#UNLESS i do several in a row some days or go several days without being able to post

[sn0wbat]

my first (non-revenge) attack of this year's artfight!!!

this is oscar, they belong to my friend @jumezat :3

[akingdomscrypt]

Make a Mercy Out of Me

Part Four

Pairing; König x male!reader (slow burn)

Word Count; 11.7k (I almost died editing this)

Warnings; dehumanization (of reader), drowning (nightmare?), slight panic, mentions of past torture (of reader), implied human trafficking (of reader)

A/n; Was going to have both chapters out on Halloween buuuuut this one ended up far longer than originally anticipated.

--- "trojan horse" ---

Lights out was over several hours ago. And yet here König was. Watching. Straining his ears to catch every small hitch in your breath, every twitch of your exposed fingers.

Making sure you didn't suddenly die off, really.

That would be inconvenient.

Going through all this trouble catching you just to have you die under his supervision? That would be all of the team's–all of his–time washed down the drain. And he couldn't have that, now could he?

Which is why he had dealt with your antics this morning. You had refused to eat, refused to even drink in front of him. He had assumed it to be the mask–a gross, filthy thing you still haven't removed–that kept you from putting valuable nutrients in your body. König could understand that, he wasn't the most enthusiastic about barring his deformities to strangers either.

Would it aid in the healing of your various wounds right now and probably lessen the time he had to spend categorizing every out-of-place movement you made? An obvious yes. But he wasn't your friend here, he wasn't in charge of making sure you were 'comfortable'. König was here to make sure you didn't kill anyone, yourself, or escape.

Besides–though probably sped up with how much of a beating your body had sustained–you could most likely go for another day or two without it before starvation kicked in. So he dropped the subject and let you sleep some more.

He was regretting that decision now. Somewhere after 1400, you had succumbed to one of the worst fevers he'd seen in his time. Panting like a dog and sweating buckets despite the cool air of the compound. Eyes glazed over and unfocused, you didn't even respond to your name. Not unless he shouted it in your face and snapped his fingers.

Even that was shoddy at best.

It was now somewhere between 0000 and 0100. König had decided to wait until morning to see if your fever lessened, or at the very least improved. Sure, you were a subject of interest, high interest even, but he wasn't about to rouse Colonel Vargas's medical staff for something that ended up not being an emergency.

His hesitation definitely had nothing to do with how terrified you'd looked yesterday when he had first mentioned it.

The sun had risen and you hadn't. Fever broken? Not yet. Though you were.. semi-conscious. You had been switching between mumbling words under your breath that he didn't understand–and was pretty sure was a language he didn't know–to looking like fresh roadkill; cold, limp, and staring blankly at the ceiling.

He thought you had died a handful of times. You'd even halted breathing once or twice. Then, like magic, as soon as he'd go to page Price about your near comatose state, you'd go back to drawing in deep, exaggerated breaths–if a little wheezy on the exhale.

König had decided to give you until noon before he finally called someone in to check on you.

It would be pointless, he reminds himself, if he brought someone in just for you to snap out of it when they arrived.

So he took to treating your wounds every other hour. The source of your fever, he determined, was likely infection. Surprised? Not at all. König had gotten a front-row seat to how downright filthy your injuries were when he stitched them up.

Each fresh bandage would come away just as soiled as the last when he switched them out. Coated in specks of blood here and there, yes, but an overwhelming majority was yellowish-green goo. After he'd gotten that to be somewhat manageable, König had started to apply an antiseptic over the sloppy sutures after each cleaning.

So far, under his own wishes, no one else had come into the room. He's pretty sure at some point one of the team had come by with breakfast.

König hadn't opened the door.

He, himself, wouldn't be too fond of enemies visiting him while he was so vulnerable, so why should he subject you to that? Because you are the enemy here. Because your comfort shouldn't matter.

König had only left the room a handful of times since they brought you in. Mostly to fetch a quick snack or just stretch his limbs–to get away from the stagnant, suffocating air of the room. It was, technically, his job at the moment, and wasn't at all surprising no one had come to drag him away. Which meant less time spent around crowds of soldiers he was unfamiliar with, so he wasn't complaining.

It's not until just before dusk, on the third day, that your fever finally breaks. König notes how you've stopped shivering so excessively, how the bandages he just disposed of were considerably less full of gunk. Still an angry reddish color, still a little swollen, but much less than it had been.

Another hour passes before you regain consciousness. Your words are still a bit slurred and there's a certain haze of confusion consuming your eyes, but it's much better than you've looked since they found you.

He doesn't rush to your side, doesn't make any move to assist you in figuring out where you are, or help you orientate yourself. No. He sits in the chair he's been stuck in for a little over three days and waits for you to notice him.

He doesn't coddle you when panic flashes through your irises or try to explain who he is. He doesn't even speak.

König simply stands up and makes his way to the small, en-suite bathroom and fills up the same paper cup he's offered you multiple times over. By the time he is at your side and offering the cup, he picks up on the recognition now replacing that fear.

And a hint of apprehension, but that's not his problem.

"Drink." When you give that firm shake of your head once again, he's not exactly overflowing with shock. Not even a little miffed. König just urges the flimsy cup closer and repeats himself, though a little more firm this time, "drink."

You–finally, for fuck's sake–take the cup, shaky hands and all. Then proceed to do that weird squint of your eyes at him that he's come to associate as something you do before spouting your typical bullshit. It had happened when he'd interrogated you. Then again when you pulled that little stunt in front of Price–König had still yet to deal with all of that.

Some would call it avoidance, König preferred to call it self-preservation.

And that is why this time König cuts you off before you even open your mouth.

"I'm not taking no for an answer, Maus. Drink." Too friendly. "You're of no use to me if you are delirious from dehydration. Drink."

This would all be much easier to deal with if you would just stop looking at him like that.

"What. What is it?" König grits out, letting the irritation that's been welling up inside him since day one finally seep into his tone. He hasn't even gotten more than maybe a few hours of sleep because of you! He's tired, and, yes, maybe he's a little more on edge than usual. But if you could just- stop looking at him like that.

"My bag." It takes König a little longer than he'd like to admit to realize you were even speaking. A little more to decipher what you just said. It sounded more like 'ma bach' to him.

"And? What about it?" König vaguely remembers you dropping an overstuffed duffle when he'd restrained you in that rundown complex.

"Need it." Again, it sounded more like 'ned ehh' to his ears.

"For what?" What could you possibly do with that? The team had not left it behind. Had brought it with them in case there was some decent evidence in there. Something to incriminate you with so they could keep you longer. There wasn't. "To drink?"

A nod. Alright. That's progress. He can do that.

"Wait here." Ha.

It's funny.

Because you can't leave.

König thinks he's hilarious.

It takes very little convincing on König's part to get Soap to hand it over to him. After all, they had not found anything to convict you with inside the bag. All that was required was the removal of many, many sharp objects, both hidden and not–seriously, how did that even fit there?–, before Price gave the okay and Soap handed it over.

Not before their charming Scotsman made a snide comment of, "what, he think ye poisoned it or somethin'?" But that was irrelevant.

With nothing more than a shrug, König was on his way back to you.

You sit up when the door opens then clicks shut again, lightly panting behind your mask. The little cup of water had been abandoned on the floor beside the cot. Useless to you at the moment.

You don't look up at the other man until the heavy bag is placed at the foot of the bed and, subsequently, your legs. You send him a brief glare before reaching down to pull the duffle into your lap.

While you rummage around through the mess they had made of your bag–praying to a god you don't believe in that they didn't take it out, that would be extremely inconvenient right now–König retrieves the water.

"You know," he says at the same time that white paper cup enters your peripheral. "Would be a lot easier if you just took that off. It's filthy."

You look up with your eyes only, narrowing them as your fingers finally wrap around the cool piece of metal you'd been searching for–not even close to the little pocket you'd left it in.

You don't take your eyes off of him as you pull it out–a thin, reusable straw–other hand reaching up to take the cup. Placing the metal straw inside, adjusting the height of it so it doesn't fit inside too awkwardly.

You would take the damn thing off if you could.

One hand holding the cup, the other deftly keeps the straw in place as you bring it to your face. Slipping it under the small slit in your mask, just below your mouth.

There was only one problem.

You can't.

The cloth was filthy; coated in mud and plant matter, bodily fluids and the sort. You'd give anything to have it removed.

Removed.

Because you couldn't simply take the damn thing off. Couldn't replace the ratty old thing. Not unless you paid a visit to your home base, and you'd rather fucking die than do anything of the sort.

You could tell him. König would probably remove it, or have someone else take it off for you. Not because he was interested in your comfort, no, but because it would be beneficial to his cause.

Something inside you, some mental blockade, keeps you from uttering those words. Keeps that freeing phrase lodged in your throat.

Besides, it wasn't always this dirty. You cleaned it.. sometimes. Whenever you could. It was awkward and involved a lot of water being sprayed at your face–and after nearly waterboarding yourself the last time, you weren't too eager to do it again.

"Thanks." You mumble when you finish off the small cup. You mean it; the cool water was refreshing after being deprived of it for so long. Soothing your sore throat and filling your empty stomach.

"More?" König asks, reaching out a gloved hand–bloodied, worn glove. Your blood.

All you can do is nod and pass it back to him; you are parched. It would take a lot more than a tiny cup to make up for days without proper hydration.

You end up having König refill the cup a few more times before you finally just place it on the ground again. Then you fold up the straw into a smaller stick, tuck it into your pocket, and lean back against the wall.

You're hit with a wave of exhaustion as you do so, muscles still sore and injuries aching. Distantly so, your shoulder burning, thigh throbbing, but infinitely better. You made sure to make a conscious effort to keep your previously relocated shoulder in place; still feeling a dull pain where the bones interlocked.

Being pretty experienced in the realm of having your body manipulated and pushed to its limits, you knew keeping the joint as immobile as possible was your best bet for a speedy recovery.

You just wanted to get some fucking sleep.

Having been surviving off an hour or two of sleep every other day, your body was fully prepared to take advantage of the lack of action. To finally catch up on all the rest you'd been missing out on.

Sleep deprivation was nothing new to you, you were built and molded to withstand far worse–you just didn't want to. Not if you could finally take a moment to yourself; even if that meant spending it in enemy territory.

König would probably let you sleep; more about keeping you in a decent enough shape. A part of you resisted the idea still–even if another insisted you should take advantage of healing as much as you could before torture was inevitably introduced. Your mind is just barely present enough to keep you from letting your guard down anymore than you already had.

Vaguely, you recall the other man hovering over you once in a while while you were delirious from the fever. The memories drift in and out of your half-conscious mind, just barely out of reach, but you get the impression König was tending to your wounds as you slept. Keeping you alive and in just barely good enough shape for whatever he and his crew of misfits wanted from you.

Hell, you couldn't care about that right now. Couldn't muster any part of you to give a single fuck about what they wanted you for; when you'd offered yourself up it had been out of anger. Desperation. Wanting to get some petty revenge on your handler. Now you were.. not necessarily regretting it, but you weren't fond of it anymore either.

"Should get some sleep." König's voice breaks your quickly spiraling thoughts. Looking up, you notice the man is still standing. If you didn't know any better, you'd almost said the behemoth of a man appeared nervous. Standing there, hovering by the door, bright blue eyes locked on you, bloody, gloved fingers twitching now and again.

You only give a soft hum of acknowledgment, keeping your own gaze pinned on his. You notice how the literal giant mass of muscle and cloth shifts his weight now and again. Anxious, you'd say, awkward.

"It's late, and you need to heal." König continues when you don't say anything. You'd find it funny–seeing the intimidating pillar of a man acting so skittish–if you weren't so fucking tired. "I'll leave you to it then."

And with that, König leaves. You had half a mind to call out to him, to ask him to stay. That, for once in your life, you didn't really want to be alone.

That this room too closely resembled the one that haunted you still, even after all these years. Too cold, too dull, too sterile.

But that would ruin whatever picture of you he held in his mind. Would look too much like cowardice. Because you should be able to handle it, you shouldn't be so damn terrified when confined within four walls. Should be better than this.

So you don't raise your voice, don't ask him to stay. Can't force the vibration into your vocal cords, can't help but feel that doing so would make you look weak. Instead, you watch as König turns on his heel and opens the door, shutting and locking it firmly behind him with a dull click.

At least König had left the light on. You're almost certain you would've spiraled if he hadn't.

Silence ate at you when alone. Only indoors, though. When you were outside and could smell the fresh air through your mask, the wind against your exposed skin, and hear the crunch of leaves and foliage under your boots; that was a whole other story.

Tolerable. Comforting, even. Not this. Never this.

It is better, when you take a look at the bigger picture. Better than that smaller, dark room. Pitch black, unable to even see your own hands in front of you. Can reach out an arm but only extend it halfway on either side before your fingers brush cold metal.

Better than the water.

Frigid liquid starts in a slow trickle from the four corners of the box–The Box–and gradually fills it up. Until you're drowning. Until you're forced to take that final breath, bitter, freezing water–was it even water??–leaking into your mouth. Staining your tongue; having to choose between risking spitting it out, taking the chance of more replacing what is dispelled, or holding it in your mouth until you're free again. But not swallow, never swallow.

You can hear her. Hear all of them. Talking, whispering, laughing. Not the other Predators, not them, not the ones like you.

Her. You've never seen her. It's her and a few of her associates, then your handler. Your handler doesn't laugh. She's silent. But you know she's watching, know she's counting down each second until your release.

Your chest is seizing, trying desperately to force you to take a breath, to draw in air. You have to ignore it, ignore the impulse, even as your chest screams, your lungs burn, as your brain begins to grow fuzzy from lack of oxygen.

You can hear every vile word spoken, every taunt and joke made at your expense. The implants permanently placed into your skull allowing you to hear every rustle of clothing, every dehumanizing spat. No matter how badly you'd like to tune it all out.

They know you can hear them. Can hear the whisper of her adding more time, the surprise that you haven't fainted yet, the mutterings calling you it, the scribbling of pen on paper.

They know you can hear. And that's exactly why they do it. Why they call you it, a thing, nothing more than a tool. An object. A product made to be contracted, be rented out to greedy generals, but not a person. Never a person.

Only a thing.

Made to be used. To be trained. To take orders without question. Like a dog–like a mutt.

You're failing. You can feel it. The lack of oxygen to your brain is starting to affect you, exhaustion weighing heavily on your submerged body. Your limbs have long since lost feeling, numb where they lay somewhere in The Box.

You can't hear them anymore. Only your own hazy mind, your own pounding heart. You're failing, falling, giving out.. can't last,

Slow heartbeat, dull, harsh thuds in your ribcage,

Numb, tingling limbs,

Soaked body, soaked mind, soaked and heavy clothes,

Weighing you down,

down,

down,

down.

You wake with a start, sucking in a sharp lungful of air, eyelids snapping open. Adjusting to a bright, bright room.

You're not in The Box. You're here. Where exactly here is, you have no idea.

You don't even remember falling asleep.

The first thing König does when he leaves you is take a shower. He's absolutely filthy. Or at least that's how he feels after not having the chance to wash away the sweat and blood from the day of your capture. For almost a week.

He feels gross and sticky in his own body, and König finds himself even more relieved than usual that he hadn't had to interact with many people. Didn't quite feel like burning their sense of smell out for good.

Sure, he was a soldier. Sure, there were times when he had to go a few days without a proper shower. That didn't make it any better.

His mother had taught him good hygiene, amongst other important things, and he'd be damned if he didn't listen to her. Even from across the globe.

The water–though lukewarm and lacking pressure–feels good on his unwashed skin. König had to duck down a bit to clean his shaggy, russet hair and upper torso, but that wasn't anything new. Majority if not all showers and other everyday things were often too small for him.

With the exception of the one in his mother's home. The two of them had broken down and reconstructed his small, personal bathroom in ninth year, when he hit a sudden growth spurt and it was clear he wasn't stopping anytime soon.

König had always been a tall, lanky child. This fact had been the source of his insecurity since he started school–the other kids latching onto this fact and using it against him. He stood out, and that, coupled with his chronic social anxiety, only made him an easy target.

He had been ashamed of his height then–often hunching in on himself in a vain attempt to seem smaller than he was–, but that was not the case now. König's height was an advantage in his line of work, something he had grown to be proud of over the years. Especially now that he put so much time and effort into turning his body into the perfect fighting machine through bulky muscle and healthy fat.

König still didn't particularly enjoy standing out, but it was better when what was once an insecurity for him was met with a healthy dose of fear and awe.

Thankfully, no one was there but him. The majority of the other people on the base are most likely having dinner around this time.

So he secures a towel around his waist and, feeling thoroughly refreshed and almost like a new man after his shower, he steps out of the tiny, curtained-off room and into the main part of the communal locker room.

Having no one else around gave König the opportunity to pull out a clean, sharp knife and delicately carve away the scruffy stubble along his jaw and upper lip–the hairs always poked through the layers of fabric on his face and it bothered him.

König's work was quick and efficient, much like most of the things he did. Running the smooth blade over and between the rises and dips of his skin. Scar tissue didn't grow hair, obviously, but the annoying spaces in between marred flesh did, so that's what König was shaving off.

Seeing his own face didn't bother him, despite what most would probably think. König sometimes thought the scars were cool; it really added to his scare factor. Then again, so did the hood he wore.

He didn't wear the fabric draped over his face because he was insecure or ashamed of his scarring–König actually considered himself a pretty average-looking man, minus the scars. It was more for anonymity and he really, really didn't feel like dealing with all the stares it would garner everywhere he went. It also helped König with his social anxiety to have that thin cloth separating him from everyone else. And he'd be damned if he was going to let his scars become the new target instead of his height.

It's still too early to return to you or go to bed himself when König finishes. He ends up throwing on the fresh clothes he'd brought with him, tugging on a more everyday mask in place of the hood, and pulling his still-damp hair into a loose low ponytail. Keeping the wild, wavy strands out of his face–the ends of it just barely brushing his shoulders.

Then König gathers up his filthy clothes and gear and makes his way into the hall. This facility isn't exactly new to him, had been here a few times with the rest of the team, but that didn't make it any less confusing to be in. Still a bit foreign to him.

Even so, he manages to find his way back to the room he'd left you in, drop off his clothes–and hide his gear somewhere he knew you couldn't reach–, then to where his teammates sat chatting in the common room.

Ghost sat on one side of the room, the furthest end of the couch, with Soap squeezed in right next to him. The two communicating in low rumbles and small chuckles. Rudy sat on the other end of that same couch; talking in soft mutterings to the man sitting in the chair to his left.

Gaz was, surprisingly, not currently present, but Price was. Sitting tense and deep in thought in one corner of the sofa opposite the other, scrolling through something on his phone.

Shit. Price. He doubted the captain would bring up that little stunt you pulled a few days ago in front of Alejandro and Rudy, but König couldn't be too certain.

He's about to back out of the room when Soap calls out his name–damn him. Not really, but König was hoping to leave undetected. A little difficult for a man of his size, but still.

"König! There ye are, haven't seen ye in ages."

König freezes in his tracks, sending the Scot a small, professional smile from behind his mask.

"You saw me this afternoon, Soap."

"Righ', righ'." Soap waves off, giving König a more playful grin than the taller man had put on. "S' wha' the lad need with the damn thin' anyhow? He pull out somethin' 'tae test it or..?"

König, resigning himself to his fate, walks over to take a seat on the same couch as Price. On the furthest end from their captain.

"A straw."

This gets Ghost's attention. "'M guessin' he didn't take the mask off for ya then?"

"Didn't expect him to." Price looks up from his phone then, all three of the other men giving him a deadpan stare.

"Do not look at me like that." König grumbles, attention tuning in to the approaching footsteps.

"Don't look at who like what?" Gaz says as he enters the room, several random snacks in hand, giving them all a curious look. When his gaze lands on König, Gaz gives a small, half-grin and chucks one of the snacks at him. "What are you guys on about?"

König fumbles a bit, but catches what looks to be some type of protein bar? He gives Gaz an appreciative nod and replies,

"Nothing important."

At the same time, Soap says,

"König's wee fixation."

König sends Soap a glare, tearing open the package. Gaz shrugs, walking over to seat himself between König and Price. Nonchalant, as if none of this is new to him. He throws a few snacks at the other men as well as he sits.

"It is not a fixation." König grumbles, sounding more like a petulant child than the grown-ass man he is. He spares a glance towards Rudy, who seems amused by the whole thing, then Alejandro, who is now tapping away on his phone. Neither of them seem to be paying any special attention to him specifically, so König decides to tug the mask down.

He's hungry, dammit, and, out of all people, this little group right here were the last ones König would expect to make jabs at his scars.

"Oh, it's not?" Price. The man looks a little amused. König is not. "Then what would ya call him, hm?"

"A subject of interest." The first bite of the protein bar unlocks a ravenous hunger in König that the man hadn't been anticipating. Made sense, really, considering he hadn't been taking the greatest care of himself while watching over you these past few days–had a habit of forgetting when he got involved in something. Food included.

As König had expected, no one even bats an eye at his revealed face, and König feels as though a weight has been lifted off his shoulders.

Much like Ghost, the others had all seen him before–Price especially, the man had his file after all–and still didn't look at König differently. Which had also been a great relief, knowing he didn't have to hide his disfigured skin from what had become his, fairly close, teammates.

"Riiight." Soap drawls, opening the small bag Gaz had thrown at him. "Tha's what we're callin' this then?"

"There is no this, Soap." König says after he swallows his last bite, crumbling up the wrapper and shoving it into his pocket to throw out later. He was still practically starving, but he figured he could find something else later. He pulls the mask back up.

"He is needed to further our investigation."

"An' tha's why ye stayed with 'im fur several days?"

"Without once leavin', I might add." Ghost tacks on, a slight crinkling in the corners of his eyes that tells König the man also finds his suffering humorous.

It's not entirely true. König had left. Once and a while when you seemed mostly stable. Not that the others would know this considering he never crossed paths with them.

"Had to make sure he didn't die."

"Speaking of the him in question," Alejandro–the fucking saint that he is–interrupts, flicking his eyes around the room and pocketing his phone. "Just who exactly did you guys bring onto my base?"

"Yeah," Rudy tacks on. "Into our country, no less."

König, a little more than surprised Price hadn't informed the two men who were currently housing them and their prisoner, sends Price a look that says just as much.

"I was going to have this discussion a lot sooner," Price rumbles, "but I was waiting for you to join us, König."

König frowns at this, a slight pull on his eyebrows as he observes his Captain.

"Waiting for me?"

"Ye did kinda ignore us fur the past few days."

"Too occupied with his, mm, subject of interest, 't join us." Ghost adds, still not out of his playful mood, it seemed.

Gaz sends König a brief, amused glance before turning away again.

König ignores the two bastards on the other side of the room and keeps his own gaze on Price instead.

"Why did you need me, Captain?" König really was a little confused.. he had only been with the bunch for almost a year. During the tail end of the team's hunt for literal missiles and so on. He wasn't exactly a.. to put it bluntly, a vital part of the team.

"You shared a few words with him before we came here." Oh no. This now felt more like an intervention than anything. "I need to know what those were."

Alejandro looks between the two with a puzzled expression of his own. "Were you not with them, Captain?"

"I was," Price doesn't take his eyes off König. König suddenly finds a spot on the floor very interesting. "They weren't speakin' in a language I could understand."

This only confuses the two men further, both of whom share a quick glance. A silent conversation between them. Then König feels both of their eyes on him.

His skin crawls, he feels exposed, he shouldn't have come out here, he should've worn the hood.

König's words suddenly feel stuck in his throat, and he clears it subtly.

"It wasn't relevant to the mission, sir." He mumbles, still refusing to tear his gaze away and look over at his captain.

"So you say." Price replies easily. "And yet you still won't tell me."

"He.." König hesitates, starting up a nervous bounce of his knee. "He asked me if I had considered his- his.. offer."

"His offer?" Price asks at the same time Gaz says, "Did you?"

"He is here, isn't he?"

"Is there anything you all know about the stranger you've brought into my home?" Alejandro says, drawing the conversation back onto its track.

There's a small, tense pause before anyone speaks up.

"We, uh.. we know he was abandoned..?" Gaz says, turning to Price. "..right?"

"As far as we know, yes."

König takes that moment to glance up, catching the slight widening of Rudy's eyes.

"Is that all you know?"

Another silence.

"I'd ask if he's dangerous, but I feel that much is obvious." Alejandro deadpans, sighing before continuing, "How long have you been on his tail? Do you have a file?"

"Yes."

"..is there much in it?"

"..no."

Another sigh, Rudy this time, before the same man asks,

"What exactly did you all expect to gain by keeping him?"

Soap lands a very pointed stare on König.

"Don't you dare, Soap." König mutters quickly. "It is not a.. fixation, it's a-"

"A subject of interest, right." Ghost huffs, mood dimmed a little more back to his usual self to König's great relief.

"He said he could help-"

"Yes, an' help with what exactly-"

"-d'ye think he'd-"

"-pretty sure he'd be able to if we asked him-"

"Ay!" Rudy barks out, snapping the other men's focus towards him. "Does this guy even have a name?"

Oh. Right.

"Mouse." They all say in unison, sans Price, before returning to their conversation.

"Mouse?" Alejandro muses. Then he turns and mutters a few quick words to Rudy in Spanish, the other man snickering in turn.

König couldn't blame him, they'd all been pretty amused by it when they first heard it, too. Made only more entertaining once one noticed how small you were. Not just when compared to König, but all of them.

König was pretty certain he'd seen literal children much taller than you.

"Strange name and what-ifs aside," Price sighs, then looks over at König. "Is he stable?"

"Yes."

"Alive, stable, or able to do a quick run with us, stable?"

".. I would give him a few days more," König answers, taking a second to think it over first. "Then he should be able to walk straight."

Pride nods. A tad confused, König asks,

"Did we get a hit, sir, is that what this is about?"

"We do have.. something."

"And?" Ghost this time, their tiny conversation having drawn the attention of all the other men in the room.

"And." Price emphasizes. "Laswell and her fiends of informants have given us an approximate 't the bomber's possible location."

"Here?" Alejandro says at the same time Soap says, "where?"

"It is nearby..ish," Price says. "A border city. I don't have any of the specifics right now, but we will know more within the week."

He then gives König a pointed look, "A few days from now. That should be plenty 'a time for Mouse to recover, yes?"

"Ja," König agrees, not knowing if it was true but, well, they just needed you to not pass out every other minute and be able to walk on your own. "Can I ask what we need him for?"

"You said it yourself he wanted to help." There were two types of Price smiles; warm and welcoming or deceivingly threatening. This time was one of the latter. "I say we bring him along as a sort of.. test. See if his story holds up under pressure."

"Not to overstep, Captain, but couldn't you use.. other tactics to get the truth from him?" Alejandro asks. "If you want, I'm sure I could get some of my men to-"

"No." König cuts in before Price can respond, the former giving the Colonel what could only be described as a death stare.

"Why not? Certainly, it would help speed things along-"

"I appreciate the offer, Colonel, but there is a sort of.." Price narrows his gaze at König, silently conveying a clear command for the other man to shut his mouth. König huffs, looking away. "An unspoken agreement against using the more traditional methods of gathering information."

