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nothingofvaluewaslost · 2 years ago

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STORY: Contamination

A science fiction story. Jannike is one of the Repair Workers, psychologists who project a virtual avatar of themselves into patients’ brains in order to remove their traumas and disorders. However, when a cancer diagnosis brings her to her knees, she comes up with a desperate plan so that she’ll still be there for her husband.

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Contamination by Christina Nordlander

When the nice grey-haired physician – she looked like a secondary-school counsellor – finished, Jannike's gaze slid out the window. A copse of pines grew on the lawn outside Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The sun lay on them, and the wind made them chaotic.

“Is there any hope?”

“There is always hope,” the physician said, smiling. “I'm going to explain what treatments you can choose from. Your fiancé and you... were you planning to have children?”

It was so divorced from all that had come before, she just shook her head. At first she got the idea that the physician had meant that it was time to reproduce now, so that her genes would live and Jimmy would have something left. She had never thought much about kids, and Jimmy hadn't mentioned it except as a joke. She tensed her cheek muscles to a grin.

“Cut my whole womb out if it helps. It's a small price to pay.”

Now she was dizzy. It was as if she hadn't been ill before she heard the word. It had slapped her in the face. Perhaps she would wake up if she fell off the chair.

“You're going to be remitted to an oncologist. They'll tell you more about the methods that will be used. It'll be either chemotherapy, cytostatic treatment, or radiotherapy, in your case.”

That made Jannike's head twitch up.

“Remove tumours,” she said, managing a smile. “That's the kind of thing I do. I'm a kind of doctor, too.”

She hadn't thought she would be able to walk from the clinic on her own. Her memory failed, but she'd walked past waiting rooms with smiling new mothers on pink magazine covers, and corridors that reminded her of the mental projections.

She'd only screamed at the physician once, mostly out of anger, when she had explained that the survival rate – twenty-five to thirty-five percent – was only valid up to five years.

The physician hadn't reacted.

“That's how you have to count it,” she said. “When do you think you've survived the cancer? When you're seventy? When you're eighty? Truth be told, Jannike, you could die in a traffic accident in a year, without the cancer having anything to do with it. I know it's terrible, but the treatment is going to give you a fighting chance.”

In five years she would be thirty-three.

What would Jimmy do? Materially, he would have no problems; he didn't need her salary. Emotionally, he was strong enough to cope. She wanted to pretend that it wouldn't touch him.

The bike path curved around more pines on the way to the bus stop, and their scent was a sweet spice that made reality fail again. The sky blazed. She wasn't the same person as the one who had gone inside. It was a kind of defence. An eighteen-wheeler tore past with a shocking noise and vanished behind the dark wall of forest.

She hadn't told Jimmy that she'd booked an appointment, and didn't have to tell him about this. He came home tired from university, and didn't seem to notice that she hugged him harder and more often than usual. When he asked how her day had been at the psychiatric clinic, she told him she'd been off sick. She made childish plans about not telling him, so he would never have to worry if she survived, and if she died, his grief would only be the definitive one after her death. He'd bought a new fantasy book today, with a dragon in antique and scuffed gold on the dust-cover, and read it stretched out with one leg up in the couch. She wasn't strong enough to subject him to that blow. She didn't want him to remember this every time he saw the book.

While she waited for her appointment with the oncologist, no-one knew except the physicians. When it came to treatment, she would tell him, and mum and dad. She didn't want Jimmy to see her throwing up in the cancer ward, but he was going to want to. What right did she have to take that ordeal from him? Twenty-five to thirty-five percent would live five years longer. Why would you put it off? She had to die one day; did she want to go through this twice?

Her colleagues at the clinic didn't know, but she volunteered for as many sessions as possible, for selfish reasons. When you went into the patients' minds, you always had your memories blocked, to avoid leaving parts of your mind as contaminants in the patient's mind after the awakening. It was a reprieve: several hours each day without the disease. Thousands of others only had their dreams and the minutes every morning before they remembered.

She retained the memories of the operations. They were more synthetic than memories from the waking world, impossible to confuse with anything else she had experienced. She'd had the idea that her mental body was unchanged from when she'd started, five years ago, slim as if it had never gone through puberty and stronger than she would have been even if healthy. She wanted to see how fast it could run, but of course she never remembered to test it.

When she forced the door, slow with a muck of moss around the frames, she knew that it was the centre. There were things around the walls that she would have liked to have a closer look at, faded icons and the remains of scaffolding, but the room was full of fog. It was darker than fog should be, if she'd been standing in its centre it might have been black, and had a faint organic smell that reminded her of something she'd been happy to forget.

It didn't move like fog. It welled towards her, even though she couldn't feel a draught. The putrid smell grew stronger, and she backed away.

It was here. At the point where the fog thickened, it had eaten the floor into pitted holes where the moisture pooled. She was in its territory. She exhaled and waved her hand at it, but instead of scattering, it tightened to something with the same density as flesh. She couldn't have damaged it, but it had noticed her. Parts of it swirled in her direction.

She had the syringe. She held it in the fog, and it had as much effect as you would expect. Her skin started tingling where the moisture clung – no pain, but perhaps from the first loss of feeling.

It had thickened into something corporeal when she attacked it. She hit it with her free fist, and once it met something firm, she was there with the syringe and pushed the cylinder down. The fog hadn't changed its appearance where she'd made it firm, but she saw a pulse of faint pink light that was the drug.

It pulled back, and the movement made her wary enough to back off when it rushed towards her. She hit it again, embodied it and pushed the syringe into it. She hadn't thought there was enough fluid in the syringe, but it was enough. Now she just wanted to put an end to it.

After perhaps three attacks it must have learnt. This time it flinched away from her hand, veered and clung across her face. Her eyes teared up until she couldn't see, but she stabbed with the syringe like with a knife and felt something thick. It had let go of her. The stinging in her eyes was gone before the panic caught hold.

Soon it was over. The next time, it didn't flow closer after her attack, and a few seconds later, rifts started opening in it, different than vapour usually behaved. (So she must have seen fog before.) She felt a dull pain in her thigh, so perhaps it had got to her, but the cloth in her trousers wasn't affected, nor was her skin. When she looked up, the fog was nothing more than a few remnants close above the floor, and they too were on the verge of dissolving. They still moved like something alive while they caught on the flagstones and faded.

She had to get out of here and get help. She could walk, but her leg felt thick, as if something was growing inside the muscles.

Now the fog was gone, she could see a door. When she opened it and stepped into the darkness, it felt as if she knew where she was going.

The pain in her thigh was constant while the memories returned, no worse than what you could bear. She sat up on the mattress and snapped off the electrodes. Her gaze went to the dark glass window on the room where the patient was still asleep. Now she remembered that he had been committed for depression and self-harm.

Dr. Tanaka had turned from the screen.

“Thank you very much, Jannike. The operation went perfectly. Now you'll get to go and take it easy until the next session.”

Something was thick and wet under her butt. Jannike looked down at the crotch of her trousers and saw dark blood. She got to her feet as fast as she could, but it'd had time to stain the mattress cover. Someone would have to take it to the laundry. She didn't know whether it had seeped into the foam rubber.

Dr. Tanaka looked away and at the floor.

“These things happen,” she said. “It's OK, go down to the laundry and get a pair of clean pants.”

Jannike reached for the cup of water, and the movement made her totter.

“Thanks, but it got on the mattress. It needs washing, I can take it with me down. I don't want anyone to... I'm sorry. I didn't know.”

She was getting hysteric, so she forced herself to hurry out in the corridor before she did anything worse. A pill helped against the pain. She could do the next session in a dry sanitary pad and clean trousers, and at some point in the afternoon, the bleeding stopped for the time being.

The next day, when she wiped herself after taking a whiz, a few clots of something dark got on the paper. At first she thought she was bleeding again, but it smelled like faeces.

The afternoon light was orange-tinted and made the forest and meadows outside the train window impossibly rich. The shock when the cancer specialist said “metastases” had been smaller than the first time. Perhaps she felt less stress without the hope. She was going to have to tell him now.

There was another thing she could do for him.

It was a long journey home. She had wanted to use it to decide whether it was morally right, but realised she was thinking about how and when. She wouldn't have to see him in the meantime.

She had taken two tablets, so that the pain in her body wasn’t what would tip the scales. The best would have been if she'd been able to deaden her feelings. Once she got home, she lay down in bed and sucked in the scent of him from his pillow, a bit greasy like the fur of a beast, and got up when she heard him unlock the door.

He cooked that night, because their bodies still needed to function. She could have done; he wanted to spoil her. He took it better than she had hoped, worse than he would if it had been his disease. She had seen him cry once before, when they'd had a fight and she'd told him that she wished she'd never met him.

“It's harder for you,” she said, at some point when they'd calmed down.

She had cried until she had a cracking pain in her skull, and he had lumbered out in the kitchen and got her a glass of water. The turnip mash tasted like it was unsalted.

He grinned at her. When he spoke, his nose sounded a bit bunged up.

“I just want to take the cancer out of you and step on it until there's nothing left. If I could... but it's not like it's possible. I just want to be able to save you.”

She reached across the table and took his hands, warm with dry and slightly wrinkled palms.

“I know that.”

She didn't hesitate any more. If she had told him now, it might have given him hope, but she was too much of a coward. It was possible that his knowledge would affect the result.

“Can you come over to the clinic?”

It was night, all she felt of him was his warmth and scent. He held her tight, as if she was going to disappear. She had an idea of how he felt now. He just wanted to sleep, because in the dreams it wouldn't have happened.

He didn't say anything, so she went on:

“I just want to check that you don't have any latent mental disorders. Michaelis wants to introduce a routine examination for neurotypical people, so we can give preventative treatment. I thought I could check you, so I don't have to hand you over to someone you don't know to snoop around your brain.”

He would have agreed to anything she'd asked him now. Perhaps he believed her just because she had never lied before.

It was dark when they went there. She didn't usually ask him to drive, but she was thick from painkillers. She wasn't allowed to hurt now. All she saw through the window was the orange lampposts.

The building was aesthetically appealing in daylight, with white façades and glass, but the hard lighting made it dystopic. She perceived a streak of autumn in the air while she swiped her card through the slot and heard the lock click open. Jimmy walked behind her in the reception, nearly a head taller.

“Can I have a look around, or are we on a schedule?”

Perhaps the novelty had distracted him from the cancer. She showed him the unlit staff room and the auditoriums, but most of the doors were the ones where she wasn't admitted: Analysis, which was the end station for the information from the minds, and the servers. Either the tablets or the exhaustion had affected her perception of reality; she walked along the corridor and got the idea that she was already doing it.

“Here it is,” she said, unlocking the door.

The recipient's room was barer than hers, with a medical couch upholstered in Naugahyde, a couple of cabinets and a gas tank. The gas wouldn't harm him. Jimmy pulled himself onto the couch and knocked on the unlit window.

“So you're OK with this, then?”

She hadn't decided what she was going to do if he said no.

“Yes,” he said. “But I don't think I'll ever be really eager for it. I don't know what I've got in there. I don't want you to find something that'll make you loathe me.”

“That's not how it works. When I'm inside a mind, it becomes... symbolic? Everything important in you is there, but I can't interpret most of it. Your relationship with your dad might just be a lion statue or an old writing-desk, or anything. It's just mental problems I'm after.”

If he had any – but she hardly believed it – she would fix them before she finished.

“My life has been fairly idyllic until now,” he said, stretching his arms. “I hope you're not just wasting your time.”

She put the gel on his scalp before she attached the electrodes. For her, at least, its chemical smell was relaxing, as if it was going to help her go to sleep. Jimmy didn't flinch when she put the anaesthetic mask on him. It had been a few years since she'd worked on this end, so she read through the instructions on the metal plaque on the tank several times. He breathed in and out, as if he was already asleep, and his eyelids fell.

“It's going to be better now,” she said to him when she knew he wasn't going to hear.

She turned on the computer in the sender's room, rubbed the gel in her hair while it was starting up, and turned off a couple of settings: the one that saved the operation to the register, and the one that blocked the sender's memories. The first operations hadn't had those safety measures. The patients had walked away with traces of the repair worker's memories and personality, more or less tangible, but she had read everything you could find about them over these few days, and the symptoms hadn't been so bad that they couldn't function.

There was one thing left to do. She checked on Jimmy, but everything was still, then hurried down to the staff room. She took the ivory phone receiver and held it so it wouldn't touch the greasiness in her hair.

“Inga, it's Jannike. Are you doing anything important tonight?”

“No, how come? Has anything happened?”

“I'm at the clinic.”

She might as well use that lie again.

“I decided to do a routine check on my fiancé, to see if he has any artefacts. Could you come down in forty-five minutes and wake us up? We're in Room 1. I shouldn't need more than that... if he has any disorders, they're not likely to be particularly deeply set.”

Inga agreed without questioning anything. Jannike had shown herself trustworthy.

In the sending room, she checked the settings one last time, attached the electrodes and lay down on the couch, the black anaesthetic mask clamped over her mouth. The strip lights blinked and went out.

Jannike stepped through the door into the corridor, and she had everything with her: she was more unchanged, perhaps healthier, but she didn't have time to look down at her projection. It wasn't the important thing. She called up memories: Mum's and Dad's faces; a stuffed tiger that had been her favourite toy until she lost it when they were at Grandmother's; and the doctor who had said “cancer of the cervix”; and the lampposts sweeping over the car. Nothing was hazier than it would have been if she'd been awake. She felt that she had control now, as if she'd realised that she was dreaming. She had raised her hand to test it with some effect, but she didn’t want to manipulate anything in Jimmy.

She had wanted to look around for a long time, because it was he, but the interior rooms resembled each other more than you would have thought. The corridor had no distinctive marks that showed that it was Jimmy. The light was a bit healthier than in the minds she used to treat, like daylight, even though there were no windows.

She had no more of an idea about what was where than in the regular cases. She started off to the left, like she used to, but after a few minutes a little sensation made her look down. Something was falling off her, making her lighter. It wasn't bits of her coat or flesh, that would have made her panic, just small ruby red spheres. She couldn't connect them to anything, but she knew they were part of her. While she had her eyes on one, it rolled to the side in a jerky motion, as if it was trying to get away, and melted to a surface, then nothing, on the varnished plank floor. One Christmas, Dad had given her a plastic ball that glowed red with your body heat when you squeezed it in your hand. She was already losing things, then. That was good, but she wanted to leave everything in one go, for the greatest possible cohesion.

She didn't try to reach her memories again. If anything was gone, she didn't want to know, and perhaps the panic would block them. Once she was rational, she realised that she must have retained the memories; they were in her sleeping brain.

She ran at first, but she was in his mind, nothing she could see was physical, so she pulled her arms and legs up and zoomed like an electrical pulse. The corridors retained their details, even though she saw them in spaces of time no longer than blinks. Everything in his mind was tidy and spartan. One window looked out on a hill with a pine tree.

She stopped in a room where the complex lancet-arc ceiling was kept in place with a web of chains, but the floor plane was full of shadows, even where there wasn't anything to cast them. Even now she had the syringe. It was a natural grief, no disorder, but she couldn't help herself from injecting the largest – it swelled and pulsated around the needle – and let his natural defence mechanisms dissolve it. Perhaps she owed it to him. It was possible that she would be able to combat them afterwards.

This was as far as she would go. She didn't have to get closer to the centre; she didn't want to risk damaging something important.

She was standing on the flagstones again, her body as concrete as it could get without the pain. As soon as she could think it, her hand held a long knife. For a moment, she wondered if she would need to be cut up into many little pieces in order to contaminate him, but she couldn't imagine that it would make any difference. Perhaps it was even better if it was a whole body. If it took longer for his mind to assimilate her, it would increase the chance of leaving a clear impression.

She tested the knife on the pad of her fingertip, and it stung. Once it started, she might convince herself that the pain didn't matter because it wasn't real, but the anguish was necessary to turn this into a death.

Soon, Inga would wake Jimmy and her, where they slept in their rooms. She would go home and talk to him and eat, and when the real Jannike died, he would have something left.

She put the blade to her jugular vein and pressed with both hands.

THE END

#drama #romancedrama #romance drama #sf #science fiction #sci-fi #mindreading #future psychiatry #cancer

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sometayrecords · 2 years ago

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folklore, evermore and Fearless era

One thing I really hate is when some people say that folklore and evermore didn’t have “real” eras. To me, these two albums clearly had their own era, both aesthetically and commercially wise. Taylor didn’t fail to do any of the things that happened to other eras, like performing in every chance she’d get, appearing in interviews, accepting awards, and supporting the album’s main aesthetic theme all the while. Yes, there were no tour, or other overcrowded events, but doing all of those things via video call or with a small attendance, doesn’t make them any less valid. In fact, to me, keeping things “isolated” wasn’t just a necessary solution to covid measurements, but also a very suitable thing to do, regarding the albums were also created in isolation.

More specifically, commercially speaking, Taylor released signed copies and digital playlists for both albums, to boost both the streams and the sales of the physical CDs, as well as plenty of original merch products. She performed in two award shows, received numerous awards for her work, gave several interviews, fully owning the cottagecore style that represented the albums in all of them, collaborated with other artists and released songs similar to folklore/evermore's style, and the list can go on.

Let’s not forget about folklore long pond sessions. Taylor couldn't perform the album’s songs in front of a huge crowd, but she performed them live in a cabin in the woods, which fitted perfectly not only to the album's aesthetic but also to the quarantine reality. And since she couldn't invite people to her house to talk to them privately about the songs, she instead released a documentary, where she talks about the songs’ meaning, for the whole world to see. folklore long pond sessions was the quarantine equivalent of what would be both previous eras’ secret sessions and also the tour’s movie. but it was better, because this time, we were all there, at the same time, and at the same place (inside a house).

I know one thing different from all the previous eras was the duration, since it only lasted for a few months before she announced Fearless (Taylor’s version), but I think we forget folklore and evermore were not planned. They happened as a surprise, and I don’t mean just to the fans, but also to Taylor herself. She didnt plan to create them, but she did because she had the urge to lean to music while she was isolated, like the rest of the world. For evermore, she had specifically said “this is for those of you who turn to music to cope, like me” because, as she also said, music has been the one thing that keeps her connected to us, and she wishes it continue to connect us, “evermore”. Taylor also said herself that, in contrast to the other albums, that were all the start of something new, evermore felt like the continuation of a chapter she was already in. It was a part of the folklore era/chapter, and both albums together complete the image of that era. People keep saying Taylor doesn’t care about evermore, but the truth is she simply cared more about giving music to the fans than promoting the music for the sales.

