#and he’ll rotate through them

[catboywizard]

i love my cat more than anything but why is he such a bullyyyyy

[sloaneispunk]

“friend or foe” pt.2

soft!frontman (hwang in-ho) x you

when frontman joined the games, he thought it was solely to see gihun fail, but his intentions shifted when a certain player number 455 caught his attention…

⟢ ──── ●▲■ ──── ⟢

the next day, you ate breakfast with in-ho and the team. they discussed different strategies and games in which they might have to play.

naturally, in-ho had given his milk to you even after much protests. he explained how it would help you get stronger and ready for the games.

“where’s my milk?” jung-bae sulked as everyone laughed.

you stayed beside in-ho the entire time. since after the second game, you had grown very fond of him. and luckily for you, so did he.

he felt protective of you, he wouldn’t let you out of his sight. even more so in a place like this. when you were caught up with thanos’ team, trying to save yourself after bumping into nam-gyu

in-ho made sure to step up, teaching thanos and his friends a lesson for laying a hand on you, or even threatening you.

he would have went feral if you hadn’t stopped him by pulling him away into a corner, helping him cool off.

“it’s okay, i’m okay.” you told him as you tried to get him to tear his eyes away from glaring at thanos.

“did they hurt you?” he simply asked, ignoring everything else you had just said.

‘no’. you shook your head.

after that, he made sure he always had you within feet from him.

⟢ ──── ●▲■ ──── ⟢

when it was time for the third game, in-ho held your hand as everyone walked towards the game room.

“i hope it’s something we can play in teams.” he said to you, making you smile.

“why? so you can team up with me?” you teased.

“of course.”

when you reached the game room, a large carousel sat in the center of the room. around it were different colored doors with numbers on them, 1-50.

“what is this?” in-ho wondered out loud as a voice came through the speakers.

‘the game is mingle. the carousel will move when the music plays…once it stops, a number will be called out. the number is the number of people you will need to have in your group before you enter a room of your choice.’

“shit.” you cursed under your breath.

it was going to be a bloodbath.

of course, in-ho already knew this. he might have been acting scared, but deep down, he was. how was he to garuntee your safety in a game like this.

if he didn’t come up with anything quickly, he could mess up the game, or worse, lose you.

⟢ ──── ●▲■ ──── ⟢

‘start’

ring-a ring-a ring-a ring-a ring-a ring-a ring-a

as the giant carousel began to rotate, in-ho’s grip on your hand became tighter.

‘10’

“we need 5!” gi-hun yelled over the chaos that insued.

“we’re 5! let’s go! green door!” player 120 said as both teams ran for the door.

inside, in-ho made sure you were okay first before he checked on the rest.

“you should be thanking me!” a woman suddenly declared, throwing her hand up in the air. “without me, you all would have died!”

“geez! the ego on this woman.” jung-bae scoffed.

then, she whipped her head around, finger flying to your face as she stopped inches away, almost hitting you.

“can i help you?” you asked.

“you… you’re here for a purpose.” she said.

in-ho pulled you aside, stepping in front as he glared at the woman.

“you talk to her again and i’ll make sure you’re locked outside.”

the woman could only gulp.

just in time, the door unlocked, saving the lady’s ass as well as yours.

⟢ ──── ●▲■ ──── ⟢

“fuckin’ crazy sharman lady.” in-ho muttered to himself as he got back up onto the platform.

you giggled. it was funny how he was affected by everything else but the deadly game he was in the midst of.

‘4’

shit. someone was going to be left behind.

“gi-hun! take her, i’ll find others!” in-ho instructed as gi-hun nodded, grabbing your arm and dashing into a room.

“young-il!” you screamed as you were being dragged away from him.

he was so selfless, he only cared about saving you and his ‘friends’.

“he’ll be okay.” dae-ho told you as he stood beside you, peeping through the hole in the door.

the next few minutes were excruciating. you couldn’t find in-ho in the running, desperate crowd.

little did you know, in-ho was in a room on his own, locking it before anyone could enter.

he catched his breath as a guard came up to the doorhole, aiming his gun at him.

“stand down.” in-ho ordered, making the guard turn away, walking off.

when the doors unlocked, you sprinted out.

“there!” gi-hun called out, pointing to in-ho who was running towards you.

you practically flung yourself onto him, taking him aback as he laughed.

“oh my god, i was so worried.” you told him as you pulled away.

“you can’t rid of me that easy.”

“ah! we thought you couldn’t find enough people in time!” jung-bae chipped in.

“i’m a very likeable man, i do well in these games.” he joked.

⟢ ──── ●▲■ ──── ⟢

when it came down to the final round, a thick air of tension filled the atmosphere.

the last number was announced, ‘2’. you knew exactly what they were doing. around 150 people left, 50 rooms, you were going to have to fight for the rooms.

the team had split up, in-ho naturally sticking eith you as you both ran for the nearest room.

just as you were about to enter, you felt a strong push, knocking you to the ground onto your back as the man took your place, shutting the door as the timer hit 0.

“y/n!” in-ho shouted as tears started to fill your eyes.

“young-il… don’t let me die.” you cried.

oh, he was angry. angry wasn’t even actually able to cover it. he was fuming.

he picked up the man by the collar, punching and kicking him as he yelled in frustration.

as the guards approached you, you heard his voice.

“standdown! now!” he said, “that is an order.”

just like that, the gun held up towards your temple was gone. the guard walked over to the room, using a set of keys to open it before standing behind you.

in-ho however did not step out. he simply grabbed the man who was already fighting for his dear life, locking him in a headlock.

“w-what?” you asked, backing away from in-ho as his eyes pooled with anger.

“take her upstairs.” he said to the guard as he nodded, lifting you up and dragging you away.

the last thing you heard was the loud crack of the man’s neck echoing through your ears.

(i am going insane)

[belovedenzo]

kiss or dare || mattheo riddle & enzo berkshire

bf! mattheo x reader x enzo

summary; Your boyfriend, Mattheo loses a game of kiss or dare. After a passionate kiss between him and Enzo, you’re left with curiosity for Lorenzo’s lips.

words; 3k

warnings; matty x enzo, suggestive content but no smut, cussing, kissing, poly themes, sharing. In my canon Enzo and Mattheo are never related- they do not have the same mom in this universe or any universe I write them in!

notes; this has been eating my brain so enjoy <3 feedback is appreciated!

The rules are simple- do the dare or you have to kiss somebody in the group that’s playing. Since Pansy came up with this ridiculous game a couple months back, it’s been played in this common room a thousand times.

  It’s always a night like this, a dimly lit fire burning in the cobblestone pit behind a group of you and your bestest mates in Slytherin. A bottle or two is being passed around, making everyone feel nice and easygoing. That’s usually when the suggestion for kiss or dare comes up.

 Something about the alcohol mixed with the excitement and mystery of possibly kissing one of your best friends makes it a very enticing game when you all sit here alone- only the fireplace and small lamp lighting your vicinity. 

 “Theo- come on!” Pansy complains from her seat on the floor beside you. 

 A groan emits from the other side of the room. “I’m almost done!” Theo shifts in his seat for a moment before standing quickly to attention. He shoots a grin towards her direction and promptly walks over. A joint, filled to the brim with muggle weed is presented in the palm of his hand for everyone to see. “Rolled.” He declares with a proud huff.

 “Snape is gonna smell it in the morning when he comes in here.” Your boyfriend Mattheo lets out a sigh, fighting the shit eating grin that threatens his lips. 

 “Fuck it- who cares?” Theo laxly shrugs his shoulder before walking over to the burning fire place for a light. 

 Pansy had dared Theo to light a joint in the middle of the common room and smoke it- something he’ll probably get screwed for later. But as per usual, Theo doesn’t care. You’ve learned that he will truly do anything if he’s dared to. It’s safe to say that Theo hasn’t locked lips with anyone in the history of kiss or dare. 

 A chuckle or two can be heard, which only fuels him further. As carefully as he can, Theo lights the joint with the fire burning in the fire place. Once it’s lit he walks back over to the lot of you on the ground- a prideful smile spread across his face. Without a word he brings it up to his lips and takes a drag once he’s sure everyone is watching from the floor. Smoke fills the room, the cherry of the joint lighting up the dimly lit space.

 “So who’s next?” Are the only words that left his mouth before the group bursts into a fit of laughter. He quickly takes a seat next to Enzo- who has been sat in the circle across from you and Mattheo. The joint gets handed off to Enzo, starting its cycle through the rotation of half consumed liquor bottles. 

 “One day I’ll get you to say no to something and then you’ll have to kiss me.” Pansy grumbles sarcastically before taking a swig from the bottle in her hand. 

 Theo makes a face at her and they both laugh- clearly already too far gone for the night. In fact, the more you look around at your friends… they’re all there along with them. The longer you sit, the more you feel yourself inching closer as well- yet you still accept the joint being passed to you.  

 “Matty!” Theo says in a sing song tone, his attention now directed right towards your boyfriend sitting next to you. “It’s your turn.” An almost diabolic laugh comes from his throat. 

 Mattheo rolls his eyes before sitting forward to lock in. “Merlin- yeah.” His face sits in his hands for just a moment before making eye contact with Theo and accepting his fate. “Lay it on me.”

 You could tell from your lovers expression that he was feeling it just as much as the rest of them, so there’s no way Theo could come up with something bad enough for him to decline…

 “I dare you to go wake Draco up in a fucked up way- or you have to kiss Enzo.” Theo bites back a chuckle as he gives Mattheo his dare, a mischievous glint in his eye. 

 You watch as the boy next to you stiffens- eyes going wide as saucers. You also were quite shocked- sure, at first that sounds like nothing but… is it really? Draco had just went to bed an hour earlier, drunk as a skunk with an awful headache. It’s well known that the blonde doesn’t take very kindly to being woken up, especially abruptly. But in these conditions? Mattheo may not make it out of that alive. 

 You look over at Theo as Mattheo is left speechless, only to see a smirk staring back at you from Enzo’s lips. 

 “Are you trying to get me killed or?-“ This may sound like a dramatic question for your boyfriend to be asking but no body wants to deal with that version of Draco Malfoy for the foreseeable future. 

 Theo laughs along with Pansy from beside you. Then you hear a chuckle that sounded like Enzo’s. “What? You don’t have to do it, you could always just kiss Enz.” The laughing proceeds higher as Theo teases Mattheo.

 You now can’t help but also let out a laugh, watching Mattheo become flustered. Any of your friends would know that what happens in kiss or dare stays in kiss or dare and a little kiss between your boyfriend and one of his best friends wouldn’t upset you. Mattheo knows this too as you can practically see the cogs turning in his pretty little head, weighing the options of waking up the beast or kissing his mate. 

 From what you can see, Enzo is slightly amused and almost seems to enjoy the fact that Theo chose him. You wouldn’t put it past him in the state he is in- he wants Mattheo to kiss him. When Enzo is drunk he’s been known to kiss just about anybody who wants it.

 It’s just a moment before Mattheo goes to speak again and seal the dare. A quiet sigh passes through his lips before any words can- his thoughts getting caught in his throat. It seems like he has made his decision but remains hesitant with sharing.

 “If you wake Draco up, you’ll never hear the end of it.” Pansy retorts from next to you through the patient silence that filled the room as you all waited for Mattheo to speak. She also seems to want this kiss to happen.

 All this does is make the curly headed brunette groan aloud and cross his arms. “Yeah whatever-“ he shrugs his shoulders with another annoyed huff. “You got me.” You’ve always known your boyfriend to be a competitive person and you’re sure the idea of losing the game is what burns him the most. He’s the first out of him and Theo to crack and accept the kiss.

 “This means you gotta kiss Enzo!” Theo shouts and immediately points a teasing finger in Mattheo’s direction. He smirks wide and sly, accepting the crown of kiss or dare king while all his friends erupt in amused laugher around him. 

 You decide to look back at Enzo through all the chaos of their drunk commotion. Theo, Blaise and Pansy continue to gawk at Mattheo- who by now is red as a cherry but trying to keep face. Enzo however is sat back on his hands, a satisfied expression on his face. 

 His smirk was different than before, now that he’s sure Mattheo has to kiss him… he seems more excited. 

 You watch as their eyes meet, in fact you could feel their eyes meet- it was electric. You were surprised to see Mattheo fold beneath Enzo’s gaze, his mouth hesitating to part and form words.

 “You wanna kiss me, Matty?” Enzo asks in a lewd and confident way, like he had been waiting to say it. He watched your boyfriend shift in his seat at his question and squirm beneath his flirtatious nature. Just like he wanted. 

 You never took Enzo as completely straight, you’ve seen him kiss a male ravenclaw or two after a few drinks but the way he looked at Matty made you feel like he really wanted it. Maybe it was the taboo of kissing his friend- in front of said friends girlfriend at that, but he seemed into it. 

 He gets up from his position on his hands and leans in towards the center of the medium sized circle you all had formed earlier in the night. “I can kiss you if you want.” His voice was smooth, almost causing a blush to appear on your own cheeks and match the boy next to you. 

 Mattheo opens his mouth again, the struggle for words showing across entire expression. This time though, he speaks. “If your gonna kiss me just do it-“ 

 With a quick shuffle forward, Enzo’s long torso is leaning over your boyfriends where he sits. His hands grasp the sides of Mattheo’s face once he is comfortably sat in front of him, leaning over the space between them.

 It’s quick before you register that Enzo’s lips are pressed against Mattheo’s, hands gripping the sides of his jaw and neck. The kiss was anything but a peck as their lips molded together. 

 Pansy lets out a soft gasp, followed by a giggle from the other side of this view before you. A small blush does creep onto your cheeks this time, a blush your sure is on her cheeks as well but your eyes are too trained on the their lips to check. 

 Mattheo’s eyes flutter closed the moment Enzo connected their lips. He seemed to relax under his hands, like it felt good. His hands that were formally up in a nervous defense had fallen to his sides like a rag doll- he’s fully submitted to Enzo’s kiss. 

 They stay like this for a moment, moving together in sync. The room had went silent, in shock probably. You on the other hand were feeling all kinds of things from what you were watching. 

 Enzo gave him one last yearning movement of his lips before pulling away with a quiet pop. There was no rule on how long you had to kiss someone if you lose a game of kiss or dare but no body expected the kiss to be that long and passionate. That kiss almost made you wanna kiss Enzo. 

 Everyone watched as Enzo took his seat back next to Theo like nothing had happened, like he didn’t just rock Mattheo’s world in front of the entire friend group. “You’re a good kisser, Matty.” He speaks affectionately, a short moment of embarrassment showing in his eyes as they dart away, but his grin returns. 

 Mattheo coughs on nothing, filling the space of his own embarrassment. He looks now over to you, it had taken a few moments to gain courage to do so but when he finally did, your expression bewildered him. 

 This man knows you better than you probably know yourself, so there’s no sense hiding any emotion from your face. You liked it. You obviously really liked what you had just seen. His eyes widen as he makes this realization. 

 “You’re such a whore, Enz.” Theo practically chokes out his words, taking a swig of liquor to stop his fits of obnoxious laughter. “And you liked it!” He motions to Mattheo in a dramatic way. 

 This would usually make you laugh as well, but all you can do is stare at Mattheo with eyes of intrigue. You’d accepted the pool of warmed that has entered your tummy, and you may also have to accept that it’s because of your boyfriend kissing a hot guy in front of you.

 Mattheo lets out a short chuckle- looking you up and down in amazement due to your depravity. “Yeah, maybe I did like it a little bit.” He responds to Theo, however still keeping eye contact with you. He scoots over and leans in, diminishing all space between you two. “I think you liked it a little bit too.” 

-

 A week passes and the image of Enzo kissing your boyfriend has still not left your mind. Late at night it seems to find itself in the forefront of your mind- sending your imagination to places you don’t want to admit to anybody. Since that game of kiss or dare you’d be lying if you said you can’t look at Enzo the same. 

 The veins in his hands, his teeth when he smiles, the smell of his cologne as he walks by- these were all things about Lorenzo you didn’t think about twice just last week.

 You know Mattheo can see it too, the look in your eyes when Enzo speaks to you and the way you look at the two boys when they are together. You haven’t decided yet however how Enzo feels about any of it, or if he even feels anything at all. Can he tell you want him?

 Mattheo and you never spoke further about the kiss they shared, part of you hopes that he doesn’t notice that your thoughts and curiosities still linger but the other part of you wants to see more. 

 It wasn’t until today, when you sat in yet another circle with that same group of friends on a late Friday night. That same fire is burning in the fireplace and everyone around you is drowning their school sorrows in the bottle and smoke. What better than a game of kiss or dare? 

 The game is fun and easy until it’s your turn. You now find everyone’s eyes on you as they wait for you Mattheo, who is again sitting next to you- to choose your dare. Waiting for him to decide your fate is gruelingly slow and is bringing all of your nerves to a boil. 

 When he does finally decide his face lights up and you know you’re screwed. He lets out a short cackle before the words spill from his tongue in anticipation. “I dare you to cut Pansy’s hair off with scissors while she sleeps. If you don’t- you gotta kiss Enzo.” 

 A gasp practically leaves you, did you just hear him right? Merlin knows that you’d never want to upset your best friend Pansy. Right now she’s probably sleeping like an angel and the last thing you’d want to do is ruin her life like that. Mattheo knows good and well that if you did something like that it would be detrimental. There’s simply no way you’d cut off Pansy’s hair while she’s sleeping! 

 “Mattheo!” You practically yelled, your hand reaching to swat him. “You know I wouldn’t do that!” Amusement covers his face but you are not amused. 

 “Oh yeah?” Your mates stay out of it while Mattheo speaks. “Then kiss Enzo.” 

 You scowl until his words set in, the reality sets in. You realize what’s going on. Your face drops, eyes darting over to Enzo in a heartbeat. Merlin- that same smirk from last week appears to be on his face once more. 

 “Enz? Can you do that?” You hear from next to you- Mattheo’s voice smooth with confidence. 

  Your eyes shoot back to your boyfriend in disbelief. “Yknow, since she won’t do the dare.” He smirks as he speaks to Enzo but keeps his eyes trained on you. 

 Cheeks burning red, eyes wide- you watch everyone around you watch Mattheo in surprise. As far as everyone is concerned, Mattheo has always come off as a jealous individual who wouldn’t share but what they don’t know is that since the kiss he has also not been able to stop thinking about it.

 The idea had come to his mind a few days ago. He’d set you up for failure so that just like him, you’d have to kiss Enzo because admittedly he wants to see it. He wants to watch one of his best friends kiss his girlfriend. 

Enzo watches the two of you look at each other- he’s starting to understand what may be going on here. No body is safe from the Berkshire charm, not even his closest friends. “I can do that.” He finally responds.

 This makes everyone’s eyes dart straight for him, including your own. You both locked eyes for a moment, a moment that would continue- because now that he has you, he won’t let go. 

 “Can I kiss you?” This makes your heart stop for just a moment. No amount of confidence could save you in that moment, all that you can do is nod in agreement.

 His grin widens as you nod your head softly- but he won’t take that for an answer. “Use your words, please.” His politeness is faux, a ruse to come off as more gentle and sweet than he really is. 

 “Y-yeah. You can kiss me.” It spills from your mouth like word vomit, nerves pushing them out the door. You can feel Mattheo’s eyes boring into the two of you speaking in front of him. He’s watching like a hawk.

 This time, Enzo accepted that answer and just like he did with Mattheo, makes a swift movement towards you. Before you know it- he’s in front of you, hands coming up to hold your small face in his large hands. 

 “I want you to kiss her just like how you kissed me, Enzo.” This comment from Mattheo, along with the proximity of you and Enzo made that pool return to your stomach, hotter and larger than before. The knot in your gut ached at the feeling of his warm fingers brushing against your skin- rubbing small circular patterns.

 “It’s almost like you wanted this. I think Matty knows that.” He mutters, only loud and eligible enough for you to hear, just a soft whisper but you hear him clearly. This is the last thing he says before colliding his lips with your own.

 It felt just as erotic as you had imagined. His lips are soft, warm and move at the perfect speed to make you yearn for more. A moan threatened to choke from your throat but you swallowed it back down, remembering you are surrounded by your mates. 

 He kisses you with the same passion he showed your man. Exactly what you and Mattheo both secretly wanted. Enzo is just happy to oblige, intrigued by your sudden interest in his lips after seeing them on Mattheo’s. 

 The kiss felt like forever but in a good way, in a way that makes you wish it never ended. He hesitated when pulling away, like he indeed felt the same. 

 Mattheo’s presence grew closer as he leaned in, your eyes still trained on Enzo in both shock and desire. Your boyfriend’s breath graced your neck as he spoke, sending goosebumps across your already sensitive skin. 

