It had already mostly closed up, healing rapidly with the amazing Pagoda blood. He carefully cleaned the area, examined it for infection, then dressed it with fresh bandages.

"Take these off in a couple of days. If the wound looks fine, you don't need to put anymore on. If there's any bleeding or discoloration, come here immediately."

Vartan nodded, pulling on his jacket. He paused, looking at you. "Is there a problem?"

You blinked. "What?"

"You have been staring at my chest the whole time you have been here. Is there a problem I should be aware of?"

You went red. You hadn't even realized you were staring. "Oh, no, I'm sorry!"

Terrian looked at you in surprise, then looked back to Vartan. "You'll have to forgive my nurse. She's not used to seeing such finely crafted male bodies. The lot we get in here are very different from you."

"Doctor!" Your face was now burning with embarrassment.

Terrian laughed, and Vartan seemed just a little confused. You were deeply upset. How could Terrian be so casual with a half-breed?

Vartan buttoned his jacket, thanked Terrian again, nodded to you, and left out the back door. Terrian grinned. "Wow, he's so polite!"

"Polite?! I saw him tear a woman's head off the other night!"

"Well, he's still a half-breed after all. At least we're safe. He seems to like us, you in particular."

You were placing the left over roll of bandages in a cabinet. "Me?"

"You haven't noticed?” Terrian asked. “He keeps looking at you. Maybe he thinks you're cute!"

You went pale. "That's not exactly a good thing, Doctor. You know what the half-breeds are like."

"But you obviously think he's cute," Terrian said, still grinning.

"I do not!"

"Couldn't keep your eyes off him."

"I was looking at his wound!"

Terrian laughed. "Why deny it? It would certainly be novel, a half-breed with a willing human."

"I don't like him!" you suddenly screamed. "He killed Miranda's parents! If we hadn't saved his life, he would've killed me too!"

"That's all true, but haven't you ever wondered? How much their human side affects them? I don't think they've ever had relationships like we have. I don't think they understand the concept of family. Maybe if they could experience that, it would awaken the humanity in them."

"But Doctor, how can you make excuses for them? They killed your father, didn't they?"

Terrian looked down, his glasses slipping down his nose. "You're right. Sorry, it was just wishful thinking."

The day wore on, just like the other days before it. You, Anna, and Terrian tended patients, joked with each other, and allowed yourselves to forget about the outside world. And when the working day was over, you parted ways and returned home.

Anna's apartment was on the other side of town, where Miranda was at home waiting for her. Terrian lived in a large house a few blocks away, but spent the night at the clinic whenever a critical patient was brought in. He had often asked you girls to move into his home, but you both had the desire for a little independence, at least for as long as you could maintain it.

You entered your apartment that evening, flipping on the light in the small living room and locking the door up tight behind you. The room was dirty, no matter how many times you cleaned it. It seemed like a thin layer of filth covered the whole city, and no one could get rid of it.

There was no television, not for the past twelve years. Your memories of it had become vague over time. Sometimes you and Anna went to Terrian's house to watch old films. As interesting as they were, you found them depressing. People were usually happy in those movies, enjoying a world you didn’t remember, and you couldn't relate to them at all.

There was an unused stove in the corner of your kitchen and a small refrigerator stocked with items like fruit, vegetables, butter, cheese, and rarely some form of meat. You counted yourself extremely fortunate to have what little you had, as produce was quickly becoming a scarcity. The Pagoda managed resources in an extremely strict manner, and even private gardens had been taken over. 

You unpacked your things from the duffel bag, then changed into pajamas. You fixed herself a glass of water, placed it on your bedside table, and went to bed. The sheets were cold without the warmth of another person, but you had gotten used to that.

Sleep came slowly to you, and then you were haunted by violent nightmares filled with screams and blood and the half-breed Vartan killing Miranda's father. And then suddenly Miranda morphed into Anna.

"Why didn't you save me too?" Anna demanded, looking up at you with blood all over her face, "Why didn't you save me like you did Miranda?!"

You backed away from her until your back hit a stone wall. "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry, Anna! I didn't know you then!"

Anna shook her head. "That doesn't matter. I needed you. I needed to be saved!"

She came closer, until she was inches from you. Finally, she reached out and wrapped her hands around your throat, choking you.

You awoke with a jolt, sitting up in bed and clutching the sheets in your fists. Sweat dripped down your back. Nightmares like that were surprisingly rare for you. Generally, you dreamed of your parents or of the clinic. 

You never got back to sleep that night, and so you were early to work the next morning, even before Terrian or Anna arrived. Terrian came first, unlocking the doors and letting you in, followed soon after by Anna. You and Anna changed into your uniforms while Terrian checked the patients. But just as you walked through the swinging doors, you heard the front door of the clinic bust open.

All of you looked up just as three half-breeds, two men and one woman, walked in. They scanned the main patient area with their two-color eyes, then looked at Terrian. 

One of the men spoke with the same mechanical voice Vartan had. "We've received reports that you are harboring those who escaped punishment. Everyone in this building is now officially interfering with punishment.”

Terrian pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose again. "Girls, I want you to run far away from here. Right now."

Anna started toward him. "But Doctor..."

"RUN!" he screamed, and you grabbed Anna's arm, dragging her toward the back entrance. As the two of you made it through the swinging doors, you began to hear screams and cries, glass breaking, and the sound of Terrian's voice as he yelled for the half-breeds to stop.

[sketchthetofu]

Okay, deep breath in OKAY LETS GET THIS PARTY STARTED- first of all, @sora-fish u asked so this is ur own doing <3! /pos and second STATIC!!!

So Static is my wonderful world hopper, but she can’t control it (wow! So original! /j) the catch is that this is a punishment she can’t remember why she got because of how many worlds she’s been in and out of, now forever doomed to hop from world to world, staying anywhere from a couple of hours to years.

With this every world she gets dumped into needs her for a specific role in its story, almost always being the role of a villain that needs to be filled, though, sometimes she gets lucky and is a sideline character or a nobody. At first she tries her hardest to keep away from being the villain, from being the awful evil person the stories want and need, but she’s never able to, she always finds herself stumbling into the role whether she wants to or not, so after many failures of changing the role she was placed in, she starts to lean into it, thinking of each world like a new game more and more as time goes on, just trying to have as much fun as she can before getting whisked away to a new world. (I got a whole list of her morals and which stages of grief she’s in each part of the story- which I could share if u want but it’s also hella long-)

Now this is where Kitchen Witch arrives in Statics story!!! KW is my beloved vigilante, think of a classic cliché high schooler has powers and decides to stop crime in their city and that’s how KWs story mostly goes :D! I’m still working on her power but rn I have her with a recipe/spell book where she writes down the ingredients of different things, brick, wood, metal, etc! And with this knowledge of how things are constructed she can build them herself from thin air. Static is able to read a story pretty quickly when she arrives in one, knowing from the style and vibe of the world that this isn’t a war torn bloody one, and so does sillier crimes and just messes around. One thing leads to another and after being rivals and enemies KW and Static somehow become friends, KW swearing to Static that she’ll figure out how to fix Statics uncontrollable world hopping, that Static doesn’t have to be a villain any longer, and Static tiredly lets her try, KWs hope and belief things will work out being infectious as Static slowly starts to hope that this is the end of the tug and pull of the universe using her, that she can stay here in KWs comfortable world. That… doesn’t last. One day while they are hanging out on a rooftop Static glitches out of existence, serving her purpose in KWs world and getting dragged to another, leaving KW alone on the rooftop where her friend used to be beside her <3. That is where KWs and Statics stories splits again! KW has her own chaos that happens without Static there (I’m creating a wonderful story for her too <3! She’s actually a wayyy older oc than Static hahaha) and Static continues to hop worlds, the next one being into my dnd campaign “Silver City” :D!!! Where there’s a whole entire MESS of lore, chaos, angst, story, you name it it’s there!!! But I can get into that next this is already… a lot… lol. And if ur still interested I’ll try my best to explain it- (This is also the campaign I’ve been working on drawing a character lineup for our group <3!)

I also got a slowly growing list of other short stories Static is a part of, “Jester to Tyrant”, “Dead Romance” etc. ;) I wanna make a multi comic book series of her adventures branching off of KWs own comics, I got arcs and everything for both of them-

As you can probably tell I love and think about my ocs like- A LOT….. hehehehe

[reviewinghiccup]

Hey!!! I’ve gone through your entire list of posts and loved it. There’s a lot of psychoanalysis which makes the work a fun read.

Though I’m curious, what is your biggest inspiration or take-a-way from Hiccup? Do you have any other HTTYD character that equally inspires you. What about the franchise that speaks to you the most?

Sorry if the questions are loaded, but I’m curious, you dissect and approach the franchise in a detailed, humanistic way, I wonder if that’s kind of how you also view the universe.

HELLO DEAR!!! Sometimes I wish you guys weren’t anonymous so that I can find you and thank you for filling up my Inbox with such amazing words of encouragement.

To hear that anyone has just read this blog and enjoyed it really makes my day. I pour my heart into my writing and I just want to say I love answering these questions and I am sorry I took over a year to reply. Before I get to why lemme answer you first.

My biggest inspiration and take-away from Hiccup is:-

He is different

I grew up with Hiccup. When the first movie was released I was the same age he was and going through my own season of not fitting in and awkwardness. I wanted so much to be noticed and recognised. Physically I was also very different. I didn’t fit in anyone’s mould.

Peers are precious about certain things and kids with many friends usually meet their criteria - but I couldn’t. Not even close.

I know how it feels like to be alone and misunderstood, even by my own parents.

but he is always kind…

Hiccup doesn’t subscribe to revenge, at least not around his immediate peers like Snotlout who sometimes, I really do feel he deserves it. He believes that there’s always something, to understand, to fix or to improve. That industriousness actually makes him the perfect leader to propel his people forward into the future. In a world where everyone focuses on what’s on the outside, he hyper fixates on what’s on the inside and if we really start listening to why people say what they said instead of just taking their words literally you hear so much more.

he stewards his gifts well.

He can invent. He’s been inventing before meeting Toothless. He’s good at it. And he meets every physical challenge he has with an invention.

He is also a natural born leader - though he never fit the mould of what a Viking should look like, he fits the mould of what a leader should be. A leader needs to earn his respect, and though still the smaller male Viking, he is very well respected.

He is fearless.

Push comes to shove, Hiccup is reliable, courageous and quick thinking. He does not back down from a challenge. Yet, he isn’t intimidated by others strength - he allows everyone else to hone their skills and be their best selves as he has allowed himself to be.

HICCUP inspires me because his growth and leadership and story comes from him first accepting himself and in time, he becomes everything he was suppose to be. My biggest take-away from him is, you will never lose if you give yourself time to see the bigger picture of why things are the way they are.

Of course I love Hiccup for so much more, but I don’t know how much you’d wanna read 🤣 Nonetheless, on the top of my head, that’s what I think he means to me.

The other HTTYD Character that Equally Inspires me is, of course, ASTRID

To be fair, we know her significantly more than the other characters so it’s natural to fall in love with her.

But they have created a very beautiful character to love.

Astrid is strong and independent, but nothing about that takes away from her femininity. Sometimes I feel like movies/shows about strong independent women make those women so unfeeling and hard.

Astrid feels real to me. She’s driven, self-disciplined and honourable, but she can also be condescending and harsh - and instead of getting defensive about it, she actually listens to that constructive criticism when it comes and changes.

She knows she is born to lead (though not in the same way Hiccup is - which is also admirable because she humbly gives way to him to do his thing) so she needs to learn how to inspire her soldiers, help them improve and make them better. She can’t do that if she always thinks she’s right. That’s what brings about toxic leadership. And she is not toxic.

I admire her dedication to improve. It’s something I love in Hiccup as well, but Astrid just works on herself and her performance. It’s inspiring.

While there’s more, I’ll keep it to these two things for now.

What about the Franchise that Speaks to me Most

Friendship. Trust. Becoming. Young Adulthood. Reality Check. Being lost. Finding Yourself.

So much really. So much.

When I first started writing this blog, I actually lost my grandmother. I loved my grandmother so much. She was warmth, love and life personified.

After she left, I was lost for a very long time, failing exams and switching careers. I couldn’t focus.

This show helped me piece together a lot of my own personal feelings. It helped me think through certain problems. When I synthesised those thoughts into this blog space, I felt like I was dealing with them.

And when I watch Hiccup and Toothless glide in the sky, it made me feel like I am there with them. The soundtrack itself is also very transportive.

I think my favourite thing about the franchise was/is that it made me feel again. At least on the rewatch leading to the creation of this channel.

The franchise when I first watch those movies, when I was really young made me feel “found”, if that makes any sense to you. Because, it talks about not being alone - like how the loneliest dragon could find the loneliest boy Viking. And that these two in turn, found a lonely girl looking for something to see herself in.