I also think a similar thing applies to Fearless TV. I could say that this album had even less of its own era, since the promotions lasted only for a couple of months. But the release of Fearless (Taylor’s version) had a much stronger significance to Taylor than the sales. It was all about her, her music and her fans - much like evermore had forwarded. It was the first official step into owning her music, and a remembrance of an era where she first felt as close to the fans as ever. The first time she was as known as to sell-out arena tickets, but as little known as to have the ability to personally interact with as many fans as possible.

Therefore, despite being a different album, I consider Fearless TV a part of evermore era, and evermore a part of folklore era. I think a different era started with RED TV, but for a whole year, from late July of 2020 up to October of 2021, we were living into one, very real and valid era. An era about magic and teen romance stories, where lines between fairy tales and the real world were blurred at folklore, had just started to fade out in Fearless, and were in the in-between in evermore. And an era of music connecting Taylor and her fans in the most unique ways.

#folklore #evermore #fearless tv #unpopular opinion

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rickmandowneyjr · 3 years ago

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Cuts to Cope

Angst, fluff Pairing: Severus Snape and Student!Reader (platonic) Warning: talk of self-harm, mentions of character's death Word Count: 2348 A/N: This is a little piece I wrote a while ago but didn't know if I should post or not. After re-doing certain bits, I decided to upload it. Hope it's not too difficult to read. As always, the ending is a little abrupt and not too detailed, leaving it sort of up to y'all as well :) Sorry if there are any typos (I only ever get the time to write when it's quite late nowadays)

Yet another day at Hogwarts - waking up at 6:30 am, showering, getting dressed in your robes, and heading to breakfast. Wishing everyone you passed a good morning, wearing your signature smile as you did.

You were a 7th year, one of the few returning ones after last year's incident with Cedric Diggory. He'd been your best friend, or at least that's what people thought. Cedric Diggory and you had been dating for the last 7 months before his death. You didn't want anyone knowing because being star students meant eyes prying into every aspect of your relationship.

People praised you, a model student and now, prefect, who set an example. An example of how to be strong and cope no matter what life threw at you. Little did they know, you harboured a little secret. A dark, horrifying, and disturbing secret that would never let anyone look at you the same way if they ever found out.

Your first class for the day was Potions. You were a brilliant student, especially at Potions, yet Snape still had something against you. You didn't take it personally, though; he wasn't really fond of anyone. You walked into class, taking your regular seat at the front. Snape walked into class a little while later, slamming the door behind him, commanding everyone's attention.

"Turn to page 420," he drawled. You opened the book to find the recipe for Amortentia. Your heart felt a tug at the name of the love potion, never having been able to find out the answers with Cedric.

Snape's deep voice brought your focus back to class as he said, "Since it takes a week to brew, I've already completed most of the process. All you need to do is the last day's work," making the class sigh with relief. "However," he continued, "The last day of brewing is crucial and not easy. So, I expect your attention to be fully on the task at hand."

You began brewing the potion, following the steps perfectly. Snape sat down to grade papers as the class worked. He looked at you and said, "Ms. [L/N], roll up your sleeves while you work. I'd hate for there to be mishaps in my class because of one student's carelessness."

You hesitated, but then did as asked. You weren't the best at wandless magic but had made sure to perfect this spell solely for such instances. As you rolled your sleeves, you subtly waved your hand over your forearms, mumbling, "Illusiont," and casting the disillusionment charm.

You saw Snape narrow his eyes at you and panicked for a second before you saw him shake his head and return to grading. Breathing a sigh of relief, you returned to the task at hand and continued brewing.

After a while, you'd finished, and were the first one to have done so. Snape walked over to your desk and took a whiff of the potion, raising an eyebrow before giving you a single nod of approval, letting you know that it was perfect. Once everyone was done, he walked around, starting at the back, and asked everyone to announce what they smelled. You hadn't smelled your Amortentia yet and hadn't planned on doing so either, feeling quite relieved when Snape hadn't asked that question earlier.

Your heart rate quickened as you began to worry about how your body and mind would react to smelling it. You couldn't do it last year, since the Triwizard tournament had led to a bunch of classes being cancelled. As you thought about how excited you had been at the prospect of sharing the experience with Cedric, Snape's voice pulled you back to your potions class.

"Ms. [L/N]."

"Yes, sir?"

He rolled his eyes in annoyance. "What. Do. You. Smell," he spoke, irritation evident in every word.

You swallowed hard as you leaned forward to inhale the scent. Your pupils dilated, your heartbeat quickened and your knees threatened to give out at the all-too-familiar fragrance. Your throat went dry as you stopped the tears from forming.

"Well? We haven't got all day, class is to be dismissed soon." He raised an eyebrow at you, asking you to hurry up since you were the last one.

With every ounce of energy, you calmed yourself and stopped your voice from wavering. "Old books, butterscotch and... vanilla," you sighed. Your breathing was erratic and you knew you needed to get out of class and get to the abandoned girls' washroom.

As if on cue, the bell rang, dismissing the class. Snape gave you an odd look and was about to ask you what was wrong but you had already gathered your belongings and were marching out the door. He decided to follow you since he'd never seen you act like that before and was wondering what had happened to you all of a sudden.

You made your way up the stairs, hurrying before you had a breakdown in the middle of the hallway. As you reached the washroom, you started rummaging through your bag since the hallway was empty. You took the small blade that you carried around out, pushing the door to the bathroom open.

Snape's POV

I followed her out of the classroom. Though not my favourite, [Y/N] was an incredible witch and this wasn't normal behaviour for her. She'd marched out before I had even dismissed class which concerned me even more, given her usually 'perfect' behaviour. She paced through the hallways and up the stairs so fast that I could've sworn she was moving around faster than I did on a normal basis. There was an urgency in her stride and I don't know why, but it concerned me.

She finally turned into the hallway leading to the girls' washroom on the third floor, which was odd. No one used this, as far as I was aware. I was a little embarrassed, considering I'd just followed a young girl to a washroom. In an isolated area, at that. I swear I never would've imagined myself going even further and following her in, but what I'd seen had shocked and concerned me enough to do just that.

End of Snape's POV

As you entered the bathroom, you had missed Snape, whose eyes were wide with shock. He couldn't believe what he'd seen. [Y/N] [L/N], the golden girl of Hogwarts, had just walked into an abandoned washroom after pulling out a blade from her bag. Not wanting to jump to any conclusions, he rushed in, wanting to confirm what his eyes had just seen.

As you were about to enter a stall, the door to the bathroom, swung open, making you jump. You hid the blade by making a fist, unintentionally cutting into your palm. You winced at the unexpected pain but didn't let it show.

You turned to face Professor Snape, and he was eyeing your hand. 'There's no way he saw it, is there?' you thought.

"Ms. [L/N], care to show me your hands?"

You panicked. He knew. You tried to divert his attention. "Sir, this is the girls' washroom."

"I'm aware," he stated. "Now... Hands," he said as he glared at you, letting you know that he wouldn't fall for any attempts to change the subject.

You sighed and opened your hands, and saw his gaze soften. He walked to you taking your hand in his as he gently pulled the razor out. You winced as it came out, knowing this would impair you for the rest of your classes.

"What were you thinking?!" He scolded, startling you. He reached for your arm, rolling up your sleeves once again and muttered, "Finite."

The scars on your arms started showing up and you couldn't do anything but look away, your eyes resting anywhere but his gaze.

"So that was the Disillusionment Charm I heard you use, earlier."

You stayed silent, still refusing to meet his eyes. Of all the professors, it had to be him. Sure, he wasn't fond of you, but you had immense respect for the man, and to let him see you in this light... it took every bit of you to not lose your composure.

"Look at me," he said.

You turned to face him. His usually cold eyes showed too much concern and the uncharacteristic response from the potions master was proving to be a lot to handle. Tears stung your eyes as he stared at you.

"Why?" He asked, his voice so genuine that you couldn't help but let your emotions spill, creating a mess that you couldn't be bothered to care about anymore.

"I can't do this anymore," you sniffled. "I don't want to. He was everything to me and it just hurts so much."

"Who?"

"Cedric."

"Ah, yes. I'm aware you and Mr. Diggory were best friends. I'm sorry, [Y/N]."

"No," you said, finally being able to talk to someone about it. "He was my boyfriend. And... I never got to tell him I loved him... because I wasn't sure. Today just made it worse when I smelled him in my Amortentia. It confirmed that I did and I never got to say it." You were sobbing now, not caring what you looked like, what a mess you probably were, or what Snape was thinking of you and your confession.

You felt him awkwardly wrap his arms around you as he pulled your head to his chest. Your cries got louder and your wails of agony echoed in the empty washroom as your hands clutched the fabric of his robes. The feeling of someone comforting you was overwhelming. You'd always had to keep up this image of a perfect student, reliable friend, someone who could never have such horrifying tendencies.

Even then, as you cried out loud, your instinct made you bury your face in his chest, muffling the 'ugly' sobs. Snape's heart broke as your thoughts flooded his mind. As you struggled to breathe, he turned your head slightly, making you audible again. He didn't hush you; just stroked your hair as your tears soaked his robes.

It took a while, but you finally calmed down, your sobs reducing to soft whimpers before they died out entirely. Your throat was sore, and lips, chapped from all the crying. Your eyes were red and puffy, and the reality of the situation finally came crashing down on you.

Your secret was out. More than one, at that. One of the professors knew, and the strictest one too. You had just spent Merlin knows how long crying into his chest, which was now soaked with your tears.

"I'm sorry," you mumbled, your voice, hoarse. "Your robes are all wet now," you said, trying to move away.

"That's the least of my worries right now," he said, keeping your head in place as he continued, "I understand what you're going through. Better than you'd know." It sounded like it was painful for him to talk about it, the tone of his voice giving the vulnerability away. "But this is not the way to deal with it," he said as rubbed your back.

"Does it go away?"

"I'll be honest," he sighed. "It does get lesser with time if you allow yourself to heal. However, it never goes away entirely. A part of you will always love and miss him. I'm sorry," he said.

"No, I'm glad. I don't want to forget him. Or my love for him. Cedric Diggory was and will always be - my first love."

You finally pulled away from his chest and looked him in the eyes as he gave you a gentle smile. You managed to muster a somber one and sighed.

"Do any of your friends know?"

"Merlin, no!"

"Why not? They're your friends. They could-"

"I can't have this getting out. Everyone will-"

"Who cares what people think?" He raised his voice. It was silent for a while before he sighed and spoke again.

"[Y/N], I want you to promise me something."

You knew what was coming. You gulped and nodded softly.

"I want you to promise me that you'll stop this. Cedric wouldn't want this for you."

"I know, and I've tried before. It's not that simple-"

"I know," he said, cutting you off. "Which is why, the next time you get the urge to do this, you'll come to me. No matter what the situation might be."

You were surprised at his words. It was incredibly nice of him to offer this to you, and you nodded, accepting his generosity.

"Also," he continued, "Please stop going to such great lengths to please others and worrying about what others think. It's not healthy."

"But-"

"But nothing. Your health is suffering and you can't even bring yourself to tell anyone because you're so busy keeping up this little charade of 'everything is fine'."

You stayed silent. There was truth in his words and you couldn't refute his accusations. You just looked up at him, once again, finding the uncharacteristic concerned look meeting your gaze. Nodding softly, you agreed. How could you not when someone had shown you such consideration and compassion?

A small smile graced his usually stoic face as he helped you up, and you both made your way out of the bathroom. He escorted you back to your dormitories, ensuring you were alright before the two of you parted ways.

The rest of the school year passed and Snape stayed true to his word, and you to yours. Every time you felt the urge to hurt yourself to relieve the pain, you'd find Snape. He was patient and helped you every step of the way. Slowly, but surely, you were able to overcome your urges and also found yourself living for yourself, rather than up to others' expectations.

By the time you graduated, you had overcome the habit and thanked Snape in your graduation speech, never giving away the details as to why. A lot of people had assumed there was something between the two of you, especially since you went to meet him all through the school year, but you didn't let it bother you, because... Who cares what people think, right?

P.S. - Sorry I've been a little slow with the writing. My college assignments have started rolling in and I'm currently swamped. Also, I'm working on a little something (announcing it in 2-3 days so make sure to check in lol). Rest assured, I'm slowly and steadily making my way through requests. Thank you for understanding <3

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holocene-sims · 3 years ago

Text

next // previous

may 18, 2021 1:00 p.m. department of rheumatology, room 414

moments like these are a cruel reminder of the loneliness that accompanies the loss of his relationship.

hospitals are houses of death and disease; they’re sterile, cold, and unwelcoming, and they're haunted by bad omens. it’s not that grant can’t do this alone–of course he can, this isn’t his first rodeo–but he’d rather not. shannon is just down the hall in the lobby but yet he's filled with an unshakeable sense of loneliness. päivi understood his fear of these morgues more than anyone else. lived experience leads to wisdom and she is the first person he’s known in a long time to have any real, personal comprehension of illness. but now he cannot even speak of his fears to her, for the days of compassion and love and camaraderie are long gone.

so instead, he will sit here alone and face whatever verdict comes his way with what bravery he can muster.

grant tries to push the haunting thoughts from his mind but stirs in his discomfort, wringing his hands, squeezing his eyes shut to protect them from the sunlight, and rhythmically swinging one leg back and forth over and over until each time his heel clicks against the hard plastic of the exam table’s railings.

he tries, he really does, but he is no good at finding peace.

the person who promised him she’d never leave, no matter what was wrong with him or what he needed to do or where he needed to go to to restore some semblance of health, abandoned in in the end anyway.

being alone is just another thing he'll have to get used to again.

“i just want you to be okay. or as okay as you can be. i know what it’s like. you already have your whole family to rely on but i'm here, too. i won’t leave you because of this.”

perhaps she hadn’t been entirely honest with him. knowing what it’s like will never prevent someone from changing their opinion. maybe it was too much: the abrupt health crisis and the subsequent chaos and fallout of said news. his life has never been the same since, but she chose to alter her own for him.

so maybe it was him. he wouldn't blame her if she somehow found him to be a burden after the last year. if grant were a gambling man, he'd still place a bet on that being the reason. or maybe it's not him and she only regrets her decisions to alter her life for him.

or maybe–just maybe–he’ll never know her reasons and pondering further it is a waste of his time.

grant has wasted enough of his time in life with pointless self-destruction. and he cannot cope with his own habitual rumination anymore, not when it's killing him.

this time he will have to find peace. he’ll force it if he has to.

their relationship is over. it’s done. there is nothing left to do but accept reality.

a quick knock at the door signals the arrival of his doctor, so grant sighs and straightens himself up, aiming to appear as cobbled together and presentable as possible.

and whatever he hears in this office, he'll have to accept as well.

#ts4 #the sims 4 #sims 4 #sims 4 story #ts4 screenshots #simblr #hlcn: everything the stars promised #the translation on what shannon and grant said is 'best of luck' // 'thank you buddy'#i always consider it canon that the family speaks irish with each other unless there are monolingual english speakers in the room so tada #anyway also my knowledge of the language is fairly limited to duolingo so apologies if anything is funky with the script #hlcn: shannon #hlcn: grant #idk if i should tag the doctor but #holocene.docx #holocene.png

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harry-writings · 4 years ago

Text

Drive Me Wild

- where Harry has a problem expressing emotions, and Y/n talks too much

Masterlist

A/N: mentions of drug and alcohol abuse, indications of depression, and a very mild form of smut (if we can really call it that)

Song mentioned: Invisible String by Taylor Swift

December 23, 2016

“Do you even have feelings for me?”

Celeste was sitting across the booth at their local diner, a half-empty mug of hot chocolate left stale at the table top, her eyes wet and cold just like the December she’d been trying so desperately to feel warm in.

Harry had his hands held together in front of him, his eyes void and stare blank as his mind played back to all the times he’d given his all to her. Sure, he didn’t always do it with a smile on his face or with lovestruck eyes, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t happy.

And how could she not see it? How could she not feel it? He didn’t even bother spending his time with anybody else because he didn’t like anybody else. She was his only company, his only kiss, his only friend.

How was that not enough?

“What would make you think that I don’t?”

She laughed, right in his face, like it wasn’t enough to tear him apart.

“You’re kidding me, right?” She looked serious then, her face fallen and lips frowned. He felt stupid because he must have done something he couldn’t remember, or something to blindly hurt her feelings, yet he had no idea what it was. They were doing so good. “Do you even know how you look at me? Like I’m not even here. Like I’m boring you half to death. I can’t even tell what you’re feeling right now.”

Broken, sad, confused. He wanted to tell her that — he really did — but what would it have mattered? He’d still have that same meaningless stare and that same emptiness that had brought them to that very moment. She wouldn’t believe him even if she wanted to.

And it shouldn’t have broken him as much as it did, considering they weren’t even dating — just testing the waters, feeling each other out, wondering if their dreams could ever belong in their reality — but it hurt him just the same. She was the closest thing to a girlfriend Harry ever had, after all.

“Talking to you is like — it’s like talking to a wall. You’re just… there.”

She stopped to look at him more intentionally then — maybe she had missed something all along. Maybe, there was something he did to show the smallest of his emotions, like a shift in his eye, a pitch in his breath, a quiver of his lip.

But just like every other time, there was nothing. He was incurably empty.

“I think you’ve laughed at something I’ve said maybe, five times?” She let out a breathy chuckle because the tension was so thick she could hardly keep herself together, and she was so nervous, and he was so unpredictable. “And then you have this way with your words where, like you say certain things to beat around the bush about how you truly feel about me, and then it makes me wonder if it’s because you don’t even feel that way at all.”

He wanted to argue with her so bad. He wanted so badly to prove to her how wrong she was but how could he have, when she was so right?

Nobody had ever taught him how to do that — the relationships, the emotions, the vulnerability that came with being human. He couldn’t even recall a single time his parents had laughed at something he had said — couldn’t recall his parents ever having friends over, having date nights, even smiling at one another.

And to make matters worse, he was an only child. He was constantly around the voidance of his parents, the empty conversations, the pit of silences — really, that was all he had ever known. And later, that was what he grew into.