"Cannae be harmin' König's wee fixation, now ken we?" Soap's light jab dissolves the slight tension that had been building in the room.

And, for once, König finds himself grateful for the tease. Though he still gives a bemoaned,

"It is not a fixation!"

You're tense, König can tell. He also gets the feel it has more to do with something other than the fact you were.. well, not in a cell. But a confined room. Definitely not the same thing.

König visited you less often now that you weren't at risk of bleeding out or dying of infection in your sleep. The man had assumed you'd be, maybe not ecstatic, but relieved that he wasn't around as often. It appeared that his absence had caused the opposite effect.

You ate.. some, and when he wasn't around. Drank, too, whenever you felt like it. Your injuries were healing spectacularly as well; no longer open, leaking wounds, but instead slightly irritated, closed lines. Would definitely scar, but König knew that was probably the least of your worries.

It frustrated him to no end that he couldn't figure out what was wrong with you–it wasn't physical, that much was obvious. You were a puzzle he couldn't decipher, and that left an unpleasant taste in König's mouth.

He was about ready to burst after two days of dealing with your attitude–not at all playful like it usually was–and bitter mood. Mentally preparing himself to just ask you straight out–even though it wasn't at all guaranteed he'd get an answer–when it all came to a head on day three.

You are about ready to combust when the door clicks open; breathing quick, heavy gulps of air while you pace the length of the small room. Having pulled on your gloves–finding an extra pair in your bag–for the first time in over a week, you were now using the familiar feel of rough fabric to ground yourself. Rubbing it over the skin of your forearms in quick, aborted motions.

Why did she leave? She abandoned you. The full weight of your situation was just now hitting you– she abandoned you.

Were you really that much of a fucking problem? You tried, you really did, tried not to be too much of a drag on her–but you had a habit of racking up stacks of paperwork like they were trophies.

You had always been her most problematic subject; having the blood of one of your own squad mates on your hands didn't help either. But you tried, you tried so hard to make up for it–that's one of the main reasons you had gone on this years-long solo operation.

To take a bit of the weight, the workload that was simply you, off your handlers' shoulders.

When did you become too much? When had she decided she didn't want you anymore?

Was it the murder? The attempted escape–a foolish thing really, you'd never felt so stupid–, the snarky attitude? The way you pushed and pushed and pushed and never let up?

What were you even supposed to do now? You'd never been without that voice in your ear, telling you what to do and when to do it–you didn't know what to do with yourself without it.

"Maus?" Shit. Right. You'd forgotten König was there.

"What." You grit, not even bothering to look up as you continue to pace. Back and forth, back and forth- Repetition, now that was something you knew.

"Sit down. All this pacing is.. stressing me out."

You pause, feet anchoring to the ground as you lock onto the other man.

"Oh?" You huff, feeling the panic begin to morph into the more familiar, welcomed burn of anger. "You are stressed?"

"Ja," he deadpans, giving you that familiar blank stare you'd come to associate with the other man. Irritation, arrogance, boredom– or all three. "I am. Because of you."

"Well my sincerest apologies for the inconvenience." You say, plastering on a fake smile beneath your mask; sarcasm oozing through every word. "But you're not the one who got fucking abandoned, are you? Zasraný bastard!" (Fucking bastard!)

You spat the last part, seething as you turn the rest of your body to face König head on. Slowly, you stalk closer until you're within touching distance. So close you have to nearly snap your neck in half to look up at the giant.

"You do not understand, do you? You arrogant fuck." Your tone is considerably low considering the harsh words spilling from your mouth. All the emotions that had been building up inside you since that day everything went to shit finally breaking free. Manifesting as misdirected anger–or maybe justifiable, according to you. "You and your rag-tag group of fuckin' misfits do not know the first thing of me. Know only what you are told."

This is probably the most you've spoken since your capture. When you were loopy from blood loss.

"So do not come in here, come to me and tell me that I am the problem. That it is me causing the stress." You're too wound up to care about reading whatever fucking emotions flashes through König's eyes. Too pissed off to worry about deciphering his unnecessarily complicated feelings. "You are not the one who was left. Left by the person who has been with you for your entire life. I am not weak, I am not your pet, so do not talk to me like I am- kurva, a damn idiot." (Fuck.)

"Maus."

"What."

His tone is a lot calmer than you had been expecting. You have half a mind to curse him out about not listening to a damn word you have to say–then you remember who you're talking to and quickly bite your tongue.

In lieu of saying anything, König simply reaches into his pocket and pulls something out. A piece of paper. Then he holds it out to you, you recognize the worn parchment and stains.

Oh.

The paper.

You don't take it, flicking your eyes between the folded note and the other's gaze. Anger quickly melts away into confusion.

"Why are you giving me this?"

"Scheiß. Und er nennt mich den Idioten." König mutters under his breath. The words spoken too fast for you to pick up on much more than the familiar curse.

"Take it." König brings the paper closer, pressing it to your chest and giving a light shove. "And read it again."

With an annoyed huff and a glare, you take a step back, distancing yourself, and snatch the folded note from his hand.

Carefully–not wanting to accidentally tear the poor thing that had already lost the majority of its structural integrity–you unfold it.

Holding the fragile thing between gloved, delicate fingers, you squint. Trying to see past the mud stains and water marks. After more than a little staring, you finally catch the vague, washed-out red.

At first, you assume it's blood–your blood, more specifically. Then, upon closer inspection, you realize that the color is just slightly off. Even watered-down blood would retain some of its darker undertones–would turn a brownish color instead of pink.

The words are too blurred to make sense of- but you know that red. None of that hot, burning anger flows through you now. Molten lava converting into frigid, paralyzing recognition.

König seems to take your silence as a good thing and murmurs a triumphant, "I will go inform Captain Price that you are ready, see you later, Maus."

And just like that, König leaves you with another little fact that shatters your entire worldview.

Only it's not the clue he probably thinks it is.

An hour. That is how long you are given before one of the only two men whose name you didn't know comes to collect you–short hair, dark brown skin.

You are given a set of less dirty clothes to slip into–not a shower though, irritatingly enough–then you're being corralled down multiple twists and turns until you are forced into a meeting room of some sort.

There are several men and women you don't recognize seated around and standing near a long, rectangular table. The man who had brought you here urges you into a seat near the center of a row of chairs, Ghost–you had heard the name in passing when König was rambling to your semi-conscious body–and the other man whose name you did not know stood directly behind you.

The man who'd brought you here sits on your right.

All eyes are on you, you can feel it, burning holes into your mask. You chose to ignore them, keeping your gaze locked firmly on the metal table in front of you. Analyzing and taking note of every flaw and imperfection; man-made and not. Natural wear from years of use and manufacturer error.

Much to your relief, it's not too long before König and the captain enter the room; followed by two men who, surprise surprise, you also don't know.

One taller than the other, tanned skin and dark hair. One with scruffy facial hair and the other clean-shaven.

The shorter one instantly locks onto you, doing a quick once over of your hunched form before trapping your gaze with his own.

After what feels like an eternity, the man's eyes flick from you, over to König, then back to you. He frowns, then turns away.

Only a few seconds have passed and now Price and the two new ones are seated at the head of the table. König takes his place on your left.

Then the meeting begins.

A loyalty test. That's what the captain calls it. Gaze locked on yours when the others, apart from the little crew surrounding you, leave the meeting room.

And now you're here, unarmed and on the outskirts of a strange city you didn't even know existed until now.

The buildings are tall and tightly clustered together. Streets empty and windows–at least the ones not shattered–boarded or blackened out. Not a single ounce of movement or sound besides the rustle of wind now and then; blowing around loose papers and other trash.

The whole thing is eerie; every nerve in your body is alert, muscles tense and ready to spring into action at any notion of a threat.

Movement flashes in your peripheral somewhere to your immediate right and your hand instinctively reaches for the knife you keep stashed on your hip. Only your fingers curl around nothing, hand coming up empty when you bring it back up. You frown slightly at the lack of weapon in your gloved palm.

"Relax, Mouse." Gaz–you had finally been properly introduced to everyone, learning new names and confirming the ones you'd already known–, having been the source of the disturbance, says. "It's just me."

A small grunt of acknowledgment is your only response, returning your attention to the city looming ahead. Gaz's words weren't exactly comforting–and likely weren't meant to be. You were still their prisoner. They were your enemy just as much as whoever lay within the limits of this city was.

Which is why your nerves are not only shot to high hell for whatever the fuck was going on in the city, but also keenly analyzing and tracking every minuscule twitch of the team around you.

"Alright, boys," Price speaks up, coming into view on your right, standing beside Gaz. "Just like we discussed. Soap and Ghost on me, Gaz, you're with König. We'll split, clearing out each side, and regroup in the middle."

He completely disregards you. As if you were nothing but an accessory.

"Keep your eyes peeled for anythin' out of place. Intel says target should be in center building, sixth floor, but we shouldn't rule out possible interference. Living or not. Expect resistance, 'specially as we get further in."

Being a passive object in an operation was nothing new to you.

Ghost and Soap come to stand off to your left and König is an unmistakable presence behind you.

"RV 'round back, Nik'll be waiting for us. And, Gaz?"

"Yes, Cap'?"

Price's eyes flick to you, then behind you to König. The captain gives a small, pointed tilt of his head to Gaz.

"Keep an eye on the cargo, will ya?"

"'Course, sir. I'll make sure 't keep the," now it's Gaz's turn to spare a glance to the man looming behind you, a small pull at the corner of his mouth. Gone in an instant. "Subject of interest in clear view."

You bristle slightly at the choice words, it felt like you were missing out on something. An inside joke, perhaps? About you?

"Alright then, let's get on with it."

There's a chorus of 'yes sirs' around the group, sans you, and then a nod from Price. Ghost, Soap, and the captain split off to head off to the right, using the blanket of night as their only cover.

You turn away as soon as they're out of sight, redirecting your attention to the other two men now on either side of you.

"You heard the captain," Gaz says. "On with it."

You find yourself wishing you doned the original gear given to you when you became a Predator. The hooded cowl, full black outfit, and, of course, all your weapons and tools, would be extremely useful right now. Perfect for this little mission you lot were on; would let you blend into the dark of night much more seamlessly than the oversized clothing you'd been given.

There was that, and then there was the only piece of equipment you were handed. A throat mic; a snug piece of elastic that was always on, listening to every breath you took and every word you didn't say. You wouldn't be surprised if there were a tracker inside it as well.

A collar, ironic, really, but fitting. Adorning you just like the dog object you had always been. It was nothing new to you.

As a Hatchling, when on any operation, solo or not, you had been made to wear something similar. Only it had more of a.. bite to it. Sewn into the nape of your neck and would emit a stinging shock if whoever was overseeing your progress deemed you uncooperative.

This was an upgrade in comparison.

The clothes, however, were not, and you were glad you'd been able to keep the boots you'd been captured in.

König, the giant bastard–you had no clue why he had given you that note, was there a more malicious intent behind the act?–, was surprisingly good at keeping a low profile. Moving through the shadows with a kind of efficiency some second-year Hatchlings couldn't even manage–they'd have to do better if they wanted to survive.

Then again, the only lighting was the waning gibbous of a moon in the sky, an array of stars, and the dim, flickering street lights.

So, really, not that difficult of a feat.

It also wasn't hard to be silent with one's strides when only sand was underfoot, so you couldn't give props to König for that either.

Oh, now look at that, your little trio had finally made it to the first building. It's about damn time.

Slow, the two of them. Like sloths.

That was an insult to sloths around the globe.

The side door is jammed shut, not budging under either of the two's weight, and the idea of kicking it in was quickly abandoned; that wouldn't help at all with keeping a low profile.

Instead, you all have to resort to slowly yet efficiently peeling the piece of cloth nailed into the window frame to get in. Only after that are you three able to climb through the window and into the first building. König radios in your all's progress and is met with a similar update from Soap.

There is a quick sweep of the ground floor before Gaz splits off to investigate the room on the left, König dragging you to one that veers off to the right.

You three regroup at the base of the stairway and slowly work up to the next floor, Gaz leading and König keeping up the back, squishing you between the two.

It doesn't take long to clear out the first building–three floors total and a roof–, having been met with zero resistance, and soon enough your group is infiltrating building two.

The city is so closely knit, each alley only about a meter apart, that the transition time from one building to another may as well be non-existent. The amount of floors on each varies, but the layouts of each are pretty much the same. This makes for an even faster clearing time.

The three of you continue the same method of sweeping each floor and building–Gaz going solo on one side of a hallway, you and König working through the other–for the next few buildings and soon enough you all are halfway through.

"Bravo Six 't Gaz, how's it on your end?"

You're on a transition between another grouping of buildings, working on breaching the next. Gaz doesn't look away from where you and König are meticulously picking at another window covering when he radios back.

"Dead silent, sir."

There's a brief moment of static before the captain's voice cuts through again.

"Keep pushing, there's gotta be something here. Out."

"It has been very quiet." König speaks up as the last shreds of cloth are peeled back.

"Too quiet." Gaz agrees.

Then you three are climbing through the vacant window frame, rubber soles landing soundlessly against another tiled floor.

The immediate atmosphere is.. different from the other buildings you all had combed through. Stagnant and full of dust? Yes. Though it was the underlying energy of the structure that sent your nerves alight, a sense of foreboding crawling up your spine.

You can tell the others had registered the change in ambiance just as you had; a tension in König's broad shoulders and a deep frown settling on Gaz's lips.

The search of the first floor comes up empty; the small half bath, living space, kitchenette, and tiny closet not hiding anything spectacular within their walls.

The second floor yields the same results, this time with two minimalist bedrooms and another half bath.

Gaz sends König a look, having a silent conversation with the taller man, then the two of them turn to you. Gaz steps away from the stairway, eyes flicking over to you now.

"Maus," König says, voice low as he breaks the heavy silence. "How 'bout you take point?"

You know it's not a question but an order, a test to see if you'll follow any command given; even with the unsettling undercurrent of the atmosphere. If you'll take it in stride or cower behind like the mutt you are.

You briefly analyze the two with a look of your own before nodding and quietly stepping to the front.

It's not until you're halfway up the stairs that you hear the ticking. A faint, almost unintelligible sound you probably wouldn't be able to catch if not for your enhanced hearing.

You pause, holding up a hand for the others behind you.

"What's wrong?" Gaz whispers.

You bring that same hand down to tap your forefinger against your ear instead, still not taking your eyes off the entrance of the third floor that looms ahead. You hear König mutter something to Gaz, likely transmitting your actions to the other man.

A passive thought passes through you; that the others most likely didn't have the same enhancements you did. Couldn't see in the dark or hear the chitters of mice from a mile away like you could.

This, though, this wasn't mice.

You knew deep down, really, what it was. You still found yourself hoping you were wrong.

When you don't move Gaz speaks again.

"I don't hear anything." Well I do, you think bitterly.

Still, you push yourself to move again, forcing each foot in front of the other as you climb up the remaining half of the steps.

You don't even have to look in the other rooms to see it.

"Scheiß." König breathes out from behind you.

The two now standing beside you could probably only see the vague outline of it, the flashing of red bulbs on top, but you.. you can see the whole thing.

You don't follow Gaz as the man steps forward, bringing his flashlight over the literal ticking time bomb. A mess of wires and tubes, crisscrossing over the faded shades of grey of what is clearly some type of explosive.

Many explosives, wrapped up tightly together into one mega bomb by duct tape and wires.

"Told you I heard something." You grumble.

"Yeah, but how-" Gaz shakes his head, sighing. "Nevermind."

Then Gaz brings his hand up to the radio strapped to his vest, holding down the small button.

"Captain," he says, voice stiff. "We have a problem."

There's a brief opening and closing of the other line, a short wave of static, and Gaz takes this as a sign to keep going.

"Explosives. Sixth building, third floor."

It only takes a few seconds before a response comes through. "Say again?"

"They've got fuckin' bombs, sir."

There's another pause, brief chatter, then Soap speaks over the radio waves next.

"Seems we've both got tha' problem."

Your own feet stay rooted to the ground as the two others investigate the bomb, trading clipped words with the other half of their team. Trying to figure out how to defuse it–if it can even be defused. Soap says it's possible, but there's an edge to his tone and you can hear exactly as to why.

The ticking, the underlying buzz of energy snaking through the wires, is steadily speeding up.

You don't have time.

In a split second, you make a decision, turning on your heel and charging out of the room. Down to the bottom floor, through the side door, and ramming into the next building. It doesn't matter if you make noise now, whoever set these explosives up obviously knew someone was coming.

Heavy footfalls behind you–reminiscent of your days' capture–, you know you're being followed. You don't care, you have to be sure.

The ticking is louder this time, you barely make it halfway to the second floor before that rhythmic beat is making itself known.

Identical to the one before, in the center of the building, the center of the room.

"Mouse, what the hell- oh."

You turn again, rushing out of the room and down the stairs once more. Passing a startled König halfway down who hurries to turn and catch up with you.

"Captain, we've got another-" Gaz is still upstairs, now making his way down, and you hear him as clearly as you would if you were standing right beside him.

By the fourth confirmed bomb, only a singular building out from where all six of you were supposed to meet up, everything is starting to add up.

Why the building you all had swept through had been completely empty, abandoned even by its invasive occupants. You wouldn't be surprised if the target wasn't here at all–only their lackeys to set up the charges.

Whoever had informed Price had received either incorrect or intentionally deceiving intel.

A trap, and now all six of you were stuck in it.

"König, Gaz, forget the damn explosives an' get the hell out of there-!" Price shouts over the comms and you hear it before you feel it.

A low hum, faint ticking, a final, louder click before the noise stops altogether.

The three of you are at the bottom of the last building you'd investigated, the ground rumbles beneath you, accompanied by an ear-splitting crash and boom of the bomb going off.

The first only sets off a chain reaction, beginning from the one above you and working backward from where you came–leaving no option but to continue on forward.

Shouts and panicked voices continue to crackle over the radios attached to König and Gaz, that is the least of your concerns when the walls around you are starting to crack and crumble beneath their own weight.

Running purely on instinct, on nothing but the need to get out and survive, you don't look back. Leaving the two nobodies behind as you leap and crash through the nearest window. Charging through empty streets and weaving between the debris that rains from above.

You think you hear someone calling your name but it's drowned out by the overwhelming sounds of falling buildings, brick against cement. Shattering glass in the few windows that still had them, metal support beams narrowly missing you by a hair's width.

A yelp, a sound foreign to you, rips from your throat as something snags on your pant leg, tripping you over your own feet and sending you tumbling.

You're up again and rolling for cover just in time before a large chunk of concrete slams into the ground in the exact spot you had been mere seconds ago.

There's no time to catch your breath, no time to check behind you or look for your captors–you have to go.

And go you do, until you're unsure which way is left and right, up and down; lost in a maze of broken streets and the remnants of fallen structures.

Dust and other particle debris have created a dense fog over the wreckage, clouding even your enhanced vision and you once again find yourself grateful for the cloth that tethers you–protecting you, even if just temporarily, from the polluted air.

Methodically, you find the wherewithal to analyze and catalog every inch of your person. A small bit of relief soothes your frantic mind as you find no new injuries–only a burning in the older ones from the strain of being on your feet for so long.

You find an odd comfort in those, the ache in your thigh, the throb of your arm, they remind you that you're still here. That you're alive.

You let your weight drop heavy against the broken half wall behind you, tipping your head up towards the blocked-out sky and panting.

They're probably wondering where you are, if you're even alive- then it hits you,

What if you just.. didn't go back?

They wouldn't know if you were alive or dead, if you had run away or gotten trapped under the fallen scraps of cement.

This was the perfect opportunity. The perfect time to get up and shamble away. Find a way out of what remains of this city, out of this damn country–whichever one it was–and..

And what? Where would you go?

Viktória–your handler–had made it clear you weren't welcomed back when she left you to rot in enemy hands. She likely assumed you were dead anyway.

Even if you resented her, even if she'd been the cause of your suffering over the expanse of your life–twenty-two years and counting–; you still couldn't find it in yourself to.. hate her.

She was the one to tend to your wounds after a particularly bad session, to be the one to call off ones that went too far. The ones that pushed you to the point of blacking out.

The blare of a phone cuts off your internal monologue, causing you to flinch against the sudden spike in the beginnings of a budding migraine.

A phone? You didn't.. you don't have a phone. Have nothing more than the strap around your throat–the tracker around your throat.

It takes your overstimulated ears a prolonged moment to pinpoint the source, and when you find it your confusion only grows.

Slowly, you push yourself up to a half crawl, half walk, making your way for the incessant ring of a payphone.

Dirt-encrusted gloves grapple for the handset of the worn phone, other hand stabilizing yourself on the plastic lip of the box.

Not really expecting a response, and clueless on how the damned thing even survived the explosion, you hold the receiver to your ear, muttering a scratchy, "hello?"

"Myš." Comes the voice in the other line, sounding almost.. relieved?

Your muscles immediately tense up at the sound of your handlers' voice, fingers gripping the phone tightly.

"Vik." You force out, words stilted. "What do y'want?"

"You're still alive." She states the obvious and you know better than to read the surprise in her voice as anything more than it is. "Good."

You consider revisiting that shouting match from the day you'd been captured, feeling that warm anger bubbling just beneath your skin.

You don't.

"I see you've gotten well acquainted with your targets. They trust you, yes?"

"Not quite." Where the fuck is this going? She abandoned you, so why is she acting as if nothing happened?

"I trust you can rectify that."

"What do you want, Vik?"

"Predator-107, that is what you are," She starts, a familiar resolve in her tone. "And I am here to properly debrief your current ongoing assignment."

"So.. you meant for me to get caught?"

"That we did. Had to make it believable, make those men think they had the upper hand. Any injuries you sustained were a necessary sacrifice, to cement the idea that you were helpless."

The clinical, logic-based words sunk their claws deep into you–a certain calm drowning out your previously panicked thoughts. This was something you knew, could latch onto, this you could handle.

An assignment. You hadn't been abandoned after all.

"What do you need from me?"

"Intel. Gather it. We need every scrap of information you can dig up on these soldiers. I want every word they speak, every action they make, transcribed and sent to me."

"May I ask why?"

"You may not." Is her immediate response. "But I will tell you."

"These men who call themselves heroes, who claim to be the ones to make the enemy scared of the dark, have been.. causing problems." And problems required immediate pruning, that was lesson number one. "Tailing us. Getting far too close for comfort, one could say. She wants them gone, but we need to know them from the inside out first. All previous attempts have only encouraged them."

"And that's where I come in?"

"Yes, 107, that is where you come in.."

Looks like you wouldn't be making a run for it after all.

"We need you to collect data, do anything you can to gain their trust. Infiltrate and collect, that is your assignment."

"Got it." A pause, then you ask, "how did you know I'd be here anyway?"

"We didn't." Ah, so it was purely luck-based. Lovely. "We always have your location on hand, it wasn't difficult to devise a method of contact after that."

They were still tracking you? After all these years, you really shouldn't be surprised.

The note König had given back to weights heavily in your pocket, burning a hole into your thigh. You neglect to mention it.

"Received." You mutter. "I better get back before they think of me dead."

Or, worse, that you left.

"On the other side, 107." Then the line goes dead, not even static or a dial tone. Completely severed now that it had served its purpose.

Just like you'd be one day.

The trek to find the others is long and exhausting and you're a bit surprised to see them there, waiting for you. König pacing about while Price talks in a hushed voice to a man you'd never seen before.

You suppose this must be the fabled Nikolai you'd heard so much about. Namely by Gaz.

Soap is the first to spot you, perking up and elbowing Ghost who stands beside him.

The two of them turn to look at you in a synchronized flick of their eyes, Ghost muttering something that sounds like a call for attention under his breath.

"Mouse." Price says when you get within, what the other man probably assumes is, hearing distance.

"Ay." You breathe, regarding each of them with a tired glance and tilting your head in greeting towards the presumed Nikolai.

"Thought you'd bailed on us." Price continues.

You can do nothing but give a small shrug of your shoulders, grunting. "Not like I got anywhere else to go."

You catch König's eyes doing a quick once over of your worn body, searching for any new injuries. When he comes up empty he gives you a brief nod.

"This is the new one, then?" Nikolai asks. The familiar, distinct Russian accent that tinged his words freezes you where you stand.

You drag your gaze back up to him, forcing the rigidness out of your body one muscle at a time.

"Mouse." You say in lieu of a formal introduction.

"Nikolai." He parrots back. There's a tense moment where you two regard one another and you briefly consider him a possible spy to make sure you stay on task. Doing a mental catalog of all the people you've met before and coming up blank, to which you immediately drop the idea.

He looks at you like there's something recognizable in your voice–no matter how much effort you put in to keep it as neutral as possible.

You turn away first, walking over to take your place beside Gaz and your assigned babysitter, König. Price and Nikolai exchange a few more words before the captain waves a hand and turns, the man's words drowned out by your turbulent thoughts.

The flight is quick and uninterrupted, the subsequent landing much the same. When addressed you merely respond in clipped words and hums of acknowledgment, strangely enough, wanting nothing more than to return to your unofficial cell.

The debrief is postponed in favor of treating the few injuries sustained by the others and soon enough König is escorting you back to said room.

On direct orders himself to get checked out after securing you in your cell, König leaves. Locking the door behind him.

His absence isn't the drag it usually is and you immediately beeline for the tiny desk pushed up against the far right of the room, nestled into the corner of the same wall shared by the door.

Sitting down in the creaky chair you shove a hand into your pocket, gloved fingers curling around the flimsy paper you've looked over many times before.

You unfold it, reading the same unintelligible red once again. Just to be sure.

Viktória hadn't mentioned the note, so neither had you. Now that you thought about it, the paper was likely intentionally left blank. To make you assume the worst; make you think you'd been left behind–which you had.

The washed-out red, nearly pink now, is familiar. A color you've come to associate with your handlers' usual messages.

The handwriting, however, doesn't belong to her–far too jagged compared to the neat, curved lines you were used to.

___

One | Two | Three | Masterpost | Next

___

@cptg00s3 @ruthgrimxiao @20nerd04-blog @gloma08 @mikahrh @in-down @hauntedapplefarm @mello-life69 @unkn0wnd3ad @tayaisback @starre-eyes @ravage-reposts @suhmie @lazyrel

If you want to be added to the tag list, let me know in the comments!

[imonlyanangel]

🪷 Manifesting Success 🪷

The most recent thing I manifested was self confidence! In this post I'll go over what worked for me.

I've successfully manifested several things in the past, but not nearly at the speed I would've liked to. There were months and months without success. I started to consider why- was I focusing on the 3D too much?? Was I engaging with negative, doubtful thoughts, or believing negative comments from others? How was my trust in myself?

Sure, sometimes I focus too much on the 3D, but I always catch myself. I've had some doubtful intrusive thoughts, but I always catch myself. I've over consumed at times, but I always catch myself. I'm human, and I'm still fairly new to learning how to manifest. None of these slip ups are a big deal! None of them can really affect my ability to manifest unless I allow them to. Unless I assume that they do.

The real reason I was struggling to manifest was this: I had a fear of being seen. A fear of being myself where others could see. A fear of succeeding in front of others. How can I successfully manifest if I'm afraid of success? How can I bring my reality into light if I only feel safe in the dark?

