#and my parents are not angry at their parent's parent's parent's

[crystalclear97]

I had some friends (notice the past verb lmao) who proclaimed themselves anti capitalists and then feel superior to anybody who wasn't poor / suffering / being exploided at work / etc, basically they got super angry at me for letting my parents pay for my rent when they could afford it and wanted to (I was looking for a job and found it soon but I needed to move for some reasons) 🤷‍♀️ guys isn't this the kind of human rights you wanna fight for? one of them would specially talk about how hard he worked... everytime everywhere he loved being a victim and a working class hero lmao it's sad that we, thinking we are fighting capitalism, tend to feel the duty of basically suffer in order to have basic rights and acommodations. That's not the enemy 🥴 anyway those were shit friends for many reasons but that part is still stucked in my head, I wish we all could afford having a house, food, health and dignity, and fuck capitalism!! 🫡

[queensunshinee]

So sweet- part 2 || Patrick Zweig x reader, Art Donaldson x reader

Rating: Explicit (18+)

Warnings: SMUT (mention of p in v sex, oral sex), mention of an eating disorder, family drama, death in the family, cheating. It's a mess.

Word Count: 7.9k

(Part 1)

So sweet- part 2:

Art leaned against the doorframe as he looked at you. Since your back was to him, you hadn't seen him yet, and he felt like he had the upper hand. As if he didn’t need to be defensive. As if he was still part of your life. Your hair looked shorter than the last time he saw you. But then again, the last time he saw you, you told him you never wanted to see him again, so maybe he didn’t remember all the details as well as he’d like to.

Maybe he felt that "never" was subjective. That everyone could choose what to take from the word "never." That a year and a half without speaking to you was enough "never" for him, and you'd be a hypocrite if you said it wasn’t for you too. "Are you going to stand there much longer, Donaldson?" Your voice sounded the same. He'd recently discovered he hated a lot of things, but at the top of his list were all the times you called him by his last name instead of his first.

"You really do have eyes in the back of your head," he tried to joke, but he didn’t hear you laugh, not even a chuckle. He hadn’t seen your face yet, but he could guess you weren’t even smiling. "Aren’t you supposed to be in Atlanta?" you asked. If he didn’t know you, he might have thought you were fine. That this was just polite conversation between two acquaintances who hadn’t seen each other in a while and ran into each other by chance. "My first match isn’t for another two days. I couldn’t miss the funeral," he said quietly. "I’m really sorry for your loss, you know that, right?" He took a few large steps and sat on the bed next to you, hoping you’d give him this moment. Hoping you wouldn’t be angry. Not when he was trying so hard.

"She was a mean drunk," you muttered. "Not a huge loss," you added, glancing at him for a second, allowing yourself to surrender to the moment. He recognized the piercing gaze. Maybe a wrinkle that wasn’t there before, but your eyes were the same eyes. You were the same girl he used to love. Used to. Used to. Used to. Before he went on his path in life and you on yours. Before he made a decision, and then you made a decision, and then both of you made decisions. Before words were said. Before he left and you stayed. Before he opened up and you shut down. Used to.

"You’re a grown man, you should know how to tie a tie by now, don’t you think?" you asked, probably trying to lighten the sadness that filled your childhood room, located right across from his childhood room. He wanted to thank you for that. But he never knew how to talk to you honestly. Why would he start now? "Tashi usually does it," he said quietly, and you stood in front of him, starting to adjust the damn tie. You had no idea what you were doing to his heartbeat. "I’m sorry about your grandmother. I was at your parents’ house afterward. I don’t know if they told you," you mumbled.

He was so angry at you for not coming to the funeral. Because by what right did you take his tragedy and make him consumed with thoughts of you? About your absence. About your hand that could’ve held his tightly, just like you did when he was eight, and Jameson died. Instead, he held Tashi’s hand. She didn’t squeeze. She let go after a few minutes. He was so angry that at his grandmother’s funeral, more than anything, he missed you. So now, a few minutes before heading to your mother’s funeral, he squeezed your hand for a moment while you adjusted his tie, looking at him with big eyes filling with tears you refused to let fall. "Better," you said.

He didn’t think it was better. He didn’t want to argue. He just nodded. . . . Patrick couldn’t focus. Every time he hit that stupid ball, he thought about the fight he had with his dad a week ago and the dumb argument he had with you before leaving for Atlanta. He hadn’t told you yet that his parents decided to cut him off from the trust fund. He hadn’t told you that he was basically broke. Sometimes Patrick thinks you’re the only person in the world who looks at him like he understands something about life. Like he’s capable of pulling off magic at any given moment. Sparkling eyes and a smile. He wonders when was the last time you looked at him like that. It’s been a few good months. He can’t deliver. Not the damn ball and not in real life.

He hesitates. Everything he does comes with a certain delay. He knows that at 24, he’s expected to understand who he is and what he wants from life. But what he wants from life doesn’t want him back, and that’s something he’s not willing to accept. He blames his parents for the fact that he’s too spoiled. That he doesn’t know when to stop. That he can’t let go of dreams. That he has to be the best, even though he’s drowning in his own mediocrity. He moves too fast between knowing how good he is at what he does and the harsh slap of reality that comes with each of his failures. Every tournament he loses in the second round, every person who was once in his life and doesn’t want him anymore. They found something better. Something more put-together.

He saw Tashi from a distance for the second time in the last two days. Always alone, Art wasn’t with her. He wondered why Art wasn’t here. He knew Art was competing. Everyone knew Art was competing. The rising star of American tennis. Motherfucker. His dad screamed it at him when he lost it a week ago— “I wish Art Donaldson were my son, maybe then I wouldn’t be so ashamed.” Patrick won’t tell anyone that it hurt. Not because he cares what his shitty dad thinks of him. Not because he cares that Art is succeeding on an international level, breaking into the world’s top ten. Fulfilling all the dreams they once dreamed together. Patrick cares because he knows that at any given moment, he could beat Art. He’s better than Art. So how is it that Art is ranked eighth and Patrick is a nobody? No one takes him into account.

“You planning to embarrass yourself in another tournament?” Tashi’s voice crept up behind him. “You know that if he competes against me, I’ll win, right?” he asked. Overconfident. Always overconfident. “I know you’re ranked 243rd, and he’s ranked 8th. It doesn’t matter who wins this, you’ll still be a loser, and he’ll still get a Nike campaign. They asked us about a winter collection.” She was trying to hurt him. He couldn’t understand why it was so important to her—to hurt him. But he thinks only two people can: you and Art. Tashi isn’t on that list. He doesn’t think Tashi comes close to being on that list.

He thinks Tashi is beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful woman he knows. Maybe you’re the most beautiful woman he knows. He doesn’t really know- it’s blurry and messy. But hearing you moan or say his name softly, sweetly, is the most beautiful thing he knows. So maybe it’s the same thing. Maybe he measures beauty differently than he did four years ago. “Sounds good. I promise to buy a jacket with his name on it. Do you need anything, Tashi?” he tried to end the conversation. He didn’t want her to see the pathetic training session he was having with himself against a wall. “I don’t know, maybe to ask why you’re here?” She shrugged like it was obvious. Like she cared about the useless existence of Patrick Zweig. Like he mattered. “I’m competing, just like Art-” he started, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, but Art’s not here. How is it that you are?” she cut off the monologue he was about to throw at her. “I don’t know why Art isn’t here, Tashi.” If it were possible, his eyes would roll so far back into his skull they’d get stuck there. “Because he’s at a funeral, obviously. She’s your girlfriend last time I checked- how are you not there?” The furrow of her brows showed she was genuinely confused. But now he stood in front of her, terrified too. Whose funeral? Who the fuck died? “What are you talking about?” he muttered, feeling his heart pound. Every muscle in his body tensed. “(Y/N)’s mom passed away, Patrick. How am I the first one telling you this?” She doesn’t understand. But he does. And right now he hates Tashi. And Art, who’s with you. And himself- mostly himself- because after four years, he’s still a selfish bastard who only cares about himself. . . . You’re not crying, and you suspect it bothers your father. He looks at you strangely. As if you’re making things difficult. Because this is an event. A funeral is an event, and you need to behave the way you're expected to behave. You just can’t seem to do it. Because you don’t think you have a warm spot in your heart for the woman you called Mom for the pathetic 24 years of your existence. To anyone else, it would sound sad. Pathetic. You don’t say it out loud very often. You don’t want to make things harder for anyone. You don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. You considered cutting an onion before you left, just to save yourself from the weird looks from the extended family you haven’t seen in years, but Art fucking Donaldson hasn’t left you alone since the second he heard she kicked the bucket.

His hand held yours like his life depended on it. Maybe yours. Someone’s life depended on it. Definitely not your mother’s. She’s dead. You wonder if the need for sacrifice died with her. You wonder if your constant need to make everyone feel comfortable all the time died with her too. It’s exhausting. You wish you could be less like that. Your hand is sweating into his. He probably thinks it’s disgusting. He probably doesn’t like it. You miss the time when your whole world was making sure Art Donaldson was comfortable. His parents hugged you, and you’re pretty sure his mom left lipstick on you. He’s been staring at you for an hour straight. Maybe two. Maybe your whole life. You can’t know; it’s an emotional day.

You try to move your hand away from his; there’s no way this is comfortable for him. He grips harder. Doesn’t let go. Doesn’t leave you alone. Your father says the Kaddish, everyone responds "Amen" and cries. You don’t. Maybe you really are crazy, like she hinted at a few times when she got drunk and called you at an inappropriate hour. Maybe you really are the reason for every problem she ever had. Maybe you didn’t sacrifice enough. Maybe you didn’t love enough.

Maybe you just don’t know how to love, and then it makes sense that you don’t deserve to be loved. Not really. Not unconditionally. Not like your father loved your mother. Not like Art loves Tashi. Not like Patrick loved Tashi. Not like Patrick hated you. Maybe he still does- sometimes you’re not sure. Patrick isn’t here. Art’s hand keeps holding you both steady. You finally cry.

When you walk into the house, your extended family is already there. Uncles, cousins- you think you saw the grandfather of someone your father goes to synagogue with. All you wanted was to sit quietly in your room for a second. Take off the heels and the damn dress. You felt the thong digging into your ass. That’s what happens when you let a dead woman dictate what you'll wear to her funeral. A woman who had conditions for her own funeral. Who told you what dress to wear. What underwear to put on. Sometimes you wonder how many years ahead you’ll keep dragging her advice, her judgmental looks. The tongue clicks. The general dissatisfaction with the world, wrapped in fake smiles. Maybe that’s where you learned to fake so well. To fake who you are down to your core. To fake and fake until you don’t know what you want or from whom.

“You disappeared. I figured you’d be here.” Art walks into your childhood room like it’s his. Like he always did. “You’re still here?” you mutter, and he hands you a plate of food he picked up from downstairs. “Where else would I be?” he sighs. As if that’s the only answer that makes sense to him. As if you two were in touch. As if you know anything about his fancy life or he knows anything about your painfully mediocre one. “In Atlanta,” you answer and place the plate on the nightstand beside you. “When’s your flight?” you ask, not looking at him as he sits next to you on the bed like he did before the funeral.

“I can stay-” he starts quietly. You know he’s looking at you, almost begging you to see that he means it. "Ridiculous,” you mumble to yourself, but you know he hears. “When’s your flight, Art?” you ask, your voice steadier, looking at him with an almost hollow expression. One that doesn’t show any emotion or maybe shows all emotions at once. A look that scared him. A look that worried you. A look you’ll think about a month from now. You’ll sit at home, writing the structure for one of your classes, and you’ll think about Art Donaldson and the empty look you gave him when your mother died. Embarrassing. Everything is so fucking embarrassing.

“Tonight,” he sums up. You glance at your phone’s clock. Sixteen missed calls from Patrick. Instinct says to call him. But it’s 6 p.m., and his first match is at 8 in the morning. “Don’t you need to pack?” He rolls his eyes, ignoring your attempt to dismiss him. “What are you doing?” he asks quietly. “Excuse me?” you snap back, not understanding the direction of the conversation. “Now. In general. What are you doing?” His gaze surrounds you from every direction. You can’t look anywhere that isn’t Art Donaldson. He reflects off the damn mirrors in this room. “Trying to sit quietly in my room, clearly,” you reply stiffly.

You remember how all your conversations used to be warm. Soft. You’d talk about dreams. About books you’d write. About tournaments he’d win. You’d kiss. He’d touch you. You’d touch him. There was curiosity. There was love. Or at least that thing you’ve spent years believing was love. The thing where you become exactly what he wants and needs and disappear when he needs something else, something better. That was the unwritten contract between you. Lately, you’ve been thinking that’s the unwritten contract between you and everyone you know. A depressing thought. You try not to dwell on it too much. On the way you please people in your suffering. Please in deprivation. Please to the point of tears, and more tears, and more tears. You try not to think about all the dreams you had when Art Donaldson -maybe- loved you. You try not to think about the joy of life. About how much you loved seeing him happy, how much you loved making him happy. How much you loved being responsible for his happiness. "Why isn’t Patrick here?" He quietly asked what he really wanted to know. He wanted to understand if you’d broken up. If you were alone. If he could laugh and say he told you so. That he told you; you had no business being with Patrick Zweig. "Because he has a match tomorrow at 8 a.m., and he trained too hard to miss it," you said it coolly, without breaking eye contact. As if it made perfect sense that you hadn’t told your boyfriend, the person who was supposed to be your confidant, that your mother had died. "He didn’t want to come?" Art continued, confused. Ice. That look again. The immediate shift in his mood confuses you, but it doesn’t throw you off balance. You know him. For the past four years, every time he’s seen you, all he’s tried to do is confuse you, to knock you off balance. It never works, at least not in his eyes.

"Hedoesn’tknow," you mumbled the words as if they were one. Quietly, knowing that what you’d done didn’t make sense. Wasn’t reasonable. Wasn’t acceptable. Didn’t fit into the unspoken rules of a relationship. "You’re an idiot." He stood up and started pacing back and forth. "A fucking moron, really." He was angry, as if he was the one who hadn’t been told your mother had died. If it were up to you, he wouldn’t have known either, but his mother told him. Whatever. "I’ll tell him when he gets back from the tournament, it’s not a big deal," you said and shrugged. Art stopped and looked at you like you’d just fallen from the moon. Like you were some natural phenomena. "If you did that to me, I’d kill you. If you thought some shitty tennis tournament in shitty Atlanta was more important to me than you, I’d murder you and then die myself. I don’t like what you have with Zweig, God knows I hate it, but how could you not tell him? Do you even understand the concept of a relationship?" He let out this Shakespearean monologue while looking at you with a half-pitying, half-angry expression. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he thought you were Tashi.

"Art, I’m not your problem. Do you remember that?" You didn’t know what else to say, so you said the only thing you knew for sure in a defeated voice. Art Donaldson was not a part of your life. "You’ll always be my problem. You should know that by now," he said, half despairing at himself. As if wondering how you both got here. As if wondering if there was anywhere else you could be. . . . Patrick was beyond frustrated. He won his first match after two and a half hours, barely. It didn’t come easy. All he could think about was how nothing came easy for him anymore, and how everything used to be so easy.

The thought that you didn’t tell him your mother had died, and then didn’t answer his calls either, hovered over his head like a rain cloud focused solely on him. He didn’t know how to approach it. He knew why you didn’t tell him- because unlike what Art thought, unlike what your dead mother thought, he knew you. He knew how you thought. He understood the mechanics behind your strange decisions. He hated that he had become someone you had to overthink things for.

That afternoon, he went to one of the courts and caught Tashi and Art’s practice. They both saw him sit down. He thinks it made Art play better. He wondered if Art imagined his face when he hit the ball. He thinks he does. Because when Tashi checkmated his relationship with Art, Patrick wrapped his life around yours as if that was how it was always meant to be, while everyone involved knew it wasn’t. While everyone involved knew that you had embroidered Art’s name on bags from the moment you learned how to stitch. While everyone knew that Art Donaldson didn’t know how to exist in the world without you.

So, Patrick took you for himself. Most of the time, he didn’t think of it as something technical, as a game he was playing against Art. Most of the time, he looked at you, really looked at you. Most of the time, he tried to make you laugh and understand the world through your own eyes. Most of the time, he tried to protect you from complex emotions you couldn’t express, from hunger. He tried to protect you from yourself, the way you protect some helpless creature. In some way, you were. In his eyes, you were helpless.

When you first started sleeping together, Patrick treated you with kid gloves, in a way he had never treated anyone before. Like you were porcelain. Like you could shatter and crumble in his hands at any moment. You had gestures and habits, ones you thought no one noticed. But he always saw. You tried to please everyone all the time. You switched from a smile to a sad look in a second, for the sake of the feelings of whoever was in front of you, for the sake of what you thought they wanted from you.

But Patrick didn’t want anything from you. He wanted to give you all the orgasms that you missed and for you to eat at least three meals a day. Some days, he didn’t know how to make you do it. Some days, he raised his voice. When he was desperate, he cried. When he was really desperate, he asked you to eat for him, so that he would be happy. That was the easy way, it always worked. He exploited a destructive mechanism someone had embedded in you (he suspects your dead mother) and used it to get you to do something he thought would be good for you. He wanted to throw up.

Art was playing well. He was playing against Tashi in front of him, and he was playing well. Too well. Patrick no longer thinks he can beat him. Not something he would ever say out loud. He wanted to ask him how you were. He didn’t want to admit that you hadn’t answered his million calls. He didn’t want to admit that he was a loser who didn’t know where his life was going. Not when Art had been with you at the fucking funeral of your awful mother. He hated that woman with everything he had. More than he hated his own father, and that had to be some kind of record. Art looked at him for a moment. The moment passed. Patrick thinks Art won. He’s not sure. . . . Patrick finds Tashi alone in the evening. Completely alone in the middle of the lobby restaurant. She suddenly looks small and fragile to him, holding a drink he can guess is whiskey or cognac or whatever it is that Tashi Duncan drinks these days. He doesn’t know anything about her anymore. Only that a few years ago, he thought he loved her, and in return, she took his best friend away from him.

When he stands in front of her, he is like a streetlight- impossible to ignore. It dawns on him, belatedly, that he is wearing her shirt. She must think he’s pathetic. He feels pathetic. He doesn’t think he cares about being pathetic in front of her. Because he sees her for what she is right now, and she is miserable. She doesn’t have much in life. She clings to what Art has. Which is fucked up on so many levels, but that’s reality. They both cling to things they shouldn’t be clinging to, and his eyes wander to her ring. Massive. Flashy. A bit like her, like the woman she tries to be when she’s not half-drunk and pathetic in front of him.

He places his hand over hers just as she’s about to take a sip of her drink, stopping her. He doesn’t know what he wants. Not from her, not from himself, but his lips find hers within seconds, and she doesn’t resist. He knew she wouldn’t resist- he saw it on her face. She wanted him just as much as he wanted her. Maybe more. And what a thought that is- that Tashi Duncan wants Patrick Zweig more.

They exit through the back door of the restaurant, go up to his room. Naturally. As if more than four years haven’t passed since the last time he was with Tashi. He wishes he knew what he was doing; it would make this easier. But it’s not particularly difficult, either- otherwise, he wouldn’t be pressing Tashi against the wall. Otherwise, his lips wouldn’t be kissing every inch of her body he can reach.

Hunger. Patrick feels hunger. It’s the only emotion coursing through him as he looks at her. He thinks he wants to hurt Art. He thinks about how Art was there for you at your mother’s funeral, and that was supposed to be his role, but you didn’t call him. So he strips Tashi of her shirt. Only to discover she isn’t wearing a bra. He compares her to you every few seconds. You never go without a bra. He can barely convince you to just be at home, without clothes, without defenses. Just be. He doesn’t think you’re capable of that. He doesn’t think you know how to feel at ease. That worries him more than he’s willing to admit.

“You’re thinking about her?” Tashi’s voice is almost angry as she kisses his neck. “No.” A lie. A complete lie. He can only think about you. He realized that a few years ago and stopped fighting it. You and tennis, as if that’s all there is in the world. What else even exists? What else even matters? “You’re a terrible liar,” she mutters against him, and somehow, the ugly shirt he’s pretty sure was Tashi’s -he doesn’t even know why he wore it- ends up on the floor. ‘You’re not thinking about Art?’ he should have asked, but he’s not here to ask questions. He’s here because he’s angry. At Art, at you, at Tashi for telling him, at the world. So he’s here. And they’re both shedding more pieces of their clothing and maybe their souls, because what they’re doing now has no way back. No forgiveness. They are bad people. Patrick knows it. Tashi knows it.

And after he wrings a heavy moan from her, one that follows an orgasm, she quietly tells him she thinks Art loves you. Patrick stares at the gaudy ring stuck on her finger, the ring that, in another universe, Art would have placed on yours. “Why do you think that?” Patrick asks softly, because what else is left to do? “I didn’t want him to go to the funeral. I wanted him to stay and train, but he went anyway,” she mumbles. Patrick says nothing, just nods. He would have done the exact same thing, and that’s why you didn’t call him. He would have come. Despite the dreams. Despite the tennis. Despite everything.

And Patrick remembers all the times Art called you sweet. All the times Art never wanted to tell him anything about what happened between you two. All the times Art didn’t want to talk about you. And it wasn’t because it wasn’t good. It wasn’t because other girls were better. It was because there was depth Patrick can only put his finger on now. So much happened beneath the surface- so much that Art had no words to describe it. So much that Art drowned in his own emotions. Repressed them and kept them bottled up until he found something shiny to bury his feelings in. Until he found Tashi.

And Tashi is safe. With Tashi, you can’t get lost. With Tashi, there’s a plan. With you, he just has to be himself. He doesn’t know how to be anything else. And that’s terrifying.