Each step of Hiccup’s life was mine. Even when he didn’t want to “take on the family business” and desired to be more than he and the world he’s in is built - that was me, still is me.

This franchise has something for almost everyone. And every which way you turn Hiccup, you will see a small glimpse of yourself in him.

In essence, I think the franchise just speaks and that’s what makes it so damn good.

[xelbleedsglitter]

Hey, I’ve been rereading SWAN for like… the 10th or more time and I’m still struck by how much I love it, even after all the times I’ve come back to it. It inspired me to try writing my own JtHM au and I was wondering how you learned to write the way you do. You got me so invested in the characters and story I love them so much!

Wow, thank you! I love hearing that people go back to it. I am extremely curious as to whether you're reading the original or the very superior please read it rewrite.

Either way, I'm happy you like spending time with my glitter garbage children; they are precious to me.

I am going to say I don't know how I learned to write in whatever way I do and then write a huge number of words about it, okay? You've read some version of SWAN, you know I am great at not shutting up.

I think one of the things that actually influenced this was that my grandmother is a professional storyteller. That was just her job title. She and my grandfather had a large hand in taking care of me when I was under ten years old, and she practiced her programs on me, and told me her tips and tricks. These were mostly geared toward public speaking, but a lot of it carried over to telling stories in social situations and making people listen to you in written form. I think this is why most of my stories start as just dialog exchanges.

Another influence was desperately wanting to be cool to my dad's friends who laughed at everything he said. I studied what they said and how they said it in order to dissect How To Be Funny like a Very Normal Child.

I told myself stories to fall asleep every single night for my whole entire life.

I liked musicals a lot, and how they constructed stories by calling back to other moments musically.

I internalized all the advice we got for writing essays around 7th grade. I had more than one teacher tell the whole class I was the only one allowed to turn in a first draft as a final because I was 'Wonder Woman'. In college I was asked why I was going into illustration because I was 'a natural wordsmith'. I was a little surprised by both of these things!

Assuming that you are interested more for 'Teach Me Your Ways' reasons, though, here is some stuff I am conscious of doing:

I never start with a boring sentence. I learned this from essay writing and my grandmother, who had to convince people to listen to her talk for an hour straight. ''The wind blew the curtains and the sun shined through the windows."? Oh my god, who cares, I'm not sticking around for that. "When he bothered to look, he saw three people in the mirror."?? Um, hello? What does the next sentence say about this? I will indulge you in a few more sentences, author. And then you just trick them into reading every next sentence.

A Cool Phrase you can use like a leitmotif in a musical. In reSWAN, it ended up being 'Trust Me', but I am guilty of something like it in everything, haha. Something I can invoke in tense moments after it's been used casually and cutely over and over or something that can be a surprise inversion later. Grandmother also used this technique frequently.

Ending on the Big Word. If I need to do a reveal, or I need something to stick like a gymnast landing, I save that word for last in the sentence or paragraph. Learned this from grandmother and the how to be funny research. Use some natural sounding twists around the topic or a synonym until you reach the dismount at the end. Takes a bit of practice and wrangling to get it to sound like natural speech and not deliberate avoidance, but worth it as payoff to have the last word that slams into the story recipient be the Emotional, Funny, Tragic, whatever word.

reSWAN in particular was written to be honest. I wanted to put ugly feelings in there. The way I feel about 'they wouldn't want you to be sad' and grieving and identity and relating to people and the stuff Hallmark wants you to stop feeling immediately because happy and generic is always better. I have to believe honesty is critical. All my asexual or demiromantic characters get reactions from that one other person going, 'oh god, thank you, my reality is like this too'. It means I get comments that hurt and make me feel like a monster, but the trick there is to decide to be the monster, I guess. I did not learn this from my grandmother.

I hope this is useful or entertaining, friend! I hope that you even see it, given that you are Anon! Thanks so much for reading and contacting me about it, and if you haven't read the rewrite, please do that~~~~ I'm so proud of it, it is so much more me and so much more Good. 💚

[jisokai]

You always thought the circus was where you yearned to be. At least, until it finally let you in—and introduced you to Hanta Sero.

[circus AU where seamstress!reader and acrobat!sero realize that their lives have been running parallel for a long time, and it’s up to you to weave them together]

part 3: that we’ll string together.

sero hanta x reader ch 3/6 | 14.7k words | masterlist | ao3

cw: more mentions of a deceased family member and grief (that is poorly repressed) notes: songs are memories by maroon 5, counting stars by one republic, yellow by coldplay

the five times sero reaches for you.

✰.

"Marco constructs tiny rooms from scraps of paper. Hallways and doors crafted from pages of books and bits of blueprints, pieces of wallpaper and fragments of letters.

He composes chambers that lead into others that Celia has created. Stairs that wind around her halls.

Leaving spaces open for her to respond."

-The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

Davide appears in your studio unannounced.

“You hate me!” he accuses in drawn out Italian, walking through the garage door. It’s warmer than yesterday by a few degrees, but you’re still huddled in a jacket as you hunch over your sewing machine.

“Only a little,” you promise.

He gasps. “You won’t even deny it?”

“That’s what you get for making assumptions,” you say, still refusing to look at him.

Davide huffs as he struts over and pulls out the chair across from you. He sets down his coffee to cross his arms, wrinkling the sleek sleeves of his blazer. “We’re a throuple but somehow I'm always third wheeling you and Chia.”

You finally cave, eyes raising to meet his blankly. They're the icy blue of the sky during a winter day: cold and sharp and uncomfortable to experience for too long. Every blink is a reprieve.

He sighs dramatically, head tilting back with a whine. “Tucano, are you really leaving? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Your chest tightens. “It was just an offer, I haven’t made a decision yet. And I was going to tell you next time I saw you.”

“Which was going to be when, exactly?”

You pout. “Sorry. I’ve been busy with the dress and the show and everything. I told Chiara first because she was free that day.” And because she’s less dramatic.

He gives you a pained look before softening with another sigh. “Babe, you know I’m never going to stop you. Seriously, how is this not an immediate yes? I mean, yeah you have some commitments lined up and some of them are my fault—” Orders for drag costumes in March, for him and a couple friends, “But we’d never want to keep you from being where you should be.”

This is the duality of Davide: a thin veil of vanity draped over a deep heart, someone who loves to talk about himself, always redirecting the conversation to his own feelings and stories—only to stare right through you and your own private thoughts in an instant, when he catches a ripple of hesitation on the surface. It's a friendship best described as whiplash. 

Your heart stings; his earnest sentiment settles as a squeeze of pain. “I know,” you say honestly, “but… there are other reasons to stay.”

Davide’s tanned face twists into a scoff, the shake of his head bouncing tight coils of hair. “Glad to know I mean nothing to you after all.”

You roll your eyes. “Dramatic.”

He pauses, watching as you rotate the fabric and slide it through the needle again. “Then what is it? If it’s not your friends and not your work.”

You bite your cheek, breathing deeply to steady your quickening heart. “It’s—” you stop when you feel stinging behind your eyes, blinking rapidly to avoid the buildup of tears.

“My abuela,” you manage softly.

Davide doesn’t respond and you don’t look at him, determined to keep your eyes glued to the fabric and out of his sight. The texture of the lace—rough beneath your fingers—grounds you in your anticipation for his response.

“What about her?” he finally asks. His voice is so flat you laugh in surprise. “Is she haunting you? Telling you not to go?”

Your face twists between a smile and grimace. You shake your head.

He sighs. “Babe, you have to help me out here. What’s going on?”

You stop, the fabric and needle coming to a halt as your face pinches. You exhale. “I… I can’t leave her here. I already took her from home, so she could live longer with me instead of with the whole family around. And then to just… just leave after she died—”

“Tucano…” he says quietly, the nickname another punch to your stomach. “If your nonna is in Italy… you know she’s only here for you, right?”

It’s a painful, cruel reality that she’s watching over you instead of resting in her homeland. Maybe because her ashes are in your living room, never mailed home or brought in person like you should have. Instead she’s sat in her little wooden box for the last few months, trapped and lonely. The thought of taking her to Japan makes you ache with guilt. The thought of bringing her back home floods your body with fear.

“This isn't like you,” he adds softly. “To get so hung up on things. You're normally so excited for change.”

It's true. Change is exciting and chaotic, something you reach for easily. You enjoy novelty, prefer it over the steadiness of monotony. But this change is frightening—one entirely up to you.

“Do you want to make a list?” he asks after your silence. You nod meekly.

“Okay,” he starts. “Your weird guilt around your family is a con. And the fact that you’d be leaving me behind. You have a steady career that you might have to restart, and if you hate the circus you’ll be stuck there for however long your contract demands.”

“I won’t hate the circus,” you argue.

“Uh oh—”

“And I’d have to learn Japanese,” you interject, ignoring his side-eye. “Which has an entirely different alphabet.”

Davide hums thoughtfully. “I didn’t consider that. But a lot of them speak English, yeah?”

You nod. “A couple of them know Italian, too. And one of the acrobats speaks Spanish.”

“Ooh, another point for the circus.”

You nod slowly, trying to push your other thoughts about Sero aside. You spent an embarrassing amount of time last night… researching the performers, looking up their names from the booklet and scrolling through articles and social media posts. You learned that Todoroki’s stage partner is his brother and that Midoriya has constant reports of spending the off season recovering his overused arms. Sero was elusive, only small mentions in articles. He must be secure in his position with Hoshi no Sākasu, not interested in marketing himself independently.

You learned that his first name is Hanta. You read it quietly to yourself, the Spanish way with a silent H. It doesn't have any particular meaning, but you couldn’t help noticing that it rhymes with canta: sings. And the letters you spoke, everything following the H, nestles neatly into the word fantasía.

Fantasy.

“Babe?”

You blink, shaking your head as you remove yourself from your thoughts. “Sorry, what did you say?”

“I was asking what other pros there are,” he answers, piercing blue trained on you skeptically. “What got you lost in thought?”

You purse your lips, not wanting to answer. He raises his eyebrows with glee. 

“The longer you take to answer the worse it gets,” he nearly sings.

You huff. “I was just thinking about some of the performers. They’re nice.”

He scoffs. “Already finding my replacement?”

“Yeah, one’s that aren’t so accusatory.”

He kicks your foot under the table. “So? What are they like? You think you could work with them?”

You nod. “Yeah, at least from first impressions. Everyone I’ve met is nice, and they seem close to each other. There’s a big range of personalities though.”

“Mmm, so that’s a pro I suppose: that you already have an idea of what the work would be like. And you’ve already worked for them so you know their process. It’s a circus, which is your dream, and it would get you out of Italy. I think that would be good for you.”

You don’t ask him to elaborate on the last point. “I think it’d be a challenge to continue working in their process, but in a good way.”

“So maybe a pro and a con?” Davide asks. You shrug. “Oh! Another con: you’ll get caught in a romance with one of the staff, but it won’t last and you’ll awkwardly be around your ex for the rest of your contract.”

You face flushes immediately. Not because of the comment—one you’d normally scoff at dismissively—but because your brain flashes with an image of Sero. You want to bury your face in your hands. What, you dance with a guy and watch his bondage performance and suddenly he’s your fantasy man?

Fantasía.

“No fucking way,” Davide says. His eyes are wide as they watch you, mouth gaped and half grinning. You flush harder and step on the pedal again, shoving your head down as you work impatiently. “There’s no way that’s already happening. Who is it?”

“No one,” you grumble.

“Babe, please. You could at least try to act convincing. This is embarrassing. And offensive.”

Your heart thumps erratically in your chest, on the brink of sweating despite the chilly air coming in. “It’s really nothing,” you say again.

“Just spill it, I don’t feel like drawing this out.” He pauses before his eyes widen again with excitement. “Wait, does Chiara know yet? Holy shit, you have to tell me.”

You grit your teeth, jaw clenched in a mixture of irritation and embarrassment.

“I said it’s nothing,” you repeat. “Not even close to a romance. But there's this guy who speaks Spanish… We danced bachata together the first night of the festival. He didn’t know I was the costume designer, but we talked more yesterday.” You try to emphasize yesterday. You don’t mention the heat of his skin, the ghost of it that still lingers sometimes.

“You’re going to leave me for a man?” Davide accuses, voice raising. “Not even that singer woman you have weird romantic tension with?”

“Shut up,” you whine. “I said we’ve known each other for two days. But if you need any more reasons for my interest in him, he performs on aerial silks.” Davide hums. “And he knows that book I love, it’s a childhood favorite for him too.” 

That pulls a gasp from your friend. “Oh my god. It’s some horrible fated romance, I just know it. You two were meant to be together since you were born.”

“You have to stop,” you say. “Either encourage me or stop me, you can’t do both.”

He laughs. “I’ll tell Chia to pick whichever side I don’t.” 

You kick him under the table. Hard. He yelps.