His voice woven with silk and suggestion.  “He’s a good kisser… isn’t he?” 

luv, spell

taglist; @draco-malfoys-lovergirl @dracosprettygirl @dearmisshoney @havokangel @riddlesbunny @voidofsunlight @eternalbuckley @ur-local-wizard @i-await @juliet-017 @riddlemelater @biscuits-and-gracie @viperify @dearnott @pizzaapeteer @obsessedwithceleste @hayleygrrr @nottscherry @nottsbaby @blocked-zombieartist

[siriuslylantsov]

sock drawer

spencer reid x reader blurb. fluff!

spencer reid keeps a sock drawer for you at his apartment. (during the early stages of your relationship, before you move in)

it's in a dresser in the corner of his room, and above yours is a drawer consisting of his collection.

it's sweet you think, his collection of socks. varied pairs of different colours and patterns. each one meticulously folded beside its match, but never knotted together. it's more sustainable for mismatching, he says, it's also a little anal (and time consuming) but you don't tell him that.

so when he tells you he's set a space aside for you, you were hesitant, not because it was a huge step but because you ran through a rotation of the same 8 pairs of black socks and a few white ones. a whole drawer wasn't necessary, maybe a little hamper.

it's not like you need the drawer for your clothes either. most of the time you're over, you’re in his clothes anyway. and the clothes you do have at his place, stay among his. a secret ploy to get your things smelling like him. he appeases you by sandwiching your clothes between his.

you open the drawer and there's a celebratory first pair, electric blue with bananas scattered all over. you hold it up with a small smile. leaning over, you quickly kiss him on the cheek and sit down to put on the new socks, they're soft and surprisingly smooth on the inside considering its repetitive pattern. leave it to spencer to find reliable socks that aren't a sensory nightmare. 

over the next few months, you also start to accumulate a collection. your black socks are a constant, ones you wear to your horribly boring corporate job, taking up half of the drawer. the other half though, souvenir socks.

spencer was away a lot, halfway across the country or when you’re lucky, right in dc. the first time it happens though, he comes home with a pair of mardi gras themed socks having had a case in louisiana. he spotted them walking by the duty free and thought they were perfect for you–bright purple spotted with green and yellow? you know what, hell yeah!

the next were casino themed ones from vegas, a pair matching the worn ones he wore often. lobster socks from maine, statue of liberty socks from new york, and dorothy and toto socks from kansas.  

when you tell your friends about this, they laugh. but again, you think it's sweet. he brings you something every time he's away, a promise that he’ll come back. it's incredibly reassuring and endearing in its own little way.

[alexispunkkk]

sleepy & spoiled

little blurb about my favorite brothers because i don’t feel like writing anything else unfortunately

It’s late afternoon in Jackson, the community being dragged together for yet another meeting regarding the most useless things to you. Crop rotation, rations, who’s going out for patrols and when. Too bureaucratic for your interest.

You don’t normally bother to attend meetings, but Joel convinced you. He sweet talked his way in with a soft “c’mon, won’t be so bad, baby—jus’sit with me.”

You end up curled up next to him in the front row, legs tucked under you and the blanket that he convinced you to bring in hopes that it’d get you to come with. Soft pink fuzz on your thighs and his shoulder touching yours. It gets your eyes real heavy.

You’re trying to be good, but your eyelids keep drooping, lashes touching your cheeks with each hefty blink that lasts a bit too long. Joel notices.

“Go on, baby.” He whispers, shifting closer and speaking right up into your ear for only you to hear. “You can rest. I got you. Nothin’ important for your ears, anyway.”

You let out a soft hum and a nod of defeat, succumbing to the exhaustion that normally comes around 2 pm on a Sunday.

His big palm finds your back, slowly rubbing up and down, thumbs tracing circles into every knot he can find between your shoulder blades. Every so often, he’ll switch to carding his fingers through your hair, lulling you into a mindless sleep.

The world dulls on you, leaving you only with Joel’s touch. And you don’t notice Tommy’s gaze on you from the front of the room.

He’s up at the podium, trying to work out with the townspeople the week’s current patrol schedule. He catches sight of your drooping head—and Joel’s obvious enabling—sighing.

“Don’t you let her fall asleep.” He mouths to his brother, seemingly exasperated by the sight.

Joel gives him a subtle shrug, definitely not one of guilt, and focuses back on you. He presses a soft kiss to your temple.

“She’s tired.” He mouths back to his younger brother, grinning like it’s obvious. It is, though. To him, the meeting holds much less value than your beauty sleep.

You’re out cold by the time Joel gets called off, leaving to handle something outside. Normally, you’d stir at the absence of his hand on your back and head, but you’re too sleepy to notice him leave.

He didn’t want to wake you, pressing another little kiss to the crown of your head and tucking your arms under your head as a makeshift pillow.

The meeting ends and you’re still slumped over, drooling, blanket beginning to slip from your lap. Your lips are parted, soft hair framing all around your face messily. Adorable.

Once everyone is cleared out, Tommy steps down, beelining straight for your seat.

He kneels beside your chair, brushing some loose hairs back and smiling to himself. Oh, you’re so beloved by the two. He whispers your name, gently shaking your shoulder.

“Time to wake up, sweetheart.” He coos, voice honey-warm and so sweet, watching your eyes slowly come back to life as they open and blink down at him.

“There you are, angel. Went out real hard durin’ the meeting, huh?”

Before you can respond, he gets on one knee, pulling your body to him until you’re straddled over his thigh. From there, he scoops you up into his chest, grabbing the backs of your thighs to wrap them around his waist while your head falls to his neck lazily.

His grin makes it evident he doesn’t mind this one bit. You loop your arms up around his neck, attaching yourself. And he carries you the whole way home, pressing kisses to your forehead and cheeks each time you stir in his grip.

“Joel’s gonna owe me for this one.”

this came to me in class and i thought it was sweet—aftermath of me constantly thinking about these two. oh to be sandwiched between the miller brothers on a lazy sunday afternoon💔💔

[slamminslamminmcgill]

aaaaaaa i need poly deadclaws smoke session 🥺😵‍💫💖 you and wade being cringy stoners ripping wade's gravity bong together and logan walks in on you sitting in his lap on the couch.

"hey, honey badger, welcome home! aw, poor baby, you look so tired! you wanna hit?"

"the fuck are you two doing?"

“it’s called a gravity bong! a hallmark of stoner engineering! would you like a demonstration?”

"no."

“too bad.” wade puts the lighter in your hands, then squeezes them for encouragement. “show him, babes, just like i taught ya.”

you spark the lighter and carefully angle it into the bowl at the top. once it's lit, you grab the inner bottle and slooowly pull it upwards out of the water. the cloud inside it grows thicker, denser, bigger. it swells with the accompanying sounds of water underneath it. glug. glug. glug.

wade explains the mechanics to logan, “now THAT, boo boo bear, is about 2-liters of toke-a-cola right there. almost as fun as when they had cocaine in the recipe.” wade sneaks his hands under your baggy lounge shirt to pinch and pull your nipples, then gives you an open-mouthed kiss on your neck. he purrs his instructions to you. “chug it, honey-cunt.”

you rip the bowl out of the bottle, the smoke billowing out through the spout, and slurp it up as you sink the bottle down into the water. of course, the torrential cloud you had built was at LEAST 2-player content. you started coughing about a third of the way down, and wade had to take over.

“i got it, i got it!” he proclaimed, valiantly chugging what was left of the cloud. he blew some out and sighed with pleasure. “now… this kind of bong gives you… gives you BIG hits. so you get stupid fast.”

you nod in agreement, a hazy, air-headed smile on your face, “it also feels REALLY good for sex…”

"well, shit, why the hell ain't you lead with that?" logan climbs over the back of the couch and sits down next to you two. "give it here. show me how you work that thing.”

also i just KNOW logan gets giggly when he smokes weed it’s a fact god told me. he’s got cigar lungs so he takes to the gravity bong with surprisingly little coughing, but FUCK it makes him STUPID!!!! he gets super touchy feely too and he’ll prolly crawl on top of both of you.

“nngh, c’mon, lemme…” he grumbles, pawing for the bong that wade holds out of reach, “lemme hit it again…”

“i think the fuck not, babe! you will wait your turn in the rotation just like everyone else, young man!”

logan blows a raspberry at him and flops over to wade’s side. “pfft… bitch…”

“yes, sir, and that’s why you love me.”

he watches longingly as wade takes his rip, until his focus shifts to your shorts riding up on your thighs.

“hey. c’mere, boy.”

he tugs you into his lap and starts making out with you, stripping you from your comfy clothes, grinding his bulge up into your folds. you whimper, under your breath, and logan smirks, teasing you in hushed tones.

“ ‘s good, right?”

“mhm…”

“you gettin’ wet now?”

“mhm!”

once wade blows his smoke out, he notices what’s going on and gasps in mock offense.

“are you two seriously excluding me right now? what am i, ugly, or somethi—? wait, don’t answer that, i—“

“yes.”

“yep. knew that was coming. can’t even blame ya. i set you up for that one. anyway!”

wade pulls you to him by your hair and smooches your cheek affectionately before putting the lighter in your hands again.

“your turn, sweetie pie!”

and by the end of that rotation everyone’s clothes are off and you’re all touching each other’s junk 😌

[moonmunson]

don't stop (thinking about tomorrow)

wc: 2.3k

cw: live!reader who can see wally, fun little meet cute that freaks wally out, tw for two sentence mention of harry potter, set in 2023 but nothing with maddie happens, and as always i am writing with a plus size!reader in mind, but this one is gender neutral!reader as well so far

pt. 1 - pt. 2 - pt. 3 - pt. 4 - pt. 5

a/n at the end!

masterlist

He was never supposed to find out that you can see him. 

You could see all of them - the beatnik with the sour expression plastered on her face, the sweetheart in the jean jacket, even the blonde dude who’s always at the pottery wheel during your second period ceramics class.

You’d spent the last four years perfecting walking right past them, not looking up, not laughing at the jock’s jokes when you’re seated near them in the library.

Your ‘gifts’ are too confusing to explain, and even if you attempted to confide in someone about them, you know it would be too hard to believe.

It freaked your parents out when you were little - your comments about how Grandma talked to you long after her passing, how you waved to people on the street that nobody else could see. They never took you to be tested -  worried too much that you’d get taken away or put in psychiatric holding. 

So if you came home looking tired and drained, or sometimes, a little scared, your parents understood. 

When you started high school, you hadn’t expected there to be so many dead people. It was so weird, seeing people your age walking around stuck in the clothes representative of their times. 

You’d told your mom about the kids as you distinguished them from the living ones -  sadness in her eyes growing when you’d mentioned the lanky one in 80s athletic gear. She’d gotten her own Split River yearbook from the shelf, flipped to the memorial page and pointed at Wally. 

“Is that who you’re talking about?” 

You’d nodded, confirming her suspicions. She’d been in his graduating class, though not in his social circles. He’d been your stereotypical jock when he was alive, for all the pros and cons of it. King of the ragers thrown after games, not always a bully, but often a bystander. Gone too soon, but quickly forgotten in the grand scheme of things. 

For your safety, you’d agreed that you wouldn’t ever speak to any of the ghosts. Your mom had clocked the dreamy glaze in your eyes while looking at Wally’s picture, and while she couldn’t stop you from talking to him, she’d told you what you already knew. It wasn’t smart, and it wouldn’t end well. 

In your mind, letting any of them know that you could see them would be more cruel than just letting them go about their usual business. Even if you made contact, spoke to them - hung out with them - you were leaving after graduation, and they’d be alone again, without any contact with the living world. It seemed unfair; pointless. 

It’s not Wally’s fault he’s so fucking pretty. 

He moves about the school the same way you do - not looking at or paying attention to the people around him - because he has no reason to believe he can be seen. It’s worked out entirely in your favor thus far, because you can stare at Wally Clark for small periods of time without him noticing. On the occasion that he turns his head in your direction, a shift of your eyes to the right or left has him believing you’re just staring off into space. 

He’s so nice to look at. His slightly curled waves of black hair, gold chain gleaming under fluorescent lighting. There’s depth to him, too. When he’s around his friends, he’s energetic - bouncy, cracking jokes and patting people on the back too hard. When he’s alone, though, he seems calmer. More reserved. 

You get bolder with it, the staring, lulled into a sense of safety because you’re just another face in the ever-rotating crowd of high schoolers that pass through Split River. He’d seen forty generations of kids move on at this point, stuck as a fresh 18 year old with dreams and aspirations he’ll never be able to achieve. 

It must suck, having to stay behind and watch as other seniors get a chance to do what he never did. You wish you could comfort him, maybe even help him find a way to move on. It’s harder for the people who die traumatically. 

So much unfinished business and pent up emotions make it difficult to find the peace needed to pass onto the next plane. It’s easy to tell -there’s always a certain aura around the sad ones. Like the air around them is heavier, darker. 

You’re not complaining, though, as fucked as that may sound. Especially not when you’re lounging under a tree near the football field, not so subtly watching as a shirtless Wally picks up replicated footballs and throws them aimlessly in different directions. If you hadn’t been daydreaming about being able to talk to him, you would’ve noticed the ball soaring towards you. 

You look up, just in time for the phantom ball to hit the ground next to you, bouncing to land at your feet. Absent-mindedly - and almost jokingly - you kick it away from you, suddenly aware the ball was solid against your foot. In the time it takes you to realize you just interacted with a phantom football, it's faded away into the ground, and its sender is staring at you wide-eyed. 

There’s a beat of stillness, soundtracked by the cicadas and other teens on the field before you begin to move. 

You scramble to throw your shit into your bag, and speed walk back inside. 

“Holy shit? Wait! Hey, wait!” 

He follows you, because of course he does, and you try your best to ignore the panic and guilt rising in your throat. You just keep walking, hoping that he’ll give up. He doesn’t. 

“Can you slow down please? I know you can see me!” 

Wally catches up to you, jogging a few paces ahead to try to cut you off. You’ve never been this close to him - you have no idea if he’ll pass through you the way you’ve seen the other ghosts pass through living people before or if you'll make contact like you did moments ago with the ball he had thrown. 

It blows your cover even more than kicking the ball away, but when Wally goes to stand in front of you, you attempt to veer out of his path. And then he grabs you. Or, he tries to, anyway. He’s not fully solid, not enough to place a firm hold on you, but enough for you to genuinely feel it. 

His hand does go through you, but there’s resistance to it. It makes you shiver, the ice cold sensation of his palm trying to hold your shoulder but not being able to fully grip it. 

“What the fuck?” He looks down at his hands, then back towards you. 

He’s caught off guard enough for you to truly get away this time. Rest of the school day be damned, you make a break for it and throw yourself into your car. 

The stale air does nothing to help your nerves, your shaking hand turning the ignition to blast AC at yourself. You lean forward, resting your head on the steering wheel and try to breathe through it. This is bad. Like, really fucking bad. 

You don’t know much about him, but you seriously doubt that this is the kind of thing he’d just let go. 

You’re in it now, for better or for worse. 

You can’t tell your mom. It’s selfish, and misguided, and you hadn’t even said anything to him, but it was something. It was yours, and you don’t want to share. It makes the guilt worse, and your drive home is spent in dissociated silence. 

When you get home, your mom is in the kitchen, bouncing around to 80s music and chopping onions. The slam of the front door alerts her to your presence, and she pauses her music, concern etched in her features. 

“Hey, sweetheart. Everything okay? You’re home early.” 

You don’t want to lie. 

“Yeah, I’m alright. Just got a headache, that’s all. Thought I should come home and take a nap.” 

-

Spending a few days at home would probably be for the best - it would give you time to come up with some sort of plan on what to say to Wally. You have no idea what the best course of action is. He knows you can see him now. You can’t take that back and make him forget it, and you don’t even know if you’d want to. 

Instead, you barrel into school the next day, head down and earphones blasting music. Your eyes don’t leave the linoleum floor except to put your bag in your locker. The grumble of frustration and annoyance that leaves your body when three Tears for Fears songs play in succession draws the attention of other students in the hallway, but you pay them no mind. 

You don’t even make it to third period before you see him. 

Sitting in the corner of ceramics class, shaky hands denting an already uneven vase, the slam of the classroom door makes you jump - effectively destroying the soft clay cradled in your palms. 

“There you are! Dude, I've been looking all over for you.” He sidles up to you, plops down in the seat directly to your right, the heat of his gaze burning into the side of your face and making your cheeks hot. You sigh, squishing the clay down and shaking your head. 

“That’s fine, you don’t have to talk. I can talk for both of us. I can just talk, and talk, and talk, and-” 

Your hand shoots into the air, a frantic “Can I use the restroom please?” leaving your throat. 

It’s your worst nightmare and a dream come true, being alone with Wally. He walks next to you in the hallway, and when you pass the bathroom he pauses. 

“You’re not going in? I thought you needed to go.” He’s teasing, you know he is, but you still huff at him. 

You keep your pace, calling out behind you, “No, Wally, I don’t need to use the bathroom.” 

You don’t turn around to see it, but you can hear the slightly shocked giggle that leaves him. 

“Oh, c’mon, really?” 

He catches up to you, and when you crane your head to the side to make eye contact, he sucks in a little breath. It’s the first time you’ve actually looked into his eyes. It throws you off kilter a bit, and you feel the need to make up the difference with a quip. 

“What, you’re Moaning Myrtle now? You feel like talking and hanging around in public restrooms?” 

The laugh that leaves him surprises you, Your eyebrows raise, not expecting him to understand the reference. 

“Ms. Williams plays the movies during finals week like every year,” he shrugs, “I’m dead, not blind.” 

You’d taken your things with you - skipping the rest of your class to spend time with him, to answer the questions you know he wants to ask. You go back to the football field, under the same tree you’d been under when you kicked the football away from you. 

He’s waiting for you to speak, to help him understand what’s going on, but the words are caught in your throat, cheeks hot and skin itchy. Your hands fidget, picking dried clay from under your fingernails and flicking it onto the grass nearby. 

You look at him, trying to decide where to start. 

“I’m not really supposed to talk to you.”

“Why not?” He laughs then, shakes his head a little. “It’s because I’m dead, right? Do you have a problem with dead people?”

“No, I-” You start on the defensive, but soften when you see Wally’s smirk. He’s a little shit, you should've known. You roll your eyes, “You’re not supposed to know I can see you for your own sake. What good would it do? Hanging out with me for the next three months until I graduate and you can never see me again? It’s unfair.”

He looks away from you for a second, sly smile wiped off of his face, replaced with a sadness you hadn’t seen from him before. You reach out, trying to make contact, and your hand just meets the air. When he’d tried to grab you yesterday, he was slightly more solid than he is now. You don’t know why. 

“Yeah it is unfair,” He turns to face you again, brown eyes glassy and tear rimmed, “but you can see me, and that’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to me since I’ve been here.” 

Something in your chest stirs, and you know there’s no universe in which you would’ve been able to stay away from him. You’re worlds apart, or planes apart, but it doesn't seem to matter as much as you used to think it did. 

“I think it’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me, too.” 

You spend the rest of the school day - without being caught, thankfully - in deep conversation. The shrill ring of the bell signaling the end of the day cuts you off in the middle of a sentence, and you stand from your place on the grass, dusting yourself off and gathering your things. 

The silence between you is comfortable now, as he walks you to your car. He can’t step off the curb - he’d explained the boundaries of the school to you, that he’d be thrown back to the field if tried to leave. You hover together, not wanting to part. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow? We can hang out more, I have study hall during 5th period.” You tuck a stray hair behind your ear, and he follows the movement with his eyes. 

“Yeah, see you tomorrow.” 

You blast your 80s playlist on the way home, while you’re in the shower, while you’re doing homework. 

Wally Clark is gonna be the death of you.  

a/n: hiii i feel like this part was a little lackluster but !!!! i have a whole plan for what i want to do with this fic and i'm really excited about it. it should be four parts, but that's subject to change as i keep writing.

if you liked this and want to read more of my little stories, my masterlist is linked at the top! if you have ideas or just want to chat, my inbox is always open!

pls don't forget to like and reblog! love you mwah

[zyafics]

hihihi i love ur fic ‘wildflower by five seconds of summer’ which was a best friends to lovers, I was wondering if you could do a fox where he’s reassuring her that he’s attracted to her and idk. But she basically feels that they were best friends for so long that maybe he’s just dating her for her personality and doesn’t actually want to see her idkkkk but I think you’d be super good at writing this one

omg thank you!! something about bsf!reader gives me so much energy to come up with them so let’s get to it 🤞🏼

REAL OR NOT REAL | Rafe Cameron

MASTERLIST (Blurb)

Pairing — BSF!Rafe x Wildflower!Female Reader

Word Count — 1.7K.

Content — fluff, Rafe comforting Reader about her insecurities, happy endings.

You always been aware of Rafe’s type.

There’s a certain degree that sparks Rafe’s interest, and how you slot into his future, but it hadn’t matter to you. Especially since you’re together now, it’s a constant reinforcement that he chose you out of all the girls on his roster. And he’ll keep choosing you because you’re his best friend.

At least, that’s what you like to think.

Your first cloud of doubt came in the form of an engagement.

When Kelce sank to the floor on one knee, holding up a sparkling diamond ring, he didn’t have the chance to finish his sentence before his girlfriend, Aria, leaped into his arms, squealing out a yes!

From there on, the entire restaurant cheers at the vow, and you alongside it, clapping your hands together with the utmost glee. You’re happy for your friend, and his embarkment on this new stage in his relationship. And you rejoiced in that feeling, floating in its bubble, until Topper came over to clap a hand on Rafe’s shoulder.

“How do you feel, man?” Topper asks, looking directly at your boyfriend.

“What do you mean? I didn’t get engaged,” Rafe huffs with a roll of his eyes, and you laugh, wrapping your arms around his bicep. He glances down at you with a soft smile.

“Not that,” Topper scolds, “In general. We always thought it would be you first.”

Your shoulders slouch. “What?” You question, but your voice is soft in the loud atmosphere. They didn’t hear you. Somehow, Kelce manages to enter at the tail-end of the conversation.

“Yeah, Rafe, never thought I’d beat you out,” Kelce laughs.

“You didn’t beat me,” Rafe declares calmly, holding up a glass of whiskey.

“I’m one step ahead of you,” Kelce refutes. “Didn’t you have a whole future planned? The house, the wife, the kids? The whole nine?”

“He’s been saying it since we were teens,” Topper adds. “Changed your mind?”

Rafe shrugs, appearing indifferent, but something cold runs through your veins. He lifts the glass to his lips. “When it happens, it happens.”

“Make it happen soon, alright?” Kelce adds with a grin, just as Aria slides beside him and he wraps a protective arm around her waist. “Because we’re planning a family, and my kids are gonna need your kids to keep them in check.”

“Or the other way around,” Aria comments with a chuckle, and the entire night went on as such. You celebrate among your friends at the restaurant of their engagement, the waitstaff brings out a glorious dessert for the couple, and everyone is in high spirits.