Self-confidence has been a struggle for me nearly my entire life. I've worked on improving it, but there was little progress over the course of my life. I didn't talk to people, or share my thoughts with family. I couldn't make decisions. I couldn't just be without being scared I was doing it wrong.

When I realized that this pervasive fear was keeping me from manifesting my desires, I made a decision. I wasn't going to work on manifesting anything else until I successfully manifested confidence in myself.

I tore a scrap of paper from my bedside notebook and wrote down an affirmation to stick under my pillow. All I wrote was: I always feel amazing about myself- I am overflowing with confidence. <3 I had read that the pillow method takes 7-10 days at most to manifest your desires. I wrote this down on the other side of the paper, and decided that it wouldn't take me more than a week to manifest it.

Before I fell asleep each night, I recited the affirmation in my mind. Some nights I only did it once, sometimes 2-3x. I imagined feeling like a pillar. Feeling upright, tall, visible, and strong. I imagined the heaviness and tension that came with being seen disappearing. I imagined feeling amazing about myself, or how it would feel to be confident all the time. I did this for 7 days in a row.

It didn't take me 7 days to notice a change!! The first morning I woke up after doing that was different. I was different. I went after what I wanted that day with no regard for whether or not I was being perceived. Since I started I've noticed many changes in behavior that have almost all felt natural to me. Sometimes I got nervous, but I had the confidence in myself to push through it.

Instead of shying away from looking at my face or my body in the mirror, I smile genuinely every time I see myself. Sometimes I catch myself thinking "wow, I am so f*cking pretty!" Now I intentionally make a comment about my confidence or my beauty every time I look in a mirror while washing my hands. I'm so confident. I feel amazing about myself today. I love the way I look. Complimenting myself in the mirror worked wonders and I recommend it 100%!!

Changes since I started manifesting confidence:

Engaged in my hobbies in front of others

Deep cleaned my room

Wore what I wanted

Voiced my opinion in family discussion

Decided to do a social media fast for a week

Made purchases to start a hobby I've always wanted to try (and started said hobby)

Had a difficult conversation with my mom that I was avoiding

Answered a phone call from a girl I've hardly ever spoken to, and we enjoyed talking for over an hour

Started decorating my room

Went out to eat (at a buffet) and chatted with a relative that I am not familiar with

This post! Whether anonymous or public, I've never posted or commented on social media till now, because I was too nervous.

All of these things are huge compared to where I was at two weeks ago. Some, maybe all of these things, would be small to others. But to me, especially with consideration for my neurotype and mental health, these are big steps of progress.

Am I the most confident, outspoken, assertive woman in the world? Not yet. But I improved so much in just a week. My sister noticed I was in a better mood every morning since the day I started. My mom has been complimenting me more often because of the difference in my countenance. My family noticed behavioral changes within 2 days.

I've been happy, and so much more confident. I have had more enthusiasm for life and for growth. And it doesn't take me more than 5 minutes a night. I will continue using this method of manifesting! I've already started a new affirmation.

XOXO,

Evangeline

[professionalranter31]

I have several headcannons regarding Tracer and her relationship with Emily

So Lena originally was just supposed to be a pilot that helped Overwatch squads get to their mission locations, however while she was flying Winston who was transporting some of his inventions to an ecopoint that were meant to help with further gathering data they were attacked by a group of mercenaries hired by a company that wanted to sabotage the Ecopoint program

Lena proved her skills as a pilot by avoiding nearly every rocket shot at them, the only one that managed to hit was at the beginning when the mercenaries still had the element of surprise. Later when Winston began work on the Slipstream he nominated Lena to be the test pilot

It would be around this time that Lena was set up on a blind date with Emily, however it was a few days after the test run for the Slipstream so Lena would unfortunately miss it

Now the Slipstream, it was sabotaged. The company that was funding it was facing the risk of bankruptcy and so had set up an insurance in case of the failure of the Slipstream. There was also a disgruntled scientist who had a similar idea to the Slipstream (albeit different enough it was obvious to anyone else that Winston hadn’t copied it but the scientist didn’t care) that the company hired to sabotage the Slipstream. Now what the company wanted was something that would just cause the slipstream to not work, but the scientist wanted to ruin Winston, and he also had a theory that if proven correct would allow him to upstage the gorilla. If the sabotage had not taken place, the Slipstream would’ve worked albeit with a few bugs that needed fixing

So the Slipstream incident happened and the company was saved from bankruptcy, and the scientist bided his time. The sabotage wouldn’t be discovered unless someone looked at the Blueprints Winston sent to engineering and the blueprints that engineering actually got

Anyway, Lena comes back and is saved by Winston with the Chronal Accelerator thus ruining the scientist’s plans without ever knowing of them

Face forward to the events of the Kings Row Uprising and this is when Lena and Emily first officially meet where during the cleanup Lena saves her from some of the Null Sector warbots remaining. Sometime later Lena is granted a vacation so she can see home again since she’s deemed stable enough to be away and they run into each other again at Lena’s favorite pub

However the way they met in the pub is because Lena got into a bar fight, she didn’t start and she doesn’t know what started it but she definitely ended it, and Emily offered to help bandage her cuts up and also ask Lena out on a date

It wasn’t until their seventh date did they both realize that the blind date they had been set up for several months ago was with the other, but they had a good laugh about it

Emily is a artist for a comic book company and does some fashion designing on the side when she’s tight on cash but her work does allow her to work from home a lot

When Overwatch was shut down Lena wallowed in her room for a long time, until Emily wore a “special” sweater and got her out of that rut and helped her try for a few jobs

None of them stuck however and since Lena was banned from ever flying again she started doing some vigilante work, setting up an outfit (her Graffiti skin) and started helping out where she could while trying to remain inconspicuous

For the most part she succeeded and did a lot of good work, until Mondatta and the events of the Underground comics, then several months later the Recall went out

Tracer almost hesitated to go, her and Emily were going strong and she had started to get used to not being part of Overwatch but Emily told her she would be fine, and that no matter what she would always be there for her

That would be the moment when Lena decided that the moment she got a break and could see Emily again she was proposing, not knowing that Emily was also gonna start looking for a ring

Now for some smaller headcannons

Emily is related to Moira, just because it would be really funny. She doesn’t bring it up because Moira reached out to her niece and told her not to mention the familial relationship between them (this is when Moira was fired from Overwatch and disgraced) because she doesn’t want her niece’s life to get messed for it

Neither Lena or Emily can cook a full meal, they can make amazing teas and desserts but the moment they try to make a full meal they mess it up in some way that ends up with them eating out

Emily has a gun and she knows how to use, she’s never had to bring it out but it’s easy to reach, she showed it to Lena when they first moved in together and it helped Lena fell more secure with her rejoining Overwatch and when Null Sector attacked London because Emily would have some way to defend herself

If it ever comes to light that the Slipstream was sabotaged it’s unclear who will be more pissed off about it between the couple, it’s Emily. Look Lena would be all sorts of angry about it but Emily actually has a temper unlike her girlfriend and has always been upset that they didn’t get a chance to meet sooner because of the Slipstream’s failure

Finally my thoughts on something else unrelated

I want Emily to become a playable character because we have all sorts of familial relationships between the various heroes in the game but not one that is explicitly romantic, not hinted at they are just straight up in a relationship

I just want that sort of dynamic in game and if it actually happens with another set of characters maybe my opinion will change

Anyways hope this was fun for you all and let me know your headcannons because this is fun to do

[stories-and-chaos]

Tarnished pt 22

[Helluva Boss AU where Blitzø’s childhood theft from Stolas’ palace is discovered and major consequences ensue for everyone involved.]

[Part 22/?? Word count: 1236 Cw: drug use, addiction, language]

—————

Barb sorted through Fizzarolli’s fan mail in her tiny office. Ostensibly, she was her friend’s bodyguard whenever he was in Greed; she was also acting as his assistant. Mammon didn't want anyone on his payroll wasting time. Technically, she worked for Fizz, which meant she could refuse the Sin. But doing administrative tasks when Fizz wasn’t surrounded by fans kept Mammon from grumbling at his brand face.

And he needed help with the mail. The Fizzies had launched in full two weeks before the fifth annual clown pageant. Fizzarolli had won that as well; his upgraded extendable limbs added to his already impressive act.

Barb had to give some credit to Mammon, he knew how to market people and products. Fizz’s second win in a row and his comeback story with the launch of Fizzy robots for every occasion, all of Hell knew the imp’s face. And they were willing to pay Mammon’s prices for merchandise.

All that exposure meant fans and fans meant all sorts of messages. Letters, forum messages, Sinstagram posts, fanart both wholesome and lewd. Mammon had a PR team for all the digital content, since that was public. The physical mail also went through the PR team before being sent to Fizz. There was still a massive amount needing replies, which Barb was helping with.

“Jesus H. Christ,” she muttered, sorting through the day's pile. There wasn’t anything dangerous in the envelopes, Mammon’s people saw to that. But the amount of requests for feet pics, pictures of Fizz without his prosthetics, offers for ‘a good time’ and straight up pornographic fanart was ridiculous. Barb felt like her eyes needed bleach some days, but she didn’t want her friend dealing with this nonsense alone. “I keep telling the assholes to not send the skeevy shit but do they listen? Noooooo, it’s ‘not their job to moderate content.’ Bullshit, you’re a PR team, it is your fucking job.”

The rejected pile steadily rose and the accepted pile gradually had a few letters added. Then she saw a name that made her want to scream. More than fan mail sorting usually did.

Blitzø.

Her fucking traitor twin. The scumbag who left- who abandoned his family and friends to be a royal pet. And now he was sending Fizzarolli fan mail?!

“What the fuck are you pulling Blitzo?” she hissed at the envelope in her claws. Nothing from him for years and once Fizz is successful and famous he tries to contact them? Not even ‘them,’ the envelope was addressed to Fizz.

Barb could tell from the feel of the envelope there were several pages in the letter. She wasn’t going to read it and she sure as shit wasn’t going to send it Fizz’s way. Most of the rejected mail was just shredded. She scrawled ‘RETURN TO SENDER’ in bold red marker. Hopefully the asshat would get the hint.

Later that day, as she and Fizz were finishing up the handful of responses to fans (mostly to kids) she debated on whether to tell him about the letter. Barb decided she’d better, in case the traitor tried to get in touch another way.

“You got another letter that went into the reject pile.” Fizz quirked an eyebrow. She usually didn’t mention the mail she filtered out unless it was important or particularly hilarious. “It was from Blitzo.”

Fizz gripped the pen he was using. His mechanical fingers twitched and the plastic tube snapped in half, creating a spray of ink. Ichor drained from his face, then his cheeks flushed again in anger. “The fuck does that asshole want?”

Barb shrugged. “Dunno. Didn’t read it, I just sent it back. Figured it can’t be that important, coming from a traitorous dickhead only when you’re famous.” He looked at her, anger at Blitzo warring with gratitude for her in his expression. “If he sends any more, I’ll send ‘em right back. Should probably tell the PR guys he might contact you another way though.”

He dumped the ruined gel pen in the trash bin and grabbed a tissue to clean his hand. “Fuck, Ozzie’s gonna be pissed if this gets in the joints. Thanks for looking out for me Barb.”

“Course Fizz. We look out for each other, right?” She decided to ignore his mention of Asmodeus. He’d been spending more time with the Sin of Lust, even now that the Fizzy robot development was done for the time being. What the fuck is it with royal demons and imp guys? she thought to herself.

Fizzarolli gave her a shaky smile and tossed the ink covered tissue into the trash. “Well I’m not up for answering more mail. Wanna call it a day and grab something terrible for us?”

Barb stood up and stretched, popping vertebrae down her spine and tail. “Thought you had a dinner meeting with Asmodeus.” She knew he did, she had to know his schedule. If he was going to be with a Deadly Sin, he really didn’t need her acting as bodyguard.

“Shit, I almost forgot. It’s not business though, if you wanna join u-“

“I’ll pass. Don’t wanna be a third wheel and all that shit.” She’d tagged along with Fizz and Ozzie once before and swore never again. Not unless she had her own date. No matter how much the two men denied it, she could see where things were headed.

Fizz stammered, “We-we’re not an item Barb! I keep telling you, it’s just business and the occasional fuck.”

“So if tonight isn’t business it’s the ‘occasional’ fuck.” She made air quotes as she walked out of the room with him. “Still don’t wanna be around for that Fizz. Have fun, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Fizz waved as she headed out the building; he had to text Ozzie to send a car up to Greed and wait for his ride.

Getting something terrible to eat sounded amazing though, so she got cheap Chinese food on the way home. The staff knew her usual order and she soon had a takeout bag in one hand and an extra egg roll to snack on as she walked.

Her studio apartment, decorated haphazardly in rock music paraphernalia, was unsurprisingly empty. She managed to keep most of her emotions at bay as she watched a hellanovella and devoured her fried rice. But there was an end to the episode and comfort food.

Anger and confusion and loneliness bubbled up. She chucked an empty takeout box at the wall and gripped the sides of her head. “Goddammit Blitzo! You’re not even here and you’re fucking up my life.” Just the reminder that he existed sent her spiraling into the worst memories.

Her brother abandoning them. Her mom covering bruises. Her dad’s rising anger towards her and Fizz. Straining to match Fizz as a partner. Fighting creeps and stalkers. The fire. Finding Fizz. Finding…her mom.

“FUCK!” she yelled, throwing a wooden chopstick after the box. She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to think about anything. Barb had promised herself she wouldn’t use again; she’d been clean the past four months. But Barb four months ago hadn’t expected Blitzo to resurface. So today’s Barb unblocked her dealer’s number to see if she could hook her up fast.

As it turned out, her dealer could. And she got a second ‘something terrible’ that let her not think about anything until the high wore off.

—————

<<First <Prev Next>

[snorkling-in-sodasea]

Moments of Stupidity 5

Well, I did a little looking at the calendar and planned it. I mean, when Moments of Stupidity, as far as the amount of Helluva Boss episodes go as of now, would end. The days throughout this month will be scattered. Some in a row, some with days apart, but it should still be done by Halloween. And the newest episode, since it should be out on Halloween, I'll do a post on that sometime early November. But onto the next episode where everyone's a fucking moron!

Harvest Moon Festival -

The first instance of stupidity is probably when Blitzo had the bright idea for a pep talk to Moxxie when Moxxie was gonna take on the hell hog. Seriously, unless Blitzo was intentionally a jerkass there, which is definitely a possibility with him, then you have to be spectacularly stupid to say all that Blitzo said and not expect someone's self-confidence to take a nose dive upon hearing it

There's also probably Millie when her parents treat her husband the way they do. It's not like they really hide how they feel about Moxxie. I doubt they're even trying to. So Millie should have noticed her mother rather roughly elbowing Moxxie or notice that her father being clearly enough mocking when Moxxie brought up entering the Pain Games himself. There's also Joe and Lin's faces at first seeing Moxxie that episode. Then Millie still says the 'they'll accept you eventually' crap. It's like, 'do you notice anything about how your husband is treated?'. Even if Millie is holding onto hope for all her family to get along with each other, there's a damn limit to how they can act towards each other

There's definitely Millie just charging in and attacking Striker when catching him hurting Moxxie. It's crazy that Striker could still move around with little to no problem after getting fucking stabbed, repeatedly, in his back but Millie would have increased chances of winning if she just kept her cool like in, funny enough, Exes and Oohs. Yeah, she was weirdly overpowered there and didn't even make a damn dent here but I still feel the coolheadedness made some difference

There's also Millie treating Moxxie like he's the dumb one for not using a gun and even forgetting all about it. Maybe Moxxie should have used his gun when he tried escaping but, given how fast and competent Striker was in his debut episode, there's a real chance that Striker could have smacked it away or even use it against Moxxie. Besides, Millie wasn't even there until she just happened to hear some noise and went to investigate. How does she get to judge how well her husband did before she showed up? All without even asking how it went, no less

Oh, and I forgot this one, but there's the fact that Millie got her leg caught in a wide open bear trap when she was thrown down into the cellar, basement, whatever. This particular stupid moment goes to Millie's family, cause they're the ones who just carelessly left freaking bear traps laying around! Maybe if we saw some hellish vermin or whatever that only a bear trap can catch them, that'd be some explanation but no! We just have an active, ready-to-trap bear trap that anyone can just carelessly brush their foot or their tail against it and make it go off on them. Even if everyone in the family was told about the traps and they knew to be careful, there's still the fact that Millie fell into the damn thing. That means everyone is still vulnerable to falling on it by accident. So why the fuck would anyone just get that freaking careless with leaving around bear traps like this?

There's Stolas's behavior throughout the episode but I'll mention that, along with his flirtation with Blitzo in Loo Loo Land, will come up later. Because really, this kind of stupidity spans over multiple episodes that adds extra layers of stupid. Might as well just mention it all in its most prominent episode. This also applies to Wally Wackford, even if it's not to the same extent as Stolas

Striker, for several instances. 1, having a holy rifle in his possession out in the open where just anyone could come across it, especially if Striker's really gonna get in trouble for having it. 2, not covering the damn gun whatsoever. It was strange that Moxxie thought a glow from under the door was what's strange but it's what got his damn attention. Besides, instance one is definitely a reason why the gun should have been covered up at least. 3, throwing Millie and Moxxie in the damn basement. Fuck seriously, even if you thought of just hightailing it out of there right after you finish your hit, there was a very real chance someone could have found them before then or the couple could have escaped themselves. Which they did. Because you apparently didn't even check Millie and Moxxie for any weapons they could use, let alone any gun that can blast a hole in the locked door. In fact, instance 4 is no checking for weapons on your captives. And going back to the likelihood of someone finding Millie and Moxxie in the basement, most likely any of Millie's family, then that's gonna be a bunch of pissed off demons after Striker's ass, including Blitz since the writers like saying that he cares about his employees. Then Striker will probably have to kill more than he has to just to live for his next paycheck so that's instance 5 now

If there's any stupid moment of Moxxie's, it's not shooting Striker when he had the fucking chance. Especially when he was at the damn door that could have whacked him should someone come in. Actually, Moxxie should have shoot him before the fight even started. Considering that the show establishes that he's the best sharpshooter, then Moxxie definitely should have been able to get Striker without getting his boss. (And seeing how Striker's character got butchered big time in his second and third appearances, then yeah. I'd prefer Striker in his debut appearance shot dead)

Joe and Lin for taking pride in being meatheads. Seriously, if they're treating Moxxie as not worthy of respect because he researched about war and strategies and is physically weak (at least in this episode), then they take pride in the fact they themselves have little to no intelligence in their heads and have only muscle to back themselves up in life. Probably good thing if they just plan to stay in Wrath their whole lives, since every native there is bound to have the same line of thinking. For whatever worth that thinking could possibly have to the average Wrath citizen

Oh, and Joe and Lin apparently decide to care more about how Millie lost a fight than whether or not she could have been killed by the farmhand the parents themselves have hired and even lecture their daughter like she's wrong for getting hurt. Seriously, they're only the second best parents because the other parents - whether it's ones of main characters or that the main characters are parents themselves - are even worse! (And who is the best parent in Helluva Boss, at least in my my opinion, you may ask? Blitzo. Because yeah, if there's anything Blitzo doesn't screw up in, it's being a father to his daughter and never stop loving her no matter what. As far as I remember, the only thing Blitzo doesn't do right concerning parenthood is disciplining Loona when she seriously needs to be disciplined)

I guess Stella, too, since she had the bright idea to just yell at Stolas that she's talking to an assassin that she's hired to kill him. She's probably just lucky that Stolas is so stupid as to not take it seriously and that Octavia was wearing earbuds (Because I'm hoping that Octavia wouldn't be so stupid to still think her parents still like each other after hearing that her freaking mother legit hired an assassin to kill her father. Horrible, selfish, and incompetent father he maybe, Octavia still loves Stolas and would be devastated at just hearing it. And yeah, I don't know if I said it before, but I agree with some well-put posts on how Stolas isn't anywhere near a good dad as a good chunk of the fanbase believes so I can't agree with 'good dad Stolas' anymore)

[what-if-nct]

(cw // mentions of sh in case anyone is triggered)

hii it’s christmas where i live meaning it’s probably not christmas for you (unless you waited hours to finally reply back) but i just wanna say merry christmas and thank you for being there with me during my hard and mentally draining days. it’s so hard being on social media without bumping into negativity such as real life news, people debating about bare minimum things such as rights for body autonomy, gay rights, etc, and especially for my case, being shunned by a community of people i thought were friends simply for talking about jonghyun on my posts that solely rely on users to create posts in order for the app to work.

while i wish i don’t want to be super negative all the time, this was exactly how i felt this year. i felt violated, stripped from my pride and tormented — yet i’m expected to be happy all the time and put up a brave face all the time.

the truth is, i hated turning 18 because i couldn’t bare the responsibility of being considered an adult at the face of the law, when i had my childhood partially taken away from me. nobody was there during my mental breakdowns. just because it wasn’t 2022 anymore, doesn’t mean i didn’t face cyber bullying and faced targeted harassment simply for talking about my bias just like any other kpop fan, and people liked to downplay it by telling me to “keep it to myself.” i didn’t get to do my dream course at my new college due to my grade, and i felt so fucking shit because i’ve done everything in my willpower just to get the same score 3 years in a row, nobody took my mental breakdown seriously. i was sexually harassed and taken advantaged of by several men, because they did not respect my boundaries, used me as my drunken self, and tried to contact me via twitter acting like a kpop fan from london in the comments, when he was a 25 year old man who only saw me for my body. i was overwhelmed with the way the job centre was treating me and making me feel worse for simply asking a question to prevent email spams by sending me to a centre that could help me get to know the basics of using technology. i had a job, but got scammed for 2 weeks worth of work and i never got paid. i lost £500 which i rightfully worked my ass for, even almost passing out due to walking upstairs and having my feet ache over the constant standing for 8 hours for 3 days a week. i never got to go to france and meet my cousins. it’s sucks because i was planning this since summer and i’ll never be able to go since my parents took the only savings i had to go to africa for a month due to how expensive plane tickets are. i even got fucking pregnant and not to mention, my mum started to act weird around me… and just the way i was treated after turning into an adult… i don’t really wanna go there.

i know it has been a long year, but idk if it’s gonna change at all or if it’s gonna get worse. i just wanted to have a peace of mind for once. that’s literally my wish for 2024. i just want to be free, to have amazing friends, having a normal life, just like everyone else so i don’t have to always compare myself to people on snapchat who show off their day or shout out their friends for their birthdays. i wish i could get rid of my anxiety symptoms, because now notifications, messages (especially pending ones) and anything that shows a number next to an icon would get me really fucking nervous that it would be a harassing message. i just don’t want guys to take advantage of me, i just want a loyal and sweet first boyfriend/girlfriend that is genuinely there and physically as well as emotionally. i just feel like i’m missing out on life just because some stupid systemic ableism in the uk where i was forced to learn at home and be in a special needs class, which can explain why i’m socially awkward and don’t know how to be a normal friend.

basically saying… i just want to be happy. (i’m so sorry for the vent i didn’t expect it to be this long loooool)

Merry Christmas!! there's about 10 minutes till Christmas for me. I am so sorry that this past year has been so hard on you. And its horrible that you had to endure all of that I can't even imagine how hard it's been for you. You deserve so much better than what you've received. You deserve respect, care, love, understanding and you deserve happiness and it breaks my heart you've been treated like this by so many people. I just send you the biggest hug and I'm proud of you, I know life has been hard but I'm proud of you for continuing. And I can't promise when, but things will get better and one day before you know it you will have the happiness you want and deserve and I will always be here to listen and talk to you.

[arabian-batboy]

So several people have asked me about my opinion about James Gunn making a live-action Batman & Robin movie centered on Bruce and Damian that’s based on Grand Morrison and Tom King runs, I already shared what I thought on twitter, but to summarize it: this is the worst news I have heard while in this fandom and if this movie happens, Damian’s and Talia’s characters will forever be ruined.

As all of you know, movies always have a massive effect on how the general public view comic characters for many years after the drop, even if their portrayal in the movie was a complete 180° change from their usual selfs. I mean look at how much damage the animated movies have done to these characters’ reputation? Now imagine what a live-action Batman movie would do, whatever “The Brave and the Bold” will do to Talia and Damian, it will easily stick to their image for 10+ years and will most likely influence the comics to imitate the movie and change their portrayal in them in a way that align with the movie, again, even if it’s completely different or regressive for their characters.

Then you have all the red flags from Gunn’s statement, first of all he’s influenced by MORRISON’S and KING’S runs? That’s the biggest red flag of them all, because if you like these two characters then you would know that these runs are hands dow the worst possible combination you could pick as an adaptation and somehow Gunn’s managed to choose both of them, seriously all that is left is for him to reference Teen Titans: Rebirth and its over for us.

I have already went on and on about how Morrison’s racist treatment of Talia is the definition of character-assassinations and how till this day her reputation hasn’t recovered yet from it, there might have been some progress lately, but it will all go through the drain if this movie happens because I don’t see Gunn’s, how sings so much praise about Morrison’s run, will bothering fixing the racist caricature that Morrison created, especially since the whole point of Talia in this run is to give angst to Damian’s backstory and portray Bruce as the superior parent compared to her (and don’t let me get started on King’s proud-ex-CIA-agent ass and HIS racism)

So yeah, unless they plan on using another character as the big bad of the movie, which I don’t see happening, because what other character has personal ties to both Bruce and Damian and can be used as an antagonist other than Talia? Then the real Talia is gone forever, she will officially never escape Morrison’s character-assassination (at the very least, they can change her drugging Bruce to her faking a miscarriage like in the original comic, since that part is not REALLY important to story, but I highly doubt it....)

Then we get to Damian......look at all the words Gunn used? Do I need to say more? Some people are actually excited that he claimed that Damian is apparently his favorite Robin, but looking at the way he described Damian here its clearly evident that he likes him for all the wrong reasons, which I would argue is worse than hating him and that he doesn’t understand his nuance or any of his best qualities.

I can already predict what he will do with his character: he’s gonna go look for the whitest White boy in the world, cast him as Damian, immediately drench him in hair gel, then have him act as the most arrogant, stuck-up, obnoxious, disrespectful brat imaginable which in turn will influence the comics to reset his character to that again for the 574th time in a row (and of course you will have fans of other characters going ""look at Damian always being favored by DC per usual!!" without realizing that this is basically a death sentence to his character forever)

Some argue that this is how Damian’s character started out like before he started his development so its alright and to that I say: 1- even in the beginning, his character wasn’t this exaggerated and he still had some redeeming qualities 2- his development happened in a slow and steady pace in stories that mostly had no Bruce 3- he started out as Dick’s Robin and had already established a relationship with every Batfam’s member as well as his place in Gotham City before he got to spend any time with Bruce, which is something the movie will obviously skip.

Also the keyword here is "development."

The problem is that so many people, including Gunn, can't comprehend that Morrison’s Damian is supposed to be Damian at the very beginning of his development, in their minds, Morrison’s Damian is "default" Damian who acts like that all the time and Gunn’s might like Morrison’s Damian just the way he is, so I don’t see him bothering to develop Damian’s character nor do I believe that he has enough time to do so in one movie (lets be real its not like they will dedicate several movies for Damian’s alone) and as an already overly-hated character who constantly get portrayed as a brat that needs to be humbled, a movie based on his fist appearances is the last thing he needs right now.

