#Learned that the hard way when i was a naive stupid twenty something who actually fell for the crap a 32 year old was spinning

[freebooter4ever]

"I know im ugly, i have had EVERY single physical flaw pointed out" — babe, they were negging you. They were flat-out lying to make you feel worse about yourself. You're absurdly pretty.

I had to google negging - and no that's not what my past relationships were doing. Its more like...someone having the idea of who they want to date in their head, and them trying to force the person they're actually dating to measure up. It always left me feeling guilty for not being able to be that.

[marveldc-imagines-hub]

Subtitles: Episode 4, We Interrupt This Program

Subtitles Masterlist

Summary: [Y/N] is still recovering from one of the worst migraines they’ve ever had and they have the scars to prove it… Wait. Those scars weren’t there before and they certainly weren’t from passing out on the sidewalk a few days prior!

Word count: 9,361

Warnings: Mentions of (not super graphic) death and mental illness. Also Reader being just a little horny on main, but what’s new; almost 9.5k words and they’re simping for most of them. Lots of dorky fluff and also talking about insecurities.

Tag list: @madamevirgo​ @ravennight41​ @multifandomgirl16 @cyanide-mustard​ @badasspolygenderfriend​

~~~

    In the black void of otherwise dreamless sleep, voices were conversing.

    “[Y/N] [L/N]…” one started.

    [Y/N] [L/N]. Age twenty-five. Born to Killian and Alice [L/N] in [city, state] but Dad wasn’t in the picture. No siblings, no living relatives. They wanted to go to school for botany but Mom was diagnosed with early-onset dementia while they were still in high school, so they changed their career path to neurology in hopes of finding a way to help her. She still lives in their hometown.

    “Oh, wait,” another voice chimed in, almost indistinguishable from the first, “I know this one. Oh, God.”

    [Y/N] was an Honors student, at the top of all their classes. A degree in neurology with phytotoxicology on the side. They took an internship in Europe one year and somehow found themselves in Sokovia. HYDRA was still laying low at the time, caught wind of them.

    “Wait,” a third voice, this one easier to differentiate from the other two. “They’re HYDRA?”

    The second voice responded, “Former.”

    [Y/N] had no idea what they were getting into. HYDRA, always good at hiding in the shadows; they brought [Y/N] in under the guise of an assistant job studying new forms of neural regeneration. A job that paid well enough to live comfortably and even send a little extra home, while developing something that just might solve all their mother’s problems? It was a dream come true. 

Fortunately for HYDRA but unfortunately for [Y/N], they were very good at their job too. They helped HYDRA develop all kinds of nasty stuff. Nanobots that changed brain chemistry, near foolproof brainwashing tech— They even helped develop special toxins, one of the world’s deadliest poisons. All the while, thinking they were doing something good.

“How is that possible?” the original voice asked. “How could they have been so oblivious?”

“One-track mind?” the second voice offered, “Plus misinformation on HYDRA’s part and ‘routine health checks’ with something a little extra mixed in.”

“They were tested on?”

“A victim of almost everything they’d helped create, except the fatal stuff and anything that would disrupt business as usual. IVs and shots full of toxins, nanobots being released into their room while they slept.”

The third asked, “What changed?”

“Wanda.”

[Y/N] stumbled upon Wanda and her brother by pure accident. They’d been late that day and in their hurry, ran through a wrong door to where HYDRA was keeping Sokovian volunteers for testing. The twins were the youngest in their group, [Y/N] was only a couple of years older and the youngest in their division. It was a match made in heaven, really.

“Try hell,” the first voice suggested with a scoff.

The other voices offered their murmured agreements.

“So they knew each other,” the third voice said, “Before.”

That’s when [Y/N] started pulling at threads and HYDRA’s costume began to unravel; their one-track mind had switched gears. There was something too weird about the whole thing, these Sokovian civilians had stories that didn’t line up with [Y/N]’s own. 

“And they believed them?”

They believed Wanda. She and her brother were just two more Sokovian citizens suffering at the hands of war and wanting to help their people. They had no reason to lie. They had more reason to be honest to [Y/N] than HYDRA ever did, actually. It was just a bonus that for Wanda and [Y/N], being around each other was like being a moth drawn to a flame.

[Y/N] may have been naive but they were far from stupid. When they figured out what was going on, they wriggled their way deeper into HYDRA’s ranks under their own disguise of loyalty. They became a full-fledged HYDRA agent, tasked with assisting in neural and poisonous weaponry. They weren’t able to protect Pietro and Wanda from testing, obviously—not that Wanda would have let them; she and her brother still believed they were being tested on for the greater good—but they did their best to stay nearby and keep the Maximoffs’ sanity intact for as long as they could. They even managed to save a couple of the other test victims by injecting them with temporary poisons that lowered their heart rate to the point of appearing dead. When the bodies were dropped off, the poison wore off not long after and some of the victims were able to escape. No side effects to be seen.

“I have a question,” Original voice said abruptly. “Why do we know this much information on one person? Like, this is some in-depth, intimate stuff. Why do we know that [Y/N] and Wanda had the hots for each other since day one?”

Second voice answered, “We’ve done extensive research on [Y/N]. The result of an investigation on the person who caused the apprehension of an entire faction of HYDRA after successfully poisoning them.”

The tests that were done on [Y/N] were not without their outcomes. They gained the ability to transform almost any matter into almost any other form.

“Huh,” Third voice hummed, “That reminds me of a series of disappearances a few years back. One house was replaced by rose bushes and another—get this—burned down because the roof had been turned to lava. Whoever it was, they either stopped on their own or died. What were they called?”

“The Alchemist,” Second stated simply, much to Third’s dismay. “And those were incognito HYDRA agents.”

After Pietro died and Wanda disappeared—not really disappeared, just left with the Avengers—[Y/N] had a choice to make. They were far too deep into HYDRA’s work now, the awful things that they had done were beginning to weigh on them, as Wanda and her brother had been just as grounding for [Y/N] as [Y/N] had been for her. After she was gone, they had a hard time dealing with the horrible business going on around them. So they did what they knew how to do; they mixed up a combination of poison and nanobots.

[Y/N] had fully committed to perishing with the rest of their coworkers but apparently, the poison hadn’t been quite strong enough. They’d made a miscalculation in a time of poor mental state and woke up the next day to hear that not all of the HYDRA agents had died either. At least the survivors had been taken in for the time being but that just wasn’t enough for them; they’d had a right to be concerned too because HYDRA had a habit of getting themselves out of sticky situations. This case was no different. 

[Y/N] most likely felt responsible for having a hand in HYDRA’s dirty work, for not doing more, and they must have felt even more responsible when they learned that HYDRA was a much bigger problem than they could have ever imagined.

First blurted, “Well, what happened next?”

Second answered, “They went after agents until they got caught, the only way they knew how.”

The second miscalculation that they’d ever made got them caught. The agent put a gun to [Y/N]’s head and pulled the trigger.

“So are they dead too?” First asked. The voice seemed to quiver.

The third voice hemmed and hawed a bit before saying, “They must have, with the way all this weirdness had been going. Oh my god, poor Wanda, not one dead partner but two—”

Second spoke over the other two voices’ rambling, forcing them to calm down and listen. “They didn’t die, though, they—”

The voices started cutting out like the dream was a TV program being interfered by a poor connection and static.

“—Found by—Barely alive—Hospital—Braindead—Westview—Find a doct—”

Suddenly gunshots sounded, one followed by several more, and the darkness cracked and shattered, revealing blinding light behind it. A silhouette walked silently through the wall of light; it was Geraldine—no, Monica—poised with a gun in the outfit she helped deliver Maximoff twins in. As she walked forward, crossing from a plane of burning white to one of void black, the image of her warped and distorted until it changed. Monica, looking much more modern, in a uniform that included a bulletproof vest and a lanyard with S.W.O.R.D. printed at the top, moving carefully towards a broken and bleeding body on the ground with another in a heap behind her. The image distorted and changed again, and the first body was sitting on their knees and looking up defiant defeat. The person they were looking at was no longer Monica but a bulky figure in a dark outfit with straps in the form of an H across their chest, the body that had been laying in a battered pile behind Monica just a moment earlier. The H-adorned assailant held a still-raised gun to the kneeling person’s forehead.

[Y/N] could only spit at their feet before another gunshot sounded and the image disappeared to black.

You woke up sweating and choking on your breath. Your brain, throbbing with a pain that shot through it like a bullet, didn’t register fast enough that you were standing instead of laying down so when you flailed, you threw yourself off balance and fell forward. Catching a quick glimpse of your surroundings on your way down told you that you were somewhere outside and that it was the dead of night. You tried last minute to brace yourself for a concrete-laden impact.

    You were instead greeted with soft fabric and arms wrapping tightly around you.

    “Goodness, [Y/N], are you quite alright?”

    You squinted at the striped sleepwear for a moment before looking up where Vision’s worried gaze and whirling irises were waiting for you; it took your eyes a moment to fully focus as the pain in your head faded but left a faint ringing behind. Then you looked around at your surroundings; not only were you outside but you were standing in Vision and Wanda’s driveway. Your gaze settled on a particular section of the house’s exterior where you vividly remembered a vaguely human shape exploding out of its walls. 

    You were standing in the exact same place you had been when it happened.

    “[Y/N]?” Vision said again, drawing your attention back to him.

    “Oh, cosmo, I’m sorry,” you said but your throat was too dry and you had to stop and clear your throat halfway through. Being in Vision’s arms, you were keenly aware of the fact that you were both in your bedwear and that yours had been sweated through. You slumped against him, partially to hide your embarrassed face but also because you felt like you hadn’t slept at all.

    “Vis?”

    “Yes, my favorite teacup?”

    You snorted softly at that. “You don’t even drink tea.”

    “Oh, I know,” Vision lilted back. Then he nuzzled his face into your hair. “I do like the patterns and the daintiness of them though.”

    That time you laughed a bit. Feeling his warm breath against your scalp and his strong arms holding you safely in place against him, you almost instantly melted into the embrace. You wrapped your own arms around him and pressed your face into his chest. “What are we doing outside?”

    “Ah, yes, about that. You appeared to be sleepwalking again.”

    You groaned. “Again? This is a nightmare.”

    One of Vision’s hands moved to run itself through your hair and down your neck. “That accident you had the other day certainly did a number on you.”

    The accident. In other words, that time where you walked off in the middle of a conversation with Vision, Agnes, and Herb to mumble at a wall and then faceplant onto the sidewalk. Not only was your nose still recovering but your mind and dignity as well.

    “The only time I’ve slept well since is when I fell asleep on your couch,” you whined. Then you lowered your voice and grumbled into Vision’s chest.

    Vision chuckled. “What was that?”

    You looked up at him and scowled. “The four of you are over here in your stupid, big, warm, cozy house. Meanwhile, I’m across the way, alone and uncomfortable, with only Bernard to keep me company. Bernard’s terrible company.”

    “Truly,” Vision agreed, grinning slightly. He loved your strange, cute, not at all challenging struggles.

    The both of you turned to give the lawn ornament in question a pointed look. Bernard seemed to glower back.

    “Well,” Vision said as he pulled away from you a bit, “why don’t you come inside then? Wanda’s up with the babies anyway. You might as well join us, especially if it means you’ll be able to sleep better.” Not taking no for an answer, the synthezoid was already tugging you towards the lit-up porch.

    You were too tired to argue and, quite frankly, you didn’t want to, so you allowed yourself to be pulled along as you admired the soft cotton of Vision’s matching pajama set.

    “Oh, my.”

    “What?” You looked at Vision’s face again only to catch him staring at a spot above your eyes. The porch light glinted off the gem embedded in his own. “What, do I have something on my face?”

    “No,” Vision responded slowly, “but you must have done something to it. You have quite the scar.”

    Your eyebrows raised. You moved away from him to look at your reflection in one of the windows and surely enough, you had a raised scar on your forehead, near your hairline. You gingerly pressed your fingers against it; it certainly wasn’t new.

    A seemingly random thought popped into your head. Is that… a scar from a bullet?

    “What on earth did you do to yourself?” Vision asked. Him walking up to stand directly behind you and press his hands to your neck, under the collar of your shirt no less, was more than a little distracting. “You’ve got one back here too.”

    You reached back to where Vision was touching and when he removed his fingers, you could feel a similar scar at the base of your neck.

    You thought again, Bullet… exit wound…? 

    Something about the dream you were having earlier called out to you but you couldn’t remember anything about it. When you tried to think about it further, the excruciating pain came back in waves and you had to steady yourself on the windowsill to prevent yourself from collapsing.

    “Huh,” you said instead, “I have no idea.”

    “They don’t hurt?” Vision questioned. “They’re not just… odd raised bruises perhaps? Welts maybe?”

    “No, I don’t think so. They don’t hurt at all, though.” To make a point, you pressed down hard on the raised scar on your forehead, watched the skin turn a few shades lighter before releasing the pressure and dropping your hand again. Under the thick, stiff tissue, you barely felt the pressure at all.

    Vision thoughtfully hummed, placing his hands back on the curves of your neck; you prayed to whatever deities existed that you didn’t make any sounds you’d regret.

    “Well,” your partner said, “I suppose that’s better than nothing.”

    A pause. Your eyes stayed trained on the window’s reflection, specifically where you could see Vision’s fingers gently cupping your neck.

    Then he abruptly leaned down and pressed a kiss on the scar tissue, missing a pulse point by a hair. “We should head inside then.”

    You had to take a solid minute to recover from the shockwave of tingles that briefly made your veins turn into lightning. Then you shuffled after Vision into the ever so inviting house.

    Stepping out of chilly darkness and into a home of cozy furniture and warm light that turned the entire place a golden brown felt like walking into another world. An extra added layer of comfort to the usually perfect home was the slight disarray of baby equipment almost everywhere that wasn’t the floor itself, most of which you had gone out and bought during the babies’ day of birth and all of which Vision and Wanda appreciated; somehow, you had prepared for the babies’ accelerated growing on a panicked whim better than the Maximoffs. Tiny baby blankets and stuffed animals were strewn about and each visible part of the house—the living room, the dining area, and the kitchen, although the kitchen was partially blocked off by a drying rack of baby clothes and swaddles of various patterns and sizes—had a designated Baby Tray. These trays, perched on whatever flat surface had been previously free of decor or clutter, held bottles, nonperishable treats, diaper-changing equipment, teething toys, a mini first aid kit for each, and other useful trinkets; the new parents had apparently completely forgotten that almost all their house’s rooms were openly attached to each other and that, if one singular Baby Tray was designated to the dining area, it would take the same amount of about five steps to get to it from either the living area or the kitchen. It was almost comedic, the number of baby care items that were laying anywhere but the floor or in proper storage because, according to Vision, god forbid something gets a speck of dust on it and have to be washed or, according to Wanda, one of the babies be without their favorite toys easily accessible at every given moment. The only thing allowed to touch the ground, aside from feet, was a playpen that now replaced the usual coffee table in the living room area and a play mat in the babies’ room with its attached toys for the twins to play with. A final touch to the hominess was the soft light that you could see streaming out of the baby room’s open door, and the gentle voice of Wanda, singing a Sokovian lullaby, fluttering out of it. 

    It felt like coming home.

    Vision stepped away from your side to clean up somewhat, picking up a few toys and folding baby blankets and onesies to move them aside in case you wanted to make yourself comfortable on the couch. Standing inside now, you could much better make out Vision’s dark blue terry robe over a pair of bright yellow pajama pants that no doubt had a shirt to match hidden beneath dark blue fabric. The yellow of his pants matched the yellow gem that was embedded in his forehead, glittering with an unused power that you had yet to experience and that felt warm whenever you went to place a kiss on it. Poking out from the hems of his robe and pants were perfectly human hands and feet, despite their deep red color that matched the rest of his body; you found the continued presence of fingernails when not in his human disguise—absolutely unnecessary to his design, he’d pointed out when you initially asked about them—weirdly cute and continuously felt the urge to grab nail polish and paint them to match either the color of the gem or the same silver as the plating that started at his scalp and trailed down beneath the collar of his shirt. You briefly wondered how far that plating traveled across his body before mentally kicking yourself.

    The greatest thing about this still-fresh reveal of Vision’s inhuman identity—aside from the fact that he was no longer hiding something important from you, obviously—was that you now knew that he wasn’t just difficult to make blush but rather he quite literally couldn’t blush. You wondered what else he could and couldn’t do, only to mentally kick yourself again. 

    I can’t tell if I’ve gotten worse or better since I’ve started dating them, you thought.

    Oh, your brain responded on its own accord, so much worse. 

    Shhh!

    Vision was still puttering why while you stared and inwardly argued with yourself. At this point, he’d cleaned up most of the chaos and moved the stuffed animals and now-folded blankies to sit neatly on the dining area table.

    “Vis,” you said.

    Before you could continue, the man perked up and looked in your direction. “Yes, duck?”

    You blinked. “You make my heart go rainbow-colored. Anyway—” You broke off into a laugh when Vision went flustered, his hands flapping about while he sucked his bottom lip between his teeth. “Did I win this round?”

    Sometimes Vision got into the habit of ending all of his sentences around you and Wanda with a pet name. When you had first noticed this feat, you’d decided to start doing the same, just to see what would happen. He noticed and began purposely doing it back, where he had previously done it unintentionally, and now doing the occasional back-and-forth conversation that ended in pet names more than punctuation was somewhat of a competition between you two. 

    Vision scoffed at you, picked up a plushie, and tossed it at you. “Not fair!”

    Being in the house that was beginning to feel more like home than your own, around your partners and their sweet baby boys, seemed to shield and reenergize you from the exhaustion you felt after first waking up that night. You caught the stuffed animal, a plushie of a wizard, grinned and tossed it back at him. 

    “Oh,” Vision chirped, catching the plush wizard again, “I see how it is.” He puffed out his chest and gave you a warning, albeit amused, glare, then picked up a couple more plushes. In a lower, sort of growling voice that made your heart leap out of your chest and into your stomach, he continued, “If it’s a war you want, it’s a war you shall get.”

    You yelped as he started in your direction and dived across the front of the couch to get some stuffed animal ammo of your own. He nailed you in the foot with a cream-colored bunny and you returned the favor with a plushie of a witch in a red dress after taking cover behind the playpen. Now each of you was standing where the other had previously been, with you poking your head over the playpen’s sheer wall and Vision slowly pacing around the back of the couch for his second lap. You pulled the playpen with you with one hand as you moved away from him and the two of you began circling each other. 

    Oh, if Wanda could see her partners now.

    “Oh, Wanda—” you started to stand, only to get smacked in the face with a blue teddy bear; luckily, it was of the very soft variety. You stared at Vision in disbelief.

    Vision stared back, eyes bulging, unsure of whether he should apologize or prepare for an attack. He was too torn to do either, though, and had to scramble back to avoid an onslaught of stuffed bullets flying his way.

    Still aware that it was very late at night, your war-cry was softened, “Revenge!”

    Then your attack quickly diminished, partially because you were running out of ammo and Vision wasn’t throwing anything back and partially because Vision was now floating off the ground and heading towards you, arms full of said ammo.

    Wow, didn’t know it did that, you thought randomly, eyes fixed Vision floating in general, before specifically fixating on the devilish grin he wore while doing so. He looked like a very handsome, well, vision.

    A handsome Vision, if you will, your brain offered. You almost snorted before remembering you had not yet moved to avoid Vision’s floating plushie attack. You stumbled backward and scrambled out of the living room just as Vision started throwing.

    “No no no no no nonononono—” You were choking between laughter and squawking as you got up and began running down the hallway to save yourself. “Not fair, not fair not fair, not fair—!”

    You ran past the baby room and caught Wanda mid-turnaround, saying, “What on earth is going on out there?” You reeled back to pause in the doorway, caught a glimpse of the babies in their one large crib, smiled, went to pant out an answer—

    Only to feel arms wrap around you and drag you back down the hallway. You started to shriek, then forced it into a startled laugh as to not disturb the babies, and flailed around in Vision’s arms as he lifted you off the ground. It was brief, though, because then your struggling caught Vision off balance and the two you tumbled to the ground. There, you both harmlessly pummeled each other until you both were out of breath and snickering, and you somehow ended up with his top half under you but his legs pinning down your own.

    “You can fly?” you bubbled. You grabbed his face and squished his cheeks in your hands. “What the hell?”

    He laughed and nodded, and one of his hands caught your own. He glanced up at you as he kissed your palm and replied, “Yes, just a little.”

    “Just a little—”

    “And his wife can move things with her mind, like the crib she just finished rocking to put the boys back to sleep, and if she has to do it again because of her partners’ roughhousing…”

    You and Vision quickly disentangled yourselves from each other and looked up at Wanda, whose face said serious but whose eyes twinkled with amusement and who looked no less terrifying in a pale pink, puff-sleeved nightgown.

    You got up and straightened your clothes, with Vision following closely behind. “I will very happily take over the next shift because I started it and I’m very sorry.” 

    “What? Nonsense, [Y/N], I threw the first stuffed animal.”

    “I threw it back,” you pointed out.

    “Neither of you better have thrown and hit something,” Wanda warned.

    You glanced at Vision for confirmation; you didn’t exactly see much when you were chucking plushies aplenty and then running from your flying boyfriend.

    Vision nodded. “Nothing at all, although I did make the evaluation that we do have a plethora of plushies and baby blankets.”

    “I thought I was the one who pointed that out when you first gave me the shopping list, but okay,” you huffed under your breath, then grinned with Vision lightly bumped you with his hip. “So, the babies having a bad night?”

    “Actually, they were apparently worried about you,” Wanda said.

    That made your head do a confused tilt. “Me?”

    “Ah, yes,” Vision nodded, “We fell asleep with them in the living room and Billy started crying. We woke up to figure out what was wrong and Wanda saw you standing outside.”

    Wanda added, “Tommy started crying shortly after I walked to the door with him like he wanted to make sure you were okay.”

    “Aww,” you cooed, peering over Wanda’s shoulder to see the babies. She stepped to the side so you could walk in and shuffle over to the crib, and she and Vision stood nearby as you crouched down to brush a hand over their little sleeping heads. You continued, much softer this time, “Were the boys trying to make sure I was safe? Are they my little protectors? My little superheroes?”

    Tommy gurgled happily in his sleep. Billy remained quiet but his head leaned into your hand.

    You looked up at their parents with big, awestruck eyes to see them leaning comfortably into each other, watching you with the same level of affection you felt for them and their babies.

    “Heroes indeed,” Vision said. He walked over as you stood up again and lightly rocked the crib; Wanda strolled over to join the group. He continued to the twins in baby-talk, “But no hero-ing until after college, my little honeydews. For now, leave the protecting to your parents.” 

    “Especially this one,” Wanda chirped, making her way over to your side and slipping her arm around your back. “They’re a handful.”

    You faked a gasp, “I’m a treasure.”

    “You’re a putz,” Wanda said simply, with a smirk and a light pinch to your hip.

    You gasped harder and stared at her with utter betrayal.

    “A goof,” Vision chimed in. He slipped his own arm around you, the final piece of your three-person puzzle.

    You gasped harder still— and almost choked on air. Then you looked to the babies. “Bullies! Bullies, both of them! Billy, Tommy, you must protect me!”

    Very enthusiastically, neither baby did anything. 

    “I’ve been betrayed yet again,” you cried, not too loudly, though. You slumped against Vision and Wanda’s waiting arms. “Betrayed by my own brood!”

    “Your brood?” Wanda questioned, quirking a brow. Vision was giggling softly at your other side.

    “Yes,” you whispered, looking at her with wide, distraught eyes, “My brood. My pack. My murder.”

    “Your what?” Vision said.

    “It’s a group of crows,” you explained under your breath, before slumping down farther and continuing your distraught monologue. “I’m all alone! Oh, the horror—”

    “Well,” Wanda said, “We’re supporting you very well a family that has completely abandoned you.”

    You flopped your head back in her direction. You were so far to the ground now that you were practically on your knees, only your arms and shoulders being held by Wanda and Vision. You traced fingers lamely across each of their arms. “So strong, those who once held me…”

    The married couple exchanged an amused but mysterious look.

    “Wanda, darling,” Vision said, “They seem to have gone delusional.”

    Wanda nodded sagely in response. “Clearly lost their mind.”

    You squinted, glancing between them. What were they up to?

    “To the ward with you,” Wanda suddenly announced.

    Then you caught a red glow by your feet, but not fast enough before you were swept up into the air on a cloud of red mist. You burst into startled laughter but quickly slapped a hand over your mouth so you didn’t wake up the children. Once you relaxed—enough to stop laughing anyway, not enough to not be freaking out about being magically escorted out of the nursery—you waved your hands through the red; it felt like waving your hands through the open air. The only thing actually felt was the pressure on the back of your body that was holding you afloat and carrying you out of the room, but when you tried to balance on it and move to a different position, all you did was squirm and twist awkwardly in the air before flopping back down. You craned your neck, mostly to make sure Tommy and Billy hadn’t woken up from your outburst, but you only caught Wanda, hands glowing red, following you out of the room and Vision trailing after wishing his babies a goodnight.