For the first time, Patrick understands Art in absolute terms. He lies in a hotel room, stroking the hair of a woman who isn’t you, and understands everything there is to understand about life. Mainly, he understands again- that you are so fucking sweet. And that there’s no way he can win. . . .

You're going over tomorrow’s lesson when you hear the door open. Without turning around, you already know it’s Patrick. Who else could it be? His scrutinizing gaze doesn’t waver from you, even when he says nothing. “How was it?” You find yourself breaking the silence, lifting your head toward him with a smile. He doesn’t smile back. He looks exhausted. The message Art sent you lingers in the back of your mind; He’s cheating on you. -Art Donaldson- Art has his reasons to make something like this up, but you doubt he’d be cruel enough to lie about it. Not while you’re mourning your horrible mother. No matter how angry he is at you. No matter how angry he is at Patrick. You don’t think Art is capable of that. You want to believe he isn’t capable of that. Then again, you also want so badly to believe Patrick wouldn’t do it. That Patrick wouldn’t cheat on you. That he wouldn’t find someone prettier, better, more cheerful and do all the things with her that he probably can’t do with you. You don’t want to think about the possibility that you haven’t sacrificed enough. That you didn’t try as hard as you were taught to. Your fault, your fault, your fault. You don’t want to believe it’s your fault. That another love will slip through your fingers, as if you’re trying to hold water. So, you choose to say nothing, because even if it’s true, even if he was with someone else, he came home. And home isn’t big, to say the least, not grand, not dazzling. But he came back. He’s right in front of you. You’re not alone. He knows you. He knows such ugly parts of you that sometimes you’re scared to acknowledge they even exist. He knows what you refuse to recognize in yourself, and sometimes he reminds you that you deserve more than you think. Which is a bizarre thought in itself. But you let him think it, you let him believe it enough for him to believe it for the both of you. “I lost in the third round. To Peter Michelson,” he says shortly, and you nod. “No choice but to make a voodoo doll with Peter Michelson’s face,” you try to joke. He usually laughs. At least smiles. He does neither. He just stands there like a block of wood, with the same expression. “I’m sorry you lost. I wish I’d been there,” you mumble, not knowing what else to say. “What about you? Anything special happen this week?” he asks, his gaze never leaving you.

Now you could tell him your mother died, but there’s no way to say it without it turning into a fight about the fact that you didn’t tell him the moment you found out. “No, nothing special, you know. My routine is boring.” You shrug and shift your focus back to the lesson you’re supposed to teach tomorrow. The Great Gatsby. A shitty book. “Nothing special at all?” he presses. “If you count the fact that Mr. Grace forgot to put in his dentures on Monday -again- and I had to sub for his class, then no.” It’s a half-lie because the thing with Mr. Grace and his dentures did happen, just not this week. Most of this week, you were at your parents’ house, helping your father deal with shiva and all the people who came by. He was completely heartbroken.

You see Patrick shake his head slightly and close his eyes. You know this is something he does when he’s trying to restrain himself. When he doesn’t want to lash out. When something is bothering him, and he doesn’t want it to turn into the biggest fight in the world. He has a bad history with fights that spiral out of control. “No one was born? No relatives died? I don’t know, maybe the woman who gave birth to you?” he says, his piercing gaze back on you. “Shit,” you mumble. Because what else is there to say in this situation? “Yeah, shit,” he stays exactly where he is, making you feel like a child being scolded. Like you dropped a lollipop and won’t be getting a new one.

“I’m sorry-” you start. “My mom isn’t dead; your mom is dead. I think I’m the one who’s sorry.” Patrick hated when you apologized. He said it was irrational with you. That you apologized more than was normal and more than people around you deserved. “Patrick,” you sigh, scrunching your nose as you try to think of a good way to explain it. “I really need to understand this, (Y/N). When were you planning on telling me your living mother was no longer alive? Another month? Two months? Two years? What was the timeline in that head of yours?” His words drip with sarcasm, like the way he used to talk to you before you became you and Patrick. Before you learned to love who he was and before he started treating you like you weren’t the worst person in the world.

“I didn’t want you to withdraw from Atlanta. You trained for it so hard.” You sigh again, quietly. This time, you’re the one closing your eyes, not wanting to look at him- and in doing so, you miss the fact that he moves toward you in giant strides. “I wish you’d told me, Little Dove. I wish I’d been with you instead of being there.” His hands cup your face as he crouches in front of you, looking up to catch your eyes. “I’m sor-” You stop yourself mid-sentence when you see his displeased expression. “How do you feel?” he asks, and you shrug in response. Because what you feel isn’t something you can say out loud, not even to Patrick. It’s not okay to feel relieved. A lot of sadness, of course. But also, relief.

“Tell me,” he insists. He has a habit of knowing the things you don’t want to say. He can look at your face and catch the slight twitch of your left eyebrow to understand what you’re feeling. To see what you try so hard to hide. You can’t beat him at this. You can’t lie to him, not too much. Not about your feelings. Not when he spent years of his life learning what to hate about you, and then a few more years learning to love it. “She wasn’t the nicest woman in the world,” you murmur quietly, like you’re confessing the most forbidden secret. Like it’s a secret that could start a world war. Like Patrick would tell someone.

“She didn’t like me.” Patrick lets out a dry chuckle, his eyes glassy as if he’s remembering something. “She used to call me Art all the time and then correct herself, like it was an accident, but she did it on purpose. So I’d know she wanted me to be Art.” His jaw tightens slightly. You can see the anger and frustration behind the fake lightness in his tone. “I’m sorry,” you say because you don’t know what else to say, and he sighs. His large hands wrap around you in an almost crushing hug. Almost making it hard to breathe.

But that’s how Patrick is. Everything he feels is out in the open. Everything he thinks, he says. Everything he wants, he does. And most of the time, he wants to be present in your life, which is ridiculous because there is no one more present in your life than him. He still acts like he needs to prove something to you. “I wish you’d let me take care of you, Little Dove. It would be easier.” He whispers into your hair, not letting go for a second. You can almost feel him thinking, almost see him guessing what might help you. “I know you care about me,” you say, shifting slightly to look at him, to show him that he doesn’t need to prove anything. That you’re okay.

“Did you eat?” he suddenly asks, stepping back slightly, scanning you, then moving toward the half-empty fridge. “What did you eat?” he follows up. “I don’t know, Patrick. I don’t keep a journal,” you roll your eyes. “Don’t give me that bullshit. What did you eat, (Y/N)?” He doesn’t let up. “A sandwich,” you mutter the first thing that comes to mind. “Since this morning?” His eyes stay locked on you. “Patrick, my mother just died. Can we not focus on what I eat for one second? It’s exhausting,” you roll your eyes and cross your arms, turning your face to the side as he steps toward you and nods. . . . "What do you want to focus on?" he asked. Patrick felt guilty. He looked at you and saw nothing but the fact that just a few days ago, he had been with Tashi. While you were mourning your unbearable mother, he was busy fucking Tashi in a fancy hotel room, at a tournament he lost and that Art Donaldson would probably win. "You," your voice was small as you looked at him, almost pleading for a break from the interrogation and the anger. He hated when you made him the center of your focus, when you tried to do what you thought he wanted you to do. So he nodded and placed a small kiss on the crown of your head, knowing exactly what he needed to do.

Patrick felt like a man on a mission as he dropped to his knees in front of you. "Pat-" you tried to protest, to tell him he didn’t have to. You always tried. As if going down on you was a burden to him, as if all it would take for him to spend a lifetime just like this was for you to fucking ask. "Baby, can you take these off for me?" It was a question, but there was no question mark at the end. Not in that tone. Not when he was looking up at you like that, completely in control of the situation.

So you slid your pants down slowly, trying to hold on to the last bit of control slipping away with every second he stared at you like that. He took care of your underwear himself. Leaving you bare in front of him. "Fuck, Pat," you mumbled, closing your eyes for a moment, leaning back against the wall, making him look up at you one last time with a smirk stretched across his face. And then he got to work.

His lips explored you like you were his source of oxygen. Like his natural place was buried under you, his mouth inside you. "Baby, I’d eat you for the rest of my life. Every day. Every fucking day." His grip on your thigh was ruthless. Patrick felt like he was holding on for dear life, like this was all there was left to do. Like it was all he knew. "Sweet fucking pussy," he kept mumbling into you, until his face was coated with his own spit and your slick. He was ready to take it all, everything you gave him. In these moments, everything that was yours became his, and the little that was his became yours.

So he was milking it. He licked your clit in slow, agonizing strokes- for both of you. He took his time. The euphoria would come, but he was going to enjoy it until it did. Your small whimpers made him growl directly into you. "Patrick, Patrick, Patrick," like a prayer. He felt it. He felt divinity in all of it. He sped up and slowed down and sped up and slowed down. Merciless to the near-sobs escaping from you. "You're so sweet, baby. Do you want to come?" And he wasn’t asking if you wanted to come for him, because he wanted you to come for yourself. Because he wanted you to always, always come for yourself. He wanted to be a vessel. He wanted to erase all the stupid patterns in your head and make sure every orgasm you had was yours and for you. "Patrick." He thought that was the only thing you were capable of saying coherently, and he was fine with that. He was selfish enough to be satisfied if his name was the only word you could say forever.

And when you came with a moan he had learned to recognize and nearly worship, he told you how good you were. How rare you were. That he was yours and that he would always take care of you. He looked up at you from below, saw the tears slipping down your face, and pressed another kiss to your thigh. One that emphasized the word always. Because he didn’t think he could ever let this go. He was too selfish to ever let this go. . . . Art peeked through the door of the room every few seconds, searching for you among the guests. At this point, he didn’t even bother lying to himself about it. Because he didn’t know what else was left for him besides admitting the truth to himself- things he was never able to admit before. Lately, he’d been thinking a lot about the nights he used to lay beside you. When you didn’t even fuck. When you just lay in that rickety twin bed in his dorm room. He was willing to take that. He was willing not to fuck you if it meant you’d hold him again. More than that, he was willing not to fuck anyone ever again. But you were too sweet, you wouldn’t let him go through life without sex. The thought made him chuckle for a second. But he was nervous. So fucking nervous.

He was about to marry Tashi, and she didn’t cross his mind even once. He accidentally saw her dress, even though he told her that he hadn’t really noticed it was there. He knew she would be a stunning bride. That months from now, people would still be talking about Tashi Duncan in a wedding dress. He knew people would envy him, he knew everything. His mind knew everything.

But all he could think about was what kind of wedding dress you would have chosen. He was almost sure it would be something less extravagant; you’d try to draw as little attention as possible. But the Art he was today wouldn’t have let you. He would’ve told you that you deserved all the attention the universe had to offer. That you deserved to be seen. He hated himself for how long it had taken him to realize that. Only when you truly weren’t there. Only when you belonged to someone else. Only when you chose Patrick Zweig of all people.

Patrick Zweig, who hated you with every fiber of his being. Patrick Zweig, who Art was almost certain had cheated on you with Tashi. It should have hurt him much more than it did. But all he cared about was figuring out if this would be the thing that made you get up and leave. You had to know you deserved better. That if not him- if not Art, the guy you both knew you loved with all your heart- then at least someone who didn’t want anyone else. That was the bare minimum you deserved. For years, he’d wondered if he had something to do with how little you thought you deserved, with how low your standards were.

He convinced his mother- who probably loved you even more than he did- to take upon herself convincing you to come to his wedding. Which was almost sadistic of him. Maybe masochistic. Maybe both. But he had to see you. He hadn’t seen you since your mother’s funeral. Sometimes he dreamed about that day and how his hand held yours, he wanted it again and again and again. He wanted everyone to die if it meant he could hold you like that again. If it gave him an excuse.

He noticed that everything about you required an excuse. It hadn’t been like that when you were his. Except you were never really his. He didn’t even understand why it had been so complicated- why you hadn’t told him that’s what you wanted (though he could have guessed). And more than anything, he didn’t understand why he hadn’t known what he wanted. Why it hadn’t been clear to him that you were his person. That you knew the deepest parts of him.

He saw you walk in and texted you, almost begging you to come to the room where he was. You could tell him to go to hell, but that wasn’t your style. No, you were sweet. So sweet that all you did was knock on the door and push it open. Looking at him while he already had his eyes on your little black dress. While he was already studying the red nail polish. While he was already focusing on the lipstick he so badly wanted to wipe off of you.

“Your mother asked me to prepare a speech. Was that your idea?” you asked. There was no coldness in your voice, which made him happy. You stepped closer and started fixing his tie. He wanted to close his eyes, but at the same time, he wanted to see you. To remember you like this; in a little black dress, in heels, standing in front of him, helping him with his tie. “What can I say? You’re my best friend,” he said. And it wasn’t a lie, just as much as it wasn’t the truth. “That’s really sad, Art,” you said, probably referring to the last four years you spent apart. “Are you saying you have a better friend than me?” he asked, hoping you’d deny it because a yes might make him break down crying.

“It’s a mediocre speech. I didn’t know what to say at your wedding,” you sighed, confessing a secret. “Saying you don’t want me to get married would’ve been a good start,” he said, taking a risk. Because he calculated the timing, and you were late, so he had a very short window for this risk. “Don’t be ridicul—” you started, quietly. “If you tell me not to do this, I won’t get married. Tell me not to do it. Tell me it’ll be okay. That we’ll be okay,” he whispered. Not looking away from you.

The silence in the room was deafening, and the chuckle that escaped him was bitter. Fake. He felt pathetic and small and miserable, and maybe he was all those things because he never knew what he wanted in time. “I’m sorry,” you murmured. Not knowing what else to add, because what was left to add? He could see the wetness in your eyes. He knew how unfair he was being. “I’m sorry,” he echoed. He didn’t think he had ever told you that before, but he really, truly was. “Did you write something good about me?” he added. “That you’re my best friend. And that my soul will always love yours,” you said, letting a single tear fall as his rough hand wiped it away with whatever gentleness was still left in him.

It was a nice speech. Everyone applauded. Art cried. . . .

Here we are- the second part of So Sweet! Hope it turned out good enough. Thanks for stopping by and reading what I write, it means a lot. Let me know what you think. Love you guys, stay sweet! 💕

[ledesaid]

William (Billy) Joseph Batson Constantine?

12 years ago, John Constantine offered his genetics with the intention of serving others while putting his own interests first (he was a donor at a fertility clinic) and forgot about it.

Indeed, he also forgot when he pawned his firstborn in some pagan ritual to save his own neck...

Once and...

Again...

Oh, heavens! A fifth time?

Can someone stop this man?

Call it luck or chance, but his sample was used only once. An American couple turned to a fertility clinic and, by chance, their firstborn was born.

Yes, that firstborn.

William Joseph Batson always wondered why all sorts of bad things happened to him. From the premature death of his pet fish, to the variety of monsters that started living under his bed, and culminating with his inability to look at himself in a mirror. That didn't deprive him of his parents' love, fortunately, at least until a demon took them when he was seven.

Everyone believes they died, Billy doesn't... He remembers they were dragged to what that monstrous creature called hell... Billy searched how to get there on Google Maps.

He is absorbed by the system for the next two years, he is nine when he starts looking for answers on his own.

He's not starting from scratch, he still remembers what the demon said that night...

"The time has come, spawn of John Constantine."

The Internet told him what "spawn" meant, but there seem to be no traces of this Constantine except for an anonymous complaint, on an occultism forum, about his poor services and his "charming" personality.

An informational seed.

He starts with local fortune-tellers' houses, all charlatans... Continues with people from questionable cults and escapes before becoming the main dish.

Other terms appear along the way: alcoholic and gambler.

He's eleven years old when his tour around the country takes him to a show by a certain Zatanna. He does the usual routine... Sneaks into her dressing room and waits...

He's already an expert at waiting.

Billy: John Constantine. He's harder to find than cockroaches. I've been looking for him for three years... They say he's my father... Do you know him?

Finally, for the first time in three years, he finds someone who knows him and has his number. It only took two more cities, of stalking the magician, for her to call that man...

That man... The one responsible for everything.

But when he sees him, his stomach churns as he notices their clear resemblance. Billy looked a lot like his mother, but the handful of the man's genes was evident.

He doesn't scream when a portal appears in the dressing room. He's seen worse and smellier ones.

John: Hello, love, is everything alright? You don't usually call first... I brought a good bottle of...

And the man also realized. Of course, he did, he knows... whispers his tortuous mind.

Billy: Finally, you are John Constantine...

John: And you must be the reason why my firstborn trick stopped working.

Billy gets angry and lunges at the Englishman. With one knee on the blond's stomach, he takes advantage and grabs him by the collar of his trench coat. He shakes him violently and shouts all he's been holding back for so long.

Billy: I've met at least five principalities, I've been chased by things I still can't comprehend, and they took my parents when I was seven... You're going to fix this now!

Billy starts to sob as he steps away from the man and leans against the dressing room door.

John: Would you believe me if I said I'm sorry?

He's not sincere, Billy knows it and also knows that his voice is nothing more than a sign of his defeated certainty.

Billy: No, you are everything they said you were...

[itsabouttimex2]

Not a request, just blabbering about the “not the beloved au” because. God. Poor MK. Obviously, y/n is the one suffering the most from the dynamic, but MK’s development is being stunted by the way the two kings are raising him. Never being told no, having everything and everyone live their life to accommodate around him- sure he’s still a toddler, they’re going to be stupid, but he’s resorting to hurting himself when he doesn’t get what he wants (ie Y/N, a whole person!) that is very troubling behavior.

I’d hate to see how he’d be grown up- he’d definitely still be a hero- he IS a good kid, he’d want to help people- but what happens if he’s not able to beat someone in a fight immediately or he’s outmatched? How much of him fighting would just make things worse because he’s used to the world bending over backwards to make him happy?

Poor kid.

Not The Beloved

Anon, I'm so glad you brought this up, because on surface level, NTB!MK is a little entitled menace. But when you take a moment to scratch past that unfortunate facade, then... well, yeah. He is a victim all in his own right, hard as it may be to see from a certain viewpoint. The only world MK knows is his own family and their home- his two dads, Y/N, the Flower Fruit Mountain monkeys, and the mountain itself.

The end. No school. No friends. Nothing.

And that's just the way his dads like it! Sun Wukong likes that his kiddo is isolated, stunted, socially awkward and somewhat entitled! That just makes him easier to spoil! Easier to love! And Macaque, too! If he helps to custom-cater a world that his beloved baby boy can't survive outside of? Then MK can't leave, and thus can never escape his love and care!

Which is exactly why MK needs the reader.

In spite of being everything that the little kid is not, Y/N's startling normality is the only grounding factor that MK has to let him know that something is wrong. Because Y/N didn't have the upbringing that their little brother had, they have a legitimate claim to being the least mentally-skewed of the family, which is, unsurprisingly, one hell of a boon.

Like, MK has it great... at first. Never Having to do chores or make your own food, and having your overbearing daddies brush your teeth and tie your shoes for you is awesome when you're four, but sucks ass when you're twelve and can barely function outside your role as a spoiled prince-

But! There's still Y/N!

Frustrated, jealous, and angry Y/N. Y/N, who seethes and huffs and kicks their feet and grits their teeth and punches their pillow into pulpy fluff, who curses under their breath and has to burn all the letters they write about how much they despise their family. Y/N who was only spared punishment after the scraps of those letters were found because MK cried and begged for his daddies to forgive his older sibling because-

Because Y/N, in spite of their jealously and anger, will still roll up both sleeves, sit down, and teach their little brother how to tie his shoes, how to roll up a tube of toothpaste to squeeze the last bit out, how to boil water and brown meat.

There's this normalcy to being hated by someone that anchors MK to reality, even though he's a little too young and naive to really put his grateful feelings into words, so instead it all manifests as "Y/N is my favorite person ever and ever!" that Wukong and Macaque don't like (because they are both horribly jealous) but will force Y/N to reciprocate.

And even when his beloved older sibling bullies their parents into coughing up the necessary resources in order to head off to college, MK keeps in touch with the phones he begs both his fathers to buy, and manages to maneuver them both into two strict "buts".

Specifically, "You can go off to college, but you have to keep in touch with us and MK." and "We'll foot the bill, but you have to come back and stay here during the weekends."

Which is... enough. Enough of a thread cut loose that Y/N slips free to experience at least a mildly normal life pursuing their desired field with some actual space to grow and heal and establish normal relationships outside of their toxic family.

(Even though they're definitely becoming the mom/dad friend.)

Then there's the matter of "How good of a hero will MK be without his good-natured upbringing, courtesy of Pigsy and Tang?" that you brought up, and the answer to that question is: "Don't worry about it, because MK doesn't get to be a hero."

After all, why would his dads risk losing their miracle baby?

So it isn't even "Would MK ditch a fight or otherwise give up on it when he struggles?", it's "Can Y/N bare-knuckle Red Son's cute face into pulp with only their long suppressed rage as fuel?" because MK isn't the hero of NTB- Y/N is.

And they don't ever intend on losing the new life they fought to find.

[pennyold]

behavior | j.m

Summary: a small correction from your best friend's father will help you avoid being a badly behaved girl.

Warnings: plot then filthy shi, public exhibition, flirting, arguing, suggestive language, car sexism, fingering, oral (male receiving), choking, swearing, size kink, and orgasm denial.

w.c: 1,623

a/n: what yall think about this one? I fucking loved it, enjoy it !!

main masterlist ↲

peace and love, penny ★

Tess's phone started ringing in my hands, she was unconscious in front of me; I sat her in a chair, looked at her phone, and the name "dad" glowed on the screen, it stopped ringing and I felt relieved, I wouldn't know what to say about this. He called again, and I started thinking about what to invent in a message, I couldn't let him hear my voice.