He relents after more teasing, eventually letting you grill him about his life while you work: a show you missed and the latest news on his own complicated romance—a love triangle involving his co-workers at his day job. Eventually the two of you sit in concentrated silence, you running fistfulls of fabric through the sewing machine and Davide furiously typing emails. This quiet intensity is the other side to your friendship, a stark contrast to the noise of excited bickering.

He leaves around noon, with a threat to repeat his actions if you don’t keep him updated. You shoo him away dismissively and he tells you he hates you. Even after he's gone, you're left smiling to yourself, in the lingering essence of your friendship.

You’re late to your meeting with Kendou. Twenty minutes after the show starts you stumble in, clutching a paper bag of pastries in one hand. She’s neither angry or amused as she turns to look at you, arching a brow at the clear evidence of your lack of urgency.

“Good to know you’re not ghosting me.”

You grimace, holding out the bag like a peace offering. “Sorry. I was in my head and then I needed moral support.”

She takes the offering skeptically, pulling one of the sfogliatella carefully between two fingers as powdered sugar rains onto the table. Her eyes meet yours, returning to the flaky, cream-filled dessert in hand. “And it had to be the messiest thing you could find?”

“I could’ve picked something bigger, to force you to eat it in a hundred bites.”

You sit next to her and drum your fingers on the table. You don’t take one of the sfogliatella for yourself, your stomach too tight to eat. She doesn’t comment on it.

“Well, there’s nothing that warrants the need for moral support,” she says after a bite. “I’m just going to answer your questions.”

You want to argue that answers are scary. This whole situation is scary, talking as potential co-workers instead of an artist and their client. Any decision you make is terrifying, whether it’s to remain stagnant or step into the unknown.

Instead you ask for the job overview, clinical questions of work hours, salary, benefits. You gather that you would work alongside the cast of Gōyoku for a year before having the opportunity to join the design team in preparation for the next show. They want an expert in sewing, someone who knows how to work the finer details of a costume: your feathers and beads.

The conversation slowly devolves into sketching an idea of what your timeline would look after the circus leaves Milan. Speculating details for moving to Japan: visas, bank accounts, language barriers, secondary work. You ask about the environment and work culture, contracts, connections. You try to put every answer she gives you neatly into the pros and cons list you started earlier, but a lot of them sit in grey territory. The ghost of Davide’s voice gripes over your shoulder, your own internal monologue joining to argue with him.

Kendou watches as you thrum your fingers and think quietly, avoiding her gaze. Eventually she says, “Y’know it’d be more efficient if you told me what you’re worried about? So I can answer your actual questions instead of walking around them.”

Your face twists in apprehension. “It’s… I don’t think there’s anything you could say—to help me make a decision at this point.” 

She blanks at your honesty. You don’t know how to admit that you’re only pretending to care about the logistics and the money, to trick yourself into putting the decision anywhere but your conflicted heart. You sigh as you run the words through your head, chest heavy with guilt for wasting her time. At the very least it got you here, finally saying it aloud.

“I think I just need time… to think,” or feel, really. Understand what you’re feeling in the first place. 

She looks at you with an unreadable expression, green eyes swallowing you like the sea. You avert your gaze. “...’Kay. You think June is late enough?”

Three full months, plus some. You nod slowly. “Thanks.”

You’re a harpooned fish, pierced by her observance. She can see your writhing and thrashing despite your collected exterior. It reminds you of your conversation with Davide. Why are you always befriending these kinds of people?

“You could talk to Touya, the older Todoroki brother,” she suggests. “He had some reservations about joining too. He doesn’t speak English, though, so one of us would have to translate for you.”

You grimace at the thought and shake your head. “That's too much.”

She hums, unbothered. “Okay. But it’s okay to change your mind. And you can talk to anyone.”

The door slams open.

“Momo, I have the rest of my ideas for the—”

Your eyes lock with Sero’s, his mouth immediately shutting when he glances up and notices you. His face is flushed, likely just having finished his act, and slightly panicked. You swallow at the visual ambush, features schooled to appear calm as you take in the tightness of his costume, the glittering details of feathers and jewels. You remind yourself that you saw this yesterday too.

“Next one over.” Kendo’s voice is urgent, almost stern. It catches you off guard.

He nods curtly, eyes lingering on you before he fumbles to close the door. “Shit, sorry. I—sorry, thanks.”

You frown at Kendou after the door slams shut. She smiles innocently and changes the topic.

You don’t linger after your conversation ends, wanting to be gone from the tents and circus monkeys, wanting space to clear your mind. But you can’t hold yourself back for long, returning when the tents of the festivals open, spilling ambiance and light into the plaza. You let your anticipating heart guide you to the quiet row in the back, that splash of red and green whispering your name.

A wave of relief floods your veins when you spot it, still sitting quietly adjacent to the potter’s stall. You try to breeze by inconspicuously, unsuccessful given your excitement. Once you reach the entrance, you pause with a sudden apprehension. Your hand hesitantly reaches for the front flap, fingers carding through soft green feathers. You exhale and dart inside without another thought.

It’s different this time.

The interior is still a tent, though much more vast than what should be possible from the outside dimensions. Instead of shelves lined with an assortment of trinkets and paraphernalia, there are tables scattered throughout the space. Thick, wooden frames with intricate engravings sit next to rickety plastic, a tablecloth strewn atop. Some are low coffee tables, while others are tall like a standing desk.

And they’re filled with bottles. 

Mostly glass, cylindrical and curved, but in every shape and size and color. There are jars and tins as well, a couple aluminum cans and the occasional vase. Some of them are tipped over, laying sadly on their sides, but the rest stand comfortably on the various surfaces in the room. They glimmer, reflecting the dim twinkling of the fairy lights illuminating the space, tinted with warm orange. Some of them reflect each other, stretching colors across their hard surfaces.

You step forward hesitantly, unsure how to react to the change. Part of you is disappointed you didn’t stay longer yesterday, missing the opportunity to thoroughly explore all the ornaments on the shelves. The other part of you is elated, heart skipping with excitement that there’s more.

Your finger traces the edge of a deep mahogany table, the tip swirling through the curve of an engraved leaf. The color is dark, rich, warm to the touch. The bottle resting on the corner is glass, straight at the base and curving gently towards the top. You think it may have held sparkling water. It’s bare of any label, and the cap is gone, it’s body empty except for your transparent reflection. You tap your nail against the surface, the clink in response soft and bright.

Next to it is a mason jar, its bumpy glass surface stained blue. It has a metal lid that calls for you. You reach carefully over the tall bottle at the corner, careful not to bump it as you lift its smaller companion. It’s heavy, weighted as you notice a dark liquid sloshing inside from your disturbance. You hold it to eye level, squinting in confusion—and nerves. You glance around the room, behind you towards the front, before turning back to the jar and the table in front of you. Only a moment passes before you succumb to your curiosity and twist the lid open.

You are hit with an overwhelming scent of salt.

It’s almost as if the entire ocean is attempting to sprout from the small container—thick, dense, and hot air roaring upwards and across your face. A faint breeze rushes through your hair and the folds of your clothes, touching gently at your skin. The crashing waves flood your ears, paired with the cries of the birds. It feels like pressing the conch shell to your ear the previous night, immediately transported to the beach.

When you look up, you are there.

You audibly gasp, confronted by bright sand and crystal blue water. The sky is massive before you, knowing no bounds—especially not the bounds of a tiny market stall—as it rolls on endlessly, populated with innocent and fluffy clouds. The seafoam beneath matches, white and soft and spreading along the water. You turn to take in the width of the view, ground shifting beneath your feet. More sand, tiny and endless, softly spilling in response to your shuffling. A couple birds fly above you, black and unrecognizable.

You take a careful step, mind incapable of understanding the scene before you, how you got here. Your movements don’t break the image, letting you amble forwards towards the water. You look down to the jar in your hands, illuminated by the sun above. Experimentally, you twist the lid back on.

And you are back in the dim light of the tent.

You blink in shock at the change, lightly twisting the jar back open and lifting the lid, immediately pulling you back to the shore. You remind yourself to breathe, heart stuttering and breath hitched at the impossibility of such an experience. The warmth and stickiness of the air is home, somewhere you couldn’t go, haven’t let yourself go. The sound of the ocean is a lullaby in your memory, singing you to sleep more often than your mother. It’s voice is sweet and nostalgic, but it becomes too much after another moment of listening. You cap the jar.

You return it to the table, by the edge so you can easily find it again. Behind it there are hundreds of containers waiting to be opened next. You reach for a slim bottle, tall amongst the others. Its glass is frosted and tinted, though you aren’t sure with what color. 

No scent wafts out, but opening it brings you a violent wave of nausea. You feel sick to your stomach, eyes immediately scrunching with the pain. The bottle nearly falls from your hands. The feeling doesn’t subside as you breathe deeply, but you manage to open your eyes.

More blue—the clear brightness of the sky—but this time you’re fully encased in it, floating upwards. The air breezes past you, as if falling while you float through the atmosphere. Your rolling stomach hardens, still uncomfortable but subsiding as your focus darts around you, trying to ground yourself in the sight of the ocean, a forest, a city—anything.

The end of the sky never appears. Instead you float with your nausea and what you realize is a desperation, one you don’t understand. You feel like you’re calling for someone, crying for them to see you, to answer. The flood of emotions are intense but foreign—like they're real, but someone else's. You exhale shakily, trying to center yourself in a plane that has no relativity. At the very least you can feel the bottle in one hand, its cap heavy in the other. You pull your hands towards your chest, weak from the pain.

A pink dust spills from the bottle, flurrying upwards with you. It’s sparkling, shimmering in the sunlight. The colors disperse throughout your vision, like rosy tufts of dandelion. For a moment you think they are the stars of daytime. Then you are filled with an incredible sensation of love. It’s so overwhelming that you choke, the beginning of a sob. The feeling is so tangible in your heart that you can’t deny its reality, despite having no idea of its origins.

A sudden rush of tranquility washes over you, nausea quelled as you simply exist beautifully in the expanse of the sky. Eventually the bottle has no more magic to give, its last puffs of sparkles emptying above you. You watch, completely taken, until your body has a weight and your neck has a pain of discomfort. Within seconds you are once again standing in the space of the tent, now hazily blinking at the string of lights tethered to the ceiling.

Now with some fear, you continue through the jars, still unsure what they mean or even are. You’re taken to a forest of bamboo and maples, walking along a path lined with stones and rays of light filtering through rustling leaves. Next you are swallowed by searing heat, body alight with fear and calling for a brother you don’t have, swimming through flames of blue and red. After being thrown into the bustling streets of Tokyo, and then feeling your own body harden like a mountain and tear through knife-sharp shards, the pattern becomes apparent. The small jars are places, and these taller ones are… fragments of memory.

Part of you wants to stop, concerned about experiencing these intimate details of lives—lives that belong to the circus, their crew and performers. But the other part barrels forward, hungry to live and breathe and absorb all of the memories before you.

The first clear memory you see is Sero’s.

The bottle is dark, sleek and mysterious with a golden lid. When you open it, you’re on the back porch of someone’s home, feet swinging against the bench as small hands clutch the half of a maracuya. Your skin is wet, drying in the warm sun behind you. Rapid Spanish filters in the background, a large family caught in an animated conversation. The fruit in your mouth is sweet, slightly sour and with crunchy seeds. You feel yourself smile into the peel, puppeting the actions of the character you’re inhabiting.

You—Sero—stand abruptly, surprising yourself, the empty skin of the fruit rolling down your lap and to the floor, eventually hitting the sand beneath the platform. Your feet move quickly, darting through the open door at the back of the house, sliding striped rugs beneath you and avoiding the bump of bodies in the crowded spaces of conversation. You hear gasps, one deep call for your—Sero’s—name. But eventually you stop, legs standing wide before the front door, a short and old woman making her way inside. Her face is wrinkled, a soft smile playing on her lips as her eyes meet yours.

“Abuelita!” you hear yourself shout.

You slam the cap on the bottle and twist furiously, wiping the memory away. Your real body stands in the dim of the tent, heart racing and with clammy hands. There's a tightness in your chest as you inhale and your eyes prickle with tears. Your hand shakes as you press the jar to the table.

This is a circus of cruelty, you decide.

You should leave; you were right earlier, that this is too invasive. So invasive that it comes full circle, forcing you to confront your own unwanted memories. Even so, you make no move for the exit.

Instead you glare at the bottle with accusation and reach for one of the stout jars. You don't open it immediately, arguing with yourself before finally pulling the lid. Snowy winter mountains greet you, reminding you of trips to the Alps. They’re cold and callous and quiet, a reprieve from the noise of family and decisions.

As you trudge through the fluff of snowfall you feel the urge to throw a tantrum, to whine and kick the ground, scattering white powder like autumn leaves. Your grandmother is normally just a lingering thought, the essence of a feeling burrowed uncomfortably in your chest. Uncomfortable, but small enough to ignore.