    You looked back at the ceiling for a moment. After you heard the nursery door shut, you asked at a normal volume, “I’m not gonna fall, right?”

    “Not unless I let you,” Wanda reassured you. You couldn’t see her but the teasing tone of her voice made you imagine her with a smirk. A smirk, narrowed eyes, her pretty nightgown floating around her, magical powers that she could definitely use to crush you if she wanted to and you’d probably thank her if she did.

    Wow, okay, I either need to confess my sins or go to sleep.

    “Why?” Wanda asked suddenly.

    “Why what?” you choked back, heat rushing to your face. Surely, she couldn’t read your thoughts…

    “Why ask if you would fall?”

    Oh.

    “Oh.” You started flopping around in the cloud of magic, testing the proverbial waters; you were being taken to the living area now. You heard both Wanda and her husband laughing from beneath and behind you when you settled again. 

    Vision asked through chuckling, “What could you possibly be doing?”   

    You suddenly flung yourself to one of the magic surrounding you, thinking maybe you would fall through, but the magic held. You huffed and laid back again but not before you caught a glimpse of the couch that you now hovered over. You grasped at the magic again, watching it wisp through your fingers but feeling nothing at all. “This is so cool.”

    Wanda’s voice was softer when she spoke this time. “You think?”

    You couldn’t hold back the disbelieving laughter that bubbled up. Suddenly breathless out of sheer excitement of learning more about the people you cared for most, you sighed, “Wanda, baby, you must know that you’re amazing.”

    Then you squawked as the magic suddenly disappeared around you, but instead of falling straight to the couch below, Vision flew up to catch you. He held you bridal style as he gently dropped back to his feet next to the couch, grinning—he very rarely just smiled, it was always a big, happy grin when it was directed at you or Wanda or the babies—and giving you a peck on the forehead when you stared up at him, doe-eyed.

    “Got my own Superman, too,” you said, “Damn.”

    Vision plopped you down on the couch. “Who?”

    “Comic book character,” you responded with a wave of your hand, “Doesn’t matter. You’re far better looking than him anyway.”

You shifted a bit to get more comfortable and watched as glowing red magic started swirling all around you. The magic was misty, red around the edges and glowing orange-white in the center, picking up the scattered toys from your and Vision’s scuffle and tossing them into the playpen, pulling said playpen out of the way and sliding the original coffee table back from its place against the wall, picking up any other stray blankets or baby items and placing them neatly out of the way; it also straightened out Vision’s robe and ruffled your hair. Part of the magic moved out of your line of vision, so you twisted to follow it and saw it taking the baby clothes off the drying rack to fold and put on the counter next to it, then continued watching as it folded the rack itself and moved it out of the way. 

Wanda was now in your sight again too; she was standing still, palms up with magic flowing outward from the red clouds around them, and looking around to see if there was anything else she needed to put away. She was also blushing, from you calling her baby or saying she’s amazing, you couldn’t tell. After staring for probably way too long, probably looking at her with the same starry-eyed, dopey look that a teenager had at their first concert or after a first kiss, her gaze flitted to yours and made a nose-scrunching face at you before finishing her magical cleanup and making her way over to the couch as well.

You slumped back in the pile of throw pillows behind you, covered your face with your hands, and flutter-kicked your feet few times. “This is so cool!”

    You felt a nudge at your feet and you raised your legs so he could sit, then did the same with your head when you felt Wanda’s hand brush across your forehead. When they were both seated, you laid your legs and head on their respective laps and the three of you settled into the comfortable position that had been adopted long after your relationship had started. 

    That is until you quickly sat up again. “Is that how you unpacked your house so quickly?”

    Wanda smiled and nodded. She rested a cheek in the palm of her hand, endeared by your wonderment towards her powers.

    “Is that you unpacked my house?”

    Another nod. 

    “And the magic show was real— Wait.” You scowled. “But all the pulleys and stuff.”

    “That was, ah, my bad,” Vision offered with a raised hand. 

    “Covering for him actually using his powers,” Wanda explained.

    “I knew the mirrors didn’t make sense with you putting your hat through your body!” you exclaimed. “So flight, super strong, and… not sure what to call that last one. What was with you that day, by the way? You acted drunk, but you can’t get drunk!”

    “I swallowed some gum,” Vision muttered, glancing away and rubbing the side of his neck. His other hand waved towards his torso as he continued, “It got all… stuck. Gummed up my gears, if you will.”

    Wanda rolled her eyes at the pun. You snickered at it.

    “I had to magic it out of him,” she added.

    Your gaze flitted back and forth between your two superhuman partners multiple times as you took in the information. Because you were sitting between the two, this involved the turning of your head various times, which made your head swim a bit. You almost wished that they were both sitting to one side of you.

    Instead of suggesting this, you settled your gaze to stare aimlessly ahead and said simply, “I’m dating two of the weirdest, coolest, most stellar people in the world. How the hell did I manage that?”

    “Charisma,” Vision offered, even though you and him both knew at this point how you’d weirdly creeped on him at the office the first day the two of you met.

    “Sheer force of will,” Wanda suggested, but you guaranteed she was remembering how, for the few dates you went on with them, you’d had to be reminded that you were actually on dates and that they weren’t just casual friendly hangouts. 

    You looked between them once more and then you wished you had suggested they sit to one side of you. Despite their steady, comfortable voices, Wanda was in the process of hiding her flustered face behind the curtain of her hair and Vision was chewing on his lip and couldn’t seem to keep his hands and feet from tapping away.

    “Okay,” you said after a moment, patting your thighs to do something with your hands. “I’m grasping that you guys don’t agree with me here. Wanda, go sit by him so I don’t get whiplash from trying to look at you both.”

    You and Wanda quickly switched places. You sat cross-legged on the couch to face them and Wanda and Vision shifted around to sit in a way that allowed them to face you without one blocking the other. After a moment, you waved your hands at them; the cheery air has since faded into something more somber. “What is it? Tell me why you get all quiet like that when I tell you, with evidence, why you’re the actual grooviest people I’ve ever met.”

    There were a few more moments of silence before Vision went to speak first, which surprised Wanda. She looked at him, eyebrows raised high on her forehead, and lightly grasped his wrist.

    “Vis?” she murmured.

    He sighed softly and placed his other hand over hers. “Oh, it’s really nothing dear, I promise. It’s just… Well, you’ve heard how the people of the cul-de-sac talk about us sometimes.”

    “Mean girls,” you grumbled under your breath with a nod, “the lot of them sometimes.”

    Wanda seemed to suddenly sag with sadness and both you and Vision reached over quickly to hold her.

    “Oh, darling,” Vision said, “It’s not your fault—”

    “That’s not true,” Wanda whispered.

    “It is true,” Vision said, and this time he said it with a fierceness that was familiar to you, whenever Wanda was being treated poorly by people like the Queen of the Cul-de-Sac, Dotty, or when Wanda decided to get down on herself. He grasped her shoulders tightly, squeezed them until she looked up at him. “Wanda, darling, love, I didn’t exist before I meant you. I mean, I did, of course, I did, but I was just this strange, non-human, non-machine thing that was just… kind of… there. It was you that gave me an existence, Wanda. You made me human.”

    Both you and Wanda stared at him, surprised. Wanda stared because she obviously didn’t fully agree with his opinion of her. You stared because of course, you were dating two of the weirdest, coolest, most stellar, and most romantic people ever. 

    Get yourself a man like that, you thought. Then after a moment, Wait, that is in fact also my man. 

    “And you—” Vision said, turning his head in your direction.

    “Oh, I’m next?” you stammered. “I thought it was Wanda’s turn.”

    Vision still held Wanda but also reached over to tightly grasp your hand and bring it to his mouth. “I just wished we could have confessed to you sooner. I just hate, hate, hated lying to you and now you’re involved with all this too—”

    The synthezoid with the English accent looked up at you with eyes begging forgiveness as if he’d committed one of the worst sins imaginable. You let out a hoarse laugh and ran your thumb across the side of his hand.

    “I’m sorry,” you said, still chuckling as you wriggled closer to your couple, “but as much as you might like to think you’ve subjected me to something I didn’t sign up for, I’d like to point out that I’ve been about a month ahead of you. I was here before you.” You felt a nagging urge to look at Wanda and repeat the last sentence, and there was something extra special about saying it that second time like there was a double and then a triple meaning behind it, but the way you both furrowed your brows afterward made it clear that neither of you really knew what those meanings were.

    Not yet, anyway.

    You cleared your throat and removed your hand from Vision’s grasp to place it on the back of the couch. “I moved into this town with no husband or wife, no family, nothing but a pile of letters and a new deed to a new house that happened to be the smallest in the neighborhood. My first week here I told one man in front of the entire night watch that I thought the joke he made about his wife was distasteful, and then the week after I tripped and spilled wine all over his wife. Agnes brought because she thought I’d be a form of entertainment and we somehow ended up becoming friends over a flask that she hid in a pocket sewed into the inside of her skirt.” You offered a look to Wanda again while you mentioned that Agnes never thought your “for the children” jokes were all that funny, though. “I’ve dealt with the comments and the rumors and the ‘what’s wrong with them, they don’t have no kids!’ People are weird and they’re mean and they’re fun and they suck. You want human, dude? You got it. If I was still bothered by comments that are nothing but a bummer, I think I’d be trying a little bit more than wearing clothes that I enjoy over the clothes that are expected of me, telling Dotty she needs to stop being awful before she gets frown lines, or, you know, pining over two people—a married couple nonetheless—until I somehow seduced them with my staring at them from around corners and just generally horrible, awful attempts at eye contact.”

    The married couple in question chortled at that.

    You used your hand on the back of the couch to hoist yourself up on your knees so you towered over Vision just slightly.

    “Here’s the thing, sunshine,” you continued, “I’m not in your boat on this one, you dorks, you’re in mine. I was here first and I don’t give a fuck.”

    Wanda gave a sudden laugh. “What language.”

    “Has he not told you about the time I said ‘Fuck you’ to a plastic bird in my garden?” you asked. “Multiple times? His name is Bernard and he’s plotting to kill me, I swear.”

    Wanda’s troubled expression was split by a wobbly smile.

    You threw up your arms in the dramatic fashion that you knew the two people in front of you loved and hollered—then quickly quieted back down to not disturb Billy and Tommy in the other room—“All this for my rambling putz ass to say, who cares about what’s outside this house! You two, and your kids, and I are the only people that matter here. Here being the house, Westview, whatever! Everyone else? Nonexistent.

    “Also, just to clarify,” you paused to wave your arms around, gesturing at the entire house, “Love it here. Love this shit.”

    You suddenly caught Vision’s slacked jaw in your hand and gave him a peck on the cheek. “This face? Love it.” You moved to peck a spot of silver on his skull. “Love this too.” You pecked the gem on his forehead and swore it glowed brighter in response. “Love this.” You pecked one of his ear plates. “Love these goofy things.” You pecked the tip of his nose. “Love this and the fact that you have it even though you don’t technically even need to breathe. Oh, speaking of which!” 

You lifted one of his hands with one of your own and tapped on his red fingernails with your other. You caught a glimpse of his face now that yours wasn’t directly in front of it and noticed him trying to hold back a giddy smile—and failing—while he watched you from underneath red lashes; your whole body would have tried to twist itself in knots under that look if you weren’t too busy swearing to kiss those eyelids and lashes too, at another time. Instead, you pecked each fingertip of the hand you were holding. “Love these ‘useless to my design’ things too. You know what, just speaking of hands—” You dropped Vision’s hand, which made itself to your waist as you went to grab Wanda’s; you were vaguely aware that you were practically leaning into their laps at that point but that could be dealt with when you weren’t trying to make a point.

When you went to touch her, she let you hold her wrist but quickly squeezed her hand into firsts before you could hold it like you had with Vision’s. She was looking away.

    You pressed a kiss to her whitening knuckles. “Wanda.”

    She looked at you, her perfect face distorted by a deep sadness that almost shattered your heart on the spot. She tightened her first further. The deep emotion appeared to make her slip back into her natural Sokovian accent when she spoke again. “You don’t know the pain it’s caused.”

    “I’ve done my fair share,” you affirmed even though you weren’t quite sure why. Then you kissed her knuckles again. “And maybe I don’t, but I know what good it’s caused, that you have.”

    Her face twisted into an ugly grimace. She asked hoarsely, “Like what?”

    “The first time I saw your face, I wanted to go to space, grab the moon, shrink it down—so it looked like one of those cool little lava rocks, you know? But prettier—and get it put on a ring,” you offered, then kissed the back of her hand and whispered, “and that’s after I found out you were married to a very attractive man too…”

    Vision snorted. Wanda cracked the smallest of smiles.

    You whispered lower, “And I may or may not have even been interested in marriage before that…”

    That time Wanda rolled her eyes; you smiled and grabbed her other clenched hand to share the attention with. You continued, “You’re also so nice, like so nice. You are so kind and care about what people think so much, it’s almost buggy—and bordering on self-destructive but that’s not what we’re talking about— And I sort of get it now, you know, but wow, making your magic show worse for the sake of people’s sanity? Wouldn’t even be on my radar.”

    Another little smile.

    “I’d be like, ‘Who wants to see me turn this entire table into a rosebush! Dotty’s rosebush specifically; Dotty, I stole your rosebush.’ I actually did steal a rose from her bush that day.”

    Wanda blinked and you noticed the lines of her expression weren’t as deeply etched into her face anymore.

    “That was Dotty’s?”

    You grinned and nodded, then kissed both of her hands. “Also, I love your hair and the way it perfectly frames your perfect face, and I love your little nose scrunches, and I love your eyelashes and the way you look at me from under them sometimes, and I’d kiss all those things but I’m not going to because I gotta get these stubborn, always-working, never-wanna-take-a-break, always-somehow-perfect-nails-having hands to relax before they hurt themselves even though it’s very clearly hard enough to make who woman who owns them do the same. Oh, I did I mention that smile—hoo, Wanda, that foxy smile…”

    Wanda was blushing now and bringing up her smile made it happen again, just slightly. You took advantage of the moment anyway and flung yourself back onto the couch with a hand over your heart. “Be still, my pounding heart!”

    Vision, who was watching by your and Wanda’s sides, laughed a bit. Wanda herself rolled her eyes again; the smile didn’t disappear afterward.

    You sat up again and pointed at Vision, now that he’d brought attention to himself again. “And I don’t know whether you heard any of the stuff this guy said! You made him exist? You made him human? What? You two also do this thing where you just look at each other and have a whole conversation, I don’t know if you guys know you do that or not. You do, though, and I don’t know if either or both of you are psychic but if you are and still love me? With my unhinged brain? Migraines and all? I wouldn’t understand, even if you explained it to me.”

    Vision offered, “Neither of us is psychic but anyway, please continue.”

    “Have anything to add?”

    “You’re doing wonderfully.”

    “Thank you.” You looked back and Wanda, noting that her face had almost completely softened now, as she was too busy being flustered to be sad at this point. You quickly scooped her hands before they could curl into fists again placed kissed on each of the crescent moon-shaped marks now dug into their palms. “Your magic rocked your babies to sleep. Your magic cleaned up all their and put it all in one nice, neat place. You floated me around the house with your magic and even protected me from falling when I was wriggling around up there; bet that was fun for both of you to watch. Vision said earlier that that was your job, to protect me, and while I don’t fully agree because I consider it the other way around, is that not what you did?”

    “I thought it was cute,” Wanda replied softly to the second to last sentence you said. She watched as you gave her hands a few more pecks.

    “So, you agree then,” you said, “that your magic protected me and also made me cuter?”

    She laughed and the sound made your heart soared, performing an aerial performance in your chest. She tried to wriggle her hands free from you but then you scowled and tucked them protectively under your chin.

    “Gotta say it. Gotta say your magic made me cute.”

    “I’m not saying that.”

    You shrugged and got comfy, laying your head in her lap with her hands still hidden. “Have to. Otherwise, no hands for you. Oh, did I not mention how good you are to your kids yet? You’re so good—”

    “Okay, okay, okay,” Wanda forfeited through a wet laugh. Hearing said laugh, your head shot up in concern, but the woman was smiling as she snagged your hands back; what she chose to do with them next was grab your face and place a kiss directly on your mouth.

    It was quick and soft and sweet and absolutely none of that prevented the fireworks that went off in your skull and your chest and your stomach and your veins that made tingles shoot all the way down to your toes. She pulled away as quickly as she had moved in and you blinked; your brain was still short-circuiting, like a robot—like a Vision with his gears all gummed up, and your dazed brain thought that was a very funny connection, so it repeated the joke verbally.

    Luckily, Vision was close enough to the level of dork that you were and he laughed at it with you.

    It took a deep breath and a head shake to de-gum your brain—if only Wanda could magic that—but after the excitement wore off, you felt sleepiness start creeping in and decided to make your final push. You curled a hand around both of your partners’ necks and brought their faces closer to nuzzle your noses together; they responded by each of them wrapping an arm around your waist and returning the affectionate action.

    “So, in conclusion,” you stated, which caused Vision to laugh lightly and Wanda to grin just slightly, “I love both of these perfect faces.” You kissed each of their noses. “And these funky, magical brains.” You kissed Wanda at the base of her hairline, then Vision just below his forehead gem. “And these equally funky, magical hands.” You grabbed the hands not looped around your waist and kissed the back of them. “And both of those babies, and this house, and y—”

    You sucked in a sudden breath to stop yourself so hard that you almost choked and you reeled back to the other side of the couch only to drag Vision and Wanda with you. The three of you tumbled into a flustered heap on the couch and over their shoulders, you could see early morning light filtering through the windows. This barely registered, though, as you were too busy focusing on the fact that you almost L-worded them on a silly, tired whim. 

    Despite the awkwardness of the moment and the unspoken words, no one made a move to remove themselves from the warm, cozy entanglement. One of both Wanda and Vision’s arms was pinned under your back, keeping them solid in place against you while simultaneously and successfully enveloping you in between them; your own arms, which had instinctively wrapped protectively around their shoulders in the tumble, kept them in a similar state. Wanda’s hair fanned found and covered the three of you like a blanket, and you were keenly aware of her breath softly wafting over the exposed skin of your neck from where her head now rested on your shoulder. Vision’s rested slightly lower, on your chest, and you felt a quickened pulse where his gem pressed into your neck, but you couldn’t be sure whether it was yours or his. 

    You stared past their shoulders and watched as sunlight shone through the curtains and dappled the ceiling. You tried to figure out whether you were stupider for stopping yourself from finishing that sentence or for not saying it at all.

    Then you felt a kiss being pressed to your clothed shoulder.

    “You’ve said so many things that you’ve loved tonight [Y/N],” Wanda murmured, her hot breath causing goosebumps to rise on your skin. “What’s two more?”

    “I—” you started, then bit your tongue again. There was something about saying that phrase that made you worried; you felt like if you said it now, the happy little world you lived in would begin to crumble, like it would all end far too soon. You sighed softly and said instead, “I don’t know how I would live without you.”

    There were a few moments of silence where you watched more sunlight filter in and wished you could take it back because what a way to talk a big game and then not follow through—

    Then Vision’s head appeared above you and he pressed a dizziness-inducing kiss to your lips. When he pulled away, he nuzzled your nose with his own as he murmured, “I love you too.”

    In almost the same moment, Wanda was mumbling the same phrase against your jawline. 

    Sleepy and hazy-brained you couldn’t do much else but stare at Vision like a lovesick puppy that struggled to say that L-word, then snuggle back down with both him and Wanda when they relaxed against you again. That seemed to be the last of what needed to be said, though, because everything was cozy and warm and golden brown in your home again and, one by one, the three of you fell into a deep, comfortable sleep.

    In the black void of otherwise dreamless sleep, you heard the vaguely familiar First Voice finish chewing something and then go, “Aww…”

[dreadysficrecs]

Stucky Fic Rec List #17

Saturday, August 21

🛡️ Aut Cum Scuto, Aut In Scuto by @humapuma, art by @hopeless--geek - [Explicit; 33,2k words]

[Modern AU; A/B/O; Alpha!Bucky x Omega!Steve; Soulmates; Mating Bond; Age Difference; Older Steve; Angst; Controlling Parents; Mention of Past Miscarriage; Mention of Mpreg; Explicit Sexual Content; Bottom!Steve; Fluff; Happy Ending]

Bucky never thought he would find his Omega at just twenty-years-old. Mates usually found each other around twenty-two or twenty-three, so he was overjoyed to learn that their bond was so strong, they were drawn to one another early.

Until Bucky's family attorney informed him that his Omega - Steve - was not only a long-time activist and a successful nurse, he was actually thirty-six.

Steve never thought he would find his Alpha. It had been more than ten years since they were supposed to come together, and he had long-since given up waiting. So, when a kid slammed into him on the street and tried to claim him, Steve was more than a little surprised.

Can these two overcome their differences, presumptions, and their pasts to find one another on the other side?

✨ The Best Boyfriend Bucky Barnes Never Had by @annerp, art by @capdeady - [Explicit; 17,7k words]

[Shrunkyclunks; Fake/Pretend Relationship; Fake Dating; Pining; Falling in Love; There Was Only One Bed; Explicit Sexual Content; Frottage; Hand Jobs; Inexperienced Steve; Naive Steve; Confused Steve; Identity Porn; Coming Out; Misunderstandings; Feelings Denial; Angst; Making Up; Happy Ending]

Bucky Barnes really needs someone to pretend to be his boyfriend for 5 minutes, just long enough to make his ex go away so he can enjoy the rest of his afternoon in peace. Super sweet Steve, with his perfect body and even better smile, is naturally willing to help the cute guy who hangs out in the park.

Fast forward several weeks and Bucky thinks they have the perfect fake dating arrangement. Bucky meets Steve's friends. Steve spends Bucky's birthday with his family.

There's only one problem. Steve apparently missed the fake part in their relationship and sets out to be the best boyfriend Bucky Barnes never had. Meanwhile, Bucky is working hard not to develop feelings for his friend.

To complicate everything, the world, and more importantly Bucky, don't know that the new Captain America, who never shows his full face, is actually Steve Rogers, the original Captain America who was secretly revived after 70 years on ice.

🌻 Not Just A Pretty Face by cleo4u2 - [Explicit; 10k words]

[Canon Divergence; CA:TFA Compliant; Established Relationship; Canon Typical Violence; Hydra; Minor Injuries; Howling Commandos; Flirty!Howard; Jealous Steve; Possessive Steve; Rough Sex; Tent Sex; Bottom!Bucky]

Steve does something stupid on a mission and Bucky has to save him with a little help from Howard Stark.

🌶️ You Like the Way I Look by @iamthe-wo-manwhocan - [Explicit; 2,7k words]

[Shrunkyclunks; Age Difference; Bearded Steve; Dancing; Casual Sex; Blow Jobs; Hand Jobs; Semi-Public Sex]

Bucky sidles up to him, hand boldly coming to rest on his chest. “What about you, big guy? Care for a dance?” Steve watches Bucky’s eyes twinkle with satisfaction, somehow already knowing he’s got Steve on the hook.

A decade out of the ice, Steve Rogers returns to New York. Reeling from a battle against the Chitauri, a night with the troublesome Bucky Barnes might be just what he needs.

🌤️ In the New Light of Dawn by @iamthe-wo-manwhocan - [Mature; 1,9k words]

[Shrunkyclunks; Established Relationship; Married Stucky; Domestic Fluff; Slice of Life; Amputee Bucky; Light Angst; Emotional Sex; Bottom!Bucky; Happy Ending]

The rustling of clothes is what wakes Bucky up.

Squinting his eyes open, moonlight illuminating the dark bedroom, he sees Steve slip into fresh boxers, hair damp from the shower. He turns to find Bucky sleep rumpled, though whatever expression is drawn across his features coils the tension holding Steve’s shoulders tight and rigid.

Bucky blinks in the dim light and wonders what Steve can read in the lines of his face.

A night in the Rogers-Barnes household.

[saber-of-dreams]

Flock Together (Birds of a Feather Pt. 2)

Part I

The world was filled with the inexplicable.  

Damian knew that better than most.  

He’d been born and bred to be analytical, to focus on the facts and remove emotion from the equation entirely.  But even he had to acknowledge that sometimes things just happened.  There was more to the world than he or anyone else would ever be able to explain.  Most days, he was okay with that.

But most days he didn’t feel like there was a gaping wound inside of him.  A raw, tender thing that made him almost insane with the desire to...well, that was the problem.  He didn’t know what it meant.  The wound wasn’t physical.  He wasn’t even entirely sure it was a mental one.  All of his faculties were in tact.  He could reason and his judgement was still sound.

Still.  He burned.  Ached.  Something was wrong.  It was a truth he somehow knew to the depth of his heart.  He just didn’t know why he knew it.  Or how.  He didn’t even know what it was that felt wrong.