"Hi, Dad," minutes later he replied, "Why don't you answer the calls, Tess? Are you still with your friend? Are you okay?" I answered each of his questions, and he responded calmly, his next message left me stunned, "I'll arrive in ten minutes, I can take my friend home. I don't like that place, and especially because you are being alone without someone to accompany you." I bit my lip thinking of a response, I answered and blocked the phone, putting it in my pocket.

Ten minutes later, I was outside the establishment with Tess in my arms. In the distance, I saw her dad's pickup truck, and my heart was pounding; I was very nervous. When he parked in front of us, he got out of the car, almost breathing fire as he walked towards me and Tess. "What the hell were you thinking?" He looked at me, and I just stared at the ground, feeling embarrassed. "Tess drank too much and has thrown up twice," I said. He shook his head and picked up Tess, carrying her to the back seat. "Get in the car. I'll take you home.”

Without saying a word, I got into the truck, buckled my seatbelt, and stayed silent until Joel got into the driver's seat, my skin prickled at the sight of his serious face; he was angry. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye during the ride, visualizing the scenery through the window when I saw the street of my house. I was about to speak, but I noticed how Joel tightened the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. I was screwed. 

Finally, I spotted a familiar street; we were near his house. He parked outside the house and unbuckled his seatbelt. "Wait here," he said. I grabbed the edges of my skirt and said, "Okay." He took Tess from the back seat and brought her into the house; it took him a few minutes to return, I watched as he took firm strides, got into the truck, and looked at me, "Are your parents home?" I nodded, "Do your parents know I'm taking you home?" "Yes," he nodded. "Perfect." He started the truck.

During the ride, I noticed that he was dissatisfied and I wanted to apologize; I never meant to bring problems to either Tess or him. "Joel" without looking at me spoke "Yes?" I looked at my skirt, still held in my hands. "Sorry about earlier, I didn't mean to lie to you and cause problems for Tess," he laughed. "I don't have problems with Tess, I do with you." Shit...

I looked out the window before speaking; I was cooked, if I said something wrong, it would be my end. I saw that I was not even remotely close to my home, it looked like a construction site about to be finished. I noticed how he moved the gear shift, and the truck stopped. "Joel..." he looked at me without any expression "You know what it means, darling.” I swallowed hard and quietly opened the door, but I couldn't leave because Joel grabbed it and slammed it shut. "Are you trying to escape from your punishment?" I shook my head in denial and shrank into the tiny space between the door and Joel's body. "So? Where would you go? Here, no one will listen to you, nor will they find you," I looked at him, pleading for mercy. "Don't look at me like that, you brought this on yourself," and he was right, I had done it, and I knew what the consequences would be.

Joel and I had agreed to please each other whenever the opportunity arose, as long as Tess and my parents didn't find out. One day, like today, I went out with Tess and lost her because I was with a guy. Joel showed up and asked me about her, and I didn't know where she was. He got angry just like today, and I got a punishment, painful, but I was very turned on.

I straightened up in my place and accepted my fate, I was being a brat by not accepting the punishment I deserved. "Good girl, always pleasing me," he looked me from head to thighs, as far as he could see. "What panties are you wearing?" "White lingerie," he smiled at me and sat up in his seat. "Take them off." I obeyed and took them off, allowing him a glimpse of my wet pussy. I slid the lingerie down my heels and handed them to him. He took them and tucked them into his pants pocket.

He patted his crotch; he wanted me to sit there, so I did. I felt my pussy brush against his bulge while adjusting myself, and Joel opened my legs, parting the folds of my core. I moaned and rested my head on his shoulder. "Joel," his breath grazed my neck, and I shivered when he brought his mouth close to my ear. "I didn't bring you here to please you, darling, relax." I bit my lip and nodded.

He rubbed my clit, and my legs trembled due to the sensation of his large fingers on my folds. I bit my lip again to avoid letting out a moan, and I felt his middle finger travel to my entrance, stimulating it. I couldn't resist and moaned, writhing in Joel's lap. "Stop moving," he said. I obeyed, and due to the effort, my legs were trembling; I couldn't resist it.

He inserted his finger and pumped my entrance, making me writhe more and my legs contract due to my effort not to move. He pumped his finger quickly, and I felt I was close to cumming, and so was Joel; so he stopped, and I could feel my pussy contract due to the lack of attention, I whimpered. "Joel,” he pulled my hair, making my neck twist back "Please, let me cum” he shook his head, tightening his grip on my hair "Bad girls like you don't deserve to cum" he threw me into the passenger seat and started unbuttoning his pants, I watched each action in detail, waiting for his orders.

He asked me to come closer with his hand, and I did. I leaned towards his pants and saw how he pulled the glans out of his underwear. Joel's cock is huge and thick, with prominent veins and the tip dripping pre-cum. I adjusted myself and Joel grabbed my hair again, guiding my mouth to the tip of his glans. I leaned in and slowly sucked the tip, then pushed it deeper until I couldn't fit it anymore.

"Suck it all,” I tried, but I choked, so I only sucked it as far as I could, Joel, unsatisfied, made me take his entire glans into my mouth, I choked again, and saliva dripped from my mouth, now he was controlling my actions. The tip of his cock hit my throat, and I couldn't take it anymore, a tear fell from my eye, causing me to swallow it with his dick.

I felt his cock start to twitch inside my mouth; he was about to cum, so I sucked it as hard as I could. While he grabbed my hair, making quick movements, he groaned as he felt his arousal approaching. "I'm gonna cum in that pretty mouth, darling, and you're going to swallow it, right?” I moaned, feeling myself choke more and more, feeling his cum spurt down my throat. Joel made me swallow it, keeping his cock in my throat. "Shit, did you swallow it, darling?" I nodded. "Everything?" I nodded again and showed him my tongue. "Good girl," I watched as he adjusted his pants and put on his belt. "Now, I want you to touch yourself until you cum, while I take you home. Could you do that for me?” I nodded and slightly opened my legs, placing my hand on my pussy, and massaging it to stimulating it a bit. "Yes, that's right, don't stop doing it until you cum, baby.”

I rubbed my clit with my arousal, I bit my lip holding a moan; I wasn't satisfied, I wanted Joel's fingers fucking my pussy. "Mmh, I want your fingers, Joel." He shook his head and said, "You don't deserve it. Get yourself off, and I'll see if I can please you next time." I whimpered and proceeded to insert a finger, but it wasn't what I wanted, so I went back to rubbing my clit, trying to reach my climax. "Shit, shit, Joel, I'm gonna cum.” He glanced at me with a smile, "Cum, princess, I want to see that pretty pussy dripping your juices." I opened my mouth, letting out the breath I didn't know I was holding "Oh my... shit!" my pussy started to contract and pulse as I rubbed it gently "That's it, so obedient" I looked ahead and noticed the traffic light was red, I took him by the face and kissed him desperately.

"Still needy? Huh?" I nodded, "Tough luck, princess, now you’ll have to wait. I hope you understood your lesson, I don’t want to be rude, but I won’t respond if you don't behave next time." I grimaced, and apart from him, he was very mean and cruel sometimes.

divider: @/enchanthings-a

[imstillalexcomic]

This isn’t really a question, but your comic in your pinned post means a lot to me. I’m going to be leaving my parents house in a few months, and I have been incredibly torn over what to do next, because they are some of the people who voted against my rights, even if they didn’t know it was me they are hurting. To know that others are experiencing the same thing, and to hear someone else struggle with the idea of keeping someone in vs cutting them out of your life has made me feel less alone, so thank you <3

My heart goes out to you.

I’m truly sorry you’re in this situation. Frankly, I still don’t know what I’m going to do, but it seems like the choice is being made for me by other people in my life.

I don’t want to lose people who are close to me.

I especially don’t want to lose the person that was discussed in the comic. But at the moment, it’s been made clear to me that even though they didn’t vote to exterminate me, they view supporting those who did as ok while me not wanting to share a table with those people makes me the extreme one.

I want to be angry, but I’m really just sad.

We are here for each other.

You are not alone.

We will get through this.

[bamboozledbird]

oᥒᥴᥱ ι'm ყoᥙrs ι'm ᥲᥣᥕᥲყs ყoᥙrs //stiles stilinski imagine characters: stiles stilinski, fem!reader, mentioned malia tate pairing(s): stiles x you word count: 4k tags: exes to ???, hurt some comfort, set in s5 warnings: some light emotional cheating, i think that's it, sad boy hours, *pats stiles’s head* this boy can fit so much trauma in here

a/n: long time no see. i've missed you my babies, and thank you so much for all the love while i was gone. i'm back with my usual overdose of angst and em dashes. i can't help it; i have a sickness. also, the timing of when stiles and malia got together is a little fudged, so they probably started dating in 4b.

It’s an icy slice of fear that wakes you up. A white flash of ‘fight or flight’ behind your sleep-sticky lids. A rattling that doesn’t belong to the pitter-patter of sleet or the whiplash of wind against your bedroom window. You sit up on your forearm, peek out from behind your fleece blanket, and pray until you’re nauseous that there isn’t a pair of glowing eyes waiting for you on the other side of the glass. 

The sleet leaves angry rivulets in the dirt-smudged panes. Sad little lines of streaming water, flooding in time with the choppy squall—you can’t help but think it looks like weeping.

A soft sigh falls from your mouth and stirs the stilted air in the room: No skulking eyes…but a foreboding sense of unease still looms above your head like the plumes of steely clouds outside your window. They swallow every trace of starlight and shift every so often in your peripheral vision, almost like they’re alive.  

The rattling sounds again, soft but deafening in the darkness. It’s a familiar sound, someone scrambling on the loose tiling of your roof, but a forgotten one. It's strange, sweet-sharp, and out of place in your current reality.

A noise that shouldn’t exist outside of a memory. 

Stiles spills into your room and lands on his knees, dripping water onto the hardwood floor. His hair is plastered to his forehead from the storm outside, and the dark clouds are a mocking reflection of the look on his face. 

The moon has eclipsed all the sunlight in his eyes, and it feels so, so cold.

For a moment, you think you’re dreaming, or maybe you’re still stuck in that luminescent oil slick spill between sleep and consciousness. Stiles looks like something from a dream—from a nightmare. He’s a boy, but he isn’t. He’s there, but he isn’t. He’s lost to something you can’t see, swept up in the storm and turned into something else.

The glow of your phone illuminates the pinch of your brow, the squint of your bleary eyes. 3:27 am. Stiles used to sneak in through your window a couple times a week, even during the day, just to avoid the parental inquisition. He still does sometimes, rarely, only when Beacon Hills is on the verge of collapsing—and it always seems to be 3 in the morning. 

He only ever needs you at 3 in the morning now. 

It makes you feel a little sick, the reminder that the only string tying you together now is barbed wire.  

You sit up in your bed and wait for Stiles to say something—to move—but he doesn’t. He just sits there, soaked to the bone on his knees, and stares at something beyond the shifting shadows on your bedroom walls. 

“Stiles?” 

Stiles doesn’t reply. Doesn’t even make a sound. 

You crawl out of your bed and sit down on the floor next to him, draping a woven blanket over his shoulders. It almost matches his flannel, blue and checkered. It’s a little thing that would’ve made you smile before, mostly because Stiles would get this warm look in his eyes when you did: so fond it felt like worship. 

It’s fall. The air smells like apples and earth. You watch the shadows of little fish swim in jagged circles through murky lake water. Stiles is a warm presence against your side. 

He buries his nose in your hair and hums, “You like the pieces.”

A fish breaks from the group and bubbles near the surface. Its silver scales gleam in the setting sun: a piece of a fractured landscape, a detail that steals all the color in your peripheral vision. 

You watch the fish swirl for a moment, almost like it’s dancing, and then shrug with a little grin. “I guess.”

You feel Stiles smile against your temple.

“Me too.”

Now, the only color your retinas can detect is black. 

Stiles’s pupils swallow his face, and they stick to everything like tar. Seep into the room and stain the moonlight until the blue haze over his skin looks more sickly than luminous. He looks alarmingly corpse-like, so still on your floor, slimy from the storm keening outside—hollowed out from the storm rotting inside. 

You sigh after a moment; a soft little sound to break the surface of strained silence coating the room. “Come on.”

It doesn’t take much prodding. Stiles bends to your guiding hands mindlessly and sits down on the edge of your bed without so much as a grunt. Pliant and robotic in the same breath. Ever the paradox, your boy is.

Though. 

He’s not, really. Yours, that is. 

Not anymore. 

Not for a long time. 

“Everything’s so fucked up.” 

Stiles is quiet, but his whisper still startles you. His voice is raw—and maybe, you’d really convinced yourself that he was dead. It feels like he is sometimes. At least, a version of him. Stiles, in the mole-speckled flesh, he’s a ghost of the boy you knew, a killer of the figment boy you never lost. A paradox. So difficult to read. Impossible to hold on to. 

Stiles doesn’t notice that you’ve gone silent, but he doesn’t really seem to notice anything beyond the wet film over his eyes. 

“I don’t…I don’t see a way out this time. I don��t know…” he scrubs a hand over his face and looks infinitely older than eighteen, “I don’t think I can fix it—any of it.”

You’re reminded, briefly, of the night he broke up with you. When you looked up, saw the look on his face, and you knew. You have the same sick feeling in your stomach now, and you want to crawl inside yourself until the flip-flopping of your intestines stops—to wring them into little knots until there’s nothing left. 

Stiles looks like he feels about the same, so small on your bed for such a lanky man. 

“What?” You pull your knees to your chest and hold onto your shins so that you don’t reach for him. “The Nemeton? We’ll find it again…eventually, and—”

“No,” Stiles grits his teeth and closes his eyes, “I mean, yes, but it’s…everything. Everything’s falling apart.” 

“Not everything. You’ve always got—”

“Not anymore.” Stiles gets that dead-inside look behind his eyes again, and your stomach turns. “You and me…and Scott—”

Your sheets whisper against your legs as you shift towards him. “Scott?”

You’ve seen Stiles wear pretty much every expression under the sun—backlit by shitty diner lights, laughing; tangled up in white sheets, panting; drenched in sweat, sobbing—but god. The way Stiles looks now, like his soul has been bleached from his bones, drained from his eyes with a power drill, it’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen. Worse than the Nogistune, because it’s Stiles. Whatever this skeleton on strings is, it’s him.  

“I fucked up.” Stiles whispers so softly you can barely hear him over the cracks in his voice, “I fucked up so bad.”

It takes you a second to realize that he’s talking about Scott. Dumb, considering you asked, but you’ve imagined him saying that to you so many times it almost feels like a memory—like he’s talking about you. 

You clear your throat and pull at a loose string on your blanket until it snaps. “He’ll get over it. He always does.”

Stiles just shakes his head, keeps his eyes trained on his muddy sneakers. “Not this time.”

Your fingers twitch with the impulse to grab his hand. “What happened, Stiles?”

“I…” Stiles rubs his hand over his mouth, trying to wipe away the taste of his thoughts. He swallows and then stands, tugging a little on his wet hair until it sticks up in random tufts—it would be cute under any other circumstances, if Stiles didn’t have a disturbingly manic look in his eyes and a desperate tumble of words flooding from his split lip. “The ends justify the means was just a thought experiment, right? Machiavelli was an academic, not a soldier—you know what kind of people actually practice Machiavellianism? Stalin, Mao—Peter ‘fuckin’ killed my own niece’ Hale.”

Your brow scrunches as you try to find the invisible path connecting all his seemingly disjointed thoughts. “Stiles—”

“And I know I rag on Scott all the time for being too soft,” Stiles sneakers squeak against the floor as he continues pacing, without a breath or so much as a glance in your direction. He might as well be pontificating to the darkness. “I mean, fuck, how many times have I said it’d be easier if we just killed the psycho? A dozen? Definitely enough for one of those stupid fuckin’ ‘take a shot’ memes.”

Stiles stops abruptly mid-step and finally looks at you, really looks at you, for the first time tonight. His Bambi eyes look so big right now, completely open and boundless on his sweet face, like the child he hasn’t been since sophomore year. “I didn’t…I don’t really mean it, you know. I don’t actually want...” 

His voice is so small it breaks your heart.  

“I know,” you say softly, coaxing him to stay here with you, in the moment.

Stiles blinks at you slowly and hangs his gaze on your face like it’s the moon. “I know it would kill him…feeling like this.” He spits it out like ‘this’ is something vile, poison on his tongue.  

Your stomach sinks, and a prickling sensation of hot-cold settles through your sinew. You lick your drying lower lip and methodically rub your clammy palms up and down your thighs. “Feeling like what?”

Stiles’s momentary dip into the present fades with the next blink of his clumped lashes. 

He starts pacing again, bending and flexing his fingers with twitching gestures that clarify little and worry you greatly. “I get it, totally support it as a concept. I mean, the greater good outweighs a scumbag or two—conceptually, because how do you really define scumbag? And that’s if you use a qualifier; real consequentialists think it’s totally fine to kill whoever the fuck you want as long as it’s in the name of a good outcome.” 

You blink a few times and drag your tongue over your teeth, “Right…killing innocent people: bad. That’s the general consensus.”

Stiles’s eyes dart back to your face. “What if they aren’t?”

“Aren’t what?” 

Maybe, if it weren’t almost four in the morning, you’d be able to follow his tangential breakdown. Maybe, if you hadn’t become dependent on his quiet sleep-babbling to fall asleep at night, if he hadn’t become the only thing capable of bleaching the nightmares from your eyelids, your temples wouldn’t be throbbing so violently. But it is almost 4 am, and you haven’t fallen asleep next to Stiles in over a year—no matter how right he looks when he sits down next to you on your bed.

Stiles’s throat bobs with his swallow before he says, “What if they aren’t innocent?”

“Stiles,” you grab one of his hands and search his face, scan every solemn line and curve for some semblance of meaning, “what’s going on?”

Stiles chews on his bottom lip and lets out a ragged breath, going stiff—bracing himself for the fallout. His voice is thick with fear when he finally whispers, “What if someone was going to hurt someone you cared about?”

You let out a heavy sigh and study his expression, eyes flickering across the unrelenting question written in his pinched forehead and glassy eyes. “Do the ends justify the means?” 

Stiles nods and bites down on his jagged thumbnail, “Yeah.”

You hold Stiles’s gaze so that he can see your eyes, so earnest they almost look pained, and nod, slow and definitive. “Yeah.”

It takes a second, but when his body catches up with his brain, Stiles collapses in on himself. Turns into a ragdoll of relief and wet clothes, and drops his head into his shaking hands. 

“F-fuck,” Stiles exhales and wipes his face dry with cruel scrubs of his hands. “Sorry—I just…” he digs his thumbs into his temples and trembles, “I’m losing my fucking mind, and I didn’t know where else to go.” He glances up from his hands, looks so devastatingly lovely as he peers up at you through his wet lashes it hurts, and murmurs, “There wasn’t anywhere else…anyone else. Nobody…” 

Stiles shakes his head slightly and clears his throat, but his words are still syrupy with so much meaning when he says, “I don’t really feel like I’m…me anywhere else.” He pauses again, and you forget how to breathe when his gaze refocuses on your eyes. His tongue flicks over his split lip, and then he whispers, “I’m not me unless I’m with you.”

This boy. This boy. He can wreck you without even trying. 

You have to reorient yourself before you get stuck on the drizzle of honey in Stiles’s eyes. They’ve always been so…alive. There’s an entire ecosystem in his irises, savanna grass swaying under the glow of sunset. A blackhole in his pupils, bending and distorting your every thought to Stiles, Stiles, Stiles.  Stop. Breathe. Count your fingers. 

Your arms are around your shins, the air is cold, and Stiles has someone who isn't you.

You still wake up with the taste of him sticking to your teeth, sweet honey and sharp cloves, but it’s never enough. Lately, it lingers like a cavity.  

You spent so long thinking you weren’t supposed to be friends, and you weren’t. You were supposed to be together—now you don’t know what you’re supposed to be. How can you belong to a memory?

What does Stiles think when he looks at you now? Does a thought even come? 

Does he ache for who you were that Friday at the lake? Does he still love that girl in his arms–orange and warm under the setting sun, blissfully unaware of the end? 

Oh, he does. Stiles aches for you, thinks of you, constantly. He meant what he said; he only feels solid when it's just you, him, and the shiny little bubble that keeps out the rest of the world. He doesn’t feel…real when he’s around other people, pretending like everything’s fine. Like he hasn’t lost every shiny piece of the life he had before his mind was stolen. 

That’s how it is for Stiles now; there’s before, and then there’s after. He can feel the schism widening with every single fucked up thing he does. Lately, it feels like that’s the only thing he does: completely and catastrophically fuck up. 

The thing is, when they finally got him—it—out, Stiles thought that would be it. Happily ever after. Evil expunged. Demon defeated. End-stop. No page turn. Cheers to the Nemeton. Stiles learned, very quickly, that you can’t purge darkness. It always leaves a mark. 

The days after…everything, Stiles discovered that rotting was a real human emotion. He still can’t believe people don’t smell it on him. The remnants of Stiles haven’t stopped putrefying in the Nogistune’s absence, and he just knows, somehow, that something this malignantly alive is contagious. He didn’t want to ruin you—doesn’t, Stiles corrects himself before he can finish the thought—doesn’t want to contaminate something so good with something so sick. 

Or maybe…maybe it was because Stiles knew that you’d see it. You’d see it, and you’d leave. 

The only clean thing he has is memories. He can’t stain the past. The figment girl in his mind can’t hurt. Can’t die. Can’t run. Stiles keeps you there—or, at least, some version of you, a you he can keep underneath the shelter of his ribcage, where you can watch the sunset turn fish scales into topaz in his maroon jacket, happy, forever.

Stiles can’t really remember the last time he saw you, the real version of you, happy. You must have laughed without him at some point, but he can’t think of anything other than when you were with him. Well, that, and the end. Stiles remembers the end with painful clarity. 