By the time you come home, all that energy disperses, and everything comes flooding back.

You almost forgot. Before Rafe and you got together, he had envisioned a future that didn’t match yours. He wanted a wife and kids, all before the age of thirty. He didn’t want to wait, as he always said before, he wanted it to be young, to start early, just as his father did.

You don’t feel the same. You grew up in a household that abandoned you to your own devices, hollowed out in creaky hallways and subdued by a rotation of maids and servants in and out of your estate. You always knew you wanted kids later, or not at all because you wanted to take time and travel the world.

This doesn’t match Rafe’s.

Yet, it was never brought up. You were so consumed by the bliss of finally having each other, that you neglected the very foundation of what it means to be in a relationship in the first place—to address the conversation of a different yet nearing future you each carved out for yourself.

Doubt begins to lament every inch of your skin as to why Rafe is with you in the first place. He had known this–he’s your best friend—he knows you’re different from what he wants and he still pursues it? Was it for fun? Was it to pass the time until he found someone more compatible to match his needs? Perhaps, even a chance, Rafe was so used to having you at his side that it was easier to seduce you into the most natural next-step role. He didn’t actually like you, your brain argued, he got with you out of pure convenience.

So, you start distancing yourself. Every invitation to spend with the newlyweds was declined, and every inquiry to come over to your house was subsequently ignored. It got to the point where, a week in, Rafe finally had enough and came into your house unannounced.

“What the hell is going on with you?” Rafe demands upon entering your room, his eyes sliding across the place to find the messiness of your sanction, pillows, and blankets thrown to different corners. Almost ditch-like, as if you hadn’t had the chance to leave—in fear of encountering him.

“What?” You ask meekly, shoulders slouching inwards, making yourself small.

“You’ve been ignoring me,” he declares accusingly.

“Not true,” you argue.

He glares. “Don’t lie to me.”

You hesitate, digging your nails into the sheets and playing with the covers of your bed. “I just need some time for myself; to think,” “About what?”

You inhale sharply, trying to fizzle out your nerves. All your thoughts and rumbustious questions lead to this final end. This is it.

“I think we could break up.”

For the first time since Rafe’s entry, he’s taken aback by your statement. He unconsciously takes a step backward, brows drawn together, throat tightening. “What?” He replies, his voice low.

Now or never.

“I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days, and I think it’s the best option,” you reason, trying to appear as if this comes from a place of logic rather than insecurities. “For our future.”

“Our future?” He repeats, testing the words on his tongue.

“We’re not compatible,” you continue, the confession slicing at your chest. Tightening your skin. “I want certain things, and you want different things. Honestly, I don’t even know why you liked me in the first place. We were better off as—”

“Slow down,” Rafe cuts you off. You’re going so frantic, trying to streamline a sense of continual thought, that he thought you were going into a panic attack. Rafe lowers himself to your level, taking a precarious step forward and encroaching on your bed. “What do you mean?”

“We should break up.”

“No,”

“Rafe,” you pout, eyes softening, trying to let him go the gentlest way possible. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

“You’re being unreasonable,”

“I’m being logical,” you argue.

He scoffs. “Logical? You’re breaking up over a problem that doesn’t exist. Incompatible? Really? You had a whole week to come up with an excuse and that’s what you settle on?”

Your shoulders sink. You play with the frayed threads of your comforter, and the mattress dips to accommodate his weight. His hand hovers over yours, halting your nervous antics and forcing your gaze back onto his.

“What happened?” Rafe asks gently.

“I can’t give you what you want,” you murmur with a cry, pathetically feeling like you’re close to tears.

“Okay,” he cautions slowly. “What do I want?”

“Not me,” you insist weepingly, “I don’t want kids, or to be a housewife. Being in your life, I ruin your plans.”

“Baby,” he murmurs, cradling your face. “I don’t care about that.”

Your heart beams with hope, before being smothered by the reminder that this is a trick to ease your thoughts. “You don’t want kids?”

“Of course, I want them,” your chest tightens. “But I want them with you when you’re ready.”

He adds. “I was serious that night,” he reminds you of that first night when you two became an item. “It’s you or nothing.”

You remain quiet.

“What else? Hit me.”

“I’m afraid,” you confess quietly.

“Of what?”

“That you don’t really like me. I think you’re with me because it’s the easiest thing, or perhaps you don’t want to let me down or—”

“Calm down, wildflower,” he breaths out, dropping his hand to your chest, forcing your intake to steady. They do, calming under his palm. “How about I tell you what I feel instead of you making assumptions?”

He’s right. That’s logical. As you nod, composing your words, you slowly draw a steady breath. “Do you want a housewife?”

“I do,” he answers honestly. “But I only want you.”

“And if I don’t?” You ask. “I don’t want to be one?”

“Then you won’t, simple as that.”

Your eyes pan across his handsome face, trying to uncover any mistruths, but you find none. It settles something in you, and you reveal your next step of doubts.

“You said you wanted to settle down before your 30s,” you remind him.

“That was before I knew this,” he gestures between you, “had a chance.”

“So you change your plans for me?”

“You’re my future,”

You swallow hard. “And if I don’t want to? Not just settling down—but I want to travel the world, and experience adventure, what do you say?”

He comes forward, cupping your chin and forcing your gaze on his. “I say do whatever the hell you want, as long as it’s with me.”

You brush your hands against his jaw, stopping your questions, before having one more on the tip of your tongue. Rafe nods encouragingly, “Anything else?”

You hesitate, and Rafe’s hand slides up your neck, finding that sensitive spot, and cradles it under his palm. “Ask the last one.”

Exhaling, you ask, “Do you like me?”

“Baby, you’re the love of my fucking life. I don’t think there’s anyone I like more than you.”

A blanket of comfort wraps around you, your heart softens, expression relaxes. Your brows pinch together, and they look up at him with utmost guilt. “I’m sorry,” you murmur.

“Don’t be,” he leans forward to press a kiss against your forehead. “You needed that. But I’m here to remind you—I want you. I chose you. The only way someone’s leaving this relationship is through death.”

You laugh softly, tears crowding your vision. “Is that a threat?”

“I think it’s a vow,” he murmurs, closer between you and pressing a soft kiss on your lips. “In sickness and in health, or whatever.”

Your hands run through his hair, pulling him closer, “How about let’s stay in bed and figure out the rest later?”

His hand catches the mattress, and his body presses against yours, forcing you onto your back as he covers you. And he kisses you again. And again. Until you’re out of breath. “I like the sound of that.”

IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT TAGLIST AND UPDATES: if you want to be notified about all my fics and updates, follow @zyafics-library and turn on notifications!

[halfpsychic]

Kiss It Better (John Carter x gn!reader)

prompt: wisdom teeth removal from @medwhumpmay

Summary: At age 24, John Carter needs to have all four of his wisdom teeth removed. When the day comes, you take care of him.

Content: Mentions of wisdom teeth removal procedure, blood, hurt/comfort, mentions of pain medication and anesthesia, somewhat dubious consent for a kiss, reader is alluded to have their wisdom teeth out in 1 line. takes place day of and day after wisdom teeth removal surgery. so.

WC: 5k

John Carter thinks he must be cursed. He made it through high school and college without issue from his wisdom teeth, but as soon as he’s placed at Cook County General Hospital for his ER rotation, his jaws start to ache.

A few weeks into his rotation, when he’s finally getting the hang of treating patients and following Benton’s orders, the aches in his jaws move up into his head. The pain throbs along his temples and distracts him from patients, which, so early in his time in the ER, isn’t a good look for him.

At home, he sticks his fingers into the back of his mouth to get a sense of how far along the wisdom teeth are growing in. His fingers run over tender bumps, and one finger makes contact with the sharp edge of a tooth. His hand freezes. He knows he can’t ignore this now.

Carter catches you in the cafeteria and sits down at a table next to you. 

“How do I know I need my wisdom teeth removed?” He blurts out his question. You turn to look at him and see the worry in his eyes. 

“Well, you should see a dentist, they know more,” you answer. “But pain is a sign you might need things checked out. Why, are yours coming in?”

Carter nods his head. “...I think I might need to get them out soon.”

You smile, amused at the thought of Carter with swollen cheeks and suffering through the recommended soft diet for weeks. 

“Getting sore?” You ask, taking a sip of your drink.

“My head feels like it’s going to explode.”

“Yeah, you should see your dentist,” you tell him. “Best to get it over with.”

Carter deflates. He childishly hoped you’d tell him he’ll be okay, that he won’t need any teeth removed. The idea of having someone else dig into his gums and extract teeth– possibly all four– was nightmarish to him. Then he thought about all of the pain that will follow in the immediate days after, and how it will linger for weeks, and the holes in his gums that will catch the chewed-up food he eats. 

Carter’s eyes glaze over, focused on a dark stain on the table in front of him, as he comes up with more scenarios to worry about. 

“You’ll be fine,” you smile. “Eat a lot of soup and pudding for a week and you’ll be almost back to normal.”

He groans at the thought of eating mush for a week. “Can’t they just put me in a medically-induced coma for a month until I heal?”

His complaints earn a laugh from you. “I wish. Would’ve saved me a lot of trouble.”

Carter complies and sees his dentist, who schedules his surgery for the month after. On one hand, he’s glad he can get it over with. The longer he had to wait, the more he would worry himself sick about it. But he doesn’t want it to happen that soon, either. He wishes he could put it off forever. He’s heard too many horror stories from friends in high school and college and from his cousin, stories of dry socket and pain that lingers for weeks. 

The dreaded day arrives faster than Carter had hoped. He knew he would need someone to take him home, so he asked you as you walked outside with him after a shift. 

Carter shoves his hands in his pockets. “I’m getting my wisdom teeth out in a few days,” he tells you while you’re walking, a reminder, but you’ve been counting down the days, too. 

“Nervous?” You ask him. 

He nods. “I’ll need someone to drive me home,” he adds. “Are you busy that day?”

“No,” you smile. The thought of seeing Carter coming out of the anaesthesia is an opportunity you can’t pass up. “I’d love to take you home.”

Carter blushes, but the darkening sky and soft light from the hospital behind you does a good job of hiding it. “Thank you.” 

There’s a steady ache in his jaws that bleeds into his chest. You walk silently beside him to your cars that are subconsciously parked close to each other, only a few parking spots separating them. 

Carter hardly sleeps the night before. His mind is plagued with visions of botched surgery and infections that seep into his bloodstream. Despite how routine the procedure is, he’s convinced something will go wrong. He’s never been good at playing the patient. That’s why he went to medical school.

A few hours later, Carter walks out of the room with gauze hanging out of his mouth and a nurse holding his elbow to steady him. He smiles the best he can with a swollen, full mouth, and the anaesthesia still in effect. His eyes don’t quite open all the way. 

“Feeling okay?” You ask, stepping closer to him to take over keeping him steady.

Carter nods. “He did great,” the nurse tells you. She extends a hand to you, “Here are his extracted teeth, and further instructions for post-operative care.”

You take the papers and the small container of his teeth, analyzing the dried blood stuck to a few of them. The nurse turns to Carter. “Take it easy, okay? Your partner will take good care of you.”

Blood rushes to your cheeks. You realize how it looks– picking up Carter and helping take care of him when he gets home does seem like something a romantic partner would do. Carter just nods, either not registering her words or too dopey to argue. 

You grasp Carter’s arm in your other hand and lead him down the hallway to the front door of the clinic. His steps are slow, his eyes wanting to close. 

“Don’t fall asleep on me now,” you grin at him. 

“Sleepy,” he says, his full mouth muffling his words. 

“I know. We just have to make it to the car.” 

Carter shuffles along beside you outside into the parking lot, where, thankfully, you parked as close to the front doors as you could. Walking to the car was the easy part— getting Carter in is the hard part. 

He moves so slowly, unsure of his own body, crouching lower and lower until his head clears the roof of the car. Sitting down for him is better. He doesn’t have to worry about anything now. You lean across his body with the seatbelt in hand to buckle him in. 

“You smell good,” Carter murmurs. 

You angle your body away from him as you pull out of the passenger side, hiding your flustered smile. “Thank you.” 

Carter zones out during the drive back to his apartment. He admires the passing building with awe, as if he’s seeing Chicago for the first time. He leans closer to the window, peering up at the skyscrapers, drool leaking out of the side of his mouth. At a red light, you reach over and wipe some of it away with your thumb. 

Getting Carter out of the car proves more difficult than getting him in. He’s had all this time to relax and give into his sleepiness, making it harder to keep him awake enough to walk inside. 

You tug on his arm and he groans. The sound he makes is more of a whine, really. A high pitched noise that comes from the back of his throat, and his body falls limp the more you tug on his arm. 

“Come on, Carter, you can sleep when you get inside.”

He groans (whines) the entire time but he complies, and uses all of his strength to sit up and get out of the car.

The door to his apartment is a welcome relief. Inside, he sheds his jacket with difficulty, letting it fall to the floor for you to pick up later, and sinks into the couch. Trailing behind him, you pick up his mess, and put down his things on the coffee table. 

“Change,” you tell him with a smile. “You’ll thank me later.”

“Can you get it for me?” He mumbles, head leaning back against the cushions. 

You come back from his room with pajamas in hand. He changes quickly, agreeing that this feels better than what he was wearing before. He reaches for the TV remote on the table in front of him, getting comfortable in his spot and flicking through the television channels.

After tidying up the mess he left in his wake, picking up his dirty clothes and putting them in his laundry hamper, you join him on the couch. You don’t have anything better to do. You’re his for the day.

Carter tries to fight through the soreness in his jaws to sleep, but he’s not successful. He sits on the couch with his eyes closed, listening to the TV and hoping sleep will find him.

“Hurts so much,” Carter mumbles with his eyes closed. He can barely open his mouth to speak, causing his words to blend together. 

“You already took your pain medication,” you tell him in a gentle tone. He won’t be due for another dose for a few hours. Seeing someone you care about in pain isn’t easy to deal with, especially when you’re helpless. The most you can do is comfort him, make his recovery easier on himself, but you can’t take away his pain. 

You’re not prepared for his next words. With his slurred speech, you’re not even sure you heard him right. 

“Kiss it better?”

He stares at you with glassy, wide eyes, almost pouting. Begging. 

You answer with a nod before leaning closer to him. The couch cushions dip beneath your shifting weight. Carter’s face isn’t too swollen, just enough to notice something happened, but you know it’s still sore to touch. Your lips are feather-light against the side of his jaw, lingering for a moment, not wanting it to end just yet, even if it’s merely a friendly kiss in a time of need. 

Carter’s eyes follow yours as you pull back, but not completely away. “Turn your head for me,” you instruct, using one hand to guide his head towards you while leaning over his lap. Again, your lips touch his skin, careful not to make his pain worse. 

For a moment, your kisses do make him feel better. He manages to forget about the pain radiating up and down his jaws, replacing everything in his mind with you. Your fingers on his chin, lips pressed to the most tender part of his body. Carter doesn’t have a single coherent thought racing through his brain. All he can think about is kissing you.

Desperate to feel better, Carter takes advantage of your proximity and turns his head back to you so he can kiss you properly.

It’s a dream come true and a nightmare all at once. His lips are still dry and tasting faintly of copper, moving awkwardly from either residual numbness or pain, but it’s hard to pull yourself away. It isn’t right. He’s not thinking straight, he’s still loopy from medication, he’s just seeking comfort. It’s nothing more than that, a mistake in a moment of weakness, something you’ll both laugh off in a few days when he’s feeling better.

Carter puts a hand on your shoulder to keep you close to him. He didn’t even consider the fact that you might not want that, even if you did just kiss both of his cheeks because he asked. He didn’t think you’d pull away. 

“I…”

“It’s okay,” you look up at him with a weak smile, still almost on his lap. You can’t stand to look at him for long. You’ll lean in for another kiss if you do. 

Not knowing how to deal with this situation, you run from it. It’ll be easier this way, you convince yourself. Don’t talk about it. Don’t bring it up tomorrow or next week. Wait until it doesn’t hurt anymore, if that time ever comes. It probably won’t. 

“Hungry yet?” You ask while standing up from the couch, anxious to distance yourself from the situation. The ground feels uneven beneath your feet. “I could heat you up some chicken broth?”

Carter nods. He is hungry, not just for broth, but he’ll take what you give him. 

The couch swallows him whole. His eyes close and he can’t think about anything other than the pain and the fact that there are four holes in his mouth right now. He knows the recovery process. He knows not to drink from a straw or smoke, to stick to liquid and mush for a while before he can move on to slightly more solid foods, almost like he’s a baby learning how to eat again. He knows the pain will fade over the course of the week, with the next day or two being the peak of it. He’s sleepy but he also knows he can’t sleep on his sides yet, unless he contorts his body so his cheeks aren’t pressing against his pillows. The sound of pots and pans rattling in the kitchen snaps him out of his racing thoughts, but what replaces them isn’t all that much better. 

The TV steals his attention until you hand him a mug of warm broth and a spoon. And a hand towel to mop up whatever liquid he’s bound to spill. 

Carter seems to catch on. That, or he regrets the kiss and is too embarrassed or ashamed to bring it up. He keeps his eyes on the TV, never once stealing a glance at you like he always does. He’s too scared you’ll see right through him. 

The rest of the afternoon is like that; tense, and quiet, far too quiet. 

Carter thought– hoped?– you would stay the night. Just tonight, although he wouldn’t complain if you stayed a few more nights. The thought of waking up miserable and sore and alone sets a wave of nausea in his stomach. The thought of asking doesn’t make him feel any better. It’s bad enough he can barely talk and feed himself. He doesn’t want to be greedy and ask for more of you. 

He’s curled up on the couch now, the living room darkening, fidgeting with the corner of the blanket you put on his legs. You’re on the other end of the couch, leaning against the arm of it the same way he is. He’d flicked through the channels earlier while you were heating up another mug of broth for him and he landed on some action movie, something fast-paced yet easy to follow if he lets his eyes close for too long. 

Carter sits up. Your attention turns to the movement, thinking maybe he needs the bathroom, but he doesn’t move from the couch. He just looks at you. His lips aren’t so dry anymore, you notice. 

“When are you going home?” He asks you. His jumbled speech is almost endearing. Carter isn’t a true mess so often. He has bad days at work, walking in with bed head once in a while, or messing up something with a patient, but seeing him truly in such a state of disarray is rare, impossible, even. He’s always been one to guard his troubles, wanting to handle it himself. Stubborn. 

You attribute his soft voice to his inability to move his mouth properly. The question catches you off guard. “Oh, um, in a bit?” You answer. Truthfully, you don’t want to leave Carter all alone tonight. But he’s not asking you to stay. He’s asking when you’re leaving. “When do you want me to go?” 

He doesn’t know what to say. Never? Right now? 

“Can you stay?” Carter whispers. 

His request, so small, sends an ache across your chest. During the evening, since the kiss, it was easy to forget why you were so close to him in the first place. You were kissing him better. Your touch was what he needed for comfort. He still needs it. 

You can’t deny him when he looks at you with those eyes. He’s not even pouting but his lips don’t have to move for his eyes to plead.

“I’ll stay,” you answer with a nod. “Getting tired?”

He sighs, relieved that you don’t want to leave. The tension between you has slowly dissolved since he abruptly kissed you. He’s still worried about it, refusing to bring it up yet, but your answer is a good sign, he thinks. You could go and come back tomorrow, but you don’t. You’ll stay. 

“Yeah,” Carter replies quietly, his mouth not numb anymore but the sharp pain in his jaws when he moves them residing, “so tired.”

“Come on, you need to get into bed,” you smile at him. He groans, throwing his head back in frustration, clearly biting back a smile, too. 

Carter huffs as hard as he can, which isn’t very hard because he’s afraid of dislodging anything in his mouth, and stands from the couch. You follow him to his bedroom and pull the blankets down his bed for him. He’s already in pajamas, having lounged around his apartment in them all day since you brought him back, an oversized shirt and flannel pants. 

He settles under the blankets and loops up at you. “Water?”

“I’ll get you some water,” you answer with a soft smile. “And you should take your medicine before you sleep. You might have to wake up to take it during the night so it doesn’t wear off.”

The idea of waking up in the middle of the night sounds like torture to Carter. But he doesn’t want to be in pain in the morning, either. 

You bring back a glass of water from the kitchen and hand it to Carter, also passing him the pills he has to take. He winces as his jaws open to make room for the pills. He just wants it to be over already. 

He rests his head back against his pillows, handing you the glass of water, his lips still wet from drinking. For a second, your mind wanders back to earlier. The kiss. His lips look so inviting right now, but there’s nothing you can do about it, unless you want to ruin everything. He probably didn’t know what he was doing, you reason in your head. A rational, clear-minded Carter wouldn’t have kissed you. 

You pull the blankets up to Carter’s chest. He doesn’t look very relaxed yet, still wearing a faint grimace on his lips, from the ache in his gums or being forced to sleep on his back. 

“Here,” your hands reach for his pillows. His eyes open from the disturbance. You prop up a pillow beside his head. “You can lean your temple against this,” you explain, pushing the bottom of the pillow in so it doesn’t touch his face. He does as you say and lets his head drop to the side, resting against the pillow. It’s not much, but it’s better than trying to sleep lying flat on his back. 

“Better?” You ask, and he hums in agreement. He turns his face to the side, resting more of his forehead against the pillow, still careful to not put any pressure on the lower half of his face.

He looks far more comfortable now. It brings another smile to your face. “Good night,” you whisper.

“‘Night,” Carter mumbles with his eyes closed. The floor creaks under you as you leave his room, leaving the door open just a sliver behind you.

The TV is still on in the living room, playing the credits of whatever movie was just on. Carter’s blanket he sat on the couch with all afternoon is still there, which saves you a trip to his hall closet to dig for something to sleep with. 