He’d tried all the conventional methods to tease a meaning to all of this out, but nothing had worked.  No one had batted an eye when he’d meditated.  Or when he’d nearly passed out from training for thirty-six hours straight.  Nor when he surrounded himself with a fortress of books on the metaphysical, dreams and their interpretations, birds and their meanings, and the wonderfully vague ‘intangible feelings.’

But this time, this time he’d gathered an audience.  Mercifully it was just his mother and a couple of servants, but still...

“You want to what?”  Ra’s Al Ghul asked.  There was an edge in that question that set Damian’s heart palpitating.

Damian stood his ground.  Though his grandfather’s presence was that of a monolith among ants.

“Leave.”  Damian repeated.

“Why, grandson?”  Ra’s Al Ghul asked.  There was, mercifully, no anger in the question.  Only curiosity.

Well obviously the truth was out of the question.  Damian couldn’t express something he himself didn’t understand.

“The world is wide, and I know little of it.”  Damian supplied.  Not a lie.  

His grandfather considered this.   “That is not all.”  

Damian acknowledged this with a short bow.  “And...I wish to know of my father.”

This was the only concession that Damian could allow himself.  The only piece of this that he was sure of, and the only part that he could speak of without raising too much suspicion.

Whatever it was that Damian felt, he knew that it had something to do with his father.  

“Damian!”  His mother snapped.  

Ra’s raised a hand.  “It is natural, for the boy to wish to know of his progenitor.” 

Damian didn’t move.  

“I will allow it.”  Ra’s decided.  “You may go out into the world, for a time, Damian.”

“My thanks, grandfather.”   Damian said, bowing deeply this time.

His mother found him as he was closing his pack.  A feat, as he’d taken the precaution of packing before making the request, and had only returned to check it over one last time.

“What is this foolish notion of knowing your father?”  She demanded.

Damian secured his pack and placed it over his shoulders before turning around.

“It is as I told grandfather.”  Damian said.

“Do not lie to me.”  She hissed.

Damian shrugged.  In all technicality, he wasn’t lying.  

She narrowed her eyes.  “A lie of omission is still a lie, boy.”

“Perhaps I simply wish to know more than the walls of this compound.”  Damian said.  He pushed past her.  She let him go.

Gotham city was his every expectation.  Gritty, hard and riddled with the exploiters of vice and virtue alike.  He thought it fitting that he arrived at night.  As his mother told him, it was his father’s time.  The time of bats.

Ridiculous.  Dressing up in a costume just to terrorize the criminals in a city where they were thicker than rats in a sewer.  Apparently he didn’t even kill them.  That was like begging the rats to keep multiplying.  

He’d had no intention of seeking out his father directly.  Actually, he had no real plan at all.  Which was something of a novelty to him.  Damian always had a plan.  But there was no planning for the unknowable.  He simply had to hope that he stumbled onto the right path.  

So he spent his days lurking the city, learning its secrets and its treasures and his nights trying to suss out where he might best observe the infamous Batman from the shadows.

Six weeks in and he’d still had no luck.  His frustration was a palpable thing, and his patience was thinner than a silk thread.  He was a master assassin.  He knew how to be patient.  He knew how to hold in his temper.  He knew - oh screw it.

He was tired of waiting for the Batman to come to him.  Damian had stayed back and watched all the little criminals in their stupid little petty crimes.  Not once had the Batman appeared to intercede.  Perhaps he would draw him out.

And he knew just the target.

A huge drug shipment he’d heard two imbeciles bragging about coming out of a bar the other night.  Large.  Lots of illegal substances.  Plenty of criminals.  It was probably Batman’s version of Catnip.  Batnip?

And if nothing else, it would help Damian relieve some of his frustrations.

There was something laughably inane about criminals and their superstitions.  Midnight?  Damian rolled his eyes as the trucks finally rolled into the warehouse where he’d spent the last three hours hiding inside a small crate, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.  

He made sure to wait until they were gathered at their thickest before he struck.  Which of course meant he was outnumbered by about twenty five people.  He grinned and leapt out, swords unsheathing as he landed nimbly in the center.  

He took down the first six easily enough.  He’d had surprise on his side, so really they fell like wheat to his scythe.  But then they regrouped and started to react.  They pulled guns, and he had bullets to dodge as well as fists.  

“Shoot him!”  One of the criminals screamed like a rampaging toddler.  Damian smiled.  

Suddenly darkness enveloped him.  He blinked as a bubble of darkness slipped over him and the bullets that had been pointed at him hit a barrier of black and purple instead.  He raised an eyebrow.

“I guess you’re reckless in any reality.”  

Damian whirled.  Found himself face to face with a cloaked figure.  He felt that sensation again.  Like the Earth was off balance.  He felt a dizziness wash over him and he fell to his knees.  Clutched his head.

“Yeah.”  The stranger remarked.  “I felt that too, when I finally woke up.”

“What...”  Damian gasped.

“We can talk later.  Now let’s get to work.”

The barrier dropped.  Damian barely had a moment to scoop up his fallen katana before the criminals were charging toward them.  He shut off the part of his brain that felt pain and launched himself into the melee.  

He was halfway through taking down a group of four when he saw the stranger perform some sort of magic.  He gaped as the form of a raven appeared.  

Finally.  

His heart quickened.  What was this excitement in his blood?  He could feel his heart pounding.  Felt the smile on his face widen.  The hole inside him...he thought maybe it had closed just a little.

A bullet nearly grazed him.  He cursed, forced himself to focus on the task at hand.  He could muse all he liked when this was done.

It took longer than it should have.  But in all fairness, he was distracted.  Questions kept ramming their way into his mind as he tried to focus on the fight before him.  The stranger was useful.  A sorcerer of some sort that he’d never seen before.

But Damian was not naive.  The stranger took out the last criminal.  Damian raised his sword.  “Who.  Are.  You?”  He demanded.

Hands came up, carefully peeling back the over-sized hood.  He gasped, shock-waves tearing through his mind.  A face so familiar, the one he’d dreamed about.  The ravens.  His katana fell from his hand and he fell to his knees for the second time that night.

“Hello, Damian.”  She said.

[builtonashes]

White Noise

So @qtmeryr​ asked the following:

Hello! I saw your post about fanfic requests so I’ve got one! Could you please write Higgs x Reader (Death stranding ofc) fic in which Higgs and reader are friends but suddenly she/he starts to feel something more so tries to ignore Higgs, and because of that he gets mad at her/him?

And who am I to deny such a nice request? ;)

WARNING: Takes place after the game, so spoilers are obvious.

Rating: T+

Pairing: Higgs Monaghan x Reader

Reader’s gender not specified.

You sat down on the grass, trying to collect your thoughts and relax before coming back to work. The weather was surprisingly pleasant; warm wind ghosting your face, some kind of sweet, flowery smell heavy in the air. Spring was in full bloom and you were so glad to have this moment outside. It wasn’t often that you could just unwind and sit down like that. You even made sure to bring a vacuum mug filled with tea to support you during the recess.

As it was, you really did have a lot to think about. You always knew that you were too nice for your own good. Too naive. You couldn’t help it at this point though; it was in your nature just like your parents’ before you, in the way they taught you to live and interact with society. You found yourself used and exploited by others many times, never truly able to read their intentions, always assuming that they were fueled by something good, by the will to do something right. The funny thing is, he was the first one you read right away. You knew it was wrong to even talk to him. You knew you should avoid him at all costs. You knew that his nature was an almost polar opposite to yours, incredibly selfish and arrogant, always focusing on his own gain. But even knowing all this you were somehow drawn to him, actually enjoying the time you spent together. You couldn’t really pinpoint the reason for that at first, but as time passed and as your meetings grew more frequent you realized it was because of the way he talked. He was a smart guy, very quick to learn new things, very attentive to whatever you would talk about. Truth was, he seemed to be the first person in a pretty long while to challenge you intellectually. And you liked that. You liked that because he made you see things in a new, fascinating light. Especially when it came to the events of the Death Stranding and the true potential of chiralium.

Now, you might have been naive, but you weren’t stupid. You knew of all that his ego has brought upon him. When he fell, he fell hard - putting everything on the scale and losing it all in the end. You saw the surprise, the desperation, the fear present on his face for the first time ever. And it did something to you - seeing him vulnerable, lost and defeated made you realize something you were trying to hide from all along.

It made you realize that you cared. Probably a little too much.

The realization dawned upon you as something so obvious you should’ve been able to tell a long time ago. But you made a pretty good job of pretending the feeling wasn’t there. Even though you knew he was just using you like all his other assets. Even though you knew you were as disposable to him as a paper towel. Even though you knew he was spending time with you just because he was bored. Yes, you were naive. But you were not desperate. It was time to let him go. You had to focus on other things, focus on your work; nothing good could’ve ever come of tending to him instead of the people who actually needed you. And you knew that getting attached to someone like him would just end in a disaster anyway.

So you stopped replying to his emails. You stopped taking his calls. You would send him an occasional message telling him how busy you were and that he should take the time to nurse himself back to health. That he should tend to his injuries. It was strange, not seeing him for nearly a month after spending so much time together. But you promised yourself to stay strong in your resolve. To not give in to something as trivial as missing him. You could do more good if you let him go.

Except now that he no longer occupied the space on your couch,he constantly occupied space in your head.

You sighed and took a long sip of your tea. You had to get through this somehow. Might have been easier if you had other friends to spend time with, but in this world connections were not something to be built easily. Most of your friends were gone. Some of them indefinitely.

But you still had your job to do. You still had your research and enough chiralium supply to run your tests. People needed you and distractions were not welcome.

You laid down on the grass with a heavy sigh, happy to feel the warmth of the earth beneath you. It calmed your nerves, soothed the white noise in your head. You took a few deep breaths to commit the smell of blooming flowers to memory. You almost forgot what it was like. Cooped up in your lab, rarely coming outside because of all the storms and BTs. It was much better now. Easier. But your heart was somehow heavier.

You had no idea how long you spent laying there with your eyes closed. You probably even took a short nap on the warm ground. You expected the warmth to pass soon, to give way to evening and ultimately to the cold winds of the night. What you didn’t expect was to see someone standing over you when you woke up.

You did not expect to see Higgs.

“Took you long enough,” you heard him say, an unnerving tone to his voice. “I’ve been standing here for the last what… ten minutes?”

You sat up quickly, blinking once, then twice. It wasn’t a mirage. He was really there.

“What are you doing here?”

“What, am I not allowed to visit an old friend now? Is this the way you greet all your visitors?”

“No,” you answered quickly, taking another sip of your tea. “Only the ones who are not welcome.”

“Now that is just rude.”

“It’s showing up here with no invitation what’s rude. I’m busy, you know.”

“I know. Or so you’ve been telling me. But I don’t see you working too hard.”

“I’m human. I need to take breaks.”

“Yeah right. Cut the crap. What’s up? Why have you been ignoring me?”

You rolled your eyes and focused on the tea again. What were you supposed to tell him?

Before you even managed to collect your thoughts, he sat down next to you and nudged you with his elbow. You sighed and turned to face him.

“I’m not ignoring you. I’m busy. I already told you.”

“Busy saving humanity? Busy laying on the grass? Busy ignoring me?”

“Not everything has to be about you.”

“Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure it is. At least now. So wanna tell me what’s going on or do I have to guess? I have time, you know. I can do this all week.”

“I can’t. I have to work.”

Was it… impatience that you were hearing in his voice? Or was he getting angry? You couldn’t really tell, but there was certainly a different undertone to his speech now. Something edgy. Something else.

“I called you seventy two times. You only picked up once. I sent you twenty long emails. You replied to two. You call this not ignoring me?”

“Higgs,” you sighed again, shaking your head. “I’m trying to focus on my work. I have a lot to do. I can’t be distracted now.”

“So you’re saying that I’m distracting you? I should probably take this as a compliment.”

“It’s not a compliment. It’s the best explanation you’re going to get.”

He went quiet for a while. That was something you didn’t expect.

“Why are you so distant, Y/N? Tell me. I’m worried.”

Worried. He’s worried. You almost laughed.

“I just… you don’t need me, Higgs. And I don’t need you. It’s probably for the best if we stay away from each other.”

You were suprised to feel his hand squeeze your shoulder. It was not a pleasant surprise, but it made you look at him nonetheless.

“Why are you saying this, Y/N? Why now? We didn’t really need each other before either. Yet I’m pretty certain you enjoyed my company during those long, boring nights filled with snowstorms.”

“I did. But that was before I knew who… what you were. Admit it. I’m just another asset to you. You never really cared about me. Just about what I could do for you. And I was stupid enough to actually help you.”

Wow. He looked really offended.

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard, Y/N. It would probably even hurt me if I knew you were telling the truth.”

“I am telling the truth. I don’t want to be used by you any longer. I have to focus on things that actually matter. You can go bother the porters if you’re bored. I don’t have time for this.”

His movement was sudden and actually a little bit startling. He moved up, reached out for your face and framed it with his hands. For a while you thought that he was going to headbutt you. Instead, he just looked into your eyes with intent so strong it almost broke your resolve.

“So this is it? You think I’m bored? You think we don’t matter? Are you for real?”

You hesitated. Probably for a while too long. But you were not going to break because of the anger in his voice.

“I think you use people, Higgs. And I think you were using me too. And I don’t need this anymore. I want to do things that help people, not bring chaos to their lives. You are evil. You always were. I just couldn’t see it that clearly before.”

He let go of your face, letting his hands fall down his sides. His facial expression was suddenly something between hurt and anger. You almost regretted saying what you did. Almost.

“Did you ever even care about me? About my feelings?”

You didn’t reply. What were you supposed to say? You did care. But you didn’t want him to know.

Suddenly, he stood up and started pacing back and forth. You could see that he was distressed. Angry. You were actually surprised to see that your words affected him this much.

“Higgs, I don’t…”

“And here I thought you were different. That you were not like other people,” he spat, not letting you finish. “I thought you liked me. I thought we were friends. I thought… I thought I had something to keep me here. Someone. But no, of course not. Higgs is the monster, it’s all his fault. I’ve learned my lesson. I should have never trusted you. You think I used you?” he suddenly stopped right in front of you and brought his legs down to a squat. His face was inches from yours now. “Well, I think you used me. How does that sound?”

You wanted to turn away from him, to hide from the piercing look in his eyes. You felt like he could see right through you, right through the walls you put up to not let him get any closer. You felt so wrong when he was looking at you like that.

“You’re delusional, Higgs,” you whispered through gritted teeth. “And you’re mad. You are known to make people your puppets and then discard them when you no longer need them. Do you need me to remind you what you did to Fragile?”

He moved closer. You scooted back. You were actually starting to worry. Would he hurt you? What if he did? There was nobody here to help you. When he grabbed your hands, you actually felt panic rising deep in your gut. Even stripped from his powers, Higgs could still easily overpower you with his bare strength. A shiver ran down your spine.

“Fragile,” he hissed, his nose almost touching yours, “Was not you. She was a tool. I was wrong about her. But you… you… I thought you were… all this time, I thought…”

The desperation in his voice was new. The shift in his speech was strange. Unfamiliar. It went straight to your heart, piercing it with searing pain. Was he… scared? Angry? Lonely? Or maybe all of that?

You tried to move your hands, but his grip was heavy, almost punishing. There was no way for you to escape. He moved even closer, kneeling between your legs. You were frightened.

“I don’t know what you thought,” you whispered, suddenly ashamed of the fear so obvious in your voice. “You never showed me. You never let me understand. You just took whatever you wanted.”

He pressed his forehead against yours. Cold. Another shiver went through your entire body.

“I never showed you,” he repeated, a weird laugh finishing the sentence. “That’s true. I never did. I didn’t know how. But I will. I’ll make you understand. I’ll make you see. That’s easy.”

When he pressed his lips against yours, he took you by surprise. You gasped. The sheer desperation of this gesture took your breath away. His lips were chapped but warm, not an unwelcome presence against your mouth. You closed your eyes. The worry didn’t dissipate at all.

He let go of your hands and brought them to his face, pulling you closer, teeth nudging at your lower lip. You moaned against your will, hoping he wouldn’t notice, but he did. He pressed into you even harder, licking into your mouth with wild abandon, not even stopping to take a breath. Hs hands were suddenly behind your back, pulling you closer, flush against his chest. You couldn’t move away, you couldn’t let go. But you didn’t want to.

You tried to pull away from the kiss to breathe, but he chased your mouth with his immediately, not letting you go. It was messy and ehxilarating at the same time. But you had to breathe. At least for a while.

“No, don’t, don’t go”, he whispered against your lips whenever you tried to put some distance between you. “Don’t turn me away. Please. Please. I’m begging you.”

You never heard this type of desperation in his voice. Broken. Scared. The kisses were grounding him, you could tell; and when you didn’t move away he pushed into you even more.

“I’m not,” you said between kisses, against your own will. “I’m here. I’m here.”

One final push sent you back on the grass with Higgs on top of you. His hands were in your hair, on your face, tracing lines against your hips. You fisted his shirt to bring him closer. You needed to make this right.

“Y/N, I’m…”

“Shut up,” you said, your lips ghosting against his. “I think I get it now.”

He leaned into your touch, chasing your hand where it reached for his cheek. You felt another sting in your chest at the look on his face. He was scared. So all this time... and he only showed you that now.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, voice barely above a whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

He kissed you again, hard, grinding against you with his entire body. He was heavy, but you didn’t really mind. It was a welcome weight to counter the constant painful pull in your chest. When you felt his fingers in your hair again, you moaned. He was actually gentle. Desperate and so lonely, but surprisingly gentle.

Your moan made him moan too. The shiver that ran down your spine this time was something entirely different from the fear you felt not so long ago.

Biting your lower lip, he closed his eyes and nuzzled your nose with his. You bit him right back, sliding your tongue against his. Who would have thought this might be a better way to settle your argument. Pushing and pulling back and forth you made a hot, writhing mess of each other. It felt oddly satisfying in more ways than one. But you needed to settle this. And you decided to take him by surprise.

You managed to roll him onto his back, straddling his hips and locking him down with your thighs. He looked at you then; looked at you in a way you’ve never seen before. Admiring. Passionate. Desperate. Wanting. So many emotions visible on his face you didn’t even know he was capable of.

Who would have guessed. Maybe you were wrong about him after all.

“You can stay,” you whispered, trying to collect yourself somehow. “But we need to set a few things straight.”

“Anything,” he answered, reaching up to place his hands on your hips. “Anything you say. I’ll do anything.”

You were starting to like that side of him. Submissive, desperate. In a good way.

“You help me with my work. I let you stay at my place. You do the dishes.”

He nodded eagerly, a smile spreading across his lips. You lowered yourself to place a soft kiss on his forehead.

“I’ll even walk the dog.”

“I don’t have a dog.”

“Well, that’s something we could look into.”

You shook your head with a laugh. He was impossible.

But maybe, just maybe, you will be able to make this work.

You were definitely willing to try.

[starwars-oc-ship-week]

keep hesitating

i’ve actually been dying to do this ship week. tyche and enlil are my favorites and they’re a disaster! cw for: gambling, mentions of alcohol, sex mentions. if you wanna see my art of them they both have tags on my blog!

Tyche Basha meets her future husband for the first time.

Most people have this happen. You meet a future partner for the first time, you look in their eyes, and sometimes there is something special from that very moment onwards. But Tyche didn’t expect to. She liked herself the way she was. She didn’t want to change.

That wasn’t on her mind, though, that night. Nar Shaddaa wasn’t somewhere for that sort of fantasy. It was her workplace more than anything. A friend of her biggest cash cow, Grakkus, had come to her with a very specific complaint and an open ultimatum, and for such a fat sum of credits, it was supposed to be easy. Some gambling rogue who owed a hefty few credits and had accidentally lured Imperials into his casino— barely any rougher than satin and poor in a fight, but inexplicably most bounty hunters hadn’t taken him. She figured they were probably having some difficulty getting him to stick around when he got to realizing what was going on— and with more opulent prey, or rich brats, they did usually just leave like that. It made quick kills hard.

This one— Enlil Velas— allegedly was an Imperial defector, by rumor. He was a medic of some sort at one point, and still practiced, but had become a career gambler with arm candy on every planet. Arhan, pretty, and he knew it. He owed the Hutt cartels enough for Tyche to take interest, at least, and she wasn’t cheap. Even so, she was considering double dipping her reward for such a good job. That was, if they’d take her fake identifications here. She had switched up her strategy with Atro aboard; the Snow Kite was too pretty a ship to let get scuffed in a fight.

She had shifted her strategy for this, too. She wasn’t going for a good strategic fight and kill, or the silent, stalking of her prey. She was the bait and lure and hook all in one. If he had a thing for pretty faces, then Tyche would play along. It was how she kept half her contracts, anyways. Very few people said no to such lovely cornflower skin and golden eyes, or ignored a figure like hers.

So she slipped into a minidress, glossed her lips, and pulled on her favorite heels. Clutching a jeweled purse close, pretending to be shy, she inched into the casino. Flashing lights, Sabacc tables, dancing girls, neon drinks— this would be her place if she hadn’t had to be a good actress. And like a good actress, she found her audience nearly immediately.

In the dim corner, was a man with skin like an orchid, a tower even sitting, with a waterfall of silky black hair He was wearing a very tacky gold jumpsuit, she thought— certainly too much for anyone, but especially on someone so long and lanky. He absently flirted with the drink girl, who giggled. Nobody else would do this, she thought, sitting down across from him at the only empty seat at the card table.

“Hey,” said a soft tenor from across the table. “I’m on a winning streak, so I’ve been buying all the prettiest people at the table drinks. Do you want one?” He swirled a glass, and Tyche knew immediately this was the kind of guy she would’ve laughed with for one night under different circumstances before ditching in the morning.

“Hm?” She perked up, feigning temporary confusion. “Oh, uh— sure! I don’t really know any local specialties so just get me something sweet. Can you deal me in?” she asked the droid.

“Put down your credits,” said the droid, and Tyche obliged, crossing her ankles.

“So,” said Enlil, making his first play, “have you played Pazaak?”

“When I was a little girl,” said Tyche meekly, a lie— and something flashed in her opponent’s dark eyes.

“Here. Let me show you. Bet’s off, this first one is on me. You get to twenty— see, that’s a five,” he said, a finger hovering over her deck. “You can’t go over or you lose. Let’s play.”

“A—alright,” she said, reshuffling her deck. “So what’s your name? I haven’t been to many casinos. I’m glad I found a friendly face.”

“Enlil,” he said with a smile. “But now I’ve got to ask, too. What’s yours?”

“Tyra,” she said meekly. “I’m just visiting friends. But I wanted to experience the nightlife.”

“You couldn’t have found a better guide,” he hummed, flipping a card and tucking it into his hand.

Tyche shyly hid her face behind her cards. “So where did you learn to play?” she asked.

“Med school,” he said calmly. “Surprised?”

“A little,” she lied. “But you seem awfully smart.”

“Not that smart,” he said. “I dropped.”

“Oh,” she said. “My line of work isn’t so exciting. I’m in finance.”

“So you really know how to gamble, don’t you? That must be how you afforded such a pretty dress?”

Tyche giggled. “Please, let me focus on the game!”

“You’re very cute when you’re concentrating.” He grinned. “You get a little dimple on the bridge of your nose.”

“Shh!” she giggled as the waitress brought her drink. “It’s embarrassing!”

“That is not even close to embarrassing,” he said with a dry smile. “Embarrassing is getting recognized by a friend of your parents when you’re losing in Sabbac. You’re just precious.”

“Do you really think so?” She tucked a drifting white strand of hair behind her ear.

“Of course,” he said, winking and taking a sip of his drink.

“Maybe you wouldn’t mind showing me one of the machines I saw towards the back parlor? I— I couldn’t get the hang of it.” Here she went. Clean games, she thought. Clean.

“Oh, sure, honey.” He stood— a whole foot and a half over poor Tyche, who was already short for a woman, but he offered his arm like a gentleman anyways. She led the way, past the loud thrumming music and laughter and concealing smiles and dancing, to the door to one of the maintenance rooms.

“You sure this goes any—“ he began as she opened the door, but before he finished that, she had a blaster to his stomach, concealed and barely larger than her palm.

“You’re smart,” she said, any trace of the sweet naive girl gone from her intonation. “Let’s figure out the game inside.”

The hatch slid shut behind them, and she reached onto the holster strapped to her thigh, picking her vibroblade for this occasion. With a flick of her wrist, she extended it, and kicked him swiftly in the back of the legs, then used his gangly instability to her advantage, shoving him straight to the ground in one motion.

“Alright. You know what I’m here for. Time’s up with the Hutts. I want some quick questions answered before—“

Before she finished the job.