And if he could have changed it, he would have. But how does one go from keeping it all inside, to letting it all out?

He’s tried it all — emptying bottles of wine, smoking down blunts, shoving pills down his throat — and still couldn’t he laugh alongside himself, smile at memories that haven’t let him go, pour his heart out to strangers.

That wasn’t him. That wasn't who he was supposed to be, no matter how hard he tried to be that person for her.

But again, why wasn’t that enough?

“But I’m here, aren’t I?”

Celeste looked at him like it was the last time she was ever going to. And he knew.

“I don’t think you want to be.”

Y/n is utterly incapable of leaving Harry alone.

And Harry’s always alone, Y/n finds. Between every meeting and during every lunch hour, Harry always has a space beside him that’s just as empty and vacant as he is — well, just as empty and vacant as he comes off — and she assumes that’s why nobody’s ever been willing to take it.

But Y/n finds herself beside him more than she finds herself anywhere else.

Everyday when the clock hits twelve and lunch hour begins, Y/n sits in the chair right beside his and talks to him about anything and everything she can think of — the books she’s read, her childhood memories, the dreams she had the previous night — because he shouldn’t be left all alone the way he’s been so used to.

He doesn’t deserve it. He isn’t just a heartless, lifeless man passing through his days and night without feeling anything, he’s so much more than that — so much more than his blank stares, his vacant expressions, and his linear lips.

There’s something so unexplainably mesmerizing and compelling about him, she can’t help but wonder how nobody else has felt it. It’s magnetic, the way he tells the world everything it needs to know by the look and glimmer in his eye.

It’s all there, everything is there, yet nobody sees it except for her.

It’s as if the universe is telling her that right beside him is where she belongs. Nobody else has claimed that spot, after all, and it’s the only place that feels so right to her.

She feels as if it was always waiting for her, long before twelve o’clock, long before they had even met.

August 7, 2016

“Do you know how embarrassing it is?”

Y/n was sat on her kitchen counter in nothing but underwear and an oversized white t-shirt, sobbing and shaking upon the granet, her elbows on her bent knees so her arms were covering her mascara-run face — too ashamed to show herself to the world that’ll only find its way to break her down again.

Cooper was sitting on the barstool just three feet in front of her, his dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his tie loose to his collarbones, sleeves rolled up against his elbows, eyes defeated yet raging with resentment.

She had never seen him quite like that — so vengeful and so unforgiving. She was so unloved, she saw it in everything he did that night — from telling her to shut up in front of his friends, to making her take a taxi home because nobody could stand the sound of her voice anymore.

The love of her life didn’t even want to take her home, and that was all she needed to know that everything she had ever held onto was everything that needed to be let go of.

“Darling… it has got to stop at some point. I know it’s because you’re nervous but you don’t do anything to change it.”

But why does she have to have to?

That’s all she wanted to know — all she wanted to scream at him at that moment in time but god forbid she had anything to say to him anymore.

And how many more times did she have to keep wasting her breath trying to convince him that she couldn’t help it no matter how hard she tried — the constant talking, the rambling, the scrambling to tell stories, the muttering in awkward silences.

It was her way of calming down her nerves in new environments she could never seem to adapt to — her way of dealing with groups of unfamiliar faces, her way of coping with the rest of the world.

And it seemed as though no matter where she went, there was no place for her. She constantly felt stuck in someone’s way, felt like she was always blocking the entrance, and no matter how many times she tried to find a corner to shelter herself in, there were people still climbing over her to go their own way, and she was always left behind, beaten to the ground.

She just wanted to catch up so badly, but only did it make her fall backwards, time after time again. Yet she still did it, time after time again.

So, she just kept crying, too embarrassed to look at him, too afraid to speak, too hurt to know that she could never forgive him no matter how hard she tried.

“Your habits become a problem when they negatively affect everybody else around you. Y/n, you barely have friends, you can’t make friends with mine, all because you don’t let anybody else talk.”

And what an over-exaggeration. Of course she let other people have a chance to respond and have side conversations… just maybe not as often as they would have liked. But it wasn’t extreme enough where the only conversations she carried were one-sided — not that she had noticed.

“I used to love you for it but lately it’s just been — it’s been too much. I can hardly stand it anymore. Don’t know how to say it without making you cry.”

There was no way to.

The babbling, the rambling, the talking… it was all in her nature. If somebody didn’t like it, then they didn’t like her, and it was just as simple as that.

There was no way around it — there was no magic serum, no prescription drug, no cure for over-talking. And there were days, endless days, that she felt cursed, because why is the one thing that’s so wrong about her the one thing she can’t fix?

But again, why would she have to?

“So — so all the times you kissed me whenever I started going on tangents wasn’t because you loved me or because you wanted to, it was because you didn’t know how else to shut me up, right? You didn’t want to have to hear me anymore. Didn’t even want to hear me cry.”

He didn’t have to answer her because she already knew the answer herself. What she once thought was manifested from pure love and endearment was just as toxic and conniving as everything else she’d ever put her hands on.

Why couldn’t she just be enough?

She refuses to move her hands away from her face.

“You never loved me.” Y/n whispered beneath the sobs that shook through her already broken soul. “That’s the worst part.”

Harry doesn’t like being alone.

He never has, but he’d been able to tolerate it through the years. He didn’t have much of a choice — forced to shove the feeling down to the very depth of his core and carry it around with him until it faded to a subtle numbness that pricked against his chest with every move he made.

Loneliness now, though, has taken on an entirely different meaning that Harry can’t tolerate no matter how hard he tries. Because now, loneliness means Y/n isn’t beside him, and he despises being away from her.

There’s something about her that’s unexplainably addicting, like a drug he can’t get enough of even when it’s soaking in his veins and taking over every one of his senses — one that gives him withdrawals that make him so far gone he can barely stand on his own two feet.

She’s unlike anybody he’s ever met.

Because though she seems to put herself out for the world to see, there is so much she keeps hidden. He can see it in her eyes — all the darkness and pain that’s been seeped within them, and nobody else has ever seemed to notice, because nobody else seems to care.

But he does. God, how much does he care, how much does he want to curse every person in existence for not seeing how deserving she is to be happy. It’s all she deserves.

And he’s convinced that the universe created her solely for him, because everyday when the clock strikes twelve and lunch hour begins, he’s reminded that she doesn’t choose anybody else — it reminds him that she chooses him, every single day, in a room full of people that are so much more approachable.

She keeps choosing him because somewhere deep down, he makes her happy. And he’ll keep choosing her, too, long after twelve o’clock.

Harry’s having a bad day.

Since the moment he blinked his eyes open, every little thing has been driving him absolutely mad — from somebody honking their horn at another driver (that wasn’t even him), to the way Jeremy asked him to change one of the slides for his upcoming presentation (even though he told him as nicely as he possibly could), everything was getting under his skin and onto his nerves like a newborn leech.

And what’s even worse is that Y/n is aggravating him when normally, he dreads the final minutes of lunch hour because it means they’re going to have to part ways and only see each other at team meetings until it’s time for them to go home.

They’ve been friends for two years and not once has Y/n ever made his leg bounce with impatience, or had him fiddle with his glasses out of anxiousness, or made his jaw clench with annoyance, until today.

It’s only twenty minutes past twelve and Harry is begging for death.

“You see, I didn’t know it at the time, though! I was twelve and the chaperones weren’t around to watch what I was doing. I saw the duck come towards me and for some reason, I really wanted to know what its beak felt like. I didn’t think it would actually bite me, I wasn’t food!”

And normally, he’d nod his head or give her some sort of indication that he was paying attention to her because he always was, but he hasn’t even so much as lifted his head from above his food since she started talking.

“And it hurt! Proper cried and screamed because it was so much worse than I thought it would be. Ducks are evil little things. I remember one time me and my mum were at the park having a picnic when a duck came flying by and almost hitting her right in the —”

“Do you ever stop talking?”

Silence.

He shouldn’t be talking to her like this, he knows that, but right now, he can’t seem to dwell on the consequences that’ll surely come after this. This headspace he’s in is so unforgiving, it somehow convinces him that Y/n never talking to him again is exactly what he wants, when it’s so far from it.

This bitterness that’s consuming him is only swallowing him down for today, it’s temporary, he knows this because it’s happened to him before. It makes him act instinctively and selfishly, like he’d tear limb from limb if he doesn’t get what he wants in that very moment in time.

He doesn’t care who he hurts in the process, even if who he hurts is the only person he cares about.

“W — what?”

She knows what she heard, she’s heard it so many times before, she just can’t believe Harry was the one who said it.

Never, in a million years, would she have believed he would ever be the person to make her feel this way — so heartbroken, so lost, so confused. He’s always been so different with her, in ways she couldn’t explain, and it always made her feel worthy of something so good.

It never crossed her mind that he’d betray her like this, she never saw that in him — she never saw him being angry at her, or resenting her, or disliking her until this very moment, as he’s staring right through her, like she doesn’t even exist.

“Would appreciate it if you left me alone for today.”

There’s a thud in her chest that makes her blood run cold and her insides freeze with sadness. And there’s this look on her face that makes Harry want to take it all back, and he almost does, but he doesn’t.

She’s lived twenty four years of misery, yet never has she felt so hurt, because never has she loved so hard.

“Oh, o — okay.” She mutters with a faltered voice, nodding her head through unshed tears.

There’s forty minutes left of lunch hour and the only friend she has doesn’t even want her here. She has nowhere else to go.

But she leaves anyway.

Y/n locks herself in her room that night.

It’s a bad habit she made out of herself when she was a teenager — where she’d lock herself up, shut herself out from the world, and keep herself quiet until she’s forced to leave her house again.

She keeps the lights off and sits in the corner in silence, keeping herself awake by repeating self-loathing mantras in her head — like a form of punishment only she is deserving of.

She cries, but that’s all she allows herself to do.

Harry doesn’t sleep that night.

He lays in the dark and just stares up at the ceiling, wondering how he let himself do what he’s done.

Y/n means everything to him, whether she knows it or not, she’s the only thing he has. There’s nothing left in this world for him to hold onto, except for her, and he still managed to let her go.

Tomorrow, he wants to tell her he loves her, because he does. But that’s just another form of selfishness he can’t put onto her again.

He won’t allow himself to, though that’s all he wants to do.

Y/n doesn’t show up for lunch hour the next day.

And Harry’s never felt so alone.

Harry sees her three hours later organizing files in Jeremy’s office.

Suddenly, his hands are slicked with sweat and his fingers shake with nervousness. He feels as if the world has stopped turning because what he chooses to say determines whether or not he could ever have her the way he so desperately needs her.

He wipes his palms against his pants, gathering his breath and his thoughts before he slowly creeps himself up behind her — terrified that if he makes one wrong move, she’ll walk away from him again.

He really wouldn’t be able to survive it if she did.

“Y/n.” Harry greets her hesitantly, knowing in the pit of his stomach that what he’s done was so much worse than he thought because she doesn’t even acknowledge him — doesn’t even look at him — when that’s all she ever used to do. “Can I have a word with you?”

Still, she doesn’t look up at him. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t even want him looking at her and she would tell him that if she were still talking to him, but she isn’t. She’s just going to keep biting her tongue until it falls off and she has no choice but to swallow it down whole.

Harry’s heart breaks when all he’s met with is her silence.

This isn’t her, and this isn’t what he wants.

His hand reaches down to her wrist, holding onto it so lightly, Y/n almost doesn’t feel it. Her movements halt.

He’s never touched her before.

“Please.”

Her eyes follow the path to where they’re connected, watching as Harry’s thumb traces the smallest of circles against her skin. And as she stares down so pathetically, she feels Harry’s eyes casted exactly where hers are, too, wondering when he’s going to have to let go.

And though his touch is mending the broken bones within her, his words cut like knives, and she’s still bleeding out so helplessly.

She rips her wrist out of his grasp, her eyes now just as far away from him as before. It happened so fast, Harry wonders if he imagined the whole thing.

“Busy.”

He waits for her to say something else — waits for her to curse him out, to yell and scream and rant to him about how much she hates every last bit of him because anything is better than this. But again, he’s left with nothing.

His world falls apart.

“One word? That’s all you give me?”

Her eyes flood with tears.

“That’s all you asked for.”

He slams the side of his fist against the shelf in defeat, so incredibly angry with himself that he can hardly stand on his own two feet without wanting to beat himself down. She’s crying and avoiding him like he’s the last person she ever wants to see, and the worst part is that he can’t even blame her for it.

He has half the mind to walk away and never look back because she doesn’t deserve this; wants to spare her the heartache and let her find somebody that is so much better than he is — somebody who can look at her like they want her to be there, somebody who can smile at her, somebody who can laugh with her.

He can’t give her any of that because that’s not the kind of guy he is, but he doesn’t have that kind of heart. He can’t let her go because deep down he knows she loves him, too, and what would it make him if he were to destroy something so beautiful before it’s even started?

“Look, if you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. All I’m asking is that you listen to me, please. Y/n, you know I didn’t mean it.”

He runs his fingers through his hair, letting out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“I like you so much.”

Y/n looks back at him now, her eyes still as wet and distant as before, and it tears him apart.

She looks into his eyes because all of her answers are there — they always are — and she can tell this has taken a toll on him the same way it has her. Even with his voice being so stagnant, and his face being so cold, he’s falling apart.

She wishes that was enough.

She looks away from him again.

And Harry’s at a loss. He doesn’t know what else to do to convince her how much he means it — how much he really is sorry and how badly he wants her. He’s so bad with words and so bad with expressing himself that he doesn’t know what he can and can’t do to get her to forgive him.

So, he does the only thing that feels right.

He grabs a hold of her arm and spins her around until her chest is against his, and before she has the chance to say anything to him, and before he can talk himself out of it, he kisses her.

His hands are intertwined with hers as he gives her everything he has. He’s absolutely relentless but it’s nothing short of passionate and desperate, longing for her even when she’s right up against him.

It’s better than either of them could have ever expected it to be.

He’s the first to pull away, and Y/n is let completely and utterly lovestruck.

“You can take it back!”

Harry looks up from his notebook with furrowed eyebrows and curious eyes, watching as Y/n slams the door shut behind her before standing at the head of the table with her arms fisted at her sides, nervously biting on her bottom lip and tapping her foot with anticipation — all the while keeping her composure as firm and collected as possible.

“Pardon?”

“The kiss.”

She waits for him to say something about it — anything about it — maybe even scoff or gag a little at the reminder. But alas, he gives her nothing but empty stares and emotionless lips.

“You can take it back, if you want to. I promise, it won’t hurt my feelings.”

And of course, she’s lying.

It would really break her heart in two if Harry felt that what happened yesterday was a mistake — that the feelings only fit in that one particular scene, that he was just caught up in the moment and didn’t know how else to apologize.

She had been waiting a lifetime for that sort of magic to be casted onto her — the kind of magic that has her feeling like she’s been granted everything she has ever wanted and more than she could ever ask for. And it feels so surreal that he kissed her that her head keeps swooning with hopes and dreams of everything that could possibly lay between them.

But if he isn’t laying in bed, desperately wishing for the same things she is, she needs to know before it’s too late.

“Oh.” Harry purses his lips, looking back down at his notebook as if she hadn’t said anything at all. “No, thank you.”

Y/n’s mouth drops ever so slightly before she shuts it closed again, flaring her nose as she lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She had been preparing everything she was going to say for every possible scenario, yet here she is, racking her brain trying to come up with how to respond to such an ambiguous yet lucid answer.

And now he won’t even look at her, his undivided attention set upon the pen and paper below him as he writes the ideas for his next project, like it was the most casual and most nonchalant conversation he had ever been in.

“Was that all, love?”

Y/n blinks at him and tilts her head to the side, dazed in her confusion and lost at his choice of words.

Love. He called me love. He’s never called me that before.

But when his eyes sneak back up to hers, she shakes her head as if to pull herself together. She didn’t sacrifice last night’s sleep just to get lost in those very eyes — she needs to know where he stands with her before she takes another leap of faith, though all she wants to do is jump right into the same arms that were holding her so closely yesterday.

“I’m giving you a chance to opt out.”

Harry feels his chest fall to the pit of his stomach.

He straightens himself up upon the chair, his shoulders tensing and his fingers stiffening around his pen, feeling uneasy because does she want him to opt out? Does she want him to take back the kiss that’s been lingering on his lips for far too long now?

And he just looks at her, desperate for her to tell him how badly she wants him to do it again — tell him how badly her lips are aching without the feel of his and how badly she wants him to kiss at them until they’re numb and no longer her own, because he’d do it. He’d do it in a heartbeat if she asked with those pretty eyes of hers, with that stutter and that stumble over her words that never fail to make his heart give out.

And if that just becomes another long-lost dream in his never-ending curse of a life, it will do him in deeper than any of the trenches that have been dug out from within him — deeper than any cut anybody’s ever made on him because right now, in this moment in his life, she’s all he has.

“This is the one and only time I will let you break this off without me babbling about how perfect we could be together and how serious I am about you. Because it’s not going to stop — this rambling thing that I do — and I just want you to know that that’s what makes me who I am and it’s not going to stop for you or for anybody else. And so if it annoys you, if it bothers you and embarrasses you, I’m giving you the chance to leave before either of us get hurt and we can pretend nothing’s ever happened between us.”

She thinks we’d be perfect together.

That’s all his brain can process despite everything else that came with it — all that’s stuck in his brain and tightening at his chest.

He thinks they would be, too, when he really thinks about it. She gets lost in stories he lives so vicariously through, and he gets lost in feelings she lives so curiously in — submerging herself between the lines, reading what lies so dangerously beneath him. And nothing sounds better to him than spending every second of his day relishing in that feeling of intimacy they had both been deprived of for so long.

So how dare he? How dare he make her feel so insecure, so unworthy and so undeserving, to be standing here defending everything that makes her who she is when he’s so captivated by it all? And why is it so fucking hard for him to just tell her?

He feels the corners of his lips dip slightly to his chin, but that’s all he can manage to do. He hopes she can see it, and he hopes that it’s enough.

“I’d rather not.”

She frowns herself, looking down to her feet, feeling slightly ashamed for putting him on the spot like this. But what else was she to do? She couldn’t risk getting her heart beaten and bruised because of her stupid mouth all over again.