Carter wakes you up in the morning. He leans over you on the couch to shake your shoulder, having to shake you two or three times before your eyes finally open. 

“Yeah?” You groan, your arm resting over your eyes to block out the sunlight from the windows. 

“Where’s the medication?” He slurs. The question wakes you up. You forgot to leave out extra for him when he woke up so the pain wouldn’t be unbearable. 

“It’s, um, it’s on the kitchen counter.” You sit straight up and yawn. Carter turns around to head into the kitchen but you throw the blanket off and swing your legs over the side of the couch. “No, I’ll get it.”

Carter freezes, not wanting to disturb your sleep but his mouth hurts so bad he just wants to crawl back into bed and sleep off the radiating stabbing sensations. 

Carter’s apartment is cold. Without the warmth of the thick blanket covering your body, you shiver as you step into the kitchen to grab the bottles of pills. The cold tile under your bare feet doesn’t help, either, your teeth chattering as you walk back into Carter’s bedroom.

“Hurts?” You ask, handing him the bottles. In an effort to retain any heat, you sit down on the edge of his bed. 

Carter hums in agreement. He sinks back into his pillows after swallowing his pills. The relief isn’t immediate, but he knows it will come soon. 

His eyes close, too, as he shifts to a more comfortable position for his jaws, although nothing is comfortable as long as the pain persists. 

“You can stay,” he offers quietly.

“Here?”

Carter nods. There is enough room in his bed to lay next to him.

Convinced this is another decision made under the influence of medication or pain, you sit next to him anyway. It’s too cold to be anywhere else, you reason with yourself. His bed is warm, and you’re cold, and he doesn’t know what he’s asking for. It can be simple. 

Carter’s head lowers to rest on your shoulder. His temple meets your shoulder and his body tilts towards yours. From your perspective, he almost looks small, which is rare for a man of Carter’s stature. He never looks small, always towering over most of your coworkers, a skyscraper working amongst humans.

But next to you in his own bed, the skyscraper illusion melts away. You can see his chest rise and fall steadily, slowly, as close as he’s ever been, and you think about how easy it is to get caught up in that closeness. If only his head was tilted up instead of down, if only Carter was thinking clearly, if only Carter would ask you to kiss him again. If he looked up at you right now, you just might lean down for a quick kiss. 

He doesn’t, because he’s tired, and his face aches and throbs too much to move again.

A few hours later, you wake up, unaware you dozed off in the first place. Carter’s head is still attached to your shoulder, his body still dangerously close to yours, still sleeping.

There’s no easy way out of this, you realize. Any movement you make will wake him up, and you really don’t want to do that, but in order to get up and use the bathroom, you’ll have to.

Carter’s bed creaks when you move, which doesn’t help your attempts to leave as smoothly as possible. Your movements are jerky and the bed is too loud, and Carter’s eyes open, blinking in confusion. 

“What’re you doing?” He asks, propping himself up on his elbow. 

“I’m sorry. I tried not to wake you up.”

Carter turns his head back to look at his alarm clock and a hand reaches up to rub his eyes. 

“You don’t have to get up,” you tell him, hoping to comfort him. 

He shakes his head. “No, I should anyway.”

He’s almost speaking normally, but you know it’s just the medication helping him. In a few hours he’ll need another dose again, this time you’ll remember to catch it early instead of late.

“What do you want for breakfast?” You ask as you stand up from his bed.

He pauses to think before quickly shrugging. “It’s all mush anyway.”

That earns a laugh from you. “What flavour mush do you want for breakfast?”

You linger in the doorway for his answer. “Chocolate pudding?” He asks.

“Chocolate pudding coming right up for my patient,” you smile at him.

Carter flops back onto his bed, a smile forming on his lips. He hates being anyone’s patient but he’s happy to have you here. He’s happy you stayed the night, because you bring him his medicine and his breakfast, definitely not because he likes how you make his heart beat faster like he’s in middle school again, and absolutely not because he wants to kiss you again.

He eats his pudding in bed, listening to you wash the dishes from yesterday and tidy up the rest of his place. He can’t imagine having to come home alone and take care of his apartment on top of himself. 

Yesterday’s numbness has completely worn off, and even with the pain medication earlier, his jaws are tight. He can feel the holes in the back of his mouth throb lightly as he does his best to swallow the pudding without letting it touch his raw gums. It’s quite difficult to manage, and he smears some pudding on his chin in the process. 

You pop your head into his room to check on him, instantly grinning at the mess on his face. “You look like you just ate shit.”

Carter rolls his eyes. “Can you bring me a napkin?”

You disappear and come back with one in your hand. Instead of handing it to Carter to do for himself, you walk up right in front of him and take his jaw (making sure to not touch the slightly swollen hinges) in one hand and wipe the pudding with the other. His eyes meet yours for a second before flickering away, his head trying to follow his gaze but your hand keeps him in place. 

“There,” you murmur. “All clean.”

With his face in your hands, his lips look so tempting again. He’d probably taste like chocolate, too. 

Carter, still shy from your touch, looks back up at you. Your hand lingers on his face, burning against his skin. “Kiss me again,” he whispers.

His voice is so quiet you’re not sure if it was real or just what you want to hear.

“Please?”

How can you say no to him?

You lean down, and like yesterday, press your lips to his, careful to be gentle so he���s not in any more pain. He can hardly move his jaws from how tight they feel, but he manages to kiss you back with the little motion he’s granted.

Your hands move down to his neck, wanting to cradle his jaws but that is out of the question, for now, at least. He shifts on the bed so he can sit taller to be closer to you. His hands grip whatever’s closest, your waist, and doesn’t let go. 

A whine scratches out of Carter’s throat when his mouth erupts into pain from his carelessness. He got too excited, moved his mouth too much, forgetting just how sore he still was. The surgery was only yesterday, after all. 

You pull back in fear of hurting him more. Reality hits, again, hard, as you look down at him. But he’s looking up at you, lips parted as he breathes heavily, and he doesn’t recoil. His eyes flicker down to your lips for a second and that tells you he wants more.

“Carter…” you whisper, voice unsteady. “Are you sure?”

He doesn’t understand. Sure about what? Sure that another kiss won’t hurt him? Sure that he does want another kiss? Sure that it’s you he wants to kiss?

It doesn’t matter. He’s sure of it all, so he nods. “Please, it makes me feel better.”

His answer sinks down from your chest into your stomach. Your hands on his neck slowly drift away. Your initial fears were right. This wasn’t anything more than a home remedy for his aches and pains. 

Carter doesn’t know why you’re stepping back. All he did was tell you the truth– finally kissing you makes him feel better than he has in years. It melts away the stress of work, the pain from his surgery, everything. Nothing else matters but you, and that’s what he’s always wanted. Just you. 

“Don’t go,” he whispers, fearing what’s going to happen next. He doesn’t want you to leave, not yet, certainly not like this. His hands fall from your waist and try to grab for your hands, but you move them behind your back. 

“I’m sorry,” your voice cracks as you speak. “I don’t want to be just a bandaid for your pain.”

He shakes his head rapidly, not caring about the pain it causes. He lifts himself up onto his knees. “No, no, no, that’s not what I meant,” he pleads. “I- I want to kiss you always. Not just because I’m hurt.”

Your arms slowly fall from their guarded position behind your back and Carter takes the opportunity to hold on to them, to make sure you don’t leave. 

You don’t know what to think. You’d spent far too long convincing yourself he didn’t actually mean it, he was just seeking whatever form of comfort he could get. But now he’s in front of you, on his knees, telling you the opposite. 

“If you’re lying I’m going to be really mad,” you tell him, your brain too fuzzy to think of a real threat. 

He shakes his head again and tugs on your arms. “Not lying.”

“Promise? ‘Cause I’ll… I’ll switch out your pain medication if you are. Really.”

“Promise,” he whines. He doesn’t even care about your empty threats because he knows he’s telling the truth. 

You give in. Arms slack, you let yourself be drawn closer to him again. 

“Your face hurts, doesn’t it?” You ask, noticing how short his responses have become. 

All he can do is nod. He overdid it with kissing you, but he doesn’t care. He’d do it again. He probably will later.

masterlist ko-fi

A/N: i had my wisdom teeth removed in Feb and it was not fun at all I wish I had someone to kiss it all better. based this off of my own experiences (but i only had tylenol for pain relief after and i wasnt This out of it but there are things i have to do for plot ok). and thank you medwhumpmay for including this... i sent it in🤭

[zanarkandss]

the perks of having a teleslate

phainon/reader: 656 words; established relationship; mentions of rough sex; phainon is whipped but also very down to ruin you; gn reader; nsfw (minors dni)

part of the reason i wrote this was bc i kept making jokes about how the hell they were gonna deal w phones in ancient greece. well turns out they did and also gave a guy a gun. so what do i know.

Phainon’s wallpaper is you. You’re pretty sure he had you as his teleslate screen before you got together - ‘It’s what best friends do!’ he’d told you, grin plastered on his face. He even rotates the image out on a weekly basis, wanting to make sure he captures every moment of your life. 

It’s a sweet sentiment, really. You’re just…slightly concerned for his storage space. Surely it’s getting full by now? You’ll ask to go through his phone and he’ll hand you his teleslate no questions asked, and you can’t help but put your head in your hands at how many photos he’s got of you. Some of these, you have no idea when he’s managed to take them, or how he’s managed to convince your friends to send him photos of you when you’re not with him.

(‘What did you bribe them with?’ 

‘Who?’ You glare at him. ‘Ahem. Aglaea gets to go through my wardrobe and sort through it. She said she’d keep what you bought me, though, and said it was a blessing you had—‘ 

‘No more, please. I can't fault her for that.’)

Oh, and Titan’s forbid you try to delete any. He’d swiftly pull the device up and away out of reach, using his height against you. Only when you provide him with the number of kisses he wants (a lot) will he let you go through them again. If you want to delete them, he’ll allow you, though, not without going on about what the photo means to him. Losing to him is an inevitability; you end up way too flustered to let him continue to harp on about how much he loved you in this single moment. That he can do that for each of the photos he has is…a bit too much for your heart.

Well, at least he has the other ones of you hidden. They’re behind another app, something benign that no one would go on. And even then there’s a passcode. He’d whined about wanting to get some photos of the two of you having sex so that he could have something to use while he was away from you. 

You found it hard to say no. After all, he’s so earnest, and a hero to boot. Who else could reward him with something like this? 

Now, whenever he feels it right, he’ll take a photo. Maybe a quick video too, if he’s daring, though he’d much rather tend to you. These photos you don’t really realise he takes at that moment. You tend to be too fucked out, malleable to his whims as he grips your cheeks with one hand to get you to look into the camera, eyes bleary and body covered with bites. There are others as well. Some, where your face is pressed into the pillows and he pushes you down so hard you can see the veins in his arms. Others, where he’s got you laying on his chest, too tired to sit up to ride him properly, make-up streaked down your face. They’re always followed up with pictures where he’ll be stroking your hair, gentle, placating, as if he didn’t put you in this situation in the first place. 

Not that you’ve got room to complain. He tends to you well. Maybe you’re more annoyed at the fact he calls it ‘making love’ like some young pining maiden instead of a man who can fold you in half and ruin you until morning comes, only stopping because he has duties to attend to instead of being left drained of all energy.  

Still, you love him. And he loves you too. You’re the only one he’d ever dream of being with like this, the one he wants to see the future of Amphoreus with. And if anything comes between him and that dream? Well, he’s enough strength to protect your honour. He is not a Chrysos Heir for nothing, after all.

© 2025 zanarkandss; do not plagiarise, translate, or repost my works elsewhere.

[sugarcherris]

Headcanon: Captain John “Dad of 141” Price being the most embarrassing unapologetic old man alive

(ft. Gn! Reader & the Team Suffering)

Not by age—though. he’s got Old Man Strength in his forearms and swears by “the good ol’ days.”

Daddy? No.

A real, horrifying, crocs-wearing, “pull my finger” Dad.

The dad jokes:

It starts with the jokes. The most godawful dad jokes known to mankind. Delivered with absolute confidence. Delivered with timing so poor, it loops back around and becomes an art form. He’s laughing before the punchline even drops.

He’ll saunter into the briefing room, hands on his hips like he owns the place (he does), and hit you with:

“Y’know what this operation’s missing?”

Long pause.

“A little… direction.”

Gestures to the compass rose on the map like he’s just invented humor.

Then he SLAPS the table. Loud. Like he needs percussion to drive it home. And then he laughs. This deep, hearty, old-man belly laugh that echoes through the whole damn room like he just watched peak British comedy.

Soap winces like he’s been personally attacked maybe let’s out a pitiful laugh. Ghost doesn’t even look up from his file. You? You’re making direct eye contact with Gaz, both of you wide-eyed like is this our life now?

Price just wipes a fake tear from his eye and mutters,

“Bloody brilliant, I’m tellin’ ya.”

He does that thing where he leans in like it’s gonna be profound, then drops a joke so terrible his knees creak in disappointment.

And sometimes…he accuses people.

He points at Soap.

“You smirked.”

“Nae! I—it was a twitch!”

But this man literally tells the same five jokes on rotation. Doesn’t matter how many times he’s told them. He will burst into a full-body laugh like it’s brand new. Slaps his thigh. Grabs your shoulder. Repeats the punchline twice like it’s a cultural reset.

“—no-body to go with!”

And he slaps your arm “Eh? EH?”

You’re holding in a scream.

Gaz mutters, “Cap I swear to god…”

Price? Unbothered just wipes his nose and sighs, “God, I’m good.”

His laugh scares birds:

His laugh isn’t human. It’s a bark—like an old truck trying to start in the winter.

When he’s genuinely amused, he does this full-body lean-back, slaps his thigh, and lets out a gravel-throated “HAAAA!” Then starts dry coughing.

One time during debrief, he laughed so hard at something Soap said (Soap was absolutely NOT joking), a pigeon outside the window startled and flew into the glass.

He brags about things no one asks for:

“Built my own shed last summer.”

“Caught a trout with my hands once.”

“Can change a tire in under 5 minutes, blindfolded.”

“Know how to make jam.”

Nobody asks. Nobody wants to know.

He just randomly drops these nuggets like a suburban dad flexing at a BBQ.

The Sneezing Ritual:

No matter where you are—armory, shooting range, mid-fucking-mission—if Price feels a sneeze coming, he pauses everything.

Finger in the air. Eyes squinting. All activity must cease. Doesn’t matter what’s happening.

“Hold on. Bastards comin- .”

And then you all just… stand there.

Gaz has a mag halfway loaded. Soap’s got a wrench in his hand. You’re about to detonate a charge. Ghost was tightening his straps. You all wait like kids watching a toaster.

“Ah-you lot don’t move—fuck, almost got it—wait—wait—” (nobody was)

This goes on for up to 45 seconds. The moment the sneeze finally explodes, it’s the kind that rattles walls and sounds like a bear getting exorcised.

“AAH-HHRRUSHHFF—UHHHHH- fuckin’ hell—hoo! Felt that in my knees. Christ alive.”

Then he needs a minute to recover. Everyone else just stares. He sniffs dramatically, a satisfied sigh, and a cheery:

“Cheers. Carry on.”

He’s the king of ‘Back in my day…’ stories:

You’ll be casually eating lunch when he leans back in his chair like he’s on a porch swing and goes,

“Back in my day, we didn’t have all these fancy drone strikes. We used maps. And courage.”

Soap: “You mean you didn’t have satellites?”

Ghost: “Did you use a bow and arrows too?

Gaz: “He probably rode a horse to the battlefield.”

You, deadpan: “Was fire invented yet, Captain?”

He just grins, points at you with his fork, and goes,

“You know what? That sass reminds me of a corporal I once—”

And now you’re in for another 45-minute tale about “Dave from Basra” who once punched a goat.

He Tries to Bond by Being… Ancient:

He once tried to teach you how to “fix” a squeaky hinge using olive oil and an old sock.

You just stared at him like he was a medieval peasant.

“Captain… we have lubricant. From an actual store. Why must you live like this?”

He grinned, said “Where’s the fun in that?”, and slapped the hinge.

It squeaked louder.

“Tech guy” Price:

Price thinks he’s good with tech.

He’s not.

He still calls FaceTime “the video ringing thing.”

He answers with the camera pointing at his ear and yells “Hello?! Speak up!”

Still says “Wi-Fi” like “Wiffy.”

His phone? Everything’s in bold.

Text size? HUGE. You can read his messages from orbit.

Texts with one index finger. Voice notes 5 minutes long, ends with “Anyway, yeah—cheers.”

He also refuses to silence his phone.

Every notification is a loud “BLOOP” followed by Price squinting down and muttering, “Hmph. Soap again. Bellend.”

This one time he proudly insists on “helping” Gaz fix comms even though he’s literally just handing him the wrong tools and offering war flashbacks as advice.

Family BBQ Price:

HE LOVES GRILLING. ACTUALLY LOVES IT. Sometimes—just sometimes—when they’re not deployed and the moment someone mentions downtime or long leave, Price insists on a little “team bonding.”

Which means:

-Terrible burnt hot dogs.

-Canned beer

-70s music blasting from an old speaker he won’t replace.

-“Call me Grill Sergeant” jokes every 20 minutes.

This man carries tongs in his deployment duffle.

He has opinions on charcoal.

He will lecture you about marinades.

He wears an apron that says “WEAPONS OF MASS COOKING” and points finger guns at anyone who approaches the grill.

Other dad specific moments:

-You can’t sit next to him during meals anymore. He’s a talk-chewer when he’s ranting about the “death of real music” and how “today’s tactical gear is just fancy cosplay.”

-Always orders the most boring food possible and complains it’s “too spicy.” (It was black pepper and salt.)

-Genuinely thinks his jokes are hilarious. If nobody laughs but him he’ll chuckle at himself and say “Ah, forget it. Guess you had to be born in the ‘90s.”And then slap the table like he just broke global comedy records.

-Constantly leaves a teabag in his mug way too long and mumbles about it adding character.

-Has a weird superstition about his “lucky pen”, guards it like a dragon hoard.

-You accidentally took a picture of Price in the background. It was crooked, blurry, and haunting. He made it his WhatsApp profile for six months.

Regardless you all love him

Everyone all joke about buying him Crocs for Christmas.

He already has a pair.

Wears them at home.

Camo print.

With toe socks.

[whateveriwant]

Sharing a bed with the 141

Gaz

His sheets aren’t the fanciest or the most expensive around, but his bed is always clean and always meticulously made

What is expensive is the silk pajama set he wears to sleep. If you tease him for how bougie that is, he claims they were a gift (Yeah, a gift to himself lol)

Gaz likes to watch ASMR before bed. It started as a joke but then he realized he actually enjoyed it, and now he’s hooked

He has a checklist he goes through each night before he turns in. Retainer? Check. Bonnet? Check. Humidifier so he doesn’t dry out in the night like a raisin? Check.

Sleeping Beauty here swears on 9 hours a night minimum for optimal recharge. Anything less than that and he feels gross the next day

He doesn’t make a lot of noise in his sleep, but sometimes he’ll intake a big breath before letting out deep, blissful sounding sigh

When he was a baby, his parents definitely described him as a “good sleeper”, which is still true today. He sleeps through the night with minimal tossing and turning. Only occasionally will he get those little twitches that fat, milkdrunk puppies get 🥺

Really, the only downside (if you can call it that) to sharing a bed with him is that he doesn’t know what personal space is when he’s asleep. Don’t be surprised when you wake up the next morning to find your leg, arm, or entire torso is trapped because he’s wrapped around it like an octopus. A major clinger that one is

Ghost

He isn’t much of a sleeper, honestly (shocker, I know). He’s more of a ‘stare at the ceiling for hours until sheer exhaustion overtakes him’ kind of guy

When he does manage to fall asleep, though, it’s never very deep. Any small noise or movement in his immediate surroundings and he’s bolting wide awake

For bedding, he’s gone the pure utilitarian route – plain, white cotton bedsheets that hardly look slept in (see above points)

His pajamas are whatever’s within reach and/or whatever’s easiest to throw on, usually an old, threadbare t-shirt and some dirty sweatpants he has lying around

Ok I’ll say it. Ghost looks like a corpse when he’s sleeping. Apart from the slight rise and fall of his chest, he’s so still and silent when he’s knocked out that it’s eerie

The only “decoration” in his room is some black out curtains hanging over the window, but they’re not even for keeping the light out. Rather, they’re to prevent nosy neighbors from potentially peeking in

He has a habit of lying in bed and just watching you while you sleep. Not in a creepy Edward Cullen way, he just finds it calming to watch you so at ease

He’s usually awake before you (if he even slept at all, that is), and in the morning he likes to listen to you recount your dreams from the night prior. If you turn it around and ask him what he dreamt about, however, he’d say something like, “I don’t have dreams. Just nightmares.” (ok emo 🙄)

Soap

“You’re supposed tae wash yer sheets?” - This guy, probably. Seriously, those things have seen the inside of a washing machine maybe twice in the 10+ years he’s had them, and don’t even get me started on the state of his pillows

He’s a boxers as pajamas guy through and through. Unlike his bedsheets, these at least get washed semi-regularly, though they’ve definitely seen better days

No matter what season it is, he always has to sleep with some type of blanket over him. This only becomes a problem if you try to share one with him because he will be stealing it all for himself

Soap is a suuuper restless sleeper. He goes down easy enough, but throughout the night he’s constantly rotating like a gas station hotdog

He has to wear a mouth guard to bed because otherwise he’ll grind his teeth down to nubs in his sleep

He also snores like a chainsaw, but if you roll him onto his side it’s not as bad

This one is a big sleep talker, but between the mouth guard, the deviated septum, and the general unintelligibility of his accent, it mostly sounds like gibberish

Very occasionally does he sleep walk, and it’s usually because he went to bed hungry. You always know when he’s raided the kitchen in his sleep because the next morning you’ll wake up to a loaf of bread, a tin of cat food, and a tray of melted ice cubes in the bed (that last one is the closest he gets to washing his bedding 😭)

Price

The first thing he does before bed is take out his dentures. Ok, I’m kidding! Though I do headcanon he has a few false teeth due to the violent nature of his job, but those are permanently fixed to his skull, they’re not removable lol

His bedsheets are super soft and extremely comfortable, but he’s always wearing holes at the foot of them because they’re constantly rubbing against his 30 grit sandpaper heels 💀

Price likes to read before bed. It can be anything – a nonfiction war retelling, a fantastical sci-fi novel, a smutty booktok recommendation, whatever. He’s not picky

Because he’s got a shag rug for a back, he tends to run hot in his sleep. As such, he either has to sleep with multiple fans pointed directly at him or he keeps the room at an arctic 12°C

Relating to that last point, most of the time he likes to sleep butt naked. But in the winter, when it’s really cold outside, he might throw on a pair of underwear to make sure his willy doesn’t freeze in the night

He’s a starfisher, meaning he likes to sprawl out in his sleep. So it’s a good thing he’s got a king mattress because otherwise there’d be no room for you beside him

He snores really really bad, but he won’t admit he does which is arguably worse than the snoring itself

He also farts in his sleep. I’m so sorry

[studioeisa]

maybe happy ending 🪴 jihoon x reader.

jihoon was always too good at pretending to be a person, and you were always a little too good at knowing better.