You were at a lake. The lake. Somehow, it only occurs to Stiles now how shitty that must’ve been for you. Anyway, you just sat there for a while, and he just listened to the silence wash over the world like a flood until the sun reached its peak. He remembers thinking: Holy fuck, this is what they meant. All those stupid songs and poems. This is what it means to break. Stiles couldn’t stand the way you kept your eyes closed, like you were afraid of seeing the inevitable car crash. If I kiss her, he’d thought, everything will be okay. If I kiss her, she’ll forgive me. 

Stiles didn’t kiss you. He just said, “I’m sorry,” and the words hung heavily over your heads. In the harrowing quiet, Stiles thought: I never realized cordial could sound so much like cowardly. 

“What are you doing here, Stiles? What is this?” 

Your voice drags Stiles from the gutters of his mind, and feels a fresh wave of shame when he hears how tired you sound. What is he doing here? Stiles knew it was a mistake before he even started his Jeep, but the flicker of doubt in Scott’s eyes drowned out his best intentions. 

“I just…” Stiles swallows, and his hand moves to scratch at his wounded shoulder reflexively. He…he just needed to be with the only person on the face of this planet that still knew him—who would get it.

You get tired of waiting, and when you speak again, Stiles feels about two inches tall. 

“You should be with her.” You say it nicely enough. Polite. No venom to fill the awkward hollowness. Cordial. 

Fuck. Stiles fucking hates cordial. He kind of wishes you would yell at him. At least, then, he’d know that you still cared. 

Stiles clasps his hands together between his thighs and leans his weight onto his elbows. He probably should be with Malia. No. He definitely should, but he’s not. And right now, like this, he doesn’t want to be. 

“She’s not good at…” Stiles clears his throat and sits up a little, “she tries, but she just…can’t.”

It’s not even her fault, and that’s probably the worst part about it. He doesn’t want to be another bad thing that’s happened to Malia Tate, but bad things just seem to be his specialty lately. 

“You know why you like her, right?” you say softly, not unkindly, but Stiles thinks he isn’t going to like the answer—mostly, because he’s sure it’s true. 

“No.” Stiles pauses and draws a circle in the dust with his pointer finger, “Well, I mean, yeah. Didn’t know you put so much thought into it.”

You don’t bother to dignify such a blatant lie with a direct response. That’s fair, Stiles thinks, and tries not to shrink in on himself.

Instead, you lift your shoulder like it’s made of marble and murmur, “She needs you.”

It’s innocuous enough—sweet, even, under different circumstances—but Stiles feels it like a blade. He clears his throat; it doesn’t help the dryness. He manages to arch a brow as he pushes out a raspy little, “So?”

The corner of your mouth lifts into a small smile; Stiles can still see it quiver. “You’re a control freak,” you bump his knee with your own, and it’s the first place on his body Stiles can actually feel, “and you and I both know she’s never going to be the one to end it.”

That was just like you; even your jokes are wrapped up inside an argument. It always left him frozen in a maddening power struggle between quipping something snarky and kissing you. No one else had ever managed to keep him on the ropes like you, and maybe that’s why no one after has managed to keep his, admittedly, short-attention span for long. Stiles has always liked his sweetness with a little bite. 

Of course, now there was no sweetness between the two of you. It’s all uncomfortable silences and unspoken thoughts that left his teeth aching for something more

Stiles’s jaw goes tight as he brings his lips to his knuckles, feeling a bit like bearing down on the bone. “That’s what you think happened?” He glances at you, eyes a little haunted, “I couldn’t control you, so I ended it?”

You tilt your head to the side, so sympathetic it makes Stiles a little nauseous as you murmur, “I think you realized that I didn’t need you; I think it scared the hell out of you.” You say it so softly, and it impales him the heart, right through the fucking center. 

It would be one thing if you were angry; people say stupid shit they don’t actually mean when they’re angry all the time—but this? You look like you mean it. You look like you mean it, and you’re saying it for his own good. The look on your face, it looks a whole lot like the truth 

And.

Maybe it is. 

It’s not like you’re wrong. Stiles remembers thinking it, more than once. He remembers more than a few mornings where he woke up to the sound of your breathing, your warm breath washing over his neck, and he thought he’d probably die if you ever stopped. It felt like an epiphany every time, the reminder that without you his world would be irreparably changed. 

Dark. Without you, Stiles’s world would go dark. 

Maybe, the Nogistune was just an excuse. Maybe, Stiles had been leapfrogging over his heart for a long time before then. Avoiding the future. Wrapping the present around your body and constantly thinking: I can’t believe it's not over yet. 

Yet. Yet. Yet. 

Maybe, Stiles thought about it so much he tempted fate. Maybe, that’s why the Nogistune chose him. Maybe, he should stop scapegoating the devil. He did end up with Malia after all. 

It’s different with her. Not bad necessarily, just different. He takes care of her, and he’s good at that. Making the plan. Having the answers. 

Being in control. 

With you…that was different. 

Stiles is a cynic at heart, but when he looked at—looks at—you, he felt less lonely. When he was with you, he kind of got why his dad used to always show up to work 15 minutes late because he got distracted by the way his mom made coffee. The simple domesticity, the comfort of a morning routine for the rest of his life, the concept of tried and true blue love: Stiles got it all when he saw you.  

You saw his happiness, and you gave it back to him. Every single time. That kind of love…it’s become abundantly clear to Stiles that kind of love is hard to find. Like maybe, once in a lifetime hard to find. 

Stiles swallows hard and shakes his head. “Whatever it was that I was afraid of,” his voice drops to a whisper, “this is so much worse.”

You’re still the only person he can really cry in front of. Stiles is reminded of that when his eyes burn and something wet drips onto his lips. He sniffles quietly, feeling so incredibly small when he realizes the sound is coming from him. 

Stiles can’t look up from his shoes—won’t—and then you speak. You’re so quiet he almost misses it. 

“Life’s a lot better when you’re in it.”

The corners of Stiles’s mouth twitch into a small smile. The first one in about a week. Feels like much, much longer. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

[consistantly-changing]

[Image descriptions in order: a tweet by @Nicole_Cliffe "Nicole Cliffe" (verified) which says "If you normalized something (non-awful) because your family did it and then realized it was not, in fact, normal or remotely common, I would love to hear about it."

@momofink "Morgan 5️⃣1️⃣ Finkelstein" replies "the villain in my bedtime stories was always the President of the Homeowner's Association and I was sooooo confused when no one else had heard of him".]

[Tags by you-held-the-door which say #when I was kid my dad and I would play that game at the playground where the kid stays up on the climbing structure #and the adult stays on the ground to chase the kid #usually the adult is like a monster or a lava monster or something #but my dad always pretended to be george bush]

[Tags which say #my dad never let me roll down the windshield when we were on highways #because and I quote "the car is going so fast that the wind can topple cars" #and I just never questioned it until years later #turns out he just didn't like the noise

#also another thing: #you know that game grown ups do with young children where they chase you around #and go "oh you're so cute I could eat you up! I'm going to eat ya!" that kind of thing? #well when my parents did that I used to go "no you won't, you guys love me. also I'm you're only child." #then my mom would go really silent and fake being contrite and tell me that #actually no I had an older sibling that they cannibalized. #I only survived because I was a cute baby and they waited too long and I got too big to fit in the pot anymore. #and it would make me really angry because I knew she was lying but I had no way to prove it #and mom thought it was the funniest thing ever #anyway I only found out in high school when I was trying for a "lol so relatable" type of joke with my friends that apparently #having a long-running joke that your parents had a dead first child that they cannibalized isn't a common thing that other families also do #mmari rambles]

[Tags which say #my family has a phrase for when someone eats most of something and leaves less than a serving of it left #(usually done to avoid having to throw it away. like leaving less than a cup of milk or just crumbs in a bag of chips) #we call it 'buddyfucking. bc ur fucking ur buddy over #apparently it came from my dad's time in the army #ANYWAYS. i quickly learned when i went to college that when most people hear ‘alright who buddyfucked me' #they do NOT think i am asking who left one square of toilet paper on the roll without changing it]

[reignpage]

ok ok sorry for my greedy ass asking another question BUT BUt (also ik u answered a similar question but this one’s just slightly different 😞) how would the jjk men react if someone was being very pushy or like shameless abt hitting on reader(s) like im curious abt who would immediately throw hands or something 😭

Gojo:

He doesn't throw hands. He does verbally bully someone. "Oh hey, glad to see you so happy, dude. Was worried that your dad's business going bankrupt would dampen your mood but I love the commitment to the vibeeee" + "oh I freaking love that shirt. you wear it everyday but it's still just as good as when you bought it 3 years ago niceee"

He trusts goth!reader to look after herself because she has a sharp tongue too and he's not insecure enough to be all macho macho, but he does get worried Goth!reader will leave him lol so he says embarrassing things more to let reader know not to date a brokie like him or something

Geto:

He knows reader would feel extremely uncomfortable but wouldn't be able to speak up for herself so he gets angry. If it's in the studio, they're being kicked out, even mid session. If it's anywhere else, he'll put his martial art skills to use and bend their arm back and shove them or something. But then he'll have to thoroughly wash his hands and he takes a while to calm down.

Choso:

Stands behind them and tries to intimidate with his emo energy. Usually works but he never needs to do much more than that because reader takes care of herself. She's a lot scarier than he could ever be

Toji:

Does not hesitate to lay a punch. Big guy like him just needs to stand to his full height and cross his arms to get those muscles bulging and yeah the dude's scurrying away

Nanami:

Lectures them about consent and proper etiquette. Could fight tho if they're very persistent and aggressive. He's built af

Sukuna:

He'll destroy them. Touch her and he's breaking your fingers. Then he'll buy out the loser's parents business, or drive up their mortgage/rent, gets them fired, blacklisted from whatever industry they do, maybe even plants evidence for drug use or embezzlement. It's slow and sweet. Even years later when they're all old and he thinks Sukuna's forgotten....he has not. He'll get his kid arrested for every little thing, if they so much as litters, they're in prison. If he winds up on reddit, he'll somehow make it so that it looks like he was inciting violence and spread hate speech/terrorism on the platform.

[grapejuicestyless]

Seven(ways to Neverland)

JJ Maybank x fem!reader

Summery: “And I’ve been meaning to tell you, I think your house is haunted. Your dad is always mad, and that must be why.” Y/n and JJ grew up together, and while it was inevitable, Y/n and JJ swore they’d never grow up. Not even when life told them it wasn’t possible to be young forever.

“My Ma is always saying dad left because he was a piece of work.” The girl said softly into the cold silence. Waves lapped at the shore calmly, and wind blew through her wild hair. She twisted the loose ring on her middle finger, a hollowed out and ground down acorn that was more brown than green nowadays. She spun the slightly wet ring around on her skin. “But I don’t believe her.”

The girl tucked her chin into her knees, curling up like a turtle in a shell. Her eyes glistened in the pale moonlight.

“Why?” The tow head blonde boy asked, curiosity in his defeated gaze.

“She drinks a lot.” The girl shrugged like it was normal. “She always did, but more now that dad is gone. Her friends do too. They talk about how their ‘glory days’ are behind them…or something like that.” She overshared her mother’s secrets, her young mind not comprehending the idea of dirty laundry and why you don’t air it out.

“Oh.” The boy looked down at the sand. “My dad drinks too.” He looked to the girl, who was now drawing circles in the sand mindlessly.

“Maybe it’s a grown up thing, and we don’t understand it yet.” She said hopefully, but her voice was low and quiet, and she looked awfully sad when saying it.

“Maybe.” The boy responded just as quietly.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if my mom married your dad?” The girl suddenly questioned. “Then maybe they wouldn’t drink as much. They wouldn’t need to, and my Ma’s friends wouldn’t have to sleepover in my bed.”

The boy nodded slowly, considering the idea before tossing it out the window.

“You wouldn’t want my dad to marry your mom.”

Silence filled the beach again, and the boy took some sand in his hand and watched it drain out slowly back onto the ground.

“He’s always angry. Sometimes he’s not, but it feels like he is.” It was the girls turn to look down and try to find some words of sympathy.

“Yeah. Parents suck.” The girl smiled, knowing the feeling of helplessness all too well.

They were only seven, but they knew a whole lot about things they shouldn’t, and they understood that just because the world worked that way for them, that didn’t mean it worked the same for everyone.

“Does he hit?” The girl asked curiously, her smile fading. The conversation seemed so casual, calm. Little children who should have been cowering, already accustomed to the treatment.

“Sometimes.” The boy answered truthfully, and the girl nodded.

“So does my mom.” The girl said quietly, still doodling in the sand beside her feet.

“Do you hate her?” The blonde boy asked after a beat passed, looking to see what the girl would say.

She thought about it for a moment, sucking her bottom lip between her teeth and twisting and pushing against the acorn on her finger.

She shook her head.

“No.”

That was her answer. Plain and simple like there was no other reason for it. She was her mother after all, and she was a kid. She would cling to her and try her best to be great for her, and when her mom would hit, she would try even harder to be great because even if her mom was a bad person, she was a bad person that the girl wanted to love her so badly.

The innocent and the good look up to the horrible and the ugly.

“Would you run away?” The boy pressed further, maybe because he was curious of what the girl would say, but maybe also because he was curious if anyone else shared the same thoughts.

“Would you come with me?” She asked.

“Why?” The boy questioned with his brow raised, his head cocked to the side.

“I don’t like being alone. I don’t like the dark.” She hugged her knees even tighter.

As the wind blew warm salty air onto the shore, waves crashed more violently against the sand, the tide rolling in quickly.

“You’d hate my house then.” The boy joked with a chuckle. It sounded almost bitter. “Dark, quiet, scary.”

“Sounds haunted.” The girl looked back into the boys blue eyes.

“Maybe. But ghosts aren’t real.” The boy shut down the girls observation quickly, picking at the loose threads at the ends of his board shorts.

The girl hummed and silence fell over the two kids again. Messy blonde hair and two tangles braids with dead ends fraying in the wind. A faded pink shirt with cursive writing and a dusty white tank top. They were so young.

“Well, I think your house is haunted. Your dad is always mad, and that must be why.” She spoke up suddenly, kicking the sand and standing up.

“My dad isn’t afraid of any ghosts.” The boy stood up quickly, looking straight back at the girl. They were at the age where he could still stand eye level with her, but he figured in a few years he’d have a few inches on her.

“But he must be afraid of you.” The girl reasoned.

“My dad isn’t afraid of any seven year olds either.” The boy argued a little more firmly, feeling protective of his father, or his lack of, despite all the cruelty he was shown from such a young age.

“Well then, why does he hit you? He has to be afraid of something if he’s hitting you. My mom says it’s because I look so much like my dad. Like I could be the ghost of him and she hates it.”

The boy fell quiet, which was unusual. Everything about the way he acted around her was odd. He wasn’t a quiet boy, wasn’t one to just sit and talk, he’d rather pace around and pick at his nails.

“I didn’t think of it like that.” The boy said softly, looking down at his dusty boots. “Maybe I look like my mom…” He agreed, but he didn’t really know what his mom looked like.

“Well, I bet she was really pretty.” The girl said, her eyes shining despite her lack of a smile. Like she was calm on the inside despite the outer furrowing of her brows.

“You think?” The boy asked, raising a brow and his head.

“I know.”

She was looking right at him, his blonde hair and his blue eyes. His skin was tan, soft looking. He had sun kissed freckles on his nose and pink lips. Anyone that pretty had to have a pretty mom, she thought. But they would never know.

The boy blushed, and he held out his dusty hand until she took it in a loose handshake.

“JJ. JJ Maybank.” He smiled, looking back into her eyes. He was only seven, and he wasn’t like his friend Pope. He wasn’t the kid who read in his free time or who practiced spelling on his weekends. He was out between the sand and the weeds, picking at the dirt and getting his knees muddy. But even he could see the wild look she had, untamed but gentle.

“Y/n. Y/n Y/l/n.” She smiled in return. She had a sweet smile, JJ thought. He’d never thought that before, or if he had he hadn’t thought about him thinking that. She had a really sweet smile. She was sweet. Blush from the wind on her cheeks and coloring the tip of her nose. A missing front tooth, which, by the cut in her bottom lip right where it should have been, JJ figured she’d knocked it out herself.

“Y/l/n.” JJ hummed, putting it to memory.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you.” Y/n hummed, her hair pulled back into two uneven braids, the part in the back a mess. JJ had done them for her today.

“Shoot away.” He replied calmly, smiling and tugging at the end of one braid, watching the girl’s head tilt closer, her feet crossing in an unbalanced step. She slapped his bicep weakly.

“JJ!” She laughed through her annoyance. She could never really be annoyed with him, she believed. She hoped JJ didn’t know it because Y/n figured if he did, he’d push through every fragment of tranquility they shared. He’d find a way to bring her right to the brink of frustration and then make her laugh it all off over and over again.

“What does JJ even stand for anyway.” Y/n huffed, crossing her arms over her chest, wrinkling her waffled shirt. “Probably something stupid.” She smirked, unraveling her hands to tuck them into the pockets of her hand-me-down overalls.

JJ punched her, his lips drawn in a thin line. Y/n rubbed her arm quickly to soothe the sting, her brows kissing at the center of her forehead. “Ow!” She yelped.

That was the thing with growing up, some get stronger, and others get left behind. Not to say Y/n was weak, the bruises on JJ’s arms from her little shoves and playful punches were proof enough, but they were nearly twelve now, and JJ figured he could probably bench her by this point.

“You started it!” He argued, though his palm still smoothed over where he hit her maybe just a but too hard. He’d check to make sure he didn’t leave a mark later.

“Did not!” They fought like children, and smiled freely like they did when they were seven, like they didn’t have all the reason to frown, to cry. To let genetics be hereditary and become the punishers. But instead they swung weakly at each other and laughed everything off until nothing really mattered anymore.

A silence fell between their giggles, a silence only broken my JJ’s pointer finger and thumb playing with the little tail tied off at the end of the braid.

“I don’t know. I never asked, I figured it was just my name. JJ.” He shrugged. “Simple. Like me.”

Y/n nearly snorted.

“You might be a simple boy, JJ, but you are not simple.” She smiled, eyes flickering down to her muddy shoes, bright red converse with holes in the sides so wide, ants found refuge in the warm shelter.

“John?” Y/n threw out an idea. JJ shook his head.

“Nah, we already got a John.” He pointed out, stuffing his own hands into his pockets.

“Well, your dad didn’t know that at the time.” She argued, and still, JJ couldn’t get on board.

“Okay.” Y/n thought, humming and biting her bottom lip, sucking it between her teeth, and swiping her tongue over the faded scar where, she had in fact, lost her front tooth all those years ago. An adult tooth had grown in since, but the scar, now pink instead of bloody, lingered like a faded memory.

“Jackson?” She looked at him, and for a moment, he thought about it. Then, he hummed, pulling his own lip between his teeth.

“Nope, too fancy. Maybe if I was Kook royalty.” He joked.

“So maybe one day?” Y/n teased back, wiggling her brows. JJ gave her an amused look as if to say, yeah right.

They went back to listing names, stumbling down the list until random names became those that started with a J. She tried out George with a J, followed by Jerry, and Jeremy. But all fell flat. It seemed to look as though the boys name was nothing more than two letters squished together.

Then, with a click of her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and a sparkle in her eye, she looked up at the blonde with wonder, the start of an idea.

“Jesse James.” She spoke matter-of-factly, her hands cupping her hips confidently.

“Who now?” He raised a brow.

“The outlaw?” She said in return, like it was common knowledge. Like her and Pope didn’t stick their noses deep into western books all summer much to JJ’s dismay. Not that he hadn’t know she was a bookworm, as if she hadn’t lugged around whatever second hand book she could snatch without the librarian noticing, but the summertime was time for the water, the waves, the tide. Not dusty pages written in small cursive letters with stupid plots less lively than any adventure JJ could drag her on.

And, no, he wasn’t jealous. That’s not why he went on a long list of reasons why he didn’t recognize the name, how it evolved into a complaint of her time spent glued to Pope instead of him, because JJ was surely not jealous.

“He was an outlaw back in the 1800’s. He robbed, killed, fought. Ran a gang with other outlaws.” She explained with a plain expression.

“Oh, so an asshole?” JJ shorted, and the sound made Y/n laugh.

“No. Well—yes, but that’s not why I think it’s so fitting. It’s adventurous, fun. Risky, you know?” She gushed over old literature, and god, if it had been Pope or anyone else, JJ swore he would’ve rung their neck by now, or at the very least ran as far away as possible. But Y/n explained it with a giggle, and JJ simply couldn’t resist listening to each word pouring from her mouth.

“Anyway, I think it’s fitting on a surface level.” She shrugged finally, and then, her eyes flickered over to his. “But I think I like plain old JJ the best.” She smiled sweetly, and then, she licked her chapped lips.

JJ figured if she liked it, he liked it too. He never really longed to know what his name stood for, if it meant anything, but her questions always raised his own. He thought a bit more as they walked between the broken branches and thick grass. He felt bugs on his shins and sweat beading down the back of his neck. He adjusted the old, beat up hat that flattened out his messy blonde hair against his forehead.

“Well, what about you?” JJ finally questioned, itching to hear her philosophies some more.

“What about me?” She continued walking, the sound of running water nearby tumbling down smooth rocks.

“Well, if I’m some outlaw, what does that make you? The damsel?” He smirked, and Y/n couldn’t help but roll her eyes.

Could he really picture her in a corset? A layer over another until she was all fabric and barely any skin and bones. A big skirt hiding the frame of her hips and the sweet curls of her hair. She laughed at the image she painted for herself.

“If anything, you’d be the damsel.” She pointed her finger into his arm, looking up at the ground ahead now, and then let out a peaceful sigh.