“But I’ve annoyed you before.” Y/n mutters between a pout, her foot kicking softly at the ground, wishing she didn’t let his words cut her as deeply as they did. “And like I said, it’s not going to stop. I’m still going to want to be around you and talk to you and keep you company and I don’t know what I would do if later down the line you decide you’ve heard enough of me and can’t handle the way I deal with my feelings anymore.”

But he wants all of that, too, more than he’s wanted anything else in his entire life. He wants her next to him during lunch hour talking about her days and her nights, wants her midnight pillow talks, wants her to be the only company in his cold and vacant home.

He just wants her to see it, wants her to feel it, just as much as he does.

“That was different.” He tries to sound more convincing for her sake, but he fails so miserably it hurts.

Talking to you is like talking to a wall — that’s all he can hear beneath his words and it makes him want to give up on the conversation because he’s afraid it’ll only bring her down more, but he can’t leave her like this. Besides, it’s Y/n. And for reasons so unknown, she understands him.

“I wasn’t aware of your importance.”

“My importance?” She scrunches her nose, squinting her eyes. “My importance to what?”

“To me.”

Y/n’s eyes widen in disbelief and she sucks in a breath so deep, it settles in her chest and she swears her heart is on the verge of flatlining.

“To you, right. To you. Because I’m — because I’m important to you...” she mumbles mainly to herself, so quietly and so breathlessly before it dies down on her tongue — the sight of Harry taking off his glasses and throwing them onto the table making her knees buckle and head spin with emotions she’s never felt before.

He’s got this glimmer in his eye and a faint smile painted on his lips and she really can’t breathe, now, as he makes his way towards her.

This is the first time she has ever seen him smile, and though it is as soft and small as any other she’s ever seen — so soft and small, she would have missed it if it were on anybody else — she’s the reason it’s there, and it’s a sight she wouldn’t dare take her eyes off of.

He stands before her now, his fingers reaching up to cup the blush of her cheeks, eyes following the shapes he traces with his thumb against her skin. And though his smile has faded to nothing and he looks as serious as ever before, he doesn’t look away from her for even a second.

And that’s enough.

“Is there anything else you’d like to say?”

She flutters her eyes closed upon his words, knowing this moment is going to end all too soon, and she doesn’t have the heart to say goodbye to it yet.

She wants to remember this feeling for when she has to.

“No, no. That was all.”

He ducks his head and nudges his nose gently against hers before pulling away to pull her back into reality, just for a moment — just long enough for him to know that she isn’t holding herself back from him.

“And I’ve put your worries to rest?”

Oh, how her worries have subsided to nothing but a stomach full of butterflies and a chest of pulled heartstrings.

Nobody has ever made her so sure of anything, the way Harry makes her so sure of him.

“Yeah, I — you make me feel really good, Harry. Can’t explain it. Can’t even put it into words, really. Just, really, really good.”

He makes her feel loved.

And she wants to tell him that, she does, but that word — loved — it’s the same word he called her not just five minutes ago, but it’s so much more than that. Maybe he doesn’t love her, she surely doesn’t expect that from him just yet, but how is she ever going to explain that her feeling of feeling loved is what other people — normal people, she supposes — would consider feeling liked?

And as Y/n’s practically melting between his palms, Harry is trying so hard to understand just how he’s ended up here, being this close to her, when he always believed he’d go his whole life not being this close to anybody.

His eyes bore into hers just to reassure himself that it’s okay — that she’s okay and that they’re okay and that now, it’s okay for him to do the one thing he’s been dreaming about doing since yesterday. And when she smiles at him, a real and genuine smile, he nods.

And he leans in for their second kiss, his thumbs rubbing along her cheeks, humming into her mouth because his own has been watering for a chance to do this again. And it’s perfect. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this way about anything.

And Y/n is on cloud nine. She could really kiss him all day every day and still feel like she hasn’t missed a thing. This — this feeling, this moment, this person — is everything she’s ever wanted and everything she will always need. It’s irreplaceably and undeniably hers, and she’ll do anything to keep it for as long as she lives.

Her hands are on his neck, pulling him further into her because she can’t get enough of him and nothing else matters besides them meeting in the break room, kissing behind closed doors like teenagers who haven’t learned how to keep their hands to themselves.

The only thing that breaks them from their moment is the sound of the copy room door being slammed in the hallway, their breaths heavy and lips red and wet from each other’s.

“Have dinner with me tonight.” Harry suggests as his fingers tuck loose strands of hair behind her ear. “Wherever you want.”

And Y/n’s unsure as to whether it’s the sleepless night sneaking up on her or if it’s the aftermath of Harry kissing her senseless, but she can’t think of a single thing she could possibly want for dinner when she just wants to be with him. He could take her to the most run-down restaurant in this city and she would still feel as though she were on the highest of hilltops, overlooking the prettiest view, all because of him.

“I don’t — I don’t care, really. It wouldn’t even really matter, anyways, just — just as long as you’re with me. Don’t even have to have dinner, if you don’t want to. Could do anything you’d like.”

She’s blushing and looking down at her feet, and Harry hates when she hides herself like this, hates that she puts herself under to put him first when she deserves to be the first and the only — he has a sick and twisted feeling she’s never been any of those things to anybody.

“Y/n.” His tone is slow and stern as his head ducks down so her can eyes can meet his. “Wherever you want.”

And how could she say no to those eyes — though always so dark, so void, are also so gentle and so kind, so deep and so open? The light in them changes just ever so slightly whenever he looks at her, and she wouldn’t dream of ever taking that away from him.

“I want what you have for lunch on Tuesdays.”

His thumb brushes against the edge of her jawline.

“It’s homemade. I can pick you up around seven, eat dinner at mine.”

Her fingers wrap around his wrist absentmindedly, holding his hand so that it stays pressed against the back of her head.

“No, Harry, that’s not — that’s too much work for you. Let me at least drive and meet you at your flat, yeah? I can’t let you do that.”

She really is just the cutest, sweetest, most considerate person he’s ever met, and the most beautiful he’s ever laid eyes on. And if she wasn’t all of those things, he would let her drive and meet him at his flat for dinner, but she is, and what kind of date would it be if Harry didn’t come knocking on her front door, holding out his hand, and leading the night away?

She deserves to have a night that’s just for her. And surely, Harry wants this date just as much as she does, but it’s not about him, because as long as she’s beside him, he doesn’t have a care in the world what he has to do to get her there.

“Y/n.” His voice is as low and stern as before. “I’m picking you up at seven.”

Y/n looks at him for a moment, studying him, wondering how she’s ended up here — the only place she has ever wanted to be. She lets out a breathy chuckle, her cheeks flushed, her bottom lip tucked between her teeth.

“I’ll see you at seven, then.”

His eyes light up.

And they kiss.

It’s 6:35 when Harry actually comes to pick Y/n up, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to see her so badly, and he couldn’t just sit on his sofa trying to justify waiting to be with her again. He would have been more than willing to watch her finish getting ready, or just stand at the other side of her door, trying to convince her to let him in because she’s going to look beautiful no matter what.

He doesn’t even care if he comes off as desperate, because he is.

And Y/n is, too, because of course she was ready by 6:35. Since the second she got home, she was putting herself together as best she could, though refusing to try as hard as she normally would with anybody else because for whatever reason, Harry likes her for her — likes her in her work clothes with her hair up, without makeup on, first thing in the morning — and she wouldn’t ever dream of jeopardizing that.

And Y/n is left speechless as she opens her front door, because not only does Harry look as handsome and fit as ever, but he’s also holding the prettiest bouquet of flowers she’s ever seen.

“Harry, I — wow.”

He holds them out to her, failing to mention anything about them, just handing them to her like it’s something so normal and so casual, when in reality, the gesture is anything but.

Out of all the years she’s lived, nobody’s ever given her a reason to believe she’s been thought about once out of sight. Even when she was with Cooper — her one and only boyfriend — he’d never bought her flower arrangements or spontaneous gifts whenever they were apart, even on the days he should have, like she only existed when it was convenient for him.

This is just her first date with Harry and she’s never felt more alive. She lives in his mind even when she’s blocks away — nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard.

She takes the bouquet from his hands, looking down at what must have been two dozen flowers, wrapped all together by a rubber band and light purple plastic wrap.

“Lilies.” She marvels at him, eyes wide with an open-mouthed smile, like she couldn’t believe the sight of them. “These are my absolute favorites.”

He nods, his hands locked behind his back, lips pursed and body rocking from heel to toe. “I know.”

She tilts her head at him.

“You told me a couple months ago during lunch hour.”

And again, she’s left speechless.

She can’t even remember telling him about her love for lilies, yet here he is, recalling all these small details about herself she’s said in passing. Even in the moments he wasn’t the most fond of her, even in the moments he could hardly stand her company, he was paying attention to her. He was listening to her, so much so that her words have stuck with him despite all the days that have passed.

And it’s no wonder she’s fallen so quickly under his spell — it was made just for her. Nobody else could ever see what he sees in her, and nobody else could ever see what she sees in him, and that’s exactly how they’ve ended up here — both standing on her doorstep, refusing to take their eyes off each other, anxious to spend the rest of their night together, hoping it’s forever.

“I love them, Harry, thank you.” She blushes, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I’m just going to put these in a vase real quick. You can come in, if you’d like. Or you can stay out here, it doesn't matter.”

He follows her into the flat, which looks and smells exactly how he imagined it would. It feels just as warm as she does and smells like a mix of lavender and honey, just as intoxicating as her.

And though there are so many things he wants to see — the books she collects beside her living room couch, the movies scattered alongside her DVD player, and the pictures hung up on her walls — all he can focus on is the woman that’s stolen his heart so effortlessly.

He leans himself against the wall of her kitchen, arms crossed over his chest, watching as she pours the water and powder into the vase, stirring it together gently between her hands. And as she unwraps and unties the flowers, Harry wishes they could live for as long as they do.

This is the view he wants forever — Y/n putting flowers he’s gotten her in clear vases, surrounded by her favorite things, sharing comfortable silences she’d feel so nervous in if it were with anybody else.

She is his, he decides, and he is helplessly hers.

“Didn’t tell you when I first saw you but, you look stunning.”

She looks over at him, her eyes gleaming and lips tugged upward at his words.

“Yeah?”

His lips tug upward, too, in the same way they did earlier today in the break room, and it amazes her how something so small could mean so much to her.

“Yeah.” He breathes out, his eyes soaking her all in, still convinced she’s a dream he hasn’t woken up from. “You always do.”

She blushes, reaching forward to place the vase onto the windowsill above her sink. She can feel his eyes on her still, refusing to break away from her, and it makes her feel like the only woman in the world. And maybe she is — at the very least, the only woman in Harry’s.

She walks over to where he stands so irresistibly — so tall and so handsome, with a chest she so desperately wants to make a home out of and kiss at until she has nothing left but the burning of his skin on her own.

And as she stands before him, neither of them have anything to say because in times like these, their breaths are taken away and all they can process is how close they are to each other.

Her hands graze over his chest ever so slightly, hesitant to touch him the way she’s been shamefully aching to, afraid to push him away. But she can hear his breath hitch in his throat and can see his pecs tighten beneath her fingertips, and she lets out an uneven breath. He likes it.

“You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to do this.” She whispers, her breath fanning his neck and she swears she can see his eyes fighting to stay open.

Her hands graze up to the dip of his collarbones, her thumbs running along the sides of his throat. And to give her more access, Harry dips his head back, overstimulated by the feeling of it all.

“To touch me?”

His voice is strained and croaked, borderline delirious. And though his eyes are fluttering closed as her fingers now run along the shape of his shoulders and up the sides of his neck, dancing along his jawline, he can see her bite down on her bottom lip and it makes his heart hurt, in the best way possible.

Her eyes gleam as her fingers twist around the chain on his neck.

“It’s been all I could think about since I met you.”

His head falls back against the wall, the smallest of whimpers falling from his practically drooling mouth.

God, everything about her drives him wild. He has so completely lost himself in her, he can’t even remember his own name. He can’t even remember who he was just twenty seconds ago, much less who he was before he met her, and it’s something so new he can’t grasp the reality of it.

Her hands all over him is a feeling he can’t put into words, and one he certainly can’t hide.

He is falling.

And falling.

It doesn’t take them too long to figure out how similar they are despite their differences, certainly not after downing half a bottle of wine mixed with being so incredibly drunk on each other.

Y/n confided in him about her past — about how her nervous habits have never made her feel like she never had a true sense of belonging because everywhere she went, she was constantly kicked out. She’s had such unfathomable lows that she’d lock herself in her room for weeks on end, forcing herself quiet, because even she was sick of hearing herself.

And as Harry listened to her speak about all the cruel, heartless things that have been said to her, he couldn’t help but feel understood despite the feeling of guilt throbbing in his gut, for he had done what everybody else did not just one day ago.

Harry confided in her, too, about how he had always been left out because he always managed to bring down everybody else’s mood. He told her things he hadn’t told anybody else because he had nobody else to tell them to — told her about all the drugs he’s taken and all the other toxic habits he’d pursued in a poor, desperate attempt to become emotional.

Then, they talked about their parents — a conversation so barren and so untouched, it was almost impossible to talk about.

Y/n grew up with parents who didn’t understand her, because who could? Even when she was little, barely forming an identity and her only concept of friendship being imaginary ones, her parents would tell her that she was embarrassing herself. She’ll always remember the look on her mother’s face at a New Years Eve party when she said, “I just can’t take you anywhere, can I?”

Harry grew up with absent parents — absent in a sense that they were around, just never really there. His parents hardly acknowledged him, hardly ever spoke to him, and when they did it felt so forced, like an obligation they couldn’t find their way out of. He’ll never forget the way they looked at him, like he wasn’t even there, like they didn’t even want him to be.

It makes them question just how strongly the universe works in their favor.

Because what seems to be the first time in her life, Y/n has found something only made for her, a place where nobody else belongs, and it wouldn’t have brought her here if she had kept herself locked away, rotting in her self pity, refusing to let anybody in for all the rest of her years.

And for what seems to be the first time in his life, Harry feels he’s exactly where he’s supposed to be, with the person he’s supposed to be with, and it wouldn’t have brought him here if all the wine, all the blunts, and all the pills did what he so desperately wanted out of them all those years ago.

They had spent their whole lives trying to make something out of themselves when they were always enough, because they were enough for each other, and each other was what they were made for.

“So you’re saying that all this time, we’ve been the exact same person?” Y/n chuckles, because though their conversation was so serious, the mood was still as lighthearted as everything else between them.

“Peculiar habits, a history of toxic behavior, no friends, and shitty parents? Yeah, sounds like it.”

Y/n laughs, shaking her head.

“Here’s to nobody liking us.” Y/n raises her glass.

“Here’s to nobody liking us.” Harry repeats, raising his own. “Except for each other.”

And they clink.

Maybe they shouldn’t have finished that entire bottle of wine to themselves, but they did.

What started off in the kitchen made its way to the living room, both sat beside each other on Harry’s sofa with their heads hung back, Y/n cracking jokes and humming along to the songs on her playlist, and Harry admiring her from the distance.

They both have their last glasses of wine nearly gone, holding them upon their thighs, taking their final sips throughout the hour and with every one they take, they feel closer somehow.

Y/n’s giggling about how Harry won’t stop looking at her, and though she can’t see it between her squinting eyes and their gaze set upon the ceiling wall, he smiles.

He can’t help it — looking at her like it’s the last time he ever will though it’s only the beginning, but he doesn’t ever want to forget the way he feels whenever he does. This is the only good feeling he’s ever had, and even when she’s not in view, he wants to hold onto it ‘til his dying day.

“You’re my favorite person.” Is all he says, his lips fallen. “My only person.”

Y/n finally turns her head over to him, now, so that her eyes are locked on his. And she wishes he can understand the feeling in her heart and the way it’s beating so eroticly, but she doesn’t, because it’s so overwhelming and too much of a good thing for her to make sense of.

Never in her life has she felt so good, yet here she is, feeling even better than that, all because of one person she met nearly two years ago.

“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

He nods, because he understands, and they both look away from each other again.

They’re getting lost in the music and lost in the feeling of the air that surrounds them — so full of unexplainable things that leave them wanting more than they did before, breathing in nothing but longing and desire.

And it isn’t until one of Y/n’s favorite songs comes on that the comfortable silence between them is all but broken, in the most beautiful way possible.

“Green was the color of the grass where I used to read at Centennial Park. I used to think I would meet somebody there.”

Harry stiffens beside her, his fingers instinctively curling tighter around his glass of wine — speechless and breathless as the sound of her voice intoxicates his already drunken state of mind, the room now spinning but only because of her.

“Teal was the color of your shirt when you were sixteen at the yogurt shop you used to work at to make a little money.”

This is heaven, he feels. It has to be because things this beautiful don’t exist in worlds so cruel, in worlds so evil.

Things this beautiful don’t belong here.

Y/n doesn’t belong here. She’s too perfect for her own good — too perfect for a world that refuses to believe in such things, but he does. He does because how can he deny the woman that’s sitting right before him? How can he deny the sound of her voice in a dim lit room, soaked in red wine, existing only to be heard by him?

“Time — curious time — gave me no compasses, gave me no signs. Were there clues I didn’t see? And isn’t it just so pretty to think all along there was some invisible string — tying you to me?”

Y/n’s raising her glass to her lips as the lyrics pause but god, if Harry has to watch her lips touch anything but his, it’s going to be the end of him. And right as her mouth puckers for a taste, Harry reaches his hand out to grab the bowl of the glass, lifting it from her fingers before setting it down upon the coffee table beside them.

She tilts her head at him with furrowed brows and squinted eyes, watching as Harry practically crawls over to her until his thighs are pressed to her knees and his hands are at either side of her waist.

“You’re so pretty.”

Y/n rolls her eyes at him but it hides behind her flushed cheeks and growing smile.

“Harry —”

“Sh.” He shushes her, laying his forehead against the top of her chest, slithering his arms to her lower back, and Y/n giggles. “Keep going.”

So, she does — keeps singing the very words she had been so hopelessly trying to put a face to, to the very man that holds her to them.

And she’s falling.

She feels it now more than ever as he practically buries himself into her, rocking her gently back and forth like she’s some sort of delicacy he wouldn’t dare to break. Everything about it is so intimate, so real, so raw — no boundaries, all walls crumbled down so vulnerably, feeling each other so deeply.

She wonders if he feels it, too.