It will just reaffirm what his haters think, that he was always a rude brat and he will always remain a rude brat and again, this will unavoidably influence the comics to reset his character (which is something the comics have already been doing constantly without the influence of a big blockbuster movie) to the characterization of his first appearance for the millionth time.

Like I said, this is the worst news I have ever received regarding these characters, I know I’m always being dramatic whenever I don’t like the treatment of Talia and Damian, but this is probably it for me. If this movie happens (and I pray it gets canceled/changed to something else in these 3 upcoming years) and it ends up being as bad as I think it would be, then I will probably lose all interest in DC as a whole, my standards were already at rock-bottom, but even I wouldn’t be able to enjoy their characters anymore at this point.

[sukunasbabymama]

The coworker.

𖣓 Summary: Hakkai falling in love with his female co-worker.

𖣓 Pairing: Hakkai Shiba.

𖣓 Word count: 1.4K

𖣓 Warnings: None.

𖣓 A/N: I love Hakkai so much bro that I don’t think i did him justice.

Playlist inspired on this ;; @erishaitto

He feels his stomach do a whole flip from day one when he sees you. Normally, he is all right as long as girls don’t talk to him, but with you, he stumbles over his own feet as soon as you walk through the door, he internally gasps at your beauty.

Right from the start, you knew all that you needed to know about him since it’s not a secret that the prettiest model in the business right now is shy around girls. Also, his sister has talked to you about his shyness beforehand so you don’t feel bad when he doesn’t even look your way.

That was several weeks ago when you first started working on a project with him. Now, he’s sure he is in love with you, but he can’t still look at you, so sometimes he gets frustrated because he wants to talk to you, to ask you about yourself. You seem so easy going when you’re joking around with his sister and he wants that.

He starts to plot a whole plan, to force himself to get closer to you one way or another, so the first thing he starts doing is letting your favorite drink in front of you without saying anything and walking away before you can even thank him. He does that four times in a row.

Then, he starts leaving cookies, cupcakes, and gummy bears in front of you when you’re getting ready. By this time, you already know everything about his plan since you talked with his sister about it, so this time, before he can run away you grab his wrist and pull him down, making him stumble on his own feet and ending up on his knees beside you.

“No running today, Hakkai.” You say in a sweet voice. He gulps and nods, seeing a random spot on the floor. “You can’t look at me?”

He shakes his head.

“It’s okay, but I want to get to know you…Too.” He nods. “Would you like to grab some drinks with me?”

He is silent for some time before he speaks, his voice low and trembling.

“I-… mhm, I don’t want to embarrass… mhm, myself.” You nod.

“Then, would you like to come to my apartment? We can cook for ourselves.” He nods repeatedly.

“Can we make… pasta? If you want.” He says, shifting his sight from the random spot to your feet.

“Oh my God, I love pasta so much! Yes, please! Let’s make some pasta!” You say excited.

He feels on cloud nine knowing that he was able to say something that made you this excited, he can’t wait to tell Yuzuha about this! See? He’s a man that can talk with a girl now!

Since you chose Saturday as the pasta day he has five more days to mentally prepare to be alone with you, unless you live with somebody or, in a more sad scenario, unless you have a partner. Yes, you agreed to get to know him more but he’ll never know, y’know?

On those five days he finds himself texting you 24/7, being more comfortable through the phone and even joking a lot. On day three he agrees to talk on video call, even though he has his camara off, scared of getting as shy as he is when he’s in front of you, and you don’t mind, putting your phone on top of the kitchen counter and starting to talk to him like you’re doing some youtube video. He appreciates how you don’t mind some of his limits.

“So they gave you the dress?” He asks, having a love drunk face seeing on the screen how you are moving around your kitchen with such elegance.

“Yes! And it’s so beautiful Hakkai! I mean, everybody needs a red dress in their wardrobe, and they gave it to me after the photoshoot as a thanks.” You tell him.

“So, are you gonna show it to me in two days?” He opens his eyes when he registers what he just said. “I-I’m s-sorry, i—,”

“I would love to do that!” You don't let him get embarrassed. “But then you’ll have to come in a pretty suit, okay?”

“Whatever you want.” He mumbles.

The day comes and he is wearing a really expensive suit that he bought just for the occasion. He knocks on your door and when you open it he sighs and his legs tremble.

You are gorgeous, in a tight red dress that looks so fucking good on your skin, with a wide slit that can seem inappropriate for some people. He loves it, he loves it all.

“Hi.” You say shyly. “You look pretty.”

“I-… mhm… you- uh, you too.” He mumbles.

At the kitchen you start to work, with him being too shy to start helping you right away. So you make it your mission to work him through his shyness.

“Hakkai, can I have that plate?” You say, pointing to a plate in a high shelf that you don’t even need, you could easily use one of the pile you washed earlier.

Steadily, he walks behind you and puts a hand on your waist and with the other he reaches for the plate, you smile and he gasps when he gets it.

“I-I’m sorry— I didn’t mean to t-touch you, I—!” You put your open hand on his abdomen and smile at him.

“I like your hands on my waist, Hakkai. It’s okay.” You murmur and he gulps, nodding and tightening his grip on your waist.

By the time the pasta is done he is as comfortable as he can get around you, touching your waist a lot since you told him you like it, talking to you a lot, even though for that he still needs to look to a random spot in the house. But you’re not desperate and he’s actually getting there fast.

“Try it with this…” He mumbles, putting some cheese on your pasta that he brought with him. Then, he silently fixes your dress sleeves so you don’t get it stained. Naturally, you lean and kiss his cheek as a genuine thanks.

“Thanks, Hakkai.”

You lean back a little bit to watch him closely and maybe it’s the closeness, the intimacy of the moment or maybe it’s his impulse, but he leans and crashes his lips on yours.

And you kiss him back, of course you do.

Forgetting the pasta y’all just made, you grab his suit and pull him to you. Hakkai, still nervous, let himself fall on top of you, between your legs. He pulls back to sigh and tremble because he doesn’t know what to do with all the emotions he’s feeling.

“Please, don’t leave me like this.” You whisper, afraid his shyness might make him get out. But it doesn’t, he puts his hands at each side of your head and leans down to hover his lips over yours.

“I-I’m really nervous.” He whispers on your lips.

“I know, baby. It’s okay, slow it’s good fo—,” And he’s kissing you again.

You lock your legs behind his back and pull him closer, enjoying the moan he lets out.

“Good?” You whisper, he nods repeatedly and rests his head on your chest, hiding his face on your neck.

“I like you… a lot.”

“I know. I like you too.”

“I don’t want you to be embarrassed of me because of—,”

“Kiss me, Hakkai.” He was already on your face again by the time you finished the sentence. “I like you and you like me. I don’t mind your shyness.”

He kisses your cheek and goes back to hide on your neck.

“You’re trying even if I didn’t ask you to do it.” You whisper, scratching the back of his head softly. “I really like you, baby.”

“C-Can I be your boyfriend?” His voice trembles a little but since he’s hiding in your neck he doesn’t want to miss the opportunity.

“I would love that, but I have a condition.” He tenses up and you caress his back. “I don’t want you forcing yourself to reach nonexistent goals, okay? You don’t need to talk more, to do more stuff. I like you, and accept you.”

“Y-Yes…”

“Then, you’re my boyfriend, baby.”

He hums in content.

“But, we need to eat.” You giggle but he gets more comfy on top of you.

“I don’t want to, anymore.”

“Hakkai.”

“No.”

“You can spend the night and we can watch movies till late at night.”

“No.”

“We can cuddle?”

“Okay.” He mumbles and you laugh.

What a happy future awaits you.

🏷: @saturnmitsuya @milliumizoomi @dai-tsukki-desu @haitanigigi @yunho-leeknow @melaninnntae @keimisan @welkinmoongrab @plutosexc @ccxiia @manjiroarchiviste @aasouthteranoswife @crushsoli

[flaringgoosebumps]

Just some thoughts because I wonder what the Duffers are going to do actually because it could go either way.

They'll have this new show that they undoubtedly want to be successful, but depending on how stranger things ends, they might lose their target audience.

Whether Milarky or Byler is canon, a large chunk of audiences Will be pissed. They would truly have to tell the story they want to tell because it doesn't matter which way they go, someone is going to be upset. I'm hoping they've made an epic scifi coming of age queer story especially because even without digging into subtext some things wouldn't make sense. But none of us will actually know until 2024. And I wonder if they meant for Mildew to be endgame, why does it feel flat? Why does it feel like they lost their chemistry after season 3? Even people who don't ship Byler notice that? Why does Mike's love confession not give me the same type of joy that even the cheesiest and poor written ones in romcoms and teen dramas do? Like personally, I'm a sensitive person, it is not difficult to get these waterworks going and this shouldn't have been any different unless it was meant to. Because if I felt like he truly did love El, without question, I could feel bad for Will and not dislike Montauk's relationship because of it. But my aversion to it has more to do with how Mike handles their conflicts than what I hope Will could have. The sad part is, Melvin always has the potential to be what it looks like at surface level. Just a dumb teen boy, feeling inadequate and stumbling his way to the girl he loves, making mistake after mistake, almost losing her, only to ultimately end up with her.

But the contrast of her and Will is always there, especially when it involves Mike. From the very first episode, Mike is shown to have a deeper emotional connection with Will than quite literally anyone else. Every season brings attention to that. We saw Mike, two seasons in a row, literally fight tooth and nail to save/be there for Will. Milesaway was being built up in the meantime but in comparison to what Will and Mike have, it feels like an after thought.

There are narrative directions that they took with Milwaukee could've been compelling but Mike didn't even seem that worried about El in the first place. He threw away her break up letter as a soon as Will said "if you keep looking at that, it's not going to change" like?? The people she was with were government agents that locked her away before, you're not worried they'll do that again. In that moment, it could be the last time he ever heard from her. Then even the heart to hearts with Will, it doesn't feel like he loves her romantically. It feels like he feels obligated to be with her because she's a girl who saved his life multiple times and honestly who else could ever measure up to that? But he doesn't emotionally support her unless she is in the line of battle and that's concerning. He had several days to contemplate how he messed up, what upset her, how to mend it and still, it felt like he didn't.

He knew knew how to fix things with Will almost immediately, knew exactly what hurt him, what to apologize for, what parts of his words to emphasize to Will and mended every single thing within one day.

Why couldn't he do that with El? Why does his attempt to comfort her feel dismissive and deflective? Why when he spoke about her to Will was it centered around her abilities but not who she was as a person? Feelings of inadequacy are a normal conflict in relationships but the fact that it is centered specifically around her supernatural abilities is concerning. He doesn't talk about how brave it was for her to even leave the lab in the first place, he doesn't talk about how he feels sad in her absence, doesn't compliment her appearance anymore, doesn't compliment her at all, doesn't express that he wants her around because he enjoys her company, doesn't talk about their laughs together or any significant emotional impact she's had outside of her powers or how literally no one else in the world will ever be her, and that's what makes her the most important person in the world to him. None of that is expressed.

And beforehand.

"If I would've said that thing, she would've taken me with her" this specifically feels like he doesn't feel it, like it's not something he wants to say but he knew she wanted to hear it.

I think this is part of the reasons why it hit Bylers so hard when we thought we were being queerbaited because they put emphasis on Mike seeming to not want to say what she wants him to say and then he does. Narratively, it doesn't make any sense that he claims he loves her like that, even if you only use s4 as a reference. Anyone that's been in love before is adding it up and the math ain't mathing with Mortuary. I'm sure it would be less of a sting for Will or us to be hurt if these efforts were going for an epic, hold your breath, there is no way anyone or anything can stop them from being with one another type of love but at this point Milkshake even though it's been built up since s1 feels like a ship they just put there to move the story.

My point is, regardless of which ship sails by the end of the show, the Duffers will face some kind of backlash. If they go with Milkvan, they would be giving us the literal bare minimum. Not because it's your regular boy falls for girl story but because they didn't properly build their romantic storyline in a way that makes you root for them unless you're someone who roots for straight relationships by default. If this were a queer relationship, I would still have the same affliction with it. But if they go with Byler, it will be an epic scifi coming of age queer story and regardless of backlash from homophobes, they'd be legends. They'd be the first people to do something like this, and I hope that the Duffers got the balls to do it lmao

[niqhtlord01]

Humans are weird: Shock Troops Part II: The Drop

( Please come see me on my new patreon and support me for early access to stories and personal story requests :D https://www.patreon.com/NiqhtLord Every bit helps)

If there is one thing to be said about the age of interstellar travel it would be that it be impossible without the aid of the space gate network.

The space gates comprised of several hundred ancient machines scattered around the cosmos that formed a three dimensional network allowing near instant travel between star systems normally thousands of light years apart. Many of these machines were often located in empty space at the edges of their local systems, but the one in the Hodun system was situated directly over the planet of Hodun Prime and was considered to be the gate to the inner sphere worlds of the Tempish Ascendancy.

Considered to be one of the mightiest governing bodies of the era, the Tempish Ascendancy was a highly efficiently monarchy protected by a near fanatical well-armed and trained military. Their rise to power is often credited to the fact that the Temp people controlled the only space gate for several neighboring systems. With this level of control the Tempish people expanded, either through diplomatic undertakings or military campaigns, into those other systems and quickly incorporated them into their domain. Within a couple of generations the Tempish population was the dominant species on these worlds firmly placing them under their control. From here they had expanded through the space gate; an expansion that eventually led straight to the doors of humanity.

How the war started has been debated and refuted a dozen times and then again a dozen times more, but the end result always comes to the war that erupted between humanity and the Tempish. Each time humanity felt it was on the cusp of victory the Tempish would flee to Hodun Prime and through the space gate back to their territory to recoup only to reemerge several months later and begin the war anew. This back and forth had continued for over a decade as humanity lacked the needed manpower to secure Hodun Prime and in turn launch an invasion of the inner sphere. This tide of fortune for the Tempish soon turned when humanity made peace with several other factions it had been at war with and finally could turn its full attention to the Tempish Ascendancy.

The space gate in orbit above Hodun Prime was controlled by a secure facility on the planet’s surface. Surrounded by near impregnable walls, shield towers, orbital cannons, and a legion of the best trained soldiers the Tempish military had; the facility was able to deny access to the space gate to any ship that was not Tempish. Furthermore, when humanity had in the past launched raids to secure the facility in the past the facility would send out a distress signal through the space gate to the inner sphere worlds were a waiting support fleet would respond and jump through the gate and arrive over Hodun Prime within the hour. This threat of being assaulted by both ground and space forces had deterred further attempts to secure the facility until only recently when a specialized regiment became available for deployment. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ripja strode into the command chamber and ran a glance along the tactical displays lining the walls. He passed between rows of consoles to either side of him each controlling a vital system to Hodun Prime’s defense; each one now blaring warning sounds and baring red marks of imminent danger. Several of the soldiers stood to salute Ripja but he waved them away. Now was not the time to stand on ceremony.

“Report” Ripja asked as he approached the center of the room. There stood a large table displaying a three dimensional hologram of the planet and the orbiting space gate currently surrounded by the high command and their aides. Several icons were scattered around the planet listing military positions, outposts, defense sectors, and more.

His second in command, Kempid, approached and tapped a data wand against the table. A rash of red icons suddenly appeared in orbit of the planet directly above the command facility they now stood in.

“Roughly ten minutes ago three human ships exited the space gate directly over us.”

Before Kempid could provide more information the entire room was filled with warning alarms.

“Enemy bombardment incoming!” one of the console operators called out.

Within moments Ripja could hear a noise reverberating throughout the entire room. It was faint and sounded distant and yet there was no mistaking it.

“Shields are holding.” Another attendant called out.

“Send the signal to the fleet in the inner sphere,” Ripja said to one of the waiting aides, “we need reinforcements now.”

With that they scurried off to the communications bank and transmitted the signal while Ripja took a closer look at the holographic display.

Fiddling with the controls he enhanced the image in orbit and focused in on the human vessels. Two were cruiser class by their ship design and the third was a troop carrier of some kind. The cruisers were using their heavy cannons to lay down a withering barrage of plasma focused directly on the shields surrounding the space gate facility.

“This doesn’t make sense.” Ripja stated, making some of the nearby command staff turn to listen as he began pacing around the table. “They must know two ships can’t breach our shields, and our guns can’t fire so long as our shields are up.” He stopped his pacing and magnified the enemy fleet once again, this time showing a live feed from one of their orbiting stealth satellites.

The two cruisers had positioned the troop carrier between them while the bombardment was ongoing and appeared to have achieved a stable orbit. As he was pondering this defensive nature he noticed through the feed several of the hangar bay doors of the troop ship slowly opening.

In silence several dozen landing craft shot out from the troop ship and began heading towards the surface. To his amazement the landing craft were not arcing away from the orbital bombardment but instead were flying directly through it; their tiny craft veering and swerving in-between the human orbital fire like insects flying through the rain.

“They must be insane!” Kempid said as he came over and saw what had enthralled Ripja.  

“Clever.” Ripja spoke as he motioned another aide over. “They’re using their orbital fire to disable our anti air capabilities while they land their forces.”

As the aide approached Ripja shrunk the hologram to only highlight the main command facility and the space directly above it. Already the red icons of the landing craft were appearing one after another as they raced towards the facility.

“Lower the shields in the south quadrant of the facility and have our orbital guns begin firing on the cruiser on the left.”

“But sir,” the aide spoke hesitantly, “that will leave that quadrant exposed to their fire.”

“They won’t change their target.” Ripja pointed to the central facility currently the focus of the human bombardment. “They need their bombardment to silence our own anti air cannons; if they deviate even for a moment it will give us a window to shoot down their landing craft.”

The aide nodded and moved aside to relay the new order while Ripja motioned Kempid over.

“Deploy all air squadrons and have them engage the human landing craft.” He said as he highlighted the leading ships. “I do not want one of them touching down on our soil unless it is a burning wreck.”

“Our pilots won’t be able to fly thro-“ Kempid began before Ripja grapped him by the throat and pulled him over to the hologram.

“The humans are flying through it!” he softly snarled at Kempid, “Get. Them. In. The. Air.”

“As you wish.” Gasped Kempid as Ripja let him go. “Command to all air wings, deploy and repel enemy landing craft.”

Within minutes a rash of new blue icons from landing fields surrounding the main facility were lighting up as dozens of combat air wings took to the skies. As he watched them take flight he also saw the shield in the south lower and the retaliatory fire commence against the human fleet.

Several cannons fired at once and impacted the left cruiser, its shields flashing bright blue in the cold void. As the retaliation strikes continued Ripja noticed that even though the fire wasn’t piercing the shields it was altering the human bombardment. The angle of the shots was being offset by the Tempish fire moving the cruiser and as a result the landing craft were thrown into a chaotic descent.

If Ripja had to guess the humans had coordinated specific flight paths to navigate the orbital bombardment fire to ensure their craft weren’t hit by friendly fire. Now however the paths were changing and the human landing craft were flying straight into their own bombardment and shattering.

Ripja let a faint smirk cross his lips as he watched the enemy icons slowly blip out one by one. Soon they will be forced to retreat and the day will be ours, he thought to himself. He watched the hologram waiting for the moment, waiting for the first ship to turn tail and flee back to the troop carrier in orbit, waiting for the enemy to flee the system in defeat, waiting for yet another achievement for his military record.

Waiting…..

Waiting….

The smirk vanished from Ripja’s face as he continued to watch in astoundment as the human landing craft did not flee, but instead sped up directly for his command facility.

Even when the Tempish air wings finally swooped in and began picking off the seemingly defenseless landing craft they still kept coming. By the count now the landing craft had suffer 37% casualties and they still had not even reached the planet’s surface.

Ripja watched in horror as even through the orbital strikes, even though the wings of fighter craft picking them off with every pass, even with another 15% of casualties the humans still kept coming until finally the moment Ripja had never thought possible happened.

The humans landed on Hodun Prime.

[kpopfanfictrash]

Raise the Barre (Ch. 10)

Author: kpopfanfictrash

Pairing: Jimin / Reader

Rating: 18+ (Eventual Smut)

Genre: Enemies to Lovers / Dance Academy!AU

Warnings: the angst continues, but this time there are glimmers of progress

Word Count: 7,221

Summary: You and Park Jimin have been rivals for as long as you’ve known one another; ever since he tripped you in the front row of your first dance convention. When you graduate from high school and enter Russet Ballet Academy, you tell yourself you’re leaving all past quarrels behind. The main problem with this though, is that your past seems determined not to leave you alone.

Worse still, the obstacles you face while out in the real world might prove more challenging than anything your enemy has to offer.  

For the first time all year, Jimin didn’t show up at class the next day.

You’d been dreading seeing him, unable to sleep all night as the kiss replayed itself in your mind. You’d told Jimin you needed to think and now, one day later, you still had no idea what to say.

You’d fucked up – big time.

Cheater had never been a label you would’ve applied to yourself; but here you were, scarlet letter on your chest. Yesterday seemed fuzzy whenever you remembered it, as though it had happened to you, as opposed to being something you’d done. Each time you recalled the moment, the kiss, your heart threatened to burst in your chest. You weren’t sure if this was because of Jimin or Finn.

Finn still hadn’t texted or called you since the fight. Maybe fight wasn’t the right word to describe the knock-down, blowout match you’d had in the library. You and Finn had never fought like that before. You’d had disagreements of course but had always managed to work things out. This was the first time you’d left an argument and found yourself at a loss.

Finn wanted a more available girlfriend and you wanted to dance.

Deep down, you knew this was an unsolvable problem, but the idea just seemed so unfathomable. The idea that this would be the thing to break you up. It hadn’t been a problem back in high school. Maybe Finn hadn’t always come to your dance competitions, but he’d attended recitals and brought you flowers at nearby performances. He’d always seemed to enjoy your dancing, even if he hadn’t fully understood it.

It made your heart ache to imagine that deep down, Finn thought your decisions were foolish. When you awoke Thursday morning, you saw Finn hadn’t called and nearly dialed his number, but then you looked at the clock and swore. Ballet began in an hour.

This conversation wasn’t one to do over the phone. Talking to Finn would have to wait, so you scrambled out of bed and threw on your clothes. Noelle had comforted you the best she could the night prior, but she still didn’t know the extent of what’d happened. All you’d said was you had a fight with Finn.

Saying it out loud felt like admitting defeat. Admitting what you’d done meant you’d have to see Noelle’s expression when you explained – when you told her you’d kissed Jimin while still dating Finn. You didn’t want to see her face when she learned the truth; you were having enough difficulty confronting it yourself.

Pushing this from mind, you focused on today as you entered the classroom. You would be forced to see Jimin this morning. You’d been so worried about talking to Finn, you’d nearly forgotten about the other piece of the equation.

You had kissed Jimin, and then you’d run away.

As you entered, you scanned the room and frowned when you didn’t immediately see him. Jimin usually arrived before you and Noelle. Setting your bag down, you began to warm up and continued to glance at the clock. At one minute until the hour, you began to grow nervous. If Jimin didn’t arrive in the next thirty seconds, the door to the room would shut and that would be that.

Watching the second hand tick, your stomach twisted as the unthinkable happened. Jimin didn’t show up. Ballet on Thursdays was taught by Mr. Vlad, who was notoriously punctual and at exactly 9:00 AM, he shut the door.

You had the sudden urge to check your phone for missed texts, but there was no time. Instead, you were forced to stand at the barre as you began pliés. You knew the second you started today would be a lost cause but could do nothing about it. Your relationship with Finn was in shambles, Jimin was clearly avoiding you but still, you needed to dance.

After class, you called Finn and went again to voicemail. Standing alone in your dorm room, you swallowed and tossed your phone on the bed. Fine – if he wouldn’t answer, you’d go and see him.

Stripping out of your leotard, you tossed this in the laundry to pull on new clothes. Jeans, sweater, coat – slamming a hat on your head, you shoved both hands in mittens and threw your bag over your shoulder. You were halfway out the door when you came to a stop.

You had no idea what to say to Finn.

Shutting your eyes, you slowly exhaled. You were angry, that much was true. Furious, even – his words had been biting, you were still hurting but you also still loved him, as insane as that sounded. Opening your eyes, you glanced at your trembling hands.

You hated feeling this way – weak, irrational. You hated wanting Finn, loving him and being so hurt all at the same time. Worse still, you hated the guilt clouding your judgement and lessening some of your anger. Finn had been wrong to say what he’d said, but you’d also been wrong to kiss Jimin.

For weeks now, you’d felt something for Jimin. Maybe months if you were being totally honest with yourself. Jimin had always consumed a larger amount of your waking hours than could be considered entirely normal for a supposed enemy.

Slowly, you turned and set down your keys. Removing your hat from your head, you stared at the door. Before you could talk yourself out of it, you sat at your desk and dialed Finn’s number.

It rang several times and then went to voicemail. This time, you didn’t hang up.

“Hey. It’s me.” You paused. “Finn, listen, I… we need to talk. Things have gotten so messed up lately. So… fucked up, right? I’m pissed, Finn. I’m really mad at you, but that’s not the only reason we need to talk. I – just call me back. Okay?”

You hesitated, wanting to tell him I love you, but forced yourself to hang up instead. Lowering your phone to your lap, you released a sigh. You supposed for all your avoidance of Finn, you deserved to give him a little more time to think.

Even though sitting here not doing anything was killing you.

As stupid as it sounded, you couldn’t bring yourself to break up over the phone. That would be considered the lowest of low. If you even wanted to break up, that is. It had been less than a week since you’d first had the thought in the cab – maybe you and Finn didn’t belong together. It seemed like a foreign concept still, as nonsense to you as chopping off your own hand.

But you couldn’t ignore things any longer. Something was obviously wrong between you. You needed to talk, you needed to lay all cards on the table and decide where you’d go next.

Closing your eyes, you leaned back in the chair. Without quite meaning to, your thoughts wandered to Jimin.

This seemed to happen more and more lately. You weren’t sure when he started vying for Finn’s place in your mind. The shift had been subtle, a change you’d barely noticed at first. But no – that wasn’t entirely true. It wasn’t as though Jimin had taken Finn’s place, but rather forged an entirely new one.

What you felt for Jimin was different from how you felt for Finn. With Finn, things between you were comfortable, things – had – felt supportive and strong. Now, Finn was none of those things to you, but he still didn’t compare to how you felt for Jimin.

Jimin was like a breath of fresh air after being inside for too long. He was something you hadn’t even realized you missed until you went out. You wouldn’t feel like this for Jimin unless something were wrong with the room you were currently in.

Suddenly, you felt very tired.

You’d always prided yourself on your ability to persevere, on your talent for overcoming by simply pushing on. This though wasn’t something you could solve through sheer force of will. The mess you’d created was only made worse by your infernal stubbornness.

Opening your phone, you flipped to the thread between you and Jimin. The last text he’d sent you had been a TikTok before the night of the kiss. True to his word, Jimin had pretended to forget all about the club and instead, simply returned to being your friend. Rereading your texts, you felt your chest tighten.