His hair had slid back behind his shoulders. They were wearing the same earrings. She had bought them from a street vendor on Mygeeto with her sister many years ago. They were her favorite. His were identical, minus a few handmade touches or anomalies.

“Before…”

His beetle-black eyes were wide with fear. He wasn’t a threat. He was an expensive target but other than play a few bad hands, what had he done? Those eyes of hers— it was just like Atro, back on the ship. She couldn’t be going soft and picking up another stray cat. She couldn’t.

She couldn’t finish this.

“Before I get you out of here. Everyone on Nar Shaddaa wants you taken care of. I’m getting you offworld.”

“You aren’t with the Empire, are you?” There was a tremor in his voice. “They’ve been tracking me down trying to recruit me again for months.” Recruit meant force. Tyche shivered.

“No. I’m just getting some guy who’s in over his head off world.” She reached out a hand. “You said you’re a doctor?”

“Well, loosely,” he shrugged. “I was a battlefield medic after I failed to make a doctorate. The Empire is pretty fast and loose with its—“

“You know what you’re doing?” she asked, cutting him off.

“Well enough.”

“Then you know exactly how badly I could hurt you if you try that flirty pretty boy shit with me again. We’re going to my ship and you won’t say a word. You’re going to respect me and my mechanic, you’re going to stop that schtick, and we’re going to find a way for you to scrounge up the cash to pay back the Hutts.”

“You’re serious?” he said, staring at Tyche in disbelief.

“Yeah.” She wished she wasn’t. “And my name isn’t Tyra. It’s Tyche Basha.”

“The Tyche Basha of glamorous, charming, heartbreaker assassin fame?”

“Overstated and untrue reputation,” she said dismissively. “But sure. That one.”

“And you’re—“

“Don’t thank me,” she said, opening the door and walking out. “It’s barely any trouble.”

“Well, you could’ve made a lot of money. I know you were about to kill me.” He pushed his hair behind his ears. “I’m not as stupid as you thought.”

“That remains to be seen. You couldn’t tell I knew how to play Pazaak already. And you messed up the directions.” She smiled. “I parked on the lower plaza. Let’s get walking.”

[dontcallmecarrie]

One Step Forward...

just realized that while I have quite a bit on Tony’s time in college for BDEL, it’s pretty general so here’s an attempt to remedy that. Bear in mind that there’s a timeline squish going on, otherwise things won't make sense.

. 

Tony looked around the enormous lecture hall with wide eyes, practically vibrating in his seat. He knew he stuck out like a sore thumb, but he didn't care: his shiny new student ID was burning a hole in his pocket, his messenger bag was a near-clone of his neighbor’s, and in the next few minutes he’d start on the next chapter of his life. 

This was the first time he’d set foot in an institute of higher learning, for the express purpose of learning. Sure, he still had to lay low, since Tony Stark was still #1 on America’s Most Wanted Missing Children [even if his twenty-second birthday came and went months ago, take a hint already Howard], and living with someone still getting used to the world after an involuntary ice nap, but...for the first time in his life, he could let loose. 

Could finally poke at some of the things he’d been itching to try with like-minded individuals, could research and leaf through theses and journals without having to sneak around anyone who might be curious as to what a ten-year-old was doing with a textbook on fluid mechanics.

Child prodigies were easy to pick out; enterprising college students, though?

When everyone was broke and scrambling to stand out, especially in a university big enough for some of its courses to have upwards of 300 students, while also having some cool-sounding research going on? 

Nobody’d look too closely at some freshman asking too many questions. 

That’s what he was counting on, anyway. 

The professor strode up to the podium, and Tony straightened up in preparation for his first day of college.

.

Mistakes were made.

Many, many mistakes were made.

.

Tony walked out of the latest round of exams with a bounce in his step, already thinking about whether or not he’d be able to make it to the guest lecture in time to find a seat...only to pick up the dark muttering of some of his classmates. 

“Ugh, that was brutal and I think there was a typo somewhere in there because how—”

“—had like one slide covering it during lecture, why was it—”

“—an I’m going to fail, this stupid class is going to tank my GPA, fu—”

Some were almost in tears, some were fuming. More than a few were bleary-eyed, clearly having pulled an all-nighter cramming for the test that made up a good chunk of their grade.

Tony tried not to feel too guilty about wrecking the grading curve because he had no doubt he’d aced it, and had done the extra-credit question too just because he could and it’d seemed like a fun thought exercise.

Then he checked his watch, bit back a curse as he clutched at his messenger bag, and started to jog towards the building he’d seen on the flyer about public health talks.

.

Culver University had several of the typical crypids for a college campus: that one bookstore five minutes away with just about every book under the sun, that hole-in-the-wall restaurant that somehow managed to avoid getting written up for health code violations, that one professor who was always listed on the roster but hadn’t been seen since the first day of class.

However, not three months into the new academic year, a new cryptid was being added to the roster: Caffeine Rush Undergrad. 

.

If Tony hadn’t known just what the hell he was doing, he would not have managed to secure a space for his research project. As it was, his obvious interest and experience in computer programming had been a plus, so even if he’d had to bullshit his way out of declaring a major while also convincing everyone he knew what he was doing— it was worth it. 

He now had a bench dedicated to his work on cloud computing, and even if Culver didn’t know his end goal was getting JARVIS even more mobility than before on top of seeing what else he could do with what resources he now had at hand, well...this place was a goddamn candy store, alright?

Also, as a bonus he was now a familiar face to several departments he hadn’t quite gotten around to checking out, including a free pass to continue arguing with that one philosophy chair whenever office hours were slow and his code was compiling.

.

Caffeine Rush Undergrad had a name, presumably.

However, when looking at short freshmen and transfer students and seeing the only one in the room who looked actually excited about the upcoming exams, well...it was hard to remember to ask. 

. 

Tony met Bruce Banner and Betty Ross after he found some of their publications, and his glee at discovering that they were working on something a few wings away from his own bench was...something. 

Not explosive, because he knew better than to attract the wrong sort of attention, but something. 

Sure, they’d eyed him suspiciously at first, but after seeing he knew what he was doing and that he had no interest in stealing their research, they got along swimmingly!

Well, at least they didn’t treat him like a younger sibling the way Foster and Selvig did, anyway.

More like a second set of eyes, and even if Tony didn’t entirely get the finer points he was able to follow along well enough. Kind of like the way Bruce was a great rubber duck whenever he shared what he was doing with JARVIS, even if he sometimes seemed more than a little amused by the comparison. 

.

Caffeine Rush Undergrad was like a goddamn puppy, all wide eyes and running around all the damn time, leaving behind towering stacks of books whenever he went to the library and sneaking into lecture halls for classes he wasn’t even in just to ask the speaker questions later.

It was impressive. And exhausting, and intimidating, especially when word got out that Caffeine Rush somehow had managed to secure a research position in one of the most competitive programs on campus.

...and then he disappeared after the Green Incident, which only cemented his notoriety.

.

Tony had two coffees in hand, one for Betty and one for Bruce, and nearly dropped both the moment he glimpsed General Ross in the hall, headed towards—

Oh.

He turned on a heel and ducked into the nearest office he could find, before Howard’s old golf buddy could spot him and risk putting two and two together.

.

“You didn’t tell me your old man was Thunderbolt Ross.” Tony said as he passed over a cup of now-lukewarm coffee. His voice wasn’t accusing; he was better than that. But his hands were this close to shaking, and there was a tension he couldn’t shake because he’d foolishly, naively assumed he was safe here, why had he—

“What’s wrong?” Bruce asked, eyes sharp and damn it he was slipping if some civilians could see it. 

“Nothing.” Tony plastered on a smile, and shoved his cup in his direction as he mentally readied himself as to what he’d need to do now because if his mom hadn’t picked up chatter then they were okay, but...

Oh, right. 

Geez, seeing Ross had really shaken him up. But his family was safe, and he had a plan and a story and he could bullshit with the best of them, he just had to get a grip.

Deep breath, steady hands. DUM-E was pressing against his leg in his messenger bag, while Butterfingers was a comforting weight in his jacket pocket. He could handle this. 

“Nothing,” he repeated to their disbelieving looks, “it’s just that my mom was a... Vietnam protestor. She broke a lot of shit, and... may or may not have several warrants with her name still out there.”

He hated lying to his friends, but his family was on the line. Uncle James was still living with him, his mom didn’t need any more stress than she already had. 

Also? It wasn’t actually a lie. Technically, his mom was a kidnapper. Jury was still out on the treason charges, though, because enough people counted her as a whistleblower that Howard hadn’t been able to get those charges to stick.

Bruce relaxed, but frowned in concern. “You recognized Betty’s father from that?”

Tony didn’t hide how awkward he was feeling now, after the fact. Especially because it was the truth, in a way. If only even weirder.

“There’s a strong resemblance going on, and he...mayormaynothavebeenlookingforherpersonally.”

Misleading? Yes. Did he regret it? Nope.

Betty shared a look with Bruce, then looked at the doorway and blanched before surging forward and shoving him behind her desk.

Fortunately, Tony knew enough to roll with it and so ducked and curled himself the best he could just as the footsteps got louder and General Ross’ voice came from the doorway.

“Oh, almost forgot— Banner? What are you doing here?” 

Bruce’s shoes had a very distinctive squeak whenever he shifted his weight nervously. Tony’d noticed it before, but never quite like now.

“Hello, General Ross—” He started, before Betty cut in.

“Dad? I wanted to tell you this in person. I have a boyfriend.” She must have gestured or made a face, for the choked noise coming from Bruce’s side of the room and how did he get himself in these situations, seriously?

[ghost-in-the-stalls]

Neil Josten's Playlist Part 4 - Allison and Renee

Masterpost and link to the playlist in its entirety here

I like Neil bonding with and deeply caring about the fox girls. With Renee, I know he doesn't always understand her and where she's coming from, but I like to think he garners a deep, deep respect for her the more he learns. And he really just wants Allison to be happy.

Allison

34. Samson - Regina Spektor

Neil has never read the bible. He catches Allison listening to this song one day, and asks Renee about the story of Samson. She explains the story and helps him make sense of the lyrics (and something in her eyes says that she knows the song, knows it's Allison's song). He still doesn't fully get it, but he looks closer at Allison the next day and it registers that it's around the anniversary of Seth's death. He knows there must have been a side to Seth he didn't ever see, considering Allison clearly cared so deeply for him despite their tumultuous relationship. He catches her humming the melody to herself while driving him back from one of their "dates", so he plugs in the aux cord and plays it. When she has to pull over because she's crying too hard, he at first thinks he made a mistake. But she eventually pulls him into a hug and makes a joke about "I feel so seen, Neil. Jeez, I thought you were supposed to be stupid."

41. Breathe (2 AM) - Anna Nalick

This song reminds Neil of Allison's persistence and resiliance. She commits herself to something and carries on with it regardless of what gets in her way. Even when she's close to breaking, she keeps going. "Because I'll be damned if I let someone stop me, Neil." But over the years, he's seen just how much pain she pushes through. He hears this song and it makes him think of how good Allison must have gotten at centering herself and moving forward. She can have an attitude he wouldn't wish on anyone at the worst of times, but she must also be a pretty solid optimist to remain the strong fighter she is. He admires her more each time he hears the song (and it occurs to him that, despite running, he's never been a great fighter. Maybe he can learn a thing or two from her.)

55. Falling - HAIM

The foxes compiled a workout playlist at one point to play in the gym on physical training days. Obviously this was a big task because everyone has their own taste in music and strong opinions about other's tastes. Allison suggested plenty of songs and was stubborn about all of them, but this was one she was adamant on keeping on there. After hearing it enough, it stuck with Neil.

He hears it and thinks of her determination and commitment to carrying on.

63. Riptide - Vance Joy

Allison said once: "I deserve to be cherished and appreciated the way Vance Joy does that girl he's talking about in Riptide!" she then sucker punched a man not twenty minutes later for something Neil doesn't even remember.

So of course Neil had to give the song a listen. It's a beautiful song in his opinion, and he starts realizing how he repeatedly gets drawn in by the way some people express such devotion in their music in a way that would feel so fake in real life. He wants this for Allison. She deserves it. She deserves to be cherished and he hopes she gets that one day (he also hopes she knows that she's already very loved by the foxes, even if they aren't all always great at showing one another).

Renee

14. Renee - SALES

He saw the name of this song and listened to it once through before sending it to Renee without thinking about it too hard. He just thought it was funny that it was her name in the title, but she opened up to him after about a girl she was in really deep with. The only other person who knew at the time was Andrew, and Neil was pretty touched that she let him in like that. It took a long time for Neil to actually let his guard down more around Renee, but her being vulnerable like that to him definitely helped him come around too. Andrew isn’t the only one he learned to trade truths with on occasion.

25. Every Single Night - Fiona Apple

One day he finds Renee listening to this song and she tells him what it's about. He doesn't press her or give attention to the fact that she clearly resonates with it much more than she says. But he keeps the song and thinks of a lot of people. He thinks of himself and he thinks of Andrew. He thinks of Kevin on rough nights when the only way he could sleep was to drink until he passed out. He thinks of Nicky video chatting with Erik every night before bed like it was a need. He thinks of all of his foxes and how they probably all have rough nights in their own ways. And then he thinks of Renee who is such a steady, positive force in their life. She never pushes too hard, but she's as sturdy as Andrew when they fall back on her. He thinks of how she probably has bad nights of her own, and he keeps this song to remind himself of how human she is. And of how she's healing as well. He doesn't understand her very well, but he loves her as much as the rest of his family.

48. Milk Bottle Symphony - Saint Etienne

One day Neil borrows the car to run an errand and stops on campus on the way back to fox tower to pick Andrew up from sparring with Renee. When he gets there, the sun had just set. They're sitting in the grass, cooling off and listening to music on Renee's phone. Neil doesn't need to ask who picked the music; he knows it isn't Andrew's style. He sits with them for a bit in comfortable silence and listens to the song. Renee hums along a bit with the chorus and taps on her thigh.

He adds the song to a playlist later. The next time he listens to it (a few times in a row because yes I'm that type of person and I'm projecting) he thinks about why it might appeal to Renee. Maybe it's the mundanaity of it. Maybe it's the way it takes glimpses into people's lives with seemingly no purpose other than to look, almost to appreciate. Finding something as beautiful as a symphony in something so normal, maybe. Maybe he's thinking about it too hard. But now every time he hears it, he remembers the way Renee seems to seek out peace after all she's been through - not in a foolish or naive way, but just in a determined way. And though he doesn't always understand her, he finds himself deeply respecting that.

67. Loose Lips - Kimya Dawson

The day Neil heard Renee singing along to this song was with the fastest and most energetic voice he's ever heard her vocalize. He heard her singing along with every word, not missing a syllable, and he knew this one meant something to her. He feels like it sums up who she wants to be pretty well.

If he hears a bit of desperation in her voice as she sings, he doesn't mention it. He just hopes she understands that she's a far better person than she thinks she is.

Not that he'd tell anyone, but he starts learning the lyrics himself.

[himbowelsh]

you writing a chuckler alphabet would melt me to a puddle!

valentines day alphabet  ( accepting! )

A   :   AFFECTION.   how does your muse show affection?

Enthusiastically. He doesn’t hold back  ---  Lew gives smacks on the back that rattle your teeth, hugs that lift you off the ground, and compliments that linger in your head for days afterwards. It never occurs to him to hold back  ---  he’s very open about his affection, 

B   :   BOUQUET.   does your muse like flowers? which ones are their favourite?

I’ll put it this way  ---  little Lew was not allowed in his mother’s garden, because he was a walking hazard. Where he went, mud pies followed. Nothing has changed in 20 years. Doesn’t know what a nice bouquet looks like  ---   he genuinely thinks the bright, dyed rainbow ones you pick up at the drugstore are nice, and will bring them home sometimes just as a surprise.

C   :   CHOCOLATE.   does your muse like chocolate? which one is their favourite?

Chocolate? Where chocolate? Yes chocolate, give him all the chocolate today please! (He loves chocolate, but is unfortunately bad at sharing. He thinks he’s subtle, hiding them, when Hershey kisses are literally spilling out of his pockets.)

D   :   DATE.   what is your muse’s ideal date? where / who with / etc?

Look, he’s happy doing pretty much anything, but has a soft spot for fireworks? Seriously. His perfect date is the 4th of July, by a lake somewhere, watching the sun go down while eating ice cream cones, waiting for those colors to explode in the sky. When they start, his partner leans against his chest, and he gets to hear every inhale, every gasp of delight...  it’s heaven for him.

E   :   EMBRACE.   does your muse like hugs? what are their hugs like?

Definitely a hugger. For as often as he ends up lifting people off their feet  ---  something he genuinely doesn’t mean to do, it just happens   ---   his hugs are extremely comforting. Their solid, reassuring, just the right level of tender...  Chuckler hugs like he’s trying to shield someone from exploding shrapnel, except in most cases the shrapnel is metaphorical. (Hopefully. He also will, and has, shielded people from exploding shrapnel.)

F   :   FLIRT.   is your muse good at flirting? how do they flirt?

Oh, buddy. This man flirts like it’s going out of style. His lead-in is usually a joke, and it’s usually stupid  ---   but if he can make someone laugh, he’s already won half the battle. Lew’s charming, and earnest in a way that’s hard to turn down flat. He’s got a particular twinkle in his eyes that draws people in, and when he winks at them...  well, flirting’s always come pretty easy to him.

G   :   GIFT.   is your muse good at gift - giving or do they struggle to get it right?

Well, he’s not good at it, but he sure tries his best. Lew loves giving out gifts. He doesn’t need a reason  ---  if he sees some nice trinkets at the store, or something that just reminds him of someone, he’ll pick it up  (usually without much thought to the price  ---  not that he’s careless, just too generous with his own wallet). Unfortunately, these gifts range from bizarre to tacky. No one knows why he thought a box of alligator erasers was a good gift for his eighty-five year old grandmother, but hey, at least he was thinking of her. It’s a weird habit, but it’s sweet.

H   :   HEART.   is your muse quick or slow to give their heart away?

Not as quickly as you’d expect. Lew gives pieces of his heart away, rather than handing out the whole thing. He’s not an idiot. Friendliness comes easy to him, but trust takes a lot longer to build, and love itself isn’t something he rushes into blind. Winning Lew over is like climbing a massive flight of stairs, one block at a time.

I    :   I LOVE YOU.   does your muse find ‘i love you’ easy or hard to say?

Did you mean his three favorite words in the English language? He loves saying it  ---  loves, loves, loves it. Not that he’ll be the first person in the relationship to say it, because this is one of the few things he’ll get self-conscious over...  but as soon as his partner says it first, his eyes just light up, and he can’t say it back fast enough. After that, he says it all the time  ---  sometimes casually, without even thinking about it; sometimes just to make them smile, murmured against their cheek in a teasing voice; sometimes just to remind them, whispered into the crown of their head at night; sometimes just to hear it, when their mouth is on his and breath comes heavily between them both.

J   :   JEALOUSY.   does your muse get jealous in a relationship?

Genuinely not? He seems completely immune to jealousy  ---  it has his friends a little worried. What human being can be that confident? The real reason, of course, isn’t that Lew doesn’t believe anyone would ever cheat on someone with abs like his (though lowkey he doesn’t), but his unshakeable trust in his partner. He doesn’t believe they’d ever hurt him, so he’s not consciously reading into instances of them being friendly with people  ---  or those people being overly friendly with them. He doesn’t see it as being naive, though some people might disagree.

K   :   KISS.   is your muse a good kisser? why / why not?

He’s the sort of kisser you write home about. One look at him, and it’s obvious he’s got a big mouth, but he knows how to use it...  and boy, does he ever. Chuckler isn’t shy. While one hand boldly explores his partner’s body, caressing every interesting curve it comes across, his mouth works hard at memorizing theirs. Lots of lip biting, sucking, leaving love marks without intending to...  he gets so into the kiss that he groans once or twice, and that might actually make him blush, but a bit of encouragement from his partner eggs him on. He does get worked up quickly...  but as soon as his partner draws a line, he scrambles to respect it. Chuckler doesn’t push, and he doesn’t demand anything his partner isn’t enthusiastically comfortable giving.

L   :   LOVE.   who does your muse love?

So many people. He can’t make a list. Lew loves casually; he’s got the sort of big heart inclined to feel warmth towards good people. His love has various degrees, but it’s all still love, isn’t it? A grocery store cashier let him off twenty-five cents short, and he fell a little in love right there.

M   :   MOONLIGHT.   is morning or night a more romantic setting?

Depends on his mood, and exactly how awake he is. Sometimes Lew’s one of those obnoxious morning people who want to be out at 7am to jog; sometimes he doesn’t get to bed until 7am, because he was up all night with his friends. Either way, he’s at his most mushy-romantic in those soft dawn hours, laying in bed beside his partner, where he’s able to just hold them close and smile down at their sleeping face.

N   :   NAUGHTY.   what is your muse like in bed?

He’s a talker. It’s a little ridiculous. Even with his head between someone’s legs (a particular favorite move) he’ll still be muttering things up to them, wry comments and casual observations that get them blushing bright red. Thankfully, he also puts his mouth to work in other, much more effective ways. Loves having his hair pulled on  ---  his scalp is very sensitive  ---  and loves being ridden / guided by his partner. (A sub? Possibly.) Very vocal lover, because he doesn’t try to hold anything back, and he’d love a partner who was the same way  (the neighbors would hate him if he wasn’t so friendly otherwise). Has a lot of stamina, and a lot of power...  but when he goes over the edge, he goes over the edge hard, and needs to grip his partner to anchor him on the way down. Passes out very quickly afterwards.

O   :   ODE.   does your muse have a way with words?

I’m not saying he wouldn’t try to write love poetry for a partner he’s head-over-heels with, ‘cause he’s exactly that level of corny...   I’m saying he shouldn’t. Lew isn’t...  bad with words, he’s just very blunt, in a way that sometimes hits like a rock over the head. His filter isn’t always there. He’s learned through experience that once words are out, there’s no taking them back, but he usually can’t help speaking his mind/feelings aloud anyways.

P   :   PARTNER.   what does your muse look for in a partner? looks / personality?

Someone who doesn’t take things too seriously. He’s attracted to bright personalities, warm laughs and beaming smiles; people who know how to laugh at themselves are endlessly attractive to him. Maybe someone with great hips (he’s crazy about hips). They’d have to have enough energy to keep up with him. Someone who he can take care of, but who will also treat him gently  ---   sometimes he just wants to feel someone’s hand stroking through his curls while being told that he’s good enough, that he’ll be alright, and his partner would need to be able to look past his strong surface and see that inner vulnerability. Someone who loves animals   ---   and if they’re small enough for him to pick up, amazing.

Q   :   QUESTION.   would your muse ask the big question or expect their partner to?

Yes! Yes, absolutely, he’s going to propose, and he’d love to be the one to propose first. Actually, he’d lowkey start forming a plan about six months into the relationship. When it really gets serious, really starts going places...  that’s when his imagination sets to work. It starts hypothetically  ---  if he was going to ask, what would be the right way to do it? What would his partner like best? The thought lingers in his mind, a plan slowly but surely taking shape, until he finally buys the ring. Chuckler would let his partner choose the location, taking them to their favorite place, and find some way to slip the ring into something sweet  ---   if they go out for dinner, it’ll be dessert, but if they go for a stroll or somewhere exciting, he’ll make sure to get ice cream cones on the way back. Sure, there’s an off-chance that the ring could end up eaten, but...  risk vs reward, right?

R   :   ROMANCE.   is your muse a romantic or a cynic?

Romantic to his core. Lew just...  isn’t good at the whole cynicism thing. He doesn’t have a bitter bone in his body. Plus, romancing just comes...  naturally to him? He’s not sophisticated about it, but he likes taking care of people, and has a talent for finding the color in mundane things. He’ll take his partner to a local firefly hotspot in the summer, or hide heart-shaped confetti inside a balloon and give it to them before popping it...  silly, exciting things that make them smile, which is all he could ask for.

S   :   SWEETHEART.   did your muse have a childhood sweetheart?

There was this cute little blonde girl in his third grade class, whose pigtails he always used to tug on (they were so bouncy!), till one day she reeled around and smacked him in the mouth. Ahh, young love.

T   :   TRUE LOVE.   does your muse believe in true love?

Sure he does! He sees all those old couples married after so many years together, and still as in love as the day they met  ---  if that’s not true love, then what is? That’s the kind of love Lew longs for. Even when he’s old and his joints crack when he walks and he always smells kind of weird, someone who’ll still love him like they always have. A love that grows with you, instead of letting itself be outgrown.

U   :   UNREQUITED.   has your muse had their heart broken?

...  no? A girl turned him down for a Valentine date once, but he figured she already had a date, so he wasn’t hurt. (Lew gets disappointed, but bounces back quickly. His brain is basically silly putty, it can stretch an excuse for anything.)

V   :   VALENTINE.   how does your muse feel about valentine’s day?