And oh, does he feel it — her words, his touch, the room fading to nothingness. It is just them — no fears, no doubts, no resentment — together in this moment, becoming one, letting everything else simply slip through their fingertips.

Harry rests his lips upon her collar bone, settling them against her sweltering skin. He can feel her heart beating against his mouth, and it feels right.

“Spend the night with me.”

Y/n stiffens.

She wants to spend the night, she does, more than anything else she could ever want. It’s been her long-lived dream to be cuddled to his chest, feeling him breathe against her, burning in his touch until slumber clouded her senses; waking up beside him in the early morning and hearing that voice so rasped and far gone.

But all of her dreams are so innocent, so pure, and so holy by him, and what if that’s not where his head is? Between all the drinks, all the touching, and all the stolen stares, it could be somewhere so far out of her reach, somewhere so far away from her own, and it’ll absolutely ruin her if that’s all he wants out of her.

Harry must have felt her uneasiness because he’s quick to lift his head from her chest.

“No, no. Not like that, Y/n. I promise. Never even —”

Had sex.

He was so close to saying it to reassure her, but he couldn’t — he couldn’t because if he did, she’d have every reason to believe he was thinking of such things when it was the farthest thought from his mind. Really, he wants her to spend the night because once she leaves, she’s all he’s going to think about and all he’s going to want beside him. He probably would have ended up on her doorstep at two in the morning, dazed and confused, all because he never wants to be away from her.

She is so close, and he wants her so bad.

“Had a girlfriend.”

He settles for something less straightforward but just as truthful and vulnerable. Besides, he figured it’s something she should know because if he ever fucks something up, or fails to do right by her, even if it’s unintentional, maybe she’d understand why.

He’s absolutely terrified that he’s going to be the first one to start a fight and not know how to fix it, or be the first one to make the other cry and not know why. He’s done it before, with Celeste. And though what he has with Y/n is so different and so much more real than what he ever had with her, he still managed to break her heart enough for her to leave him. He wouldn’t blame Y/n if she ever decides to, too.

Y/n looks down at him with eyes full of sorrow. He’s not asking for pity, she knows that, but how he’s gone his whole life without ever being loved, she’ll never understand.

It’s all he deserves.

And she can’t help but feel like she’s the least deserving person to be the first because she knows, down to the very pit of her soul, that Harry isn’t like the others — that Harry wouldn’t kiss her, ask her out on a date, and snuggle himself into her the way he is right now just to get a proper shag — yet she convinced herself that maybe, somewhere so deeply within him, he is that kind of person, and that is so far from fair.

She runs her fingers through his hair.

“I’ll only spend the night under one condition.”

He blinks at her.

“Anything.”

She leans forward to rub her nose against his, a soft smirk set on her lips as she kisses him gently.

She giggles before pulling away, sliding out from underneath him and though the small pout on Harry’s face would send her right back to him, she chooses to stand beside him with an open-palmed hand sticking out before her, her eyes glistening, her lips bitten.

“Dance with me.”

And god, how could he ever say no to that face?

He lets out a breathy chuckle as he hitches his glasses up — the closest thing to a laugh Yn has ever heard out of him, and it makes her want to cry. And he shakes his head softly before grabbing onto her hand, letting her lift him from the sofa.

“You drive me wild.”

She hums, lifting his hand up to her lips.

She guides him behind the coffee table, grasping both of his hands in hers, and though she fully intends on pulling him to her and leading the rest of the way, he beats her to it.

He’s got her pressed up against him, one hand hooked to her lower back and the other holding hers between their shoulders, swaying them side to side as they dance together in slow circles.

They’re at peace. Together, they can do the most cliche of things — make a dance floor out of a living room, make a night out of a date — and not feel anything but pure, genuine happiness out of it.

They don’t need anything or anyone outside of each other, and that’s what makes it all the better.

“Hm…” Y/n hums, resting the side of her cheek against his chest. She feels at home like this. “Quite the dancer, you are.”

His thumb rubs at her wrist, and he shakes his head.

“Only for you.”

Y/n doesn’t go home the following night.

Or the night after that.

This must be the third time Y/n’s set off the smoke alarm.

And in any other circumstance, she probably would have given up and called Harry’s favorite take out to spare him from a night of potential food poisoning, but Harry’s spent the past two weeks telling her how much he wished Thanksgiving was a British holiday, and now that it’s late November and Harry has spent the past three months of their relationship doing all the cooking, she can’t quit him now.

Even as she’s flinging around the oven mitts trying to waft the smoke from the open oven out of her face, she still can’t quit.

The things she does for love, she fucking hates it.

“Pretty, you’re going to burn our flat down.” Harry chuckles from behind her, his hand landing on the small of her back as he rubs gently at it. “Let me take it from here, love. I’ve got it.”

Y/n’s quick to close the oven door back shut and press her back to it, practically flinging herself away from Harry’s touch as she does so. She’s panting and sweating and her hair is an absolute wreck, yet she refuses Harry’s helping hand.

This is his day, and she is his girl, and she just has to do this.

“No, no, mister! Don’t you even think about it! I’ve got it all under control.”

Her lips are pursed for the simple reason that she knows it’s an absolute monstrosity — she’s burnt two rounds of yams, somehow turned mashed potatoes into soup, and overcooked the green bean casserole to a cripst — but at least it’s all been made with love.

And she assumes Harry doesn’t believe her, either, because he’s trying his absolute hardest to not laugh at her, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.

“Pretty,” Harry laughs, facepalming himself before his hand cups around his mouth to try to stifle the sounds. “You — you closed the oven door again and it’s —”

“Fuck!”

She turns herself around before ripping the oven back open, coughing and groaning as a cloud of smoke hits her face for the millionth time tonight before reaching in to grab yet another round of burnt yams.

She slams it onto the stove, ripping her oven mitts off and throwing them onto the counter beside her.

Harry feels bad, he does, because she’s been slaving away in their kitchen for the past five hours and she’s the farthest from satisfied she could possibly be, but he can’t deny that he loves seeing her like this — so passionate, all cute and grumpy just to make him happy.

Oh, how he loves her so, even when she burns his beloved yams.

He kisses the back of her head.

“Looks incredible, baby. Don’t need anything else than what you’ve got.” His lips move to her cheek. “Let me set the table while you put everything in dishes, yeah? Starving.”

He lights two pumpkin spice candles upon the table, pouring two glasses of their favorite wine, and setting down two plates for each of them because they haven’t eaten all day in preparation for their dinner, and they’re both at their wits end.

Y/n sets dinner up buffet style along the kitchen island — the roasted young turkey set in the middle surrounded by bowls of corn, mashed potatoes, stuffing, macaroni and cheese, and dinner rolls.

Though she’s far from being a good cook, she does feel slightly better when she sees it all set up in autumn-colored dish sets. It could have been a lot worse, it really could have been a lot worse.

And it’s the look on Harry’s face that makes the past five hours of hell so incredibly worth it.

His fists are on the kitchen table, his body leaning forward as his eyes marvel at the sight in front of him. Autumn has always been his favorite season, and he’s always been so fond of the concept of Thanksgiving — spending time with his loved ones, reminiscing all his favorite memories throughout the year, delving into his favorite foods.

He’d contemplated making a Thanksgiving of his own for the past couple years, but whenever it came down to it, he realized he didn’t have much to be thankful for, and he didn’t have any memories to look back on. So, he never did.

But now, he has so much to be thankful for — so many unforgettable memories, a lifetime of happiness, and a loved one to finally celebrate with — all of which are standing right before him.

Nobody else in the world would ever do the things she does for him. She is one and a million, his little miracle, and the absolute light of his life.

“Have I ever told you that you’re the best girlfriend in the world?”

She shrugs, a teasing grin playing on her lips.

“Once or twice.”

She loads their plates up with everything she made — giving Harry extra stuffing, of course — before she makes her way back to the kitchen table, sitting across from the very man she’s thankful for this year.

She didn’t realize how good it would feel — to spend a holiday with Harry, even though it’s illegitimate — but it’s warm and homely and everything else in between. It’s no wonder she falls more in love with him everyday, and no wonder she wants to spend all of her days exactly where they are now, until they’re old and grumpy and can hardly stand the sight of each other anymore.

Y/n lifts up her wine glass.

“This year, I’m thankful for being yours and only yours. I’m nothing without you.”

Harry lifts up his wine glass.

“This year, I’m thankful for you and your love. You’re everything to me.”

They clink, they eat, they kiss, and they do it all over again.

“You know, I don’t think guys are meant to do this kind of stuff.”

Y/n’s sitting across from Harry on their queen-sized bed, their legs crossed Indian style as Harry’s hand is spread out before her, Y/n grasping onto his fingers with her own as she paints a thin layer of black nailpolish onto his nails.

It didn’t take Y/n much convincing to get Harry in this position. She knows full well that all she has to do is pout and cross her arms for him to give her what she wants. And normally, she doesn’t use his weaknesses against him — she doesn’t think it’s right, and he’d never do it to her — but this is something so harmless that she gave herself a free pass.

Plus, she knows he’d look hot with his nails painted black.

“Shut up, H.” She giggles, shaking her head. “They’ll look really good, I promise. Besides, it could be our little secret.”

He can’t lie, it does feel nice to be pampered like this. Her hands are soft and it tickles when she goes finger-to-finger, and it’s a damn good excuse to touch her and look at her for minutes on end. She’s got her eyebrows pinched together as she moves his fingers around, trying to get into every edge and crevice, and he can see it in her eyes how much she’s truly enjoying herself right now.

His eyes take a peek at his nails and it’s not nearly as bad as he thought it was going to be. They make him feel… different, but in a way that can only be described as holding a certain power he never knew he had.

Guys normally don’t do this kind of stuff, but he is, and he looks damn good while doing it.

And as Y/n takes both of his hands out to her and starts to blow on them, his eyes flutter with amusement. Maybe, just maybe, he’d let her do this again.

She pokes one of her nails into his.

“They should be dry now.”

And though his nails are finished, Y/n still hasn’t let go of his hands, and her eyes haven’t left his fingers. Instead, she’s marveling over them — eyes gleaming, bottom lip tucked between her teeth, her digits twisting at his rings.

He smirks at her.

“Look good?”

She nods, lifting one of his hands up higher towards her neck.

“They look really good, H. So good, I —” She doesn’t even let herself finish before she brings his pointer and middle finger up and into her mouth, hollowing her cheeks and proper sucking on them like she was born for it.

Harry’s breath gets locked in his throat, his entire demeanor changing as he broadens his shoulders and tenses his chest, his eyes darkening and hawking over every move of her mouth, every swipe of her tongue.

She’s moaning — whimpering and whining like she’s been left starving and he’s her first proper meal in weeks. And nothing’s even started yet.

He reaches his free hand over to her face, petting her cheek with the back of his fingers.

“That’s it, my pretty girl. Just like that.”

She pops them out of her mouth, her lips red and wet and eyes glossy with lust. And Harry watches as she grabs a hold of his wrist and guides his two, sloppy and dripping fingers down her neck and between her breasts, stretching down the collar of her shirt, leaning back for him to have the most perfect view.

“Fuck.” He breathes out, the hand that was once on her cheek reaching over to grope at her thigh. “Is this what I’m going to get every time you paint my nails black? You being such a good girl for me?”

She nods her head, gulping.

“Y — yeah.” She shudders as the hand on her thigh inches up with every passing second. “Told you they’d look so good.”

He chuckles darkly before he reaches his hand up to grab at the base of her throat. It’s her favorite, when he takes her breath away like this, because all she can feel is him.

And right now, he doesn’t want her to feel anything else.

He pushes her down until her back is fully pressed against the mattress, and he crawls until he’s above her on his hands and knees, his fingers still squeezing at her throat.

Such a pretty neck, such a pretty face. And it’s all his.

“Let’s see how good they look all over you, yeah?”

Harry hears something when he passes one of the vacant offices at work.

It’s a bloodcurdling sound, one he hasn’t ever heard before and one he wished he’d never heard at all, but he knows exactly what it is before he sees it.

He could never mistake the sound of his girl — it’s all he ever hears and he’s been around her long enough to know the sound of her very breath. She’s a part of him — he feels her in his bones when she’s close and knows exactly what she’s feeling at every moment in time.

But what he sees is worse than he could have ever imagined.

Y/n’s sobbing something so awful her face is nearly blue, lips trembling and eyes all but swollen shut, shaking and convulsing upon the chair below her.

And Harry doesn’t know what to do.

His brain is working at a million miles an hour and he can’t keep up — doesn’t know left from right, up from down — because all he can feel is the overwhelming sense of heartbreak and his world crumbling out from underneath him.

He practically runs to her — tripping over the legs of office chairs, ramming his hips into the corners of the table, on the verge of collapse with every step he takes. Yet nothing stops him from falling to his knees before her, letting his hands grab a hold of her soaken cheeks, having his thumbs wipe away her endless tears.

“Pretty —”

He can’t even get a word out without wanting to cry, but he’s never done it before. He wouldn’t know how to even if he wanted to, but it’s there — that lump in his throat, that tightening of his chest, that burning in his eyes, it’s all there.

“What happened, baby? Talk to me.”

And though she really didn’t want Harry to see her this way, she can’t help but clasp her shaking fingers around his wrists, holding him there because she doesn’t know what she would do if he were to leave her now.

What happened today — what happened to her — is just further proof that the only person she can trust and the only person she can truly be herself with is Harry. The world is so vengeful and so deceiving towards her, for reasons so unknown, but it’s brought her to the very man kneeling between her thighs, with eyes full of unshed tears, wanting her and loving her even when nobody else does. And if he were to walk away from her now, though she knows he wouldn’t dream of it, she’d lose every last bit of hope she has, and she wouldn’t be able to survive it.

She needs him so badly it hurts.

“Can’t —” She shakes her head as she sniffles back a sob. “Can’t tell you.”

She can’t because she doesn’t want him to see just how bad it can get for her — see how her differences are so obvious to everything and everyone around her. It never ends. It’s been like this for as long as she can remember and she’s so scared and so afraid that if Harry sees it, too, he’d do the very thing that happened to her twenty minutes ago.

But even through her waterfall eyes, she can see just how devastated Harry looks at her words.

“Pretty, you can tell me anything. You know that. Can’t —” He shakes his head, gulping, one of his hands rubbing at the back of her head. “Can’t see you like this and not know how to fix it.”

She pulls her hands away from her tight hold on him so that they can cover her face — too ashamed for the world to see how much it’s broken her down, too humiliated to face somebody so much better than her.

“It — it’s s — so emb — embarrassing!”

She’s hiding from him. Harry hates when she hides from him.

“No, please don’t — please don’t do that.” He practically begs as his hands reach back up to hers, pulling them away from her face and intertwining their fingers together. “It’s me, baby. It’s me. You don’t have to do that with me. Please, don’t do that with me.”

He’s got their hands held on top of her knees, the pads of his thumbs stroking her palms, his lips pressing to the top of her exposed thighs because it’s the only thing he can think of doing right now.

He’s never done this — never had anybody break and shatter before his very eyes, much less somebody he loves — and he is so bad with words and so bad with dealing with his own feelings he wouldn’t even know where to start dealing with hers, but he does know that he can be the most affectionate boyfriend there is towards her, and he hopes that’s a start.

But he doesn’t have a single clue just how good it feels for Y/n to be loved by him when she feels so hated. He is the only person that really, truly matters to her, so to feel him touch her and kiss her when she’s at her absolute lowest, is all she really needs.

Harry notices her breath starting to shallow and her sobs fading to distant cries every time he presses his lips to her skin, and despite how much of a mess he is, it warms his heart to know that they share a love that can overcome anything life decides to throw at them.

He reluctantly lifts his head up to look at her properly, now. His glasses are all fogged and wet but he refuses to take them off the way he normally would with her, because that would require him letting go of her hands, and for both of their sanity, that’s not something he can do right now.

He’s crying.

And though his face is as stone cold and tight as always, his eyes, Y/n notices, are unlike anything she’s ever seen. They’re so undeniably broken, and her heart crumbles into a million pieces just at the sight of it.

She feels it’s all because of her.

“The new recruit, Mason, he —”

She sucks in a breath, trying to find the right words that could possibly explain the amount of damage that he caused her without sounding so weak and pathetic. It wouldn’t have hurt her as badly if it wasn’t something that’s happened to her more and more over the years, beating her down further and further each time, digging deeper and deeper into her already hollowed out chest.

And all Harry can think about is how one name, one person, has made this much of a mess out of her — one that she has to see every single day, that she has to speak to in order to get her work done, that she has to face time and time again.

He’s never hated so much in his life.

“What did he do to you?” He whispers it, afraid that one wrong tone of voice or one wrong word can tear her apart all over again. “Did he hurt you? Did he touch you?”

She shakes her head, her eyes casted down at their intertwined hands.

“Laughed at me.”

Her voice is so small and so sad, it’s the most heartbreaking sound Harry has ever heard. And he feels like he failed her.

He knows full well that somebody laughing at her and degrading her, hurts her more than any physical pain she could possibly feel. Even if Mason had touched her, it wouldn’t have made her like this — so afraid, so self-conscious, and so successfully ruined.

“In front of the whole team, just — just kept poking fun at me. Mocking me. Speaking about me as if I wasn’t there. Making fun of my nervous stutter and — and talking over me like, ‘oh, and she keeps going.’ and ‘wow, it just never ends, does it?’ and making everyone laugh at me.”

He should have been there. All he can think about is how he should have been by her side the way any boyfriend should — should have been there to protect her, to keep his eyes on anybody who dared to even look at her the wrong way, to never let her out of his sight.

They’re on the same team and he just should have fucking been there.

“Said he’d take bets with people to see how long it would take me to shut up and I wanted to tell him so badly that the more he says those things the more I ramble because it makes me nervous and I don’t know what else to do but apart of me — apart of me felt like he already knew that and kept going so that I could keep going so that he can keep making a fool out of me.”

Her bottom lip quivers again, and so does his, and Harry has had enough.

He can’t keep seeing her like this because who knows what his love for her could make him do. He’s already broken so many boundaries just from taking one look at her, he can’t even imagine what comes next, or what would come next, if he has to see it again.

With every last bit of courage he has, Harry lets go of her hands and brings his wrist up behind his glasses, wiping away the remnants of his tears, before bringing his hands back down to her knees.

“I’m going to tell Jeremy that you’re not feeling well and that you needed to go home, okay?”