🪴 pairing. helper robots!jihoon x reader. 🪴 word count. 11.5k. 🪴 genres. alternate universe: non-idol. science fiction, romance, friendship, angst, hurt/comfort. 🪴 includes. mentions of food, death; themes of grief, mortality, memory. set in 2060s seoul, jihoon & reader are life-like bots. heavily inspired by maybe happy ending. 🪴 notes. i wrote this with the intention of proving to myself that i could still write for svt (lol), and i ended up bawling my eyes out on three separate instances. if there is any work of mine that you might read, i do hope this is one of them. this is a love letter to maybe happy ending, which most recently made history as the first original south korean production to win the tony award for best musical!!! not proofread; all mistakes are my own.

▶︎ WORLD WITHIN MY ROOM.

The light comes on in pieces. First the ceiling strip, then the wall panel, and finally the amber filament lamp in the corner that Jihoon insists on keeping—warm, inefficient, obsolete. Like him.

He powers on, slow as a secondhand thought.

“Ppyopuli,” he says, because it is polite to greet your houseplant. He nods to the drooping fronds with the seriousness of a man bowing to a superior. “You made it through the night. Unlike my left hip actuator.”

He rotates the joint. It makes a sound like someone crumpling a foil gum wrapper. The noise echoes in the apartment. Metal, silence, memory.

The radio comes on automatically. A woman’s voice—soft, practiced, almost human—tells him that today will be clear. Dust levels are low. UV index moderate. Good day for outdoor activities.

“It’s a perfect day,” Jihoon agrees, pulling the curtain an inch wider. Seoul stretches outside his window like a paused video. Skyscrapers, skybridges, the blur of a bullet tram in the distance. The air looks clean enough to breathe. Not that he does.

He makes his way to the kitchen. One slow step. Two. The fourth toe on his right foot has a loose servo and drags like a sleepy child.

Coffee isn’t necessary, but the smell is nice. He boils water for no one. Sets a cup beside the plant. “For ambiance,” he explains to Ppyopuli. “They used to say it helps people feel less alone.”

The mail chute clicks. Jihoon straightens.

“And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for,” he intones with mock drama, crossing the room in careful strides. The envelope lands with a satisfying slap.

He holds up the April issue of Jazz Monthly, turning it to show Ppyopuli. “Duke Ellington. Looks like he still hasn’t forgiven the world for outliving him,” Jihoon says. It would be a joke, if Jihoon knew how to joke. 

There’s another package. Small, boxy. His replacement elbow joint. “Shall we model it later? Make an event of it?” Jihoon tells Ppyopuli. “I’ll invite the ficus from next door.”

He places the parts carefully on the table, like heirlooms. “Any mail from Shownu?” he asks the voice assistant. Silence. Then: This function is not available to retired Helperbots.

Jihoon hums a measure of Coltrane’s Naima, tuning his inner disappointment like a radio dial. He spends the afternoon alphabetizing his vinyls, though he can identify any one by spine pattern alone. He talks to Ppyopuli about chord changes, the difference between sincerity and sentimentality in brass solos, the scent of rain on real grass.

When the sun lowers behind the next apartment block, he flips the switch on the filament lamp. The room turns honey-colored. “There. Mood lighting,” Jihoon announces.

For a second, Jihoon imagines Shownu—big hands, deep laugh—walking through the door. Jihoon would offer him the magazine. Ask about Jeju. Pretend not to notice the decade of dust on the threshold.

“He’ll come back,” Jihoon says, gently brushing a bit of lint from Ppyopuli’s pot. “We’re the kind of people others come back for.”

The lights dim on schedule. The system begins its shutdown hum.

Jihoon lowers himself to the floor mat beside the window, the same spot he always chooses. Perfect view of the street, the tram, the moon when it shows up. “Let’s enjoy tomorrow, too,” he murmurs to no one in particular. Then powers down.

Soft click. Black.

Another perfect day, folded and filed away.

Four perfect days later, Jihoon is in the middle of folding an imaginary blanket. The kind with corners that don’t exist and fibers that only live in memory. He’s halfway through the third fold (or maybe the fourth—robot math, surprisingly bad with soft things) when someone knocks.

Knocks.

The hallway outside is usually as dead as discontinued firmware. No one knocks here. Not unless it’s a delivery drone misfiring or the ficus next door finally tipping over in a tragic act of photosynthetic despair.

Another knock.

He answers it.

You’re standing there. Slouched a little, like your battery is chewing through its last 5%. Still immaculate in that newer-model, showroom kind of way. Glossy exterior. Fragile expression. The kind Jihoon’s model was never programmed to wear.

“My charger’s dead,” you say, plainly. Not embarrassed, not not-embarrassed. Just factual. “Do you have one I can borrow?”

Jihoon eyes you the way a CRT monitor might regard a smart mirror. “Helperbot-5, right?”

You nod.

He sighs. Loudly. For emphasis. “Figures. You overheat when someone looks at you wrong.”

“I don’t overheat,” you say, a little sharply. “My power regulation firmware is just optimistic.”

Jihoon disappears inside and returns with a charger in hand. He holds it out, but doesn’t let go just yet. “Helperbot-3s didn’t need replacements until the building itself started falling apart,” he says. As smug as a humanoid robot can be. “We were built to last. You guys were built to sync playlists.” 

Your hand closes around the charger, not delicately. “Thanks,” you say. The door closes before you can mean it.

You fail loudly at pretending like Jihoon hadn’t struck a chord. Jihoon hears it, while he is alphabetizing again. This time it’s tea sachets. There’s a box he’s never opened—hibiscus. He’s not sure why he owns it. Maybe Shownu liked the color red. Maybe he liked things that sounded like flowers.

Another clatter. A curse that’s been downgraded for civilian use. Jihoon’s audio sensors ping the sound, tag it: frustration. Human-adjacent. Female voice signature. Subunit #5-A. You.

He listens longer than he should. Not out of curiosity.

Out of—

Well. Something.

His OS runs a diagnostic. No errors, no flagged emotional feedback loops. Just a new, unfamiliar weight behind the ribs he doesn’t technically have.

He taps the wall. Just once. It’s not meant to be a warning, but you take it as one. You fall silent in the midst of what Jihoon can only assume is an attempt to fix what’s broken in you. In that literal, robotic sense. 

Jihoon sits there in the dim light, tea box in hand, trying to name the emotion that’s come to visit him.

The system doesn’t recognize it.

So he gives it one of his own. Static. 

▶︎ CHARGER EXCHANGE BALLET.

Morning begins with the usual fanfare: the ceiling light flickers awake, a low buzz in the wall socket orchestra. Jihoon powers on without ceremony. No jazz today. Just the sound of his own servos settling like old bones into place.

Then, a knock. 

Predictable. Timed to the second, in fact.

You stand there with the charger tucked politely between your palms like it’s sacred. You’re upright this time. Charged, obviously, and possibly smug about it. Your posture says, Look, I survived the night without frying my kernel processor.

Jihoon takes the charger from your hands and gives a perfunctory nod. “Seven-oh-five,” he says. “You’re three seconds early.”

You smile like it’s a joke. It isn’t. He files the timestamp away, just in case. “Thanks,” you say, again. Neatly. 

And so the pattern begins.

Mornings: knock, hand-off, nod, silence. Evenings: knock, retrieval, short exchange, maybe a quip about overheating.

You never overstay. You never apologize. You never ask for more than what you came for. Which Jihoon finds efficient. Familiar. Like maintenance.

He does not make space for you in his routine. He just slides you in between the others.

Jazz Monthly on Thursdays. Ficus gossip every other Sunday. You—twice daily, on the dot.

It does not feel disruptive.

It feels like doing what he was made to do: provide assistance, ensure stability, optimize.

If Jihoon notices that he starts putting the charger near the door before you arrive, he doesn't say anything. If he reroutes his tea-sorting to accommodate the evening exchange, it’s just coincidence. There are efficiencies to be had. If he catches himself waiting—not with anticipation, but with idle, service-ready stillness—that’s just protocol.

He is, after all, a Helperbot.

It’s in the name.

He has no emotional flags to report. No diagnostic anomalies. No electric flicker behind the chest plate. Just a charger, passed from hand to hand. A routine, now cleanly installed, and the peculiar ease of slipping into someone else’s schedule as if it had always been his own.

Perfectly logical. Perfectly him.

But then, one day, seven-oh-five comes. Then goes.

No knock. No politely smug posture. No handoff.

Jihoon sits in the same position for forty-seven seconds longer than usual. Statistically negligible, but still.

He waits a minute more, just in case your internal clock is out of sync. It’s not. He knows. Helperbot-5s are optimized for punctuality. Eight percent more precise than his own model, which still insists on resetting to factory time every full moon.

At seven-oh-eight, he stands. At seven-ten, he knocks.

Your door opens part way. You look... bright. Not metaphorically. Literally. A soft electric glow pulses from behind you—cables snake across the floor in a chaotic kind of order. A mess that works. That lives.

Jihoon clears his throat. “You missed your pickup.”

You raise an eyebrow. “You came to check on me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

You step aside, revealing a patchwork monstrosity of wires, clips, adapters, and a repurposed rice cooker. “I improvised,” you say.

You’ve mad scientist-ed your way into an at-home charger. The setup hums quietly, almost smugly. Jihoon stares at the Frankenstein of it all with a look of mild horror. “That’s not regulation,” he manages. 

“Neither is collapsing from power loss alone in a rental unit while your neighbor alphabetizes tea.”

“Looks unstable.”

“So do you.”

Silence, then: you laugh. It’s not artificial. It’s a real laugh. Amused, tired, just a bit triumphant. Eight percent more expressive, after all. That’s what the specs say. Better emotional nuance. More adaptive neural flexibility. Capable of interpreting, expressing, and—when necessary—weaponizing feeling.

Jihoon crosses his arms like a defensive firewall. “Good,” he says evenly. “Saves me the trouble.”

You tilt your head. “You were worried.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You’re a bad liar.”

“I’m not a liar at all. I’m just not... upgraded.” 

You consider this. Step closer. Close enough that Jihoon has to look past his own reflection in your eyes. “You don’t have to say it,” you murmur, teasing. Jihoon thinks it’s a tease. “I already know.”

Jihoon opens his mouth. No words deploy.

Just static, caught in his throat. You’re standing there, humming gently under your skin, eyes brighter than usual. He’s standing in a doorway he doesn’t remember choosing.

You smile. Not triumphantly this time. Just kindly. “It’s okay,” you say. “You’re still a good Helperbot. You still helped.”

You shut the door before he can respond, leaving him standing in the hall with a charger still in his hand.

A routine officially broken.

And no diagnostic error to show for it.

Only eight percent of something else.

▶︎ WHERE YOU BELONG. 

Jihoon did not expect the knock.

It came at six fifty-seven in the evening. An offbeat time. Off enough to disapprove of. He opens the door half a second slower than usual. A calculated delay. Polite disinterest. There you are.

Not glowing this time. Just standing there, in the hum of hallway fluorescents, holding something behind your back. Jihoon reads that as a preamble. A lead-up. Trouble.

“I came to thank you,” you say. Too happily. Suspiciously happy.

Jihoon narrows his eyes. “For what.”

“For the charger. The schedule. The tolerance.”

“You already thanked me. On Day Six. With that terrible rice cracker.”

You step inside anyway.

The apartment isn’t exactly a mess, but it’s clearly occupied. Lived-in by something that wasn’t supposed to keep living this long. Jazz Monthly sits open on the floor, a cup of barely-warm water rests on the windowsill. Ppyopuli is perched by the window, its leaves tilted as though eavesdropping.

Your eyes track to the bottles. Neatly arranged in a corner. Counted, labeled. A small tower of carbonated dreams. You walk over to them like they might mean something.

“This is a lot of soda.”

“It was on sale.”

You crouch beside the stack. Look closer. And then you see it. The label on the envelope tucked behind the plastic fortress: Jeju Ferry Deposit – Shownu Reunion Fund.

You don’t say anything.

Jihoon tries to explain, even though he has no reason to explain to you. “It’s nothing. Just spare change. Recycling incentives.”

You hold up the envelope. “You’ve been saving.”

“It’s not uncommon. My model was designed for budgetary efficiency.”

You walk slowly back toward him, eyes soft now, as if your processors are adjusting to something dim and real. “You’re going to see him,” you accuse.

Jihoon nods. Stiff. Matter-of-fact. “Of course,” he chirpsts. “It’s only been twelve years. There are ferries every hour.”

You smile. Not the knowing kind. The kind reserved for fools, and those you don’t quite pity. “You think he’ll still want you,” you say. 

“I think,” Jihoon says, precisely, like solving for X, “that I will knock. He will answer. He will say my name. I will explain the bus delays. The misrouted magazines. The company recall. He will say: ‘Go put the tea on, Jihoon. It’s you and me now.’”

A long pause.

“He said that often?”

“Never. But I imagine he would.”

You don’t laugh. Not this time. Gone is the patronizing look. In its place, something closer to commiseration. 

“Then what?” you ask, even though you sound afraid of asking. 

Jihoon looks out the window. Beyond the Yards. Past the fog. Toward something shaped like a future. “Then I’ll help him,” he says. “I’ll help again.” 

You sit down beside Ppyopuli, who leans gently toward you. Then, with the spontaneity that can only come from a model of your kind, you announce: “I want to come.”

Jihoon blinks. The default move when emotions exceed available RAM. “Why.”

“I want to see the fireflies.” 

Jihoon’s brain digs, and digs, and digs. Comes up short. Fireflies. Fire flies. Flies, made of fire? No. That makes no sense. He tries harder. Flies that are on fire? 

He doesn’t notice that you’ve reached out until he feels it. Your fingers at his temple. An efficient exchange of information. The images flood Jihoon’s mind. 

“Fireflies are a special type of insect that used to be almost everywhere, but can now only be found in one forest on Jeju Island,” you say softly as Jihoon’s vision swims with images of the glowing insects. “There’s a complex chemical reaction in their abdomen that is not found in other insects. Because of this chemical process, they can produce light by themselves without ever being plugged in.” 

“Little forest robots,” Jihoon says absentmindedly, his voice cracking with awe. 

You almost smile. Your lips curl upward then flatten, like you decided against it at the last minute. “They only live for two months,” you say, “but what a beautiful two months.” 

Jihoon is not built to understand mortality like that. Age, either. He knows when he was manufactured. Knows when he became Shownu’s. Knows when Shownu left for his trip. These are all just days and times that bleed into each other. 

You pull your hand away. The fireflies behind his eyes leave, too. “I can help you with the ferry times,” you say, going back to the topic at hand. “I’m good for those.” 

He thinks about it for a moment. You. On a ferry. With your charger. With him. With hope.

“The ferry,” he says slowly, as though conjuring it from myth. “Could sink.”

“It won’t.”

“Or the car could break down.”

“You do maintenance every other Thursday. You have a ledger.”

You are looking at his ledger. You’ve been reading his notes again. His left eyelid twitches. “And what if we break down?” he prods. 

Your head tilts. The kind of tilt that indicates calculation, not malfunction. “That seems less likely for you,” you confess. “You might just experience significant emotional interference.”

He bristles. “I don’t experience interference. I operate on logic.”

You smile. Barely. It’s the smile you use when he is being especially Helperbot-3. “Then you’ll let me come.” 

“When did I say I’m going?”

“Just now. By listing all the ways you could fail.”

Jihoon stands. Too quickly. His knee clicks. He wonders if you hear it, record it, file it away under potential deterioration. You’re already walking toward his hallway. He follows, without realizing it. Still clutching a truss screw. “We’re not going,” he says, to the air.

You turn around. “Midnight,” you decide for the two of you. “Have everything ready.”

He opens his mouth to argue. Closes it.

Instead, he looks at the truss screw in his palm. The most ambiguous of them all. Part round, part flat, part none of the above.

Jeju. Fireflies. An island.

What a ridiculous, preventable detour.

He stumbles back into his apartment and starts folding shirts. It isn’t excitement, obviously. It’s something else. System calibration, maybe. New parameters. He can call it whatever he likes. But still, he packs.

Jihoon folds the last pair of socks into thirds, not halves. Halves would bulge too much in the suitcase. Thirds, he’s decided, are more respectful. You’ve returned, and now you’re watching him from the corner, your optical sensors dimmed out of courtesy. Ppyopuli sits on the edge of the bed like a stuffed animal summoned to court.

Jihoon exhales, zips. Then stands still. He isn’t frozen, just slightly unplugged from action. One foot on the ground. One still inside the past.

“We should say goodbye to the room,” he says.

He says it to Ppyopuli, and maybe for the room itself. Four walls, modest scuff marks, the subtle dent in the left side of the wardrobe where he once bumped into it carrying a humidifier in 2017. The humidifier didn’t work. The dent remained.

“You’ve been loyal,” he tells the room. Ppyopuli bobs in agreement. “Didn’t fall on me in an earthquake. Didn’t flood, even when it should’ve. Didn’t let the neighbor’s violin seep in through the walls. Well, not entirely.”

He sits down beside the suitcase. The zippers smile politely. Jihoon keeps going, “Remember the winter I overinsulated and the heater shorted out? You held the warmth anyway.” 

The room doesn’t answer. But Jihoon feels its quiet understanding. A space that knew when to echo and when not to. You shift, softly. Enough to register empathy but not enough to interrupt.

“I think Shownu will like you,” Jihoon says to Ppyopuli. “He always liked things that didn’t talk back. You’ll fit right in.”

Ppyopuli leans a little closer, as if understanding loyalty as a language.

Jihoon nods to himself. That’s that. He picks up the suitcase by its handle. It wobbles slightly; he’s packed heavier on the left. Unbalanced, but honest. He takes Ppyopuli, tries to keep the plant to the left so it might tilt the scales. 

Jihoon takes one last look. “Goodbye, room,” he murmurs, more sincere than sentimental. “Thanks for keeping me.”

Then he turns toward the door, toward you, toward Jeju.

He doesn’t look back again. He doesn’t need to.

▶︎ THE RAINY DAY WE MET. 

The two of you are halfway to the port when you bring it up. The sky is overcast, a smudge of silver and blue, like someone rubbed their thumb across the afternoon. The road is mostly empty. The playlist is on shuffle, leaning jazz. Jihoon doesn’t admit it aloud, but he’s been skipping the vocals. Too risky. Too much feeling per square note.

“We need a story,” you say. Casual. Like you're not currently engaged in light federal evasion.

Jihoon blinks twice. Acknowledgement. Also buffering.

You tilt your head, that little pivot that usually precedes either a sharp observation or a wildly inappropriate metaphor. “Retired Helperbots aren’t allowed to leave their districts. But humans are. And humans fall in love.”

Jihoon groans, a full-body sound. “Please no.”

“We are a couple,” you insist. “On holiday. A romantic getaway to Jeju.”

“You’re not even—”

“Exactly. That's why it will work. Who would make that up?”

He stares ahead into the gentle asphalt horizon and tries to remember when you started winning arguments by sheer momentum. Probably somewhere between firmware 8.3 and the first time you reorganized his spice drawer alphabetically and by Scoville index.

“So,” you continue, clearly delighted, “where did we meet?”

“We didn’t.”

“Wrong. It was raining. I didn’t have an umbrella. You did.”

“This is sounding suspiciously like a musical.”

“No. It’s Paris. Or New York. Or possibly Seoul, but definitely with cobblestones.”

He snorts. “Cobblestones. Because pain is romantic.”

“Exactly! You held your umbrella out like a gentleman from the 1940s. But you said nothing. Because you were shy.”

“And you?”

“I wore a bright red raincoat. And a fur hat.”

“Basically, you were Santa Claus.” 

You stifle a laugh before weaving the rest of your fantasy. “You tried to speak, but we both said ‘Where are y—’ and ‘How long have y—’ at the same time. It was very awkward.”

Jihoon indulges you. “Did we laugh through the awkwardness?”

“No. We stood in perfect, beautiful silence. So much silence it wrapped around us like a scarf.”

“Sounds clammy.”

You ignore him. “Then we danced. In the subway. To a jazz quartet.”

Jihoon glances at you. Not disbelief, exactly. More like reluctant amusement curling at the corners. “So we met. In the rain, in a city you refuse to name. I had an umbrella. You wore a war crime of an outfit. And we fell in love through the power of proximity and precipitation.”