You come to a stop at that thought. Your heart continues to race, speeding up instead of slowing at your stillness. This feeling scares you, its enormity and intensity, so powerful you wonder how you haven’t let it take over. Is this the first time you’ve ever sat with this… this tangled knot of grief? Even one second is too long and you start treading forwards again, offering a physical explanation for these symptoms. The mountains are still too calm, too quiet, and you leave the cold to stand in the warmth of the tent once again.

The room is also silent, unmoving, but the shining jars distract you, pulling your attention away from your thoughts. You stand with them silently, eyes roaming the many options—the many perpetrators of your distress. The mason jars—innocent containers for locations—are safe, you decide.

A red lid stands out to you, the body wide and clear. It’s filled with beads, clicking gently as you pull the jar to your face for inspection. It takes you to a bustling American city, you guess New York from the looming buildings and grey skies. For the first time you pass a window. The room behind it is dark enough to cast your reflection. Momo’s surprised face blinks back at you.

You walk around the table looking for more innocent memories to invade, nearly missing a small bottle close to the center. When you take a few steps it reveals itself, originally shadowed by the larger jar in front. The exterior is a sharp lime green, recognizable despite the warmth of the dim light. You know this color by heart. You pause while reaching for it, when you realize the shape of the bottle is the same as Sero’s.

You stare skeptically, heart thumping in alarm but arm itching to see what it holds. You try to reason with yourself, remind yourself that you’re looking through other people’s memories, invading their privacy. Even if you can only place two of them so far, that’s still two too many. Hell, everything you’ve seen is more than you should have.

But the color—that bright chartreuse… a devious part of your heart yells that it’s a sign. It’s meant for you. 

You have no strength. You open it.

The smell of citrus overwhelms your senses, paired with warm light streaming in from a window. You’re sitting on a stool—on your own hands—as gentle fingers card through your hair, pulling and pinning it back in place. A murmur floats through from the neighboring room: muffled bickering. Your ear itches, and you dip your head to meet your shoulder to relieve it.

“Oi!” a voice barks behind you, the stern chide of your grandmother. “Quédate quieto, tú tucán.”

Sit still, you toucan.

You frown, eyes teary from the discomfort and the sting against your scalp as abuela tugs your head back. “Pero me duele,” you whine. But it hurts. “Y no quiero ser un tucán.” And I don’t wanna be a toucan.

The part of you watching as an observer, as an adult looking over a decade in the past, feels a panicked jolt in their heart. This is the exact sort of memory you feared, one that would bring you back to your family without any warning, throwing you into abuela’s mandarin-lemon perfume and wrinkled hands. You think this could be the cruelest memory for you to relive, the evening before your first parade in the Fiestas de Quito. You’re visiting an aunt, a regular parade performer who invited your family to join.

Your younger self thinks toucans are weird, with their large beaks and boring bodies. Abuela uses the nickname because you’re easily fussy and angry, ready to peck both literally and metaphorically. Chiara adopted it when she overheard you on the phone at work, claiming it still suited you.

You eye the head garments on the desk in front of you, the vibrant beak attached to a stick for you to hold to your face, a reddened tip that fades into blues and greens, swathed with a hint of yellow and orange. The front of your costume has a matching lemony yellow along the chest, but the rest is loose black fabric falling over your shoulders and back. You feel yourself frown at the sight, your younger self internally grumbling that they wanted to be a macaw. The fabric is itchy anyways, and you’re scared to dance out in the road with your family.

“I’ll stop calling you Tucán the day you stop fussing like one.”

You only frown further, temper rising as if your body wants to prove her point. A cry bubbles in your throat, nearing painful as you swallow it down. Instead you let tears prickle at the corners of your eyes. At a particularly harsh tug on your hair you ball your fists beneath your thighs, knuckles aching at the force. The headpiece is heavy and itchy when it's secured in place, and the pins dig uncomfortably in your scalp.

But then it’s done. Abuela’s hand comes down to your shoulder and squeezes gently, her warmth seeping through the rough fabric and into your skin. Her touch is firm but gentle, the touch of a grandparent. You turn to look at her carefully, accusatorily. Her face is soft, a fond smile tugging at her lips when she notices your teary eyes. She steps forward to hug you, encasing you in warmth and citrus. You bury your face into her shoulder, easily welcoming her despite your earlier annoyance. She hums, patting your head carefully.

“Lo siento,” she apologizes quietly. “You did good. Let’s try to have some fun, okay?”

You nod as she pulls away, already missing her warmth. Your hand timidly reaches for hers. She takes it easily, holding firmly as you slide off the stool and collect the beak from the table in front of you. She gives it a squeeze as you make your way to the next room together. You find the memory ironic, since the parade was a disaster; you fell and broke your ankle near the end, carried the rest of the way crying in abuela's arms.

But here with her hand in yours, you can't help but believe it might be different this time.

How long has it been since you two held hands? Your most recent memory of interlocked fingers was after she had passed, her hand limp while you squeezed it violently—on the phone with emergency services. But when did she last reach for you? Was it here in Italy, or years ago back home?

In this memory before you, her hand is rough and wrinkled, skin cracked and scarred—the telltale signs of a weathered person. She's always been worn to you, always old in your memory. Unlike the jagged surface of the earth, which fades into softness, smoothness, as it ages, people are soft from the start, warm flesh covering the sharpness of bone. Time pulls that cushion thin, until it is stripped away entirely.

Until the people themselves are stripped away—from your life and your memories.

When you blink awake in the tent, you’re kneeling on the cold ground, bottle clutched atop your thighs. Your cheeks are wet, eyes heavy and burning. There’s a similar burning in your heart, an ache and a longing that overwhelms you, makes you feel incomplete.

But there’s also a sense of peace, one you think you haven’t felt before. There’s a quietness to your pain, one that holds appreciation. It's almost content. Despite the stinging in your heart, the muscle sits still, beating slowly. Your head is clear, like you’re actually living. As if this pain is an affirmation that you are alive.

You bring the opening of the small container to your nose, breathing in light and citrus once again.

The following day, you come to the circus ready to demand answers. You want to furiously ask who is crawling through your memory, putting special moments in bottles to be experienced by someone else. You want to ask why—why they would do this. You want to ask how—how the hell it’s possible to whisk you away to another world. And who—who’s doing this?

You want to ask if it’s all for you.

You immediately turn around once you reach the entrance. Your stomach hurts, squeezing at the thought of asking your questions, at the thought of receiving answers. The coward in you leads you to a nearby cafe, hoping that an hour in brooding silence will help you muster the courage to stomp back and interrogate the entire cast. 

You sit by a window nursing a hot drink, staring at people as they walk by in their coats and boots. The mug heats your hand and lips, smooths over the unsteadiness in your chest.

After some time a hand obstructs your vision, eyes forced from a garish skirt you were admiring on someone walking across the street. You’re annoyed by the diversion of your attention, then panicking when you turn to see the hand’s owner. Any shield of peace you had started to build immediately collapses at the sight of Kaminari—the friendly blond and one of the puppeteers.

“Hey!” He exclaims. “Whatcha doin’ here?” 

You smile nervously by habit, unsure how to react to the ambush. Before you can come up with an answer, he asks, “Are you coming to hang out backstage again?”

You pause, suddenly embarrassed by the question. Are you being annoying? Hanging around their cast members and pretending for a moment that you're one of them? You don’t know what to say, not ready for the reaction that will arise if you affirm or deny his question. The answer is opaque even to yourself, unclear where your heart and mind are willing to compromise.

“I’m not sure,” you say honestly.

His expression doesn’t change, still an open curiosity. He blinks, as if your answer is one he didn’t prepare for.

“Oh,” he says. A silence lingers awkwardly for a moment. “You should come! If you have the time.”

Your chest crumples at the response. You don’t know why or what it means. Then you frown, realizing that the show has already started. “Wait, why are you here? Don’t you have to get ready?”

He hums in denial, the fluff of his hair bouncing as he shakes his head. “Not yet! Since I’m one of the last acts they sent me on coffee duty,” he finishes with a pout.

His head turns as an order is called, the barista slipping the last cup into a drink carrier on the counter. He turns and smiles at you. “That’s me. Help me carry them?”

You’re surprised by the request, glancing at your nearly empty mug. Kaminari doesn’t wait for an answer, already walking across the room. Body moving on its own, you down the rest of your drink and scurry to follow him. He hands you a carrier, taking another in his hand and a box of baked goods in the other.

“Yay,” is all he says, smiling warmly before leading you outside.

Your eyes narrow as you watch him, walking with a slight bounce in his step, face soft with contentment and eyes curiously taking in the surroundings of red brick, cobblestone roads.

“Your circus can’t afford delivery?” you ask, wondering why they would send a performer and not a random stagehand.

He giggles, shaking his head. “They send me on errands to get me away from the stage. I get antsy waiting for my act.”

Like a dog, you think.

You two stop at the crosswalk, waiting for the pedestrian light to turn green. Kaminari uses the pause to awkwardly balance the pastry box on his arm carrying the drinks, pulling out his phone to check the time. You wonder what his carrying strategy would have been had he not run into you.

“I would’ve stacked them all on top of each other,” he answers when you ask.

A vision of him tripping on the sidewalk, twelve hot drinks tumbling to the ground and splashing against his skin, flashes through your mind. You decide it was a very good thing that your cafe brooding was intercepted, even with your nerves still sitting in your chest.

You enter backstage mostly unnoticed, everyone preoccupied with watching the show on the screens or preparing for their own acts. You help put the drinks on one of the tables, near an armature that some of the athletes use for stretching. Sero’s backside is facing you as he hangs from one arm and then the other, warming his shoulders for his act. He speaks casually to the poi artist—Bakugou, standing with his arms crossed and a scowl on his face.

You avert your eyes, not letting yourself get lost in the ripples beneath Sero's costume, the way his muscles shift when he switches arms. His body looks weightless, light as he tugs and swings with ease, despite being dense with lean muscle.

You wonder how he would feel if he knew your eyes trailed his form like this, especially after last night—after you crawled your way through his memory, to live his own life for an instant. Would he grimace, losing that meaningful sheen in his eyes when they stare into yours? 

When you look away you lock eyes with Uraraka. She must have just finished her act before you entered, laying on one of the lounge chairs. She lifts a hand lazily to wave. You wave back.

“Hanta!” you hear from beside you, Denki’s cheeky voice. You don’t understand the Japanese that follows, but watch as Sero turns around, a flash of embarrassment crossing his features before he hesitantly walks over.

You frown slightly at the call of his name, eyes moving down to the table as you think.

Not Hanta with a silent H, Hanta with the H, soft and breathy.

Hanta.

“Huh?” you hear him beside you. You look back up and catch a face of surprise. His cheeks are pink, flustered. Confusion washes over you briefly before it turns into embarrassment, realizing you must have said his name out loud.

“Sorry!” you say quickly. “I just—I assumed it was ‘Anta, the Spanish pronunciation. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

God, this man needs a break from you.

His mouth moves slightly, lips pressed as if suppressing something. Kaminari laughs beside you and you feel another wave of embarrassment. Your knowledge of Japanese culture is sparse, but you have the decency to recognize that you aren’t close enough to be whispering Sero’s given name to yourself.

He shakes his head, coughing gently before he assures, “It’s fine, I prefer it anyways.”

You nod dumbly, swallowing as warmth bloom in your cheeks. Kaminari hands Sero his order, slender fingers removing the lid of the dark drink before holding it to his nose for an inhale. You look away, hand slipping into your pocket to clutch the green marble between the fabric. Last night you took that bottle with you, the one with abuela tucked away inside, but when you left the tent it became nothing but a small glass sphere. You want to yank it aggressively from your pocket and put it on display, demanding answers for what you saw… and why you can’t have it again. Your stomach tightens.

Others filter over, thanking Kaminari for the drinks and rummaging through the box of snacks. You relax at the sight of Momo, talking animatedly about the show tonight. Shouto and Touya make an appearance shortly, acts finished. Sero is quiet, you notice, more subdued than the previous days. You can overhear his conversation with Kaminari, but it’s incomprehensible, rapid Japanese, as you try to maintain yours with Momo.

Your eyes lock once, but he looks away first. Your stomach clenches again.

You wait with Momo before her act, near the opening towards the stage. She stands confidently, eager to make her way to her performance.

“I’m amazed by how not-nervous you are,” you tell her.

She smiles softly. “I’m certainly nervous, but more excited than anything. When I first started performing, as a teenager, I could hardly find the courage to stand on stage.”

You stroke your thumb over the marble in your pocket, the memory of your own first performance—your discomfort and your nerves and the disaster that followed. Your face twists with uncertainty.

“Break a leg?” you offer, then regret. Is that a phrase used in the circus? Are you cursing her?

“Thanks,” she answers with a smile.

She eventually parts the curtain to take her place on the darkened stage, leaving you at the edge between the inner and the outer—the carefully crafted world of performance, and the mess of construction behind it. You squeeze the marble in your pocket, taking it out to confirm its existence. In the dim light you can hardly tell it’s green, but there are shiny speckles scattered within, reflecting silvery light sweeping over. They’re layered throughout the clump of glass, everywhere and endless.