She nods with a pout on her face because god, how badly does she want to crawl into their bed and hibernate beneath the covers until the weekend’s over.

“I’ll help you finish up whatever you need me to, and I’ll meet you back at our flat once I’m done.” He hooks his pointer finger under her chin, kissing away the pout his heart just can’t handle the sight of. “I love you so much. You’re everything to me.”

He didn’t have to tell her, because she already knew.

And it’s so hard for him to leave her like this, but he has to. He has to because she can’t stay here and face the same team that just spit on her name and pretend everything is okay, when everything is so far from it.

He kisses her one last time.

“Go home. I’ll be there soon.”

Harry wasn’t looking for Mason.

He really wasn’t, though every fiber in his body instinctively wanted to hunt him down and brutalize him until he was nothing but a pile of broken bones and battered flesh. His fingers ached for it, but he was more focused on getting home to Y/n so that she didn’t have to be alone — so that he can hold her, and kiss her, and remind her that the only reason the world keeps trying to knock her down is because she’s too perfect to be existing in it.

But as he stands in the copy room to help finish one of Y/n’s major projects, that’s exactly who he sees.

He walks in, whistling the same tune he does every other day, one hand holding a pile of papers and the other slinging the office keys by their lanyard. And as he occupies the empty copy machine next to Harry’s, he lifts his chin up as if to greet him on this truly horrible, unforgiving day.

Harry tenses on sight, his shoulders straightening up and his fingers tightening around the folder that now holds everything he needed to make his way out of here.

But how could he, when Mason is right here?

He takes one last glance at Mason and one last breath before he slowly and steadily makes his way to the door, shutting it closed, before he says anything at all. And really, he doesn’t even fully know what he wants to say, but he does know that he can’t let him get away with the things he’s done, or the words he’s said, or the pain he’s caused to the one and only person Harry cares about.

He’s never been one for confrontation — never been one to project his feelings onto people, or make his problems into somebody else’s — but fuck, it’s Y/n, and his love for her is so different than any other emotion he’s ever felt. It makes him hate, it makes him dangerous, and it makes him something so beyond himself when he sees her the way he did not just three hours ago.

And who would he be if he didn’t do what he knows is right?

“I’m not an emotional guy, Mason.” Harry starts, his fingers twisting and knotting against his palms, trying so hard to keep himself together. But this is too small of a room to carry around so much anger, so much loathing for one person, and the narrowing space between them is building so much tension Harry feels like he’s drowning in all of it. “But I am today.”

Mason’s full attention is on Harry now, fully suspicious of his actions and words, confused as to why the temperature in the room has suddenly fallen below zero.

“I’ve got a lot of feelings… never really learned how to express them. Got a lot of resentment, a lot of anger, a lot of love for my girl.”

Harry takes his glasses off, closing them shut before stuffing them in his jacket pocket.

“Got a lot of all three right now. But if it ever came down to it, I’d do what’s right by Y/n and I wouldn’t think twice about it. Can’t say that for anybody else, except for her.”

And it’s true.

She’s the only thing in existence that can get to this side of him. He’s been so visibly numb his entire life, it didn’t matter how angry he was, or how hurt he was, or how depressed he was, he was so incurably lifeless despite all the vulnerability scrambling inside him. Yet seeing Y/n practically fall apart between his palms set something so deeply within him, he cried alongside her.

And now, he’s rolling up the sleeves of his jacket.

“You understand what I’m saying, correct?”

There’s a pregnant pause in the air, and Harry’s left starving to feast on this poor excuse of a man.

“Look, mate —” Mason finally turns to him, smiling so obnoxiously it makes Harry’s stomach churn. Y/n’s spent the whole day crying and Mason is smiling, laughing, even, like he doesn’t have a care or a clue in the world that he’s broken somebody down so badly — somebody so innocent, somebody so undeserving. “I’m a jokester, alright? Whatever I said to her, it wasn’t personal. I was just trying to lighten the mood a bit — make some jokes, crack some smiles. All innocent here, yeah? It’s all good.”

Out of all the things he could have said, he chose all the wrong words.

And Harry just can’t understand how somebody could be so heartless and cruel and be so completely unaware of it — how someone could turn something already so foul into something so nauseatingly evil and do it with shrugged shoulders and a shit-eating grin.

His palms twitch.

But it isn’t until Mason pats his hand against Harry’s shoulder like he’s the one that’s being let off the hook, that Harry is pushed over the edge.

He should be on his knees, begging for mercy, begging for forgiveness, writhing in fear.

He grabs a hold of Mason’s wrist so tightly his fingers turn numb under the pulse of the very man he so desperately wants to demolish. And before he can even process what’s happening, before he has time to suppress the blackout rage crashing down on him, the fist of his right hand knocks Mason down cold.

It happened so fast, Harry couldn’t even keep up. One second he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with the enemy and the next, he’s towering above him with knuckles covered in blood that isn’t his.

“Man, what the fuck?!” Mason cries from the ground, his hand reaching up toward the side of his already swollen and busted eye, cupping the wound as if to keep the pain from spreading and the blood from dripping. “You just fucking hit me!”

Harry’s panting and shaking and still has yet to finish what he’s started.

“My girlfriend is not a joke. She is not somebody for you to pick on when you want to crack some smiles and she is not a punchline for you to use when you have nothing funny to say.”

The tone of his voice is such a contradiction to the rest of him that if anybody else were watching, they wouldn’t understand why he did what he had just done. Because he’s far from yelling, far from screaming, far from anything other than the way he’d talk in any other circumstance, yet he doesn’t care. For the first time in his life, he just doesn’t care, because what he did was enough.

He rolls his jacket sleeves back down, the side of his wrist wiping the sweat from his top lip.

“You could have done anything else, but you didn’t.”

His bruised and busted hand takes his glasses out of his pocket, unfolding the temples and sliding them back onto the bridge of his nose. And he doesn’t bother taking another look at Mason — doesn’t even want to — before he hooks his fingers around the doorknob.

“If you ever make a joke out of her again, I’ll kill you. That’s it. Just like that. I’ll kill you.”

When Harry gets home that night, he’s got his hands full of all Y/n’s favorite things.

Not only does he have two bags of her favorite take out, but he’s also got a pint of her favorite ice cream, a heated blanket she’d been eyeing whenever they walked down Bond Street, and a bottle of the sweetest wine he could find at the liquor store.

And when she walks to the front door to greet him, wearing nothing but underwear and one of his favorite sweatshirts, he realizes that he couldn’t imagine a single day not coming home to her, or loving her, or protecting her from all the bad that’s been chewing on her and spitting her out.

“What’s all this?” She smiles softly at him, reaching to take some of the bags out of his trembling hands.

“A peace offering.” He whispers so quietly, Y/n almost doesn’t hear it.

He knows what he did was right, but what he doesn’t know is if this will make her see him differently. Because what he did was not the Harry she fell in love with, and maybe it’ll drive her so far away she’ll never have to see him again.

But he’s praying, down to the very depths of himself, that she’ll understand.

“What?” She tilts her head at him, “What do you mean?”

His eyes fall to his knuckles, that are still scarred and busted from before. And as her eyes follow his gaze down upon them, she gasps.

“Baby —”

“I had to do it, Y/n.” He whimpers, his eyes closing. “He made you cry, I had to do it.”

And later that night, after they ate everything Harry had brought home until they could barely get up from the sofa, Y/n kissed at his knuckles, one by one.

He’d get his knuckles bloody every single day if it meant getting his hands full of all the love he has to offer her. He’d cry, and cry, and cry if it meant Y/n doesn’t have to face the world alone. He’d go against himself in every way, in every conceivable notion, just to make her smile the very smile he’s looking at right now.

She is stronger than any drug, stronger than any other pain, any other happiness, any other feeling he has ever felt. Because now, he is so much more than he could ever imagine himself being, and all it took was her.

She is his favorite person, his only person — his little miracle and the absolute light of his life, even after all this time, and he couldn’t imagine it being any other way.

And it was then, he knew.

#harry styles fanfiction #harry styles one shot #harry styles imagines #harry styles imagine #harry styles preference #emotionless!harry

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ghostdrew22 · 4 years ago

Note

angst fic where ravenclaw!reader has thalassophobia and is playing with the water by the shore in the dark lake with the necklace draco gave her before they broke up a few years back when the new girl he’s been going out with throws the necklace into the middle of the lake in spite, and the reader cannot afford to lose it djeiwis sorry if it’s messy u dont have to do it ure uncomfyyy

Prompts:

If you die, I’m going to kill you.

Jump In || Draco Malfoy

Requested: Yes Pairing: Draco Malfoy x fem!reader Warnings: ANGST, a bit of swearing, panic attacks and thalassophobia mentioned. Summary: Years after breaking up with Draco you find that the last gift he gave you is still the only thing comforting you, and his new girlfriend doesn’t like that.

WORDS : 3546

Gleaming, twinkling Eyes like sinking ships on waters So inviting, I almost jump in

The crescent moon outside begs for your company and you oblige, preferring to be alone than stuck in a room full of people who pity you. You lift the bottom half of your dress from the ground and sneak out of the ballroom nonchalantly, anxiety dissipating as the soft breeze comes in contact with your face.

The sound of your heels clacking against the cobblestone fills the air as you walk toward the boardwalk hanging above the lake, and it reminds you of a time when Draco would bring you down here. The lake behind the Malfoy Manor has always been subject to your fear, and you rarely ever go toward it, but tonight you’ll do almost anything to feel alone and normal for once.

The tiny ripples forming on the surface send shivers running down your spine and you look up at the sky immediately in an attempt to subdue your anxiety. A few meters away lies the ballroom, full of dignitaries and old family friends of the Malfoy’s who attend their annually ball every time without fail, and you can hear the faint sound of laughter mixed with a beautiful crescendo. You shut your eyes, take a deep breath and drag your fingers up to your neck to toy with necklace lying around it, as you try to imagine that you’re anywhere else.

You’d thought that it would be easier, coming to the ball and seeing him with his new girlfriend, but it had proved to be a bigger challenge than you’d anticipated, and residual feelings that you’d been trying to stuff down for months had resurfaced like anchors being pulled up from the bottom of the sea. It reminded you of what he said that day, “I’m yours forever, even if you’re not mine.”, and the only thing that stopped you from running back into his arms was the chain hanging around your neck.

A silver chain with a midnight blue sapphire dangling on its end, worth one of your arms and a gift from the blond himself. He had given it to you as a promise, one to love you till the sun stopped rising, and at the time you had thought that it was the perfect gesture. But reality hit and you soon realized that a life with Draco Malfoy would be one filled with envy and uneasiness, and you knew then that you both deserved more.

The necklace’s monetary value reminds you that Draco belongs to a long and esteemed family line which demands attention that you cannot cope with. But the fact that it had been his proclamation of love reminds you that in order for you both to lead happy lives, you must be apart. The way it gleams beneath Chandeliers is so captivating that it always brings you back to earth; a life with Draco is inviting, but some invitations mustn’t be accepted.

But I don't like a gold rush, gold rush I don't like anticipating my face in a red flush I don't like that anyone would die to feel your touch Everybody wants you Everybody wonders what it would be like to love you

All eyes instantly fell on him the second that he appeared; sporting that notorious smile which always brought people to their knees, and a priceless suit that hugged his figure so well it made all the straight men positively envious. A true Malfoy; charming, rich, attractive, easily the whole package. You didn’t get a chance to speak with him because he was instantly preoccupied with the ramblings of his mother as she dragged him around the room with pride, showing off the son that she’d done such a good job at raising.

Draco’s life had always been politics and he’d been raised to invariably stand tall, look presentable, get good grades, converse well. You watched him in awe every time, admiring the grace and ease with which he conducted himself. But it made you wonder when he’d been taught the art of letting the spotlight go, to focus all of his attention on the one he loves instead of the search for approval. And the answer was that he hadn’t, Draco never grew out of the desire to have everyone’s praise and approval.

‘If everyone loves you, if everyone wants to either be you or be with you, then you’ve succeeded.’ He’d told you late one night after one these balls. You’d looked at him with pity, not having the heart to tell him that love and validation are not synonymous, and you’d hugged him so hard that somehow you both knew it was all coming to an end soon.

He grew up being a magnet to both jealousy and admiration, a symphony of applause being the background track to the movie of his life, and he didn’t know how to live any other way. When all you’ve ever known is lustful stares from fellow peers, stolen glances at the back of your head, and unbridled acclaim masked behind attraction, then it’s hard to put that life behind and settle for the love of only one person.

Walk past, quick brush I don't like slow motion, double vision in rose blush I don't like that falling feels like flying 'til the bone crush Everybody wants you But I don't like a gold rush

He truly was magnificent though, even you couldn’t deny. Years ago, when he’d walked down the stairs in one of those clad black suits, he had met you at the bottom of the stairwell and you could’ve sworn that you were floating on cloud 9. He had smiled so brightly at the sight of you, had laughed so sweetly in the space of your ear, and fit so tightly into your side like it was a home made only for him, that you were intoxicated on the feeling of him and hadn’t noticed what was happening.

You were falling in love. You weren’t flying, no, you didn’t have wind beneath mystical wings that you’d somehow managed to grow. You were falling, and at a speed so treacherous that you didn’t even realise it was happening until it was too late. One day you were falling, and the next you were ruins buried so far into the ground that you couldn’t even tell where the earth stopped and you started.

Falling in love with him was fast, like a bullet train, but everything after was so slow that you felt as if you weren’t even moving at all.

What must it be like to grow up that beautiful? With your hair falling into place like dominos I see me padding 'cross your wooden floors With my Eagles t-shirt hanging from the door At dinner parties, I call you out on your contrarian shit And the coastal town we wandered 'round had never seen a love as pure as it And then it fades into the gray of my day old tea 'Cause it could never be

Promises to run away together and start a life somewhere off in a distant town.

Fingertips, laced with the narcotic effect of young love, tracing lines across the expanse of each other’s faces and trying to figure out which of the other’s features would be inherited by your children.

Dreams about a time when your lives would no longer be dictated by the paths your parents had set out for you, but instead by the spontaneity and reassurance that came with endearment.

Tastes of tea replaced instead with the taste of each other as long-forgotten tisanes made home on bedside tables because you both got lost in the haze of tenderness.

Arguments about mundane and useless concepts that would go on for longer than necessary, because he insisted on disagreeing with everything, and always ended with your acute responses.

Lives that had once lacked passion, that had once been so dull they compared to Snape’s drawling, instead replaced with all the colours that the world had to offer.

It was the perfect life, the one you two had planned.

But it was too perfect to ever be real.

You take a deep breath and unhook the necklace to observe it once more, hoping that it’ll provide some comfort for the ache in your chest.

'Cause I don't like a gold rush, gold rush I don't like anticipating my face in a red flush I don't like that anyone would die to feel your touch Everybody wants you Everybody wonders what it would be like to love you Walk past, quick brush I don't like slow motion double vision in rose blush I don't like that falling feels like flying 'til the bone crush Everybody wants you But I don't like a gold rush

“Y/N.” A voice slurs behind you.

You turn with furrowed eyebrows and roll your eyes when you see who it is, “Pansy.”

“Don’t be rude.” She hisses and hiccups as she stumbles toward you, “What are you doing out here?”

“Could ask you the same thing.” You narrow your eyes at her, “Are you drunk?”

“Just a tad.” She replies as she hiccups again and finally stands before you. You watch silently as she gracefully sits on the wood below her, making sure not to create creases in her dress or fall over in her heels.

“Shouldn’t you be in there? On his arm like a trophy?” You ask, and inwardly groan when you hear how jealous you sound.

“Probably.” She shrugs and looks out into the water. “It doesn’t matter though, I’m not you.”

She looks up and into your eyes, you look away immediately. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to take from that.”

“Yes, you do.” She states bluntly, “He told me why you left him. That was really selfish of you.”

You gasp and turn to look at her, “How dare you? You have no idea-“

“No, actually, I do.” She gets up from the ground swiftly as a fire rages in her eyes, “You think I don’t know what it’s like to be like him? We’re the same, we were practically raised on the same blueprint. Despite what you think, there’s a lot more to the issue than what lays on the surface.”

“Oh and I guess you have all the answers?” You spit out with a scoff.

“I thought Ravenclaws were meant to be smart.” She shakes her head and hiccups as she turns to face the water, “Draco’s entire life has always just been this.” Pansy turns and gestures toward the Manor with a grimace.

“It’s always been about being the best in the room, just so that he can earn five seconds of approval from his parents. But you came, and you showed him more, you gave him a glimpse of what love feels like. Then, because you were scared and couldn’t hack it, you left him.” She continues and you grip the necklace tightly in anger.

“That’s not what happene-“

“How can you possibly expect him to come back to me, to this bullshit, when he’s experienced actual happiness? How is he supposed to come back from you?” She finally turns to face you and you hear a slight crack in her voice with the last words, “I love him so much and if I could make him half as happy as you do then I would.”

“You can.” You breathe out shakily, “If you two try a little more then you’ll realise why it just makes sense.”

“Love isn’t about sense Y/N. It’s not about appearances, it’s not about applause, it’s not about any of the crap that him and I were raised to prioritize.”

“You call it crap but that’s all he knows, and he just isn’t ready to give it all up.”

“Why do you get to decide that for him?” She tilts her head to the side and raises her eyebrows, you look away from her.

“I should probably get back inside.” You mutter as you start to turn toward the manor.

“You’re righ-“ She gasps and you turn to see what’s shocked her, “You still have it?”

“Have what?”

“The necklace.” She points to your hand and you nod awkwardly in agreement, “I helped him pick it out.”

“Oh.”

“A sapphire to match your virtue and faithfulness.” She says absent-mindedly as her eyes lock on the piece of jewellery. “Guess he got that wrong.”

She laughs coldly and you scrunch your face in confusion, “Excuse me?”

“You’re just like the rest of them.” Before you even know what’s happening she’s reached for the necklace in your hand, “You love him until it’s no longer convenient, until the paint starts to chip.”

“That’s not true.” Your voice comes out shaky and lacking conviction, it makes her laugh again in disgust.

“And then who has to pick up the fallen pieces? Me.” She continues to ramble as she walks toward the edge of the boardwalk, you feel your breathing start to pickup as you try to focus on her instead of the lake behind her. “As if I don’t have my own pieces to pick up.”