It wasn’t as though Jimin had been entirely innocent.

He’d known you had a boyfriend, but you’d never done anything to push him away. You’d been the one to move closer in the club. You had been the one to kiss him first. Jimin didn’t deserve to be treated this way and slowly, you lowered your head to your hands.

It was too much. By all rights, several people should hate you right now and you had no idea how to fix any of it.

Looking up, you set your jaw and sent Jimin a text.

Y/N: you weren’t in ballet class today. Is everything okay? [3:14 PM]

It took Jimin a while to respond. While you waited, you stared at the ceiling, then the floor until you saw ellipses typing. Jimin paused, then stopped and started again. After several long minutes, you got a new text.

Jimin: was sick, sorry [3:22 PM]

Y/N: that sucks :/ [3:22 PM]

Jimin: Y/N. What do you want? [3:23 PM]

Swallowing hard, you sat back. You had no idea what you wanted, and therein lay the problem. Belatedly, you realized you couldn’t have this conversation before you talked to Finn. You couldn’t know what you were apologizing for until you knew where you stood with your current relationship.

You needed more time, which was what you had told Jimin yesterday – and then proceeded to ignore, texting him now.

Y/N: nothing. I’m sorry. I just… wanted to make sure you were okay [3:25 PM]

He started typing again, then stopped. This happened a few more times and you imagined Jimin rewriting whatever it was he wanted to tell you. Finally, he sent his text and you felt your heart sink.

Jimin: yeah. I’m fine. [3:27 PM]

Y/N: okay [3:28 PM]

Placing your phone to the side, you fought back the tears which now threatened to fall.

You’d never imagined yourself an emotional person, so you couldn’t imagine where all this was coming from. Some long-lost, pent-up part of yourself which throbbed and whispered how stupid you were. Stupid to have fought with Finn, stupid to have pushed Jimin away, stupid to have kissed him and hurt everyone in the process.

Climbing into your bed, you curled into a ball and let the tears fall until you had nothing left.

The next morning, you walked into ballet class with red-rimmed eyes. Noelle had returned yesterday afternoon, taken one look at your face and transitioned to mom mode. She thought your breakdown was all about Finn and you hadn’t bothered to correct her. In a way, it all was.

He still hadn’t called. When you woke, you battled again whether to go to Redfield and confront him in person. That hadn’t worked out so well the last time, but it was driving you crazy to exist in this state of not knowing.

When you entered class Friday morning, you saw an unfamiliar woman at the front and felt your heart sink. In the chaos of this past week, you’d nearly forgotten about today’s master class.

Maisie Vern was a renowned choreographer of classical ballet. She’d choreographed for some of the most well-known ballets all over the world, with her pas de deux choreography receiving comparisons to Balanchine originals.

You’d completely forgotten she was teaching today. Starting to panic, you forced yourself to stay calm. Just because your private life was falling to pieces didn’t mean this needed to manifest in your dancing. You could do this.

And then Jimin walked into the room and you realized you couldn’t.

He looked as tired as you felt, dark circles shadowed beneath his eyes. He hardly glanced your way as he entered, crossing to the other side to set down his things. Following him with your gaze, you watched Jimin begin to stretch at the barre. Dark hair fell over his forehead, hiding his face from view.

Forcing yourself not to look, you noticed Seokjin standing at the front. Seeing him beside Miss Vern made your stomach sink. Seokjin was in high demand as a teacher’s assistant; the only reason he’d be here was if he were assisting Miss Vern. And if he were assisting Miss Vern, this meant today’s combination must be a pas de deux.

Confirming your growing dread, Miss Vern clapped both her hands. She was dressed in a slouchy sweater, wispy bun and flat canvas ballet shoes. Effortlessly standing in first position, she glanced around the room.

“Hello,” she said. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Maisie Vern. We have a long class today, so make sure your water bottles are full. For the first hour we’ll warm up at the barre, then we’ll move to center and learn some choreography. I will warn you,” she said, raising her brow. “This pas de deux is from a ballet I’m choreographing for the San Francisco ballet, so it has never been performed live before. Therefore! A certain amount of professionalism and confidentiality is expected.”

Whispers swept the room, everyone eager for the opportunity to prove their worth. Even you found yourself awed by the moment – it was a privilege to dance in the same room as Maisie Vern, let alone learn choreography she’d yet to reveal to the public.

“Now.” Miss Vern gestured to Seokjin. “Some of you might know Kim Seokjin, my assistant for the day. He comes to me highly recommended and will help demonstrate some of the more complicated lifts. Today’s pas de deux is less about the choreography though, and more about the emotion.”

Hearing this, you froze at the barre.

“The ballet is a modern-day retelling of the Odyssey epic. Our hero, Odysseus, has just returned home and is reunited with his love, Penelope. He suspects her of cheating in his absence, so he disguises himself as someone else to test her. Penelope realizes who he is and is furious at her husband for his lack of faith.”

Your gaze darted to Jimin. He stared ahead at Miss Vern, but you could see his jaw tense from all the way across the room.

“This pas de deux is all about tension! Two people in love but pushed beyond their limits. Time and distrust have come between them. This,” Miss Vern announced, “will be the goal of you ballerinas and danseurs to convey.”

All around, a few people nodded, but most of the class seemed unnerved by the prospect. Thus far, your classes at Russet had mainly focused on technique. Even in weekly variations class, the emphasis had been on learning the choreography, rather than on how to tell a story.

This was the hallmark of a great dancer, though. Being able to act as you moved, telling a story which the audience could understand.

“It will be a challenge,” Miss Vern said. “However, I think you will find it to be enjoyable. With that said, let’s start at the barre. Pliés!”

Everyone scrambled to stand, including you and Noelle. Pressing play on the music, Miss Vern demonstrated the combination before you began. Barre passed quickly, possibly because you were dreading center so much. All too soon, the hour was up, and Miss Vern instructed the class to find their partners.

Warily, you crossed the room and came to a stop beside Jimin. He looked up as you approached but kept his face carefully neutral. You couldn’t tell what he was thinking and for a moment, felt a glimmer of resentment.

It had taken two people to kiss in that practice room.

Jimin had known you were taken, just as much as you’d known you were dating Finn. Even if you’d started the kiss, Jimin hadn’t stopped it – if anything, he’d kissed you back.

The moment you thought this, some of your anger drained away. Jimin had wanted to talk, but you hadn’t let him. Maybe you’d realized you felt something for him since then, but Jimin had never said anything similar to you.

For all you knew, he’d simply been caught in the moment. It wasn’t as though Jimin had ever said anything about wanting to be more than friends.

“Alright!” Miss Vern clapped her hands. “Ballerinas, you’ll start offstage. We begin at the end of the male solo. By this point in the choreography, Penelope and Odysseus have reunited. In her solo, we realize she knows who he is. In his solo, he’s angry to hear she’s entertained other suitors. They reunite for the coda!”

Glancing again at Jimin, he immediately looked down. The kernel of anger returned and this time, it grew larger. Although yes, you’d initially run away, you had at least tried to reach out to him yesterday. Jimin had been the one to skip class and shut you down.

It wasn’t fair for him to expect you to have all the answers. You had a boyfriend and you’d kissed. Clearly, you had a few things to work through.

Jaw tense, you separated from Jimin and went to stand on the sidelines. Miss Vern began teaching the danseurs the end of their solo, instructing the men to spread out on the floor. Unscrewing the cap of your water bottle, you took a large, angry sip.

As the music began, the male dancers followed suit while you watched from the side.

“Y/N?”

Turning your head, you found Sabrina before you.

She was dressed in her usual ballet clothes, but there was something about her which seemed different today. Maybe it was the hesitancy in her expression.

Looking at her in surprise, you wondered what she had to say. The fight you’d had on Halloween night seemed so far away but had barely been a week ago.

“Yeah?” you said as you set down your water.

Sabrina hesitated, seeming at war with herself. “Hey. So, I was wondering…”

Miss Vern yelled a correction at the group. Gaze darting sideways, you attempted to see who it had been directed to. After a moment, you returned to Sabrina.

“Wondering what?” you said, arching a brow.

“I was just… wondering if we could talk,” Sabrina finished lamely.

You blinked and stared at her in surprise. Out of everything, this was quite possibly the last thing you’d suspected would happen today. Before you could respond though, Miss Vern called for ballerinas to enter.

“Ballerinas!” She motioned you forward. “Your entrance will come from the top right wing. Run through the center and find your partner.”

“I – okay,” you said, realizing Sabrina waited for an answer. “Later.”

Sabrina frowned, about to respond but Miss Vern clapped her hands again, forcing you to move. Hurrying past, you hastily positioned yourself in the back of the room. With everything else that was happening, you didn’t really have time to worry about another enemy.

Speaking of whom – Jimin’s gaze hardened when you approached and in response to this, anger flared in your belly.

You’d asked him to give you time and he had agreed. It seemed this was no longer the case.

Woodenly, Jimin held out his hand. Staying carefully neutral, you took this as Miss Vern began to teach you the steps. She hadn’t been lying when she’d called the pas de deux difficult. By necessity, some of your anger disappeared as you focused on learning.

Jimin seemed equally concentrated, barely looking your way while he practiced. It took nearly forty-five minutes to learn the entire coda, with Miss Vern stopping partway for a water break. By the time you knew the choreography, both of you were sweating.

Miss Vern had also been right to call the pas de deux one about tension. At the start, Jimin’s character was testing Penelope. This involved him pulling you towards him, turning you and making you chase him – until halfway through the coda, when Penelope snapped. Choreography shifting, you began to chase him, revealing you knew who he was.

The choreography was intricate, necessitating trust between partners. Despite everything, you were relieved to find this still existed between you. When you jumped, you knew Jimin would catch you. When you fell, you knew his hands would find your waist.

Still, this didn’t mean things had returned normal. As you practiced a fouetté, turning quickly to face him, Jimin gripped your wrist harder than usual. Wincing, you pushed on towards the next jump.

The combination involved several lifts, one of which was the most psychologically taxing. It involved Jimin lifting you overhead with your front leg extended, holding only your waist. While not the most difficult move technically, it required a certain fortitude of mind to dangle, upside-down from his arms.

This certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that Jimin kept grunting.

“Will you stop doing that?” you hissed as he set you back down.

A muscle in Jimin’s jaw ticked.

“Stop doing what?”

“Grunting. I keep thinking you’re about to drop me.”

Jimin gave you a look, chest heaving for breath. “Well, it’s hard.”

“Our job is to make it look easy.”

“Yeah, look easy,” he argued. “That doesn’t mean it actually is.”

“Well –”

“Let’s just try it again,” Jimin said, cutting you off.

After a moment, you nodded and returned to your position. As you began to practice with music, you felt a familiar sinking feeling in your stomach. It seemed you’d taken several steps backwards since the start of the year. Instead of continuing to grow as partners, you and Jimin had returned to the start.

As you repeated the steps, you felt his grip on you tighten, but Jimin lifted you overhead with nary a grunt. He set you back down, your leg extended in arabesque.

“Good!” said Miss Vern as she walked past. “Try to support her lower back more, though, Jimin. She shouldn’t be falling that far behind.”

As she walked away, Jimin nodded and exhaled a breath. Once she was gone, he turned sideways to face you. Again, his gaze was unfamiliar and cold.

“Alright,” Jimin said. “Again?”

“From where?”

“Middle of the partner section?”

You nodded, taking a step backwards to catch your breath. The break in the partner section began with you running towards him, Jimin catching you around the waist to sweep you into a fish lift.

As you ran through the steps, you tried to concentrate on the choreography. Not on your partner, nor on the uncertainties which roared through your mind. Jimin certainly didn’t seem to have the same qualms you did. By all accounts, Jimin was a sharp, perfunctory, and timely dance partner.

You found this to be maddening.

Just when you’d forgotten how strained things had become, he’d grip your hand a little too tightly, or turn you a little too sharply and your eyes would narrow. After another ten minutes of practice, Miss Vern called your attention by the stereo.

“Let’s try it full out,” she suggested. “I won’t hold the first time against you, but please do your best to execute every lift.”

The class grunted in agreement; wiping sweat from their brows, they retreated to their starting positions.

Glancing at Jimin, you said, “Full out?”

He nodded. “If you want.”

Turning on his heel, he walked across the room. You watched him go, your blood beginning to reach a boiling point. Jimin was acting like a petulant child. This was how he used to be in high school, back when he was your enemy and everything had been simpler, but you didn’t want that anymore.

Now that you knew who Jimin was, you couldn’t possibly go back to hating him. The very idea made your heart hurt.

Possibly you were being unfair, or naïve. Clearly, you’d hurt Jimin, but there wasn’t time to fix things between you before the end of class. You needed to be professional, you needed to pull your shit together and you needed Jimin to do the same. Turning around, you crossed the room and reached your starting spot.

Taking a deep breath, you waited for your cue.

When Miss Vern signaled the ballerinas to enter, you ran – and felt Jimin catch you by the wrist. He wasn’t gentle, pivoting you to a penché and waiting for you to rise. When you did, he crushed you to his chest and caught your knee in posse.

Teeth gritted, you kept your gaze on him while extending á la second. Hand finding your calf, Jimin raised your leg higher. His grip was rougher than usual, making you shiver as his hand slid to your ankle.

Gaze lidded, Jimin bent you in cambré. When he pulled you upwards to face him, your noses practically touched. Your frustration, previously under control, began to unwind.

“Why weren’t you in class yesterday?” you whispered.

Jimin’s eyes flashed, as though in warning. When you turned around, he caught you deftly around the waist. Pulling you to him, Jimin’s breath ghosted your neck.

“I told you,” he murmured. “I was sick.”

“Bullshit,” you said, breaking free of his hold.

Jimin followed close behind, his feet skimming the floor. As you piqued to arabesque, he caught up and pulled you against him.

“You’re avoiding me,” you accused.

“I’m not. And it’s not bullshit,” he added. Turning you around, Jimin dipped you, only to catch you before you hit the floor. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

The next part required more footwork, both of you circling the other. Your breathing was heavier the next time you were close enough to speak.

“You’ve barely spoken to me today,” you hissed.

A mirthless laugh left his lips. Spinning you sideways, Jimin caught you against his chest, your bodies pressed together in heated silence.

“I thought you told me not to say anything?” he said sweetly.

The next move tore you apart, your feet skimming the floor before Jimin caught up and lifted you high overhead. You saw the ground for a moment, heartbeat hammering your ribs before he set you back down. Chasséing forward, you battemented and were again caught by Jimin at the ankle.

Dragging you closer, his hand found your waist.

Stubbornly, you met his gaze. “I needed time to think.”

“Oh, did you?”

Releasing your leg, he lowered you to a penché. As you rose, you managed to say, “I did. And now, I think we should talk.”

Jimin snorted. “What’s there to talk about?”

Your next battement nearly hit him in the head. Jimin’s eyes widened, but it was all part of the choreography. Timed to a change in tempo, the choreography shifted to you as the pursuer.

On pointe, you ran forward, leaping into his arms at the last second. Fish dives were difficult, since they required complete trust of your partner, but Jimin caught you easily, cradling you close to his chest. 

Lips brushing your ear, he set you back down. “Are you still with him?” he asked, chest heaving behind you. “Your boyfriend?”

Meeting his gaze in the mirror, you hesitated. “Yes.”

His gaze hardened. “Then, there’s nothing to talk about.”

There was no time to respond since the next sequence involved Jimin chasséing away into a tour jeté. You followed with chainés, head whipping around to spot him every time. As soon as you were within speaking distance, you caught him by the arm again.

“I say there is,” you insisted. “Why are you making this so difficult?”

“Me?” Jimin barked a laugh as he turned. “You’re the one driving me crazy. Like you always do.”

“What the hell does that mean?” you said to him, baffled.

Jimin’s gaze cut to yours.

For the briefest of moments, you saw his façade break. All of his pain, all of his hurt and frustration shone through and you felt yourself falter. Staring at him, you couldn’t form a response.

Not that there was time. The dance hadn’t ended and class hadn’t stopped. Taking a slow step towards you, Jimin tenderly caught your attitude effacé and extended your leg. Dragging you forward, he pulled you across the floor.

As he came to a stop, Jimin swept your body to his as your fingers curled in his hair. In the choreography, the moment was one of near reconciliation between Penelope and Odysseus, a breather before their intense ending sequence. Jimin’s chest was concave with your breath, his gaze dark and lidded when he pulled back to see you.

You swallowed, disentangling yourself as you bourreéd away.

Heart pounding, you skimmed the floor with glissades, crossing the room with Jimin close behind. The final sequence was the grand reveal, with Penelope exposing Odysseus for who he is and forgiving his mistrust.

You could relate to the sequence.

Not all of it – had you been Penelope, you might have cheated while Odysseus had been away. You might have fallen for someone else; one of the suitors, perhaps. When you looked at Jimin now, you saw that clearly. There were feelings here which extended beyond a normal crush.

Still, you could relate to the dance. You could relate to Penelope’s frustration at Odysseus for being gone for so long. For leaving in the first place, for forcing her to withstand all her burdens alone. She’d been faithful to him and all he’d done was accuse her of cheating. You remembered Finn’s words to you in the library and felt your heart sink, since you’d ended up proving him right after all.

You’d also hurt Jimin though, which you hadn’t intended. Of course, he was angry – you’d repeatedly led him on, not pushing him away when you should have. And when things between you had finally snapped, you hadn’t let him speak. You’d run away.

Executing a double pirouette, you extended in attitude for a quick promenade. Shutting down your mind, you allowed yourself to be swept away by the music. Swept away by the characters, the dance and its emotions. The choreography became less important as the story came alive. Jimin’s hands were as familiar to you as your own, lifting you easily and setting you back on the ground.

Your heart ached with each step, wanting to be closer, wanting to be nearer to him than you were. As the steps slowed, you found yourself softening. Jimin’s hand slid to your thigh, settling you against his chest in a move reminiscent of the first time you’d felt a spark. Locking gazes with him, you inhaled and lifted your hand to rest on his cheek.

Time seemed to slow; you both felt and saw a muscle tick in his jaw. Jimin roughly exhaled, his chest pressed to yours as his gaze dropped to your lips.

“Bravo! Brava!”

Startled, both of you looked up.

Dazedly, you remembered you weren’t alone. You were in Miss Vern’s ballet class, most of whom had stopped dancing midway to watch. Placing you down on the ground, Jimin took a step backwards. Lacing both hands before him, he refused to meet your gaze, choosing instead to focus on Miss Vern.

“Beautifully done!” Crossing the floor, Miss Vern stopped before you. “The passion you showed! Such emotion, such artistry. My own principals couldn’t have done any better.”

Eyes widening, your lips parted. A flutter of incredulity went through you. It was unthinkable to receive such a high compliment from a teacher at Russet, let alone a choreographer as famed as Maisie Vern.

If you’d been looking for a sign to continue, this had to be it. One of the top choreographers in the world, commending your talent and somehow, her words didn’t feel nearly as good as when Jimin had said them.

Glancing at him, you found Jimin looking as stunned as you felt. The ache within you sharpened to a point, realizing how much he meant to you. How much you wanted his success, regardless of your own.

In that moment, you knew it had never been about anyone else’s perception of you as a dancer.

You knew you could do this. You knew you could make it at Russet, could make it as a dancer. Deep down, you’d always known this, despite your moments of doubt. Jimin had been right. You wanted to dance, you loved to dance and you would continue down this path regardless of what anyone else said.

That hadn’t been what crushed you about Finn’s words.

It had crushed you that after all this time, he still didn’t seem to know who you were. The fact that he could throw out those words so casually, as though you might simply stop dancing meant he didn’t see you. He might as well have asked you to stop breathing.

Jimin, though – Jimin understood. Jimin knew who you were. He’d been a part of your life for so long, he got what made you tick. He’d seen you at your worst, as your most bitter enemy and then again, as your most trusted partner.

It was part of why he meant so much to you.

You understood all this in the blink of an eye, then realized you hadn’t responded to Miss Vern’s praise.

“Oh,” you said, fighting to catch your breath. “I – thank you so much, Miss Vern. I honestly don’t know what to say.”

Miss Vern nodded, as though she were used to such a response. Beside you, Jimin was still breathing hard, but he nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

She nodded, not choosing to linger as she faced the room. “Use them as an example!” she said, striding towards the stereo. “Seokjin and I will demonstrate, but that is the level of performance you should aim for. Again!”

The rest of the class passed in a blur, some of the fight dissipated between you and Jimin. He was still quiet, but you didn’t push him again to speak. You’d done enough for now.

As the class came to an end, Miss Vern gathered you round to give a short speech. She thanked everyone for the pleasure of teaching and, once you were dismissed, turned towards the barre.

Jimin left before you could, throwing his things in his bag as he rushed from the room. You followed him with your eyes, knowing he was avoiding you, but not blaming him in the slightest.

Sabrina wasn’t far behind and your gaze lingered on her, remembering the attempted conversation during class. You still had no idea what she’d wanted to say but honestly, Sabrina was the least of your problems right now.

Exhaling, you stood from the ground and checked your phone. Still no word from Finn.

You were trying desperately to understand, trying to give him time to think, but after your fight on Wednesday, you honestly weren’t sure if you still had a boyfriend. Finn’s radio silence didn’t seem to indicate anything positive, but you refused to let this be the way things ended between you. He owed you that much, at least.

Returning to your dorm, the knot tightened further as you imagined what he might say. Both of you had said hurtful things and now, you needed to tell him something which would change your relationship forever.

You needed advice. You needed to talk to Fin. You needed to apologize, you needed–

Plopping down on your bed, you dialed the only number you could think of to call. Noelle had graciously left to stay at Irene’s, giving you the room to yourself.

Your mom answered on the first ring.

“Y/N? Hello?”

“Mom?” you said, your voice suddenly tight.

“Oh, honey” she said, hearing your shift. You heard a soft click, as though she’d entered the next room. “What’s going on?”

“I – nothing.”

Closing your eyes, you fought to control your breathing.

“Nothing, hm?” Your mom made a gentle noise. “You’re still coming home for the holidays, aren’t you? That’s not what this is about? Your dad won’t stop talking about plans for when you get here. He just goes on and on! You’d think he didn’t have a wife.”

“No, no,” you said, opening your eyes. “I just… missed you. That’s all.”

“Well, then call more!”

When you tried to laugh, the sound came out weaker than usual.

Your mom fell quiet for a moment. “That’s not all, is it?”

“… No.”

“Tell me,” she prodded.

So, you did.

Once you started talking, you found you couldn’t stop. Everything came pouring out. The difficulties you’d had at Russet, the need for private lessons, the injury to your ankle and everything going on with Finn. The time he missed brunch, the gradual growing apart, the night he left you at the club – your mom had some choice words at this point – and your growing feelings for Jimin.

Everything had changed when you’d gone to Russet, and you’d always assumed Finn would stay the same but now, even he was crumbling into pieces.

When you were done, your mom was silent a moment, then sighed. You could picture her so clearly in your mind’s eye, seated in your dad’s office chair. This was likely where she’d gone when you heard the door click. The image made you so homesick, it physically pained you.

“Life isn’t ever as neat as we wish it would be,” your mom said at last. “People make mistakes, Y/N. People change. Sometimes the things we thought were permanent turn out not to be.”

“I know. And I know Finn and I are young, but –”

“It’s not that,” your mom said, cutting you off. “Some people meet the person they want to be with early on. That happens. Some people know who they are from the minute they’re born, but other people change and want different things.”

“I – I know. Objectively, I know but… it’s so hard to do something I don’t want to do. And I… I don’t want to break up with Finn.”

“Why not?” your mom said gently.

Biting down on your lower lip, you felt tears fill your eyes. Your answer was stupid – you knew it was. Partly, this was why you kept running away. You knew the answer wasn’t enough, which was why you didn’t want to say it.

“We’ve just been together so long,” you said, closing your eyes. “We’ve gone through rough patches before. Why is now any different?”

“I don’t know. Why is it?”

Swallowing hard, you whispered, “Because this time, I have no idea how to fix things. I think we’ve hurt each other too much, mom. I don’t know… I don’t see a way back to how we were.”

Hearing the words said out loud, you opened your eyes.

There it was. The thing you’d known for weeks but had been unwilling to say. So long as you kept it bottled in, pushed down, you didn’t have to acknowledge its presence or pain.

In truth, your fights with Finn had become so commonplace, you could no longer point to ‘the big one.’ The fight about spending time together had mutated, becoming a multi-headed dragon of differing life goals, de-prioritization and feelings for others.

Whenever you and Finn were happy these days, you found yourself holding your breath. You were waiting for said happiness to dissolve into pain. You had no clue when a relationship was supposed to end but had to imagine this wasn’t a good sign.

“I don’t think there are any easy answers, Y/N,” said your mom. “This is something you need to decide for yourself.”

“Shouldn’t it be easy, though?” you demanded, grip tightening on your phone. “When I list out everything that’s happened, I know things are bad. I haven’t been telling you things because deep down, I don’t want you saying what I already know.”

“Which is?”

“We… that we should break up.”

Your mom was quiet a moment. “It’s never easy to give up something you love.”

You wanted to respond but found you couldn’t, simply nodding even though she couldn’t see. On some level, she was your mom and she understood.

“What about the other boy you mentioned?” she said, sounding curious. “The one you’re having feelings for. Is this the same Jimin as high school?”

“Yes,” you whispered, the white-hot shame of your kiss burning you from the inside.

That was something you couldn’t tell your mom. Not now, at least. Maybe sometime in the future but for now, you couldn’t bear the shame of admitting what you’d done. You never should have let things get to this point.

“Hm.” She made a thoughtful sound. “You know, I’m not surprised to hear you’re getting along. He always seemed like a nice boy, despite how you treated him.”

“Mom!” you blurted. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“I am, honey.”

“Jimin used to bet I’d lose against him in competitions.”

“Mhm. And who started those bets?”

Although you huffed, you didn’t respond because your mom was right. Your bet senior year had been Jimin’s idea, but you’d been the one to start them before.

“It’s not even about Jimin,” you said, quieting somewhat. “It’s more… nothing in my life is solid anymore. I had a plan, mom. I knew exactly what I wanted and now that I’m here, nothing’s how I imagined.”

Softly, your mom chuckled. “Welcome to your twenties.”

“Mom!”

“You’re right, I’m sorry. Welcome to adulthood.”

“You’re not helping.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Her voice grew softer. “I wish I was there, so I could give you a hug. You’ve always been the type of person who needed a plan. But there’s more than one way to be happy, Y/N. What is it you really want?”

Her words were so reminiscent of Jimin that for a moment, you could only pause. What you wanted was dance, but you knew acknowledging this meant giving up Finn.

“I don’t know,” you whispered.

“Well, then. That’s probably the first thing you should figure out.”

Closing your eyes, you nodded. You stayed on the phone with her a while longer, talking about nothing and slowly calming down. When you finally hung up, you promised to call more and confirmed your plans to come home for the holidays.

Lowering your phone to the bed, heavy realization settled over you. You’d reached your lowest moment. If you sunk any further, there’d be no salvaging anything.