You exhale and turn to walk back to the main room. You jump in surprise when you see Sero, shadowed in the corner by the entrance. He bristles when you jolt, marble falling from your hand with a clack and rolling towards him. You feel your stomach drop, filling with dread—the fear of losing something.

“Sorry!” he says, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

He crouches to pick it up before you can tell him not to bother. His hand pauses briefly before carefully grasping the small object. Your heart buzzes as it rolls to the center of his palm, his fingers folding to gently squeeze it. When he stands, his arm stretches to return it, and you have the urge to shiver when his fingers brush yours. They're warm. Hot, even. When he pulls away, the marble is safe in the center of your cupped palm.

The expression he wears is complicated, but you think he mostly looks confused. “A keepsake?”

You aren’t sure if he means for the circus or something else. You want to ask him if he recognizes it, what it means. How it can hold something so important and so vivid. All you can manage is, “I found it yesterday. In the festival.”

He looks surprised, shooting a sliver of disappointment through your chest. You want to frown at the feeling, your hope fluttering away. You hoped he knew what it was. A part of you hoped that he was the one orchestrating the tent to begin with, that he was letting you in himself.

“It’s pretty,” he says.

You nod. When you tuck the marble safe into your pocket again, you relax.

Sero looks calmer too, shoulders a little lower and face softened. You’re distracting him, you think, from his anxiety for his performance. You smile, an attempt to reassure him. His lips part slightly, eyes gently widening before they crinkle at the edges, teeth displaying in a crooked grin. The warmth that floods through you is palpable, embarrassing, such an intense feeling for someone you don't know. But you grin back excitedly, that bubbling of child-like giddiness strong in your chest.

The tent tonight is empty, void of tables and shelves and little objects to touch or open. Instead it is endless, one never-ending tunnel, stretching impossibly far. The light above is still dim, soft and warm as it casts against the fabric edges, illuminating just strong enough to reveal the floor. A vibrant mosaic swirls below, clusters of colored glass slotting neatly together, white plaster spacing them apart while also holding them together in place. The shards by your feet are a rhythmic pattern of white and yellow and red, the beautiful warmth of a corn snake. It looks alive from a distance, a breathing monster when the light flickers across the tiny tiles. You take a step, and the refraction offers the illusion that it is slithering away.

One more step lands you on the tail, and immediately you are surrounded by bright purple. Tall lengths of purple, like giant knives that bend and sway, streaks of pale gold and neon green running through them. You feel yourself tread forwards, the vibrations of your movement reverberating through your belly, rubbing against the ground beneath you. Your head darts to the side, tongue flickering to smell the air. It only takes you another moment to realize you are the snake, slithering through a sea of grass, grass that is warped by an infrared vision. Maybe stalking, waiting, enjoying the dapples of light that peek through the canopy above you, warming the smooth scales that line down your body.

The change in perspective is alarming, unsettling. But it’s exciting, watching the world through unreliable eyes, instead letting a new sense guide you. There’s damp, cool air resting on your tongue, refreshingly crisp. Your body curls freely, waving through divots in the ground, brushing against a rough stone along your path. 

You fade in and out of animal metamorphosis, reappearing as a human in the tent at the head of the snake, now walking forwards towards the extended paw of a gray wolf, glimmering reflective triangles scrunched into clusters of fluff. When your shoe makes contact with the edge, green and yellow floods your vision and the scent of pine takes over. You walk along soft needles that carpet the ground.

Next you’re a fish darting through warm water, gills breathing deeply as you slot yourself between corals. Then a polar bear, giant paws carrying along endless sheets of ice and leaving indents in the soft layer of powder on top. A dragonfly, world separated in two warped globes as you clumsily land on a bundle of brush leaning into a river’s edge. As an octopus you roll your tentacled body along the ocean floor, curling and grasping a closed mussel in your row of suckers. Your body is heavy and slow as a tortoise, but completely content with itself dragging against dry dirt. And then you’re a howling monkey, grasping swaying branches to swing through a jungle canopy. The air rushes against your face. You feel free.

This trail of other lives, the opportunity to live as another, is almost a gentler, more lighthearted version of what the tent offered you last night. You walk along the path greedily, giddy as you inhabit other species, get to be small or big or something you never imagined.

(Maybe you are all the same—creatures living for their very first time, as earnestly as you can while you try your hardest to survive, or even to live. To make do with the vessels you inhabit and to explore every crevice of what you’ve been offered. Whether it’s the sky or the sea or the dirt, there is a place for you to be.

There are so many places to be, so many purposes to fulfill. How does one choose?)

The next mosaic is a vibrant green bird, the long length of the guacamaya verde: the green macaw, your military macaw. You pause, brain stuttering at the sight. Are these tents really… for you? But why? Who has any reason to go through this effort, to share such… secrets.

Secrets, because that’s what they are. Impossible moments and experiences, precious memories that you can’t even match to their owners.

You step forward, body falling through the sky as you fly in the body of a green macaw. That overwhelming feeling of freedom rushes through you again, chest light against the wind and face soaking in the breeze. The world is expansive and sharp and saturated. You can see the canopy below you, giant fanning leaves and clusters of tall, tall grasses. There are blooms of orange, the flaming flowers of the Llama del Bosque—The Flame of the Forest.

The sky is vast and blue and yours. Endless freedom, endless choice. Nothing holding you down, nothing clipping at your wings to prevent your journey forwards. The joy is uncontainable, bubbling from your throat in the form of excited chirping. You laugh at the sound, manifesting as a squawk that pulls more laughs from your chest.

There’s a response, another call in the distance. Your head twists, neck craning towards the sound. The small ruffles of feathers across your neck brush the skin beneath, making you twitch and shiver, body faltering in the air as your wings tilt. You dip slightly, arcing through the atmosphere as you search for the origins of the sound.

Another green macaw swoops to your side from above, chirping. It's an emerald against the sapphire of the sky, shimmering. Large wings flap beside you, nearly brushing your own. Your heart swells, never having been this close and intimate with a bird before. As a human you are a distant admirer, watching content from the ground as they whoosh above you. But now you’re here next to one, as one, comrades gliding through the sky, chartreuse swathes of paint in a canvas of cerulean blue.

You coast together, soaring through air and wind. Your new friend tilts forward, dipping to swoop to the ground before soaring far beneath you. Your heart rises to your throat with nerves, but you take the plunge and dive down to meet it.

Cold air rushes past you as you find yourself running through the stalls. You yelp in surprise, and the lack of warning before you were removed from the sky. Now you stumble on two legs, trying to slow yourself while simultaneously reacclimating to being on land, body falling forwards as you barely catch yourself.

You’re finally stable, chest heaving as you stand by a market tent, the clink of change and mumbling of exchanges bringing you back to earth. Your body is on fire, tingling with life and anticipation. You turn your head quickly, confused how you arrived here, back through the front of the tent and into the row of artists. Nobody looks surprised by your appearance, not blinking an eye as they pass, caught in their own worlds.

You turn helplessly, body buzzing with disbelief. There’s a giddiness in your chest—the belief in something impossible. Otherworldly.

The red-draped tent stands quietly, unassuming, soft folds spilling onto the plaza floor. You walk towards it slowly, curiously. When you pull the curtain back and step inside again, it’s the small, empty, ordinary space of a covered market tent. A part of your heart clenches in disappointment, wanting to relive that special feeling or freedom and flight over and over again. Then it stutters, painful with an emotion that touches on pride, maybe spiteful glee at the implication that the tent was for you. That it emptied itself after it carried you on your intended journey.

You step back into the markets with a skip, giddiness uncontained. You’re a child again, impatient to move, to do something. The stalls blur as you flit through them, weaving along the people and rows with a thrill.

You see Momo.

The world of glee you’re lost in comes to an end momentarily. You falter, conflicted as you watch her bend to a knee next to a young boy—a fan bouncing with excitement for a photo. You haven’t stayed long enough to see any of the cast the past two nights, running away too soon or too quickly. But here’s an opportunity right before you, a potential answer.

She approaches you first.

“Are you enjoying your evening?” she asks. 

“Of course,” you reply honestly. More words bubble at the entrance of your mouth—vulnerable questions, skeptical demands—but they don’t manage to escape.

“It’s a beautiful night.”

You hum in agreement, and leave it at that.

When the next day comes, you tell yourself you need to stop, that this itch you have to run back, the anticipation you can’t shake off, is a fog over your mind, not allowing you to think clearly. Deluded thoughts of running away start to seep into your brain. You try to remind yourself that it’s not a delusion; they want you, Kendo’s offer being proof. Then you think you’re delusional for believing it.

You wonder if you should take a break, stay away for one night to let your mind reset and have a sense of tranquility. Not this habit of chasing cravings—dreams and fantasies of running away with them, never looking back. How can you do that with a box of ashes in your living room, an anchor chaining you down. You repeat this to yourself, a mantra as you push fabric under the needle, glide scissors through careful outlines of a pattern to stitch together.

But when the evening comes, you can’t stay away.

This time when you pull the flap open and step inside, you nearly trip into a vast pool of still water. You land on a gondola, rocking harshly from your clumsy footing. You manage to grasp the edge of the wooden boat, holding your body rigid as it eventually comes to a still.

Before you is a pond, or maybe an ocean, a clear blue body of water reflecting the brightness of the sky. There’s a faint blush of orange seeping from the horizon, sun hovering a few degrees above the surface. It must be a lake, with the giant, twisting mandarin tree that stands before you. The trunk is thick and sturdy, giant bundles of leaves bursting from the top and sprinkled with clusters of oranges. You’ve never met a tree this massive, at least ten times the size of its standard.

At the base of the trunk, where bark meets water, the surrounding surface is filled with fallen leaves and oranges. They float calmly, mirroring the canopy above. A wind rustles your boat and the branches, leaves chattering—whispering to each other. Two oranges break from their stems, plummeting below. They sink at first, spurting water from their point of impact. A wave rolls through, gentle ripples disturbing the silent blanket of green and orange.

You breathe, citrus and clarity entering your lungs, your mind. Everything is quiet. Still. 

Your eyes sweep the gondola, its dark and empty body. Feet move carefully along the bottom, the vessel rocking with each step. You grasp the handle of the oar once it's in reach, tucked in the elbow of the fórcola, and lift to place the long rod into the divot at the top. You pull experimentally, the bow slicing through blue ripples; you and the boat trudge forward as one—awkwardly curving to the left.

Your movements are unpracticed, never having been the one to pilot a gondola before, only ever the passenger. The boat rocks choppily with your command, switching directions constantly and moving with no predictable pattern. But it’s fun. You laugh when your steering propels you in the opposite direction you intended. The sound expands into the vast space beyond, carried by another breeze that flutters across your skin.

The tree is still out of reach, likely another ten minutes of amateur paddling. But you notice an orange floating in the water, only an arms length away. Quickly you tuck the oar securely before you carefully lean over the edge to grab the fruit.

The pads of your fingers brush the skin—smooth and wet. Slightly bumpy. And then it’s soft. Papery thin, folding under the pressure of your touch.

It opens into the bloom of a lotus flower.

You startle at the change, boat jerking at the force of your reaction. The water jostles, lotus wavering on the rough surface, but it looks calm, unworried. Content to ride out the wave. The air has a stronger tang of citrus, a cloud of orange spreading through the air.

Your miraculous touch persists as you slowly approach the tree, transforming the little fruits into opened flowers, crowns of orange with fiery red edges. They look like layers of sharp spoons, folds of colored paper, licks of flame reaching back for you. But they’re cool to the touch, soft, thin. 

As your boat cuts through clusters of oranges, parting them through the water like lanterns floating through the night, you reach for them, entranced at their unfolding. Flowering. The moment feels too beautiful, too peaceful for you to be a part of it. You don’t understand how your fingers, oftentimes nothing but hurried, rushed, clumsy appendages, could have such a magical effect. How they can transform. Create. 

Reveal. 

As the sun dips down, kissing the horizon, orange floods your vision. The sky becomes the petal of a lotus, red and orange and pink melding into one another, like blotches of ink seeping through cotton. The water is a liquid mirror, a chameleon to the sky, and the little lotus flowers nearly vanish, lost to the quilt of warmth they are sewn atop of.

You breathe deeply, calmly. Fresh, warm, citrus air fills you. You think if abuela were a color it would be orange. That fleshy inside of a limón mandarina: covered in green skin, a citrus that leans a little more sharp, a little more sour than the one you’re surrounded by now. This one is soft, sweet, with an orange skin that matches its inside, with leaves of a deeper green than you’re familiar with. But it’s equally warm, equally loving.

The peace in your heart is unfamiliar, one you haven't known for years. You bask in the balmy light of the falling sun, the hazy glow of a light burning out. You bask in the security of your feelings, your strength, your ability to remember, and to remember with ease.