“Pansy, please just come here so we can talk about this nicely.” You respond and swallow.

“No. You don’t deserve a civil conversation.” She spits out as she finally reaches the edge of the boardwalk and hangs the necklace out by her arm, “In fact, you don’t deserve anything. You don’t deserve his love and you definitely don’t deserve this pendant.”

“No!”

What must it be like to grow up that beautiful? With your hair falling into place like dominoes My mind turns your life into folklore I can't dare to dream about you anymore

Everything after falling in love with Draco happened in slow motion. You don’t know how, or when, but your life had become a slackening slideshow of bad decisions.

You hold your breath as you watch the necklace fall into the lake. It’s as though minutes, hours, days pass in that moment, but you know that it’s merely a few seconds. When the splash finally sounds, you let out a huge gasp and Pansy laughs as she turns to leave.

Panic sets in and you start to contemplate your options. You could jump in and get it yourself? No, that’s absurd, you’re not going to overcome your fear that easily. You could rush into the manor and find someone who’s willing to get it for you? No, no one would take you seriously.

You shake your head and decide to just do the easiest thing; try and work up the courage to get it yourself. You start to pull off your heels and scrunch up your dress so that you can step into the water and you walk toward the edge of the boardwalk.

But as soon as you’re near the water you realise that you can’t do it and your panic rapidly worsens. You step back a few paces before falling to the ground and pulling your head into your knees as silent sobs begin to shake your core.

Breaths, in rapid beats, are going to and from your lungs as the sound of the water swishing fills your ears. Nausea begins to set in your stomach as you think more and more about your terrible predicament, your fear of bodies of water and your sadness at losing the necklace combining to form one indestructible lump in the pit of your stomach.

“Y/N? Are you out here?” A voice calls out from a yard or two away and you try to recognize it, but everything is foggy in your state of trepidation.

“Shit, Y/N!” The voice calls out once more and you hear footsteps pick up to a run as the person approaches you. “I swear to Merlin, if you die I’m going to kill you!”

You realise that the person still hasn’t noticed you, and is probably assuming the worst, so you try your best to croak out a word- any word.

“Here.” You manage to rasp out between sobs and wheezes, and the person immediately runs toward you.

“Y/N? Are you okay?” They ask as they pull your head out from your knees and you try to nod slowly.

You blink back a few tears and try to focus on the face in front of you, “The- the-“ You try to say and shake your head of the confusion as the words refuse to formulate.

“Hey, breathe princess.”

You recognize the nickname and then soon enough your eyes register that Draco’s kneeling in front of you. “Draco?”

“Yes, it’s me.” He responds softly as he cups your face in his hands and tries to wipe a few of your tears, “Take a few deep breaths for me, yeah?”

You nod and do as told, breathing until you finally calm down and manage to think clearly again. “I’m okay.” You breathe out and he sighs in relief.

“I was so worried, Pansy came in rambling about getting back at you and something about tossing and water- And I was just so scared that she’d thrown you in or something, because I know that you can’t swim and you’re terrified of the lake so I-“

“Hey, slow down, I’m okay. I’m right here.” You respond and manage a weak smile. He nods and sighs again. “She didn’t toss me into the water, though I think she would’ve liked to. She threw in the necklace. Shit! The necklace, it’s still down there!” You exclaim as you try to stand up but find that your legs are asleep, and end up coming back down instantly.

“Calm down. What necklace?”

“The one you gave me, the one with the sapphire that you said was a family heirloom?” You ramble and he furrows his eyebrows.

“You still have that?”

“Yes, I do. And it’s at the bottom of the lake and I need to get it back!” You stand up and Draco immediately does the same, placing his hands on your shoulders to keep you still.

“It’s just a necklace Y/N, you don’t need it.”

“It’s not just a necklace, it’s-“ You pinch your nose and sigh, “It just means a lot to me, okay?”

He narrows his eyebrows but nods in understanding, “Okay.” He steps back from you and pulls off his suit jacket, looking absolutely magnificent with his toned shoulders showing beneath the well-fitted shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to get it for you.” He shrugs and you shake your head.

“You don’t have to, I can figure something out.”

“You tried to figure it out and you had a full on panic attack, I’m the best option.” He says sternly as he looks at you and you nod in agreement, “Now just wait, very far away, and let me find it for you.”

“Thank you.” You call out behind him but he doesn’t respond.

At dinner parties I won't call you out on your contrarian shit And the coastal town we never found will never see a love as pure as it 'Cause it fades into the gray of my day old tea 'Cause it will never be

“Here you go, in perfect condition.” He says as he drops the necklace into your hands and runs a hand through his hair. He looks gorgeous and you look down to avoid getting lost in his eyes.

“Your suit is wet.” You mumble with a sniff and he chuckles, the sound makes your heart race.

“We have magic, I’ll dry up.”

“Thank you.” You whisper as you finally look up at him and he smiles, that same hypnotic smile. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without it.”

“It’s just a necklace Y/N.” He smiles softly and you shake your head as tears begin to stream down your face again.

“No, it’s not just a necklace.” You sniff, “It’s you and I. It’s all that I have left of the love that we had, it’s all that I have left of the life we were going to build together.”

“Y/N.” The sternness in his voice makes you swallow hard, but you pull your hand up to indicate that you’re not done.

“Let me talk, please.” He nods and you continue, “This little gem is all the words that we never had the chance to say. It’s the nights we would’ve spent climbing into bed together, in our little house that’s tucked safely into a small town. It’s the cups of coffee I was going to make you when you woke up in the mornings, and the cups of tea you would’ve made me when we went to sleep. This little gem is the only thing I have to remind me that our love was real.”

“It also doesn’t hurt that it costs a fortune huh?” He asks with a grin, despite the fact that there’s sadness in his eyes, and you nod with a choked out laugh.

“Definitely a bonus.” You say as you laugh a little more and wipe away a few tears.

Draco pulls the necklace out of your hands and opens it to put it around your neck once again, and you turn around so he can put it on. “Look, Y/N, life is too short to fill up with ridiculous mistakes. You left me, like I never mattered to you, and it broke me.”

You turn back around quickly, “That wasn-“

He twists you back around abruptly, “Let me talk now.” You nod and he continues to hook the chain around your neck. “It took me months to decipher what you meant when you said that I had too much love for the spotlight, that I didn’t have the capacity to let it go. It took me months to finally grasp what you meant when you said that people fall at my feet, that my contrarian demeanor is a crowd-puller. And the recognition hurt, a lot, because I realised that you we right about most of it.”

You feel his fingers leave your neck as he places a soft kiss on your shoulder, “What was I wrong about?”

He pulls you back to face him and smiles as he looks down at you, “The only thing you were wrong about was my unwillingness to let it go.” He pulls you into his arms for a hug, and you sigh in his arms.

“You can’t just leave this life Draco, we both know it isn’t that simple.” You muffle into his chest and the vibrations of his chuckles make you smile.

“That’s where you’re wrong angel, I can just leave this life. You never gave me the option but,” You pull apart and he smiles so wide that you think his face might come apart, “I would give it all up, for you.”

Gleaming, twinkling Eyes like sinking ships on waters So inviting, I almost jump in

His eyes are shining as they look down at you with adoration and commitment, and it takes all the strength you have left inside to not pull him back into your arms. He brings his fingers up to the sapphire and rubs his thumb along it.

“It’s not all you have Y/N.” He pulls your chin up so you look him in the eyes, “I’m still right here.”

~~~

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taglist: @dracoscene @dreaming-about-fanfictions @astoria-malfcy @gwlvr @wh0re4blaise @marrymetheonott @dracomalfoyposts

~~~

hi lovies! guess who’s finally feeling good enough to write again! :) we’re going to ignore the fact that the FOOLWAG sequel is beating my ass though

I will not lie, I had a great time writing this, possibly one of my favourite requests by far. I was originally going to make the ending angsty but I figured @evermoreeve (thx sweetie<3) reminded me that we all deserve a happy ending now and then.

anyway, i love you all,

jean <3

#draco #draco malfoy #draco x y/n #draco imagine #draco fanfiction #draco fluff #draco angst #harry potter fanfiction #harry potter imagine #draco malfoy angst #draco malfoy x reader #draco malfoy fluff #draco malfoy imagine #draco malfoy fanfiction

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slashbitch2 · 4 years ago

Text

Wavelength

slight nsfw warning ;)

Eve had always felt that she stood out from those around her. That in every situation, in every group and at every point in her life, she was walking round on an entirely different wavelength. Although, living this way wasn't as direly lonely as it sounded, rather she learnt to appreciate the few and far apart moments with company. When someone would, for just a split second, understand her.

The first person to ever make her feel this way, and regrettably the only for a very long time, was Ted. He'd swept her off her feet and into a less isolated world, a concept so unfamiliar at the time that she'd allowed herself be dragged out to sea. Then there was Brandon, who she was told would change her whole world. And he did, for a while.

Brandon was her life preserver until his priorities changed; until Mother's day cards became Valentines day cards, movie nights were exchanged for house parties and homework for alcohol. But Eve wasn't the kind of mom to act as though this behaviour was unwarranted and abhorrent, so she let him wedge the door shut and clear his search history. She could cope with a little more distance.

Then along came Ted's affair, their crumbling marriage and eventual divorce. Before she knew it, she was drowning.

The all too familiar feeling of solitude reappeared, completely devastating for her when Brandon left for college. However, this time she swore that she wouldn't let it overwhelm her, and did everything possible to prevent herself from sinking. Which initially started with a class at a community college, and ended with her lying in the arms of both her colleague Amanda, and classmate Julian. And yet, after they'd hurriedly packed up their things and left, she felt no better.

Brandon was sitting on the porch when she found him later. His back was turned to her, but the hunched up posture and awkward shuffling said more than enough. In that moment, Eve reverted back to her old way of thinking. She came to the conclusion that she'd failed as a mother, that her mistake was unforgivable despite the years of morose behaviour and selfish demeanour Brandon had subjected her to.

For retribution, she removed Julian's number from her contacts, predicting that he wouldn't be able cope with remaining friends. He too immature, still in that irrational sulky stage of adolescence. Next, she specified to Amanda that what happened was a one time thing, though she was already way ahead of Eve, chatting casually like nothing had taken place that weekend. Her easy-going reaction was a nice break from the prevailing tension with Brandon, which she then mentioned to her friend.

She tried to casually bring the subject up in the same manner that she imagined Amanda would if the roles were reversed, acting like the issue was nothing to do with her.

"As much as I hate to use such an outdated phrase," Her friend said. "boys will be boys. "

Eve chuckled, though the general concern weighing down on her shoulders meant it came out as more of a scoff. "You can say that again."

There's a brief lull in conversation as Eve disinterestedly taps away at her phone while Amanda sips thoughtfully at her coffee. The silence is only invoked by an awareness of social standards, since there's much Eve wants to talk to her friend about, but feels would be inappropriate in public.

Eventually, Amanda's the one to break the silence. "Are you still looking for someone to fill in for Sarah?"

Eve's attention flickered back to the woman sitting opposite. "I am." She replied hesitantly, knowing that she ought to have posted the job advertisement weeks ago, but had forgotten.

"I know someone who'd be good." Amanda was sliding her phone across the table before Eve got the chance to respond.

The screen displayed what she could only assume was a job application, though the font was too small to actually read. Squinting, she picked up the device to try and glean some information about the potential applicant.

Amanda continued as Eve scrolled. "She hasn't worked with seniors before, but has managerial experience."

"Are you sure she'd want this job?" Eve asked apprehensively as she set the phone down. "Seems a little over-qualified to me."

"Yeah, she's serious about it." Amanda's expression grew more determined. "Y/N just moved here. Mentioned she was looking for a more lowkey kind of job."

Eve remained doubtful.

"She's travelled a lot. Had a lot of different jobs." Amanda took another sip of her drink. "But she said she wants to settle down somewhere. Get a job that'll take her to retirement- which was an exaggeration, but you get the gist."

"Well." Eve sighed. "You can't get much closer to retirement than working at a nursing home."

"Exactly. So can I pass on her contact details then?"

"Sure." She shrugged. Assuming that her friend's recommendation was genuinely helpful, then she would be saved from suffering through the tedious interview process, which was worth taking a risk for.

---

As Eve sat at her desk, the world around her faded into obscurity. Without Sarah as the assistant manager, she'd been suffocating under piles of neglected paperwork, only now forcing her way through it. The main thought motivating her was that you were due to arrive any minute, for what she'd described as a first informal interview. The idea of conducting anything more formal this late into the evening was unappealing. So, based on the unusual circumstance by which you'd applied, and the strange time slot reserved, the interview would be more casual.

Finding that her eyes were starting to strain, she granted herself a quick break to look round the office. Eventually she settled on looking out the window, content watching the world pass by. The day had been unexpectedly hot, and some of that humidity still lingered, but judging by the gentle breeze filtering in through a crack in the window, the evening must've started to cool. A soft pink colour filled the sky, darkening to orange where the sun had just set over the horizon. From the other direction, a deep blue had begun to filter into view, the only indication that night was approaching.

When her gaze drifted back to the room, she realised that the pink light was cast around the room, bathing every surface in a delicate glow. How the simple beauty of the evening had previously escaped her attention was a mystery. One that prompted Eve to take a break to admire it.

The break was short-lived, however, as a sharp knock at the door quickly stole her attention away.

"Come in." She called out but found her voice hoarse from disuse. She frantically cleared her throat as the guest entered.

Eve looked up at you and smiled politely, then down at her desk, then did a double take. Although she hadn't given enough thought to form any preconceived image of what you might look like, she certainly hadn't expected someone quite so attractive.

As soon as the label crossed her mind, she was already berating herself for it. You'd barely entered the room and were here for business, she couldn't let herself think of you in that way. It was wrong. Both professionally and morally.

"Evening." Your voice was deep, smooth and with an accent she couldn't distinguish.

Eve tried her best to smile amiably, though she was sure the emotion wasn't reflected in her eyes. Instead she scanned your body from top to bottom, lingering on your neck, and then your hands. The action was automatic. An unintentional response to her attraction- and there it was again. She'd allowed herself to get distracted barely ten seconds later.

"Hi." Eve was too quiet, her tone lacking the necessary command. She swallowed. "Please, take a seat." And smiled, this time more genuinely.

"Thank you."

She watched you stiffly slide into the seat, effortlessly demanding the attention of the entire room. Although Eve had known you for less than a minute, she'd already decided that there was something hypnotic about the way you moved. From the slight twitch in the corner of your lips, to the gentle rise and fall of your chest. Every movement, regardless of it being barely perceptible, had her mesmerized, however she was mostly fixated on your hands. How they couldn't quite settle in your lap, rather were wrung about anxiously until abruptly stilling.

Your hands falling limp dragged Eve back into reality as it dawned on her that she'd been staring for a little longer than appropriate. She literally had to shake herself out of the senseless state and clear her throat once more before she was ready to continue.

"It's nice to meet you." Jolted into reality, she outstretched her hand, which you eagerly met. Your grip was firm, matched with a confident yet humble smile that looked well practiced.

"And you."

Eve already understood how you'd succeeded at accumulating such an impressive employment history, as every second of the interview so far, you'd acted perfectly. Like you'd written the book on 'How to Handle Job Interviews.'

"Just call me Eve." Separating from the handshake, she dismissively waved her hand, unable to hold the eye contact for any longer. There was an inquisitive manner to the way you were watching her, as though you were trying to ascertain the most information possible from appearance alone. Being exposed to your scrutinising glare caused Eve to shift in her seat, though not from discomfort or uneasiness, rather from inadmissible lust.

As the interview progressed, her eyes continued to occasionally stray toward your hands. Despite how hard she was trying to stay focused, she kept catching herself unintentionally imagining how they'd look gripping her waist, pushing apart her thighs. And if she blocked out this particular fantasy, then her attention would shift to your neck, and how she'd love to bite down on the supple skin presented to her.

She'd hoped that her fling with Amanda and Julian would've suppressed her incorrigible longing for pleasure, yet still found her thighs pressing together as her imagination overpowered reason. All the scandalous scenarios flashing through her mind only grew more vivid, more frequent. An incessant stream of borderline pornographic images, which worsened her guilt as she struggled to focus on what you were saying.

The cool breeze from earlier seemed to have vanished, replaced by unbearable humidity. She could feel herself sweating bucket loads, and only flushed more upon realising that she must've looked a mess; with stray hairs framing her face, an inability to sit still and a layer of perspiration covering her entire body. You'd probably noticed by now.

"God it's been hot recently." You commented, playing with the neckline of your shirt.

Had Eve not been observing you so closely, she would've guessed this was general small-talk. But judging on how you'd acted so far, this was a strategically placed act of mercy, a way of excusing her, no doubt, dishevelled appearance.

"Yeah." Eve chuckled, twirling a strand of hair round her finger. "We could move outside." She suggested, then quickly added. "If you wanted to, that is." Her desperation to please you came as a surprise. The roles should've been reversed. You should've been trying to impress her.

Eve had undeniably lost all authority in the situation, which simply excited her further.

---

When Eve laughed, she scrunched up her face and closed her eyes, which was inconvenient even at the best of times. Right now, however, she'd never despised the quirk quite so much.

As inconsequential as the current circumstances would look to any passer-by, she wanted to commit every detail to memory. From the lingering pink hue of dusk, to the way you threw your head back as you laughed. In fact, she wanted to memorise everything about you. Since leaving behind her stuffy office, conversation had flown easily between the two of you, the matter of employment seemingly dropped in place of getting to know one another. You'd indisputably gotten the job. Eve knew it. You knew it. So both were happy to indulge in a lighter tone of conversation.

The topic had turned to worst first date experiences, so she had very few to share with you, though that didn't stop her from enjoying listening to your little anecdotes.

"What about you?" Taking a calming breath after an outburst of laughter, you paused to ask her the dreaded question.

In comparison to your story, her worst date was relatively tame. "Well." She scratched at the corner of her eye, considering whether she could exaggerate in some way. "I went on a date recently that I had to walk out of."

"Really?" You folded your arms, leaning back against the brick wall. "What happened?"

"Nothing. I guess it just didn't feel right." She shook her head, hoping to deter any more questioning.

"Fair enough. Sometimes you just know- right?"

Eve drew her eyes away from being locked on the ground, finally summoning the resolve to look directly back at you. She bit her lip, compelling herself to nod.