What else could happen? You barely had a relationship with Finn to speak of, had hurt Jimin’s friendship in the process and were so distracted, so tired, you were in danger of jeopardizing your future at Russet.

Somewhere along the line, everything had become twisted. You had too many problems to ignore any longer. Sitting up straighter in bed, you wiped tears away with your palm. All you could do was move forward – starting with Finn.

Satisfied by this, you rolled over in bed and closed your eyes. It had been a long time since you’d slept; you figured you could try and nap before you called. Finn wouldn’t be out of his classes for a few hours yet.

For the first time in a week, you managed to fall asleep before your mind could talk yourself out of rest.

Author’s Note: Thank you for reading 😊 ONE MORE CHAPTER LEFT! (and then the epilogue, but you know) New chapters of Raise the Barre will be posted weekly; dates are listed on the series Master List. Requests for updates will be deleted.

RAISE THE BARRE MASTERLIST 

© kpopfanfictrash, 2020. Do not copy or repost without permission.

[cinnaminsvga]

🌷 social media au where y/n posts an advertisement looking for a new place to stay that is closer to campus, causing seven upperclassmen to make it their mission to recruit her into their dormitories 🌷

A/N: THIS TOOK FOREVER AND I KINDA RUSHED IT AT THE END BUT HOPEFULLY IT MAKES SENSE?? anyway, yoongi didn’t do anything stupid (depending on your definition of stupid) so no need to worry about him being cringey,,, i spared you all from the secondhand embarrassment but i won’t be so kind next time!! anyway... enjoy || W.C. 3.8K

prev // part 11 // next masterlist here.

By the time Seokjin’s phone begins to ring, Yoongi can already feel the dread settle deep inside his bones. The familiar coil of anxiety tightens around his throat like a vice, and Yoongi has to remember how to breathe to keep himself from fainting like a corseted Victorian lady. 

“Well, that must be her!” Seokjin chimes, promptly declining your call without a glance. Yoongi catches a glimpse of your contact photo anyway: it’s an unflattering angle of you from below your neck, giving the illusion of a multitude of chins. If it were any other time, Yoongi might have smiled like a lovesick fool. 

“Don’t you dare let her in here,” Yoongi seethes. He tries to sound menacing, but the effect is severely diminished by how badly his voice cracks. He tugs at Seokjin by the sleeve, but the older man refuses to budge. “Hyung, I’m serious. I know what you’re trying to do.”

“Are you done live-tweeting your confusion now? Finally got the memo? I always knew you were a smart boy,” Seokjin laughs, patting Yoongi on the shoulder with his tomato sauce-covered tongs. “Since we’re on the same page now, why don’t you change clothes while I finish cooking? I know your entire wardrobe is composed of the free t-shirts you got from job fairs, but it would do well to wear a clean, unstained shirt.”

Yoongi swipes at him, hissing like the catboy that he is. “You’re the one who wiped shit on me, asshole. And yes, I figured out what you are trying to do. You think you’re so slick, but I know that you’re just trying to embarrass me in front of Y/N!”

Seokjin shrugs. “It isn’t like I’m trying to be slick. I embarrass you all the time. Besides, I’m setting you up on a date with the love of your life! You should be thanking me, if I’m being honest.”

Yoongi stammers, his jaw dropping in shock. “Love of my–?”

Seokjin waves his tongs in his face, silencing him. “Oh, hush. Don’t even try to hide it, Yoongi. I figured out that you like Y/N. Your weird behavior finally makes sense! After years of you avoiding her, I always thought you were just bad at forming human connections, but turns out you’ve got a gigantic heart boner for my best friend!”

“Please don’t phrase it like that,” Yoongi groans, smashing his head against his kitchen counter. He hopes a few brain cells might have died, just so he can stop processing the words coming out of Seokjin’s mouth. “Actually, just please stop talking.”

Seokjin snorts in exasperation as if Yoongi was the dramatic one between them. “Point is, this is a favor that I’ve chosen to grant you from the goodness of my heart! As I said, I’m giving you the love life you deserve! So stop whining and get moving before Y/N gets up here.”

“There isn’t any goodness nor a heart inside of you. And more importantly, when was the last time you did anything for free, you capitalist bastard!”

Seokjin clicks his tongue, shaking his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Yoongi-chi. You’ve already paid me for my services by offering me front row seats to watch you lose your fucking mind. And that, my friend, is priceless.”

“Aha! So you do admit that this is all just a ploy to humiliate me!” Yoongi shouts. He grabs a knife from his scabbard, pointing it threateningly at Seokjin. He doesn’t even flinch, instead gently guiding Yoongi by the wrist over to the chopping board where he had placed some garlic cloves beforehand. Without prompting, Yoongi’s hand begins to move, his culinary instincts taking over.

“Yes and no,” Seokjin admits as he grabs Yoongi’s cast iron pan from the top shelf (which he has never gotten to use since he bought it, ever since Seokjin had borrowed it once and placed it too high for him to retrieve.) “I’m honestly trying to help you out here, my dude. Besides, even if shit hits the fan, Y/N isn’t gonna think any less of you. She’s too much of an idiot to resent anyone.”

“Speaking from experience?” Yoongi huffs, eyeing him with intense vitriol. “Can’t say I understand how she’s gone this long without killing you.” The next time the two of them are alone together in the wilderness, he can’t promise that his hands won’t find their way around Seokjin’s throat, and it won’t be sexy.

“Hmm. Yeah, definitely,” he says, nodding absentmindedly. As he begins to season the steak, he hands the cast iron pan to Yoongi. “Start preheating this. We need it to be smoking hot before we can place the steak on there.”

“I know how to cook a steak, fucker. And who said you’re allowed to serve my Wagyu steak? I was saving that for a special occasion!”

Seokjin looks up from his ministrations long enough to raise a brow at him. “So going on your first ever date with Y/N isn’t considered a special occasion?”

Yoongi falters, eyes widening. “N-no, that’s not what I mean!” he defends hotly, but he quickly snaps out of it. “Wait, no! This is not a date! Not when both parties did not agree to any of this!”

Seokjin pauses from his cooking to place a perfectly manicured hand on his hip. “I mean, Y/N agreed to it, so are you going to reject her? Huh? Too good for her and my spaghetti?”

Yoongi scoffs, rolling his eyes. “No, she did not agree to this. She doesn’t even know you’re forcing her to eat lunch with me.”

“How can you say that with such certainty?” Seokjin challenges, puffing his cheeks. “You don’t even know what I told her!”

Except I do know what you said, Yoongi thinks darkly to himself. And more importantly, I know what she thinks you were implying. He is pretty sure that the words “crush on him during high school” have seared themselves underneath his eyelids forevermore.

But instead, he says, “Yeah, well. If what you told her is as vague as what you told me, I have a pretty good hunch that this is going to blow up into a huge misunderstanding.”

Like the absolute menace that he is, all Seokjin does is shrug nonchalantly. “Suppose you are right… Who cares? It’s not like the two of you are strangers, so I’m sure this is going to go great!”

“What the fuck? She is a stranger! I’ve literally only spoken two words to her in the past four years!” Yoongi seethes, his temple throbbing from an oncoming migraine. 

Seokjin ignores him, as per his want. “Grab that plate, will you? I gotta plate the pasta before Y/N starts calling again to let her into the building,” he says, nudging the tongs into Yoongi’s hands. Yoongi squawks, quickly turning the stove off to keep the food from burning. 

Seokjin tears off his (read: Yoongi’s) apron off, wiping his hands on his jeans with a quick smile. “Great! While you finish up here, I’ll distract Y/N for a bit in my room before I lead her in here, alright? You better hurry unless you want to keep her waiting!”

“Oh, like how you kept her waiting downstairs for the past–” Yoongi checks his wall clock, “–seven minutes?”

Seokjin cackles madly, rushing out the door. “Well, that’s where you and I differ, Yoongi-chi! I give no shits about how Y/N thinks about me, so good luck!” After sending Yoongi three flying kisses for good measure, Seokjin slams the door shut, leaving Yoongi to simmer in his bad life choices.

The worst choice that he’s ever made? Being friends with one (1) Kim Seokjin.

“God, just end me,” Yoongi mutters, placing his $80 steak on his pan. It sizzles deliciously, much like how his (nonexistent) love life is about to get burnt to a crisp.

x x x x x

“Took you long enough.” You watch as Seokjin taunts you with a funny little dance by the lobby of his dormitory, the building receptionist not even batting an eye at his eccentricity. That’s the sad side effect of living in close proximity with Seokjin: you start getting desensitized to most things, not even flinching at the sight of a man without a functioning central nervous system.

Seokjin slides his card to open the door, finally allowing you entry. “Sorry. Got busy preparing your lunch! Which by the way, you should be thanking me for.”

“The moment I thank you for anything is the day that you slip on your own cum and die,” you grouse, nudging past him to get on the elevator first. You punch the button for the 5th floor before rapidly trying to close the elevator door on him. Unfortunately, Seokjin makes it in time before his ass gets clamped by the two steel doors.

“Thinking about my cum? Oh my, Y/N… I know you’ve had a dry spell for too long, but I didn’t think you’d be that desperate for some of my butter,” Seokjin says, leaning closely to wink at you.

Against your will, your cheeks brighten furiously, weakly pushing Seokjin away from you. “You wish. At least I don’t spend my spare time loitering outside the campus gym to ogle all the sweaty hot people.”

“And the invitation to join me still stands by the way!” Seokjin singsongs, leaping out of the elevator once you reach his floor. You walk side by side until you reach his room, but you catch him shooting a furtive glance at his next-door neighbor.

“Is Yoongi joining us for lunch?” you ask, failing to keep your curiosity from showing in your voice. If Yoongi does end up joining you for lunch (which has never happened in the past four years, convincing you that he must have a personal grudge against you), then at least it can confirm to you straight away that whatever this “date” is just another prank by Seokjin. You don’t know if you should be disappointed or grateful if it is just a joke.

Seokjin beams in response, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “You know what? He is going to join us, actually!” 

He had been in the midst of unlocking his dorm when he changes direction, leading you to Yoongi’s door instead. He rifles through his other keys, and you notice one of them looks similar to his own house key, except with a Hello Kitty sticker on it. He pulls that key out and promptly unlocks Yoongi’s door without missing a beat.

What kind of weirdo must Yoongi be to give Seokjin a spare key to his dorm? You’d rather shit out a cactus than let Seokjin have free entry to your home whenever he pleases.

You hesitate by Yoongi’s door, feeling nervous all of a sudden. “Um, Seokjin? Are you sure it’s okay for me to–?”

“HONEY I’M HOOOOME!” Seokjin’s loud guffaw cuts you off before you can finish your question. He bursts through the door and leaves you by the hallway, and you watch as he nearly tackles Yoongi to the ground.

Yoongi, despite looking like he’s half the size of Seokjin on a good day, manages to keep upright despite how his back is now bent parallel to the floor. “Get off me!” he yells, roughly pushing Seokjin off of him. 

Seokjin tumbles to the floor, but the shit-eating grin on his face hardly wavers. He points at you by the doorway, a cheeky grin on his lips. “Look, Yoongi-chi! I brought a guest!”

Yoongi spares you half a glance before returning his attention to whatever he was cooking. “I suppose you did.”

Okay, this date is definitely a joke. Why the hell did you even think for a second that Seokjin might have been into you?

“Um,” you stutter nervously. You grind your heel into the carpet self-consciously, your gaze downcast. “Hello, Yoongi. Sorry for the intrusion, by the way…”

“It’s fine,” Yoongi replies, albeit a little curtly. He clears his throat, his face still tilted away from you so you can’t tell if he’s genuinely annoyed or not. 

You point a glare at Seokjin, who looks shamelessly pleased with himself. After taking a deep breath, you take your first steps into Yoongi’s home before gently closing the door.

As you look around at your new surroundings, you notice that his home is a lot cleaner than you would have expected, though you’re not exactly sure what you should have expected in the first place. It’s minimalist, but not in a barren type of way; it’s seems like Yoongi is fond of simple designs more than anything. It’s certainly a nice change of pace compared to Seokjin’s abomination of a room, with his vaguely yellow-stained bedsheets.��

The smell of freshly cooked pasta and meat being grilled catches your senses immediately. You watch as Yoongi flips over a hefty piece of steak, the aroma causing your mouth to salivate instantly. 

“I… What is… Huh?” you start, not knowing what to ask. You catch Seokjin snickering quietly to himself, but promptly shuts up when you mime punching him in the dick.

“It’ll be finished in a second. Why don’t you sit down?” Yoongi announces quietly, his gaze still fixed away from you. Confused but left with no other choice, you tentatively make your way to his couch, unable to relax as your spine remains ramrod straight and your jaw stays clenched. 

You hear Seokjin shuffling behind you until he eventually makes his way to sit with you, plopping onto the couch as if it were his home. “Ah… I’m soooo hungry. Smells good, doesn’t it?” he asks you, his brow wiggling too much to be considered normal. Either that, or he was having a stroke.

“Yeah, it does,” you say, greatly uncomfortable. You peek at Yoongi once more, who is still dutifully attending to the steak. Making sure he isn’t looking, you twist Seokjin by the nipple, causing the elder to let out a high-pitched squeal. To an outsider, it might have almost sounded like he was being pleasured. 

“Ouch! What the fuck was that for?” Seokjin whines, rubbing his tenderized nipples. 

“You know what that was for,” you hiss, keeping your volume low. “What the hell are we doing here? Why are you making Yoongi cook for us?!”

“For us? It’s for you!” Seokjin snaps back. “Didn’t you say you would only come over if you got fed? Well, this is how you get fed!”

“I was under the assumption that you would be feeding me, not him!” you seethe. You check back on Yoongi, who still hasn’t looked your way once. “The poor boy… No wonder he doesn’t like me! He must think I’m as bad as you!”

Seokjin snorts. “Of course he likes you! This whole lunch date wouldn’t have even fucking happened if he wasn’t assdeep in lo–”

“Lunch is finished,” Yoongi interrupts loudly, his spatula rattling loudly against his pan. The sudden noise makes you jump away from Seokjin, who appears vaguely triumphant. 

“T-thanks,” you stutter, standing up and resisting the random urge to shake his hand. Everything about this situation is so tense and awkward that it feels like you’re being filmed for a prank Youtube video or something. Knowing Seokjin, the odds of that happening are great. 

“That’s my cue to leave then! Bye! You guys have fun!” Seokjin says, jumping to his feet. 

You vaguely hear Yoongi gasp quietly when you launch yourself at Seokjin, just narrowly keeping from escaping. “Oh no, you don’t! Who said you could leave? You’re not going anywhere!”

But like the slippery snake that he is, Seokjin manages to wriggle out of your arms and hop over Yoongi’s coffee table to get to the door. “Too bad! I have classes to get to, so I gotta blast! Use this time to get to know each other or whatever it is that kids do these days,” he says, winking salaciously. With one final sputter of (evil) laughter, Seokjin makes his exit, leaving you and Yoongi to fester in some good ol’ fashioned discomforting silence.

“Um,” you say, just as Yoongi opens his mouth to say something too.

“No, you go first–”

“You go ahead–”

The two of you pause mid-sentence, staring at each other. You grin sheepishly at him, motioning for him to speak first. 

He returns your smile half-heartedly. “So, um… I just wanted to say I’m sorry for letting Seokjin rope you into this. I tried stopping him, but… You know how he is.”

You laugh, sounding a little crazed even to your own ears. That’s the longest sentence you’ve ever heard him speak! 

“Yeah, believe me… I am intimately aware of how he is. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t,” you joke. 

Amazingly, your little quip makes his smile widen, his cheeks puffing up imperceptibly. “Glad we can agree that Seokjin has the amazing ability to ruin people’s lives. It’s almost welcoming to find solidarity in a shared experience.”

“Shared experience? Try shared trauma. That dude is a walking serotonin sucker,” you say dryly. 

You don’t think what you said was remotely funny enough to warrant a laugh, but it causes Yoongi to let out a loud snort regardless. But the amusement on his face is short-lived, his cheeks going red in embarrassment. He slaps a hand to his mouth, breaking eye contact once more. “Oh fuck, that was so unflattering,” he groans, clearly mortified.

His blush, multiplied by his shy demeanor, makes you want to coo at him, but you doubt he’d take that too kindly. So instead, you change the subject to save him. “So, uhh… The food? You don’t have to give me any, by the way. I wouldn’t want you to waste your lunch on me or anything.”

Yoongi snaps out of his previous embarrassment, returning to the more familiar stoic expression you’ve come to associate with Yoongi. “No, that’s fine. Seokjin–er, rather… I made enough for two people, so it would be a waste if you didn’t eat at least some of it. But I don’t care either way if you want it or not.”

For two people? you wonder. So Yoongi had known Seokjin wasn’t going to join for lunch?

“Oh, if it’s fine with you…” you trail off, meekly making your way towards him. The spaghetti and steak look absolutely delicious, though you don’t need to tell him that when your stomach speaks for you. “Oh shit, that’s so embarrassing,” you say, your cheeks heating up this time.

Yoongi chuckles, shaking his head. “Haven’t eaten breakfast yet, I assume? That’s pretty stupid if you ask me. Don’t you have class until 5? How the hell would you have survived until then?”

You choke in surprise. Where did all that sass suddenly come from? “Excuse me? I’m not stupid! I would’ve been fine with a sandwich from the cafeteria if you must know!” you say indignantly. You’re too busy being offended that you don’t fully comprehend his words, failing to notice how he had known you had class until 5 in the first place.

“Sure, whatever you say.” Rolling his eyes, Yoongi starts shifting through his cupboards and pulling out a pink tupperware. He begins to load them with food, nearly overflowing the containers with how much he tries to stuff in them.

“H-hey! What are you doing?”

“Packing your lunch. You have class in a bit, yeah? It’s almost 11:50 and it takes around 15 minutes to get to the main campus. You won’t have time to eat here and make it in time,” he says, pointing you with a look. “Wait. Did you have coffee this morning?”

“Yeah? So?” you ask, defensive. “Are you gonna call me stupid again for not having caffeine or something?”

“No,” he grunts. “If you’re caffeinated, then that means it should only take you 7 minutes to get to class.”

“That doesn’t even make sense!” you exclaim, but you can’t help letting out an incredulous laugh. “Wow. You’re kinda weird, did you know that?”

“You barely even know me, so how would you know?” he retorts. He finishes placing food into the tupperware and promptly clicks the lid in place. He offers it to you, smirking slightly.

You huff, but your ire is all for show. You aren’t actually annoyed by him–he’s just… different from what you expected. A little shy, a little rough around the edges… but you can tell he isn’t a bad guy. You understand why Seokjin loves to torment him; he seems like a fun person to tease. 

“That can be amended,” you respond, taking the tupperware from him. Your fingers graze the backs of his hand by accident, causing him to quickly retract his hand as though he’d been burned. You nearly drop the container in surprise, but luckily your reflexes save your precious food just in time. 

“Sorry. About… you know.” Yoongi gesticulates wildly, his gaze darting anywhere but at you. 

You smile secretly to yourself, amused. Ah. He’s like a human seesaw. Blushy one second and grumpy the next. “No worries, Yoongi. I’ll be sure to return this container soon, so don’t you worry.”

Yoongi shrugs. “Keep it if you want. I don’t care either way.”

Says the guy who has an entire cupboard full of color coordinating food containers. “Roger that, Yoongi.”

Yoongi walks you out the door, pausing outside the hallway with you. “Do you…” he hesitates, swallowing loudly enough for you to hear. “Do you… want me to walk you out?”

His sudden offer almost makes you want to laugh, but you have a feeling he wouldn’t find it amusing at all. Instead, you just shake your head with a smile. “Don’t worry. I won’t get lost. I think I remember where the door is.”

He pouts, his lips jutting out cutely. “Yeah, well. I was just trying to be nice, but you do you.”

You giggle lightly, patting him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. You were more than nice,” you say, winking for added effect. It does more than you thought it would, causing Yoongi’s cheeks to bloom once more.

With one last wave, you make your way out of the dormitory, your heart a little lighter than before. 

“Huh. That was weird.” You glance at the pink little tupperware in your hands, its warmth keeping your hands safe from the winter chill. As you walk to class, your thoughts are filled with nothing but a shy boy with soft hands and even softer cheeks. Maybe Tuesday isn’t going to be so bad after all.

[bex-la-get]

I love the new prompt! Can I request 5 and 6 for Ethan and Natalie, thank you!

NONNY! You put together the BEST combo! Yes, I love this, let's go!

Note: This takes place in an AU where Nat and Ethan confessed their love for each other, but Nat decided to leave Edenbrook after her residency.

And fair warning: this is gonna be long.

From this ask list.

5) “...you look like you just saw a ghost.”

6) “I... I can’t believe it’s really you. I thought I’d never see you again.”

Five years. Five long years since Natalie had left Edenbrook.

In those five years, she had thrived. After taking a position in the Internal Medicine Department at LAC + USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, Natalie had revamped the medical industry. From fighting Big Pharma companies-- such as Panacea-- on overcharging for basic life-saving medicines and winning to using her experience of saving Naveen's life to revolutionize patient care and saving countless lives, Natalie had become a household name in the medical community and the world.

Ethan had watched from afar via social media and the occasional television interview she had done. He couldn't be prouder of Nat; she had far surpassed anyone's expectations and was reaching new heights every day. But as proud as he was, he couldn't help but feel a bit sad.

He still loved her. He always would. And while he was thrilled Natalie was succeeding in her career-- and he would never ask her to stop doing what she loved-- he silently hoped one day she would come home. That one day, she would come back to him.

He knew it was unlikely. Still, if there was anything Natalie had taught him, it was to never give up on the person you knew you were meant to be with. And he knew Nat was that person for him. So, until he was proven otherwise, he'd hold out hope for her. Always.

------------------

Ethan was walking the halls of Edenbrook, mentally checking off the to-do list for the Board Meeting he had that afternoon, when he saw a familiar head of bright red hair. He almost brushed it off until he heard that all-to-familiar laugh and his heart nearly stopped.

Natalie.

He turned to find the source and saw Nat talking to Sienna and Jackie, looking every bit the successful doctor she had become. What she was doing here, he didn't know; but he didn't very much care. She was here, she was back. But for how long?

Without realizing it, Ethan's feet carried him towards her. He had to see her in person; had to hear her voice and to see her smile.

As he got closer, Sienna spotted him first and she smiled. "Oh, hi Ethan!"

He smiled at Sienna but was quickly distracted by the blue-green eyes he'd missed so much. The moment Natalie spotted him, she grinned and his heart began to pound in his chest. If it were possible, she was more beautiful now than ever; and yet barely anything had changed. Her hair was longer, her face a little more mature and she held herself with all the confidence in the world. But she was still Natalie. She was still his Rookie.

"Ethan!" Natalie said, making her way towards him.

He outstretched his arms and relished in the hug she gave him, enjoying this brief moment where she was back in his arms. "It's good to see you, Rookie," he said, as she pulled away.

She smiled. "I don't know if I'm much of a rookie anymore."

He returned her smile. "You'll always be Rookie to me." There was such fondness in his words that Nat's eyes shined with admiration for a brief moment. His heart was pounding so hard right now, it was a miracle it hadn't burst out of his chest yet.

"What are you doing here? Just visiting?"

"Actually, I was hoping to meet with you, Chief," she replied. "I'd like to talk to you about something."

He raised his eyebrows, intrigued. "Well, you caught me at a good time. I have some time before my next meeting if right now works for you?"

She nodded and waved goodbye to Sienna and Jackie, promising to meet up with them later, and followed Ethan to his office. He closed the door behind them, ensuring their conversation would be private and turned to face her again, sucking in a breath as he met her eyes.

She raised an eyebrow. "Are you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

He chuckled. "Yeah, I-- I just can't believe it's really you. I thought I'd never see you again."

She smiled sheepishly. "I did do a pretty bad job of staying in touch, didn't I?"

He shook his head. "You've been busy saving the world," he said. "You have no reason to be sorry for that. But, if I may, I've been following your career, Nat. And I'm very proud of the work you've accomplished. You've become quite the doctor."

She blushed. "Thank you; you know I couldn't have done it without your guidance. You taught me everything I know."

"Now that certainly can't be true; you know far more now than I could have ever taught you."

She chuckled. "Well, maybe a little."

He smiled and fought every urge he had to take her into his arms and kiss her senseless. Keep it together, Ethan. He shook his head. "I'm sorry, you said you had something you wanted to talk to me about. Please, take a seat." He sat behind his desk as she sat across from him and pulled out a black folder from her bag.

"Yes, well," she began, "I've enjoyed my time in LA and I'm proud of the work I've accomplished. But Boston will always be home to me-- though don't tell my mom that, she's still hoping I'll move back to Philly." Ethan chuckled and nodded as Nat continued. "I-- I miss home. I miss Edenbrook. I miss y-- my friends. And... I may or may not have seen that the DT has an opening for the lead position and I thought I'd throw my name in the ring. For the job."

She placed the folder on his desk. "Everything you need to know about the work I've done over the last five years is in this folder and I have several character references, including one from the Chief at LAC. I've also included my notes that I'll be referencing for my book that will be coming out early next year and--"

"Nat," Ethan cut her off. "There's no need for all this. The job is yours."

She looked at him wide-eyed. "What? Just like that? Don't you want to field questions? Ask me about how I'd handle certain situations?"

"I don't need to; I told you, I've been following your career. I know of the work you've done and I've seen first hand how good of a doctor you are. I don't need to field questions, Nat. If you want the job, it's yours."

She smiled. "Thank you, Ethan. I can't describe how grateful I am. I know the team means a lot to you; I'll do you proud."

"You already do."

She blushed. "So, what's next?"

"I'll get the paperwork filled out and sent to HR. Assuming everything goes smoothly and HR doesn't drag their feet, we can have you start as early as next week," Ethan said. "Unless you need more time to settle in?"

Nat shook her head. "No, I already have a place lined up. I'm just crashing with Sienna and Bryce for a couple nights while the movers bring everything up."

Ethan nodded. "Alright; well, I'll get the paperwork set up shortly." He extended his hand out to her. "Welcome back to Edenbrook, Dr. Cusack."

"It's good to be back," she said, shaking his hand. They smiled at each other for a long moment, neither wanting to let go of each other's hand. Natalie seemed to be searching Ethan's eyes for something before she spoke again. "Ethan-- er, I'm going to Donahue's this evening with everyone to celebrate my return to Boston. You're welcome to join us, if you'd like."

He smiled and nodded. "I might stop by for a bit."

Her face lit up. "Okay; then I'll see you there." She slowly-- almost reluctantly-- slid her hand out of Ethan's and grabbed her bag. "See you later then, boss."

He walked her to the door, smiling. "It's really good to see you, Nat," he said. "I-- I'm glad you're back."

The look she gave him nearly took his breath away. If he were mistaken-- and he rarely ever was-- he'd say she looked at him the same way he looked at her: madly in love. "Me too," she said. They looked at each other for another long moment before she looked down at her shoes and cleared her throat. "I'll see you tonight."

"Yeah, see you tonight," he said. He watched as she left and took a deep breath in an attempt to slow his pounding heart. She was back. She was home. It was as if all his hopes and dreams from the last five years were finally coming true. But there was one big question that still needed answering: Did she still want him the way he wanted her?