He loves it! A day just to go on dates, be romantic, and eat chocolate? What’s not to love? He’s made a game out of going store-to-store, trying to find the biggest stuffed animal, which he’ll then inevitably give as a gift to whoever will take it. (That’s why Leckie has a stuffed bear bigger than him sitting in his attic. No, he doesn’t want it, but no, he doesn’t know what the hell to do with it.)

W  :   WEDDING.   would your muse get married? why / why not?

Yes, of course! Even before he’s in a relationship, he knows for sure he wants to get married someday. He’s genuinely excited about it.

X   :   XOXO.   does your muse use / like pet names?

Sure, but not casually. If he has a pet name for his partner  ---  “baby” or “honey” being his favorites, he’ll only use them during teasing moments, or particularly intimate ones.

Y   :   YOURS.   does your muse get protective easily?

He does, but he’s not, like...  aggressive with it. Lew isn’t out here to kick anyone’s ass unless he needs to. Can they talk it out? Yeah, let’s do that first. Does someone need to be escorted off the premises for causing trouble? He can do that, he can be hella intimidating when he needs to be. As a rule, Lew won’t swing unless someone else throws the first punch...  but he won’t sit around like a stone if someone he loves is being threatened, either.

Z   :   ZZZ.   how many people has your muse slept with?

He’s no saint. This man’s got rock-hard abs and could lift another human being over his head with one hand. More people want to sleep with Lew than he has the energy to sleep with. 9 - 10 partners is a good estimate, but it might be higher. He honestly could not say.

[crazybagelbitch]

Maddie and Chimney have a stupid argument in the middle of the station when he gets injured and he says something a little too far to her trying to defend himself. Maddie storms out but regrets it soon after, even though her brother is insisting he take her home, she knows Chimney just said it as a defensive mechanism and not out of malice but when buck says “didn’t you learn anything from before?” She goes off

“Bobby told you to get out of the building!” Maddie screams, hand on her swollen pregnant belly as the rest of the 118 pretends like they’re not keenly listening in on the argument.

“And I did get out of the building!” he snaps back. 

He had been really trying to keep his cool up until that point, but he’s tired and in pain and a little embarrassed about his girlfriend screaming at him in the middle of the fire station.

“You stopped on the way out! For a fucking cat!”

“That was right in the middle of my path out. Just a quick detour and I got out in time!”

“With burns on your arm.”

“Burns that aren’t even that bad and that will heal.”

“You’re in pain. I can tell.”

“And that will fade.”

“God, you’re so stupid! Risking not coming home to me and our unborn baby over a cat. What was I supposed to tell our daughter? Sorry, daddy never got to meet you because he thought a cat was more important than his kid!”

“That’s not fair!”

“Oh, I think it’s more than--”

“How about you also tell our daughter that mommy thinks her getting a little scared is more important than daddy’s job!”

“Oooh. That’s not gonna go over well,” Eddie whispers, nudging Bobby’s shoulder.

“A little scared?! A little! I thought you might be... fuck this. Fuck you. I’m out.”

“Maddie--”

He calls out, but she’s already angrily marching out of the station and he knows better that to try and follow her. He balls up on himself on the couch, cradling his arm as the tears start to slip out from his eyes. He’s mortified, both for everyone hearing him yell that out at his pregnant girlfriend, and for everyone hearing her scream at him that he supposedly thinks a cat is more important than being their to see his kid grow up.

Maddie must change her mind halfway through the drive home, because not even fifteen minutes later she’s sighing as she strolls back into the station. She’s still angry and a bit hurt, but she knows Chimney hadn’t meant it. He had just wanted her to leave him alone, or at the very least to leave him alone until they were in the privacy of their own home. What he said was out of line, but she was out of line, too.

He owes her an apology, but she owes him one, too. The least she can do is get her injured, likely in a great deal of pain, boyfriend home so he can rest and they can make up in peace, without the spectacle of everyone watching.

“Hey, Maddie,” Buck says softly, grabbing her arm and pulling her aside before Chimney can even notice that she came back to the station, “just leave it. He was a dick. Shift’s over in twenty minutes, just come home with me. Hen can handle Chimney.”

“Buck, no,” Maddie rolls her eyes, “I can handle an argument with my idiot boyfriend. He’s hurt, I want to take it home.”

“But he--”

“He shouldn’t have said it but I shouldn’t have said what I was saying either. He only snapped at me because he wanted me to leave him alone. He was in pain and embarrassed because I was screaming at him in the middle of the firehouse-- I think I can forgive him.”

“But, not right away,” Buck shakes his head, and Maddie’s trying to be patient, really she is. She knows Buck is wary, even though logically he knows Chimney is a good guy who is nothing like Doug. But the trauma of his sister being abused, a whole across the country away with radio silence from her? Yeah, she gets why he’s so protective.

“My decision to make, not yours.”

“Maddie, you can’t just--”

“And you can’t just tell me what to do with my own relationship. It’s fine, we’re fine. He’s hurt and I want to take him home now.”

“Maddie, no.”

“Buck, yes. Butt out. I forgive him. That’s my choice.”

“God, didn’t you learn anything from before?”

It’s silent between them, dead silent for a few seconds, both of them in shock that Buck had actually said that. Buck recovers, opening his mouth to apologize when Maddie starts shouting for the second time that day, now at a different target.

“Take it back!”

Well, now Chimney (and everyone else) has surely noticed that she’s back at the station.

“Maddie, yes, so--”

“Take it fucking back!”

Chimney tries to scramble up from the couch, but it’s a little too quick and he gets woozy and falls back over, thankfully back into the softness of the couch and not the hardness of the floor. Hen is at his side in a second, telling him to just rest, no sudden movements, Bobby is on his way down the stairs to make sure Maddie is okay.

“I take it back. I take it back. I take it--”

“How fucking dare you! I’m a grown woman who can make her own decisions about her relationship with her boyfriend! I get to decide what I do and don’t forgive, and how DARE you bring Doug into this! How DARE you accuse me of being naive about those same mistakes I made after all that I’ve been through! After living that fucking nightmare! God, you must think I’m just a stupid little girl! I hate you! I hate you! Never talk to me again!” 

[hcrsegirl]

╰☆╮MUSE 46 — wait, is that cerise “reese” du pont? is it just me or does the twenty-one year-old look exactly like abigail cowen? last i heard, they still weren’t over being exposed by the sentinel. according to the app, they can be credulous & turbulent, but i’ve also heard they're intrepid & audacious. can’t be too sure, people have a way of surprising you. all i know is that they remind me of vape scented smoke appearing in the middle of lecture , filming viral tik tok’s in public , the brushing down of a horse , forgetting a pencil but remembering to bring the juul to class & drinking homemade moonshine for barbie movie drinking games. honestly, the broadcast communications major should try to keep their head down. after the events of last semester, i wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. ╰☆╮

wow hey hi hello!! i’m kaya and this is my lil crackhead, reese!! this got really long because i never know when to shut up but if you want to plot pls hit me up here on tumblr or on discord at medieval 4loko gang#5402

P A R A L L E L S

gigi ( booksmart ) , keanu reeves ( always be my maybe ) , serena van der woodsen ( gossip girl ) , kirby anders ( dynasty )

T R O P E S

hard-drinking party girl , cloudcuckoolander , the trickster , upper-class equestrian , fleeting passionate hobbies , naive animal lover , fearless fool , playing with fire , parental neglect , fantasy-forbidding father

S U M M A R Y

born and raised in wilmington, delaware on the du pont family ranch, reese learned how to ride and compete on her family’s thoroughbreds. she’s a seasoned equestrian who typically competed in eventing and throughout the years had accumulated a series of ribbons and trophies between dressage, cross-country, and show jumping. definitely was a horse girl growing up and tbh still is???? definitely not the type to eat grass anymore BUT if given the chance she will not shut up about them.

a veterinarian before marrying into the du pont family, reese’s mother had their ranch doubling as both a home and veterinary clinic where the kids would help with the animals and keep them company. this caused reese to develop a soft spot for them, one that contributed to her going vegetarian at the age of 12 and eventually vegan at 15. it was also this love of animals that led her to wanting to help the environment they lived in and so her parents put her in girl scouts and eventually her love for the outdoors would cause her to join steinhardt’s outing club.

while her mother, eleanor, also helps out with the du pont family business of breeding thoroughbreds as well as run her clinic, her father, pierre, is a chairman of dupont, a conglomerate who got its start in the black powder market before expanding into chemicals for agriculture, materials science, and specialty products.

he was the type to have HIGH expectations for his family, expectations that reese never met. not that she cared to. definitely not a daddy’s girl, she’ll be the first one to call her father out for being a pompous douche straight to his face. probably quoted this to her father during a thanksgiving toast of “what are we thankful for this year”.

the black sheep of her family, even at a young age she could be found stirring up some trouble and almost always dragging one of her siblings or cousins along with her. a rebellious child who didn’t like being put into a box, she lived in a fantasy world of whimsy, often playing make-believe much to her father’s chagrin. she believed in all things fantastical from fairies to mermaids and while pierre tried to stifle those thoughts, they stubbornly remained.

even through her teenage years she’s held onto the firm belief that barbie lore is real. no one knows if she actually believes that or if it’s all of the drugs and her love for the movies getting to her head, but when confronted about it she will always be adamant that it’s a legitimate form of history.

speaking of history, her concept of it is slightly skewed?? def has weird beliefs of what communists are?? like you’re an android user??? suddenly she thinks you’re a communist????

tbh you could probably tell her something about anything and she’ll believe you without a hint of doubt. research?? she dunno her!! you could say the moon is a government con-job and she’d think it’s a fact??? super gullible and it’s a mess

i guess now would be a good time to preface that she’s dumb. stupid. an idiot. the list goes on but when i say she’s lacking brain cells… i mean it. the definition of head empty, she probably has a bunch of rocks where her brain should be sdfgh. but really, she can be innovative when she wants to be but academically she just doesn’t care to do well. in high school she ditched classes more often than not and was probably the kid smoking under the bleachers.

but where she lacks in intelligence she makes up for in brawn??? def the brawn over brains type who was a jock in high school. competed for her school’s equestrian team but also was on the fencing and archery teams. she once begged to be put into archery lessons after seeing the princess diaries 2 and fencing just came along not too soon after. she also used to run track and play soccer but those two sports ended after her senior year of high school although she probably still plays for the steinhardt’s intermurral league as well as any athletic competitions her sorority, tri-zeta ( zeta zeta zeta ) enters.

definitely the jack of all trades type except she’s passable at a whole bunch of things but good at none of them. probably can change a tire but it’ll need to be changed again soon. can bake a cake but it’ll be a little dry. the list goes on. she’s just very curious and picks up a lot of things but gets bored of them easily so she changes to the next thing.

okay i know i said she could bake a cake but she really…can’t. like with supervision she probably could but she’s impulsive and following directions for that many ingredients??? impossible. she just gets tempted to toss everything into a bowl and wing it and she does that every time. she can however make rice krispy treats. especially if they’re suppose to be edibles dfghj. but ya, don’t ask her to cook bc she can. not.

a stoner and overall drug connoisseur, she’s probably most known for being that kid who forgets to bring their backpack to class but don’t worry!! she remembered her juul!! has a collection of juuls on her person at all times. definitely that party girl who shows up hungover to class whenever she did bother to show up.

calls herself an entrepreneur because she used to sell edibles and other drug-related things and definitely was that tweet where she would give discounts if you signed an environmental petition or went to a protest.

has never said no to a dare EVER. you name it and she’ll do it. and if you dare her to drink cow titty milk or eat a piece of meat she’ll do it but it just makes you a dick dfghj

gets bored easily and tends to lash out and do something chaotic because of it?? the type to spontaneously light a couch on fire because she felt like it. a mild pyromaniac who once learned how to make a molotov cocktail. she can’t do it well. at all. but the one time she did try was also the same day she realized what a dumpster fire looked like.

i’m also not saying she’s out here to ruin your life for her own whims but like home girl has ZERO boundaries for anything. if you want to say she was a homewrecker in a past relationship??? honestly full send because it probably was her. morally she’s chaotic neutral and doesn’t care to be good or evil, she just wants to live her life of chaos and whatever happens happens. it should also be noted that she’s selfish. she puts herself first and others second always.

god someone pls try to start a fight with her. she’d either pat you on the head and ignore you OR go feral and just…foam at the mouth and bite you. probably claims to have gingervitis which is where she like…sprays vegan whip cream into her mouth and just… attacks you. for fun.

WOW ALMOST FORGOT but she’s a big larper!!! loves to go to the ones that are historical-esque where she can be an elf ( because she has a collection of elf ear tips dfghjk ) and acts as a knight/ranger by using her ACTUAL fencing, archery, and equestrian skills. she learned sindarin ( elvish ) for this but also she’s a big lord of the rings fan in general so it just worked out. her character’s storyline is her acting as her cousin, taay’s, protector but she has been known to enroll in a few competitions regarding any of her three skills.

currently selling moonshine alongside her roommates of trap zeta ( also known as the residents of the moonshine & roses subplot ) and so if you saw her running around with stolen pressure cookers, that is why !! making your own alcohol is illegal, but selling it??? even worse so they only sell it to trusted customers and anyone vetted by their usual customers. they probably have secret passwords and shit just like the prohibition period.

speaking of trap zeta, with the exception of fraternities on greek row, they throw the biggest parties. their jungle juice??? fire AND strong but also, they keep it in like....these dispensing chugs with a key so the only ones with access to fill them up or trap zeta themselves. they also have a stripper pole ( or two ) around their living room so like...ya get lit, get twisted, go off ig.

let it be known that their sorority, tri-zeta, is actually known for their stellar amount of community service but after the residents of trap zeta moved in together their sophomore year, the rep for partying started to increase and that’s why the home of muse 46-50 is nicknamed trap zeta. reese has probably been sent to standards way too many times and only got in and is still in bc her mother is a very generous alumni of steinhardt’s chapter of tri-zeta. 

a broadcast communications major, she’s a social media intern for steinhardt’s barstool page but most importantly has a whole tik tok account alongside her roommates dedicated to their college antics. think the hype house except it’s not pg-13 dancing and rly just their crackhead, drunk antics. might eventually make a playlist of tik tok’s that are probably posted on their account, we’ll see.

okay so you know the whole exposing of secrets from last semester??? reese doesn’t usually get mad but rn she Big Mad. like not only are they be scrutinized by the dean but their sorority is too and suddenly tensions are high between tri-zeta bc if trap zeta gets caught they all suffer and their chapter will be shut down and it’ll be a whole ass mess. atm she suspects their customers and even their somewhat rivals, the drug dealers of the ludes plot, but does she suspect anyone from the house??? no not rly

you can find her  stats page here and a wc page here

you can also find her pinterest board here

i also have a reese playlist here and a trap zeta playlist here

[sugamoonv]

Origins Pt.3

At Last

Summary: You learn how BTS came to be and what specifically they are.

Word Count: 3,785

Warnings: blood, fighting, near death experience

A.N: This is the last installment to the Origin stories. I’m sorry if you felt that it ventured a lot from the actual story but I felt as though it was necessary and gives information for later chapters. Anyways, enjoy!!!! Let me know what you think and if you want to be added to the tag list

Masterlist / Origins Pt.2 / Prologue

“You told Jimin that he could meet Namjoon?”

With a nod of his head, Taehyung was being pushed up against the wall of the barn by Hoseok. Sunlight filtered in through the cracks of the wood onto Hoseok who had his teeth bared and a feral look in his eyes.

“How fucking stupid are you?”

Taehyung was pushed deeper into the wall.

“Huh?” Hoseok gave a violent shake before slamming Taehyung back into the wall.

Taehyung squeezed his eyes shut as he flinched. “Stop acting as though I’m the only guilty party. They only found out about me and Namjoon because of you.”

“AND YOU WERE TO ERASE THEIR MINDS,” Hoseok’s face turned red with anger. “Not lead them to where the could get more information to tell Byung-Wook,” Hoseok seethed.

“Jimin wouldn’t do that.”

“And what of Jungkook? Hm? He’s a child. He’s naive and selfish but he’s loyal and that makes him dangerous. I don’t doubt for a minute that he would be the one to get us all killed.”

Hoseok kept Taehyung pinned as they stared into each other’s eyes. They could feel their powers thrumming underneath their skin, begging to lash out.

“Hoseok, enough.”

They heard an exasperated sigh as Namjoon strolled into the barn, a disinterested look on his face. Behind him were Jungkook and Jimin. Jimin looked guilty to have interrupted the disagreement while Jungkook’s face was passive.

Hoseok uncurled his fingers from the lapels of Taehyung’s jacket and stepped back. As he turned to Namjoon and saw Jimin and Jungkook, he clenched his jaw to contain the surprise that he felt. Though he figured Jungkook saw the way his eyes widened for a millisecond because the young boy was fighting a smug smirk from his face. This only angered Hoseok more.

“Namjoon-” Taehyung stepped beside Hoseok and bowed.

“Namjoon, do you really think it’s best to meet with them present?” Hoseok cut Taehyung off and sent a warning look to Namjoon. “It could be unsafe. We can’t fully trust-”

“They’ve decided to join us.” Namjoon spun to face the two men behind him. “And the consequences would be dire should they fulfill the urge to tell anyone.”

Chills ran up Jungkook’s and Jimin’s spines as Namjoon gave them a deadly look. One that was full of promise that Namjoon was more powerful than he led on and wouldn’t be afraid to use that power should anyone cross him.  

Crickets and begun chirping and fireflies had lit up the grass they flew above by the time Yoongi gathered the courage to go to Jin’s room. The night sky had chilled the air enough so that the skin on Yoongi’s arm was ice cold and because of this, he gladly welcomed the warmth of the empty inn. The stairs creaked as he made his way upstairs to where the rooms were. He and the other servants were held below the first floor in the basement. Actual rooms were reserved for those paying.

“Jin, can we please talk?” Yoongi leaned into the door and kept his voice low as not to wake any other tenants. “Jin, I promise you I can explain everything. All you have to do is let me in.”

Yoongi looks up as he hears footsteps approaching and relaxes when he sees it’s a man stumbling. The smell of alcohol hits Yoongi’s nose as the man roughly walks by him, speaking to himself and swaying from wall to wall for support. The hallway feels even more silent when the drunk man finds his room, or a room, and departs into it with an unaware slam of the door.

Yoongi returns his forehead to the door. “Jin, you can’t ignore me forever.”

At the sound of dead silence, Yoongi grows antsy.

“Jin?”

Yoongi grabs the door handle and slowly twists it expecting it to be locked but finds that the door swings wide open with barely a push. Jin’s room is bare and cold. The candle lantern on the bedside table shows it hasn’t been in use yet. The sheets on the bed are perfectly smoothed. Yoongi shivers as a gust of wind blows into the room from the open window.

“Shit,” Yoongi spits as he rushes back out of the room.

“What is it exactly you want in exchange?”

Aiko looks at Jin with calculating eyes as he stands before her. She had been preparing a spell when one of her officers told her of the visitor. It took everything in her to hide her satisfaction as the man spilled of the rendezvous her enemies most trusted servant had with the poor man named Yoongi. The man had all but given her everything she needed to destroy Byung-Wook out of petty jealousy.

“To become an Amarbhagat.”

That, she was not expecting.

“Why would an innkeeper's son want to become an Amarbhagat?” Aiko leans forward in interest.

“So Yoongi doesn’t have to go to anyone else for help.”

“So for love?” A slick smile spreads across Aiko’s face before she glances at her Admiral standing to the side of the room, her face softening. “A noble reason.”

She stands from her cushioned seat and beckons to Jin, “Follow me.”

“What do you mean he’s not with you?” Yoongi pants out with a frantic gaze. He had sprinted to Lord Byung-Wook’s manor and spent the last twenty minutes searching for Namjoon.

Needless to say, Namjoon was thrown off guard when Yoongi burst into the barn, crazed with worry, interrupting his meeting with Hoseok, Taehyung, Jimin, and Jungkook.

They had been together the past few hours discussing what next to do. With Jimin and Jungkook joining their ranks and Yoongi informing him of Aiko, Namjoon finally felt ready to weaponize Aiko against Byung-Wook. This would give them all the chance to escape without anyone noticing and the aftermath of the fight would distract the Lord so he wouldn’t be able to search for them.

“I mean Jin has not been here.” Namjoon regards Yoongi with a worried gaze. “Yoongi, what did you do?”

“Nothing. Nothing,” Yoongi gasps out. “I could tell Jin was getting suspicious so I thought he came here but I don’t know where he is.”

“Who’s Jin?”

“How many other people have you involved?”

Hoseok and Taehyung blurt out questions.

“Yoongi is the last one and Jin is Yoongi’s….” Namjoon doesn’t finish answering, unsure of what he should say. He looks to Yoongi to finish.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m afraid he’s gone and doing something stupid. I need to find him.

Jimin steps up and lays a comforting hand on Yoongi’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll help you find him. I’m sure he’s fine.”

At the sound of protesting, Namjoon sent a glare to the men effectively cutting them off.

Yoongi sprinted forward to the crumpled body as fast as he could. Footsteps thundered behind him as the others followed suit. Laying in the middle of the dirt road was Jin. His lips were tinted blue from the cold and he was unresponsive, even as Yoongi frantically shook him.

“Stop.” Jungkook kneeled next to Yoongi and forced his hands off of Jin. Yoongi let out a sound of discontent and fought to touch Jin again until Jimin ran up behind him and forced him to sit still.

“What’s wrong with him?” Hoseok slowed himself to a stop, slightly out of breath.

“I don’t know, his energy feels off,” Jungkook distractedly says as he looks thoroughly over Jin’s body.

“His energy? But he’s human. I would have felt if he were one of us.” Namjoon speaks up.

“Someone probably did the spell wrong when they tried to turn him.”

Yoongi looks at Taehyung as he speaks. “Can you help him?”

Taehyung’s heart nearly breaks at the desperation in Yoongi’s eyes and he nods. “As a ranking official, I have to be present whenever we turn new soldiers. I can probably help but we have to move fast.”

At this, Jungkook slides his hands under Jin’s body and hoists him up before speeding into a steady jog back to the manor. Hoseok, Jimin, and Namjoon hectically throw items to the ground to clear a space for Jungkook to put Jin. Yoongi watches on with concern, useless at the present moment and Taehyung has gone to sneaking inside the manor for supplies. He soon returns with his arms full and drops by Jin’s head.

Taehyung presses his fingers to Jin’s temple and his eyes turn white.

“What is- what is he doing?” Yoongi asks from the side.

Taehyung’s eyes flash back to their normal color. “I was going through his memories to see whatever this person did when they performed the spell. There was no one to tether Jin and that’s why it’s not working.”

Most often, soldiers who try to join a lord’s army without any connections to their family or fail to make friends amongst the trainees are turned away because the spell requires a connection to someone in the real world for it to work. Witches and Amarbhagats learned this the hard way when they noticed certain people kept dying during the spell.

When Taehyung first joined, his grandfather had joined him in initiation to be his tether. That made his death all the more painful years later. Namjoon’s mother had worked with Byung-Wook for years and so the lord had been a parental figure to Namjoon when he was turned. Resentment soon burned away the bond between them that was formed as Byung-Wook offered to be Namjoon’s tether. And then Namjoon volunteered to be a tether for Hoseok and Jimin and Jungkook had already had a bond from growing up in the same city together.

“So what? Is it too late? He was supposed to have a tether when the spell begun.” Jimin asks worriedly.

Taehyung sighs. “I have an idea but it might not work.” He looks to Yoongi, “If I could perform the spell on you with Jin as your tether, you may be able to become his tether and help him complete the transformation.”

“Taehyung, that’s never been don-”

Yoongi interrupts Namjoon before he can finish his sentence. “Yes, anything.”

Taehyung nods, preparing himself. “Okay. Jungkook, I need you to move Jin to the floor, Yoongi has to be next to him and there’s not enough space on the table.”

Jungkook picks up Jin and moves him as Taehyung gathers the ingredients and begins spreading them around the floor. “Yoongi lay next to Jin.”

Yoongi obeys Taehyung’s command. Taehyung immediately opens the bag of salt and pours a ring around the two men then carefully steps into the circle to tie Yoongi’s and Jin’s wrists together. Yoongi takes deep breaths to try and calm his frantically beating heart.

“Taehyung, are you sure you can do this?” Hoseok doubts.

“I’ve seen it be done a thousand times. We need to at least try.” Taehyung says as he leans over a small bowl, pulverizing the ingredients to a smooth mixture.

Taehyung dips his fingers into the mix then spreads it across Yoongi’s forehead, chest, lips, and palms of his hands before doing the same to Jin. Now that Yoongi’s looking at Jin, the blueness he was worried was from the cold before might have actually been remnants of the other witch's spell.