“The accomplice.” She smiled, hooking her arm in mine. I let my hand slip out of my pocket so she could pull me closer. “But never the follower.” She raised her brows, a serious gleam in her lively eyes through her long lashes.

“Anyway, crime isn’t for me and it isn’t for you either, blondie. You’d end up in jail, and I’d have to bail you out. Hell, I’d probably be behind bars with you too.” She dreamed up the image, already seeing the way JJ would be leaned back, laughing at her stressed out expression. Cool and unbothered, the way he always seemed to be.

“And I don’t know about you, but I don’t just wanna be the kid from the cut who ended up as just another sheriffs little pet. I wanna be something. Someone.” She clenched her fist in determination.

“I wanna be that girl even in my eighties, dancing in the rain and running up and down the beach like my bones can’t flake away.” She smiled brightly. “And I want to scream, I want to yell! I’d scream ferociously, leaping between the waves like we do now, and I’d finally jump from the rocks, and I won’t be scared because I’ll have done it thousands of times.” She painted her future, her desire.

There was no money, no big house with a picket fence and an army of children. Just the ocean, some laughter, and enough fearless ambition to spill into the next lifetime.

“Sounds nice.” JJ agreed, but he didn’t have the same imagination as she did, he didn’t have it in him to dream a dream as pure and grand. So what, he wished for a little money, it didn’t make him any less noble. He didn’t need to live on figure eight, he just didn’t want to be stuck with three jobs until he turned to dirt.

“It will be. And you’ll know it because you’ll be there with me, and we’ll be the same pirates we are now. We’ll smoke on the roof and wear fancy clothing that we made ourselves. We’ll ride the waves and make lemonade and sweet tea like John B’s dad does. We’ll have mustaches from the sugar, and we’ll be young forever with the grass between our toes!”

She stopped, suddenly grabbing his shoulders at the opening of the thick greenery, the sandy beach an open land that laid out for miles around them. The waves hit the smooth rocks, the rougher ones that stood tall thrashing with the heavy water. Sea salt coated their glistening skin.

“We will be interesting forever.” She promised with a serious smile, like she knew there was no other fate for people like them. “And nobody will ever forget how we lived like real people should and how we never let the temptation of a corporate paycheck take away the big picture.”

Her hands wrinkled the shoulders of JJ’s old tank top, the sides cut so far down, it was nearly just a napkin with a hole for his head. Everything about their attire screamed kids from the cut, there was no fooling anyone, yet they carried themselves with pride, like the lack of civility in their lives was a thrill, the dirt and the worms and the bees and sweltering sunburns were all a gift to have been rubbed across them on their walks in the rain, in their summer time hikes to the secret beaches they weren’t supposed to venture on.

The Kooks had it good, an easy life, but Y/n declared that they were the only ones living.

“Well, we can start on that dream now.” JJ declared hopefully, looking out to where the waved lapped at the shore. His ringed fingers pointed out at the rigid rocks that overhung the deep waters.

“If we’ve got a thousand of leaps to take, you have to start with one.” He looked back at the girl, the way she nervously fidgeted before setting her hands stiffly by her sides.

“And then we won’t be scared.” She repeated to herself, but more to him.

“No, we won’t ever be scared again.” And there was a shared understanding, an understanding that dreams are just dreams until they make them more. If she could do this terrifying thing, all for the rest of her deepest wishes to come true, there was a new found certainty that anything scary could be done.

That she and JJ could do all the scary things the world could offer, even just as the awkward children they felt they had grown into. It was possible.

JJ sat in jail for the first time when he turned sixteen. He hated it. His head hung heavily in the palms of his hands, elbows pressed sharply against his thighs, eyes focused on the dirty floor between his old boots.

It wasn’t his fault—not fully at least. Yes, he agreed he had instigated Popes anger, but to JJ he saw everything they had done as self defense. Pope was a good kid, a smart kid, second in the class—no. First. He was first now. She was first, but now she wasn’t. Funny how things can change so quickly, rearrange to make it seem like nothing changed at all.

The point was, Pope had a future, and JJ sure as hell didn’t. Any dreams he had were replaced when she had shared hers, because he decided then that he wanted those things too. But that hope had long vanished, and now Pope had a real chance to chase his dreams, so JJ took the fall. He sunk to a new low just like the boat, sitting alone in the cell she had once warned him about. Only now, she wasn’t there to share it with him.

He thought about that day a lot. Just a year after they’d taken the leap, started the path to their future filled with laughter and whispered secrets, meticulously planned schemes and toothy grins. JJ woke up early, ready to sneak around the back of her house that sat beside John B’s and knock three times on her window. He’d beg her to go sneak away and let loose with him, and of course, she’d agree.

He biked the short distance, ignoring the storm clouds, ignoring all the signs that led straight to the forming pit in his stomach. The worry, the dread. He hadn’t felt it yet. He only felt the dust clouds kicked up by his feet and the rust scratching his shins from his old bike chain.

The police lined her driveway. Sheriff Peterkin stood with her hands in the loops of her belt. Men stood with their weapons drawn, her mother sat on the gravel, handcuffs binding her violent hands. She looked angry, but her eyes were dark with the evidence of liquor. She looked well-rounded from a far, but JJ knew the truth, and the dirt under her nails made his stomach flip.

In the line up of tin and metal, a van with a label he’d known so well from watching his old classmates getting whisked away. Child Protective Services.

“Y/n!” He’d nearly fallen to the ground at how fast he jumped from his bike, the petals grinding against the gravel. He ran the rest of the way, desperate to know what had happened. He had seen her yesterday, she was happy yesterday, what happened? Why were the authorities at her front door?

“Y/n/n! Where are you?” He reached the back window, only to find the emptiness of the bedroom through the cracks in the glass. It was messy, but untouched at the same time. Every single item thrown around left where it had been yesterday. Her pajamas she had laid out, still thrown over her flattened pillows. Untouched.

He hadn’t seen her leave, didn’t hear her cry. The van was empty, he’d caught a glimpse through the tinted windows. They hadn’t snatched her away yet, so where could she have gone?

“Come on!” He grunted, his palms pressing underneath the stubborn window, the wood groaning as the glass slide against itself. His thirteen year old arms bent under the weight, and he cursed his scrawny limbs. The glass only cracked more as it finally shot up enough for the blonde to wiggle himself into the room, soft thuds and gasps escaping his lips as skin pressed between wood and plastic.

“Y/n!” He pleaded more softly, weary of the fact that he was sure the entirety of the Kildare Police Department was lined up outside, and the breathlessness that came with the pressure on his lungs.

He earned no response, and in a desperate effort to trace some clues back to her, he began further ripping the room apart, spinning in circles for some sort of clue, evidence she still existed, that she wasn’t just some name in the wind, another urban legend spread around Kildare for the tourists to gawk at. Underneath her bed, behind the small table she’d made herself with rotting wood and hot glue, in the piles of clothes thrown around. He spun around and bent over until everything ached and he grew dizzy.

His eyes found the crooked clothing rack, a cheep bar of metal she had found with him in a ditch beside an old thrift store. She had painted it teal in the fifth grade and carved her initials into the posts. Her favorite pair of overalls hung limply from where they were draped over the bar, swaying in the wind with a crinkling sound in the front pocket laid flat out in the center of the chest, still covered in mud from their last adventure.

He investigated curiously, and in his best attempt to slow down in his desperate hurry, he pulled out a small slip of paper with his name scribbled on the front.

“Jesse James.” It read just beneath his real name, though it seemed now that she had become the true outlaw.

He opened it with shaking hands, his brows furrowing. When he saw the familiar scratchy handwriting, he internally let out a sigh of relief. Thankfully, this wasn’t another one of her failed cursive lessons he always failed.

“JJ,” The note began, “The rich are the bane of my existence. I hope one day, when we are older, we are rich in all aspects of life but the literal sense. Maybe it’s just Kildare, but the more money that lines their pockets, the more cruel people seem to get. But we will be kind forever, and we will continue to swing from tree branches and work long and hard for the simple pleasures. I’ve been ratted out; or—my mom has. Ward Cameron passed by earlier to return a shirt I left at their house at the end of the year party. It was one of her bad nights, you know how she gets. Anyways, he must have heard her, seen it. I didn’t even get the chance to wipe my blood off of the window before the cops started pulling into the driveway. I’m running. I’m running far away into the trees where nobody without a heart will be able to trace me. I promise to come back. After all, what is an accomplice without her influence? But I cannot keep our dream safe in a faraway place where they want to take me. If you need me, picture me in the weeds and you’ll hear me in the folk songs at the Chateau. Until we dance again, Y/n/n.”

JJ stood there in the silence, the banging from outside the house leaking indoors, and soon, he had no choice but to slip out of the familiar sanctuary that was her bedroom, the paper hidden in his blistering palms, damp with the sweat the coated his now clammy skin.

They were thirteen then, freshly graduated from middle school and ready to take on high school. She had been leading the class in all ways, kindness, brains, bravery, and now, there was nothing left but the crumpled note JJ had thrown in the fire out of bitterness towards the Kooks and whispers about the girl who disappeared.

To Narnia, they said. The ball of sunshine and endless life had slipped away to a place where only the creative are let in. She would be a pirate there, she wouldn’t have to hide in the closet on beneath the sheets in fear. She was as free as the August breeze, and JJ was as lost as a drunken sailor.

JJ decided he didn’t want to be an outlaw anymore after his first time behind bars. It wasn’t as fun as she had pictured it. Maybe if the trouble was something interesting, a scheme they could have conjured up together, but it wasn’t a sadder reality. Pirates weren’t on peg legs with eye patches and parrots anymore, and the good and interesting were more boring as they tried to come up with philosophies that could never measure up to the youthful spirit she once had.

He wished for all the beautiful things he once had, and often he found himself wondering if they even still existed. His friends were his life, his soul. But he could still see her braids in woven patterns, hear her feet hitting the concrete and whipping in the tall grass in the breeze, and her laughter in those old cheesy folk songs John B’s dad used to play.

JJ found bliss in recklessness. Partially for himself, but also for her. He always believed in the idea that no matter how far he strayed away, pieces of him would always reflect his father whether he liked it or not. So, when presented with the possibility of a gold hunt that led him right into his jail cell, he took the chance, gambling away his safety for the thrill of the chase.

They had gotten so close too, the heavy metal sitting pretty and shiny in his hand. But he never won, no matter how hard he tried or how much he gambled and chanced and risked, he always came up short, the small half of a wishbone, the edge of the party crackers. He felt like an outlaw now, and it wasn’t nearly as fun as it should have been.

How they all ended up on some boat, JJ had no clue. Well, he had some hints, another forbidden treasure stolen just when he thought they finally won, and now, nothing but heavy breathing in a heated storage container that had no food, no water, nothing but pointless rope and endless trash.

The B team, is what he referred to himself as, which Kiara had taken offense to. Sure, it was low of him to refer to her like she was a worse option, but the blonde was itching for some action.

But he was benched. Benched because he was everything she loved. Reckless, unpredictable, free. He protected that sweet sliver of childhood beauty he found when he thought of her memory. Her sweet eyes, her sweet smile. He had never thought about anyone like that before, and not ever since. He hated braids, hated the way they reminded him of her, how Sarah and Kiara would slap his hands away and grumble about how childish he could be. She wouldn’t have gotten angry, she would have laughed. Or maybe she wouldn’t, he didn’t really know anymore and that killed him.

It killed him that he couldn’t know because he didn’t even know if she made it, if the trees were kind to her or if she had swung herself over the edge on a vine stretched too thin.

She would be eighteen now, just like him, though he was a little older. He wondered if she still wore the two loose braids down over her shoulders, taming her wild hair and tucking her curly strands behind her ears. Did she still swear by overalls? Dare to run barefoot over the hard cement and dive head first into thrashing water? Were there still beautiful things to her, or had life finally caught up to her?

JJ didn’t know her face, and he was sure if it weren’t for the hours he spent trying to find her, trying to trace her cheeks even in photographs, he wouldn’t recall it at all. She was five years older, and so was he. He wasn’t scrawny, he’d swore to get strong so that the day she would finally return, he could slam the windows open and keep her tucked safely behind him.

“What are you thinking about?” Kiara spoke up, legs swinging softly from where she sat on top of piles of plastic and wooden crates. JJ sat curled up in the corner, his elbows resting heavily on his knees. He’d never been so sweaty.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged plainly, focusing on the small circles on the floor made of rubber. They weren’t very comfortable.

“You gonna tell me, or should I guess?” She smiled, tucking her hair behind her ears. He saw a flash of someone he once knew sometimes in her. Sometimes it was nice, other times it made him angry. It wasn’t Kiara’s fault though, not her fault she had spent so much time around the lively firecracker of a girl that she had also become another version of Y/n.

“I know I said a surf trip would be good. I mean it would, but do you ever think about what you might do with all that money?” JJ furrowed his brows, licking over his lip, the split in the corner of the bottom lip stinging at the sensation.

Kiara hummed, leaning back and stretching her neck to catch the passing breeze through the small opening in the top corner of the metal container covered by a vent.

“I mean, yeah. A stable home life would be nice. Then, I’d probably do something with turtles. It’s a lot of money so, could probably do a lot with it.” She reasoned, wiping her skin with her palms and blinking the salty liquid away from her eyes.

JJ hummed. She had it all figured out, her real, serious dream that had stability and certainty. All the things Y/n’s dream never had, the very dreams she made JJ want just as bad.

“You know what Y/n would do with all this money?” JJ snorted at his own thoughts, practically hearing her voice ringing through his head. He heard Kiara hum, waiting for him to continue, and he simply smiled wider. “Absolutely nothing.” He laughed to himself.

Kiara laughed too, knowing deep down he was right. Maybe a tree house, or a small plot of land on the outskirts of society where all good things green can grow and only the wild folk dare to stumble, but nothing more than that. A few thousand, if it even were to cost that much, and the rest pocketed, maybe donated. Maybe just enough left over to buy some new shoes, some good shoes for dancing.

“A lifetime supply of overalls and red converse. Maybe even some nicer scarves to tie in her hair.” Kiara entertained JJ’s thoughts. She still thought of the girl every so often too, they all did, but no one more than JJ. After all, nobody had known her nearly as closely as JJ had. A bond that only comes once every few lifetimes, that’s what they had, Kiara was sure.

“She’s probably outgrown the overalls.” JJ added, and silence fell over them. Then, in the still air that coated the small space in a thick layer, laughter bounced between the pair.

Such a funny thought, to think Y/n could ever change. She had been a lot of things, but she was always herself. She found what she loved, and she loved them dearly. There was no changing her free spirit and old habits, it was who she had grown to be, through and through.

“What do you think she looks like now?” Kiara wondered out loud, looking down at JJ to see the way his brows furrowed and he pulled at the corners of his lips.

JJ thought for some time, because though at first he had tried to piece together and image of Y/n all grown up in his head, he’d long given up on those fantasies because they were never her. Only bits and pieces of the girl he could never forget.

“Bangs.” JJ said suddenly, followed by nothing else. He could picture them, hair sun kissed and twisting up in wild curls that were swept to the side. Not full, choppy bangs, but those cut with rusty scissors in the early morning, just framing bits to tug out when she put her hair up.

“Bangs?” Kiara chuckled, her hands subconsciously slipping over her stomach, and her arms tucking into a firm grasp, a hug she was giving herself. “Nothing else?” She smiled, curious because she had thought about it a lot.

Her hair would no longer be in braids, and those sun kiss freckles would have multiplied like the sparkles in her eyes did. She would have an eyebrow slit, or a piercing, maybe even a stick and poke, all of which she would have done herself to make herself stand out. Maybe she would have finally grown out of her nail biting, but Kiara doubted that part.

“Nope.” JJ said wetly, leaning back further and letting out a deep sigh. “Just like she was, only taller and older.”

Part of JJ wondered if it was his heart forcing him to believe Y/n would never change, and then the other part of his would remind his aching heart that it didn’t matter, because he would never know. All he could do was do as she asked so nicely before she left, picture her in the trees, jumping wildly from stone to stone and dancing in the breeze.

“Do you think she made it?” Kiara wondered out loud, her temple now pressed against the metal confines of the container. The breeze soothed her burning skin, and her sweaty palms threaded through her tight waves.

“Y/n?” JJ asked like it was even a question. It wasn’t even a question to him, wasn’t even an occurring thought, not after the first time he really sat down and thought it over.

“She made it.” He said confidently, because he knew the girl, and even if she had lived in the mud amongst the bugs and the thick vines that attempted to grow over her tired body in the night, she would do it happily because she was living.

“Without a doubt?” Kiara shut her tired eyes, her chest deflating with every labored breath. Sweat glistened as it rolled down the slope of her nose, sparkling on the slivers of sunlight.

“Without a doubt.”

When she said she wanted to be a pirate, she had envisioned a life close to home, lounging around on John B’s old boat with her best friends, drinking from coconuts and ripping the skin off of mangoes with her teeth until the juice stained everything she touched. She imagined a life of pure peace, where the little things were enough and money was an afterthought.

But here she was, skin slick with sweat, hair stuck down to her forehead in damp curls, and her shirt clinging to the denim that covered her. The deck was cooler, a free space for her to stretch her eager legs, and though it was confined, she found peace in the open ocean, a vast space of blue expanding as far as her eyes could see.

Now, her back ached, her wrists just as damp as her face, and with each swipe of the backs of her hands against her temples, she simply spread the wetness across her forehead in a streaking mess.

She fed the flames, shoveling coal and other waste into the small opening, trying to fuel the large ship with what little energy she had left to offer.

Her back ached, and her knees were sore. She loved a challenge, yearned for the work because at least it gave her something to do, something to stick her needy palms into, but she was too worn thin to carry multiple jobs all at once. She desperately waited for the girl she had come to call her close friend to return, shovel in hand and thick gloves covering her relatively well-manicured hands. Cleo, she learned to call the girl over her few months spent on board, had abandoned ship, split when she needed her most. Nobody had said anything about her absence, so Y/n was led to believe she had left without warning.

It was hell below deck, a new low, and Y/n knew low. She could list a few things just from the past couple days if she wanted to scrape the surface, but most memories came from her earlier years, when college still seemed so far away, and she swore she would never grow old. She missed when her joints didn’t ache with even the smallest movements. She missed jumping from branch to branch and swinging herself into the depths of the ocean with reckless abandon.

More than that she missed him. Her best friend, and the only person who had ever believed her when she swore to live out her most childish fantasies. Anyone else always looked at her like she had dreamed of being a fairy, a mermaid, a princess. All things unrealistic and unreachable in her living situation and the rules of the world, yet JJ had always seen it as completely plausible.

If she said she wanted to jump to conquer a fear, there he was tugging her along and laughing the whole way down. If she wanted to dance, he would learn the steps, and fall into line with her, spinning and dipping her in the wet pavement that scraped against their bare feet.

So, as she shouted for some sort of assistance in the basement, she couldn’t help but wonder if she should have let them take her away that day. If she hadn’t been so set on remaining untouched, unfiltered, wild and free, if she had let the warmth of a calm, civilized home find her, would things have ended differently? Was it her mistake for chasing after a feeling of childish wonder that had been stripped of her? Was it wrong to want something so badly simply because her own life had been too hard to ever enjoy at a normal pace?

She hadn’t seen the thick greenery in years, the daffodils snd the daisies only vibrant sights when their stems were sliced and their leafs were wilting. She missed the mud between her toes, the summer air lifting her up. When she wore braids not because they kept her thick hair off of her neck, but because she liked the way they looked. When her overalls were a fashion statement, not because they shielded her from the dangers of her work. She missed the bright red fabric on her converse, and the old doodles from her friends on the soles when they got bored. They were caked in oil, and grime, and sludge. Dimmed by the struggles of her reality. She wondered internally if there were still beautiful things.

Then, like her prayer had been caught in the wind by her savior, there was some scrambling that echoed across the floorboards, followed by distant shouting and metal hitting metal.

Mumbling and chaos shook the frame where she stood, distant cries and grunts as bodies slammed together leaving her torn in a moment of desperation. Her heart ached to go, to run and finally catch her breath, to see what disaster had swept over the ship in such a short moment of time, but her brain thought logically, told her to feed the flames to keep everyone afloat. It was a split second decision, the divide between rational and reasonable.

And then she thought about all the good in the past few days. She thought of the glimpses of the world she’d stolen between the bustling mornings and the restless nights, of the small treats she stuffed in her pockets and the beautiful sunsets and clear constellations in the center of a world untouched by light pollution. She thought of Cleo, her only friend she’d found in a life where she only knew abandonment and fear. Where the only affection she had ever accepted had hurt her, and the only good and gentle people in her life had fled, Cleo had appeared like an angel, a thick accent and a toothy grin. Born and raised as a thief, and trained as a fighter. She was smart, and kind beneath her rough edges, and Y/n thought of the sadness in her eyes each time she worked until her bones stung. She thought of how badly she wanted to dive into the waves below them and pull the girl with her to show her how freeing running can be.

Faced with fear, she could not save either of them if she waited for another miracle, another moment to excuse her actions, to make her breaking loose seem justified if it were to all go wrong. If they’d have her head for betrayal, the ocean waited for her on all ends, and she believed in her ability to survive confidently enough to take the risk presented to her.

She took the stairs two at a time, and the door to the outside air swung open with such force, it echoed like a gunshot when metal connected with metal, bolts grinding together angrily, her soot covered hands staining the rusting exterior, the cheap white paint flaking off where her hand had pressed firmly against the door.

“Cleo!” She shouted in the wind, her arms covered in goosebumps as the slick sweat became a layer of gel that turned her warmth into an uncomfortable chill.

She looked frantically, turning corners and sprinting over ramps and down steep stairwells. She hopped over ropes and swung from bars, her dirty sneakers slapping against the floors in heavy steps, and her breathing coming out in short pants through her nose.