Only one way to find out.

---------------------------

Donahue's was packed. Ethan had forgotten it was Wednesday, which meant half-off drinks for all EB employees. It was something Reggie had implemented a few years ago in order to get more weekday business. It had worked a little too well and Reggie had to hire more people to keep up with the demand; but business was booming as a result so it wasn't like anyone could complain.

He'd found Nat and her friends easily; they had commandeered one of the biggest booths in the place and were currently taking tequila shots, courtesy of Jackie.

"Jacks, we're not in our twenties anymore," Natalie reasoned as she pushed a tequila shot away from her. "I can't do several shots in a row and still be a human being the next morning!"

"That's quitters talk!" Jackie argued but relented when Nat gave her the unwanted tequila shot. "More fun for me!"

Natalie laughed and shook her head in disbelief, when she spotted Ethan. Her smile grew and she excused herself from the table, getting up to greet him. He returned her smile and welcomed the hug she gave him, once again relishing in the feeling of having her in his arms. "I was wondering when you were going to show," she said, as she pulled away.

He chuckled. "Sorry; being Chief means I have a lot of extra paperwork that needs to be taken care of."

She shook her head. "You're here now. Come on, we're due for another round, anyway, so you came at a good time."

"Actually," he grabbed her hand, stopping her from walking away. "Could-- could we talk for a moment? Privately?"

She nodded, curiosity evident on her face, and followed him outside to the patio which was, surprisingly, empty. Not that Ethan minded; having the patio to themselves meant less prying eyes and ears. He sat at one of the tables and smiled to himself when Nat sat next to him.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah; I just... Nat, I realize this might not be very professional of me but I need to know." He turned to face her and took a deep breath. "Before you left, you told me you loved me. Do-- do you still feel that way?"

She rolled her lips together in anticipation to answer and he braced himself for rejection. Instead, she took his hand in hers and said the word he desperately needed to hear. "Yes."

"Really?" He almost couldn't believe what he was hearing.

She nodded. "If I'm being honest, Ethan, part of the reason I moved back to Boston was because I missed you, desperately. I still love you. I always will."

He fought back tears and caressed her cheek with his free hand. "I never stopped loving you, either, Nat. I always hoped you'd come home; come back to me. But I couldn't have asked that of you, especially as your career began to thrive."

She smiled. "I know you wouldn't; it's not in your nature." She scooted closer to him on the bench. "But as happy as I've been in my career, I've always been missing one thing: you." She sighed. "I wouldn't take back the success I've had over the years; I wouldn't give up the career I've built for myself because I'm extremely proud of it. But... I can't help but wonder what could've been if I hadn't left. Where would we be? Maybe running the DT together; maybe we would've gotten married, had a couple kids, maybe got a house in the suburbs. I feel like there's a whole life we could've had if I didn't leave."

"We can't sit here and wonder what could have happened, Nat," he reasoned. "You needed to leave to find your footing, spread your wings, and flourish into the incredible doctor you are today. Don't sell yourself short; the things you've accomplished are nothing to sneeze at." He looked at their joined hands and ran his thumb along her knuckles. "I would never ask you to give up your dreams or put your career on hold for me. It killed me to watch you leave but to see you thrive was more than I could have ever asked for."

"Thank you," she said, quietly. She took a deep breath. "But, since I'm home now, and I plan on staying here... maybe we can pick up where we left off? Try the whole dating thing again? And everyone knows I've made a name for myself on my own so you don't have to worry about anyone saying I slept my way to the DT position."

He chuckled and nodded. "Good point." He squeezed her hand. "I would love to pick up where we left off; if that's what you want?" She nodded and he smiled. "Good; because that's all I want too."

Moving faster than he could process, Natalie cupped his face in her hands and kissed him soundly. He melted into the kiss immediately and kissed her back feverishly, his hands gripping themselves tightly around her hips as he pulled her impossibly closer.

Though it had been years, kissing her was so familiar and natural that it was as if no time had passed between them. Her lips fit perfectly with his, full of unspoken words of love and passion. Five years had passed since he last held her in his arms or kissed her, but in an instant, those five years were gone. The only thing that was left was the two of them, making up for lost time with forever spread out ahead of them.

Tag List below the cut:

Tag List (let me know if you want to be added/removed):  @genevievemd @jamespotterthefirst @paulfwesley @ethansdique @openheartfanfics @perriewinklenerdie @little-flowers-on-heaven @stateofgracious @coffeeheartaddict @liaromancewriter @potionsprefect @mm2305 @gryffindordaughterofathena @actuallybored @writer-ish @queencarb @takeharryandgo @lsvdw-blog @itsjustwinter @imaneditorthankyouverymuch-deac @chaoticchopshopheart @ohchoices @maurine07 @oldminniemcg @parisa-kh @shanzay44 @uberamsey @izzyourresidentlawyer @adiehardfan @custaroonie @mia143 @a-crepusculo @takemyopenheart @toadfrog26 @quixoticdreamer16 @barbean @headoverheelsforramsey @natureblooms24 @choicesaddict5

[jj-babebank]

Camp Willowdale / JJ Maybank AU / PART 6

Synopsis: Camp Willowdale is buzzing with new campers. It’s Caroline Windsor’s first year as a camp counsellor after attending the camp as a camper for ten years. Little does she know that this year Willowdale Lake is going to be a little different from what she is used to it being…

Warnings: future chapters may include curse words, mentions of drugs, mentions of alcohol, mentions of sexual activities, mentions of death.

Pairings: JJ Maybank x fem OC Part 1 ; Part 2 ; Part 3 ; Part 4; Part 5 ;

Masterlist

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Part 6 -

49 days of camp left

“The thing I don’t understand is,” said JJ, taking a sip of his coffee several days later at breakfast, “How is everyone so chill about all of this?”

“Yeah, everyone except for us,” said Caroline.

“And Topper,” mumbled Sarah.

Her three friends all looked up at her, eyes wide.

“What?” she looked back at them, eyes equally as wide in confusion, “Why’d you think he’s been moping around camp, face looking like a slapped ass?”

“Sarah, why didn’t you say anything at the campfire?” Caroline asked angrily.

“Um, I did,” defended Sarah.

“Um, no you didn’t,” clapped back JJ, getting visibly annoyed.

John B nodded and mumbled quietly, “They’re right, you didn’t…”

“Not now, John B,” snapped Sarah at him, turning towards her other friends, “What do you mean I didn’t?”

“When we asked you about what Topper said, you literally said ‘oh nothing of importance, he doesn’t care about the bitch either’ and then you went back to glaring at those girls goggling at John B,” said JJ.

Sarah scoffed, “I was only glaring because they refuse to listen to me and only do whatever he says,”

“That’s beside the point, Sarah,” sighed JJ, “If you weren’t too busy doing that, perhaps you’d have mentioned that Topper doesn’t buy the whole boyfriend story either, which could mean that we’ve got an ally amongst all of these lunatics!”

“Sorry,” Sarah shrugged, “I guess I just got distracted,”

Caroline shook her head sighing, “Anyway, it’s almost 9,” she looked at JJ, “What’s on our schedule for today?”

“Funny you ask,” JJ responded, “We’ve actually got swimming until 11, which means the kids have swimming until 11 and we can just chill by the lake,” he wiggled his eyebrows, “If you know what I mean,”

In the days since camp began, the whole Madison thing had died down and since there was no new occurrences and, well, no new leads, Caroline and JJ decided to put their primary focus on their teens. They’d made a small rule that every time their schedule indicated that they’ve got an activity where their physical participation is not directly required, Caroline would sneak some whiskey in their thermoses and they would quietly drink it in secret, just to spice up their day.

So far Caroline was doing a pretty good job at hiding her crush on JJ, which was somehow becoming bigger by the day. For some reason everything that JJ did was attractive. Whether it was him running, or teaching the boys how to tie a noose, or eating (pretty messily) his food, or not to mention swimming practice when he was required to get naked – Caroline could just stare at him all day. She was somewhat happy about their newfound tradition of taking over some of their daily tasks while tipsy because the alcohol was somewhat helping her seem more confident and less shy.

Caroline tied her long brunette hair in a Dutch braid and smeared the tiniest bit of mascara on her lashes, just to seem effortlessly pretty, of course. She adjusted the straps of her swimsuit and grabbed her and JJ’s prefilled thermoses before heading out to meet the boy and their group in front of the camper’s cabin.

“There she is,” said JJ, unable to hide his excitement, “We ready to go?”

The campers all agreed and they made their way down towards the lake, where Caroline and JJ sat at one of the benches while their campers hurried into the water.

“Now, now, Teens 2,” said JJ after them, not too bothered about sounding strict, “Usually our timetable says swimming, but since we’re all grown ups here, we can all do whatever we want, as long as we don’t go too far away from me and Carrie’s eyesight, alright?”

Everyone agreed and JJ sat back down next to Caroline, who handed him his thermos.

“I’ve gotta give it to you, Maybank,” she said, taking a sip of the spicy liquor in her flask, “You’ve got a way with kids,”

JJ smiled down at her, taking a sip too, “I mean they’re hardly kids, C,” he said, “Besides, I try my best, I wouldn’t want to embarrass myself in front of you,”

That blush that Caroline was all too familiar with crept back onto her cheeks, “In front of me?” she repeated, surprised.

“Yeah,” nodded JJ as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, “I don’t see any other pretty girls around here,”

Caroline looked in the opposite direction, too shy to look at JJ, as she took another rather large sip of her drink, “JJ…”

“What? Can’t a guy give you a compliment?” he smirked, “Hey, come on now, we’re in this together, besides… your mom did say -”

Just as Caroline was about to turn towards JJ with a panicked look in her eyes, fearing what exactly her mom had said to him, two of their campers began screaming their names, diverting both of their attentions.

“Carrie! JJ! You’ve gotta come see this!”

JJ shot up, helping Caroline up as well, as they ran towards the dock. Bobby and Eli, the two campers who had called out for them, were hastily swimming back to shore.

“What is it?” Caroline asked, worry filling up her nerves.

“We found something dope!” said Eli, reaching the dock, “But we can’t reach it without you guys’ help,”

“What did you find?” asked JJ.

“That,” Bobby pointed in the direction they’d just swam from. There, a good distance away, in the middle of the body of water, stood an abandoned-looking stilt house.

“The old lake house,” JJ and Caroline said in unison.

“That’s just an old building, it’s been there forever and there’s literally nothing in it,” explained JJ, his nerves calming down after the initial jump scare, “Trust me, we’ve looked,”

Bobby rolled his eyes, “Oh, come on, you can’t be serious,” he moaned, “That place looks wicked!”

“Yeah, if you watch a lot of horror movies,” said Caroline, “JJ’s right, there’s nothing in there. I’ve been numerous times, it looks way cooler in your imagination, believe me. Reality is underwhelming,”

Eli crossed his arms, “If it’s so underwhelming why don’t you wanna take us there?”

JJ sighed, “Eli, taking you there would require taking the boats, which we’re not allowed to do unless it’s on our schedule, which it’s not, and if we take you there, we’d have to take everyone there, and -”

“Take everyone where?” came Jennie, another one of their campers’, voice suddenly.

“Yeah, JJ,” more campers gathered around the dock, “Where are you taking us?”

JJ and Caroline sighed in defeat as they shared a defeated look, making Bobby and Eli high five in victory.

“Change of plans, kids,” said JJ finally, giving in, “Swimming’s cancelled, looks like we’re going to be learning how to row today,”

_________________________________________________________

“You sure about this?” JJ grabbed Caroline’s hand as she was stepping off the boat and onto the back deck of the abandoned stilt house.

Caroline turned towards him and gave him a reassuring smile, “It’ll be just like the old days,” she said, her tone sounding promising.

JJ followed her onto the deck and they helped their campers tie their little boats on the deck’s cleats.

“Looks like y’all were really paying attention during our noose tying workshop,” JJ said proudly as he double-checked that all the boats were securely tied, “I’m gonna make sure to bring that up to Miss P and we might have a shot of winning at the Will-all-hail banquet,”

Caroline snorted at the name, “So tacky…”

“Come on guys, follow me and Carrie and watch your steps,” JJ signaled, catching everyone’s attention, “This place is crazy old so be careful! One wrong step and you may end up in the water,”

Carefully, the group entered the old creaky building. It was all too familiar to Caroline and JJ, the smell of mold and condensation hitting their nostrils as the single dusty dark room they had secretly lurked into numerous times as kids presented itself in front of them. Part of Caroline had always secretly wished for the old lake house to serve as a passageway to a parallel universe, or to hold some great big secret, or even to be inhabited by the not-so-friendly ghost of whoever built it back in the day, however unsurprisingly, nothing seemed out of the ordinary yet again. The room was empty, other than the numerous spider webs which decorated almost every corner and crease.

“There you go,” Caroline said, turning to leave, “Nothing to see here,”

JJ agreed, “As always, underwhelming and empty,”

“If it’s so empty,” spoke one of the campers, “then what’s that?” the teenager pointed in the direction of where there was once a door leading towards the front deck.

Everyone’s heads turned in that direction and sure enough, on one of the old nails sticking out of the door frame, was hung a piece of red fabric, barely noticeable from the inside, let alone from where the shore to camp was.

“Stand back,” said Caroline, slowly stepping forward towards the fabric. She peeped her head through the door hole cautiously, checking if there was anyone on the front deck, holding her breath as she did so. She breathed out in relief once she saw that the coast was clear and analyzed the fabric, “Hey, J, can you come over?”

JJ, half-impressed, half-paralyzed, snapped back to reality as he walked over to the girl who now looked so brave in his eyes, mentally slapping himself for not being a man and volunteering to go instead of her.

“Why does this look familiar?” Caroline said once JJ came over to piece of clothing. It turned out to be a dress.

JJ shrugged, pulling at the material and taking a sniff, “Whoever’s it is was here recently,” he said, “Smell of perfume is fresh,” he sniffed again, “And super strong,” he scrunched his nose, a look of disgust on his face.

Caroline took a sniff too, “Yeah, that smell is so familiar, but where from…” she sniffed again, closing her eyes in an attempt to figure out where she recognized the scent from.

“Probably one of the girls from your cabin,” concluded JJ, “I’d put my money on Jenna Kinley, she seems like the type to sneak around,”

Caroline smirked, “Sounds about right, she was probably up here sneaking around with Barry, I hear her talking about him all the time,” she unhooked the dress from the nail, “I’ll bring it back to her, she must think she’s lost it,”

JJ nodded and they led the campers out of the stilt house and onto shore again. Caroline tucked the dress in her bag along with her thermos and waited until after everyone’s daily activities were over to meet Sarah by the showers and tell her about her and JJ’s scandalous little discovery. Ever since they’d arrived at Camp Willowdale and had their phones taken away for the rest of the summer, the only source of news and gossip was whatever was happening around camp, and since it wasn’t all that much, every little bit of spice counted.

“So how was archery?” she asked Sarah as she folded her underwear and turned the water in her shower on.

Sarah followed in after her, not bothering on going into a neighboring shower stall. They had developed his habit of showering together about three days into camp, with Sarah seemingly having separation anxiety and insisting that “they’ve both got the same bits and pieces” and that how “any guy would be lucky to be in the position Caroline is in,”.

The blonde groaned as she squeezed some of her purple shampoo in her palm, foaming it up and working it into her hair, “Horrible,” she said, “How do you see me with a bow and arrows?”

“Do you really want me to answer that question?” teased Caroline, mirroring Sarah’s actions and washing her hair.

“Whatever, C,” Sarah rolled her eyes, “How was your swim date with your boyfriend?”

“Okay, first of all, he’s not my boyfriend,” said Caroline earning a smug look from Sarah, “And second, you’ll never guess what we found,”

“Oooh, is it the incessant lust you have for each other?” teased Sarah.

“No, it’s better,” said Caroline, ignoring her friend’s words, “We went to the old lake house and we may or may not have found what we believe to be Jenna’s dress just hanging there,” Sarah’s eyes widened at her words, “Yeah, we assume she’s sneaking around with Barry, how fucking scandalous is that?”

“Shut up!” gasped Sarah.

Caroline nodded excitedly, “Right? She’s been yapping about him nonstop and we just put two and two together,”

“Who’d have thought… little miss perfect and Barry,” scoffed Sarah, “D’you have the dress? It’ll be so embarrassing once you give it back to her, I can picture her face already,”

“You bet I do, it’s in my bag,” said Caroline, “Must’ve done the deed recently, it still reeks of her,” she scrunched her nose at the thought of the horrible smell.

Sarah raised an eyebrow, “What’re you pulling that face for? Does she smell that bad?”

Caroline shook her head, “It’s her perfume,” she explained, “Smells like what I imagine Miss P’s underwear drawer smelling like,”

Sarah scoffed, “Now you’ve got me intrigued,” she quickly rinsed her hair and body off, hurrying for her towel, “Where’d you say this dress was?”

Caroline nodded her head in the direction of her bag, “Somewhere in my bag,” she said, “But I’m being serious – you’ve been warned,”

As she continued rinsing her hair, Sarah dove her hand into Caroline’s bag, searching for the dress in question. When she finally felt it in her hand, she pulled the piece of clothing out pressing it against her nose to take a sniff. Her eyes widened in horror as realization consumed her.

“Carrie…” she mumbled not loud enough for her friend to look up, “Carrie, this isn’t Jenna’s dress,” she spoke louder.

This time, Caroline looked up at Sarah with a look of confusion in her eyes.

“The perfume you’re talking about,” said Sarah, “It’s Guerlain Shalimar, I’d recognize it anywhere,”

“Your point being…?”

“This perfume doesn’t belong to Jenna,” Sarah turned to look at Caroline, her eyes still wide in horror, “It’s Madison’s,”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: chapter 6 is upppp!! I hope you like it!! let me know what you think and if you want to be added in the tag list for future chapters, tell me!! xxx

tags: @k-k0129 ; @hayleyy-l ; @marvellover04

Part 7 here

[soobadnoonecanstopher]

Touch it for Real, Part 4

Genre: Humor / Fluff / Eventual Smut

Warnings: OMG they were roommates / slice of life / slow burn / mutual pining / crude humor / cursing / virgin!baek / idiots to lovers

A/N: The song featured in the kitchen scene is Fantasy by Mariah Carey.

Characters: Baekhyun X You/Female Reader

Description: You teach Baekhyun how to date. (Basically the Get You Alone M/V)

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5

You were puzzling. Alone in your bedroom, laying within the comfort of your own bed, you were positively puzzling.

After sorting out just who Ben was and fixing the damage Baekhyun had done to your reputation by explaining that your idiot roommate had just gotten a hold of your phone, you reintroduced yourself and apologized for the confusion.

This ‘Ben’ actually seemed to laugh off the odd behavior he’d gotten as a first impression of you, mentioning that your roommate seemed funny, if not weirdly protective of you.

You could see what he meant when you read through the rapid fire questions Baekhyun had asked him from his age, to his preferred operating system, whether or not Ben had Facebook so “you” and him could be friends, his profession, and his parents line of work, his current place of work, how long he’s worked there and whether or not he moves around a lot, his hometown, his hobbies and even whether or not Ben has now or has ever had any pets; it seemed that Baekhyun had actually done a whole lot of legwork to give you a pretty good idea of what Ben might be like.

But the moment Baekhyun’s conversation topic changed to innocently ask Ben for his astrological sign, something struck you as off to see Baekhyun proclaim you to also be the same sign and after the two compared birthdays you began to find the whole exchange quite odd.

You realized that Baekhyun had simply lied about your birthday. Baekhyun knew your birthday. Why had he given a fake date to Ben? Unless there was something else happening that you didn’t understand. Then again, Baekhyun had always been rather stingy about giving out personal information; both yours and his. He was probably just being cautious about revealing too much to a stranger.

And actually, Ben seemed rather …. nice. You always hesitated to give them this adjective right off the bat as most of the guys you met who seemed nice right away turned out to be very good at faking nice and stringing along at least three or four girls at once for the shot at fucking at least one of them, and the hopes of fucking all of them.

You’d been called the wrong name late at night, whispered through a sleepy voice over the phone. You’d been sweet-talked and then abruptly called a bitch for refusing to send nudes to a guy you’d been talking to for only a week. Apparently a week was his limit and all his other girls gave him what he wanted within a couple of days. You’d been ghosted by nice guys who felt victimized and led on when you said goodnight politely with a smile and a wave instead of inviting them inside for ramen.

You did want a nice guy. But you wanted a real one.

What you wouldn’t give for one of them, for just one of them to be honest with you and really show you their true self.

Perhaps you had been going about it all wrong.

Your conversation with Ben quietly fizzled and you put your phone away to charge and now, now you were simply puzzling.

It panged at your heart to think of it, but the upset with Baekhyun hours earlier kept replaying in your mind. You propped your feet up on your wall and let your head hang off the edge of your bed, enjoying the way the gravity pulled at the blood in your brain and you tapped your fingers on the bed absentmindedly to the soft beat of music you heard playing from his room.

And you puzzled.

Don’t use your beauty as a weapon against me.

You hadn’t been this bothered by something since you’d watched that Mission Impossible movie the first time and spent an hour and a half trying to wrap your head around the complicated plot.

A Weapon.

Your beauty … a weapon … against me.

Why did it bother you so much? Why had he been so upset that you were playing with him, that you were messing with him. He messed with you all the time. You messed with him just as much. He never got this upset. No, he never got upset in this way. In such a way as to call you out on using something you had, against him. Something that you hadn’t even known had any power at all to attack the man. Your beauty. Did you have such a thing?

You thought about the other times you fought with him.

Not really fought, the two of you never did that, but that fake sort of fighting like when he’d woken you up at 2am for the third night in a row with his loud working music and you found him out in the kitchen disassembling your favorite toaster, the one with the wide slots for bagels that also toasts four slices of bread at once and even has special buttons for frozen items. The stainless steel one that you won in a work raffle and proudly marched through the office carrying with a huge smile on your face. It was a deluxe model. Supreme even. The master of it’s craft. Said so right on the box. Your toaster in a million pieces on your kitchen counter; all because he needed some components or resistors or whatever the fuck it was and he decided the best move was to take your toaster apart rather than to just order what he needed online and wait two business days for them to arrive.

Sure, he put it back together a few days later but not without enduring the laser eyes you shot him over breakfast when you had to toast a piece of bread in a frying pan on the stove like a loser who did not own a four slice Deluxe Toastmaster Supreme.

You’d planned your revenge then. It was something tiny and it involved his TV remote. His precious TV was enormous, took up almost the whole wall, OLED or SUPER-NANO or ULTRA-NANO some similar nonsense words and had 8-Ks of pixels or so he claimed and had so many smart functions you could hardly get comfortable using it for anything that didn’t involve the Netflix button. And no, no, you didn’t do anything to the actual TV. Relax, this was just the remote. This was harmless. Absolutely harmless. Easy to solve really if he had half a brain in his head.

You just carefully cut out the smallest tiniest piece of IR blocking tape that fit exactly over the infrared sensor on the remote control and fit so well it was undetectable to the human eye. Unless you knew it was there and knew exactly where to stick your fingernail in under the plastic bezel to peel it back. You simply applied the tape and left the remote right on the coffee table before you left for work.

You’d come home that night to a pile of assorted battery packs all strewn about the coffee table, and the remote completely taken apart down to the tiny circuit board and Baekhyun was quietly touching the tip of some tiny tool to the different spots on the scary looking green part from inside of the remote with all the metal bits stuck to it and when you slowly walked by he looked up at you through the magnifying eye glasses he wore. His eyes looked comically enormous and you swallowed away your laughter and considered how long you’d let him suffer.

“Something wrong with your remote, Peanut Butter?”

“It was working fine yesterday. I just don’t understand it.”

“Maybe it’s the batteries,” you offered innocently and he just ignored your helpful suggestion as he began screwing tiny screws into place with a precision screwdriver.

He was reassembling it all now and you sat down beside him on the sofa about as amused as you had ever been to sit and watch him suffer.

He grabbed two new batteries from an unopened pack on the table and aimed the remote, pressing the buttons again and again. Nothing happened.

He was surprisingly calm about the whole thing and judging by the various shopping bags and different brands of batteries you saw, he seemed to have been working on this all afternoon. Probably for hours now.

“I’m going to have to take the TV apart.”

He was already standing up and walking across the room toward the wall mounted monstrosity when you leaned forward for the remote. He glanced back at you as you did it and he looked at you just in time to see you shake the remote back and forth and then hit it twice lightly against your left hand. Just a little knock-knock should do it. You were careful to keep the expression on your face calm and well controlled.

When you pressed the power button, the big TV came to life and you pressed the button for Netflix and scrolled through your recommended titles. You had a new episode to watch. You’d have to make time tonight for that. After he was done with his little project here.

Baekhyun instantly pulled his hands away from the TV and hopped back and away from the screen, peering up at it with his mouth hanging wide open. His eyes shot back to where you sat on the sofa holding the remote control. You did not allow your smile to form. Nothing in your whole life had ever been so difficult. You felt as if you could pop right here. You casually flipped through the menu on the screen and the man looked back up at the TV and back down at you again.

You could see him coming in then. He was moving fast with several large steps toward you and with the quickest movement you could manage you used the tip of your finger to slide the IR tape back over the remote sensor. You could not be as precise as you had been before with him coming right at you so quickly, but hopefully it wouldn’t be visible.

He reached for the remote. “What did you do, how did you fix it?” He held it up and pointed it toward the TV. Again, the remote did not work. You bit down hard on the inside of your cheek.

He was pressing buttons again and nothing happened with each new button he smashed down. You could see the madness growing in his eyes the more he tried.

He made the smallest whining sound from the back of his throat and it took every ounce of self control to keep from laughing as he lightly tapped the remote twice against his hand just as he had seen you do. Nothing.

You tried to hold it. You tried so hard. A tiny sound escaped, the smallest sniffle with a laugh broke free from your throat and you coughed lightly to hide it.

His face turned on you and those crazed eyes were back only instead of directing them at the remote, he was looking at you now.

“How did you fix it? Do it again.” He looked insane and desperate and a tiny smile betrayed you as you grabbed the remote from his hand. You played the smile off as part of the help you were willing to offer him but you also had to inhale a deep breath and carefully and slowly exhale it through your mouth to keep from breaking completely.

You held it up in your right hand and gave it a little shake. As quickly as you had done it before you turned the remote on its side as you gave those two little knocks and his head flipped toward the TV when you aimed. With his eyes averted you were able to slip the tape off just before pressing the button.

The Netflix logo greeted you and Baekhyun threw his head back and let out a loud frustrated yell into the ceiling above him.

You’d been holding your laugh for too long. It was becoming too difficult now and he was back, reaching for the remote when the first suffocating giggles took your composure and you laughed out loud.

Your laughter brought all of his attention right to you and only you. The entirety of his focus shifted and that brought those crazed eyes of his bearing down on you, wide and demanding.

It was, by far, the most successful and meanest prank you had ever played on him to date and you were gasping for air and laughing as he reached for you. He grasped both of your shoulders and he shook you as you laughed and laughed at the absolute madness in his eyes. Oh he was crazy. It was just so damn funny.