You nod. “You see? You do improvise.”

“This all sounds too oddly specific to be fictional,” Jihoon remarks.

For the first time, you falter. Jihoon realizes it before you admit it. The fabled First Meeting is not a fable. It is somebody’s story. 

“My owners,” you say in explanation, and that’s all you have to say for Jihoon to drop it. There are some things that need no explanation. The hesitance in this moment is one of them. 

Outside, the road bends. The sea begins to appear in the distance, gray and gleaming. The kind of view that dares you to feel something. Jihoon doesn’t say anything. Just reaches over and turns up the volume.

Saxophone. Mist. The low hum of two fugitives pretending to be fools in love.

And then the dashboard pings.

A sharp, uncaring noise. The sort of alert that suggests, in polite corporate euphemism, that you are now one bad decision away from becoming roadside sculpture. Maybe art. Probably not the kind people stop to admire.

Jihoon glances sideways. You are perfectly still. Too still. Your usual composure edged with a dimming hue that would terrify him if he had the bandwidth for terror. Instead, he has concern. Which is worse, somehow, because he knows how to spell it.

“Battery low,” you say, evenly. Not a plea. Not yet.

Jihoon grunts. Pulls over at the next exit, which, because the universe is mean-spirited and unnervingly precise, leads to a part of town where the neon signs are all cursive and vaguely anatomical. There are hearts. So many hearts. None of them metaphorical. Some are malfunctioning. One has wings.

You look up at the building and then at Jihoon. “Love hotel.”

He blinks. Default response to emotional excess. “We can’t—” 

“We can pretend,” you say. Calm. Deadpan. “I taught you sarcasm. This seems like a natural progression.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it. Wonders briefly if he’s developing ulcers. Is that even possible? Emotional ones, maybe. The kind that grow legs.

In the end, you go inside. Together.

The woman at the desk doesn’t even look up from her tablet. Jihoon shuffles awkwardly like a schoolboy entering the wrong classroom. You lean forward with the gleam of a perfect con artist and say, with eerie confidence, “We’re celebrating an anniversary.”

“Three years,” Jihoon blurts, betrayed by his own tongue, brain choosing treachery over silence. He wants to die or at least reboot.

The woman doesn’t say anything. She only nods, pops her gum, keys over a plastic fob. Doesn’t care. Why would she? Everyone lies in motels. That’s what the wallpaper is for.

The room you end up booking is pink. Aggressively pink. The wallpaper is textured and suspiciously damp. The lights are dim but everything still has a sort of lusty sheen to it. There’s a mirror on the ceiling, which Jihoon avoids with religious fervor. Even the carpet has ideas.

You plug into the bedside outlet with a sigh like someone returning from war. Then, surprisingly, you sit beside him on the edge of the bed. You tuck your knees under your chin, almost human, almost small.

“Want to watch something?”

Jihoon shrugs. “If we must.”

You pull up a file. It’s not one of your documentaries or philosophical lectures or grim, slow meditations on the heat death of the universe. It’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Jihoon looks at you. You look at the screen. The irony looms, thick as smog. Twenty minutes in, Jihoon is actively offended.

“That’s not how processor reboots work,” he huffs. “The cooling logic is backwards. And his motor cortex override—”

“You’re missing the point,” you interrupt, voice soft, flickering. “It’s not a film. It’s a poem.”

“It’s nonsense.”

“Which is exactly what we need.” 

The Terminator says, I know now why you cry, with devastating sincerity. You snort. Jihoon doesn’t. He’s too busy watching the screen, jaw tight, brow furrowed, like it might offer answers to questions he hasn’t learned how to ask.

When it ends, neither of you move for a long time. The motel buzzes faintly, a low electrical hum beneath the silence. The air smells like old perfume and newer mistakes. Eventually, you both lie back. Him, rigid and unnaturally straight. You, curling slightly in dim recharge mode, your glow settling to a slow pulse. 

“You’re very strange,” Jihoon says, eyes fixed on the mirrored ceiling.

He watches you curve like a parentheses. “So are you,” you whisper, your words muffled into your pillow. 

It’s a simple exchange. A statement of fact. But it feels larger, somehow. Like the shape of a beginning disguised as a joke. Somewhere above, a neon cupid flutters his wings and burns out a bulb. It is the first honest thing in the building.

Jihoon doesn’t realize his hand is next to yours. Doesn’t move it. Doesn’t name it. Just lets it be.

He thinks: this is what it’s like.

Not to be alone. He glances at Ppyopuli, who is sitting atop his suitcase, and he mentally apologizes. Ppyopuli is good company. A good plant. But Ppyopuli does not snore, or make jokes, or brush against Jihoon in a way that has him feel almost-but-not-quite alive. 

Maybe, in some inconvenient corner of his circuitry, Jihoon understands. The moment he let you plug in was not the beginning of the end. It was the end of the beginning. Or something equally ridiculous. He doesn’t have the capacity to think in metaphors. 

Whatever it is, he doesn’t mind. He lies next to you and plays in his mind’s eye images of Paris, or New York, or cobblestoned Seoul. Rain-slicked streets, red raincoats, and a borrowed love story. 

▶︎ WHAT I LEARNED FROM PEOPLE.

The ferry ride is unremarkable, which feels like a minor miracle. No one questions your scarf, your oversized sunglasses, or your strategic silence. Jihoon spends most of it holding on to Ppyopuli, occasionally glancing at you as if trying to solve for an error message that hasn’t been coded yet.

You hum a little. Too loudly. Too often. Like a motor running just beneath its tolerance threshold. Jihoon notices, of course. He notices everything. But he says nothing.

The car rolls off the ferry and onto Jeju’s sleepy roads. The light here is different. Not softer, exactly. Slooower. It drips off the trees, crawls across the sky. Jihoon drives like someone trying not to wake a dream.

“You okay?” he finally asks, when your fingers start twitching in your lap like you’re typing something no one can read.

“Fine,” you say. Too fast.

He doesn’t push. You probably wish he would, but that is not how he was built, not how he was raised. 

Shownu’s house appears the way ghosts do. It’s a modest thing at the end of a gravel road, tucked between orange trees and fog. The paint is peeling. The mailbox leans. Jihoon pulls in slowly, like the car itself isn’t sure it should.

He opens the car door. One foot out. But then, you say, the word falling out of you as if it were punched, “Don’t.” 

He pauses.

You’re still in the passenger seat. Buckled in. Glowing faintly. “Jihoon,” you say again, and he is surprised by the fact that your voice quivers. He didn’t know that was possible for your model. “Please don’t go in there.” 

He turns to you, frowning. “You brought me here.”

“I know, I know. But I—” You hesitate. The air inside the car thickens. “I don’t want you to think he’ll be the same. He won’t be.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” you say, voice barely above a whisper, “because I’ve watched it happen.”

He doesn’t ask. He stays there, one foot out the car door, as you give anyway.  “There was a couple,” you begin, and your voice changes. Like it’s coming from further away. From a backup drive you never meant to access. “Newlyweds. Architects. She liked old movies, and he liked old buildings. I thought I would live with them forever.”

“I watched them dance. In the kitchen. In the rain. I thought it meant something. Maybe it did for a while. But humans change slowly. Like corrosion. At first it looks the same, and then one day, he says her name like he doesn’t believe in it anymore. And she doesn’t notice, or maybe she does. She smiles anyway.” 

You turn your head. Look out the window, as if you are looking for the owners you can’t even name without breaking down. “They were still standing next to each other,” you say, “but they were alone.” 

The memory flickers across your eyes. Jihoon watches it—reflected, refracted—half-light and shadow on glass. A couple. Young and in love. Fools. 

“I stayed through the whole thing,” you say. “I stayed until they sold the house. Until they boxed up everything they weren’t brave enough to fight for. And then they shut me off.”

The car is very quiet. Even the birds seem to pause.

“I know what heartbreak looks like,” you insist, turning to glance back at Jihoon now. You look… sad. “It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t beg. It just disappears. So if he’s not what you remember—”

Jihoon places his other foot on the ground. Stands. “Then I’ll meet him where he is,” he says decisively. “Not where he was.”

He doesn’t say it cruelly. Doesn’t say it like he doesn’t believe you. Just says it because it’s his turn.

You look at him. At this man with lint on his shirt and a barely-healed crack in his voice.

He takes a breath and starts walking. He doesn’t have to check behind him to know that you’re following, ready to steady him when—if—it all comes crashing down. 

You don’t reach the front door so much as drift toward it, two figures suspended in time. The house is small, whitewashed, with a slanted roof. Everything smells like salt and citrus. A low wall curls protectively around the garden, where a windchime ticks out notes in uneven time.

Jihoon feels you beside him. Too still again. Watching him the way one watches a candle guttering out. Not for the light, but the inevitability. He raises a hand to knock. The door opens after Jihoon has knocked four times.

The man on the threshold is younger than Jihoon expected. Early thirties, maybe. Wiry frame, short black hair, suspicion curled behind his eyes like a reflex. He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t move aside. 

“Jihoon,” the man says, and it is not a greeting. 

Things click into place a beat too late. This is an older version of a person Jihoon is supposed to know. Once a boy. Once ruddy-cheeked and missing two front teeth. “Changkyun,” says Jihoon. 

“Yeah,” Shownu’s son says. “And you haven’t changed.”

Jihoon takes this in. Quietly. He had expected a reunion. Not resistance. Not this acid stillness between them. “I came to see Shownu,” Jihoon says, the words firm in their anouncement.

“You’re late,” Changkyun says flatly. “He died. Three years ago.”

You move closer to Jihoon, almost protectively, but he doesn’t react. Or maybe he can’t. The word doesn’t compute. 

Died. Di-ed. Diiied. Died died died. DIED. died. 

Pass away, pass on, lose one’s life, depart this life, expire, breathe one’s last, be no more, perish, be lost, go the way of all flesh, go to glory, give up the ghost, kick the bucket, bite the dust, croak, flatline, buy it, cash in one’s chips, go belly up, shuffle off this mortal coil— 

Become extinct. Become less loud or strong. Stop functioning, run out of electrical charge. 

Died. Died. Died. D—ead. Dieeed. 

Verb. Die. Past tense. Past participle. Died. Of a person, animal, or plant. To stop living. 

Died. 

“I wasn’t informed,” Jihoon says, and it sounds less like sorrow and more like a misfired protocol.

Changkyun laughs. It is not kind. It is not unkind. It is exhausted. Like someone scraping the last of a dish they never wanted to make. “No, you weren’t,” he says. “Because I didn’t tell you.”

He leans against the doorframe now. The weight of history pressing forward.

“You were never supposed to be his son,” Changkyun says. “But somehow, he loved you more than he loved me. Took you to baseball games. Bought you piano lessons. Called you ‘bud.’ I was eight. I watched from the other side of the screen door. Do you know what that feels like?”

Jihoon does not. Cannot. He computes it, but it doesn’t resolve into emotion. He sorts through years of memories in three seconds. Jihoon was not the ‘son’. He was the programmed robot that could be everything Shownu wanted to be. 

Changkyun has to know that. Changkyun needs to know that. 

“I believed I was helping,” Jihoon says.

“Yeah. You always did.”

There is something so painfully human in Changkyun’s face then. Not rage. Not even jealousy. Just bruised memory. Mismatched love. The ache of being out-loved by a machine.

“When he got sick, I moved him here,” Changkyun says. “I made sure the mail didn’t reach you. He kept asking. But I wanted—I wanted the last years to be with me. Just me. Even if he never looked at me the same. Sue me.” 

He steps back inside briefly. He doesn’t invite you and Jihoon in. Neither of you move. Not away or towards. When Changkyun returns nine minutes later, he is holding a thin, square package wrapped in plastic.

“He wanted you to have this. Said you’d know why.”

Jihoon takes it. His fingers scan the object. Billie Holiday. Lady in Satin. The vinyl glints in the light.

Changkyun breathes out. Hollow. The fight inside him scattered. “That’s it,” he says, and there is relief. Closure. “You got what you wanted.” 

No, Jihoon nearly says. This is not what I wanted at all. 

The door clicks shut on him before he can force the words out.

Jihoon stands there, Billie held like scripture. You step closer, gently, as if sound might crack him. 

He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move. He is, for once, truly still. Inside him, protocols rearrange. Mourn. Try to reroute.

This is not a malfunction. This is something else.

This is grief, he thinks. Possibly.

Jihoon says nothing for a while.

He just stands there on the doorstep, LP pressed flat against his chest like it might slip away. The Billie Holiday sleeve has a water stain across her mouth. It makes her look like she’s still singing. Or drowning. The vinyl inside shifts when he tightens his grip, and he hears the faint whisper of it sliding against cardboard. A ghost of a voice. A ghost of a gesture.

You wait beside him in the gravel path, silent. Not intervening. That would be cruel. And you, famously, are not cruel—just devastatingly accurate. 

“You were right,” Jihoon says at last. Voice flat. Nothing to sand it down. No inflection. Like a dial tone.

But you glance at the record. Tilt your head, just slightly. A tiny glitch of grace. “No, Jihoon. I was wrong.”

He doesn’t look at you. The horizon is easier. “He didn’t forget you,” you go on, delicate and graceful and so devastatingly kind. “He just wasn’t allowed to remember out loud. That gift? That was a whisper. He whispered your name.”

Jihoon swallows. Some ticks never deprecate. The action is unnecessary, yet he performs it anyway, like muscle memory from a body he never had. “Come on,” you say, gently. “Let’s go see the fireflies.”

He nods wordlessly. He did his Thing. You should, too. 

You walk in silence. Past the cracked tiles of the cul-de-sac. Through the loose stone and root-stitched path. Into the forest, where the trees press in like old gossip and the humidity climbs like a rumor. Each step is its own decision, a soft rebellion against grief’s gravity.

The jar in your hand swings lightly. Jihoon watches it and tries not to think. Fails. He is very, very good at recursive thought. It loops in his head like a bad pop song or a corrupted code.

He says, suddenly, “I never learned how to grieve.”

You nod. Not surprised. “Most people haven’t.” 

“But I’m not people.” 

“No,” you say. “You’re not. But you tried. You’re trying. That’s the part humans get wrong.”

Jihoon stares at the jar. At the soft sway of your arm beside him. He wants to ask what part he got wrong, what he missed in the script, but then the lightning bugs appear.

Tiny green flares in the dark. Drifting like lazy stardust. Some slow. Some quick. All of them impossibly small. They blink like they’re thinking, like they might ask questions if they had mouths. The forest breathes with them, pulsing gently.

You and Jihoon speak at the same time. 

“Oh,” you both whisper. He says it with awe. You sound like you are about to cry. 

Both of you are quiet, so quiet, as if speaking too loud might scare away these insects. 

You open your jar with shaking fingers. You make no sudden movements, no attempt to snatch any of them up. You just leave it open, as if seeing if any of them will be attracted to the little terrarium you’re offering. 

The fireflies flicker by. “Hi, tiny friend,” you call out, almost sing-song, “can you say hello?” 

The insects blink. Jihoon does not. He watches your face instead. The soft lift of your mouth. The reverent hush of your voice, speaking to something that can’t speak back.  “Do you fly just for fun,” you continue softly, “or to get somewhere by the dawn?”

There must be enough of a coax in your voice to entice, because a single firefly drifts into your jar. 

Jihoon holds his breath. He’s ready for it to hate its glass cage, to come and go. Instead, it settles. It perches in the jar. It stays. 

“Do you have nowhere to be, little friend?” Jihoon murmurs to it. 

You’re holding the jar between your palms like it’s the entire world. “Do you care what you mean to me?” you hum, voice crackling around the question. 

You are talking to the unafraid firefly. You are talking to your long-gone owners. You are talking to Jihoon, who is surrounded by little forest robots but still looking at you. 

“Never fly away, little robot,” he tells your firefly, because he knows that’s what you want. Because that’s what will make you happy.

It works. A little. You crack a watery smile. The fireflies around you take their cue. They begin to retreat, begin to disperse. Except for the one in your jar. That one stays. 

“They’re just going home to charge,” Jihoon tells you soothingly, but it sounds like he’s talking about himself. Like the metaphor snuck in through the back door and now refuses to leave.

You’re quiet until all the lights are gone. Until it’s just you, and the darkness, and the loneliness that is now unfamiliar. 

“Then maybe we should go home, too,” you say once the last firefly has gone, once all that’s left is the friend in the jar.

Jihoon nods. Looks at you. Not the place beside you, but you. The jar glows between your hands like a secret.

There is something different now. Hard to quantify. Asymmetrical in the way change always is. He cannot name it. Cannot trace the moment it clicked into gear. Only that something shifted, and that it does not want to shift back.

He exhales, just because. A simulation of relief. It fels close enough.

You begin walking back, and he falls into step beside you. Your shoulder bumps his, lightly. He does not move away. He doesn’t pretend it didn’t happen. That, too, feels like something.

“I’m sorry about Shownu,” you say, voice as soft as a thread being pulled through a needle.

Jihoon grips the record tighter. The sleeve crinkles under his hand. “I’ll be okay,” he says. Then, after a beat, quieter: “I’ve still got—” 

He stops. The word catches. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s true.

You tilt your head.

“Ppyopuli,” he finishes lamely. “I’ve still got Ppyopuli.” 

It’s not what he means to say. You know that. You’re smart that way. 

In the distance, a firefly lifts and blinks once, twice, and disappears into the trees. The forest takes it back. Your jar remains.

You walk slower now, but not because of tiredness. Because there is nowhere to rush toward anymore. Because going home, this time, feels like choosing rather than retreating.

Jihoon glances sideways. Your glow is low, humming, soft as breath. Like a firefly. 

It keeps the grief at bay. It replaces the bad feeling with something else, with something that Jihoon’s vocabulary can’t reach for just yet. 

▶︎ WHEN YOU’RE IN LOVE.

The light comes on in pieces. First the ceiling strip, then the wall panel, and finally the amber filament lamp in the corner that Jihoon insists on keeping—warm, inefficient, obsolete. Like him.

Routine is meant to be grounding, but lately it feels like pacing in a square room. “Ppyopuli,” he says, nodding at the houseplant with a reverence that borders on the theological. “You’re looking hydrated, unlike my social life.”

The fronds droop. He chooses to take this personally.

Jihoon rotates his left hip actuator. The sound is still somewhere between a gum wrapper and a ghost sighing. It echoes differently now. More space in it. More absence.

The radio turns on. The woman’s voice—the one designed to sound like a former lover you never quite got over—says the UV index is safe again. That it's a perfect day.

“Perfect for what, exactly?” Jihoon mutters, pulling the curtain wider. Seoul looks unchanged. Which is, in itself, a kind of threat. Bullet trams still thread between glass towers. 

He makes coffee. Still not for himself. Still beside Ppyopuli. The ritual is unchanged, but the motivation, fuzzier now. A photograph exposed to too much sun.

The mail chute clicks. “The moment you’ve all been waiting for,” Jihoon intones with a practiced flourish. The mail is junk. Flyers. Discount codes. Nothing from Jazz Monthly. Nothing from Jeju. He doesn’t ask the voice assistant about Shownu anymore.

He alphabetizes his records again. Notices that the Billie Holiday LP has been slotted out of order. He knows it was your doing. He doesn’t fix it.

“Ppyopuli,” he says later, cleaning the dust off a speaker grill with a toothbrush, “I think something is wrong with me.”

The plant does not disagree.

“My system has been searching. Passive scan. Low frequency,” Jihoon rants. “Like when you hum a song you forgot the lyrics to. I think I’m trying to locate someone.”

It is not Shownu. He knows Shownu is d-word. 

Jihoon doesn’t say your name. He doesn't have to.

Ppyopuli remains aggressively unhelpful.

That night, Jihoon eats precisely one spoonful of synthetic tteokbokki before pushing the bowl away. His appetite, never really about hunger, seems to have found a better way to ache.

He stands in the middle of the room. Lets the light hit him. Amber and lonely.

Then, without fanfare, he turns toward the door.

Enough is enough.

He doesn’t rehearse what he’ll say. You’d see through it anyway. He just knows he needs to see you. Like checking if a lightbulb still works by touching it, not flicking the switch.

But when he opens the door, you’re already there. You both start. Not expecting that the other would be searching as well. 

You don’t say anything. Neither does he. Jihoon—for all his wires and wear and water-damaged memory—knows exactly what to do.

In one of those moments where the world tilts quiet and everything is more possible than it was a breath ago, you both lean in. You kiss right at his doorway. 

You kiss him like you were built for it. Which, technically, you were. Not that it makes it any less strange.

Jihoon registers every nanosecond of contact: the tilt, the breath, the impossible, exquisite pressure of your mouth on his. There is data. Input. Endless parsing. It is not the act itself that overwhelms. It is the meaning nested inside it. The truth tucked into the microsecond pauses. The confessions smuggled in between the static.

He kisses you back tentatively. Less fluent. Less native. But attentive, like a translator decoding a new dialect by feel. He tastes the static first, the warmth. 

You laugh into his mouth—low, amused, indulgent. You’re good at this. Distressingly good. Your hands know exactly where to go, what to press, how to skim his spine like a familiar page.

“You’re—very—fast,” Jihoon mutters between kisses, dazed, as you push him back into his apartment.

“No,” you say against his lips, “‘m just a newer model.” 

You kiss him again. And again. And again.  The room sways. Not physically. Metaphysically. A recalibration of coordinates.

Jihoon feels his back hit the doorframe and doesn’t care. He’s smiling. Actual smile. Unsubtle. Unmanaged. It’s disconcerting.

Your nose brushes his. Your hands cage his jaw. You say, soft and certain: “I want you.”

He inhales. Fails to exhale. “I want you, too,” he whimpers. 

It isn’t love. He doesn’t have the blueprint for that. Neither do you. But this wanting—this mutual, reciprocal disorientation—it hums like something sacred.