“John B!” A quiet shout rattled down the thin hall that lined the perimeter of the deck, bouncing off of the thick walls and hollow railings. It was a name she hadn’t heard in a while. For a moment, she thought she had imagined it, that in her moment of desperation to grasp onto the bits and pieces of bliss in her hellish life, her mind had reeled and found a temporary way to cope. But then it came again.

“Where is he? John B!” The voice called out again, whiny and pleading, and much too loud on a ship crawling with people who were indescribably more dangerous and destructive than the cruel people who lingered in her hometown.

Then came the struggle, more grunting, and the sound of shoes scraping against the floor in a slippery mess. She could hear faint taunts, familiar names of people she longed to see again ever since the day she had left, and the sounds of exasperation over the loud lapping of waves against the side of the ship.

“Kie, now!” She heard suddenly, a deafening shout that silenced all other chaos around her, her breathing slowing in her ears and her heartbeat pounding against her temples.

It was as if time slowed, and all things far away rushed at her in a blink of her eyes. It was slow, yet so fast, her vision blurring into a jumbled mess to the rhythm of her unsteady heartbeat drumming against her ribs, begging to get out.

It was a voice she prayed to hear again, only deeper and raspier, but still the same. A voice that called to her in her darkest moments and pulled her from her slumps, reminded her of all the beauty of instability, of pure trust in luck and intuition. A voice that she had grown to love and hold dear to her, one so precious she found herself covering her ears so that she would never forget the sweet sound of it.

“JJ?” She pivoted quickly, her hip slamming harshly into the metal railing and her shoulder making contact with the opposing wall as she used the accidental thrashing as momentum down the long, swaying strip of flooring she ran on.

She felt crazy, delusional chasing after a sound she wasn’t even entirely sure was real. She had been dehydrated, overworked, underpaid, forgotten about and thrown to the side amongst all the other treasures that laid untouched beneath the deck. She used to scream ferociously anytime she wanted, and now it felt more like her life had become an exhibit at the zoo, a cage for her bosses to look down on, tossing fish to keep her from starving. What had happened to her freedom, her love for recklessness? She decided to hold onto her delusion, to chase it because to be wrong was better than to be certain in her correctness and abandon her love for the chase.

“JJ? JJ!” She shouted, her voice coming out in broken cries, knuckles whitening with how hard they gripped anything with a corner or a curve. Anything that could keep her afloat as she dove into waters so deep, she couldn’t touch anymore.

“Cleo!” Her cries echoed through the tense air, carrying over the grunts and slamming and shouting that passed through coworkers, some she knew, and others she didn’t. If she couldn’t be given the life long dream to reunite with her drive, her motivation to keep going, she prayed to whoever was listening to her that at least her friend would be waiting for her at the end of the hall.

The boat rocked with a shift of weight, a crane groaning under the intense pressure of something indestructible, and in the glistening sunlight, Y/n caught sight of something truly magnificent. A golden cross shining in the halo of sunlight that surrounded it in all of its glory, a true treasure that had been, unbeknownst to her, been stuffed away just mere feet away from where she had been working until not a single inch of her body didn’t know pain.

She stumbled back at the sight, the jewels imbedded into the holy fortune sparkling with a beauty Y/n had never seen in person. It took her back to her days at Sunday school sat right beside JJ. Her mother wasn’t a religious woman, but JJ’s father was, and so with an excuse to be cut loose from the torture of her house—because she refused to call it a home; she too began to believe in something greater than what she was supposed to believe in.

For the first time in her life, her neck craned up to look at the artifact which swung ferociously in the wind, the groaning crane whipping it around erratically, Y/n closed her eyes, and she prayed.

She didn’t ache for the chase, for uncertainty in this moment. She was unchanging in all her beliefs, but for one singular second, she prayed and pleaded that for once, there would be certainty in who she would stumble across.

Then, with a sudden feeling of calamity in the midst of reigning chaos burning over the life she had grown accustomed to, Y/n rounded the corner, stepping down the last bit of the hall into the thicker opening of the side of the deck, lined with a few stray crates to block off broken pieces of the rusted railings.

And there it was, the sudden loss for breath, the heavy feeling that weighed down everything she could once do without even thinking. Her feet refused to move, and her nails dug into the ragged shorts of her overalls. The wind blew her curly, sweaty bangs across her face, tickling her nose. Her entire world shattered and then became rebuilt at the relieving sight.

It was a man she did not know, someone who had joined the expedition under the employment of someone Y/n wasn’t allowed to know. A man who simply worked for another man much wealthier than she was, erratically swinging his curved machete around in an act of violence against two people she recognized clear as day as if time had never passed them by.

Kiara sat bent over, the wind knocked out of her as her cheeks puffed up to try and keep what little air she had left inside of her. Her hair hung over her bright eyes, her pink lips bitten raw, Y/n could make out that detail even from a distance. But there, just s few feet away, stood JJ backed up against the railing, leaning dangerously close to the edge, his hair wild and untamed like the rest of his appearance.

He wasn’t the boy Y/n had left behind. He wasn’t the scrawny tow headed blonde who liked to tease and run, but rather a more muscular blonde with a fire in his eyes, passion that couldn’t be manufactured, but found through growing up. He was just as beautiful as she remembered, just as dear, just as lovable. Even without a single bit of insight on what he had been up to, how he could have changed, Y/n’s feelings for her best friend had been long cemented within her heart. She loved him like no other, to the moon and to Saturn.

She was only broken out of her lovesick visions by the sight of the unfamiliar man growing closer to her friends, his grip tightening around his weapon like a threat, and Y/n feared the worst.

“JJ!” Y/n found her tongue, which had previously gone numb at the sight in front of her. She had shouted out for the boy to warn him, to try and get him to recognize the mans posture, how he stalked over Kiara like a looming threat, but she was foolish to believe that the sight of her, even so many years later when she was sure he would have learned to forget her, wouldn’t stop him in his tracks.

His blue eyes found hers, and she could see how his body seemed to tense, and then very quickly, slump in shock. His jaw fell slack, eyes widening and brows furrowing, almost as if he was in pain, in some sort of conflict. To run into her arms, or to focus on why her shouting was so desperate, so raw and broken.

He wanted to speak, to beg her to tell him if this was all real, or if the heat from the container had caused some sort of heat stroke and he was hallucinating her up to comfort him in a time of crisis. But his breath refused to come out, and in a blur, the blunt end of a blade struck his head, and his feet swept over the edge of the boat, plummeting him into the depths of the sea below.

In that moment, Y/n realized three things. One; she had spent so much of her life dreaming, she had left so little time to go and live those dreams. Two; in every single thing she had ever wanted so badly it had become a part of her dreams, JJ had always been there right alongside her. In most, he even led her confidently, and three; that very same boy she had been dreaming of for endless nights, until her entire youth was filled with only dreams of him, had just gone overboard, and now, so was she.

Her dirty shoes scraped the edge of the railing. Part of her felt like spreading her arms out wide to welcome the wind, but as her wide eyes flickered from the golden hues of the sky to the deep blue that seemed miles away, fear struck her body.

It was a long drop. Much farther down than the rocks she had learned to leap from effortlessly, hand in and with her best friend to guide her. Water thrashed below her then, and it did so now too.

He floated below her, face down and limp and she felt her blood pumping. Back then, he had held her hand firmly and whispered out promises into her ear with each doubt she had. Back then, she believed every word he said when he promised there wasn’t a single possibility she would get hurt because he was right there. And when she leaped with him, he had been right.

“Wasn’t it fun?” He had laughed back then, so excited to have been right. Her face was unreadable, her lip trembling and eyes wide. For a moment, he had panicked, even at twelve years old he understood what it felt like to want to keep something so special safe. He held her face, cradled it in his wet palms until her cheeks lifted into a smile.

“Can we go again?” She had giggled, feeling a familiar warmth in the pit of her stomach spreading.

“Yeah. Yes!” He encouraged, proud of her bravery and her ability to find pleasure in things that once scared her.

He was always more brave than her in her eyes. She imagined if it were her down there, he would have already jumped in no hesitation.

Y/n looked down again, and then back at Kiara, who was back up on her feet, limbs tangled with the man she still didn’t know the name of. She was struggling to a degree, but quickly got some ground to push off of.

“Y/n!” Kiara called out from over the mans broad shoulder, eyes frantic and her skin dusty from the mans shirt and the wooden deck.

She could see her internal debate, both people who were so special to her put in situations where they were nearly helpless. To leave JJ meant he would be on his own, but to leave Kiara opened up so many more possibilities.

“Go! I’m okay!” Kiara promised as he pushed the man away, getting some leverage, and at the desperation in her voice, something inside clicked within Y/n.

The bottom of her worn out shoes scraped against the old metal, and for a moment the wind felt freeing as she leaped out, the warmth from the sun made it feel like flying, like by some miracle she could never fall. But the cool water below crushed her imagination as it wrapped around her body like a cold blanket.

When she surfaced, the world around her spun, echoes of her old pleas to go again ringing through her ears as her limbs cut through the waves desperately, goosebumps pebbling down her arms almost instantly.

“JJ!” She shouted, her voice raw and ripped from all the desperation she felt, how vulnerable and helpless she felt.

He laid on his stomach, submerged with no air like a starfish, only bobbing with the current. He seemed completely washed of all life.

She felt weak splashing over to him. She kicked and cut through the waves like she needed it to survive, and yet her malnourished bones only let her go so far so fast. It felt taunting to her, having to watch him get closer at a snails pace.

Y/n’s arms wrapped around him feebly, his larger body resting heavily on her shoulder. He was broader now, no longer the small boy she had to leave behind. If only he knew how quickly her dreams were crushed in order to survive, if only she’d been more careful, if she hadn’t left her shirt. If only she’d didn’t look like her father, if only her mother was a good woman.

“JJ hey, I’m back, wake up okay?” She smiled weakly, like her presence could shake him. He swallowed so much water, she knew it. If only she wasn’t so scared. If only she hadn’t been stripped of all the bravery she had learned from him.

The boy’s head rolled to the side with each tap of her wrinkled fingers, the cold biting their limbs with each lap of the waves crashing into them.

“JJ, come on wake up please!” She grew frantic as the water seemed to only grow rougher, a vision of the thrashing water between the jagged rocks clouding her reality and his weight sinking them down below the surface.

“JJ!” She cried out, her voice ripping through the heavy pants and her nails digging into his body. Blood stained his hairline, his blonde hair now darkened from the water and strawberry at the roots from his wound.

She knew it better than she ever had. He had grown stronger while she had been whittled down into only a shell of who she had once been. He was taller, faster, braver than she ever was, and as hard as she kicked her legs and splashed around, it felt like more and more waves seemed to pull them under momentarily.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She apologized towards the sky, guilty for not being able to keep them afloat in the choppy waters. “I’m sorry, I love you.” She promised, and she held onto him tighter with each passing second, even as her vision started to blur.

After all, he always loved the company and she was afraid of loneliness and the dark.

“I love you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m trying J, I really am!” She promised through gasps of air, water falling from her lips more rapidly now.

“John B!” She screamed, her voice piercing through the empty space. “Pope!” She called out again, hoping that just one of her friends might hear her. Would they recognize her voice, she wondered, or had growing up changed everything about her? Had she become unrecognizable?

She surely didn’t recognize herself anymore. She avoided mirrors, and parties, and small talk often. She hated the sound of her voice and how it had changed and how she’d grown taller and how her freckles seemed to dot her face more messily. How she had to live with the changes that would make her harder to recognize if she would ever get to meet her friends again.

“JJ, please wake up.” She pleaded again, all other sounds beyond her heavy breathing and the faint ringing in her ears falling deaf.

She recalled the last time she heard him laugh. She heard it in her sleep, covered her ears to drown out anyone else’s late at night to savor the sound. She recalled running her fingers through his hair under the stars, promising him one day everything would be okay. It would be okay, right? One day it would be okay?

“Kiara!” Her throat felt raw now, the salt water tearing apart her dry lips and stinging the scrapes on her palms and knees. Everything hurt, the more and more she begged and cried for help, the longer time seemed to stretch. The heavier he grew in her arms.

There was nothing she could do to change what was happening to them, no plywood or branch to grab onto, no ladder or savior to come and save them. Her heart felt empty, her chest closing in. If she had a mirror, she would’ve seen the loss of color fading from her skin. She missed the certainty she once hated. She missed everything about knowing what tomorrow brought, when she knew JJ would still be tapping at her window, when he wasn’t lying limp in her arms.

She hated it and cried about it, though it was pointless. She cried out for help but her voice was muted with bubbling water, her head bobbing below the surface. For a moment, her vision cleared as the waves dipped, and she swore she saw the outline of a figure in the distance, but she couldn’t be sure. The waters rose just as quickly as they fell, and with a deadly grip, her arms wrapped around JJ to ensure not even the strongest currents could pull them apart as her body gave out. And in a sudden moment of weakness and a final soft apology and a kiss to the blondes cheek, the feeling of sinking was a gift.

Then, the tugging. It was desperate, nails drawing blood by her neck, three or four pairs of hands pressing their palms deep into her raw skin, fingers all wrapping around her before the depths could take her. She felt the rough material before she saw it, the dark grey fabric lining the outside of the small boat, a large motor in the back and each empty space filled with a familiar face, all of their legs bent upwards in an impossibly uncomfortable position to save space.

Her breaths came out ragged, heavy dry heaves leaving drops of water heavy with saliva stringing from her mouth. Blood trickled down the bridge of her nose, a new, burning scratch earned in the messy tug-o-war to save her from sinking.

Y/n swore she felt her heart stop with each cough, eyes squeezed shut and her back hunched over in pain. Her palms pressed into the bottom of the boat until her body found the floor, and her knees slide beneath her.

Still, she recognized two things; one, the air sent pins and needles down every bump that had spread over her skin, her joints screaming with each small bend; and two, JJ was laying lifeless just a few inches away.

His head was propped up against the side of the boat, the fabric wrapped around what Y/n assumed was an inflated portion of the body. His face was tiled away from her, having lolled to the side as the boy Y/n recognized as John B through her blurry vision frantically steered the boat.

The blood had stopped trickling down JJ’s forehead, but the sight of his breathing so shallow and uneven, as if he was fighting each time to get another chance to breathe, sent an uneasy feeling through Y/n’s body, and panic shot straight into her brain.

“JJ!” Her voice came out rough, stripped from all her panic alongside the copious amounts of water that nearly filled her lungs. But despite her obvious aching and tender pain, her hands grasped the boy with a new found determination, her knuckles shaking with the intensity of her grip on his skin.

JJ’s head rested against the boat, but his back no longer pressed at an awkward angle between the elevated sides and the hollow floors, but rather laid tucked against Y/n’s lap, her left hand pulling him close, even as her arm shook with his weight mixed with her weakness all while her right ran affectionately through his wet hair, trying to rouse him from his unconscious state.

“No, no, no, no. Please, please I just got you back please.” She begged, her trembling hand connected against his cheek in quick, soft taps.

Her eyes filled with tears immediately at the horrific sight, her lip trembling all the way down through her chin. She breathed deeply, but choked it all the way down. She could barely swallow, her saliva and her pride stuck between her teeth. Guilt consumed her.

“JJ!” She shouted, nearly demanding that he wake up like a distraught child. Her voice was laced with a whiny tone, each plea falling from her mouth more broken than the previous.

Y/n’s hands connected with JJ’s chest, no longer providing that warm comfort that her delicate palms had as her fingers ran through his hair and cradled his wet face, but rather quick jabs at his firm body, just below his heart.

Her curtain-like bangs hung in curls over her face, dripping onto JJ’s chin and neck and reflecting small images of the girls distraught expression. With each shake, another droplet rolled off of his skin, and with each push she felt his back dig into her knee.

Y/n felt hands on her back, soft, smaller hands gently pressed against her shoulder blades, right between the crevice between the bones. The fingers were adorned with rings, the delicate hands rubbing soothing circles as her back shook with suppressed sobs.

“It’s all my fault.” Y/n’s voice broke, her lips trembling and her words nothing more than a shattered whisper. She stopped hitting the blonde boy, and instead covered her mouth to contain her cries of guilt, and grief. “If I had been braver I could have gotten to him sooner.” She tried to reason, needing something to blame to give her some form of organization, even if the blame was inflicted onto herself.

“Y/n.” The girl who kneeled closely murmured, her hand a point of stability as Y/n watched the sky fall. “It’s not your fault.” She tried to provide comfort, but her attempts fell short.

“But it is!” Y/n nearly snapped, but not out of anger, of something else.

Everyone was looking at her, she had caught it the second they had pulled her from the sea. She was a spectacle, a great vision of the past, a figure that had slipped from the lives they had grown attached to long ago. Someone they had all missed and grieved in their own time. And so they stared at her and drank up the changes they had missed.

She was pretty. Y/n was always pretty, but now she was especially pretty. She grown up to be taller than she was when she left, her hair curls twisting all the way down her back, the short hair now a distant memory, and her body curving in ways that gave proof of her aging. She was the more mature version of the firecracker that had been shot too close to the sun too soon. Their light that had burnt out prematurely.

And so they all looked at her, ogling like she was something out of a fantasy film instead of looking at him.

“No, no, no! You don’t get it!” She threw her arm up in frustration, tilting her head back to force the building bile in the back of her mouth to go down. Why couldn’t it just all go down? Push it down, that’s what she needed to do. Push it down. Forget it, and push it down. “I’ve ruined everything. A-and I’m no good and I’ve fucked it all up!” Y/n sobbed, her head hanging forward now, shoulder slumped and her hands now gripping the wet shirt that clung to JJ’s body so tightly, her knuckles turned white.

“I should’ve jumped, I should’ve jumped in but I was too scared and he was there, he was there and if he hadn’t and it had been me he would’ve. He would’ve jumped in because he’s not afraid of anything. He would’ve have held my hand and he would have told me it would all be okay because he’s braver than me and he’s a whole lot better than me.” She rambled, and the wording of her breathless explanation made little sense to those who crowded around her, those who hadn’t experienced the moments Y/n and JJ were free of civility.

“Y/n.” Pope, the smartest of them all, spoke up, his voice emerging from behind a blonde girl she recognized as Sarah Cameron even all these years later and the familiar, yet somehow, not comforting face of her newer companion, Cleo.

Y/n didn’t listen, she refused to, too overpowered by her self blame, pointing her fingers at herself before anyone else got the chance. Why wasn’t anyone else freaking out? Did the loss of their friend not rip them completely open like it had her? Or had her best friend she had kept as a fond memory, completely kind and loving grown bitter and cold over the years? Was he not the JJ she knew?

“I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” Her eye contact was fleeting, and in a final attempt to cling onto what she could before all was lost, her head fell to JJ’s chest, her forehead pressed against his shirt, listening to the fading beating of his heart.

Then, a cough, then another and another until a loud heave tore open JJ’s lips, a thick mixture of warm salt water and stringy spit drooling down his clammy skin, splatters of the mixture falling into Y/n’s salt-soaked hair.

She didn’t care, of course she wouldn’t, not even if it were blood and vomit, she swore she wouldn’t as she raised her head, her eyes flickering to where JJ’s brows furrowed, his shoulders drawing forward.

Y/n rested her hand in the dip on the center of his chest, applying soft pressure to ease his wheezing.

“JJ.” She breathed out, relieved and yet completely broken from the near loss, one she couldn’t handle again.

The thought alone shook her. He would never know how hard it was for her to leave, how badly she wished she had just hidden in the closet. But she knew her hiding could only do so much, the evil would find her and she had to go, she had to go to save them both.

"Yeah, yeah! Cough it out, cough it out baby!" John B encouraged, a sea of instructions following from the others in a desperate hurry, all reaching over to simply feel for a steady thumping of a pulse, all while the deafening ringing filled Y/n’s ears, her eyes stuck to the pretty sight of JJ’s face.

Y/n sat back on her heels, but her body fell forward in a deeper slump to protect the boy from the burning sun. She felt sick, and crazy, and confused. She wanted to throw up, scared of how fragile the boy might have become.

"Welcome to the land of the living, dude." Popes voice cut through the distant bells, the busy streets, all the background noise that flickered in short fragments through her head.

At her realization of his return, as it really sunk in, Y/n’s touch became a hovering sensation over his body, fingers shaking over his chest like she believed she had the power to only cause harm to what was already hurt, like she could fracture what had been a small crack.

Her chest felt like it was closing in, her ribs clenching around her heart tightly, and she wondered if it was what dying felt like, if JJ had felt something similar while each breath became less full.

Her mind spun like a broken clock, thoughts of self deprecation running in a constant loop, leading back to the same problems in similar processes with no end in sight. How beautiful was the feeling to be pulled from her spiral by the sight of his blue eyes focused on her face, tracing the curve of her nose down to the cupids bow on top of her lip.

She waited for him to speak, to say anything to her. Her heart pounded waiting to hear his voice, how lovely each syllable rolled off of his tongue. But the silence stretched on, just heavy breaths and tight grip that kept them connected.

His arm raised from where it lay limply by his side, his index and his thumb reaching by her arm to twirl the end of one of her braids between his fingers. In a swift motion, the pads of his fingers pinched the loose strands, and tugged for a short moment hard enough to tilt her head to the side.

She let out a soft gasp, only in reverse. All her air had deflated out of her chest, spreading a soothing sensation through her tightly wound bones just like the warm smile that expanded across her flushed cheeks.

Her laughter was a work of art, the most beautiful music JJ had ever heard, just as light and sweet as he remembered it. She hadn’t changed much, yet she had. She had more freckles now, and he found Kiara was right about the bangs. Yet her hair was still woven into the familiar pattern of two braids that now hung loosely at the bottom of her head, twisting and falling over her shoulders perfectly. She was taller, older, but he felt the shortness of her nails against his skin, and he couldn’t help but smile to himself knowing old habits die hard.