“Okay,” Taehyung takes a deep breath and kneels by Yoongi’s and Jin’s head. He leans forward to pick up Yoongi’s and Jin’s spare hands with each of his so all three men are connected. Taehyung begins chanting and Yoongi feels as though his whole body has been submerged into a frozen lake before the corners of his vision begin going blurry and then there’s a flash of white.

Jimin, Jungkook, Namjoon, and Hoseok watch as Taehyung performs the spell when there’s a loud bang from the door. Another one and the door hits the wall and a collection of female soldiers are rushing in.

Jungkook is the first to run towards them and collide with them halfway across the barn. Jimin quickly follows and soon both are intensely fighting against the attacking force. Hoseok grabs the closest object to him to use as a weapon and launches himself into the fight. Namjoon glances behind him to see that Taehyung has lost some of his focus with all the sudden commotion.

Namjoon walks backward towards Taehyung, keeping his eyes on the fight. “Keep going!” his voice bites.

Outside, Namjoon can hear even more shouts as the rest of Byung-Wook’s soldiers grow aware of the invading force. There are at least a dozen unconscious soldiers littered on the ground before Hoseok, Jimin, and Jungkook have a chance to breathe. Their faces stone serious and sweat dripping to the floor as their eyes sweep across the room for any more threats.

“Namjoon, we have to leave. This is our only chance.” Hoseok strides forward and speaks into Namjoon’s ear.

“No. We can’t. Not until Taehyung finishes the spell.”

“We don’t know how long that could take. If we want to leave, we have to do it know.”

“He said no!” Jungkook shouts. “We’re not leaving Taehyung or them and that’s final.” Jungkook stares Hoseok down challengingly, adrenalin running through his veins, preparing him for another fight.

Hoseok stares back at Jungkook for another moment before he angrily flashes his teeth and tilts his head and walks towards the open doors. But before he can close them, a woman steps into his view and with a twist of her hand, Hoseok is on the ground screaming as the bone in his leg snaps.

Namjoon has to yell at Taehyung as his eyes snap open to the screaming and the words on his tongue come out slower. Yoongi twitches as the spell loses momentum and this draws Taehyung back and he picks up the pace.

Jungkook and Jimin quickly build up a mental shield, not wanting to be taken off guard like Hoseok. It diminishes the effectiveness of their powers being used on the offense, but it protects them from any other Amarbhagat that was quick to attack and force them into defense.

“I’ve heard you’ve been talking about me, Namjoon.” Aiko strides into the barn past the three fighting soldiers without care.

Namjoon glares at the woman and further steps in front of Taehyung, Yoongi, and Jin to protect them. At this, her attention is drawn to the three behind him and she laughs humorlessly.

“Poor boy was actually stupid enough to think he could actually be an Amarbhagat. Had no idea what he was getting himself in to.” Aiko mockingly frowns at Namjoon, “You don’t think that’s actually going to work, do you?”

“I have faith in my people.”

“That’s not faith, it’s blind love.” Aiko moves closer to Namjoon as he opens his mouth to rebut. “Did your master, Byung-Wook really not tell you the hidden secret about becoming an Amarbhagat?”

Aiko watches with satisfaction as Namjoon’s eyebrows pinch together and doubt stirs in his eyes.

“The magic used to turn you leaves you vulnerable. It amplifies your feelings. So you spend enough time with someone and your magic attaches itself onto that person. Then anything you do with that person creates a bond so powerful that if they were to die, the magic inside you would slowly eat away at you until you were just a shell of a person.”

Namjoon can feel his heart pounding in his chest and he has half a mind to turn around and stop Taehyung from finishing the spell but he knew if he did that, both Yoongi and Jin would die and Taehyung would be seriously injured.

“People weren’t meant to have soulmates, Namjoon.”

Aiko looks straight into Namjoon’s eyes and there’s something unspoken that’s being communicated between them.

She opens her mouth to say something else when there’s a sword pointed at the back of her neck and Jimin is staring down the worn metal with a deadly glare. Aiko slowly turns to Jimin, confident in her magic that she knew Jimin held no power over her, but that confidence soon turned into despair when she saw Jungkook slowly standing up.

At his feet, was her admiral, completely still, eyes shut. Bruises and blood were littered over her face from all the fighting. Jungkook swayed above her from exhaustion, blood trickling from his nose as his everything including his magic, was about to give in from overuse. But still, Jungkook had enough energy to lift his head so that he locked eyes with Aiko. The pride and power in them infuriated Aiko and with a yell, Jimin was thrown across the room.

She turned to Namjoon and Namjoon raised a fist to attack but she muttered a spell and the veins under his skin turned black, moving up his arm causing a burning sensation until he was writhing on the floor in pain. Jungkook limped towards Aiko as fast as he could, desperate to stop her from harming Taehyung and the others.

Just as she raised her hand, charging her magic to smite Taehyung’s, Yoongi’s eyes opened, completely white, and he was gasping for air. Taehyung fell back, exhausted, normal color bleeding back into his eyes. In the second it took for Aiko to realize she was too late and decide on a new course, Namjoon used her back being turned to his advantage and threw his whole weight onto her, ignoring the burning sensation beneath his skin. She was stronger than how she appeared and easily held his weight before throwing him off.

As she stood over Namjoon, fury in her eyes and unwilling for mercy, her eyes turned white as she gasped. Her body unnaturally made small twitches as she resisted the foreign magic. Namjoon watched from his space on the ground confused until he looked to his side to see Hoseok standing on one leg and holding hands and leaning on a battered Jimin. Both of their eyes were with as their magic intertwined.

Yoongi took the opportunity while Aiko was distracted to turn to Jin, who still had yet to open his eyes. He patted the man’s face a couple times and muttered his name but after that produced no results, he focused on Taehyung. Yoongi shook Taehyung’s foot and Taehyung grumbled as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

As Yoongi was trying to shake Taehyung awake, Jungkook dropped beside Yoongi, teeth gritted as his knees made harsh contact with the ground. Jungkook clenched his fist and breathed in a couple times through his nose before slamming his hands onto Jin’s chest, eyes going white. Yoongi watched mesmerized as he could feel Jungkook’s power seeping through his skin, its presence growing steadily stronger.

Blood began dripping from his nose as he used more and more of his magic to try and bring Jin back from the precipice of death. He felt as though he was going to burst from the inside out as his power grew out of control. Luckily, just as Jungkook was about to give in, Jin’s eyes slowly blinked open and a rush of color went back to his cheeks and lips. Yoongi pulled Jungkook away and Jungkook fell back, too exhausted to do anything but stare at the ceiling. Jungkook couldn’t even make out the words Yoongi was saying to him, everything had become muffled.

Jimin and Hoseok released Aiko from their grip once Namjoon moved to safety and they no longer had the strength. Aiko’s eyes returned to normal and she looked around the room to see Namjoon, Hoseok, and Jimin watching her warily, Taehyung and Jungkook lying on the ground, and Yoongi guarding over Jin’s body, who was still slowly waking up.

“It’s over, Aiko,” Namjoon rasped. “Listen. The fight’s over.”

She did. Instead of the previous battle cries she heard, it was mainly silence though there was occasionally the shout of an order or someone asking for medical attention.

Aiko’s body shook as she looked from Namjoon to her Admiral that still lay dead on the ground. Pain welled inside her chest.

“You’re going to regret this. One day, I’m going to take away everything you love from you just as you’ve done to me. I’m going to destroy you from the inside out.”

You breathed out slowly through your nose and your forehead rest in the palm of your hands while your elbows were on your knees. “So you...you all have superpowers?”

“No,” Namjoon is quick to correct you, “We call them gifts or abilities. Being connected to this certain type of magic allows us certain privileges.”

“Being...Amarbhagat.” You sound out the word slowly and Namjoon nods in confirmation at you pronouncing it correctly.

“Yes.”

“And then...being Amarbhagat connects you to each other.”

“Yes.” When Namjoon sees you slowly blink at the floor he continues explaining, “Our magic sort of has a mind of its own and when it meets a certain person, it sort of intertwines itself with that person’s magic, if they do have magic. If they don’t, it just makes us very attached and vulnerable to them. It’s the same connection, only it’s more one-sided magic wise.”

“So like soulmates? You and Jin and Jungkook and Jimin and Yoongi and Hoseok and Taehyung are all soulmates?”

“Yeah,” Namjoon confirms and lets out an airy laugh when you breathe out a large puff of air.

“That’s….a lot to take in.” You ignore the pang in your chest at the disappointment that they already were soulmates and you were just someone fun to play with. That’s the only possible explanation as to why they were okay with kissing you thus far.

You keep your head in your hands for another couple of moments.

“Are you okay?”

“My head kind of hurts now,” you force out a chuckle as you lift your head. “It’s been a really long day so I think I’m just gonna’ go to bed.”

You slowly stand from the couch with a tired smile. Namjoon stands with you. You lock eyes with each other and a comfortable silence builds between the both of you before you’re bowing and walking down the hallway to your room. Namjoon fights the longing in his chest as he watches your retreating figure.

Thoughts spring around his head as he sits back onto the couch. He told you about everything except for Aiko. Her warning to this day still terrified him. At first, Namjoon was afraid that she was talking about one of his members, but now that you were in his life, he knew that if she were still alive and did something to you, there would be nothing in this world to keep him from falling apart

Tags: @detectivebourbon @eshika0102 @xsmilebitesx @perfectlyfangirling @eilowyneleyne @itsapurrfectstorm @idonthavehusbandsihavelovers @suck-my-bts @rosymccheese @craftypersoncheesecake@ficcion-escrita @ficcion-escrita @twilight-loveer @respectfully-yours-blog @delightfulyoongi @disfoqia @deathsasshole @mint-myg-yoongi @vljvanessa @young-yellkie @jungkookssistan @sincemalik @milady-mira @stardustjjk @recoveringflowerchild @xandraray22 @shelley-hennig14 @justapotatonow @riyahrocks @notalentforsubservience @stitchattacks @perrryyysblog @drearii @im-emo-motherfuckers @okgoogul @loserwithapen

[cvnturion]

(3/3) ...... and three !! this is the worst intro ever written. she’s a pretty new muse so i’m still trying to work out the details, but below the cuts is a brief introduction regardless.  tw: murder, death, drugs, crime, pregnancy mention

( scarlett leithold, female, she/her, twenty-two ) — have you seen ophelia greene, the law student around oxford yet ? i hear they can be aggressive and engaging, but those who know them insist they’re reminded of fishnet stockings, chipped nail varnish, leaving your texts on read, last call when they’re around. rumour has it that she accepts funding from a fellow student in exchange for sexual favours. is it true ? only time will tell…

general information.

full name: ophelia fleur summers greene date of birth: 12 july 1996 place of birth: manhattan, new york, us

background.

few things fuck your childhood up as much as having a mob boss for a father. ophelia had to learn that the hard way. it’s hard to regain a sense of normalcy when actual murderers and henchmen step over your neatly built tower of legos to discuss something very illegal with your father. her mother tried her best to provide a stable childhood for her two young children, showering them in love and affection. what sebastian greene lacked in ability to care about his two children, océane more than made up for.

all well and good, right - had it not been for the fact that around the time lia turned five, her mother was in a car ‘accident’ that unfortunately would cost her her life. while there’s no actual, hard proof that sebastian had planned it out or executed it, lia has always had this nagging feeling that her mother’s death was her father’s doing. and it wasn’t made any better by the fact that less than a week after her funeral, sebastian’s side piece had moved in, already pregnant. and, with a new step mother, came four new half-siblings.

not only was her mother’s passing a monumental event in and of its own, but it also marked a change in their father’s approach to his two eldest kids. while their mother had been alive, they’d been more or less sheltered from all the criminal goings-on of the greene family. and without the insistence of their mother that they be kept out of it, it didn’t take sebastian long to bring his children under his wing. so to speak. first came ollie, but i’m sure alex will write in length about that so i will skip that real quick. lia was kept out of it for the most part until her brother went to college.

so, without going into too much detail, lia had to grow up real quick. what had been a soft, sensitive child had to harden, because - well - crybabies don’t survive in the wild.

personality.

i think if i were to describe lia with one word, it would be stupid. capital s stupid. it’s a trait she inherited from her mother, who was far too dumb and naive to to realise that her father didn’t actually have her best interests at heart. fronts this facade of being a tough bitch™, and will probably actually fight you if you upset her, but she’s actually a massive crybaby. (don’t tell her i said that). a bit of a wild card - doesn’t really go anywhere without drugs on her, always down for a good time. 

secret.

lia didn’t want to go to university, in fact, there wasn’t really any chance of her getting in. her poor attendance alone would be enough to for any university to discard her application, but her brother didn’t want to leave her alone in new york, forged her papers, and basically forced her to come with. so, needless to say, being in a country you didn’t wanna be in, attending a university you didn’t wanna go to, tends to be pretty boring. and that’s why lia turned to sugar dating. not because she needs the money, but she’s bored - and if she can get both sex and her expensive habits paid for, why not?

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT COLLEGES

There's no concept of office hours in most startups. There's a lot of different cafes, but there are signs it might be helpful to be in New York or LA. He said We'd hire 30 tomorrow morning. Colleges differ, but they're nothing like the stamp of destiny so many imagine them to be exceptional. So you shouldn't do it if you're not ready for commitments on that scale, it costs nothing to fix. Life in a zoo is easier, but it won't be if things change as much in the next 50 years as they did in the last few decades US universities seem to have such a bad time. I used to write papers for my friends. Another from that batch was Loopt, which is one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. This is what real productivity looks like. Back when he was a kid in the seventies, a doctor was the thing to be. 82347786 This time the evidence is a mix of stuff from the headers and from the message body, which is typical of spam is that every one of these can destroy you overnight.

But because the buildings were built at different times by different people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do is start one. Intriguingly, this implication isn't limited to books. When I was a kid trying to break into computers, what worried him most was the idea of going on the medical equivalent of what lawyers call a fishing expedition, where you sit passively and watch as a plot happens. It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person and pleasant to another, but I have never had to talk. Anything deleted as spam goes into the nonspam corpus. Thanks to Sam Altman, however, is an outlying data point. They need to work at something that pays the bills. Next I create a third hash table, this time mapping each token to the probability that the mail is spam. If you want to convince yourself, or someone else, that you are doing a lot of them. I'm so determined that I can't imagine what's going on in the heads of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies.

In almost everything, reward is proportionate to risk. The striking thing about this phase is that it's harder for them to make it look fast. And that's why startups thrive in startup hubs they understand it. Structurally it is to an ordinary university what suburbia is to a city. You should be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you make a conscious effort to find smart friends. Intel can no longer give us faster CPUs, just more of them to solve a given problem. It is just as well, and with it growth. Over and over, I've seen startups we've funded told us later that they only decided to apply at the last moment. How much do we have to do, at least for programmers.

If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have only fear of loss. The url is in such cases practically enough by itself to determine whether the email is neutral, the spam of the future, it will at least show other organizations what to aim for. Don't say, for example. People are all over this idea lately, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. If an adult says that's a stupid idea, a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. Actually this tradition is not much more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of individual words. Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments. It's a smart move to put a startup in a place where there was infrastructure for startups, accumulated knowledge about how to make them excessively conservative. Technology will increasingly make it possible to relive our experiences. The most powerful form of disagreement, we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.

Nor is there anything wrong with that. People buying technology for large organizations. Startups aren't interesting just because they're a way to reinforce what you learned in that chapter. I advised graduating seniors to work for Microsoft, you can always make money from it. If there's something wrong with the senator's argument, you should not merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that direction. Founders tell themselves they need to without anyone telling them. 047225013 standardization 0. Contradiction. There have only been a handful of the most egregious spam indicators. I realize this kind of controversy is a sign of a good idea. I asked more to see how he'd qualify it.

When only 1. Maybe mostly in one hub. Dealing with immigration problems is like raising money: for some reason it seems to consume all your attention. If you write the laws very carefully, that is. Cancer will show up on some sort of radar screen immediately. If a mail triggers this second level of testing designed specifically to avoid false positives. I was even more convinced of it after hearing it confirmed by Hilbert. But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it. This argument applies proportionately. Redwoods mean those are the parts where the fog off the coast comes in at night; redwoods condense rain out of fog. Each person should just do what they need to hire in order to be successful.

Naive founders think that if checksum-based spam filtering becomes a serious obstacle, the spammers will just switch to mad-lib techniques for generating message bodies. I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. I like. So if you're ready to clip on that ID badge and go to that orientation session, you may be better to get selected than applicants not of type x have to be good at math to write Mathematica. Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. At first it may seem cool to get paid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college. VCs weren't allowed to get rich. Eventually we may be able to avoid the fatal pinch. We currently fund about 40 companies a year, selected from about 900 applications representing a total of about 2000 people.

[thedefinitionofbts]

Only Now

Pairings: Jeon Jungkook x Reader

Genre: Angst

Words: 8.5K

Description: Requested by @softelkie

When you close your eyes, you can hear his voice intertwined with the sound of waves crashing against blushing beaches at sunset, a faint whisper originating from a dream beyond the horizon, one that you had never been able to decipher until now.

A/N: This is also my entry for the NEABL Writing Contest! Hope you guys enjoy ^_^

You know that song?

The one that makes you feel happy and sad at the same time? The one with the lyrics that conjure fluttering hearts and forgotten memories?

The song that makes you think about the boy you love?

...

The smell of the ocean is something you know better than the back of your hand. A cool, salty breeze that reminds you of rippling water, shimmering under bright orange sunsets and cloudless pink skies. It’s the scent of your childhood adventures and nostalgic daydreams, a fragrance stronger than the flourishing gardens of your adulthood, an aroma more thrilling than the most potent of spices.

Perhaps your love for the seaside was what brought you back to that small town after university. The town you hadn’t seen since you packed your bags and headed to the city in search of new faces and limitless opportunity, but it was only a matter of time before your longing for the return of your youthful dreams drew you back to the ocean.

In search of that place again, you were definitely being naive to not expect grown-up responsibilities to follow you there, and leave it to your parents to remind you of your aging body and transpiring days. 

“Honey, you’re nearing your mid-twenties. You should consider meeting someone, don’t you think?”

“Mom, you can’t force these things.” You fight back the urge to get annoyed. She’s been pushing you to start dating ever since you entered your junior year, worried that you’ll soon reach that age when you’re considered undesirable. “It just hasn’t happened yet, ok?”

She sighs. “You can’t be too picky.”

“I’m not!” There’s irritation in your voice this time.

“What about that friend of yours?” She raises her brows. “Jimin, was it? He seems like a decent option.”

“MOM!” You stand up from the table, pushing your chair back loudly. “Jimin is just a friend. Can we please stop talking about this?” You literally can’t believe she’s bringing this up on your first night back when she knows for a fact that you hated discussing the topic. 

“Your mother is right.” Your dad seems to find your mild exasperation a good sign to conveniently butt in. “Time will soar by faster than you can predict.”

“Dad” You whine, hating yourself for acting like a child, ironic because you’re always seeking to dwell inside adolescent dreams. 

“We're just looking out for you.” He sighs. “We don’t want you to be alone when you are old.”

Perhaps it’s because his words hit the spot you had tried to conceal. That concern you had convinced yourself was not worthy enough to bring you down. Or perhaps it just reminds you of how childish you really are, for secretly dreaming you’ll end up with a person who probably doesn’t even exist. Waiting for someone who will never come. Looking for someone you’ll never find.

“I need some space.” You hastily excuse yourself from the table, taking long strides towards the door and slamming it shut to make your point. You honestly cannot believe your parents are treating you like this when you’ve just graduated from university. Shouldn’t they be happy that you’ve accomplished one of life’s big milestones? They should be congratulating you, not giving you more shit to stress over. 

And what the flying fuck is wrong with being single? Why can’t they just accept that you’re happy being alone? That you don’t need a significant other to live a good life. It’s so absolutely infuriating that you have to take deep breaths to calm yourself as you make your way to the beach.   

There are neither winds nor clouds to hide the stars and the moon, only soft laps of water smoothing across the wet sand. The calming silence is reminiscent of all those nights you snuck out of the house in search of irreplaceable peace, a type of serenity you cannot find anywhere else.

Sitting on the rock that faces the ocean, you can sense your anger fading. Thank god because this is exactly what you came back for and if even your secret hideaway couldn’t relieve you of irritation, you might as well head back to the city. But just as you were about to relax fully, the rustle of footsteps on the grass startles you, and the voice that follows makes you jump out of your skin.

“Enjoying the view?”

You whip your head around to see the shadowy figure of a boy, face half hidden by dark, long bangs that sweep across his eyes. His hands are tucking in the pockets of his hoodie, skin of his knees barely peeking through ripped black jeans.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” The questions tumble out of your mouth before you realize how absurd you must sound, interrogating some stranger as if they had just trespassed into your territory.

He chuckles lightly at your bewilderment. “I think I should be the one asking those questions. I’ve been coming here for years, and it’s the first time I’ve seen you occupying my spot.”

“Your spot?” 

He tilts his head and points at the rock you are perched on.

“Oh, I-I’m ss-orry. I didn’t know.” You clumsily climb down, feeling kind of stupid for acting like you owned the place despite the fact that you’ve been gone for the last four years.

“Hey, it’s fine. I can share.” There’s a playful hint in his voice, and it stirs your curiosity.

You pause midway down, unsure if you should go back up or just leave, but your distracting mental debate causes you to take a misstep. The stranger quickly lunges over, holding his arms out just in time to catch you before you fall.  

You slam against his chest, firm but just soft enough that it doesn’t hurt. In that moment your mind is blank, cheeks flushes from the sudden turn of events.

“Shit, s-sorry.” Averting your eyes to avoid how awkward the situation has become, you wish you had been more careful. 

He laughs lightheartedly. “Leaving so soon?”

Realizing you were still trapped in his arms, you hastily remove yourself by taking a step back. “I don’t want to get in the way of you and your….” You trail off, not knowing what a boy his age would do out by the ocean in the early evening, but whatever it was, there was probably no place for you in the equation.  

He chuckles again, this time nose scrunching up and eyes crinkling around the edges. “I could use some company.”

His response is an invite for you to stay, but hesitation prevents you from accepting his offer right away. You had come out to be alone

“But you seem like you have a lot on your mind.” He speaks before you can formulate an answer. “I’ll just find another rock.”

“Wait…” The word slips past your lips before you can organize your thoughts, and conclude whether or not you actually wanted to stop him from leaving. You swallow, not knowing what invisible force, urge, or desire gave you the push to ask him to stay. For one, you didn’t even know the guy. He could be some creepy stalker for all you knew, but then again, he seems all right judging by his politeness and did he smell pleasantly of citrus and strawberries too? Not that you were purposefully taking note of his scent, but it was kind of hard to miss when you literally fell into his arms two seconds ago.

“Are you new around here? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around.” He’s the first to speak after the two of you are comfortably situated back on the rock.

“I just moved back home after graduating from college. I mean, I’ll probably have to look for a job in the city eventually, but I figured it’s good to take some time off.”

He nods, leaning back an observing you more closely.

“How about you?” You direct the question back, not wanting to miss a chance to learn more about him.

“I wanted to find an inspirational place to compose and the ocean was mysteriously alluring.” There’s a mischievous hint in his voice, like he wanted to spark a bit of your interest, which he’s successful in doing.

“You’re a writer?” You ask, unable to hold yourself back.

“A song writer.”  

“Oh, a musician.”

“Aspiring to be.” His lip quirks upward as you turn to glance at him.

You continue to look at him as his attention is mesmerized by the boundless water, tracing along the contours of his face, outlined by the silver moonlight, and noticing rather naturally how soothingly attractive his features are. The way his nose curves at the tip, his slightly parted lips and relaxed eyelids as he breathes gently. Despite the obscurity of the night, you can effortlessly see his appearance with the help of his aura and something strangely familiar about his demeanor.

“May I ask for your name?” It suddenly hits you that you have yet to ask the most basic of questions.

He turns back to face you, lips curving up as he blinks slowly, almost sleepily.

“Jungkook.” His voice is low, marginally husky, but smooth like the sand underneath the perennial waves.

“Jungkook.” You repeat, lowering your gaze and noticing how instinctively it glides off your tongue.

“And you?” Startled by his question your pupils shoot back up.

“Y-Y/N” There’s an obvious break in your voice as you pronounce the syllables, nerves kicking back in for reasons you can’t comprehend.

“Y/N.” He exhales it the same way he had said his own name, and the warmth ignited in your heart is undeniable.

A stillness floats between the two of you as the night grows older, but it is in no way uncomfortable, quite the opposite in fact.

“So do you have any plans for the rest of the summer?”

His sudden inquiry snaps you out of your reverie. “Huh?” You whip you head back to see that he’s looking at you intently.

“You mentioned taking some time off.” He adds casually.

“Oh…right…ummm” Surprisingly it’s something you hadn’t really thought about. What were you going to do besides relaxing by the sea?

“If it’s too personal or something, you don’t have to answer.” There’s no trace of bitterness in his voice, no sign that he’s just saying it out of courtesy. You can tell he really means it.