When the sun finally dips, extinguishing its light into the water below, you are on firm ground. Unwavering ground. Steady ground. There are no lights above you or water beneath, just solid earth.

Your tranquility persists when you step out into the night air, body completely at ease. The world has a new sense of clarity, reality that you can experience freely. Free of shackles to your own mind and fears. Free of questions terrorizing your heart.

Free of embarrassment, when you bump into Sero near the musicians.

He looks surprised to see you, or maybe nervous. You aren’t entirely sure, only able to observe wide eyes, a slight pink across his cheeks, a smile that doesn’t quite split his face. But you take it in stride, lips curving softly as you greet him.

“Hi Sero,” you greet, then pause. “Hanta,” you correct yourself, his given name still unfamiliar to your tongue and mind.

“Hey,” he says. It’s breathy. Soft. You hear clearly over the ambiance of the music and the crowd, somehow.

You don’t respond, feeling no reason to, letting your eyes sweep through the plaza instead.

“Are you… enjoying yourself?”

You hum as you turn back to him. “Yeah,” you say. “Tonight’s been… really good.”

His face twitches, lips tugging higher up his cheeks before they’re smothered back down. His eyes relax. You think his shoulders drop slightly. 

A silence passes through you, a third presence to mediate your conversation. You accept it easily, let it hang in the space as you stand towards the edge of the scene. Moments go by. You let them.

“Care to dance?” Sero—Hanta asks abruptly.

You feel your cheeks tighten, lips stretching as you look down at yourself, your mismatch of patterned pants and too-big shirt. Chunky boots that would crush his toes. Then you turn to him, eyes crinkled with amused concern. You tap your horrible, chunky boot against the toe of his shoe.

“Only if you’re brave enough.”

Sero’s face breaks into a crooked grin. You watch his eyes unfocus, darkness smearing against his skin, hiding in the crease of his eyelids. His lashes are long, you realize, dark feathery strings that frame honest expressions. And his teeth are so bright, boasting a smile that shines.

No more words pass between you, silence still a third participant in your conversation. It’s only long glances, eyes flittering over features. An occasional yelp or grimace when you inevitably step on his toes.

But you’re at ease. At peace. Warm, with his hands on you.

The feeling does not persist to the morning.

In the rising sun you are a regretful creature, face flaming against your pillow—in attempt to suffocate yourself—as you recount the night before. The ability to let go, to exist in the moment and in complete peace, is a distant dream. Now you are embarrassed. Panicked.

When you rise and check your phone, there is a missed call from your sister. You drag your thumb across the screen to send the notification out of sight. Out of mind.

You arrive at Chiara’s early, letting yourself in to find her sitting in the living room. She grimaces as her eyes sweep over you.

You’re in your dress of stars. Bunches of sleek, dark fabric spill over your figure, elegantly taught against your waist and tightly wrapped around your torso. The shape is littered with glimmering flickers of silver, star-shaped stones and beads and gems sewn delicately into the skirt. A feathery length of ribbon is tied to each one, sheer silk that lifts as you walk, taken by the rush of your movement. The same misty fabric coats your arms in loose pleated waves.

You think you’d look captivating, ethereal even, if you didn’t pair it with a bright red beanie and thick, yellow-plaid coat. You smile, assuming they’re also the source of your friend’s disdain.

“I’m afraid to find out what shoes you’re wearing.”

You pinch the fabric around your thighs and lift, tendrils of frosted ribbons swaying as you reveal your most dirty, weathered, casual sneakers—once white but now grey, or maybe brown. Chiara scowls.

You linger quietly as she readies, heart nervous and distracted. It’s the final show, the last night of the festival. Likely the last night of secret, quiet little tents. Tents made just for you.

After she changes she shoves a jacket into your hands—a matching black with a sheen instead of rough felt and fleece. You pout, knowing you won’t be as warm, attempting to make a compromise that you’ll take it off when you’re inside, but she won’t have it. You manage to argue for your shoes, but she yanks the hat from your head as you exit her home, tossing it behind the door before locking it quickly. She ignores your protests and pushes you towards the elevators.

When you settle comfortably in your seats, jacket shrugged from your shoulders as you expected under the warmth of the canvas top, it nears half an hour to the start of the show. Chiara grumbles next to you at the punctuality.

“Scusami,” you apologize half-heartedly. “I’m excited.”

Her furrowed eyebrows and scrunched mouth soften, features smoothing as she rolls her eyes. You grin. She averts her eyes, glossy nails threading through the pages of the performance booklet.

“Sorry in advance for my lack of enthusiasm.”

“It’s fine,” you tell her. You know she doesn’t understand why you chase these shows. This one is even further from her range of interest, since the masks leave little to be studied from a cosmetic standpoint. “Thanks for coming anyway.”

She scoffs. “Of course.”

Seeing the show a second time in full and in the audience has a special quality. The first had the element of surprise, a suspense that gripped you tightly. This time you’re full of anticipation, and as Midoriya told you when you met—spending time backstage and seeing the hidden parts of the show help you appreciate it more, better understand the amount of work and skill that went into certain acts: to achieve ideal transitions, to tell the story.

Momo's act is executed perfectly for the last time—the last time here, in the city where you made her gown. The last time here, with you in the audience. The last time here, you floundering in uncertainty. You would tear up easily if it weren't for Chiara's nails digging into your arm.

Even after several days of seeing snippets of the show, of catching performers in costume and preparing backstage, you aren't prepared to watch Sero's performance. He's more captivating than the first time you watched him, stealing your focus and your breath as he moves. Would it be weird to ask for a recording? For some way to watch him in the future? Are you going to be cursed with mere flashes of his movements for the rest of your life, wishing you could see him again?

You try not to stare, in case your friend catches you. But you give up in an instant, accepting that you set yourself up for failure.

When the show runs its course and the audience makes to leave, Chiara’s grip on your hand is painful.

“What the hell was that!?” she exclaims over the rushing of the crowd.

“What? The last performance?” You can admit the giant, mechanical puppets were unexpected, but you think they worked well for the show and as promotional pieces.

“The whole fucking show! And shit Tucano—your dress!”

You laugh, nodding in agreement. 

“Do you know that guy, the white haired one doing the handstands?” Her eyes are wide, boring into yours with interrogation. “I think the booklet said his name is—Shigaraki?”

Your face twists in confusion. “We were introduced, but I haven’t spoken to him much.” He’s quiet and kept to himself, though you aren’t sure if that’s limited to his backstage personality.

You make a face when you realize what she’s thinking. Your eyes drop in disbelief, lips tightening in a line when she asks, “Introduce me?”

“You can introduce yourself,” you say. The row finally clears and you step from the line of seats to walk towards the stage. The guard is the same as the one from the first night; this time he doesn’t stop you from climbing up the steps and through the curtain.

The room is in a frenzy when you enter, many of the actors half undressed as they change into their festival costumes for the last time. Some scurry to begin the process of deconstructing the props. Large trays of catered food lay on folding tables near the center of the room, plates and bowls unfinished and scattered around the space.

Momo is by the entrance when you walk in, still in full costume, to give you a hug. The embrace is tender, soft and warm as you carefully bring your arms to her waist to return it.

“What an incredible first week!” she exclaims when you pull away. Her eyes shine with glee and pride. “Quite possibly the best we could have imagined.”

“You deserve it,” you tell her. “I’m so happy for everyone. And it was a dream… to be able to be part of this.”

The edges of Momo’s eyes deepen while her dark irises shine. She blinks rapidly before grasping your hand. “Don’t act like this is our goodbye. We still have Carnival.” The Ambrosia Carnival—happening for the next three days, where the crew and puppets will be paraded.

“Are you going to be free? To get dinner with Kendou and myself before you leave?” she asks.

You nod eagerly. Momo’s eyes sweep to Chiara, then back to you. The looks you exchange are an agreement that you’ll work out the details later.

In the meantime you introduce your friend to the cast. Chiara stands confidently, shaking hands and explaining her work. Her English is more refined than yours, her accent less noticeable and language more eloquent. Sometimes you forget this side of her, used to crass Italian that lovingly insults you—not unlike your sister’s Spanish. Your sister… You briefly wonder if she acts like Chiara when she’s working. Her missed call comes back to your mind. You shake the thought away.

When you return to the present, Chiara is gone from your side. You frown and look around the room, eyes widening when you see her enthusiastically talking to Shigaraki. He looks intimidated, almost cornered, and you watch with uncertainty if you should interfere.

“Is that your friend?”

You turn to Sero’s voice, sending a mental apology to the white-haired man, knowing you won’t move to save him. You hum in affirmation. “Chia. She can be kind of intense.”

You itch to compliment him, ramble on about his performance, the fluidity and the beauty of it. How it still takes your breath away despite having seen it several times by now. Then you remember the way you stepped on his toes last night, your giant boots making your movements choppy and clumsy. You fight a grimace, clenching your jaw at the memory. He deserves the compliment.

“Your performance was incredible, again,” you muster.

His embarrassed smile makes a piece of you tense, wanting to curl your toes and clench your fist as you watch his eyebrows curve upwards, like he’s ready to dismiss it. You bite your tongue.

“Your dress…” he trails off, unsure how to finish. 

You brighten. It’s the first anyone has mentioned it tonight. “Oh! It borrows from Si Estiramos Estrellas Como Seda. I mean, it’s inspired by the fifth chapter. I wanted to play around with the concept of the stars, and I like the way it moves.”

You twist your hips slightly, letting the skirt twirl and sway gently over your legs. The sheer ribbons float along, a delayed trail of strings. An afterimage of your figure.

Sero’s lips part slightly as he watches the rustle of fabric. You think you can see awe, striking a giddy warmth through your chest.

A voice sounds behind you, deep with a rise towards the end that borders condescending. You don’t understand the words, Japanese, but you feel like they’re meant for you. A flash of irritation crosses Sero’s face, eyes darting behind you in a glare that almost makes you nervous.

You turn to see the Todoroki brothers. The younger one speaks when your eyes meet. “Don’t mind Touya, he doesn’t speak English.” He pauses. “And he insulted your shoes.”

You laugh, eyebrows raising curiously. “What did he say?”

Todoroki shakes his head. “It was rather crude.”

Neither Sero or Todoroki entertain your pleading for answers, and you’re forced to pout in your ignorance while the eldest grins to himself. His smile is sharp and glinting, a knife against skin. You remember Kendo’s comment: that he was originally apprehensive to join the circus. You wonder why, with how comfortable he looks with everyone. What held him back, and what finally convinced him?

You don’t ask, instead getting pulled into further conversation about your dress. Sero pesters you to take some of the food, offering a plate that you gently refuse. Only then does Chiara materialize next to you, graciously taking the dish that you won’t.

“Hey—” you try to stop her.

Sero grins. “It’s fine. There’s always extra. Please, take some too.”

Chiara grunts when you shake your head. “There’s no way you're passing up catering from la Brisa.”

You can’t relate right now, stomach sporting faint knots. They were easy to ignore at the beginning of the night, distracted by Chiara’s bickering and the show. But with each minute you get closer to wandering through market stalls, walking your way into that tent one final time. You’re too excited to eat—too nervous, even.

“I agree.” Hanta adds with a grin. He turns to Chiara. “I’m Sero, by the way.”

You pause, frowning as your friend introduces herself after Todoroki. You look at Sero skeptically, then as blankly as you can, ruminating on why he called himself Sero. I prefer Hanta, he told you.

“Tucano?”

You blink, mind returning as Chiara taps her nail against your arm. 

“Hmm?”

“I asked if you were gonna be okay, if I left before the festival,” she says, eyeing you. “There’s a club that just opened, but I need to change if I go.”

You frown. “It’s a Wednesday?”

Her face contorts between a grimace and a look of disgust.

You roll your eyes. “Yeah, yeah I’ll be fine.” You smile at her gently, gratefully. “Thanks for coming.”

“Always, birdie.” You can hear the softness beneath her dismissal. You wave her off.

When you step in the tent for a final time, you fall.

It’s a plummet of surrender. The void is vast and consuming, the darkness of a night sky. A black piece of paper dotted with needles, a sheet of silken fabric pulled taught, lightness seeping through the threads. Your body burns against the rush of air, a meteor, a streak of fire in the coldest abyss, the vacuum of space and time. You let it take you, pull you through one final journey. The fall is fast and terrifying, stomach heavy as if you swallowed the weight yanking you down. But it’s safe. Free.

You touch land like a blazing arrow, fiery hot as you roll against the ground, body slowing as you tumble through long grasses. They are black, narrow blades that wave in the night, slivers of silver streaked down their bodies like shards of the moon. The vegetation is a cool mist against your searing skin. You roll slowly, turning gently onto your back when you finally lose momentum. You’re left staring into the sea of sparkles you just fell from.