“There’s my favorite pirate.” JJ finally spoke, his voice gravely from the exhaustion that traveled through him, leaving his body heavy and soft in Y/n’s arms.

“Theres my favorite outlaw.” Y/n joked back, her voice just as soft as it was the first time he heard it that day on the beach. Just like it had been when he heard it even when she was gone, in the trees, and floating through the folk songs that spread throughout the old Chateau.

“Welcome back to the good life.” JJ laughed, and the sparkles in his eyes as he said it held every bit of truth within that statement.

It was a life that promised all she ever wanted to be. One where they could be interesting forever, where they would be kind forever.

This was the best life, the most freeing one she could ever dream of. It wasn’t about swinging from the vines or leaping from the ledges anymore, but rather the guiding hand on her back as she scraped her knees and chipped her baby teeth. It was always him, the influence to her accomplice.

She had promised to run freely with him again, to dance with him just like they used to and lucky enough, Y/n’s shoes were good for dancing.

“I claim thee, Poguelandia.” JJ’s foot propped up against the old tree that hung low over the sand. It’s tilted stump holding firm in the breeze, and its ancient branches shaking from the way John B’s hands gripped the leaves.

“Do we get a vote?” Sarah complained, rolling her eyes at the uncreative name JJ had thought of on the fly.

“Nope.” JJ smiled, pointing a finger at the blonde girl. “It’s already patented and pending.” JJ spoke confidently.

“Define that.” Pope sassed, crossing his arms and lying back against the old bark. Silence filled the sandy space, soft laughter echoing around the small circle everyone had created, sitting as comfortably as possible of the dying drift wood.

JJ shook off the comment, a smile forever present on his face despite the pounding headache and small bump forming on his temple.

“I like the ring of it.” JJ ignored Pope, pressing his palm against the large tree everyone gathered around and leaning into his hip until his shirt hung just above where Y/n’s body sat slumped in the sand.

She let out a soft laugh, if it could eve be considered that. More of a huff of air escaping her nose, a smile slowly spreading across her cheeks. Despite the quietness of her amusement, it seemed to only push JJ on, his eyes sparkling at the familiar sound he had gone without.

“I’m gonna make a flag. It’s gonna have a chicken on it. With a coconut bra smoking a ‘j’ in crocs.” He continued with his wild fantasy, watching how the girl beneath him hunched over with laughter and brought her hands to cover her toothy grin. “Y/n likes it.” He pointed out proudly.

“Yeah, I didn’t say that.” The girl quickly argued, tossing her head back and stretching her neck to catch his eyes. Though she tried to keep that same fight she once had with him, that natural bickering that made their relationship so beautifully complex, the reality that she finally had him again set in swiftly, and her serious expression failed to mask her excitement.

“Whatever, she totally does.” The boy swatted his hand, playfully pushing the girls head forward until she nearly bent in half. Just where they had left off, completely comfortable in each others touch and always ready to give back what they took.

“We were feeding a broken engine for hours, I think we’d both take anything over that.” Cleo pointed out, bumping her shoulder against the flustered girl beside her. Y/n couldn’t help but give Cleo a soft shove. An old habit she never really squashed.

“We? You bailed ship Cleo, don’t think I forgot.” Y/n said, pointing a finger at the sweaty girl who seemed uncomfortably close even with the endless amount of space around them. A whole island to themselves.

Then, with a careful glance to make sure JJ had leaned away from her, she stood up quickly, wiping sand off of the wet denim that clung to her skin, each cuffed leg weighing her down just a little more.

“Why don’t we leave the naming stuff to Kiara or Pope. Or you know…not you.” She twisted her braids between her hands, tugging the stretched bands out from the ends to free her now nearly dry hair from the patterns woven throughout. As she ran her knuckles through the tangles, her hands clasped around the legs of her overalls, her hands unrolling the pants until they sat just above her ankles.

“Where are you going?” JJ called out for her, not used to the proximity of her now that he had grown used to the distance. He chased after her as quickly as she began to walk away, chasing after the rush just the faint smell of her gave him.

“It’s gonna get dark soon, right? Can’t live off of salt water, J.” She teased, her feet leaving wet prints across the sand, kicking up the dirt in clumps that stuck to the backs of her heals.

He followed like a dog, practically weaving between her legs with his tail wagging in excitement, a familiar rush that was only brought out in the forever thrilling presence of her.

She took the pocket knife from the ripping pocket in the center of her chest, dark denim carrying puddles of the ocean in the stitching. With a bend of her knees, he watched as she dug the blade into the fabric that dripped around her feet, slicing the legs with a tearing sound just above her knee. With her other hand, she rolled the overalls higher, and stuck the closed knife back into its home. She left the cut pants in the sand where they had pooled by her ankles, walking by like it had been nothing. JJ figured she had done it before, probably when she was younger and on the run.

“I don’t remember you being so quick around a blade.” JJ teased, bumping his elbow against hers. He wanted to tug at her hair again, but his fingers curled around nothing by his sides as he decided on admiring the slope of her nose down to her pretty smile instead.

“Bull—shit, yes you do.” She laughed, turning to him with a sense of wonder in her curious gaze. “I used to cut you out of shit all the time!”

“Nah.” JJ played it off, but the blush on his cheeks betrayed him. “I let you. So we could play pirates and all that.” He lied through his teeth, recalling all the times he stumbled through the thick bushes just a little too carelessly and how Y/n’s rusting knife had cut his laces just a little shorter each time he lost a boot in the entanglement of twigs.

“Oh is that what we’re calling it now?” She bickered back, biting back a large smile in exchange for a playful grin. If she had access to the dusty space that she had once called home, she would have hung up the dusty laces that had been stored away in some box shoved beneath her bed.

“Yup.” He popped the p, licking over his dry lips with his tongue swiftly, tasting the salt on his skin.

A comfortable silence fell over the pair, her steps falling into line with his, and their hands shoved deeply into the depths of their pockets, fingers poking through the holes at the bottom from rough knuckles and heavy rocks.

With a heavy sigh, JJ tried to catch her eye, yet it remained trained on the sky like it was the most perfect thing she’d ever seen. He wondered silently if she’d seen the hues they once adored so much as kids recently, or if the thrilling life on deck had swept away her favorite thing, stargazing and watching the sky change as if she needed to put it to memory.

“So.” He finally broke the silence, her breathing hitching only to relax once her eyes found his, a gentle reassurance that everything would be as it once was, that the chase was finally over. “Was it as cool as it was promised?” He couldn’t help but ask, the same childlike wonder sparkling in his eyes.

“What?” Y/n let out a breathy laugh, wiping her hands on her tanned thighs.

“The pirate life. Where civility doesn’t exist and dreams can come true.” He clarified.

To anyone else, they might have believed it was condescending, a taunting question to shame her for her deathly grasp on all the childhood promises nobody ever kept for her. But to Y/n, she knew he really meant it when he asked, that he wanted to know if what they dreamed up was really as good as they pictured it on paper.

“It’s no Peter Pan story.” She breathed through her nose, eyes flickering down at the way her body was blossoming with bruises from her restless work, her dreams all crushed within the first week spent on the sea.

“I tried to make it Neverland, I really did. But you can’t change what happens to you, no matter how far you run. It’s like running in a circle. You go so far, yet nowhere at all.” Y/n knew she would never enjoy the pirate life she once dreamed of. In her dreams, JJ and her were co-captains, sailors with fancy white hats and no hooks for hands.

Now she felt like she should be fearing the ticking of the clocks, and running from the danger that once excited her.

“Did you believe it?” She couldn’t help but ask, wondering if her JJ had really waited to hear all the stories she promised to share with him, all the hustle and bustle of her fantasies.

JJ paused, then, looked at his sad friend’s face, and gave her a sympathetic nod. It wasn’t completely truthful, but that’s what happens naturally. He always believed in her and her curiosity towards the simple things in life. He believed that all the times he felt he had an ounce of childhood to hold onto were only beliefs because she had made them so. And when she had to go, so did the nice things he saw in nothing at all.

“I won’t confess that I believed it, that I didn’t have my doubts, but I always figured you’d be okay. That you’d find your way and maybe even come home.” What he didn’t say is all the times he’d left the lamp on, kept it burning on the porch so she’d know someone was home if she were to return.

He didn’t tell her that he had only gone on the wild gold hunt because part of him believed if he had the money to back it up, he could search every part of the earth to find her. Because it wouldn’t matter if he had or hadn’t told her, it wouldn’t make a difference and it wouldn’t change a thing.

They both made promises they couldn’t keep, and that was just the way life seemed to go. So she didn’t ask where he had been all these years, and he never asked about where she had gone. The timing would come to them eventually, and it would all work out. There was no point in catching up for two souls that had never been truly apart.

JJ and and Y/n had walked themselves to a ledge by the end of their conversation, nothing but soft breathing and the comfort of the wet, warm winds to wrap around them like a soothing blanket of serenity.

Y/n would be lying if she said the height didn’t scare her, if the wild waves below didn’t cause a crisp trepidation to shoot through her limbs. It was a big jump, the final leap she had always dreamed of.

The waves hit the smooth rocks, the rougher ones that stood tall thrashing with the heavy water. Sea salt coated their glistening skin, and as the wind blew through her hair, she came to a realization she had never considered before.

All this time she believed she had been something like Peter Pan. She joked about pirates, and running free, and all things children should know and love, and she acted fearlessly like she would forever be that version of herself. Yet, as time closed in on her and she grew taller, maturity had grown into her bones with each added inch. She was no Peter, she was more of a Wendy, and at first it had killed her, but only for a moment.

When she looked over to her side, she saw the blonde she had fallen in love with when she was still so little. They were young, and with their spirits, she was sure part of them would always be. And she knew then, if she was Wendy, he was her Peter.

“What?” JJ smiled, catching her glances. Standing proudly beside him, only older than the last time they’d met up. She had promised to grow up and come find him. She guessed she wasn’t lying about that.

"We will be interesting forever." She recited her promises from their youth, promises that were oceans deep with a serious smile, like she knew there was no other fate for people like them. "And nobody will ever forget how we lived like real people should and how we never let the temptation of a corporate paycheck take away the big picture."

Her hands reached up to hold JJ like she had when they stood only five feet tall. Now here he was, towering over her like he always promised he would. She wrinkled the shoulders of JJ's old tank top, the sides cut so far down, it was nearly just a napkin with a hole for his head. Everything about their attire screamed outlaws, pirates, lost boys, fighters, and believers. There was no fooling anyone, yet they carried themselves with pride, like the lack of civility in their lives was a thrill, the dirt and the worms and the bees and sweltering sunburns were all a gift to have been rubbed across them on their walks in the rain, in their summer time hikes to the secret beaches they weren't supposed to venture on.

The Kooks had it good, an easy life, but Y/n declared that they were the only ones living.

“Do you still dream the same dreams?” JJ asked softly, the wind blowing through his messy blonde hair, and the ocean rolling calmly below them now.

She nodded, letting her hands fall into his, and tugging at the loose threads that fell from his worn out friendship bracelets. Just fractions of the ones she had littering her own wrists.

"I still wanna be that girl in my eighties, dancing in the rain and running up and down the beach like my bones can't break away." She smiled, and he noticed how much more sincere it felt now. "And I want to scream, I want to yell. I'd scream ferociously, leaping between the waves like we did now, and I'd finally jump from the rocks, and I won't be scared because l'll have done it thousands of times." She painted her future, her desire with a loving glance into JJ’s blue eyes.

There was no money, no big house with a picket fence and an army of children. Just the ocean, some laughter, and enough fearless ambition to spill into the next lifetime.

"Sounds nice." JJ agreed, only now he had grown to have the same imagination as she did, he had it in him to dream a dream as pure and grand. He didn't need to live on figure eight, he didn't even mind being stuck with three jobs until he turned to dirt of it meant they would be dancing together forever.

"It will be. And you'll know it because you'll be there with me, and we'll be the same pirates we are now. We'll smoke on the roof and wear fancy clothing that we made ourselves. We'll ride the waves and make lemonade and sweet tea like John B's dad did when we were kids. We'll have mustaches from the sugar, and we'll be young forever with the grass between our toes.” She kept her word, because there it was, the same sparkle in her eyes. The same sweet, delicate wonder.

"Well,” JJ began, his eyes leading hers to where the grass overhung the large fall into the deep blue below. “we can start on that dream now." JJ declared hopefully, looking out to where the waved lapped at the shore. His ringed fingers pointed out at the rigid rocks that overhung the deep waters.

"If we've got a thousand of leaps to take, you have to start with one." He looked back at the girl, the way she didn’t seem to be nervously fidgeting like she had when he first promised everything would be okay.

"And then we won't be scared." She repeated to herself, but more to him, more for the memory of the first time she felt like flying.

"No, we won't ever be scared again." And there was a shared understanding, an understanding that dreams are just dreams until they make them more. If she could do this terrifying thing, all for the rest of her deepest wishes to come true, there was a new found certainty that anything scary could be done.

That she and JJ could do all the scary things the world could offer, even just as the awkward young adults they felt they had grown into. It was possible.

He took her hand more firmly in his, and counted down under his breath. There were hoots and hollers from the excited audience that had gathered below. Their friends filled with fear but also the fiercely spreading feeling of wonder and happiness that JJ and Y/n had found in one another.

With a deep breath, he led her off the edge, and in the moments that came before the cool water surrounded them, they swore they were flying. That they were living like nobody had ever lived before. They were seven again, then thirteen, and then back to where they found themselves now, flickering through the past as they came down.

It was only one of a thousand promised leaps, and Y/n didn’t feel any fear as the water poured into her ears.

Because when they surfaced, there he was, his hair wet and his smile wide. His hands clasped in hers, holding her arms over her head so high, her legs had to wrap around his waist.

“Again!” He shouted excitedly.

One promise kept, nine hundred ninety nine left to live.

[celli-ohs]

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 TXT's Hello Baby!

. . . aka TXT as "fathers" starring in the variety show 'Hello Baby'

genre: headcanons, fluff, a lil bit of crack, a teeny bit of angst warnings: none! word count: 2.3k

author's note: I've been having baby fever, so I was rewatching Hello Baby, specifically SHINee's season (my fav!). it got me thinking of how TXT would be on this show. I spent way more time writing this than I should have, it's been in my drafts for so long with how much I added over weeks lmao. lmk if you guys like this! i might do other groups depending on how well this does lol

comments/reblogs appreciated!!✗♡✗♡

WHAT'S HELLO BABY?

Hello Baby is a variety show by KBS in which idols experience parenthood by caring for one or more babies or toddlers for a certain period of time, usually a couple of months. They also perform "missions" throughout the show to test their skills as parents. The show aired from 2009 to 2013 and starred popular idols like Girls' Generation and SHINee!

The idol groups are usually given letters from the families regarding the children's health, habits, and likes. The show also shines a light on how each child has a different personality, how they express their feelings, and how the idols themselves learn to raise children and help them grow as individuals. Their missions can consist of something small, like making the children snacks, or something larger, for example creating a musical with the kids (MBLAQ did this in their season!). Usually, every episode each group member will compete to see who is the best "parent" by having the children pick who they like the most.

For TXT, I imagine them having to care for two children. To make it fair in this headcanon, one boy and one girl, both between the ages 3-5. (All of my headcanons are based off of interactions TXT has had with children from various videos and media found off the internet!)

CHOI YEONJUN ‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃

the type of “dad” that is extremely affectionate to the children, he’s a sucker for aegyo, smiles, kisses, etc.

he can't help but spoil them, he will buy them as many gifts as they want if that makes them happy, even if his wallet goes empty

he loves skinship the most: giving/receiving hugs and kisses, tickling, cuddling, and he'll even wrestle with the kids for fun

but sometimes this can feel suffocating for the kids, they’ll push him away at times

he is really good at playing with them, specifically in role-playing! he can be a monster, a patient, a superhero, whatever the kids want

he likes to dress up for them too, even if the kids costumes don't fit his long lanky body he will wear it with pride

is really dramatic when he plays, if he's a doctor's patient expect him to be howling in pain

will definitely make a fool of himself in hopes of making them laugh

he tries to impress them with his dance moves, but they don’t really care, this hurts his pride lol

he makes sure those kids eat good, and will make/order any food they want

while he’s really good with the children when they’re happy, he has a harder time when they’re upset, sad, or angry

when one or both of them cry, he will panic and try to make the situation better rather than comfort them

when they’re feeling down or upset, he will try to make them laugh, which works sometimes, others he will fail

when the kids are angry, whether at him or another member, he has a hard time trying to diffuse the situation

he doesn’t want to be too aggressive and scare them yet he also wants to be able to discipline them, usually it ends with the kids crying anyway

he's voted the 3rd most popular "dad", a position he excitedly accepts, he’s happy the children like him so much

at the end of the show, when giving his video letter to the kids, he will tear up and cry a little, he didn't expect to become so attached to them but he's happy and grateful to have met them

I think he'd keep in touch the most after the show, video calls, little dates, he'd even invite the children to showcases/fan meetings if the families allow

CHOI SOOBIN ‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃

the type of "dad" who is responsible and reliant but he’s a worrywart

is always checking up on the kids: making sure they like the food, the clothes they wear, and how they’re feeling

he used to not like/really care for kids, but now has a soft spot for them

he’s absolutely baffled and in love with how tiny the kids are compared to him, he thinks it’s so cute how someone can be so tiny and not know

he’s probably the most gentle of the members around the children

he holds them like they're made of glass

he loves it when the children talk to him, whether it’s intelligible or not he likes their baby talk he finds it super cute

likes to imitate them because of this (he, Yeonjun, and Kai do this the most)

he doesn't ask for kisses or hugs bc he doesn't want to feel like he's forcing the kids to show him affection so he really cherishes when they do

when it comes to playing with the kids though he's lacking, mainly because he has difficulty immersing himself in their games

he will still try his best though, and because of that the kids still enjoy playing with him

will play video games with the kids! something family-friendly, like Mario kart, will have one of the kids sit in his lap and "help" them

soobin is really good at comforting the children though! If they cry he will gladly hold them, pet their hair, rock them back and forth, sing a little, anything to make them feel better

when the children become upset or angry, he panics bc he feels the need to fix the situation as fast as possible, he doesn't like to see the children upset or fighting each other

he's voted 4th best "dad" and honestly he's upset, but at least he's not in last place

still petty as hell though, so he's complaining that he's 4th despite all of his efforts to get along and close to the children

he cries in his video letter. 100%. He just loves the time he got to spend with the kids and he's going to miss them so much, he's really thankful

he keeps in touch, but not as often as Yeonjun. he will call once in a while and go visit with a couple of members every few months

CHOI BEOMGYU ‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃

the type of "dad" to act silly and plays with the kids, he wants to relate to them so they like him more

yet bc of this he often embarrasses himself in front of the kids, his members, the audience...

except he's rough, and often goes overboard; he forgets how young they are

also has a tendency to make everything a competition?? will literally brag to the kids that he's better than them (like bro ur a grown-ass man??)

has definitely made the children cry more than once, proceeds to fake cry louder than them

he doesn't mind skinship or affection from the kids, he accepts it graciously

he just won't initiate it himself, he doesn't feel the need to(?) he'd rather have the children verbally tell him they like him or show it by choosing him over the other members

he really likes talking with the children he finds that their perspective on life and how the world works is a bit refreshing, it reminds him of simpler times

when the kids ask him questions, he gives them silly answers

for example: "will a watermelon grow in your tummy if you eat a seed?"

beomgyu will say that it's not true, then eat a watermelon seed in front of them and the next day stuff his shirt and show the children his watermelon tummy

and yes he will scream about how they need to be careful the next time they eat fruits (they started crying because they thought he was sick)

another one who freaks out when the kids cry or get upset he really doesn't know what to do!

he will be visibly panicked, trying to calm them down with promises of a new toy, looking around the room for a member who can help him

but like I said, he's the cause for half of the children's breakdowns, so most of the time when they cry, he gets put in time-out

is voted last place... I mean are we surprised...

will literally start arguing with the kids for picking him last

in his video letter, I don't imagine him crying, but you can tell he's very sentimental, so much so that you would not recognize him to be the naughty "dad" of the group, he seems so pure

surprisingly he will visit them the second most often after the show! the kids love to play with him so he likes to take them to the park or just hang with them at their homes (he still makes them cry though smh)

KANG TAEHYUN ‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃

(im ngl i have the least info based on taehyun, there's like even fewer interactions of him with kids that I could find but these are my assumptions with what I could see)

the type of "dad" who is cool and knowledgeable, he's himself but like toned down for kids tbh

is incredibly sweet to them, will indulge in their questions, imagination, etc

knows that children's brains are like sponges, so he tries to turn everything into a fun learning experience!

the way he plays with the kids is through arts and crafts, reading/storytelling, and of course exercising

loves to take the kids to the park, he will most definitely teach them to stretch before running/playing to help their muscles

does magic for the kids! omg they eat it up!! once they know he can do magic they fall in love with him, they call him a wizard

similar to Soobin, he lets the children choose when they want to give kisses and hugs but he also will ask for them as well when he feels like it, just not as frequently as Yeonjun

is surprisingly good at mediating whenever the kids are upset or angry; sure he panics a little, but he's good at hiding it and talking to the kids through their feelings

his only downside is that he doesn't seem to realize the kids are not feeling happy until it's too late, one too many times he has been confused as to why they're crying (if beomgyu isn't the reason)

he has a really calming energy that the children like, it's like it transfers to them they're the best behaved with him

The kids listen to him the most, but no one can pinpoint the exact reason why (Yeonjun and Soobin think it’s because his voice is stern yet reassuring, while Kai and Beomgyu believe it’s because the kids think he's a real wizard and are scared of getting cursed)

is voted 2nd place! he's very proud of this! and yes he does make fun of every member who's below him!

his video letter is very heartfelt, he doesn't cry but you can really feel his sincerity through his message and you can tell he learned a lot about parenting

I like to think that he tends to visit the kids after the show sporadically, sometimes he's alone, sometimes with members, sometimes for hours, sometimes for minutes

HUENING KAI ‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃

the "type" of dad who is like a best friend! he's so supportive and loving it's hard to not love him back

is not only kind, he's also very observant and understanding of the children, is the best of the members when it comes to communicating with the children

out of all members I'd say he's the most quipped to being the best "dad" (all thanks to Lea and Bahiyyih!)

they feel a lot of security with him, he's really reassuring and trustworthy

is the best at playing with the kids! no matter what the kids want to do that day, he will give his all and is really quick to adapt to the kids' quick thinking and rule-changing

will play harmless tricks on the other members with the children!

he takes a genuine interest in whatever the kids like, he wants to know why they like it even if he's unfamiliar or not good at it

likes to try and make even normal things fun for the kids, like brushing their teeth, grocery shopping, cleaning the room etc

like Soobin he plays video games with them but always lets the kids win (unlike Beomgyu)

this guy will pull out his guitar and play songs for the kids! actually, any instrument he can get a hold of he will play for them

forms his own lil band with them, teaches them to be gentle with the instruments

will learn to play nursery songs/any song they like so that the kids can sing along (Beomgyu tried this too but could not keep up with the amount of song requests)

again I think it's because he's the middle child, but he's the best at diffusing arguments/fights and mediating such

instead of yelling or getting upset he will try to find a way to comply with both parties

but he also understands that he can't always be friendly, and has moments where he needs to be a bit more serious with the children, he knows how to discipline without scaring the kids or making them feel worse

was voted 1st place! (if you think I'm biased, please watch him and soobin on return of superman on youtube he'd be a great dad!)

is so happy he will dance, sing, bro is having a concert for this immense win

his video letter is so sweet! Kai rarely cries, but I like to imagine he does think extremely fondly of the two children because they remind him of his own family with he was younger so he's a bit more sensitive than usual

but uh oh! bro ghosts them kids just like he ghosts everyone else lmao! the kids only see him when he tags along with the other members, someone is already on the call with them, or just randomly out of the blue (it's not that he doesn't care, he just has a hard time keeping up with people in general)

perm taglist (open): @ancnymcnzjy

kpop masterlist ˚₊‧꒰ა ♡ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

bookshelf ⋅˚₊‧ ୨୧ ‧₊˚ ⋅

[porcelain-and-nightbird]

OH MY GOD THIS POST YESSSS

I need more portrayals in fanfictions about Steven being angry and scared because they always write about him being too understanding.