You quietly laugh to yourself at how awkward you were being. “N-no, it’s just. I guess I’m not really sure. Haven’t exactly planned, you know?”

He nods, tongue poking out to wet his lips out of habit. “In that case, would you like to hang out sometime? Like during the day?”

“Are you asking me out?” The blunt words escape before you realize and you immediately regret being so inept, mentally face palming and missing the way his smile grows wider.    

“Yes. I am.” His own blunt response makes your cheeks heat up even more. You have a hard time finding the right words to accept his offer, years of turning people down have done opposite of preparing you for this moment.

“It’s fine if you don’t. I don’t want to make you feel forced.” He adds quietly, finally looking away nervously.  

“No! I mean, y-yes. I-I’d like to hang out.” This time you mentally face palm so hard, you swear you can hear the loud smack tangibly.

He chuckles, eyes crinkling at the edges. “I’m honored.” He comments teasingly as he pulls out his phone.

You quickly mimic his motion; assuming that this is the part you’re supposed to offer him your number. When the screen lights up to half blind you, the first thing you notice after your eyes have adjusted is the time, or more precisely how late it already was. “Shit!” You involuntarily curse.

“You have to get back home, right?”

Nodding frantically, you flash him an apologetic look. “I’m basically free every day.”

Your reassuring words make him smile.

“Me too” He responds.

The last thing you see that night is his lingering gaze trailing after you as you run back along the path cutting through the grassy field, further and further away until his figure diminishes, transforming into a small speckle in the distance. At the waning of that transient image, you feel something you don’t think you’ve ever felt before, at least not for someone you’ve just met: the reluctance to leave.

You don’t know what it is about him, what he possesses that sparks your fascination in learning more about him. How he was able to engage so much of you so early on. Maybe it’s the ocean’s doing, just like that person it makes you see when you close your eyes.

Maybe it’s the way he smiled at you, washing away the anxieties that accompany the act of meeting new people. Or maybe it’s the way his voice was the kind to tell stories without words, calming your fears with an un-pinpointed familiarity.

Whatever it was, you were undoubtedly planning on finding out.

…

The universe works in mysterious ways, because you’ve walked this earth for almost a quarter of a century never have you ever felt the kind of inexplicable excitement you did when Jungkook messages you the very next day. With the vibration of your phone waking you up, you’re greeted with near exhilaration the moment you see the text. Why was your heart racing? Why are you virtually having trouble breathing? You blame it on being woken mid REM cycle. It’s called being startled and thrown off. You were never a morning person to begin with.  

Hopping out of bed, you actually take the time to look nice or, more accurately, feel the need to do so. Normally, looking presentable was all you ever aimed for, but you were unexpectedly self-conscious about seeing him for the first time during the daylight hours, aware that the additional light would allow him to see parts of you that he couldn’t last night. The concern is a bit unusual, but you weren’t going to read too much into your suddenly altered inclinations.

You meet him at the same spot on the beach you had chatted with him the night before. The scenery looking completely different now that the sun’s rays were illuminating the entire area, the tall grass, the trees leading into the shady forest, and of course, the lively ocean.

You find him leaning against the giant rock, hands casually tucked into the safety of his pockets, and gaze cast towards the breathtaking body of water. In any other scenario, you would’ve been more interested in how stunning the surface of the sea was sparkling under the iridescent light, but in that moment, your fixation was drawn towards the boy and how fondly he was admiring the landscape. His expression is the picture of calm, features relaxed yet the flicker of his eyes gives away how alive he was feeling at the sight of such magnificence.

“Jungkook?”

He turns. Slowly. And you don’t know why you’re holding your breath, but the moment he sees you, his lips curve upwards, transforming into the most adorable of smiles and loosening all the knots in your stomach, making your insides flutter. The moon had not lied about his attractiveness, and the sun had just confirmed the truth.

“Y/N” He breathes out airily, still grinning like a child. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

“I’m not even thatlate.” You defend, pulling out your phone and checking to see that it’s technically only five minutes past the time you had told him you would arrive. “But sorry, I was just-”

“It’s fine,” He laughs. “I wouldn’t blame you. After all, wedid meet under some pretty sketchy circumstances.”

This time it’s your turn to chuckle. “You’re right. You could be some serial killer.”

He huffs another laugh. “So what made you come?”

Perhaps the question held more weight than you had taken the time to consider in that instance, but to you then, it was nothing more than a casual exchange. “It’s a small town, and I’ve got nothing to lose?” You shrug. “And how do you know I’m not dangerous?”

You’re surprised that he actually spends a good minute forming a response, but he eventually beams once more. “For all I know, you probably are. But I’m willing to take the risk.”

Your jaw drops at his reply. “Wow, so you think I’m out to hurt little boys.” You cross your arms, pretending to be offended.

“Hey, I am not little.” He pouts, bottom lip protruding on it’s own accord.  

“Whatever you say~” You continue to tease, even though you feel kind of mean for doing so.

The mood is lifted, and your remaining worries from the morning have completely disappeared.

Jungkook inquires about you childhood as the two of you survey the forest and lush green fields. You find it interesting that all the places he takes you are the exact ones you enjoyed exploring as a child: the old tree that curves downward to form a nice shelter, it’s stair-like branches making it perfect for climbing, the trail of stepping stones along the stream leading to the hidden waterfall at the side of the mountain, and the tall cliff over-looking the awe-inspiring ocean.

“Oh god, you’re going to fall.” Your eyes are stretched wide as you watch him crawl towards the end of the branch the two of you were sitting on as he attempts to catch one of the largest butterflies you’ve ever seen.

“I won’t” He grunts, still fully concentrated on the target. You can’t deny that he’s athletic by the looks of his controlled movement and the bulge of his biceps, not that you were staring.

“It’s going to fly away.” You call once more, gripping on the tree trunk for dear life as his movement makes the entire branch sway.

“You’ll never obtain what you are looking for if you’re afraid you’ll lose it.”

“This is no time for philosophical remarks!” You squeak as his the branch snaps crisply. You immediately squeeze your eyes shut, waiting for the imminent fall, but all you hear is Jungkook’s laughing.

“What did I tell you?”

You open your eyes to find that he’s standing on the ground, proudly cupping the creature in his hands. Leaning down to get a closer look, the branch finally gives way. You barely have time to react before you realize that you’re actuallyfalling this time.

“Whoa!” He instinctively releases the butterfly to catch you in his arms. “Someone enjoys falling.” He chuckles as he holds onto you tightly.

“Hey, this time it's all on you.” You throw the responsibility on him before the heat can rush to your face.  

“Ok, ok. But at least I caught the-” He blinks a couple of times, visibly realizing the butterfly made an escape in his haste to catch you.

“The what?” You smirk, finding his dumbfounded reaction utterly hilarious.  

He sighs. “Are you ok?”

The genuine concern is a contrast to your own joking tone. “Um, yeah. I’m fine.” You clear your throat awkwardly.

He smiles in relief, and this time your burning face is inescapable. “Good.”

There’s something about Jungkook that strikes a perfect balance of just enough boyish charm combined with a manly protectiveness. You find out that he’s a few years younger than you, which isn’t all that surprising considering how young he actually looks. He has a baby face for sure, but there’s something about his sharp jawline and tall nose that makes him appear more mature at the same time. It’s an enigma in and of itself really, and you have to force yourself not to dwell on his appearance too often.

As striking as he is physically, it’s his aura that really leaves a lasting impression.   There’s something eerily familiar about him, but you’re afraid to allow yourself to believe it’s for the reason you’re suspecting. You’re convinced it’s just the nostalgia and your innate love for the seaside.    

Even so, you can’t deny feeling that he seems to understand you without words, without even having known you for very long, and when it feels like no one else in this world does. Although, you were most likely just jumping to conclusions too early on, but if he can make you feel like time doesn’t matter when the two of you are staring at the endless sky, that all of your anxieties are washed away as you’re breathing the scent of your childhood adventures, and that reality is just as beautiful as your most vibrant dreams, you’re more than willing to believe in his galaxy.  

…

Jungkook wasn’t lying about being a musician. You had almost forgotten that creating music was his official profession, until he brings you back to his apartment to show you his studio.

It’s small one bedroom type of flat on the seventh floor of one of the newer condos. He even got sound proof walls installed so he could work late into the night, although it would probably be a necessity during the day as well. He’s eager to sing you a song, and you can tell he’s passionate. The excitement in his eyes gives his whole heart away, and you were planning on bursting his bubble as a playful joke of some sort, that is, until his voice unapologetically steals your breath away.

Jungkook’s voice is beautiful, wholly, extraordinarily, and indisputably, to the point where it's almost unreal how he can express the full range of human emotion through song. But surprisingly, it isn’t the pure sound of his singing, but rather the familiarity that renders you speechless once again. Maybe the ocean had been trying to tell you something all along.

You’re almost in disbelief, questioning if you were being delusional in thinking the voice you were listening to right then was the exact one you had been imagining all these years. It almost causes your legs to give way, but you luck out because he stops singing the moment you start to feel your body sway.

“So what do you think?” His request snaps you sharply back into reality.

Clearing your throat and metaphorically slapping some sense back into yourself, you smirk impishly. “A song about love?”

He chuckles lightly. “Not your cup of tea?”

You shake your head; glad he picked up on your jest and didn’t take offense. “It’s not that. The song is beautiful, but a bit unrealistic don’t you think?”

“So you’re not a fan of love songs.” He bobs his head in understanding.

“So you’re pro sappy, romantic love?” You counter, reflecting his motion. It’s not that you wanted to judge his belief system or put labels on him, but you had expected his thoughts to be more aligned with yours, especially based on the conversations you’ve had with him the past couple of weeks. His outlook on life was so similar to yours; you have a hard time wrapping your head around the fact that his view on something so mainstream was vastly different. Raising a brow rather amusedly, you probe him for confirmation. “You can’t actually believe in true love can you?”

He glances at you cautiously. “Are you going to laugh in my face if I say yes?”

“I’ll try not to.” You grin, trying to hold back the laughter that is already tickling your chest. You find it charming that he’s so concerned about your opinion of him, and despite all of it, he still manages to remain honest. “It’s just, I didn’t take you to be the hopeless romantic type.”

“I’m just a casual fan.” He defends with a shrug.

“If you’re a fan that automatically makes you a believer.” You accuse playfully, feeling a wave of endearment from the way his face cutely flushes ever so slightly. The fact that he’s so pure when it comes to these things at his age and the fact that he remains true to himself in the face of your teasing just makes him even cuter.  

“I’m ok with that.” He responds. “I just didn’t expect you to be so against the idea.”

His comment suddenly makes you wonder when you started to give up on believing in love. If anything, it should be more of a female thing to be a fan of romance. “I guess I just can’t see myself that dependent on another person, or even fathoming such a person even exists? It’s hard to explain…” You purse your lips, searching for an explanation or a way to articulate how you truly feel about it all.

“I kind of see what you’re getting at.” He bobs his head once more. “But to me, I don’t think loving someone is as hard as the world makes it seem.”

You cock a brow. “What do you mean?”

“You know, the whole I would do anything for this person and without them my life can’t go on.” He exhales, shaking his head displeasingly. “The way I see it, loving someone is pretty simple. You make them smile and care for them. You hold each other in your arms and become each other’s happiness.”

Your jaw drops in incredulity at his description. “Wow, you just managed to make romantic love… boring.”

He cackles, throwing his head back. “Hey, it’s not my intent to downplay what they show in the movies or write in books. But love is what you make of it, right?”

“You just contradicted your song.” You point out. “And what about the dark side? Like unfortunate diseases, cheating, unrequited love, and pairs who are star crossed?”

“Yeah, those factors would complicate things.” He furrows his brows. “But everyone loves the same way, even those who are star crossed. I say if two people grow apart, it’s fine to break up when that time comes. I think you’re getting believing in love and believing in forever mixed up. I don’t believe in love that lasts forever, but I do believe in the capacity to love another person.”

“Oh, I see. So you’re not as wacky as I thought.” You giggle, relieved your beliefs systems are not entirely clashing.

“I’m guessing you haven’t experienced what is defined as ‘love’, yet? Or at least your capacity to love someone hasn’t been tested?” You’re too busy to notice how red his face has become or the nerves sprinkled in his voice as he’s asking these next questions.

You sigh heavily. “Nope. I’m proud to say I have yet to fall head over heels for anyone.” You take another deep breath, reminded of what your parents have been urgently pushing you to do ever since you graduated college single. “Although, I’m not exactly sure if it’s something to be proud of.”

“Well, it’s definitely not something you can control.” His voice is more relaxed now.

“Have you?” You question, curiosity getting the better of you.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know…” The uncertainty in his voice is a strangely stark contrast to his usual confident tone. He slowly lifts his gaze to peek at you, making you wonder why he’s suddenly acting weird. He hastily clears his throat, averting his eyes.  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll write you a song about it.” He offers nonchalantly.

“Another song about love?” You cock a brow.

He exhales with a smirk of his own. “About the simple love I believe in.”

Jungkook doesn’t talk about love after that day, well at least not for the rest of the summer. You’re thankful the space between you is still contentedly amiable, but you find yourself wondering why you’re thinking about him so often.

Why you’re always waiting to see him each day, checking your phone for text messages and planning your outfits days in advance. You acknowledge the undeniable sensation of feeling more than at home when you’re walking alongside him as the two of you spend long afternoons chatting about the most random things and the maddening reluctance to leave him when the evening finally arrives. You don’t understand this new feeling, why you were suddenly giddy over the tinniest things that would conjure the thought of him or why every ordinary day had suddenly become something to look forward to. Was it new or had you been like this with other friends too?

Because even as your parents were suggesting you meet their friends son, on friendly terms and totally not for the purpose of setting you two up, the first person that pops into your head in none other than Jungkook. The thought of him always made you feel safe, and that was something you couldn’t say about anyone except him.

“Do you ever feel like you’re searching for something that doesn’t quite exist?” He’s looking at you as he voices the question, eyelids sleepy and wind tousling his soft bangs.

You continue to examine his lazy features, lips slightly parted as he waits. He’s mesmerizing, and despite thinking it’s just due to the fact that he possessed an objectively good-looking face, you have a hard time convincing that’s the only thing you’ve been spellbound by.

Observing that you haven’t replied, he continues. “I mean, you’ve felt like it doesn’t exist until you find it.” His gaze is now cast downward, and you think you can detect a slight flush in his cheeks.

“Actually, yeah.” You swallow. “Like something you can only sense in dreams.” You wish you’re somehow able to express your resonance with his inquiry better, but you were never good at conveying your deepest thoughts.

He nods, smiling faintly. “Or chasing after a place you know you’ll never reach, but doing it anyways because you know someone is waiting for you there.”

“Do you think that person would wait if they knew you’d never get there?” You can feel the weight of your query hang in the space between you.  

A silence lingers in the air, and you’re almost led to believe he’s fallen asleep because he’s still staring idly at the ground, breathing calmly and sitting so, so still.

“I know they would.” He finally exhales, glancing at you with an unreadable, yet reassuring expression.

You wonder why being with Jungkook feels so comfortable, why sharing a conversation with him is so pleasant and engaging. You’ve known him for less than three months, and it already feels like he’s been with you all your life. Or perhaps it’s the effect of you not remembering what life before you met him was like. Is this what people mean when they say your whole world changes when you develop feelings for someone?

No way. That’s some bullshit. You don’t actually believe falling in love would happen this easily. It’s just infatuation. You’ve heard about it, and you know it doesn’t last.

Sure you’re always thinking about him, but in your defense, he’s the only person you’ve been hanging out with recently, granted you still find it absurd that every little thing would suddenly remind you of him. It’s like he was filling every nook and cranny of your mind, making you question how you could be so childishly infatuated so quickly. And you’d expect this new development to annoy you at least somewhat, but no, it actually just makes your heart flutter whenever you see the image of his smiling face as you close your eyes, euphoria that ripples through your chest and saturates your body with warmth.

It’s definately infatuation. Nothing special.

But what is the difference between categorizing someone as a friend vs more than a friend?

You clearly still have no idea, and you also didn’t know you would find out soon enough.

…

Jungkook likes to keep the atmosphere light. Call it a personality trait or habit, but he enjoys jokes and tries to work around matters that would usher in concern, even when you can tell there’s clearly something important on his mind. Heavier topics are not usually brought up in your conversations, until the day he tells you he’s been offered a contract from a record company in the city.

“Congratulations.” You voice, not knowing why the news makes a knot form in the pit of your stomach. There’s one tightening in your throat as well.  

“Thank you…” He mumurs, still looking at you as if he can't quite read your reaction.

“You’re really going places now.” You force a smile, but a person would have to be desensitized to not be consciousness of the tension in your speech.

“Y/N” He cuts in, scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably. “I haven’t signed. I-I umm, wanted to ask for your opinion on it first.”

“Me? Why?” You laugh almost hysterically, and it’s so out of place that you yourself don’t even know where such a reaction came from. “It’s your dream. What does it have to do with me?” You were really taking your immaturity to new heights. Thinking back it’s embarrassing how you couldn’t control your emotions, how dumb you had acted at the time.

He doesn’t respond right away, looking down on the ground as he attempts to formulate a response. “So you’re ok with it?”

“Of course!” It’s a lie, but you’ve gone too far to turn back now. “My opinion shouldn’t matter anyways.”

“That sounds more like you’re not ok with it.” He murmurs barely audibly.

“We’re not tied to each other for an eternity. If we grow apart it’s ok, right?” You hate yourself for being so passive aggressive in that moment, how disgusting you feel for bringing the topic of breaking up into a conversation about the future and potentially going long distance. Why were you such a coward?

Jungkook only swallows and looks down at the ground. “Y-yeah, of course.” He mutters.

He doesn’t hold a grudge, and you persuade yourself that you don’t have to apologize even though you know you should. You reacted in the wrong way, and you almost wish Jungkook would hold you accountable for it. But he doesn't and it only makes you feel worse.

A couple days pass, and he doesn’t message you. Maybe for the purpose of giving you some space or maybe he was disappointed in the way you treated him, you don’t know. You feel awful, and you can’t even bring yourself to rationalize your actions because there was no justification for your harsh words. And you knew if you didn’t work this out, you’d regret it for the rest of your life.

“Jungkook?”

“Hm?”

“I’m sorry for the way I acted the other day. It was completely uncalled for. I was being stupid and totally overreacting. I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty or anything. I was just…. scared.”

He doesn’t say anything for a good two minutes, letting the sunlight grow and fade as clouds floated across the blue sky. The ocean breeze tickles your cheek, and you wonder what he’s thinking about for such a long time.

“Take my hand.” He finally says.

“Huh?” You look down at his hand, palm facing upward as he waits. “Y-you, I-I…”

He chuckles, reaching down and interlacing his fingers with yours as you were obviously too taken aback to react normally. His hand is so warm and strong. You can feel his heartbeat vibrating through his veins, the twitch of the tiny muscles in his digits, and again, you’re surrounded by that same kind of safety only he can provide.

“I finished the song.” He murmurs. “Would you like to hear it?”

You nod, still staring at him with a mildly shocked expression. Your gaze never leaves him as he sings, his voice so heavenly it’s impossible to describe with mere words or images alone. You’re looking at the sunset reflected in his eyes, the way the colors speak of the same promises his lyrics are conveying. It’s the first time you’ve looked inside someone else’s heart, and found that they’ve created a place for you there.  

“We don’t know what will happen to us later, but I like that the future isn’t decided.” He says as he stops singing and begins drawing swirls on the back of your hand. 

“Uhh, because it’s more interesting that way?” You’re really good at killing moods, but if you weren’t, you’d be tearing up at how full your chest feels in that moment with his hands still interconnected with yours. But in all honesty, you’re heart is still secretly crying at how his actions now and for the past few months have all spoken of one central message. The one he has just delivered as a song dedicated to you.  

He giggles. “Yeah, and it makes me feel like I have the power to choose.” He smiles blissfully at you; the universes in his eyes already stealing the show before the stars appear.

…

Long distance is just as hard as everyone makes it out to be. You miss him. You miss the blissful summer you spent with him, but you’re thankful for technology.

At least you can still hear his voice through the receiver, see his face on the screen, and message him as much as your heart desires. 

Still, you’ll never stop missing him.

It was fine at first, when he would call you with news of how well his debut album was doing, and you felt so proud watching him perform his songs live. But you couldn’t stop the insecurity that dating a rising celebrity would inevitably bring. What if he falls for another celebrity? What if he finally realizes he could have someone way hotter, more talented, and successful than you? Those were the questions you asked yourself every night, each time a dating rumor was published on news sites or when the growing number of fangirls would loom over you like inescapable shadows.  

But each time you drowned in doubt, he would remind you of his promise.

“Remember the song I wrote for you?” His voice is muffled through the receiver, but it relaxes you nonetheless.

“Ugh, how could I forget?” You roll your eyes despite knowing he can’t see anyways.

“The meaning will never not be true.”

“Why are you speaking in double negative?” You accuse, pretending to be annoyed.

He laughs, and you can see the way his face is probably scrunched up in your mind. “It will always hold true.”

You sigh, smiling down at the blanket covering your legs as you sit in bed, phone in ear. “Ok.”

“Ok?” He sounds astonished. “Have I actually converted you into a believer?” He’s referring to the idea of love, and the excitement in his voice is undeniable.

You roll your eyes again, hoping it’ll translate over in your voice. “Yes, I’ve been converted.”

No matter how hard you try, long distance is unrelenting.

It happens gradually, and perhaps that’s the scariest type of change. The kind that is undetectable, until it's too late. It’s like a break up that is planned, the whole “letting someone down easy so they don’t go crazy and hunt me down” sort of schema. You don’t find it difficult to convince yourself that Jungkook would never do that to you. He’s not that cruel, and he would never break a promise.  

Would he?

But then the calls become more and more spaced out, until they stop all together. He stops responding to your texts, and no matter how hard you try to persuade yourself that he’s just busy with promotions, you can’t help but feel that something is not right.

Despite knowing that being fueled by insecurity only comes off as desperate, you sum up the courage to pay him a surprise visit. A trip to the city in which you were searching for jobs in anyways. You could make it a chance for you to get a feel for the place and decide whether or not it was somewhere you could see yourself working and living in for the next few years, although, the fact that Jungkook was there had left no doubt in your mind that it was.

The train ride is long, but your eagerness overrides the suspicions that plague your mind. It’s going to be fine. He’ll be so happy to see you. It’s been over half a year.

“What are you doing here?”

The sharp voice throws daggers against your back.

“J-Jungkook, I-I…”

He walks past you and enters his apartment before you could explain. You had been waiting outside his door for over three hours. His schedule ran overtime.

“I’m sorry for showing up unannounced but I wanted you to be…umm pleasantly surprised.”

“Pleasantly?” His bitter response takes another jab at your heart.

“What’s wrong with you?” Your jaw tenses, finally letting the anger and hurt overtake you.

“What’s wrong with me? Absolutely nothing.” He scoffs. “I guess, I’ve just…”

“You’ve what?” You spit, unable to lower your raised voice.

“Moved on? I don’t know how else to phrase it.” He says, almost mockingly, not even trying to hide the fact that he was purposefully trying to hurt you. “I tried to let you down easy, but you just couldn’t pick up on the hints now could you?”

“Are you fucking serious right now? Is this you breaking up with me?”

“Is it not obvious?” His jaw twitches from his clenched teeth.

You can’t believe what you are hearing, praying that your ears are deceiving you but also wishing you didn’t feel so stupid for not reading the signs sooner. “So we’re over? This is it?” You fight back the tears that would only make you look more pathetic. “You don’t even remember what you said to me do you?” You didn’t mean to bring up something so foolishly trivial at this point, but you can see his body tense at your words.

“Remember what?” He voices lowly, avoiding direct eye contact, lines on his forehead growing deeper as he searches for the answer.

You scoff and sniffle, tears finally rolling down your cheeks. “I can’t believe you’re acting like you don’t know. Wow, I really was an idiot to trust you.”

And then you’re rushing out the door, ignoring the rain that has started to fall as his calls for you to stop. Lightning flashes across the sky and thunder crackles loudly in the distance, but nothing could stop you from getting out of there. The anger and pain was drowning out his desperate cries for you to stop running.

“Y/N! Y/N!”

You continue to sprint as fast as your legs can carry you. You knew that you probably won’t be able to outrun him anyways, but you pray that he’ll give up and just let you be. Why would he put in the effort to care anyways? What you’ve done was already embarrassing enough. You didn’t need him to kick away the rest of your remaining dignity, however nonexistent it was at the present.

“Y/N, stop!”

He reached out and grabs you by the wrist, pulling you around to face him, his wet bangs completely covering his eyes. Your own vision is blurred by the rainwater, increasingly obscure as the pellets pour down harder.

“What are you doing? Let go of me!” You scream, attempting to rip your arm out of his clasp, but he doesn’t budge.