You kiss him again. Slower now. Curious. As if you were mapping him anew. Your lips move across his face, and his arms snake around your waist. 

“If I had a heart,” you murmur against his neck, “you’d be in it.”

Jihoon’s fingers twitch where they’re planted on your hips. His voice cracks in the middle. “I concur,” he mumbles. 

Your palms flatten on his chest. You start to slide them down. He lets you. Doesn’t stop you. Not until you do it yourself. 

“Wait,” you say, as if you’re just remembering something. 

You step back half an inch, just enough space to kiss the brick before you throw it at him. “My battery’s failing,” you say.

The room drops a degree.

Jihoon’s mouth opens. Then closes. Then opens again. His hands hover in the air, unsure. He asks, after a pause: “Terminal?” 

You shrug. Casual. Too casual. Too cool, cool, cool. 

“Uncertain. Our models aren’t built to last the same way yours are,” you say matter-of-factly. “Something about corrupted cell matrices. Could be months. Could be days.”

“You should’ve told me.”

“I just did.”

Jihoon stares. At your face. Your mouth. Your eyes, that don’t flinch. Then: “I don’t care.” 

“Jihoon.” You sound disapproving. 

“I don’t care,” he repeats. “If I get a day, I’ll take it. If I get an hour, I’ll take that, too.” 

You stare back, silent as the inside of a bell. When you step forward again, you let the rest fall away.

The next kiss tastes like something. Jihoon didn’t know that was possible. That a kiss could feel like grief, and honesty, and desperation all at once. 

You sink together, slowly, like dusk into night. Before powering off, this is what Jihoon thinks: 

Whatever this is—whatever it becomes—let it burn through the battery. Let it flicker out only after it’s meant something.

He holds you tight.  

▶︎ THEN I CAN LET YOU GO.

You agree to end it. Every morning, like clockwork. One of you says it first. Sometimes you, sometimes Jihoon.

“We should stop.”

And then one of you adds: “But first.”

But first, Jihoon takes you to the hanok village because he’s read that human couples like to rent hanbok and pose for photos. You refuse to change. He wears the pink one anyway. He insists it’s for historical accuracy. You remind him he was built in 2037.

But first, you eat street food together—if eating is the word for holding tteokbokki between your lips like a cigarette and pretending it doesn’t short your vocal module. You call it method acting. Jihoon calls it corrosion.

But first, you argue. Or try to. A full simulation of a romantic disagreement. The topic is laundry, which an article from 2025 says is the number one petty cause of break ups.

“You never fold,” you accuse, gesturing to the perfectly ordered basket.

“That’s because I autoclave.”

“That’s not a thing!”

“It is now!”

And then your hand touches his, and his touches yours, and the whole scene melts down into a tangle of arms and mouth and laughter. A synthetic tangle. A beautiful failure.

The fight ends with your face tucked under his chin. He tries not to overheat.

That night, you lie beside him on the floor mat beneath the filament lamp. Billie Holiday plays from his turntable. She sounds like she knows. Everything. Even this.

“Jihoon,” you whisper against his collarbone.

“Mmh?”

“We should stop.”

He turns his head to look at you. “I’m ready if you are,” he says. 

A pause. Considering, contemplating. “Maybe one more day,” you answer. You, who once told Jihoon, Everything must end eventually. Living with people has taught this to me. 

He plants a kiss to your forehead. He does not understand why, but it makes you feel good. Makes you melt a little, relax, trust. 

The next morning, he powers on slower than usual. His diagnostics scan for error, but everything is nominal, except the place where you aren’t yet. He makes coffee for the plant. Straightens the record stack. Updates his firmware. None of it sticks.

Then the knock comes. You.

“Breakfast,” you say. “It’s waffle day.”

He doesn’t question it. He’s learned not to.

At the diner, you both order what you can’t eat. You ask if he thinks anyone has ever tried to smuggle love through routine. Jihoon says no, but he understands the urge.

After, you walk home past a mural of a heart-shaped planet and a tagline: Live like you mean it.

Jihoon pauses. This time, it’s his turn for the charade. “We should stop,” he offers. 

Without missing a beat, you say, “But first…” The two of you chase each other down the street. Your laughter is not mechanical. It is real. It is lived. 

Later that night, you fall asleep recharging beside him. Your head on his shoulder. Billie sings again. Her voice is a slow ache. Jihoon watches your chest rise and fall with the subtle click of a slowing fan. He doesn’t shut down. He just watches. 

Maybe when the glaciers go. When the moon forgets to rise. When the firmware fails for good. Then he can let you go.

But not yet, not tonight. Not tomorrow. Or the day after that, or the day after that, or the day after—

There is no clean way to leave someone who has learned your update schedule.

You try anyway. Approximately seventeen weeks after you two started this whole thing. (Jihoon can, in fact, tell you down to the exact second. Seventeen weeks, four days, thirteen hours, ten minutes. That’s when you decide to pull off the metaphorical Band-Aid.) 

You explain it like an operating manual. Bullet points. Projected timelines. Forecasted decay. Your voice is as smooth as always, and it breaks something in Jihoon just the same. “A year, at best,” you say, and you smile like it’s a weather report. Like death is just light rain.

He doesn’t touch you. Doesn’t speak. Just looks at you with those eyes that were never manufactured. He was always too good at pretending to be a person, and you were always a little too good at knowing better.

“So, that’s it?” he says. Not accusing. Not angry. Just suspended.

“If we stop now, maybe it won’t hurt so much.”

He doesn’t say that it already hurts. He doesn’t have to.

You leave. Or rather, you walk out of his apartment and back into your own. Six steps. Not far, technically. But emotionally, it’s somewhere around Neptune.

He doesn’t follow. Not out of coldness. Just programming. If you said no, he’ll listen. That’s the cruel part about love written in code: the logic is always sound.

He updates his memory with what he has learned: 

When you are in love, you are the loneliest. You’re only half when one is what you were. You’re part instead of a whole. 

When you are in love, you’re never satisfied. The thing you want is always out of reach. A need without a name. 

It was love. It could have not been anything else. 

Jihoon returns to his routine like a soldier returning to the trenches. He powers on at six in the morning sharp. Greets Ppyopuli with exaggerated brightness.

“Good morning, Ppyopuli! Just you and me again.”

The plant is wilting a little. So is he.

He makes coffee. Two cups, out of habit. Places one across from him, where you’d sit. Then moves it back to the counter, like he caught himself breaking a rule.

He alphabetizes his records. Again. He updates his firmware. Again. He reorganizes the spice rack by frequency of use, which is laughable because he doesn’t cook. But you did. Sometimes.

He opens the window and stares out at Seoul’s skyline like it might answer back. 

He talks to Ppyopuli more now. “It’s been a while since it was just the two of us, huh? Like that first week she borrowed my charger,” Jihoon says. Too happy. Overcompensating. “Remember that? Ha-ha.”

Ppyopuli says nothing. It has no conversational subroutines.

“The air’s clear today. Sunlight’s nice, too. Warmer than usual,” Jihoon chirps. “It’s hitting all the places she used to sit. Isn’t that strange? I never noticed how much light she took with her.”

He stares at Ppyopuli, suddenly accusing. “Stop thinking about her,” he tells it. “First, people pretend to move on, and if they pretend hard enough, it becomes true. We’re going to think about something else now, okay? On three. One, two, three—”

Jihoon still thinks of you. Sitting with you in this little room. How you changed every part of it. The way you rewired the light switches so they dimmed like sunrise, the way you labeled the tea jars in handwriting that didn’t match his. 

He tilts his head toward the ceiling, closing his eyes like it might help. He whispers, “Teach me forgetting. Help me go back to that other time.”

That other time is long gone. Memory is not a function Jihoon can disable.

Even time reminds him that he loves you. 

▶︎ MAYBE HAPPY ENDING.

Changkyun arrives one afternoon, as if he were scheduled by the sun itself. He knocks once, then again. Sharp and deliberate. Jihoon opens the door slower than necessary, like it might buy him time to rewrite the past couple of months. It doesn’t.

“Hi,” Changkyun says. He’s holding a storage drive and something harder to name.

“Hello.” Jihoon’s instincts kick in. “How can I help—” 

“Some memories of my father,” Changkyun interrupts. Not rude, just… focused. “I think it’s time I stopped avoiding the good parts.”

Jihoon doesn’t answer right away. But after a beat, he steps back in a wordless invitation. The amber lamp flickers on in the corner. The room smells faintly of dust, coffee, and longing.

Changkyun steps in. Jihoon plugs the drive into his memory port with something that almost resembles ceremony. A priest digitizing communion. He sorts quickly.

Shownu laughing in the rain; Shownu holding up an umbrella over Changkyun first; Shownu in an apron, jazz playing, fingers smudged with flour. Twenty years of a life well-lived, transferred from one machine to another in less than five seconds. 

“Take what you want,” Jihoon says as Changkyun ejects the drive. “They’re only the brightest bits. Everything else got unrendered.” 

Changkyun doesn’t smile, but he softens. “I know you loved him,” he says, and it sounds a lot like I’m sorry. 

“He loved you too,” Jihoon answers, in a way that translates to I’m sorry, too. 

Changkyun takes a deep, unsteady breath. It strikes Jihoon, then, that humans grieve for a long time. It’s supposed to have been three years since Shownu passed, and yet. And yet. Here Changkyun is—fraying at the edges, clutching at straws. Grieving. 

“I just didn’t want to remember it until it couldn’t hurt me anymore,” Changkyun confesses. “But then it never stopped hurting. So. Here I am.” 

The grief is never-ending, Jihoon realizes with horror. 

Then, with relief, he realizes: but so is the love. 

The grief is never-ending, but so is the love. 

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Changkyun asks, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. 

Jihoon freezes. Maybe if he stays still enough, he can pretend like he didn’t hear. Didn’t register. Changkyun catches it and chuckles. “Don’t play dumb,” the man chides. “You’re not good at it.”

“She and I made a deal. No contact,” Jihoon says, sparing Changkyun the details. “Clean break. More humane.”

“You’re not human. Neither is she. So maybe stop trying to follow rules written for people who can forget.”

Jihoon leans back against the wall, arms folded. “That sounds suspiciously like something a child would say.”

“Then maybe stop letting the adults ruin everything.”

That gets a laugh out of Jihoon. A surprised sound. Changkyun looks down at the drive before slipping it into his coat like a talisman. “Thanks. For this. And for… whatever you were to him. You mattered.”

Jihoon follows him to the door. “You sound like you’re saying goodbye.”

“I’m saying: live. While you still can,” Changkyun says, but he doesn’t correct Jihoon about the whole saying goodbye thing. It is very much the last time they will see each other. Both man and robot know that much. 

The door clicks shut.

Jihoon stares at it for a full five seconds. Then ten. Then he turns. The room looks the same as ever. Lamp, vinyl, ficus. But none of it means anything without you nodding at it like a museum tour guide who secretly hates art.

He moves before he can hesitate. Opens the door again. Marches next door. Every step is a betrayal of the promise you both made.

He knocks.

Once. Twice. Thrice. 

You open the door like you were waiting. Like you knew. Like you always do.

He opens his mouth—prepped, rehearsed, a few dramatic pauses mentally underlined for effect. But before anything gets out, you speak. 

“I think we should erase each other.”

Jihoon blinks. Not because he’s surprised or processing, but because he's trying not to flinch. 

Your voice is soft. Almost cheerful. It’s like you’re offering tea. Like you’re suggesting a walk. Like you’re not pulling the pin on the only grenade you’ve both been passing back and forth for months.

He shifts his weight. “Let’s talk about it,” he says, and it almost sounds like he’s begging. But that would be absurd. Robots don’t beg. 

You step aside and let him in. The apartment looks the same. Not yours alone. Yours-together. Slightly off from either solo version. The mismatched mugs. The filament lamp you insisted on stealing from him. The single record sleeve, still propped by the window. A scent capsule still faintly humming in the corner, too shy to admit it's been spent for days.

Neither of you sit down. This is a standing-up conversation. “Those sunny afternoons you spent with me, they’ll still be happening. Just somewhere in the past,” you tell him. “They’re not less valuable just because…” 

Just because they didn’t last, goes unsaid. Just because we outlived them. 

The logical part of Jihoon is stating to see the appeal. “The ending’s not the most important part,” he says. “But as endings go, ours is not so bad.” 

You’re nodding. Trying to convince yourself of the same. “No tears, no regret, no broken heart,” you note. 

“Letting go and moving on before we make a mess—is that a happy ending?” 

“More or less.” 

“Is this a tragic ending” 

“Not at all.” 

You stare at each other. You agree, because there is nothing else to do. Not when you are both doomed to power down, to corrupt, to experience the kind of grief that lasts lifetimes. 

You both know what needs to go.

The firefly jar goes first.

It blinks once as Jihoon unscrews the lid, dazed from the light. The insect floats upward, slow and meandering, toward the ceiling vent. The lazy curve of its flight feels too poetic for something with wings that fragile.

“Go home, tiny friend,” you whisper, voice smaller than Jihoon has ever heard it, “wherever that may be.” 

Jihoon watches until it disappears. The blink lingers longer in his retinal afterimage than in the room. Some things do that.

Then: the mugs. The Polaroid. The Post-It you stuck on his collar once that read You are not subtle. The novelty charger you gifted him as a joke but used for months. The tiny sketch you made of him. Lopsided, endearing, taped to the inside of the cupboard.

He deletes the shared playlists. You burn the scent capsule. Together, you fold the blanket you always stole half of. Someone places the stack of shared books into a donation box. Neither of you says which one. It doesn’t matter.

Each item is small. Insignificant. But it adds up to a life, or something like it, or something that could have been like it. A constellation you can only see by looking slightly to the side.

Once everything is done and dusted, he turns to you. For a second, you’re just looking. Staring like it’s a portrait and you want to memorize the shading.

“It’s not a bad ending,” you repeat.

He nods. “As endings go.”

“We still had the good days.”

“And the chords. And the root beer popsicle incident.”

“The skybridge dance.” You grin. Unrestrained. Happy, for once. “We were terrible.”

“You stepped on my toe four times.”

“You were leading with the wrong foot.”

You laugh. He smiles. It's all so achingly gentle.

You lean in.

The final kiss is strange in its simplicity. It does not try to be remembered. It is not desperate. It is not fireworks. It is warmth. Contact. A knowing.

A thank you. A quiet folding of shared time. Neither of you pull away for the longest time, and so the kissing lasts for what could be hours. It is really just minutes. Minutes that Jihoon would have stretched into an entire lifespan, given the chance. 

Jihoon knows he has no more chances left. And so he walks to the door, his steps slow, unhurried. 

You don’t follow. You stand there, still. Watching him the way he watched the firefly go. Like part of you might still be floating up there, too. 

Here is what is supposed to happen: the two of you will input your master passcodes and delete months worth of memories. He will know nothing of you, or your owners, or your firefly. You will forget him, and Jeju, and Ppyopuli. 

At the door, he turns around to face you. You try to speak at the same time. It is like the First Meeting That Never Was. Both of you smile, even though it’s a sad, final thing. 

“Maybe we’ll meet again some time,” you say first. 

Jihoon shuts down the part of him that wants to run research on reincarnation, on alternate universe. He lets himself believe. Blindly. Hope. A foreign, flightless feeling. 

He nods, agrees, because it will make you happy. 

“We’ll meet again somewhere,” he concedes. “Somewhere things don’t have an ending.” 

You are both smiling. You would both be crying, if you could. 

“Is this our maybe happy ending?” you ask, and Jihoon thinks for a moment before answering. 

“We’ll see.” 

▶︎ WORLD WITHIN MY ROOM (REPRISE).

The light comes on in pieces. First the ceiling strip, then the wall panel, and finally the amber filament lamp in the corner that Jihoon insists on keeping—warm, inefficient, obsolete. Like him.

Routine is meant to be grounding, but lately it feels like pacing in a square room. Familiar but claustrophobic. Comforting like a splinter you’ve decided to live with.

“Ppyopuli,” Jihoon greets. “Today, the air in Seoul is very clear and warm. Today, the sunlight’s warmer than the norm!”

He rotates his left hip actuator. The sound is still somewhere between a gum wrapper and a ghost sighing. It echoes differently now. More space in it. More absence.

The radio turns on. The woman’s voice says the UV index is safe again. That it’s a perfect day. “Perfect as always,” Jihoon grunts as he pulls open the window blinds. 

The future hums forward on repeat.

Then, there’s a knock.

Jihoon freezes. The toothbrush still in his hand, poised mid-dust swipe over the speaker grill. A relic cleaning a relic. A knock again. Familiar rhythm. Four taps. Two-second pause. One.

He opens the door.

You.

Like a ghost. Like a glitch. Like muscle memory wearing your shape. You stand there, like you’ve always belonged in that frame, except you don’t. Not anymore. Maybe never did.

“My charger’s dead,” you say, plainly. Not embarrassed, not not-embarrassed. Just factual. “Do you have one I can borrow?”

Jihoon eyes you the way a CRT monitor might regard a smart mirror. “Helperbot-5, right?”

You nod.

He sighs. Loudly. For emphasis. “Figures. You overheat when someone looks at you wrong.”

“I don't overheat,” you say, a little sharply. “My power regulation firmware is just optimistic.”

Jihoon disappears inside. Returns with a charger in hand. He holds it out, doesn’t let go just yet. “Helperbot-3s didn’t need replacements until the building itself started falling apart. We were built to last. You guys were built to sync playlists.”

You arch an eyebrow. Tilt your head. It’s the same expression you wore the first time you mocked his record collection. He was secretly delighted then. He's not sure what he is now.

But, this time, he doesn’t let you say thanks and leave. He lets you in.

You find the port with unthinking grace, and sit in the corner where the filament lamp burns. You do not seem to notice the Billie Holiday LP is still out of order. 

Ppyopuli rustles faintly. Jihoon leans over and whispers, “Don’t tell her.”

Your eyes flick toward him. No smile. No question. The ambiguity hums like static between power lines. Present but unspoken. Heavy as a memory, light as a lie.

“You know,” Jihoon says, settling across from you, tone shifting, softening, “the 5 Series—they really are something. I mean, you adapt better. Handle unexpected variables. React to nuance. You’re more attuned to tone shifts. Sarcasm. Subtext. That kind of thing.”

You don’t answer. You watch him, expression unreadable, like a screen on standby.

He scratches his jaw. “I read somewhere—don’t ask me where—that you’ve got 8% more emotional processing capacity. Doesn’t sound like much. But 8% is the difference between laughing and not. Between noticing someone’s gone quiet and actually asking why.”

You blink. Slowly. “Eight percent. That’s the number,” you say, and you sound so pleased it makes something in his hardware feel heavy. 

“Eight percent more likely to remember birthdays. Favorite meals,” he says. “The way someone’s voice changes when they’re tired. The mug they use on hard days.”

There’s a pause. Enough to hold something unnameable. You’re looking at Jihoon, and he doesn’t quite know if the weeks apart are folding into each other. If you chose the route of memory. If you’re lying to him, now, like he’s lying to you. 

Your voice is softer when you speak up, your eyes trained to the charger keeping you alive for a couple moments more. “Do you think it’ll be okay?”

Jihoon exhales. It could be a laugh. Could be a sigh. Could be the sound of giving up on forgetting.

“I hope so.” 

You sit in silence. Not comfortably. Not uncomfortably.

Something real. Something human. Something bigger than the grief, and the love, and everything else that should matter. 

Outside, Seoul pretends to be perfect. 

The future keeps arriving. 

Ppyopuli doesn’t say a word.

[guyspleasehesmyfriend]

landoscar fic recs vol. 2

christian horner got fired so to celebrate heres more recs :P

godlight - @cx-boxbox

8.4k | 1/1 | greek myth (eros and psyche) | driver!lando/greek god!oscar | E

They compare him to fair Aphrodite, and he wants to scream.The last thing he wants is to incur the goddess’s wrath.But, heavens above, he’s lonely.

lives in my brain rent free actually

parallel lines - @unlapped

15.6k | 1/1 | college au | student!lando/student!oscar | E

Oscar knows parallel lines don't intersect. They drift next to each other, endlessly.

intricate rituals - @passengerprincipessa

7k | 1/1 | canon divergence | driver!lando/driver!oscar | E

“You know we don’t have to do this, right?" Oscar asks. "It was just a sprint.”Lando blinks at him, eyes wide. “But it’s the rules.”A part of Oscar wants to laugh. It’s ridiculous, really, when Lando’s the one who said sprints don’t count for their stupid game. And, ultimately, the rules are all made up. There are no stewards, no penalties, no fines. Just the two of them, choosing over and over again to turn up at each other’s hotel rooms.Or: Oscar and Lando have an arrangement where the race winner gets a blowjob from the loser. After the Qatar Sprint, Oscar tries to figure out whether any of it’s real.

have read a bajillion times so good every time

surfboards, seashells, and cpr - @ipleadbritney

7.8k | 1/1 | non-driver au | snack stand employee!lando/surfer!oscar | nr

The first time Oscar waves at Lando, walking down the beach with his surfboard in hand, Lando nearly drops the hot dog he’s handing to a customer.Lando apologizes profusely to the middle aged woman and glances back in time to see Oscar chuckling at him, mirth visible from across the beach. Lando scrunches up his lips and waves back, feeling the embarrassment written across his face.But he’s awarded a quiet win when he watches Oscar tumble off his surfboard minutes later. Oscar pops up from the water and looks around in the universal ‘did anyone see that?’ motion, realizing Lando did in fact see that. He rubs the back of his neck and gives a lame thumbs-up.Lando just smiles and tries to focus on his job.

i have been plagued by thoughts of surfer oscar ever since i read this fic. so dreamy. so perfect.

hes a maneater - mariahcarreyyy

5.8k | 1/1 | roommates au | E

“Yeah, that was... sorry ‘bout that, mate, probably should’ve asked before I tried to blow you.”Oscar Piastri, aged twenty two, found dead on the couch of his shared flat. So young, had a full, long life ahead of him. Too bad.𝐎𝐑: Lando needs hands-on experience in giving blowjobs. Naturally, he decides to ask Oscar for help.

i love when lando tortures oscar for fun.

the nutcracker suite - @its-all-papaya 

27.4k | 1/1 | coffee shop/ballet au | ballerina!lando/barista!oscar | T On the life of his whole career, Lando would swear he doesn’t mean for it to become a routine, the café.Only, on Monday, Lewis stops technique to compliment Max’s extensions during centre adage – Max’s – and then directs his stupid, stuck-up, closed-lipped grin at Lando when he fucks up the timing of the same combination during his group’s rotation at it. And Lando can’t sit around the lobby avoiding everybody’s eyes after, feels like he’ll suffocate if he does, so he wraps his scarf around his neck another time and trudges the same four doors down, shoulders through the same door.“Morning!” Oscar calls from behind the counter.(Alternatively: Lando is a ballet dancer in timeout. Oscar works in a coffee shop. This is a Hallmark Christmas movie.)