He may be more understanding now if he found out about Jake in a second season...but even in cases someone writes an AU of the first interaction between Steven and Marc, or even with Jake, Steven believes everything right away. Like, someone is taking your "normal life" and putting it upside down, REACT!

Maybe writers want to write him like that because they want them to have a good relationship fast but they are stripping Steven of his number one coping mechanism: "denial, denial, denial".

Marc's situation, on the other hand, is just tragic in the first episodes. He took the time to "parent" Steven, take care of his illusion of normality, and also had to take all the insults (ok, most of them, not the ones that involved Layla) in stride because he believed he didn't deserve anything good (and if someone who he believed was truly good told him he was bad, then hey! It must be true).

That's why when Steven learns the whole truth and sees their actions for what they truly were (both his denial and Marc acting as a kindness to Steven) that this scene becomes so freaking important.

JESUS THIS SCENE BREAKS ME

TLDR: WATCH MOON KNIGHT AND CRY BECAUSE OF BEAUTIFUL WRITING

You’ve got to live a happy, simple, normal life. You understand? [But it was all a lie, wasn’t it?] So what? What does it matter?

[butchisrevolution]

dolly dog man readthrough #8

grime and punishment

THERE'S SOME INSANE SYMBOLISM IN THIS ONE

also yes i skipped a readthrough and yes it is in my drafts, im publishing it later bc i had problems with the image files

this is a metaphor for life and having the autonomy to choose your own path and this is probably gonna be the theme for the rest of the book

im guessing

all of grampa's experiences with others in life have been transactional, likely since childhood, to the point that he is unable to see others in any way other than a means to an end

while his son, petey, fits an NPD diagnosis almost exactly, grampa seems to fit an ASPD diagnosis almost exactly.

anddd

andddd

this is the most open he has been about his feelings. and its in an altered state

this is a metaphor for people who avoid therapy and medication, instead opting into dependence on recreational drugs to regulate and process their emotions

petey hangs onto the hate towards his father because it's the only thing he has left with him in relation to his father. giving up the hate would mean giving up his father, and deep down he still just wants to be loved, so he settles for what he's given

being a witness to abuse is really hard, especially when you're trying to explain it to someone who wasn't around to see it, someone younger. you want to protect them from the harsh knowledge, but you want them to understand your pain. it's even harder when you have to watch your other parent simply take it, settle with the abuse, because they feel like there's no escape. it makes you lose hope and really shapes your expectations for what life will look like for the worse.

OH FUCK. SHIT

side note: the composition of these frames is really nice... in the second frame, his son's speech bubble comes from behind him, as if it's sneaking up on him. the sizzling of the pan goes off the page to the right, continuing as his son talks, but it abruptly stops once he finishes the sentence. it literally shows the room going quiet.

in the last frame, petey is super far behind him. there's a divide between him. it's as if li'l petey is fading into the background and an invisible barrier, petey's memories, is brought to the foreground. a divide between them, really showing how different their experiences of life are.

i also appreciate how the color changes of the background went through these panels, starting a deep angry color, fading to a more neutral, some tension with the yellow, and then desaturating as the question is asked.

silhouette comes in clutch every time. this entire scene is genuinely a cinematic masterpiece

i appreciate that they took the time to show that even when there's tension between them he still makes sure to take care of li'l petey

sickening page

this was created so beautifully.

the third panel is absolutely stunning, the symbolism managed in the imagery in such a simplistic comic is incredible. the bottled weeds from earlier in the book on the counter, the weeds that li'l petey specifically referred to as dying, which ended up symbolizing resistance in struggle... in this scene, it means both of those things at the same time. there's a duality.

also, the buds of the weeds being white i assume symbolizes grief and loss. outside, it's dark, the world is a dark place, but they've made a loving home together, which is why the walls are still multicolored. petey is struggling with issues from the past, but this time he's not alone and he can't give up. it's a lot of mixed feelings, just like the mixed colors on the wall.

he has a point, the little anarchist has a point

ACAB chief my beloved

he just does it for the fun of the game

i feel like im witnessing a Socratic seminar in comic form

to hate or not to hate

or smth

YEAH TELL EM LI'L PETEY SET THOSE BOUNDARIES

bro needs to stop parentifying his child !!

I KNEW THAT WAS GONNA COME BACK.

shitt bro...

let go of your baggage or it will only weigh you down

also i rlly liked the artistic decision to make petey's outline glow more when hugging his son so cute

fun fact this is actually a DBT crisis skill called "Pushing Away"

when there's nothing else you can do to make a situation better, you're allowed to give yourself the benefit of retiring from it. you're not required to stick it out for every problem in your life. you are allowed to have peace of mind

and now grampa has no choice to accept the situation for how it is. it's settled and boundaries are set. he can't wriggle out of them. it was a direct, neutral statement with no judgement. when you're in the wrong, sometimes that's the hardest thing to sit with. if someone tells you something you did with no judgement and you feel ashamed because of it, you can't blame it on the way they said it, you can only blame it on what you did.

PERFECT DBT SKILLS. PERFECT BOUNDARIES SETTING.

yeah this is essentially what people are saying when they try to make you explain your boundaries

if you fight enough with someone they may forget their footing and adjust their boundaries, but you don't have to fight, you don't have to explain your boundaries, you can just set them and leave it.

real shit bro real shit

IM FUCKING TWEAKING HOLY SHIT

that bottle again,,,,

after years of struggle he lets his inner child finally feel and see. he travelled his path and now he's ready to share his resilience with the rest of the people in his life, ready to reconnect in a new way, instead of hiding his resilience in private, ashamed, as if it's a show of weakness. he's learnt the strength of being open

YOU CAN COLOR IT ANY WAY YOU WANT......

FIEND! FIEND! FIEND! FIEND!

so THISSS is the sauce they put in this book...

EACH BOOK KEEPS GETTING BETTER AND ALSO MORE HEARTBREAKING

IM GONNA GENUINELY START TWEAKING

DAV PILKEY WHAT ARE YOU

[moon-ayyye]

Hi just got back from stalking your page. I love your takes on Jason! Do you have any thoughts about Jason and Damian’s relationship, like if they met in the League of Assassins or something? I really haven’t read much comics but I feel like their dynamic would be interesting

Thank you!

As for Jason and Damien, I like it when they have a good relationship from the League of Assassins, it's a guilty pleasure of mine when they're really tight, but that's not the case in canon since Jason is supposed to be 'bad'. They really don't like each other, and it's funny as hell

Of course, they have their moments, but so do Cass and Jason, and I wouldn't say they like each other at all. I still love a good Jaycass dynamic because they're my faves, guilty pleasures and all that, but it's simply unrealistic.

I think the main reason Damian hates Jason is because Bruce does. Or at least acts like it. Because think about it: Jason does what Damian was raised to do, kill their enemies and not show mercy, but it makes his father angry, and Damian's idolisation of his father is the most integral part of his character. I swear there was a panel where Damian said it's fine if he didn't exist if Bruce's parents didn't die because he wants Bruce to be happy.

This level of unhealthy idolisation means that nothing holds more weight than Bruce's word. At least he's kinda breaking the mould in recent comics, with him volunteering at the hospital.

Back to his relationship with Jason, though. Damian internalises that Jason is what he would be like with his father should he go back to the ways of the league, the way which he was raised, and that would cause him to hate Jason due to projection. If DC pushes the whole batfam thing with Jason again, I'd imagine they would be pretty close, since they've both been through a lot, and have a lot in common, but they'll probably always be antagonistic.

In short, these bitches MESSY

[shamebats]

Honestly? I feel like the "pretty girl" comments were rarely actually compliments. At least for me. I heard it the most when adults wanted me to guilt me into doing things I didn't want to do.

Like instead of asking me why I didn't brush my teeth (my parents didn't care), the dentist who came to our school when I was like 7-9 would make these comments about how I was such a pretty girl & what a shame it was that I didn't put in the effort to have a pretty smile. Or when my mother & her hairdresser needed to shut me down when I asked to have my hair cut shorter. Or when they wanted me to wear clothes I didn't like. Or when adults wanted me to smile when I wasn't happy. Or when I cried or got angry & they tried to make me stop experiencing emotions by telling me it made me look ugly.

It was like the "pretty girl" status was a carrot on a stick they could dangle in front of me to control me. It was something I could earn by obeying & conforming to gender roles.

Btw if the main concerns keeping you from going on T all come down to the fear of not being "pretty" anymore, you might have to consider that maybe the way adults talked to you from when you were very little might have perhaps instilled in you the belief that your value as a person is derived from your prettiness & how appealing you are to the straight male gaze and while it's understandable to fear things like weight gain, body hair, hair loss, anger, loss of fertility etc, it's at least worth asking yourself if those fears are maybe coming from a place of internalized misogyny, especially if it's keeping you from starting a medication that you suspect could really help you feel better mentally & physically. All because the fear of not being pretty enough is keeping you paralyzed.

Truth is, even big buff hairy men can be very pretty, just not in the way straight men find attractive. But maybe that just doesn't count because you, on some level, believe that your body is not your own and that the worst thing you could possibly do, a fate worse than death, would be to disappoint everyone around you by "ruining" it with your silly, selfish desire to look in the mirror and truly see yourself.

Or maybe that was just me.

[communicationthroughlyrics]

I Work Too Hard, Can You Fuckin' Pay Me?

Part 13 - Y/N moved to escape some of thier looming troubles from Westview, to the place that their best friend said would make a difference. New job, new digs, will Y/N make a change for the better, or leave another city with their tail between their legs?

TW: Angst is turning up a notch

Word Count: 2.1K

Read Pt. 1 HERE Read Pt. 2 HERE Read Pt. 3 HERE Read Pt. 4 HERE Read Pt. 5 HERE Read Pt. 6 HERE Read Pt. 7 HERE Read Pt. 8 HERE Read Pt. 9 HERE Read Pt. 10 HERE Pt. 11 HERE Pt. 12 HERE

A Prisoner By My Own Hands

You spent a couple of hours going over all that had happened in Westview. From your womanizer habits that got you kicked out of high school, and had you placed into alternative schooling, your parents kicked you out at 16 and essentially forced you to grow up fast. To Carol, your first true relationship, the older woman led you through the trials and tribulations of adulthood unbecoming. When she left you for a 'more mature, fitting relationship' in another country, you were heartbroken.

You began sleeping around, bringing a different girl or woman home every night, hoping to fill the void that Carol had left in your heart. Many parties with Pietro, and finally one of you had settled down. Pietro was wildly in love with the older woman, and you were eyeing her stepdaughter. But amidst the games, Pietro got hurt and decided it was best to leave, knowing he couldn't stay away from Val if he didn't. Val came over to your place, looking for him, but in reality, she wanted you.

She twisted the moments of vulnerability, making it seem as though she was heartbroken, and you were the rebound. You had felt used and disgusting, having slept with the woman your best friend had sworn was the one. In your disgust, you seduced her stepdaughter, fucking her on every surface imaginable in thier house, Val coming home in the middle of your lusty, anger-fueled stupor.

You told Wanda how anticipated Val to be angry, to yell, to scream at you- force you out of her house. But she didn’t. Instead, she sat there, staring at you with an energy you couldn't quite place at the time. You know it now as a challenge. She watched as you fucked her stepdaughter, before quite literally stepping between you both to fix herself a drink. Once you were done with Maria, Val cornered you, forcing herself onto you.

From that day, you were caught between the two, often time fucking one, before sneaking out of the room to the other. Part of you enjoyed it, the thrill of the forbidden, the other part of you felt dirty, like you had betrayed not only your best friend but yourself. It went on for weeks until you got caught leaving Val's room one night by none other than her husband, and her stepdaughter, hickeys adorning your neck, hair mussed, and flush cheeks.

The look of betrayal on everyone's faces, the ensuing argument and boxing match with her husband, the look of disgust on Val's face as you're kicked out of the house, clothing torn, beaten, bruised, and abused. Val had no shame, and she doubled down. She spread the word of how you seduced her and twisted everyone's perception of what happened into her benefit. How she had been completely oblivious to you sleeping with her stepdaughter when often times she would lick her daughters arousal off you as she fucked you.

You had left Westview with no friends, no family, and no self respect. You had moved across the country to get away from the whispers and the glares of everyone who knew what had happened. But here you were, back in her orbit. You had hoped that with enough time and distance that Val would forget about you, move on, find some new toy to play with. But she was back, and she had her sights set on you once again.

Wanda sat, despondent, as you detailed the lies, manipulation, and blackmail that the woman put you through. She knew some since Val had done the same to her brother, lying and manipulating him throughout thier relationship. She had been so deceitful to Pietro that he had no clue that Val was married. When he found out, that is when he left town.

But knowing that Val had played you too, used you as some sort of twisted revenge on her own stepdaughter and her now ex-husband, it brought a new kind of anger to the forefront. "How could you, Y/N?" she whispered, her eyes brimming with tears. "How could you let her do this to you? You watched her, destroy Piet. You warned him, I know you did. And then you decide to fuck her and her daughter? God," she shook her head, her now stressed demeanor and tense frame exuding a nervous energy that honestly could be cut with a spoon. Her lithe fingers ran through her tressed hair, her gaze avoiding yours.

You felt like the wind had been knocked out of you, the weight of Wanda's words like a sledgehammer to the chest. "Wands, I didn't mean for it to happen like that. I just, I was hurt too, and got lost in the feeling of being wanted. At least, that's what I thought it was."

Wanda stood, pacing the room, "But you knew better! You knew what she was capable of!" She stopped in her tracks, whipping around to face you. "You knew the pain she had caused my brother and you still went there?!" Her voice was raised now, echoing off the walls of her living room. "And now," she began pacing again, her hands running through her hair excessively as you watched her. "Now, she is here, to prove a point. God knows what this point is, but she is here nonetheless."

You watched her, feeling like a deer caught in the headlights. "What do we do?" you murmured.

Wanda stopped pacing, her eyes meeting yours, and for a moment, you saw the Wanda you had heard about in high school, and in Piets stories. The fiery, stubborn woman who will torch the earth to protect the ones she loves. "We? No, no, no, Y/N. You. You need to fix this." She spun on her heel, moving away from you. "This is your mess, and you need to deal with it. And the first thing you need to do, is come clean with Pietro."

Your heart sank, "But, Wanda-"

"No," she cut you off sharply. "You need to tell him everything. You can't keep playing these games with everyone's hearts, especially not his. He deserves the truth, no matter how hard it is. He thought he was in love with that woman, and then you fucked her. Then her daughter-"

"Stepdaughter."

"It doesn't fucking matter, Y/N! It's fucked! No matter how you look at this, and no matter how much she fucked with you, this is still fucked up of you."

You felt your chest tighten at her words, knowing that she had a right to be angry, but hoping she could find a shred of understanding. "I know," you said, your voice thick with regret. "I know it's messed up," your voice coming out almost unrecognizable, small, as you tried to talk to the woman you had grown so close to in the past months. You could feel the tears in your eyes building as you thought about losing Wanda and Pietro too. "Wanda, I just need support. I know what needs to be done, but I need help. I need you."

Wanda's expression softened slightly, the anger in her eyes fading into something more complex. "You need help? From me? After all this?"

You nodded, feeling the weight of your own words. "I know we haven't known each other long, but I feel most comfortable, most stable when I am with you. I don't know how to do this without you, Wands. I don't want to go through this alone again, I will lose myself."

Wanda sighed heavily, turning to look out the window. Her reflection was cast onto the glass, showing the turmoil playing out across her features. "I don't know if I can, Y/N," she admitted, her voice cracking slightly. "This is... it's a lot. We are still in a fairly new relationship, if we want to call this," she motioned between the both of you. "That."

You stepped closer, reaching for her again, but she held up a hand, stopping you in your tracks. "I can't, Y/N. I need some space. To think, to process. You can't just throw this shit at me and expect me to be okay with it. You have to deal with this. You have to tell him, Y/N. You can't keep hiding from him. He's your best fucking friend."

Wanda's words were like a knife to your gut, but you knew she was right. You nodded, feeling the gravity of the situation settle over you like a heavy blanket. "I'll tell him," you murmured. "I'll tell him everything."

Turning away from the window, she faced you, her eyes searching yours. "And what if he doesn't forgive you?"

You took a deep breath, feeling the tightness in your chest. "Then I'll accept it," you said, trying to keep your voice steady. "But I have to try. Like you've said, he is my best friend. And the only family I have."

Wanda studied you, her expression unreadable. "Okay," she finally said. "But if he doesn't, you can't come to me, and expect me to change his mind."

You nodded solemnly. "I won't. I'll handle it."

Wanda turned away, moving towards her kitchen, "I need some tea," she murmured, the tension in her voice still palpable. "Do you want some?"

Wanda's 180 shot confusion across your features. "Didn't you just want me out of here?" you asked, unsure if you'd heard her correctly.

"Yes," she said, her voice tight. "But I also know that you're not going anywhere without a plan. And if you're going to tell him, I need to be prepared for whatever happens next."

You followed her into the kitchen, feeling like you were walking on eggshells. The room was warm and cozy, filled with the comforting scent of herbs and mint as the kettle began to whistle. Wanda moved with purpose, her movements sharp and precise as she grabbed two mugs from the cabinet and a box of tea bags. She didn't look at you, and the silence between you was as palpable as the tension.

"Wanda," you said softly, your voice cracking as you watched her move around the kitchen. You watched as she took a deep breath, resting her hands on either side of the sink to gaze out the window before her.

"Yes?" she asked, not turning around.

"I know," you sighed, trying to collect your thoughts before continuing. "I know that I told you I was messed up. I know that Pietro told you the same thing," you began, your breath catching as she spun and crossed her arms over her chest, a dark stare shooting across the kitchen towards you. "But I want you to know that I didn't just leave Westview because of these situations I caused, and what I put myself in. I left so I could become a better person. So I could change. I am not that same person, Wanda. You have to know that."

Wanda's eyes searched yours, the anger slowly draining away, replaced by a sadness that made your heart ache. She didn't say anything, but the way she looked at you spoke volumes. You knew that she was hurt, that she felt betrayed, and that she was trying to understand. You felt like the biggest piece of shit in the world, standing in front of her, but you had to keep going. You had to make her understand.

"I know, Y/N. But with all of this information, it's really hard to believe that." You let out a deep breath, dropping your head as you stared at your feet. You heard a shuffling, looking up as Wanda poured the steaming water into two mugs before grabbing a spoon for the sugar and milk. She walked over to you, handing you the warm porcelain. She stopped, a contemplative look on her face before she turned back to you. Her hand reached out, rubbing your chest before she stepped away.

"Look, I know it's not fair of me to ask you to trust me after this, but I swear to you, on everything I am, that I have changed. I never wanted to hurt you, or anyone for that matter."

Wanda's eyes searched yours, the sadness in them deepening as she took the mug of tea you offered her. "I want to believe you," she murmured, her voice barely above a whisper. "But you need to understand that this isn't something I can just... put behind me."

You nodded, understanding the gravity of the situation. "I know it's a lot to ask," you said, your voice thick with emotion. "But I promise, from the bottom of my heart, I will make this right. And as much as I need Piet in my life, I need you too, Wanda."