When you sit up, you see that there is no end to the meadow in sight, not until you turn and greet looming, jagged mountains standing over your backside. They’re intense, watchful, protective of the moon, its light obscured behind their sharp figures. It’s all grass otherwise, rolling hills of hair blowing in a soft breeze. All grass, with one large pond carved into the carpet of the earth ahead of you.

You take your time approaching, crawling slowly through the grassland. A childish grin tugs at your mouth, feeling like a lion parading through its kingdom. The greenery rustles under every step, crunching beneath your hands and knees. You think if you were a lion you could feel the roughness of your paw against the fibers, your fur tickling your skin, mobile joints shifting under flesh.

The water in the pond is still, not a single ripple in motion. It’s surface is impossibly reflective, silver glass that captures every detail of the sky in sharp precision. When you lean over to get a glimpse of yourself, it’s not your own face that looks back at you.

The figure is dark, a shadow against the freckling of stars that twinkle from above. The silhouette is not yours. You freeze, heart racing as you are struck with realization.

Without hesitation, moving purely on instinct, you lean to dip your fingers into the pond, fist hovering over a cluster of stars, the face of Lepus’ skeletal form. You pull.

Bright, shining threads float through the air, silken lengths of stardust. They shimmer, glow under the gaze of the moon. You stretch the stars like silk, like you’ve dreamt since the day your eyes read chapter five of that mysterious little book. It’s a beautiful sight, the twisted, bright fibers floating through the night with every cluster you pull. Most shine silver and white. You notice a particularly thick thread with an orange hue—Jupiter, you think. Another is bright red. Mars.

You aren’t sure how to weave your stars and planets, holding the bundle of threads like a tuft of hair near the base. A braid could work, the closest weave you know to an actual rope. You imagine abuela scoffing as she watches you, retaining nothing from all the years you watched her work her loom. When you begin to separate the clusters of string, flitted through your fingers, a hand comes through the water to grasp your wrist.

At the heat of the touch, the searing contact of a palm and fingers over your skin, you are certain that Sero is on the other side.

He tugs you close, body falling through the portal of water, and you are once again shooting through the night sky. This time Sero falls beside you, one hand over your wrist and the other around your waist. Your body is burning again, searing as if his touch is everywhere, pressed deep into your side and holding you impossibly close. His face is still obscured, body still a void of darkness, a black hole. But you have no doubt it’s him. A tremor runs through you, heart beating rapidly as it pumps more heat throughout your body.

The universe is palpable, a tangible surface that you strike together. The stars are scattered beneath you as you are jostled in Sero’s—Hanta’s—protective arms. You want to press your face into his chest, dissolve into him as he cradles you, tumbling through stardust. After two more rolls you come to a still, laying gently on top of him, his chest a steady ocean wave beneath you. One of your arms comes beside him to lift yourself up, peering down. His face is illuminated in the moonlight, no longer a blank mysterious figure. You can see the white of his eyes blown wide, cheeks noticeably darker than usual. You watch him closely, unable to speak or look away as your body tingles, heart still pounding, racing through your chest and throat as you think of something to say. Anything. You feel weak under his gaze, arm a tremoring pillar.

The stars sparkle beneath him, like fine spheres of glass. When you clench your hand to try and steady yourself, shift for better footing, you realize it is glass. Sand. Black sand, the kind that twinkles in the day, a starry sky in the sun. You’re the first to break eye contact, sweeping past Hanta and across the shore. Your shore. The black sand of the Eastern coast—deep and rugged against clear blue waters that look murky in the night.

There’s a tug at your hand: Hanta, having stood without you noticing. You let him pull you, words still frozen as you watch his cautious face. He looks afraid. You are too.

He leads you to the water, your feet—now somehow bare despite still in your cosmic dress—pressing into the lapping waves. They don’t sink until they touch sand, instead pressing against the surface of the water, your sole a hydrophobic pad that can’t break through. Sero pauses once you’ve taken a few steps, turning to look back at you before he continues forward.

The trust is easy, natural. You think nothing of the disappearing shoreline, only looking ahead. It’s easy with him guiding you.

The sky lightens as you cross the ocean, black becoming a deep blue that lifts from the horizon, evaporating as vibrant orange takes its place, eventually fading into bright, constant cerulean. The sun waves through the air, eventually floating directly above you. Your heart steadies, slows, as you jog over the ocean in tandem. There is only peace, bliss. Freedom. It’s just you and Sero and the sound of the water. Sero doesn’t look back, not since the initial step off the shore. Only when a new form of land enters your sight—close enough for you to see sand—does he take another glance. His face is still smothered with worry. Your trust is still firm, but your heart wavers at his uncertainty. What is he doubting?

When your feet touch sand for a second time, tan clusters of shell and stone dust, it is fiery hot against your skin. Searing like Hanta, his hand still pulling yours. You run through jagged rocks and grasses, uphill, towards the back of a house. It’s small, with a sun-bleached deck. It looks familiar.

When you reach the deck, wood creaking under your weight as Sero pulls you through the backdoor, your vision flashes with the memory of a sleek black bottle. Then it’s you, sitting on the bench holding a maracuya to your lips, abruptly jumping to run inside and greet abuelita. You are once again in the warm confines of Hanta’s memory, this time as you. This time with him, to guide you through.

The inside of the house is empty, but you remember your way to the front door. You think he’s going to stop, open it and greet his abuelita. But he only pushes through, pulling you out of his childhood home as quickly as you entered it.

When you fall through the portal of the front door, his touch disappears.

You come to a stop, head spinning from the suddenness. Your ears fill with the thrum of layered chatter, dozens, if not hundreds of people surrounding you. You frown as you look around, at the new scene smearing into focus. A road stretches beneath you, dark pavement a runway for people dressed in a variety of parade outfits, flanked by neoclassical facades. It’s a sea of white in front of you, sprinkled with bright red and occasionally some blue. You’re the shortest in the crowd. When you look down to your own outfit, the layered chiffon of your dress is replaced with loose black fabric, the only color a swipe of lemon yellow across your chest.

You are once again a child about to dance through Fiestas de Quito—as a toucan.

Your head turns frantically, scanning your surroundings for your family. Your heart pounds in your ears, childhood nerves resurfacing despite being over a decade older. You think no matter how old you are, how many years have flown by, reliving this moment will always return you to the delicate glass of a child’s nerves, emotions so overwhelming all you can do is look for someone to reassure you.

The anxiety lifts, releasing from your stomach and your chest and your shoulders when you spot abuela, wrapped in cerulean and yellow fabrics as the blue and gold macaw. Mamá stands beside her with her hand in your sister’s, an aracari and hummingbird.

Your feet act first, scraping the rubber of your shoes against the pavement as you scurry over. Abuela’s hand is warm when you take it, the final balm you need to soothe the prickle in your chest. She smiles at you softly, encouragingly, face wrinkling as she walks forward to follow the next group of performers. Your heartbeat picks up again, skin flushing in preemptive embarrassment from the dance you’ll perform along the street.

But abuela is stable, walking forwards with a calm confidence that makes you think it’ll be okay. Your eyes dart to your sister and mother, stomach squeezing with envy at their shining eyes and hops of uncontained excitement. You feel a squeeze at your hand, a reminder that you’re okay. That it’s okay to be nervous and subdued.

Dancing through the streets of Quito is not exactly as you remember. The beginning is identical to your memory, your nerves churning, feet stuttering clumsily as you falter through your routine. Your eyes sting, lip wobbling as you scan the crowd—full of people watching you struggle through movements you practiced for so long. But abuela holds you firm, guiding you along. The warm, rough touch of her hand is your north star, a constant and a weight that keeps you tethered to the ground. Your other hand clutches the base of your mask, a dowel with that large, vibrant beak—a shield for your burning face.

You don’t remember enjoying the parade, only existing as a torturous memory. Even now, you wait anxiously for the moment you fall and break your ankle, anticipation clouding your heart. But somehow, soon enough you’re having fun, feet and body taking charge as your mind fades into the back. Is it because of abuela? Or even Sero, wherever he's gone? Regardless, you feel the grin on your face, the warmth in your chest as you deliver the practiced movements of your dance. The child in you is gleeful, hopeful. The costume is no longer an itchy cage, but a dressing for your movements as you finally settle into the music and the performance.

Before you know it, your hand is gone from abuela’s, giving you the freedom to twirl. You spin happily, face rushing through the open air. When you recenter to the front of the street, your eyes sweep through the crowd. A boy your age is watching closely, eyes wide with awe and mouth slightly agape. He’s dressed in bright patterned stripes, a contrast to dark hair and eyes. One of his hands is lifted, grasped by the woman standing behind him. Your free hand comes up to wave, passing your excitement through the air with a massive grin.

You watch an excited smile cross his face, expanding like an inhale, and you realize that it’s Hanta.

You don’t continue down the street to the end of the parade route. You don’t fall near the end, leaving the festival shaking with sobs and hiccups. Instead the world fades away in that moment, the crowd morphing around you, sky darkening, music shifting from horns and drums to the strumming of a guitar, all while you hold Hanta’s gaze.

You’re in Milan, flanking the live musicians at the circus festival as you stare at this man—his earnest, nervous expression—and wonder why the world is so cruel for not bringing him to you sooner.

"i'm never writing imagery every again," i say, lying.

when i first wrote this part i was like "this one's my favorite :')" and then i wrote the next part and the part after that and said nvm.

la Brisa is a real ristorante that i've never been to and honestly don't even know if they do catering but i'm so tired of researching that i can't be bothered anymore.

[jade-of-mourning]

sooooo I’ve recently stopped being dead to the world

I had to backtrack and reread down to your answer to my last ask (which,,, thoughts,, when you manage to beat them into submission pls pls pls pls share everything) because I haven’t touched tumblr in a hot second but then I saw your post about lok s1 (and specifically s1 korra) and,,,

okay so this is me and my dumb hyperfixation talking but how do you think the rest of tlok would’ve gone if makorra wasn’t ruined. like just in general, what do you think would’ve changed?? if anything??

keeping this short but like. brain worms are munching. cuz the way their characters developed and how they each influenced each other. how would that have ended like. romantically. like what if korra burned bright and bright and bright and offered her soul and her strength and every one of her fingernails in love and mako bit his lip hard enough to offer blood in a kiss. what if they were a little bit insane by the end of everything.

sorry that doesn’t make any sense!

love

🐌

hey snailon!!! i've missed you <3 i've been hella busy myself (cough i have four ap tests in a row next week) but it's always lovely to see you around haha

hmm there are definitely a fair share of really well written meta regarding a not-slanderized makorra, but i don't really have any specific links on me rn. i'll just give you my sparknotes version of what i'd imagine, which might end up combined with stuff i've read from other people that i don't remember reading

i'd probably postpone them more than the series did — which, granted, they did write it with one season in mind, so i'll give them that. (i would argue that it's still a valid explanation for certain writing choices, because even though the books were commissioned before the release of their predecessors, it's not like the writers get to just rewrite the ending spontaneously bc episodes aren't constructed chronologically lol) okay ignoring that tangent

i'm okay with the love triangle in season 1 as it is because even though it's insane, it also checks out on all parts for korra, asami, and mako in terms of backstory and personality at this point in the story. korra is socially unaware because she never interacted with people her age or really Society, asami is desperately lonely and values good intent above all else, and mako is also impressively socially stunted and has the pressure of financial concerns as well. (if it were up to me, i would either just commit to korrasami or makorra from the start and add in the third if going in the throuple direction. i'm going off on a tangent again)

i have conflicting feelings about endgame. on one hand, makorra is so full circle by concluding the way they do here — mako's first encounter with korra he treats her like he doesn't give a shit that she's the avatar, the first person to ever do so; yet, by the end when korra's absolutely devastated and believes her only value was as the avatar, mako tells her straight up that he doesn't care if she's the avatar or not, as he has all along. it's genuinely so cute and i could honestly write so many more words about it than i did. but at the same time, i just would like to think that after the shitshow love triangle, they would put off getting together, perhaps as an overcompensation upon recognizing how they hurt asami.