The remote was still in your hands and you flipped through the different inputs on the TV as you cackled and tears formed at the corners of your eyes.

“How did you do it? You devil! Tell me how you did it?”

He balanced with his knees on the couch and his hands were on you, roaming over the fabric of the sweater you wore, lifting your arms to look under them, maybe for spare remotes or for hidden batteries or secret formulas, who knows what he thought he might find.

You’d stashed the tiny circle of tape by sticking it to the skin inside your elbow and he was currently examining the fingers on all of your hands up close as if they concealed all of the secrets he was looking for.

It wasn’t until he searched higher, pulling your hand forward toward his chest and his thumb grazed against the shiny plastic of the tape circle you had on your inner arm when he did a double take, pulled your arm harder and lifted an accusing finger to point at the tape.

“What is that?!” He clearly thought himself to be the world’s greatest detective.  

You allowed yourself to be manhandled by him a little bit more as you got every bit of humor about your recent victory out of your chest and you lifted your other hand, the one he did not have held hostage right now to wipe at the tears that had fallen from your eyes.  

“Stop laughing and answer me, woman! What is it?”

“It’s my birth control patch,” you said through a laugh and his eyes widened as he pulled his hand back. It was a tiny movement but you were so close to his accusing eyes that it felt monumental and the dramatic reaction to your teasing lie made a fresh wave of laughter bubble up in your chest. You knew he would react this way. Any mention of your contraceptives always made him clam up.

“It’s IR tape, Baekhyun. Infrared blocking tape. I put it on the sensor this morning after breakfast. After I made toast in a pan instead of in my toaster.”

The truth pulled his whole head back and he fell down on his butt on the sofa briefly before he slipped and fell right off the couch onto the floor and he sat there with a blank lifeless look on his face; staring ahead without any focus in his eyes.

“Do you know how sad pan toast is, Baekhyun? Tell me, how am I supposed to be satisfied with pan toast when I should have been having Deluxe Toastmaster Supreme toast?”

He was shaking his head back and forth as you spoke and when he did move it was to lay down flat on his back on the floor of the living room. His hands were up and he rubbed roughly over his face.

“Oh my god. Oh my god—it’s so good. I would have never checked for tape over the sensor. Fucking tape. A piece of goddamn tape. I was so focused on the batteries.I went to three different stores today. The circuits to the sensor were all intact, I checked it, it was good — I never even considered this. Are you an evil genius? My sweet innocent Bug ... is actually an evil supervillain.”

You left him on the floor and made your way into the kitchen to make dinner. It was your night to cook and thanks to the man stewing on the floor of the living room you had to do it around the scattered carcass of your third favorite kitchen appliance.

You remembered the way he reacted then. He pouted and moaned on the floor for a few moments until he smelled the stew you were cooking on the stove. It was comfort food. Something with meat and potatoes and warmth and spices. It would lift anyone’s mood and his had been lifted almost immediately. There were no apologies or any tears. Just a promise to put the toaster back together tomorrow after he went to the store for the parts he needed and that was the end of it.

He didn't storm away. He didn't raise his voice or say you were mean or unfair or too beautiful for him to withstand. He didn't get angry about closeness being used the wrong way, in a way that was unfair to him. In a way that could hurt him, like a weapon.

If he said you had the kind of beauty that could be used against him, didn't that mean he found you beautiful? Wouldn't that mean that Baekhyun found you attractive?

The words protested inside your mind. You shook your head.

That was impossible. Definitely. You’ve been so close to him for so long without even a hint of that sort of a feeling from him. Sure you were close to each other. Sure you cared for each other. It was a familiar sort of affection you shared. But attraction? Because he found you beautiful in a way that was unfair?

The puzzling was giving you a headache. There were some things that just did not exist in the same space in your mind and that was the existence of your roommate, Byun Baekhyun, and the possibility that he was attracted to you in any way.

You’d been inside your bedroom for hours now and you were no closer to answers than when you first came in here.

Baekhyun would be done with his episode. He would have watched it with Mia and discussed themes or scenes or dramatic moments with her. Did he talk to her on the phone or maybe though a headset as they streamed the episode together.

Did he like her voice and did she like his jokes?

Did he make her laugh? Of course he did. He made everyone laugh. Baekhyun was charming and hilarious. But could she make him laugh? Could she make him giggle and shake like he laughed with you?

It was late. That didn't really mean all that much to Baekhyun, as the man didn't really have any set bedtime and usually just fell asleep when the sun began to come up. It was a weekend night and you didn't have work in the morning and frankly your curiosity had grown too much for you to just stay in here and fall asleep without at least checking on how the streaming date went.

You knocked lightly on his door. You could hear music playing inside. Nothing too loud or crazy. The man seemed to be having a somewhat low key evening.

“Yeah,” his voice called lowly and you opened the door and peeked your head inside.

“How is our girlfriend doing?” Baekhyun was sitting on his butt on the floor in front of his bed with his head laid over his arms and his phone abandoned in the middle of the floor out of arm’s reach.

He let out a long low groan but did not lift his head up when you stepped inside.

“I don't even know. I don't know.” He sounded defeated already and this had only just started.

“Peanut, what happened?” You picked up the phone and unlocked the screen, searching through his apps to find the dating app so you could see if they had said anything to each other that might give you some clues about what went wrong.

“Nothing happened. I was too quiet. I couldn’t talk at all. I didn't say anything during the entire episode. Why is this so scary. Uggghhh...I feel unsafe. It’s gross.”

You stepped over him and climbed onto his bed, sitting up against the head of the bed as you scrolled through the chat logs.

It looked normal. Not unfriendly. A little terse and abrupt on his part. The man didn't know how to loosen up when he talked to girls and you wondered if maybe you needed more one on one lessons with him before he was really ready for this stuff.

When you leaned back against the headboard you felt the bed dip and he climbed onto the bed beside you and angled his body toward where you sat up against the pillows.

When you got to the end of the chat you could see that she was the last one to speak and she remarked that he felt a bit different from when they spoke at the beginning of the day. He didn't say anything in response to that.

Baekhyun moaned with his eyes closed and he turned his head into your waist. He was obviously reliving some perceived embarrassment he must have felt during the interaction with Mia and when he moved his arm around your waist you looked down to find yourself trapped under his arm that constricted as he pulled tightly, hiding the entirety of his face somewhere in the shirt you wore. He was warm. The weight of his arm around you felt nice.

“I felt so unsafe,” he repeated his complaint from earlier and his voice was obscured and muffled as he hid himself. He switched the tense though and you wondered if he no longer felt unsafe now that you had come in.

You typed out a quick response to Mia. You didn't think it was right to just leave her hanging without an explanation for his strange silence during and after the show.

“I’m going to tell her that you were so quiet because you were nervous. I’ll also thank her for watching the episode tonight.”

You heard and felt a hum and the tightness of his arm around your waist relaxed a little as his arm went slack. He did not move though. He still hugged you. He was still warm and it took only a moment for your nose to pick up the pleasant smell of his clean bed sheets fresh from the dryer. You both had a schedule for washing things like towels and bed sheets. Yours had been cleaned today as well, but something about the smell of his bed felt better than yours had. Perhaps it had been all that difficult puzzling that had tainted yours.

Mia responded right away to your message. She was flattered by his nervousness. You could tell with the way she reassured that he really didn't have to be nervous around her. That she was an easy going kinda girl. Low maintenance she said. You scoffed at the thought of a computer geek being low maintenance. As if you didn't know how difficult to obtain fancy GPUs were and how expensive high powered CPUs, high capacity SATA drives, and their required cooling systems were. You looked around Baekhyun’s set up and figured it had to run somewhere in the multiples of tens of thousands of dollars; just in this room alone.

Low maintenance. Please, she was just as high maintenance as any other regular girl just with a different catalogue of parts.

You switched to the emoji keyboard and keyed off some random happy faces and closed her chat window with more force than was necessary; suddenly and unexpectedly irked when she responded with similar emojis and the notification popped up on the screen. You swiped it away quickly to be rid of it.

“She sounded nice though, even if I couldn’t talk. She sounded nice. Do you think she will even want to talk to me again? I think she likes you more than me.”

“She will like you. If she doesn’t she’s an idiot. A girl would have to be an imbecile, Peanut, to not fall for you.”

He lifted his face then, just enough for the corners of his eye to peek out and you looked down at the side of his face as he looked at you for a moment, absorbing the encouraging words you spoke to him. His leg began to shake somewhere on the end of the bed. You could feel the rhythmic motions. He often did this when he was tired.

You had been scrolling through matches on his phone, building on an idea that popped into your head.

The man needed some practice to build up his confidence. Maybe, just maybe you could find another girl. Someone who he could talk to, chat with, be friendly with, that maybe wasn’t just so wonderfully perfect for him. Someone just to break the ice with.

You stopped on a girl. Her dress was short and the neckline was low. She really left very little up to the imagination with this outfit. Outside of the revealing clothes, it was clear that she was a beautiful woman. She was sexy and very confident in herself despite the glaringly obvious grammatical typo in her bio.

You spun the phone around to show him.

“She looks nice,” you said. Baekhyun blinked at the phone and pulled his face back a little to see the image clearly.

“—-follow you’re dreams — you are — Never too old to follow you are dreams.” Baekhyun read out the sentence with the typo out loud and you laughed.

“Come on, she’s pretty,” you said softly, “right?” You probed gently and he chuckled once to himself and closed his eyes up with a sigh.

“Yeah, she’s pretty,” he said after a while and you felt yourself stiffen just a little bit with his admission. Of course she was. Anyone could see it. He’d be lying if he didn't admit it.

“Okay but like, just pretty or do you also think she’s beautiful?”

He hummed some non response and you focused your attention back on the phone in your hands. After scrolling through a few more profiles you found another woman whose beauty shone brightly right through the screen at you.

“And her? Is she pretty or is she beautiful?”

Baekhyun’s eyes opened again but just barely. He looked half asleep and you wondered if the reason his arm was still around you was because he was so sleepy he didn't realize he was still hugging you like this on his bed.

“Pretty,” he mumbled and pushed his face into your waist again. This time the shaking in his leg began to settle and you could hear a slow steadiness in his breathing.

“Should I message her? Maybe we can practice talking to her so you’re not so nervous talking to girls?”

“Sure Bug,” he said quietly, “you can do anything you want.”

He was falling asleep now. You could feel the change. It didn't matter. You’d let him rest a bit while you opened up a chat window and began talking to Candy.

She responded quickly and had a completely different feeling from Mia. Maybe this was good. Candy was easy to talk to but she had nearly nothing in common with Baekhyun. She casually asked what a computer programmer did and when you went into specifics you had trouble finding synonyms for words that didn’t just make it all more complicated. You finally settled on a simple explanation of what kinds of computer software Baekhyun had developed and left it at that.

After a while Baekhyun shifted in his sleep and uncovered his face. His lips were parted and from the upside down angle you could see the dark splash of his pretty eyelashes that landed over his soft cheeks. He looked lovely and peaceful. All the worries and fears of the day were gone and he was sleeping so calmly. You watched his sleeping face for a while, growing warm inside with the strange contentedness you felt.

You could see some light movement behind his eyes and you wondered if he was dreaming about anything.

Candy had asked for a picture. She was asking something superficial like what sort of car Baekhyun drove and you slipped into his picture gallery for the folder with the shots you took for him when he first bought his car. You found a nice one with him smiling behind the driver’s seat, bright red seatbelt across his chest and the logo of his fancy ride on the steering wheel.

‘Wooo, baby boy an Audi? you must be loaded. When are you gonna come pick me up in that?’

You laughed at her obvious reaction. Candy was exactly as you expected her to be. Baekhyun would be able to laugh and chat with her easily without too much pressure of impressing a complicated woman like Mia was. Candy was an open book. The stakes were lower with Candy.

Your giggle made him stir and you looked down to see his eyes open a tiny bit before he closed them again.

“It’s going well with Candy,” you whispered and he inhaled a breath and nodded his head as he closed his eyes again.

“Mmm, the pretty one?” he asked in a sleepy voice and you hummed your confirmation. Something buzzed inside of you; just a bit of nerve. Call it gumption.

“Baek,” you called quietly and his lips parted with his breathing but his eyes stayed closed this time. He did not respond. He didn't give any indication at all that he heard you call him.

“Baek, what about me?” Your voice was tiny when you asked it. You felt more warmth in this bed suddenly. You felt it in your chest and it seeped up to warm up your face too.

He hadn’t responded at all to your question. It had been pretty unclear though. He might not have heard it, or might not have understood it. Or his sleep may have just been too deep to register your words.

“Am I pretty or am I beautiful?” You said it so quietly there was little chance of him actually hearing it. He was asleep and you were just here, trapped in his embrace on his bed as he slept and you puzzled over the words he had told you during an upset. The words that you had pried from him when he was vulnerable and emotional. The words that you shouldn’t be over analyzing like this. Those words felt too risky to be giving this much thought to.

Here you were again, using your sneaking methods to try and trick him into something when you knew it wouldn't work, when you knew there was nothing really there and you were reading too far into things.

His steady breathing continued. His eyes remained closed and his arm still gripped around your tightly, holding you still, holding you close to him as he slept.

So you gave up. You’d moved back to the phone to respond to Candy; something silly and lighthearted, something easy just like she was, when you heard him speak.

“You are so fucking beautiful,” he said so far under his breath the statement sounded more like air than actual vocalization of any kind and your fingers stopped their rapid typing in the middle of your sentence.

Your eyes looked down. Your entire body was frozen. Half of you expected to find his eyes open and a wide teasing smile on his lips, begging for you to take the bait and believe his words just for the chance of laughing at your shocked face and making fun of you for being stupid enough to believe them.

He was asleep. His eyelids did not pull open when you looked down at him and his breathing remained as steady as ever.

Baekhyun was asleep.

That damn puzzling — your jaw was sore from clenching your teeth down and your lips were dry and chapped from biting them.  

You had dropped the phone and it disappeared somewhere amid the bedcovers.

Baekhyun’s sleep was deeper now. He must have been very tired to be falling asleep so recklessly like this. You shifted downward and made some attempt to find the phone without waking him up and your small movement made him inhale a deep breath through his nose and he was moving now. You felt him shifting, moving his sleepy body up higher in search for some comfort; for something to lay on that was a bit more comfortable than flat on the middle of the bed like that.

You used the movement to reach for the blanket and pull it over his body so he could be warm at least and when he finally settled he shared the same pillow as you. His forehead rested against your shoulder and he was once again, fast asleep.

His arm though— you found yourself still very much trapped in nearly the same embrace as before, just shifted. A forearm landed over your chest and you felt a new heaviness of his bent leg land over your thigh.

You could wake him.

You could push him off and let him roll the other way so you could make an escape back to the peace of your own bedroom.

You would. You would do that soon.

Your current state of thoughts was simply too overloaded to follow through on any game plan. If you could only have a few more minutes of his warm steady breathing, you would move away from this. You would do it.

It wasn’t that you had never considered it. It was that you had gone through many lengths to come to this place. You were safe and secure here.

It was that you had nowhere else to go when it was over.

This place was your home.

Peanut was part of that home.

Things were nice right now; the way they were at home.

But…

As they sometimes do, and against your own will, your thoughts wandered.

You wondered as they wandered — wondered about him.

From the deepest parts of your mind; down where you’d shoved them roughly many times before, those wondering thoughts danced and swayed lightly to the soft music playing in this room.

Those secret thoughts about the sweetness in his eyes. Secrets about the fondness you felt for the little tips of him; the tip of his nose, the tips of his fingers, the pink tips of his ears. Thoughts you refused to encourage.

Baekhyun was asleep and you were thinking.

With the thinking came the shame and your skin was hot to the touch. The last thing you wanted was to ruin your home. With the thinking came the denial. You could not encourage anything. You could not afford to become complacent. You did not need these thoughts to become so brazen. You did not need them taking root. The last thing you needed was them making an appearance again.

The sounds he made while dreaming pulled your closed eyelids back open. You turned your face toward the sound. It was soft, the small groan from the back of his throat. But his face changed then; eyebrows screwed together and his lungs constricted as he let out a softer sound, like a whine. It was a complaint. His face showed signs of pain. The dream must have been unpleasant.

You lifted a hand then, shifted within his embrace you raised your palm and laid it carefully over the side of his face.

The shift happened with the warm contact and his features evened out and that pained look was gone.  

You smiled then. So sleepy but satisfied that you could help when he needed it.

You would move after he got a little more sleep. After he’d had a little more comfort from you, you would move.

You weren’t the first to move. And it seemed by the change in light that shone through the windows that your visit had lasted much longer than you had intended.

It was the untangle that woke you up. A conscious and deliberate lifting of limbs; the careful grip of a hand lifting your arm by the wrist and setting it gently down on a flat mattress.

You opened your eyes when he pulled his own leg out from between your thighs. The temperature change was most jarring. You had felt so warm before.

Baekhyun was sitting up in his bed. His hair was standing up in places all over his head and he was moving slowly and carefully, in an attempt to disengage himself from the tangle of this woman he had just woken up with.

The sleep was still very thick in your head. It hadn’t been a full night’s sleep had it? You felt like you had just closed your eyes a minute ago and yet the sunshine was so bright outside already.

“Sorry,” Baekhyun whispered when he realized you were now awake and looking at him, “guess I got too comfortable...must have fallen asleep.”

His voice was thick with sleep and with embarrassment too, you could hear it everywhere, with the quick words he spoke to you and the pink that covered the back of his neck and flooded his cheeks too.

This situation...this was an embarrassment. Of course it was.

This was something that should not have happened. Not with two adults of similar age who shared so many liberties with each other; spending time in each other’s arms at night, well…

You felt awkward all over. What if—what if you’d done something in your sleep? What if you said something?

And he already wasn’t meeting your eyes as he climbed out of the bed and awkwardly made his way into his bathroom.

You could hear the sound of the running water faucet and the door closed with the smallest click like he went out of his way to close it as softly and quietly as possible to avoid disturbing you any further.

You could feel the heat burning on the skin of your cheeks and you used his absence to get up and get out of his bedroom before he came out and found you still, still tangled in his bed sheets like you’d been tangled in his legs and in his arms all night.

You had to ignore this. You had to forget it ever happened, and anyway, you were best friends with the guy...right? Wasn't this thing bound to happen in the course of a friendship? What if you went on a holiday with him and the hotel only had one bed? These things really did happen, you read about it on twitter once. Would you be that asshole best friend who let him sleep on the floor just because he was a man? No! You could build a little pillow wall between your bodies and sleep as still and motionless as possible, like a corpse.

This feeling would go away. The red hot embarrassment would wash down the drain of your shower. The sticky warmth left behind by his skin would go with it.

You’d made it as far as to undress and turn on the hot water when an awful memory dawned on you.

Baekhyun still had your shampoo.

You didn't have any other shampoo in this bathroom that you could use. You pulled open cupboards and drawers, searching for anything; tiny hotel sized travel bottles, a nearly empty bottle under the sink for a rainy day, even maybe something in the trash can that still had a few drops. Nothing.

You eyed the hand soap on your sink and pictured stepping out of the shower a frizzy, tangled mess.

A soft knock vibrated against your bathroom door.

“Bug, your shampoo.” Baekhyun’s voice called out, muffled by the sounds of the running water and the door itself, “it’s almost empty, but there’s a little left. Sorry, I’ll run to the store and get more.”

Your ear was pressed against the door so you could make out everything he said; so you could listen carefully to the tone and delivery of his words to see if he was still embarrassed about last night or if he’d brush it off easily like he did most things that seemed to bother him.

There were another two soft knocks, “B-Bug?”

“Yeah, Peanut, thank you. Can you just...put it by the door. I’m already undressed. I’ll grab it in a bit.”

He did not respond right away and you stayed with your ear against the door waiting for some sound. Some indication that he had left. The click of your door, anything.

“I left it by the door,” you heard his far away voice shout and then the click of your door.

When your shower was done and you were dressed in your favorite weekend outfit, the high waisted comfy shorts with pockets and a cute top that made you feel somewhat pretty even on a casual day and you emerged from your bedroom feeling ready to face whatever weird moods or wacky situations accosted you today.

You found him singing a song to himself in the kitchen as he made something that smelled delicious for breakfast. The radio was on a pop station that played hits from all the past decades and the upbeat rhythm of the song that played was a definite favorite that had him dancing at the stove.

It was a groovy little love song, quite old now that you thought about it and you felt the beat hit hard in your chest with each pop of his shoulders and hips. The joy you could feel in this song hit you just like that beat hit; heavy and prominent, and you smiled wide to welcome this morning mood it brought with it.

When you stepped into the kitchen to grab a mug to make yourself some coffee you couldn’t help but sing along to the song, you loved the song as much as he did and when he noticed you enter the room you could hear him singing the main parts; expertly, even though the singer was a woman, his voice could always reach the high notes as well as the low ones. She was the kind of epic singer with one of a kind of talent that was world dominating. Baekhyun was singing along, doing the same kinds of ad-libs and vocal runs that she did and he did it while holding the spatula up to his face like a microphone.

As you walked by he dipped his head and looked into your face and his eyes caught ahold of yours. You knew what was coming. You could hear it coming in the song, the chorus. The part you had to sing. These were the rules. He leaned hard and brought the spatula up to your lips just in time for your part to come on. You did not disappoint. You gave it your all closing your eyes up tight and throwing your head back, singing from the very center of you, this part you always sang during this song. The part that was made for you; he knew it and you knew it.

His smile was genuine and breathtaking and he grabbed your hand with his spatula-less hand and pulled you into him, the beat taking over whatever bit of nervousness he might have had before. This was different. This was dancing. This was singing to simply the best song for a Saturday morning and it was moving and laughing with your best friend and you let him spin you in a small circle, careful to keep your coffee mug lifted so it didn’t hit anything during the spin.

His sense of rhythm was perfect. His hips moved as if they were made for this. You had no choice but to follow. An occasional hand on your hip told you where to go. The song was reaching its peak and you knew it was a short one. The best ones always were. It was going to begin winding down now. It was always such a sweet and short lived moment of happiness that you always appreciated immensely.

As a final move, he gave you a little spin and released you to go on your way toward the coffee maker you so desperately wanted to get to when you first entered this kitchen.

He finished the eggs with the last notes of the song.

As you both sat down to eat, his eyes met yours and yours met his and you dug into the eggs and bacon he’d prepared. You offered him a perfectly buttered toast slice and he took it, nodding his head as he bit into the crisp corner.

“So Bug,” he spoke up between bites of eggs, chewing and swallowing thoughtfully, “about this...Candy.”

You swallowed the hot coffee in your mouth and clasped your hands together, suddenly remembering how asleep he had been when you had hit it off with Candy, his practice girl.

He listened to your explanation. Your theory that the stakes were simply too high with Mia and he needed someone to talk to that was a bit more of a relaxed task for him. You called it easy mode so he might get the game reference. He ate and listened to you talk and occasionally his eyebrows would lift or screw together with whatever sorts of thoughts he was thinking inside his head. You could tell by his body language that he didn't exactly want to start something with Candy and you had to emphasize that it was really just for practice, talking to her. It was to help build his confidence.

“She’s already in, Peanut. She thinks you’re super cool, she thinks you’re rich and thinks you have a very good job and plus, you make lots of money and she seems super into that.”

He was not speaking yet, despite how much you had talked and you were beginning to get worried that he didn’t see the benefit of practicing his conversation skills a little bit.

“It’s not even real, Baek, you just have to make some things up with her. Just to get over that anxiety about talking to women. Just until you are more comfortable.”

When he finally did speak, it was as you feared.

“It just feels kinda gross, Bug. She’s a real person too, even if she is obviously a gold digger. It just seems wrong. I’ve been...thinking lately. What if this is...wrong of us?”

“What if I just have to tough it out with Mia and get the fuck over it and just,” he thrust his hands forward over the food on the table for emphasis, “just — blehhhh — talk, just fucking talk to her.”

You lifted a fork with eggs toward your lips but your stomach protested. You suddenly didn't want any more food. The coffee you were drinking had suddenly gone too cold for your liking and you pushed the plate and mug away from you with your fingertips.

You were bothered.

Why did he choose right now to suddenly grow a conscience about this? Did he forget that Mia was chatting with both of you and not just him?

“I...I just — I want to try with Mia. I know I can get over it and talk to her. And I don't want to talk to Candy. The person Candy thinks I am, well...that’s just false. I can’t be the person she’s expecting me to be.”

He had obviously read through the entire conversation with Candy last night and found the tales you told simply too stretched out for him to try and live up to.

“But that’s what people do when they start dating. They stretch the truth, make themselves sound just a little bit better, make themselves taller, or make themselves look richer. They all do this.” You simply could not understand why he didn’t get this. Why he didn’t just play by the rules that everyone followed to get through the door so he could stand a chance here.

“Well I don't. I don't want someone to fall for a fake version of me. I want someone to like me now. This me. Byun Baekhyun. The Peanut with anxiety who lives with Bug who almost killed him over a cheese stick, but who makes really great toast.”

He was smiling now, joking about the funny memories. You pulled your lips into a forced smile and lifted the coffee for another drink so you didn't have to smile any more.

He was watching your face. You were sure he sensed it. Something had bothered you to the point of giving up on your breakfast and every pass your eyes made over his face led to the same thing. He was watching you.

“Why are you upset?”

You shook your head lightly. Willing the obvious signs to leave your face. You didn't even know why. You didn't have a name for this. So you just shrugged in response to him.

“Because I don't want to practice on Candy? Did you actually like her for me?”

You really made your best attempt. You inhaled deep and closed your eyes and you shook your head.

Candy did not matter and you knew it. There was something ugly inside of you maybe. Something that did not want Baekhyun to get along with perfect Mia. Something that was fighting against the idea of him being happy and healthy and free of this unhealthy attachment you had to him. Free and happy away from you.

“Then why?”

Enough. You were being unfair to him. You had promised him that you would help him. You had gotten him this far and you’d be the worst kind of asshole if you didn't see him through to the end; if you didn't follow through with your promise to find him someone who would love him like he deserved to be loved, exactly as he was now. The amazingly wonderful Byun Baekhyun.

“It’s nothing like that,” you smiled softly. It felt like a sad smile, but at least it was genuine. “I just worry when you get so anxious. You know you fell right asleep last night. As soon as I came in, you passed right out.”

Your words skillfully slipped out of your lips and you successfully changed the subject. You felt like a coward, but you simply did not have words for what was happening to you.

“I didn’t...say anything did I? Before I fell asleep?”

This question was quiet. His fingertips grazed over his lips as he asked it, nearly muffling the words he shyly asked you at the breakfast table, the morning after.

You are so fucking beautiful.

You are so fucking beautiful.

You lifted your coffee cup to drink the tepid liquid inside and dropped your eyes from his shaking ones. The answer to his question sat on the back of your tongue even after you swallowed away the liquid.

You swallowed again and it refused to budge and yet you sat in silence, unable to utter a single word in reply to his quiet question.

Your silence went on for too long and he looked up into your face. An instant smile lifted at the corner of your lips and you forced it up into your eyes.

“You just slept, Peanut. We—” you had to exhale the breath that you had been holding for too long in your lungs, “we just slept.”

 Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5

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