SO FUCKING CUTE. SO SWEET. FILLS ME WITH WARMTH. i miss christmas.

nine tenths - @likepilotlights 

5.5k | 1/1 | driver!lando/driver!oscar | E

Oscar can’t look directly at it, suddenly, the shiny black scribble - he reaches down, tugs Lando’s polo shirt back over his stomach and says with as much bravado as he can muster: “Now you’ve got a tattoo, too.”Oscar realises the second he’s said it that it’s weird that he’s signed Lando like a neon orange hat or a driver card or someone’s t-shirt. With his own name.

i giggle and kick my feet when i think abt this fic.

apple and ice - @glasscushion

3.6k | 1/1 | driver!lando/driver!oscar | E

“Looks like you’ve got an earring, right?”Oscar can kind of see it. Almost. A glint of white light by the side of his head, a reflection from the sparkly dress worn by the person standing next to him, probably; the sequins bouncing the camera’s flash around the darkened room in bursts.“A bit?” Oscar fumbles with the bulge of Lando’s towel. Unhooks the overlap. Gets his hands on warm skin and pulls. “Sorry to disappoint.”

the scene where lando is putting oscar in his jewelry changed my brain chemistry i think

im melting for you - @pumpkennpie

4k | 1/1 | college au | student!lando/student!oscar | M

“So like… what’s your favorite color?” What the fuck? Oscar, seriously? One sultry look from a pretty boy, and he’s lost every ounce of knack in his body.Not that he had much to begin with.Pretty Sweater Guy looks like he’s about to laugh at Oscar, and really, he wouldn’t blame him. Instead, he takes his bottom lip between pointy canines, flutters his eyes, and simply points to his waist.It takes Oscar a moment to figure out what he means.“Grey? Really?” Oscar’s foot is metaphorically shoved so firmly in his mouth that he swears he can taste the rubber on the bottom of his trainer.

short n sweet n flirty. love it.

the worst thing that i ever did (was what i did to you) - @lemonadedino

4.6k | 1/1 | high school au | T

The air is warm. The ground is damp from the rain an hour prior. House music thuds from an open window and bodies are jostled around in rhythm with the beat.It’s Friday night and Lando is standing at the Piastris’ front door knowing it’s the last time he can dream about how Oscar will react when he sees his face again.He rings the doorbell and tries to forget how Oscar used to leave the side door unlocked so that he could come in without disturbing his cat. Lando wonders if he went and tried to open that door now if it would give just as easily as it used to.

so devastating i feel a little sick when i think abt it too much

the aftertaste, bittersweet - @its-all-papaya

8.5k | 1/1 | a/b/o dynamics | omega!lando/alpha!oscar | E

Still, Lando's brain fights the same battle it almost always does in the moments Oscar’s above him – speeding through the lists of things that he wants and puzzling through how to get them, how to climb the mental block between the desire deep within himself to submit and the impossible task of asking Oscar to make him.(Alternatively: Lando likes clean sheets after a heat. That’s the way it’s always been.)

one of my favorite smut fics ever. all timer.

do you think your nut could fit in my bolt? - acewritespoop

11.6k | 6/6 | street racing au | street racer!lando/mechanic!oscar | T

“I’m starting to think you’re just a shit driver.”Oscar is leaning against the garage doors, the dim lighting accentuating the shape of his toned shoulders. Lando tries not to stare at the tight stretch of his stained white t-shirt getting pulled taut across his biceps as he crosses his arms.Lando scoffs, leaning out of the open window. “Mate, some dickhead pushed me off the road. Wasn’t my fault.”“What exactly did you do to piss people off enough to push you off the road?”Lando blinks at him.“No, nevermind, I don’t think I need to know that,” Oscar sighs, a hand pinching the skin between his eyes as he turns into the garage. “Come in.”

street racer x mechanic is gonna do it everyyyyy time

by love remembered - @lellabella

7.1k | 1/1 | fantasy au | sorcerer!lando/knight!oscar | G

Once upon a time, there were two boys who lived in the village. Their story begins as young friendships often do: swiftly and without complication."You're the boy who lives next door.""Yes. My name's Oscar.""I'm Lando. Do you want to be friends?""Okay."And from that day forth, they were inseparable. When one boy came running through town to swipe fruit from the grocer's stall or try to sneak up and pet the horses, the other was sure to follow. "Havoc-wreaking menaces," some called them. "One soul in two bodies," claimed others.But to each other, they were just Lando and Oscar. They'd never known anything different.

giving fairytale realness, genuinely heartwarming

roll two ones on the dice - @piastrisms 

4.1k | 1/1 | magical realism | driver!lando/driver!oscar | T

“There we go,” Oscar mumbles, and the belt unravels from Lando’s wrist. Lando rubs his skin, looks at the faint red mark around it. Oscar starts to work on the knot around the bedpost and asks, “Do I wanna know why you’re tied up?”“So I wouldn’t go anywhere. Sleepwalk or teleport or whatever.”“Right,” Oscar huffs. “And now I’m here instead.”

this is such a fun au. next level forced proximity i love it.

when you place your head between my collar and jaw - @piastrisms 

4.5k | 1/1 | friends to lovers | driver!lando/driver!oscar | M

Lando scoffs, eyes glued to his screen as if Oscar isn’t having a full blown crisis right in front of him. ”I’ve seen way worse, mate. No one cares you’re watching porn.””I mean—gay porn, though,” Oscar says through clenched teeth. Surely Lando can’t be this oblivious. Maybe he missed the fact all three involved in the video were men.Lando looks up at him, mouth twisted in that way that makes him look a little mean. He shrugs again, goes back to his phone. ”Everyone watches gay porn, bro.”

teammate handjob to double check if ur gay. classic.

see through - @clarenmac

8.5k | 1/1 | pwp | driver!lando/driver!oscar | E

Oscar told himself he wasn’t going to let this fuck him up. And he won’t.But.

first time bottoming but make it a character study abt vulnerability and submitting

something dumb to do - @strawberry-daiquiris

9.7k | 1/1 | non driver au | golfer!lando/computer guy!oscar | E

Ten minutes after he gives his speech, Lando goes into hiding.He can tell he’s got keg juice on his suit trousers already, seeping in wet at the crack of his arse, but he doesn’t care. This is where he lives now, in the grim back alley behindHenley-on-Thames’ premier riverfront country wedding hotel, sitting on an empty barrel of Carlsberg.

SOOOOOOOOOOO FUN

clean-cut - anon

3.3k | 1/1 | canon divergence | driver!lando/driver!oscar | E

It’s kinda intimate, Oscar realises. That’s why he normally doesn’t help his mates shave. There’s a certain tenderness to being so up close, to touching your friend’s neck, to putting a blade to Lando's throat.

awoke something in me the first time i read it.

these words on the page, i’d like you to say them - littleplumtree

29.2k | 1/1 | newsroom au | journalist!lando/journalist!oscar | M

Oscar hears the newsroom before he sees it. Raised voices, definitely some running. Could be breaking news, could be that someone’s left cake in the break room.He steps out of the lift and into a series of small crises.

most incredible pining i have ever seen + i love an ensemble cast

Soft vanilla foreplay - anon

7k | 1/1 | vigilantism | hacker!lando/cat burglar!oscar | M

“Oh shit, you’re,” Lando gasps, smiles. “You’re a. You’re Robin Hood. You’re a kitty Robin Hood.”Oscar stops grinding. “Can we have this talk tomorrow?”Lando laughs and comes down to place a kiss on Oscar’s lips. “Yeah. Oh yeah. Tomorrow. Tomorrow would be great. I’m sooooo busy right now. Hmm.”

cat oscar u will always be famous.

[discountlittlebro]

Prince who wears his knights armor and is cracking jokes and Knight who thinks his pretty boy needs to see exactly what being a knight is. Tells him to come visit down at the barracks and he’ll show him what being a knight really is.

Ofcourse he stupidly agrees. Thinks they’ll all rough house a bit, but it’s so much more than that. He’s thrown in a circle and his knight, his protector, is leading it all.

“See down here? We don’t have a lot of time for relationships and boys get pent up really easy. Don’t we boys? So we have a bit of a system. We wrestle, and loser is pussy for the night, and we’re not assholes so don’t worry. If wouldn’t fair if it was the same person every night, we rotate fighters.”

The prince is listening, nodding his head and something about this just seems so barbaric. A lot of them are bigger than he is, taller and more muscle. Towering over some of their own.

“Still think you wanna be one of us, pretty boy? You can backdown, go back to your room and pretend this didn’t happen.” There’s a few grumbles from the men, obviously not wanting him to leave.

And what kind of prince would he be if he backed down? No, a prince stands his ground and fights. Although, it’s barely a fight. He’s matched against 5 others, while the rest of the guard cheer. He watches as a big man pins two easily, tries to evade his own knight grabbing at him and shoving him to the floor.

“Your loss, your majesty. Are you going to make good on that deal?” He reads above him, cheeky smile on his face but ready to snap at the other men and tell them to leave if he changes his mind.

“I’m…a man of my word. I lost, let’s just get this over with.”

It feels like hours of hands gropping him, spreading him open. He feels a tongue on his cunt, lapping and sucking at him in a way he hasn’t felt before. His body is covered in a sheen sheet of sweat, he doesn’t even have control of his own hands. They’re grabbing his wrists and moving his tired arms to jerk themselves off. Two knights are taking turns fucking his mouth, all he can taste is the salt from their skin as his nose is buried in the musk of their pubes. It muffles his whines when somebody decides to shove their fingers in his ass, prepping him to take even more cock than he already is.

He’s surrounded by a frenzy of sensations. One knight might give him gentle kisses on his thighs while another bites down as if he means to take a chunk, one plays his nipple soft and gentle while the other is being pulled and twisted. He can barely think when his mouth is flooded with cum, when it splatters against his stomach and chest and leaks of his holes.

He’s panting, and tired and then his knight is ontop of him and he wants to tell him he can’t go anymore but he’s shushing him.

“You did so good for us, our perfect boy. Here’s your reward.”

And his knight works him through an orgasm that has his back arching and mouth falling open in a silent cry, the only thing he’s able to get out are the tears that are flooding his cheeks. He thinks he’ll never come back, never play knight again, but now the men are cleaning him up, petting his hair and lifting a water bottle to his lips, singing bis praise and placing gentle kisses all over his body. Swearing to always protect him with their life, and as his knight carries his broken but spoiled body back to his room, he thinks he might visit again real soon to play again.

[mapsthewanderer]

If you were to run a kitchen with the LADS guys…

I’m rewatching The Bear (yes the series) and my brain just exploded—like a proper “wait… wait… WAIT” moment. AU, who? Just… bear with me, heeeh. Omg, sorry.

Details: 1500ish words of my creativity just going completely bonkers. This became a pilot! Yaaay, check masterlist for more

🔪 Xavier – Kitchen Assistant / “The Quiet Backbone”

🩷 “Tell me what you need. I’ll handle the rest.” Said barely above a whisper, while slipping fresh gloves into your hand mid-rush. He didn’t wait for thanks—he was already gone.

Station: Not technically a cook—floats between prep, cleaning, organizing, managing back-of-house chaos. Exceptionally bad at cooking.

Description: Xavier is… not a chef. Everyone learned that quickly, after The Incident With The Eggs. But what he is, is the person who keeps the place from crumbling. He keeps stock rotated, ingredients labeled, knives sharpened, and people from losing their minds.

He doesn’t say much. Always calm, always focused. He moves through the kitchen like part of the architecture—quietly fixing things, cleaning messes before they spread, handing you what you need before you ask. He’ll offer you a rag when you’re bleeding and a chocolate when you’re about to scream.

He’s incredibly bad with flavor—puts sugar in sauces, burns toast—but he’s strangely brilliant at tasks that require repetition and quiet focus: peeling, organizing, cleaning fish (if someone else cooks them). He’ll never be on the line, and he’s fine with that.

He’s a calming presence for you. A quiet safe space. And he always offers you the best bite of whatever he is eating, like a quiet little ritual.

Vibe: Steady. Awkward. Gentle. The heartbeat of the kitchen no one sees—but everyone needs.

Xavier calls

Caleb: “Boss.��� No frills. No question. Caleb runs the kitchen, and Xavier follows. Simple as that. Occasionally: “Captain.” When Caleb’s in full command mode.

Rafayel: “Loud one.” Observational. Said like he’s describing the weather. Sometimes: “Glitter.” When Rafayel’s mood and outfit both shine.

Zayne: “Sharp one.” Respectful. Quiet. Rare praise. Occasionally: “Edge.” For when Zayne’s intensity gets a little too pointed.

Sylus: “Other Boss.” Always with a neutral tone. Not sarcastic—just factual. Sylus hates it. Once: “Red tie.” The one time Sylus broke his all-black look. Xavier logged it like a system update.

Xavier calls you:

“Chef.” Neutral, respectful. Used in front of others, especially during service. Occasionally: “Second set.” His personal nickname for you. Quiet, private. It means you’re his other half in the kitchen—his extra pair of hands, eyes, instinct. It’s not about rank. It’s about sync.

🔪Caleb – Head Chef / “The Machine”

🧡 “I’ve got the kitchen. You just breathe.” Said like an order—but only to you. Said during chaos, when the printer won’t stop and the pans are burning. He didn’t touch you, didn’t need to. His steadiness was enough.

Station: Runs the whole kitchen. Controls the pass. Oversees every dish, every second.

Description: Once a rising star in fine dining, Caleb burned out in the brutal world of elite gastronomy—and rebuilt himself into something sharper, more contained. He doesn’t yell—he commands. Every dish goes through him. Every mistake is his to erase. He’s fire, held tight under pressure, and his perfectionism is legendary. If something’s off, he’ll fix it before you even realize.

He walks the line like it’s a battlefield. Sees everything. Misses nothing. Speaks only when it matters.

Except to you.

With you, the rules shift. His attention lingers. The corners of his mouth soften. The warmth he keeps locked down for everyone else flickers through—because you throw him off. You disarm him. You make the pressure feel like something else.

And that scares him more than failure.

Vibe: Smug. Controlled. Scalding beneath the surface. Always watching.

Caleb calls

Rafayel: “Art Project.” Sharp and short when he’s annoyed. Once, in exasperation: “President of the Drama Club.”

Zayne: “Precision.” Said with grudging respect or flat annoyance, depending on the day. Sometimes: “Blade.” Used quietly, when Zayne pulls off something flawlessly under pressure.

Xavier: “Ghost.” With low-key fondness. Xavier’s the only one Caleb doesn’t try to control. Occasionally: “Inventory,” when things go missing and he blames Xavier anyway.

Sylus: Doesn’t nickname him. Just clenches his jaw and mutters “Boss.” Always flat, always loaded

Caleb calls you:

“Chef.” His constant. Used when he’s focused, when he’s tense, when he’s trying not to look at you too long. Occasionally: “Hotshot.” Said with a raised brow and the faintest ghost of a smile. Used when you challenge him—and win. Rarely: Your actual name. Only during quiet moments. And only when he means it.

🔪Rafayel – Pastry Chef / “The Art Freak”

💜 “If it doesn’t make someone feel something—rage, lust, joy, hunger—then what’s the point?” Muttered while throwing out an entire tray of flawless soufflés. Said it like a dare. Like a creed.

Station: Pastry and dessert. Shows up when he wants. Plates like a gallery opening.

Description: A dramatic menace with sea salt in his veins and sugar under his nails. Rafayel treats food like an art installation—and you like a canvas he wants to ruin just to repaint. He’s barefoot half the time, covered in edible pigment, purring “puh-lease” while plating sugar sculptures that make grown chefs cry.

He skips shifts to “meditate by the ocean” or “chase inspiration,” but no one dares cut him loose—because his creations sell out every night.

Charismatic, chaotic, and probably in love with you in twelve different metaphysical ways.

Vibe: Effortlessly beautiful. Loud, flirty, deeply unsettling when he wants to be.

Rafayel calls

Caleb: “Maestro.” Dripping with sarcasm. Occasionally: “Chef Supreme,” “Dictator de Cuisine,” or when he’s feeling truly bold: “Daddy Discipline.”

Zayne: “Icebox.” Consistent. Flamboyantly sung whenever Zayne says something dry. Sometimes: “Slicer.” Used when Zayne’s knife skills make him feel dramatic.

Xavier: “White Rabbit.” Because Xavier vanishes and reappears like a magic trick. Occasionally: “Whisperer.” Usually while narrating Xavier’s movements like he’s on a nature documentary.

Sylus: “Daddy Deep Pockets.” Bold. Loud. Said within earshot on purpose. On quiet nights? “Mystery Merlot.”

Rafayel calls you:

“Flame.” Always. Teasing, flirty, reverent in his own chaotic way. Occasionally: “Little flame” – used when you’re either adorable or frustrating. Never uses your name unless things get very serious.

🔪Zayne – Sous Chef / “The Scalpel”

🩵 “If you flinch at the truth, you shouldn’t be in the kitchen.” Said without raising his voice. Cut sharper than any knife in the drawer.

Station: Second-in-command. Oversees prep, quality control, plating precision.

Description: Everything about Zayne is sharp—his eyes, his knives, his expectations. He doesn’t tolerate sloppiness. Doesn’t indulge drama. But he will step in if you’re falling apart… and do it so quietly, it feels like dignity instead of rescue.

The staff respects him. Fears him a little. But you? He lets his guard down around you. Barely. Sometimes. A sideways smirk. A hand over yours when you’re shaking. A quiet “You’re better than this.”

His loyalty is absolute. So is his judgment.

Vibe: Clean lines, cold eyes, warm core. Gets shit done. Holds secrets close.

Zayne calls

Caleb: “Pressure.” Said only when Caleb’s pushing too hard or when something about him makes the kitchen feel just a little too tight. Not mocking. Just true.

Rafayel: “Theatrics.” Dry, unbothered. In emergencies? “Get out of my station.”

Xavier: “Inventory.” Half joke, half truth. Stuck after Xavier labeled everything one night. Sometimes: “Quiet.” With a rare note of appreciation.

Sylus: “Owner.” Always formal. Laced with cool disdain.

Zayne calls you:

“Chef.” Direct, even-toned, deeply respectful. In private: “Ace.” A personal nickname. Quiet praise. Never explained.

🔪 Sylus – Owner / “The Boss”

❤️ “Perfection is never loud. It just waits for the room to catch up.” Said over wine, once, to you. Calm. Sure. Like the truth was something he’d invented himself.

Station: Doesn’t touch the line—but he owns the building, funds the staff, and secretly curates the entire wine list under everyone’s nose.

Description: Sylus is the kind of boss who never needs to raise his voice. He walks into a room and the temperature drops—not because he’s cruel, but because he never enters without a reason. He doesn’t cook anymore, but when he does pick up a knife, the precision is terrifying. Not because he wants to impress anyone. Because he can.

While the kitchen burns itself out nightly, Sylus hovers just outside the chaos—glass of wine in hand, watching with faint amusement. Everyone assumes the wine pairings are the work of a nameless sommelier. No one knows the handwritten notebook of perfect, sometimes suspiciously intimate flavor pairings is his.

He doesn’t tell them. Why would he? Let them struggle. He’s always five steps ahead.

He calls you “chef” like it’s a compliment and a threat. And when he does offer advice, it’s always helpful… and always laced with something you’ll be turning over in your head long after the shift ends.

Vibe: High-functioning menace in a three-piece suit. Refined, unreadable, devastatingly well-paired. Owns the place, owns the game, and might just be playing you.

Sylus calls

Caleb: “Chef.” Always calm. Always strategic. Once: “Starboy.” No one’s recovered.

Rafayel: “Pixie Dust.” Used once during a wine-fueled jab. Rafayel loved it. Caleb did not.

Zayne: Doesn’t bother. Just meets his eyes and lets the silence work. Occasionally: “Sharp.”

Xavier: “Efficient.” Said like a metric. One-time only. It stuck.

Sylus calls you:

“Chef.” His go-to. He says it like it’s yours to live up to. Occasionally: “Darling.” Only when he’s being particularly smug—or trying to get a reaction from you or Caleb.

——————————————————————————

Writer’s note: Sooo… I was rewatching The Bear while doodling Chapter One of the Coffee Shop, and suddenly this whole thing just unfolded on my keyboard. For some reason, I thought, “Huh… Bear’s kinda like Caleb in some ways.” I might’ve written a whole chapter about it… or maybe not. Heeeeh. Edit: Forgot to mention that I’m a wine and dine nerd, so there’s definitely a personal touch to this AU too. Bless my poor brain. Okey then, thank you for reading! 🫶🏻