since the latter route is the au i've decided to follow, so be it. in endgame, korra and mako still have their full circle moment and spinny-hug, but instead of kissing in front of naga they just longingly pine into one another's eyes. excessively so the viewers know. okay cut

season 2 they are rekindling their friendships with asami and asami is tired of watching them dance around their feelings for one another and also maybe pining just a little bit for korra but huh what. i would actually have to rewrite the entirety of lok to shift s2 into a readable mess. korra is still amazing as always and saves the world as always. oh also throw in some korrasami with the family betrayal theme. yeah i don't want to think too hard about this

see the struggle is that i love krew!friendship in season 3 so much but at the same time i feel like end of season 2 is the perfect time for a makorra get-together instead of a makorra breakup, seeing that korra has literally changed the entire world all by herself because she is so amazing. so alas, we'll go with end of season 2. mako no longer lives under his desk to hide from korrasami and in the two weeks between s2 and s3 they are done with their honeymoon phase so they'll just be as they are through s3 tbh. honestly there was so much makorra shipteasing throughout canon s3 that i don't really think there'd need to be too much rewriting. they're still the level-head/kick-the-door-down-subtlety duo within the krew dynamics and they're still clearly very important to each other specifically. the makorra hug before korra goes up to face zaheer might be drawn out even more and maybe something sweet couples say idk. (i have so much rizz i know wht i'm saying)

korra gets even more trauma for a lifetime (again), and three years pass. korra writes to asami once as in canon because by the time she feels human enough to pick up a pen, she doesn't even know how to talk to mako, let alone try to address the guilt of ignoring the guy who devoted himself to her so thoroughly. asami understands what it is to lose. mako (& bolin) has lost more than anyone else once perhaps but i think that the trauma repression means that that was never processed and he would be terrible to talk to about any of this. he's been there, but he doesn't understand it, if that makes sense.

okay so korra comes back, makorrasami dinner (ig the shitling that canon wu is is there also), makorrasami train fight, then we have remembrances and beyond the wilds — y'know, the korrasami/makorra episodes respectively. korra is now experiencing feelings for both of them Oh Fuck. by default i would say that masami has been hooking up through these three years but since makorra was a thing through s3 then i retract that; however, their friendship has rekindled very deeply as the only two members of the krew left in the city. and mako & korra have not discussed what they were or what they want to be at all, just been adamantly dancing around the subject.

blah blah kuvira blah blah city blows up then the wedding then bam!!!! mako's love confession to korra is actually a love confession to korra (wdym "i'll follow you into battle no matter how crazy things get; i've got your back and i always will" ISN'T a confession of love). korra is joined by both mako and asami after tenzin leaves, asami grieves, and the three of them have a moment together that has very heavy implications for throuple-ism. then bolin pulls up very devastated that he has missed the final krew party. cue the laughter, cue korra's final delivery of "i'll always try to restore balance" bc it should've been here instead as the three of them stare at the changed city before them, and cut.

(yes krew should've had the final scene together. i've said it before that i don't think korrasami was particularly well written, but i still like them and the ending is still very sweet. however, i hate that they completely disregarded the rest of the cast for the final episode instead of giving them a scene together, even if not the very last one, bc of how that translated over into the entire fandom… i mean what. and the spirit world vacation is a sweet sentiment but also i feel that korra would never immediately go leave on a vacation immediately after everything that just happened and her declarations of duty. i don't think i articulated that very well. but yes.)

[jor-elsemissary]

Fall

Summary: Set some time during/after the last season, the real Lionel Luthor survived his son’s attempt on his life and seeks vengeance against those who wronged him. They wanted a villain, he would give it to them. He just needs to overcome his feelings for a certain widow.

———

When he came back from prison, his enemies thought his fangs had been pulled, what with the way he had tried to seek redemption through charitable foundations and such. But his son’s evil twin had merely proven them wrong, that the old wolf was still in there waiting to claw its way back to the surface and onto center stage.

Then his son believed him to have grown sentimental and weak over his obsession with a certain farmer’s widow and her son. But the younger Luthor simply was not aware of the truth about him and the son, and how much stronger his conviction was with that knowledge.

It hadn’t been enough to spare him the pain of a eighty story fall though. Barely alive. Declared dead to protect him from his murderer. It took years for him to recover. Years lost in a hospital far away from Metropolis and Smallville. And when he finally returned to get his revenge, his son had gotten himself killed and a doppelgänger tried to take his place.

It all could have been avoided, of course.

All they had to do was simply listen to him. But they chose to believe in the lies his son had crafted. Ignored his warnings and his pleading for clemency. They wanted to paint him as the villain, believing he had never truly changed, and so now, that is what he will give them.

With Kal-el gone and John Jones too busy elsewhere, and Jor-el’s construct no longer wracking his brain with head splitting migraines, he could easily slip into the role of the treacherous and ruthless CEO of LuthorCorp again. He would give them what they wanted.

A villain to fear and hate.

He just needed to overcome his feelings for a certain widow first.

“I don’t know what happened to you, Lionel,” Martha Kent firmly spoke but there was a sadness in her eyes that he could see. Behind him were two of her son’s friends, bound and gagged, though the latter was to grant him some peace and quiet from Miss Lane’s insistent chatter. “But I know this isn’t you.”

“It’s always been me,” he answered back nonchalantly. He dismissively gestured with the gun he held while he paced back and forth in front of the Senator. “I’ve simply allowed sentimentality to rule my judgement. That ends now, Martha.”

“It doesn’t have to. You have friends here, people who care…”

“No one cares about me! Not even you!” he snarled and whirled around unexpectedly at her, the cold steel now pointing at her. “The only person to dare defy my murderer and come to my funeral was your son. Where were these so called friends? Where were you?!”

She fell quiet and he felt a pang of guilt. He knew where she had been. She did not have her son’s gifts to traverse the distance quickly. There hadn’t been enough time from his death to the funeral to allow her to come.

Lionel lowered the weapon and looked away, knowing that if he continued to meet her gaze, her will would overcome his own. He chose to glare at Miss Sullivan who returned it with a look of defiant bravado. “It doesn’t matter anymore. They want a villain, they will have one. Go back to Washington, Martha. Forget about me.”

“No.” She was so stubborn. That strong will and determination was one of many traits he had come to cherish about her. Right now, though, it was becoming an inconvenience. “You were abandoned when you needed them the most. I will not do that to you.”

Lionel Luthor looked upon the one woman he had been willing to give his life for. She still amazed him even after he had gone cold and bitter with hatred. He wondered once more if she actually loved him but her loyalty to Jonathan kept her from acknowledging and exploring it.

“Why must you do this to me?” he demanded to know from her. Why was she willing to risk everything for him? He was a murderer, a liar, and a conman. He only protected Clark because that was what Jor-el wanted.

“Because I… do care about you, Lionel.” She dared to touch him, a gentle hand on his forearm and he could feel himself unraveling to that touch alone. He feared it wouldn’t take much for him to completely fall apart. She always had that effect on him.

“Do you?” he questioned, hazel eyes meeting blue in challenge. “Or is it Clark’s friends you’re more worried about?”

“Of course I’m worried,” she tells him while stepping closer to him. Lionel found himself swallowing thickly at her closeness. “But I still care for you as well. You must know that.”

She wasn’t wrong. It’s why he loved her in the first place. Despite all that he has said and done over the years, she still found it in herself to care about his wellbeing. He felt tender fingers brush across his cheek before a hand lovingly rested against his face.

“Let them go, Lionel,” she pleaded with him, her other hand gliding down his arm to the hand holding the gun. He didn’t want to let them off for what they had done to him, but he also wanted to make her happy. To be proud of him. To trust him again. He was hurting, he knew she could see that. She always seemed to know exactly how he was feeling and why. A mother’s intuition perhaps?

“They let him murder me.” The words came out in a quiet whisper and he felt his shoulders drop as he found himself leaning into her touch. “I didn’t deserve that fate, Martha.”

“No one does.” Her thumb caressed across his cheekbone and he felt himself close his eyes. Maybe, just maybe, he could forget everything and just be with her. “But this is not the way to get justice.” He let her take the weapon from him and he heard the safety click into place before it was discarded.

Martha Kent once more found a way to disarm him and he allowed it as she took him into her arms and simply held him. It took Lionel a few moments to overcome his own defensiveness to embrace this remarkable woman and rest his head against her own.

With eyes shut tightly, and Martha soothingly rubbing his back, Lionel Luthor came undone in her arms. Quiet sobs wracked his shoulders and his body trembled in her embrace. He needed help and Martha gave him her promise that she would, that he would not see the inside of a prison cell this time.

He didn’t resist when the police came in a few moments later and bound his arms behind him. He didn’t fight back when they took him away from her. He kept his eyes on Martha until he couldn’t see her anymore and his head lowered in defeat and despair.

The turmoil of betrayal and anger left him feeling hallow inside, except for that tiny spark of light that Martha Kent left behind in him. He decided then and there that he would endure whatever the courts decided. He would endure the mistrust and scornful tongues of Clark’s friends. He would endure the public humiliation he knows Lois Lane would put him through with her articles. He would endure it all so long as Martha Kent was there to guide him through it all.

He had set out to be the villain this time. Instead, he felt every bit as his son’s victim all over again.

[chaosnojutsu]

good morning!! I see your backstory ask post and I would love to hear more about the bridgerton AU or extraordinary love!! Whatever you want to say about them. they are faves of mine!! ❤️ thank youuuuuuu

You get both as I try to decide if I can swing something for Shikatema month and prep for Nejiten month! Perfect timing, I actually just re-read these two last night looking for inspiration!

ask about the backstory for one of my fics!

send shivers down my spines: I wrote all the Nejiten story and separately wrote all of Lady Whistledown as one cohesive letter, and then decided where I wanted to place each of her gossipy interjections. That was neat to explore as a writing device because I had room to expand upon the world and add a little more flavor (like detailing Naruhina’s relationship and my obligatory background Shikatema mention) without feeling like I had to do it all from Tenten’s POV, which would have detracted from the core of this story: Tenten being horny for Neji.

Another fun part of writing this was casting what role each character would play! Coding Neji as Simon was easy — deciding to split Daphne between Tenten and Hinata then seemed natural; the premise of having sex in the library comes from Daphne and Simon, but it felt disingenuous to her character for Tenten to be the diamond of the season. My personal favorite analog is Tsunade and Queen Charlotte, which also felt like a duh decision given their roles in society, but I liked the nod to Tenten wanting to impress Tsunade.

I solemnly swear to never refer to Tenten’s junk as “nethers” again lmao. I usually can’t stand that one, but it felt appropriate for the piece. And I can’t talk about this fic without bringing up the dom Neji agenda! Who’s going to tell the head of the house he can’t give head anywhere he wants in his house?? Definitely not Tenten, and apparently not any of their house staff. I’ve spent some time considering what a dom Neji might look like since your initial comment on the fic, so he might make a stronger appearance in another work — yay and thanks for putting the bug in my ear!

extraordinary love: “Temari knows damn well why a stupid social construct like her nonexistent virginity matters. Back in the day of arranged marriages, the whole thing was more of a business deal. The wannabe groom would have to pay more to his bride’s family in exchange for her hand in marriage if she was pure. Virgin brides from influential families were high dollar items. Temari’s family is influential enough. But now that the matter of virginity is off the table… this barter is looking more like the Sand seeking retribution against the Leaf than tit for tat. If her marriage is blessed, they’ll probably stipulate Shikamaru move to Suna instead of the opposite, which is not what Temari and Shikamaru decided on. In the most drastic worst case scenario, like Kankuro said, their engagement (or the knowledge that said engagement has been consummated on a number of occasions) might be seen as an act of war. They’ll stick Shikamaru’s stupid, handsome face in a bingo book with shoot to kill orders.”

This premise is the heartbeat of the story. What does it look like when your personal values don’t align with those of everyone else around you? How do we respond when well-intended people stick their nose in our business and give an opinion we never asked for? Combined with fan theories/headcanons that Shikadai was a pre-wedding pregnancy — and that’s an interesting concept to me, especially considering what that might have looked like for Temari and Shikamaru if they were still long distance or abruptly decided not to be (and the parallel to Mirai and Kurenai and Asuma, of course, which I didn’t hit in this story because Temari wasn’t actually pregnant) — everything fell into place.

Making the call to write from Temari’s POV was exciting but scary because she’s so Particular, you know? But this story needed to come from her because of what it is, and it’s about Temari’s agency: she gets to decide who she marries, and whose baby she has, and she gets to decide when those things happen. And then I got to actually write her being in love (which I’m eager to try again), and I love the energy of Temari being like “Look how impressive my fiancé is! I made a good choice! I’m trying really hard to make you approve of him!” and Shikamaru being like “Yeah, what she said!” Because Shikamaru understands that as far as Suna’s customs and culture go, he doesn’t have a dog in that race, he IS Temari’s underdog in the race.

I’m honestly proud of this fic because I know I just made it sound really serious in terms of themes etc., but it ultimately is a comedy, and anyone who has ever done comedy can speak to how difficult of a skill it is to learn and hone. One of the things that makes comedy work well is that the characters have to take everything seriously and respond sincerely, now matter how ridiculous or grandiose their circumstances or responses may be. Temari even says from the beginning of this story that she knows she has the Kazekage on her side, but she panics a little because of her circumstances and takes matters into her own hands, and she doesn’t relinquish that control until shenanigans have ensued and Gaara finally reminds his sister that his support of her was never in question. (I’m not sure how I feel about my iterations of Gaara and Kankuro individually or overall, but I do like their scenes with Temari as siblings and their consistency.)

Side note: the reception of this story gave me the confidence to write chapter 15 of Reliance the way it panned out!

(also, I’m late, what’s new, lesbian nejiten is coming i promise)