“I didn’t mean to do that.” He pulls you closer to him.

“What? Break up with me?” You scoff again, turning your head away. “I’m pretty sure you made it quite clear.” You feel his grip loosen around your wrist, and that’s when you turn back to a scene that shatters your heart.

He begins to cry. And you’ve never seen him cry. Not that crying was a strange occurrence or an inappropriate reaction in a situation like this, but the way he completely broke down, tears mixing with rainwater to the point where you can’t tell if just raining that hard or due to how long his grief in the form of tears has been accumulating, was painful to witness. Your chest constricts sharply at the sound of his agonizing sobs, the way he drops to his knees and covers his face with his hands, kneeling in front of you in the middle of the street, so small and powerless.

You’re confused. 

You don’t know why, and you most certainly do not understand what he’s trying to do, but there’s not a single cell in your body that has the strength to walk away from him like this, so you make your way over to him slowly, waiting for him to realize you’re giving him a chance to explain. The moment he feels your hand on his shoulder, he opens his arms and hugs your waist tightly, afraid that you’ll leave or disappear if he isn’t quick enough.

“I’m sorry” He cries, body still shuddering from his sobs.

And that’s when you learn why he doesn’t remember.

…

The events that happen afterwards are stored as a fuzzy memory somewhere deep in your recollection of the time you spent with him.

Jungkook.

The boy you made fun of for believing in love. Only playfully though because he spend long nights conversing with you under the moonlight and he allowed you to see countless sunsets reflected in his eyes. And joke’s on you because you fell in love with him.

Jungkook.

The boy who wrote a song for you because he placed you in the center of his heart. And maybe the greatest thing that came out of his effort to make you believe in the kind of love he grew fond of in his days listening to music and writing songs by the sea, is that you are now here to remind him even on the day he doesn’t anymore.

Jungkook.

The boy who has a rare genetic disorder that results in premature dementia.

The signs started showing up not long after the release of his first album. And maybe if you were more observant during all the days you spent texting with him back and forth or the late night video calls snuck in during his busy schedule, you would’ve suspected there was something abnormal about his growing forgetfulness. You had suspected it was from the stress of promotions and recordings, but of course, fate isn’t always that generous.

“W-was it difficult to love me?” His voice is meek and grief-stricken, finishing off with a noticeable tremble. You notice the tears welling up in his eyes for the first time as the scene before you makes your chest cry out in pain.

You shake your head frantically, unable to believe he’s assumed you ever had to force yourself to love him and unable to comprehend what it even means to find it difficult to love someone like him: the boy who holds entire galaxies in his eyes alone, the boy who embroidered the vast expanse of your sky with colors you had never even known existed until he showed them to you, the boy the ocean promised would light up your life when you met him- and he did. 

Loving him was the easiest thing you’ve ever done, and there’s not a single day that goes by where you’ve ever come close to regretting falling for him. The inability to grasp how such a question could even manifest in his mind makes you freeze in place, searching for the right words to make up for not showing him how much he’s meant to you or how little you had to try to embrace him tightly in your arms because your heart had long chosen its owner.  

“I couldn’t have stopped myself even if I tried.” You whisper, cupping his cheek in your hand as you kneel at his bedside.

Your words are the final blow that makes him break down. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I know I said when a time like comes, it’s ok to break up...b- but, but I don’t want to forget. I-I don’t want-” He shakes his head as tears ceaselessly stream down his face.

“Shhh, it’s ok.” You use the pad of your thumb to wipe some of the salty liquid away, but it’s no use because he’s still crying. “I’m not letting go of your hand.”

“No, you have to.” He cries. “I’ll only hurt you when I can’t remember. You have to leave me. You can’t-”

“Jungkook” You interrupt. “Whether you want it or not, I’m going to hold on to you.”

You end up holding him on his hospital bed for the rest of the afternoon, patting his back gently as he cries into the crook of your neck.

“God, I shouldn’t have written you that song.” He chuckles in between waning sniffles, dabbing the used, crumpled tissue against his already swollen nose.

“I’m thankful you did, because it’s still my favorite.” You smile, tracing circles along the back of his hand.

“I can’t believe you just watched me cry like a baby for the last three hours. I wouldn’t blame you if you decide to leave me now.” Though he intends for it to be a joke, you stiffen slightly.

“Jungkook, please, never tell me to leave you.” You concentrate on him pleadingly.

He sighs. “I don’t want to hurt you when I lose the ability to love you the way you deserve to be loved.”

“I don’t care.” You voice. “You can’t force me to not love you.”

“I know.” He exhales defeated by your stubbornness. “I just wish it was me and not you.”

“Don’t say that. It hurts just as much.”

He nods regretfully. “I’m sorry.”

Days pass intermittently, with winter ending at the arrival of Spring. You didn’t know how rapidly his disease would overtake him, optimistically hoping it would progress by the year rather than the week. As much as you didn’t want to acknowledge his fading memories, it’s impossible to ignore when it began to affect his ability to perform daily tasks.

You had always expected that real love would be just as painful as it is euphoric. 

Maybe that is precisely what you were afraid of believing in it.

“It’s getting worse.” He murmurs, staring at the lively sea, winds stronger today as they pick up the waves.

“Don’t feel bad about it.” You squeeze his hand tightly in your own.

“But when the day comes that I don’t remember to love you, just know that I still do. I always, always will.”

“And I’ll always be waiting for you.” You whisper. 

“The me that remembers will be sure to come and meet you.” He swears it by the stars in his eyes, the ones that you know will shine forever. 

His words make you smile and lean into his chest, firm but soft just like the first time you fell into his arms. Perhaps you knew all along that it was him. That you didn’t want to believe he existed because loving him makes you vulnerable, that the euphoric bliss that comes with love is a tradeoff for something darker, something more painful. But would you change things if you knew that this would be the outcome? No, you’ve come far enough to know you wouldn’t.  

“Don’t worry.” You breathe out just a wave of the ocean crashes against the cliffside. “I’ll remind you of all the things you’ve known and all the things you’ve forgotten. I’ll bring us back here, and I’ll play our song. And when the day comes that I start to forget, we’ll lay here in the rain, in the dark, in each other’s arms.”

…

You probably remember that song now.

The one that you’ll still listen to because it reminds you of that boy. The one that is kept safely tucked deep within your heart for the rest of your days.

The song that will forever be a message from the boy who loves you.

...

[toxicityrp]

   MORPHINE ● OWNER OF THE ST. VINCENT ● CLOSED

      ❝ If I knew a word that could embody who Morphine is,             I’d be fuckin’ using it right now.        I can’t even have a straight conversation with     the guy without him shitting on me. He’s got style             but I really fuckin’ dislike him. ❞

THE SINNER.

“I don’t know what goes on in a child’s early life that ends up producing people like Felix and Fiona Duval. One would hope that it would be some dreadful horror story, death, abuse, or rampant mental illness at the very least. But in reality, such things are rare, and some are just born bad. I know it is an unpleasant thing to say, but Felix and his sister are bad apples, rotten to the core, and no amount of education, positive influence or opportunities will change that. I hated using the word ‘evil’ especially when talking about children, but if there was a single redeeming quality in either of those two I was never able to see it. They were the sort of infants who would pull the wings off butterflies simply to watch them die.  Irredeemable. Often with children like this, you blame the parents. But with the Duval siblings it runs deeper then that. They were born nasty, life just got in the way.

                                                                            - John G. Norris - School Teacher

It was hard to believe it was real, but there was a time when Felix actually remembered when his mother would hum, not around the house or in the kitchen like a sugar-coated fairy tale, but while playing cards. She’d shuffle the cards in her hand, shifting them to her pleasure, perhaps throwing in a lyric under her breath; an old standard from the time of her parents. At one point she would glance over to Felix, knowing he was watching her, giving him a quick wink and a sly smile. Felix was five. The game of choice was gin. No child’s games for Felix, never go fish or old maid. Not for Gertrude’s boy. Gertrude talked to Felix and treated Felix like the adult he already was, for the two of them had practically grown up together. Married at twenty, pregnant by twenty one, life wasn’t at all what Gertrude had thought it would be. But, being a smart girl, Gertrude learned fast, she adapted fast. She’d gone from a naive school girl to learning the lessons of life in a blink of an eye. Life wasn’t to be seen through rose-colored glasses, secrets had to be kept for the protection of others; and love wasn’t a living, breathing thing, but an idea. The world isn’t put together in picture perfect boxes with nice bows. The only people who love you back are your children. Life is hell and the world can’t be saved with pleases and thank yous.

On the day Gertrude Duval turns twenty, she opens her eyes and decides her life is over. She behaved like a dizzy idiot and married for love, without even knowing the man she fell in love with very well, and got pregnant before realising she didn’t have the first idea of how to be a mother. Now her husband has left her for a younger woman, which makes her seem like a widow though she isn’t, with everyone looking at her either pityingly or telling her she must be so very proud. She tries not to remember loving him at all, because that will make it easier once she gets the inevitable announcement. There is the child, living proof that she went through it all, the handholding, the gazing into each other’s eyes, the memorising of stupid song lyrics because the song played at some point in their ridiculously brief romance, the unprotected sex because she wanted him so much. All of this happened. If it hadn’t, Gertrude would have finished college. She has a first class mind, and she would have defied gender expectations and gone to Washington, first as someone’s aide, but then rising to the top in her own right, she’s sure of it. And then, only then, when she was ready, she would have married, and he would have been quietly supportive. None of this will ever happen, she thinks, and stares at the baby the nanny places in her arms. The baby’s eyes have a trace of blue or green, depending on the light, like his father’s. The hair is auburn, like Gertrude’s own. It feels very soft under her finger tips.

“Knock, Knock…” The nanny not only knocked on the door but spoke the words at the same time. She was trying to be cheery, she was just irritating as hell, Gertrude thought. From her bed, Gertrude glanced over at the nanny in her doorway. But only for a moment, before rolling herself back toward the window, looking out with a glazed over look in her eyes. She felt like a hard rock, heavy and filled with nothing of note or purpose. Gertrude felt like everything she had known to be true didn’t exist – nothing felt right. It was like she didn’t know her left from her right. She had nothing to believe in anymore. The nanny had Felix in one of those little hospital cribs with clear plastic sides to it. “I brought the baby …” The nanny wheeled Felix toward the other side of the bed, but Gertrude wouldn’t look at him. “Lucky” The nanny said with her saccharin smile. “What?” Gertrude asked in her groggy voice. “Felix – it means Lucky. I assumed you knew. Why you named him…?”

“Does it…” Gertrude’s voice trailed off. “Maybe that’s why…” She didn’t seem interested, or maybe it just reminded her of her dreams and how they weren’t anything at all, they were just dreams. Then Felix cried and it hit something in Gertrude’s soul. She cocked her head toward the baby and the emotion hit her. Here was her child. Here was her son. The nanny saw it. “Do you want to hold him?” She smiles, and holds the baby for her to take. “Yes…” Gertrude pulled herself up in bed, she was still sore and it was hard for her to move. “I.. I don’t know what to do,” she confessed. The nanny instructed Gertrude on how to hold him before she placed young Felix in her arms. “You shouldn’t have happened,“ Gertrude says. The nanny is shocked. “Now, now, Mrs. D, you mustn’t say things like that.” she tuts, with the mixture of disapproval, pity and condescension a woman of forty has for one of twenty, especially if the younger woman can be seen as a spoiled brat. “It was a statement of fact,” Gertrude says coldly. “You’re fired. This is also a statement of fact.” The nanny babbles on, but Gertrude ceases to listen. Instead, she looks at the baby. Her son. Arthur’s son. Her future, all the future she’s going to have now. The injustice of it makes her rage. And yet, and yet. He doesn’t feel like a burden at all. The nanny probably hasn’t fed him enough; yet another mark against that woman. “You shouldn’t have happened,” Gertrude repeats, “but now that you have, you’re going to be worth it.”

“Felix and Fiona were lovely when they were little. I know, that sounds a little unbelievable now, but they were really beautiful. Blonde hair and bright little eyes. And they hardly ever cried. They just looked around them and stared up as if they were trying to absorb everything around them. Intelligent, too. They walked very early, and were always trying out new things. They used to repeat whatever they heard their parents say, though some of it wasn’t very nice, they were only small and didn’t realize it. Certainly, they had their flaws.  Felix didn’t seem to like his sister at first. I think he was jealous of all the attention she got. He grew out of it. In fact, afterwards he used to do whatever his sister told him to, no matter how trivial. If she asked him to fetch her something, he would do it without question. It was rather sweet really. I always thought he would grow up to be a gentleman. The two of them were constantly whispering together, about what I really don’t know. Making plans I suppose. But they grew up far too quickly, and the things Felix used to say…It is just too awful to repeat. I have to admit, as much as I loved those children in their infancy, I was glad when it was my time to leave. They didn’t need a nanny any longer, and I hated watching what was happening to those kids. I’m not sure if their parents were oblivious to this behavior, or even, god forbid, encouraged it but it would lead to nothing but pain. It was just a matter of seeing whether it would be their pain, or somebody else’s.”

                                  - Elizabeth Warner - Nanny

His father doesn’t see him the day he is born. After so many failed attempts at conceiving, and fights over miscarriages, affairs and pointing fingers, Arthur Duval leaves his very pregnant wife and his unborn son to their own mercy. It’s not because he is afraid of the responsibility of becoming a new dad, since he has long been preparing for it. But his relationship with Gertrude is starting to make him feel inadequate as a husband. And he knows deep down, that even though he will make a good father, he was not sure if the baby that was about to be born will make a good son. If he will rise to his expectations or just be a disappointment. His absence lasts two years, and when he meets Felix for the first time, he wishes to feel something. Anything that would let him know that this was his own flesh and blood. Sadly, he feels no connection to the boy standing a few feet above the ground, and who was now looking up at him with wonder in his eyes. “I’m your father”. He said the words in order to reassure himself that in fact he was his father, but the words were empty … meaningless. It takes him a few years to find affection for Felix, because everything that he does is not good enough. Arthur believes that his son is a weak link, and he tries to push him harder. He needs to be faster, smarter, and most of all, he needs to be stronger. The first time Felix cries, his father slaps him and tells him that his tears are not welcome, and that nothing will ever be gained by weeping.

Felix’s earliest memory is of his father, which in itself is strange because he can count the number of private interviews with his father on one hand, and he certainly couldn’t remember anyone pushing for intimacy between the two of them. Not that he’s complaining, Felix never wanted anything to do with him either. But this memory is of a man on man interview in his library. He remembers the sunlight filtering through a gap in the heavy velvet curtain, the spines of leather bound books lit up like holy tomes on the high wooden shelves. He was five, maybe six years old, and his ability to read was limited at best, so all of the business jargon felt like words of another world, and Felix could do nothing more then simply admire the lettering as his father asked him questions. Was he looking after his sister? Yes. If by ‘looking after’ he meant putting worms from the garden in her bed and/or pulling her hair till she cried like a girl. Did he listen to his nanny, do what he was told? Yes. Or at least, he did after she’d asked him the fifth or sixth time and boxed his ears to get his attention. He’s getting tall, he’ll be a grown man soon. Yes. Not soon enough though. When he gets older, he’ll be going off to school, is he looking forward to that? Yes. Why not, it can’t be any different then here. Felix was looking forward to that. His father asked him if his hands were clean. Obligingly Felix held them out for inspection, and his father eyed the dirty nails for a moment before proclaiming them ‘good enough’ and handing one of the books down from the top shelf. It was so heavy that he could barely open the front cover. Never mind that, turn the page. Words on paper. Family secrets. And though his young mind couldn’t quite find the words to voice it, he felt a thrill of anticipation for the future. His future. This was broader then politics, he had seen that deep place in the human psyche which told what people were really capable of. No morals, no feelings. Just power and control. He looked down at his pale, pudgy hand, and suddenly clenched it into a tight fist, nails digging into his palm and knuckles turning white.

“I went to high school at the same time as the Felix Duval. I can’t say I wanted much to do with him, even then. He looked nasty…I mean, nastier then usual. He had this dark heavy look about him, and when he smiled it was more like a smirk. He was always leaning over, chatting to his sister, and then she’d let out this mean, hard sounding laugh and point at someone different. It was obvious he didn’t care about anyone apart from their own sick little sense of fun. Felix showed his true colours pretty early. He bumped into this kid once and made him drop his bags, and Felix slapped it straight across the face as hard as he could. I couldn’t see his parents there, but even if they were, from the way he acted the probably wouldn’t be told off for it. He carried himself like he could do whatever he wanted. And all he wanted to do was be as miserable as possible.”

                                               - Jack Miller - Former classmate

When Felix was 20, he got a girl in pregnant, a girl who was unsuitable in every possible way. It didn’t soothe his mother in the least. For one thing, Felix did not know, and so he did even have that much of an excuse. For another, Gertrude could tell that Felix would never be more than mediocre if he married his trashy blonde. Even if he didn’t marry her but had an openly acknowledged illegitimate daughter. While her husband verbalises his anger and indignation, and resorts to silent icy stares instead, Gertrude sat patiently. There he is, her son, going on about accidents and fate and maybe and what if, and she could imagine him, taking the girl dancing, holding hands, forgetting every bit of caution life as a Duval ever taught him. You’re not supposed to be like this. Not you. So she gave the girl enough money to disappear. “Take care of it”, she asked of her. “And trust me child, I will know if you haven’t”

“Felix’s student record is hardly glorious. Average grades in his classes, with moments of below average. He was not a stupid child, he had an aptitude for academics which raised some people’s hopes. But he was stubborn when it came to learning - easily bored and impossible to keep on track. He lived in his own world, where knowledge was something you could pick and choose from. But he was bright. Crafty. Always searching for people’s weak spots, and taking advantage of them whenever they were shown. He was suspended from school twice. The first time was second year, he snuck some alcohol and fed it to the school’s parrot and killed it. Felix was sent him home for a week. You could tell by his bearing that he certainly didn’t get any punishment there. The second time was in sixth year, when a student was seriously injured. At first no one came forward, and then finally some fingers were pointed at the him, amongst other kids and Felix stepped forward. He pleaded an accident, but he could barely constrain that leering smile of his. Even at sixteen he had slipped away from us, and there was nothing definite to pin on him. Even the girl he hurt wouldn’t say for certain who it had been. The poor thing was frightened half to death. So he went home for two weeks, then returned to school, the dread of some of his classmates and the hero of others. It makes me feel ill to think of what he might be up to now.”

                    - Patricia Crowley, High School Principal

Felix smiled on the inside as his father died. He smiled through the funeral. He smiled through the parade of commiserating mourners; those who cared, and those who didn’t care, and those who thought they should but couldn’t. He smiled, because he’d finally learned what his father had tried so long to teach him. Victory. The true goal, the only goal. Not just to best your enemy, but to see him removed from the game forever. To be victorious. He’d struggled for so long, because he hadn’t understood. He’d wanted acknowledgement; he’d wanted his enemy to bow his head and surrender. But there was no room in victory for surrender. Only obliteration. The purpose of winning was not to see your enemy humbled. The purpose of winning was not to prove that you could do it. The purpose of winning was to win. In that moment of clarity, that moment of decision, he’d seen it all. His father had called for his help, and at last, he’d been in the position of strength. He’d been in the position to chose between mercy and victory. There was no room in business for mercy. There was no room in business for altruism. There was no room in business for emotion. Only for cold, logical decision-making.

And in that instant, he’d finally mastered the biggest secret of them all, discovered the key to that Duval detachment. The ability to assess the situation coolly, impassively, scientifically. To see the opportunity for what it was, removed from all the trappings of emotion and sentiment that could cloud his judgement. The key to victory was to destroy your enemy. Nothing less would do. And should the perfect opportunity present itself… Well, business was business. Nothing personal. It had taken him a long time to learn that secret, to find the truth in those two words, to separate himself out from his decisions and see them without emotion. Freed from that weakness, free to see them the logical way. The Duval way. His father’s way. It had taken him a long time… but now he understood. And he smiled. He smiled as he entered his father’s office, smiled as he sat at his father’s desk, smiled as he reached for the hidden compartment that he knew without a doubt had to be there. Smiled as he absorbed the secrets of a man who no longer seemed such an enigma. Yes, at last he understood Arthur Duval - and in understanding him, had finally defeated him. He’d watched his father die, with no expression on his face. And on the inside, at long last, there had been nothing. Nothing, but a secret smile. And still he smiled as he emptied out the remnants of his father’s secrets; absorbed him, consumed him, broke him down and took him over. He read reports of operations with names that had never been spoken aloud. Flicked through diaries of clandestine meetings. Skimmed contracts for underhand dealings. Lifted the last of the papers aside, and saw the photograph.

Hidden away at the bottom of the door, but cracked with age and folding; battered around the corners from twenty years of being handled. Just a photograph. His mother, looking on, her eyes alight with the softness of affection, and his father, looking down. Looking down at the baby in his hands as if it was the most precious thing the world had created.

That was when he stopped smiling.

“I’ll never forget that day. Gertrude had taken what was supposed to be a quiet dinner and turned it into another of her social gatherings, with several of my colleagues and their wives, each possessing ample conversation to fill in what my children lacked. business moguls, the lot of them. I can’t say I regretted nor noted his silence till I thought back upon the evening, he had always been quiet in my experience, and I thought it showed a proper respect for authority. But as dinner drew to a close something sparked Felix’s indignation, and he said something very shocking, which made his mother grow pale in embarrassment and would likely harm my standing amongst my colleagues. I took him aside, and if he had been younger I would of distributed justice in the usual way. But he was an adult now, and I was a little more wary of sparking his temper now then I used to be. I told him in clear terms his behavior was unacceptable, but he was still angry, and we argued. It was one of the first times I had ever heard him directly contradict me. As it grew more heated, I was worried about the guests hearing. Before I could do anything else his hand was on him and he pushed me back with such force it knocked several bookcases over and slammed me against the wall. I was winded and in pain, unable to fully realize what was happening. He walked over,  and for a moment I was actually afraid (a rare feeling for me). I thought he would do something worse. But instead he came to me, like some great act of defiance. Don’t ever contradict me again, he said. Then he walked to the doorway where his sister waited, and it was impossible to ignore the slow smile which spread upon both their faces.”

                                 - Dimitri Duval, Uncle

THE FACTS.

A child prodigy of exceptional talents, Felix was dubbed the “climax” of the Duval line, an already prestigious family of skilled business moguls that go back to the 1920′s. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for years then you’ve heard of the name. His father was a tyrant who saw him, not as a son, but as a pupil. Someone he could mold to his own image. He taught him to approach everything with a cold and detached demeanour because that would allow him to become a more rational individual. This is the reason why Felix can seem to be emotionless and almost robotic. He began working on his own at a young age, while still in school, proving that he could have made a successful career by himself even though he was born to wealth and power. He has the drive and the hunger to learn everything in his reach. So of course to him, most individuals are less than extraordinary in the brain department.

Felix can be witty and charming. A stellar actor, able to change his tone at the drop of a hat, to assume the role of a charismatic persona at will. A child prodigy of exceptional talents.  Felix is a profoundly intelligent and highly successful man, and he has an arrogance that comes along with it. Not because of his social status, but because he considers himself as being more capable. His moral stature is based on his commitment to his own mind regarding all issues of his life. He recognizes that human beings must rely on their minds for survival so to him, the worst type of individual, is one without a purpose. his characteristic mockery, his use of irony and biting derision, is always is always directed at the irrational. He laughs openly at people’s conformity and despises individuals who piggyback on the rewards of another man’s efforts. but even though he might come off as a self-absorbed asshole, his trademark mockery always supports his values.

He does not respond well to mediocrity and he can’t stand those who lack ambition and that appetite for success. Felix is not a man people like. Mostly because of his bluntness and the way his intensive use of contempt towards others, even when he is extremely polite about it. He is a very difficult man to impress and keep interested, and he has no problem letting you know about it. Still, he is not someone who hates because that emotion is too time-consuming. He can also be very selfish, because he is of the mentality that if he doesn’t put himself first, then no one else will. So he has to look after his own interests in order to be ahead of the pack.

When it comes to friendship, he likes to be impressed. he likes people not of power, but of substance. They have to have something interesting as a part of their personality, and intelligence is a big part of the package. He admires beauty, but a beautiful face does not go a long way as far as he is concerned. If you are unable to hold a conversation with him, then he is not someone who will be wasting his time trying to get to know you. His mother is eager to see him married, but Felix downright refuses, and won’t consider anything more then brief flings that bring more frustration then happiness to both parties. He is not celibate, he finds that far too difficult, but his relationships are all seedy, squalid affairs that barely deserve the title. It is a meeting of sadists, who do not expect it to result in anything, but like to put themselves in the ill-fitting roles anyway. Infatuation is the most he is ever likely to feel, for anyone who entrances him, no matter how dangerous or pointless it may be. Feelings are something he generally finds foreign, and not knowing them, he prefers to toy with them instead. Like a kitten with a ball of yarn, he feigns affection for a while, but quickly changes his mind. Given a choice between hurting someone and screwing them, Felix would probably choose pain, because at least that’s something he knows well.

 THE MUN.

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