There was something about you that was pure ecstasy to her. While looking at you, she could feel herself falling deeper into the hypnotic state she'd been in earlier, unable to tear her eyes away and unwilling to try. In spite of the normality of the situation, it felt meaningful. Eve didn't feel so alone, so out of place. Which made no sense to her as she'd known you for barely over an hour.

"What did you do after?" Your voice was somehow deeper, eyes lidded and posture relaxed. "After the date." You clarified.

The inquiry was personal, even without context that could be inferred. Eve hummed, delaying her response long enough to consider how much she was willing to divulge. "I-" She laughed nervously, suddenly embarrassed to confess. "I went swimming."

"Swimming?" Your eyebrows shot up, amused by the many connotations of her vagueness. "Where?"

Eve scuffed the heel of her shoe against the concrete ground, shamefully incapable of returning the eye contact. "Here." She admitted quietly, grinning as if in disbelief that she'd actually done it.

"Wow. I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting that." You took a deep breath, rendered speechless for a second. "So, you have access to the pool?"

Eve shifted restlessly, hesitant to pursue the topic any further. She knew where this was going, and that she shouldn't endorse this type of behaviour. But the heat wasn't helping, and neither was her overactive imagination. She was supposed to be responsible, but then again, so were you.

Inevitably the possibilities of what could be overpowered her better judgement. "Yes." She reached into her pocket, producing the coveted key ring and hanging it on her pointer finger.

Upon glancing up, she discovered you were watching her intently, indisputable lust reflected in your eyes. Eve found herself in one of those rare moments where she felt understood, on the same wavelength as someone else. The logical part of her brain argued that you were basically a stranger. That if she followed through on your shared idea, then your hiring and subsequent job experience would be forever tainted. But the possibilities were too tempting to ignore.

So when you asked. "Want to go swimming?"

She couldn't refuse.

---

You'd held her hand as she'd lead, the reasoning being that most the facility was shrouded in darkness. Though Eve liked the weight of your hand in hers, so she didn't bother to turn the lights on until reaching the pool. Only then did you separate, crouching down to check the temperature. You beamed with childlike joy as you waved your hand around in the water, skimming the surface then diving deeper down.

Eve grinned. Your pure happiness was infectious, the effect it had on her similar to being drunk. She was intoxicated from exhilaration. She would've been content watching you relish in the feeling of water running through your fingers for eternity, though to her dismay, you soon grew bored. And then to her surprise, you unabashedly began to strip. Her eyes were glued to the expanse of your back as you pulled your shirt over your head, and to the revealed skin as you tugged your trousers down.

She had to stop herself from stumbling back as the strange reality of the situation suddenly dawned on her. Instead, she reacted by comically clutching at her heart, clawing the fabric of her own shirt.

You turned to the side, looking at her out of the corner of your eye. "You coming?"

She chewed on her lip, pondering the two words in greater detail. This was you asking for consent, giving a final warning. You were both aware that this was an incredibly outlandish idea, an extremely irresponsible one that should've discouraged Eve. Yet it had the opposite effect.

Before she could overthink the consequences, her shaking hands were clumsily unbuttoning her blouse. At the unspoken confirmation, you smirked back at her, then without warning, threw yourself into the pool. The splash echoed round the room, proceeded by carefree laughter as you resurfaced and began leisurely swimming away from her. While you were busy, Eve took the chance to continue undressing without interference.

Her insecurities didn't emerge until it was too late, resolved moments later as she dove into the pool. The water was colder than she'd anticipated, but her burning desire dulled the intensity. Breaking through the water's surface, she inhaled deeply, grateful for the supply of oxygen. However, her breath was soon stolen from her as she noticed you were treading water directly in front.

Somehow, you looked even more beautiful now. With the wave's reflections dancing across your skin, your hair drenched and dripping. She wanted to chase after the droplets with her tongue, despite knowing she'd likely be met with the bitter taste of chlorine. But what really flustered Eve was the way you were staring at her; the hunger in your eyes that hinted at your intentions.

Your stillness was teasing her, the water practically stagnant around you both. Eve was becoming increasingly irritated, the heat between her legs only growing. So it didn't take long for her to snap. She lunged forward in an attempt to grab hold of you, though her hands couldn't quite clutch onto your slippery skin. She stumbled to the left, floundering around until you grabbed hold of her.

Upon securing her grip, she froze, due to both the sensation of your body pressed up against hers, and her embarrassment. She couldn't bare to look up, to face her awkward failure. After a beat of silence, she heard you laugh lightly. It wasn't necessarily unpleasant or mocking, but she insisted on keeping her eyes locked on the wall. That was, until your lips gently brushed against her ear.

"Were you trying to kiss me or drown me?"

She snorted, the tension leaving her body, then turned to rest her forehead on your shoulder. "The former. Definitely."

You laughed again. This time Eve joined in, happy to ignore what'd just occurred.

"Want to try that again, then?" You kissed just behind her ear, causing a shiver to suffuse across Eve's body. She waited a minute, expecting more before realising you intended for her to make the next move.

She glanced up at your face, fixating on your lips. You were so close. All she had to do was lean forward ever so slightly. One final glance to your lidded eyes confirmed you wanted the same- all she had to do was close the distance.

Taking a shaky breath, Eve shifted a hand up to cup your cheek, her thumb softly stroking your skin. There was no rush; you both wanted the same thing and were eager to revel in the experience. So, when her lips finally grazed against yours, there was no deep sigh or sudden change in pace, rather a blooming warmth in her chest. She was floating, both literally and metaphorically in a sea affection.

She kissed you again, this time with more conviction. Then fell backwards, her feet now comfortably resting on the bottom of the pool, her back hitting the wall as your grip on her waist tightened. You dragged a hand across her chest, causing her to gasp. Your touch was scolding compared to the cool water. A perfect balance between lustful heat and a mind-numbing, all-encompassing chill.

She raised her arms, flinging them around you and exhaling as her impatience reappeared. Though thankfully, you didn't make her wait long. Soon enough, your mouth had latched onto her neck, leaving messy kisses from behind her ear, to down by her shoulders. The feeling was pure bliss, encouraging her to lean into you and press your bodies closer together.

She didn't need to say anything. You seemed to know exactly what you were doing. Like you had her body memorised: every caress was perfectly placed, each touch just what she needed. It didn't take long for Eve to reach her pleasure, although she did spend a while in a dazed state of satisfaction, simply drifting in your arms. Eventually, she regained awareness to feel you tenderly nibbling on her lower lip, and eagerly reciprocated the kiss.

Motivated by the sudden fervour, she switched the positions, pushing you up to the wall.

"Get on the ledge." Eve murmured against your lips. She looped her arms under your thighs, ready to lift once you'd agreed.

Surprised by her abrupt confidence, you quirked an eyebrow, but obeyed nonetheless.

With you sat before her, she knew the evening was only just beginning, and judging by your breathless expression you felt exactly the same. This was one of those rare moments where Eve felt completely understood.

#eve fletcher x reader #mrs fletcher #eve fletcher

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luxwritesfanfic · 4 years ago

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Right Where You Left Me

Reader gets déjà vu in a way she never expected. Or, the one where Sherlock is the gift that never stops giving. AU!Bucky because he always has your back. Enjoy!

Author’s Note: There is a lot of angst and multiple different aspects that could be very triggering for some within this work. Please be mindful of the trigger warning below and if you see something that you feel should be listed, message me and I will edit accordingly!

Trigger Warning: Severe depression, suicidal ideations, suicide attempt (overdose), forced vomiting, talk of death in general, angst with a happy ending

Sherlock Holmes/Reader

You couldn’t really tell how long you’d been lying in bed for. Time was such a foreign concept to you now. It was either before the fall, when you were happy and he was with you, or after the fall, where you were all alone. You weren’t alone physically because your friends would never allow for that. Since the fall, you’d been staying in Sherlock’s flat, and Mrs. Hudson would always bring you a plate of whatever she was cooking and put it in the fridge. And like clockwork, she’d come every Sunday and clean the fridge out from where you didn’t touch any of the plates. She never seemed to mind, though, and she never stopped bringing you food.

Bucky would come by every day and check on you and help you do things around the house. And by help you, he did everything for you. Mrs. Hudson would let him stay in John’s old room whenever he needed, and he’d make sure you showered and that your laundry was done. He would tell you he does this because he loves you and that even though you weren’t born his sister, you would die that way.

John had moved on and moved out and you were happy for him. Mary was lovely, and you wished you could move on with your life, but you couldn’t. You knew he was taking it just as hard as you and that you both just had different ways of coping with the pain.

When you had to quit your job, Mycroft was immediately there and offered to take care of you financially. “Please, allow me to do this for you. It’s what my brother would have wanted. He couldn’t stand me when he was ali—here, so the least I can do is make him happy where he is now,” he said quietly. Pigs must’ve been flying in the window behind you because when you reached to hug Mycroft, he met you halfway. You cried nonstop for days after that.

You had tried to be better after the scare, not for you, but for your family. You don’t remember much from it, but you do know that no one brings it up around you and you haven’t been left alone for longer than a few hours since.

You woke up with your face propped up against something cool, but you could barely open your eyes to see where you were. Your stomach was in the most pain it had ever been in and everything around you sounded so far away. You remember being yanked back and fingers were shoved down your throat and someone, Bucky, was standing over you and holding you up saying through tears, “I know it hurts and I’m sorry, but you have to throw it up, Y/N. You have to. I can’t lose you, too.”

Everything hurt and in between gags you could hear Mrs. Hudson crying and begging whoever was on the phone to get there faster. You had never heard anyone scream like that and you were sorry you were the one who caused it.

Even though you’d promised Sherlock he would never lose you, Fate stepped in and you lost him. When you thought about the turn your life had taken, you just told everyone you were keeping your end of the deal.

Bucky knocked on your door and stuck his head in. “Mornin’, Y/N. I’m gonna start some laundry and make us some coffee and then I’ll be back, okay?” You could tell he was worried by the tone of his voice, but he did a good job of hiding it. You didn’t say anything back to it and he didn’t expect you to.

Bucky came in a little later with some towels in his hand and a coffee in the other. “I know you’re not feeling real good today, so I was thinking I could wash your hair for you? You can just bend over the tub and I’ll do all the work. I’ve even been watching some videos on how to braid and then you won’t have to worry it matting up either.” He set the coffee down on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed next to you.

By this point you were already crying into the pillow because how could the people in your life love you this much when you had nothing to offer them anymore?

“I love you so much,” you cried, and Bucky’s heart broke at the sound, “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry and I love you.”

He brushed the hair away from your face. His hands were warm, and it made you feel human again. “You don’t have to be sorry. I love you and I will take care of you for however long you need me to. God knows you would-- and have, done the same for me. So, let me wash your hair for you and I can tell you all about how Lestrade constantly shits on Anderson now as an eternal tribute.”

You smiled and although it wasn’t full of life, he was just as happy to see it. You ended up just getting a shower and Bucky rushed next door to get you a sandwich in hopes that you’d eat for him, too.

As you were brushing your hair out, you heard multiple voices. You heard Bucky, and he sounded… shocked? And then there was John and then just as you were about to reach for the door you heard it. You would know that baritone voice anywhere. Barging out of the bathroom and almost tripping over your own two feet, you came to a full stop.

“Sherlock?”

There he stood in the middle of the room with John a few feet behind him, and Bucky with his back to you, seemingly always ready to protect you. It looked like him and it sounded like him, and hell, it even smelled like him. You couldn’t believe it.

“Y/N.” He went to make a step towards you but seemed to have think better of it. It was better if he assessed your reaction to seeing him first. It had been so long since he had last seen you and while he silently fought the raw want he had to hold you, he knew you were seeing red.

“I don’t even—I can’t-- can’t even comprehend this. Where do I start? Where the fuck have you been? You were dead, Sherlock! I watched you…” You squeezed your eyes shut, steeling yourself the best you could. You weren’t going to cry. You had too much to say. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw John and Bucky slip through the front door. You were sure that was their best bet.

Sherlock said nothing as you went off because there was really nothing for him to say. He understood why you were so mad with him, even if he wasn’t generally self-aware when it came to his own feelings, he wasn’t that daft. He had come prepared for this and he was going to make it right.

“No, you know what? Don’t say anything. I don’t even want to hear it. I have been fucking rotting in this flat while everyone else was able to move on with their lives. I was here, because I couldn’t live without you. My world stopped. I do nothing, Sherlock, nothing but sit and lay in your bed and cry into your old shirts!” You were yelling now, hands running through your hair as you tried to make sense of it all. Somewhere in the back of your mind you made a mental note to thank Bucky for making you get up and shower this morning.

“I quit my job, Sherlock. Mycroft has been paying to keep me alive and Mrs. Hudson and Bucky take turns to make sure I’m still breathing every other hour because they’re scared that if I’m left alone for too long, I won’t be. And poor John, I see him and start fucking bawling because then all I see is you. I stopped caring about everything, and everyone else, because the only person I cared about looked me in the eyes and walked off a fucking building!”

Sherlock opened his mouth to say something, but you quickly cut him off.

“Seriously, don’t speak. You don’t get to just waltz in with John after all this time—you know what? There’s the million-dollar question. Was I the only one who didn’t know you were alive? Because so help me God, Sherlock, I’m this close to losing it.”

He didn’t know whether or not he should actually speak, but he took the cue after he started to physically feel the heat from the deathly glare you were giving him. You quite literally looked deranged but that didn’t stop him from taking a step towards you. He always seemed to chase danger, and you were no exception.

“No… you weren’t the only one. John only just found out a few weeks ago, and only a few select people knew the whole time.” Sherlock was careful with his words. He knew he was walking on thin ice.

You didn’t say anything to that, and Sherlock found that even scarier than when you were yelling.

“Hah, select people, huh? I like that one. So, where were you staying? Were you in London this whole time? Shit, you could’ve been downstairs for all I know. I guess I wouldn’t be a select person to know that, though, would I?”

Sherlock grimaced. Things were going worse than he imagined, and he already figured it would be pretty bad. That was an understatement. “I had to jump around often for everyone’s safety, but I stayed in London for the most part. I stayed with Molly when I could.”

You laughed in his face at that, and you clamped your hand over your mouth, turning your back on him lest you start laughing again. He watched you with furrowed brows and you knew he wanted to speak but you couldn’t do it right now. You took a few steps towards the kitchen window and looked out at the bustling London streets beneath you. For months your world stopped, and it seemed so real when in reality nothing stopped at all.

“Great, great. That’s so great. Splendid, really.” You murmured to yourself and perched your free hand on your hip. Drumming your fingers against your lips, you began again.

“Bucky had to glue the windows down because he thought I was going to jump, and you were staying with Molly.” The tone of your voice was venomous and if looks could kill, Sherlock Holmes would be dead for real this time.

Sherlock winced. “Y/N, please, let me—” You cut him off, speaking louder this time. Your face was void of emotion, but your eyes betrayed you as the tears started to fall freely and your voice cracked under the weight of everything that was being said.

“Bucky had to glue the windows down because I thought I was going to jump, and you were staying with Molly! Damn you, Sherlock Holmes! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” You grasped at the kitchen counter to steady yourself as you gasped for air between the sobs that you couldn’t contain anymore. Your heart ached so badly that you actually clutched your chest, afraid that it was going to break through your ribcage and abandon ship. You could barely register Sherlock coming up behind you through your tears and as he willed you to face him, you noticed that his eyes were brimmed red and glossy. Even sad, Sherlock looked as beautiful as a doll.

“I always come when you call, why didn’t you come for me?” You cried, fisting your hands in his shirt so tightly that you thought heard buttons pop. Your head was swimming and you had never felt more betrayed in your life. How could Sherlock turn to anyone but you? Had you not made it clear that you would do anything for him?

“I called for you every single night, Sherlock! Begged for you, mourned you, I—” The tears wouldn’t stop flowing and your voice was starting to crack from its sudden and harsh overuse.

It was then that Sherlock wedged himself so close to you that you didn’t even have the space to move your head and look up at him. A pair of strong arms wrapped around your back and you were being squeezed so hard to him that you thought you’d either die from a heart attack or suffocation. And even now at the hands of Sherlock, neither seemed that bad. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He whispered against your forehead again and again as if he was repeating a chant he had been practicing for some time.

“I love you so much and you didn’t even call! Why didn’t you call?” Your words were lost to the both of you now, spoken into his shirt and distorted by your sobs. Sherlock held you as you cried and tried to contain your shaking body against his as you let out months of sadness and pain and despair. You were so overwhelmed that you couldn’t think straight.

“I know, I know you do, and that’s why I couldn’t call. I couldn’t call for you.” He held onto you as he spoke like you would disappear. Sherlock had decided before he even stepped foot into the flat that he would not lose you again. In his time away from you, he was subjected to feelings he could only describe as both love and heartbreak in equal measure. Being apart from you had left him feeling a void that nothing could fill, but it was his love for you that he relied on to keep you safe and away from him.

Sherlock pulled back from you and while it was only by a few inches, you suddenly felt worlds away. You go to pull him back to you when he gathers your hands in his and leaves a trail of ghostly kisses along the spread of your knuckles.

“I have never begged for mercy in my life…” He murmurs, eyes never leaving yours. He was determined; that much you could tell. Your eyes widened as he lowered himself to one knee, and then two. “Until now. I have hurt you in ways that are beyond comprehensible. Please, grant me the mercy I do not deserve to explain myself. I am willing to bare myself before you if you’ll have me.”

You were in shock at the sight of Sherlock on his knees before you. You had heard him apologize maybe twice in your time of knowing him and here he was, begging for you to hear him out. All you could do is nod.

You expected him to stand up again, but he sat in place and looked up at you with so much love in his eyes that felt all the anger you were harboring dissipate under his gaze. He took a deep breath and prepared himself. If you were ever going to forgive him, he knew that he would have to be honest. And he knew that if he was going to be honest, he would have to admit the feelings he had for you and hope that he could express them in a way that you could understand.

“There were constantly people watching you, and John, and pretty much everyone else who held any value in my life,” he explained, rubbing his thumbs over your fingers as he spoke absentmindedly, “they knew you would be suffering, they counted on that. And if you weren’t, they’d know something was going on. Your suffering had to be real, or else it wouldn’t have been believable. I didn’t want to keep you in the dark. But I had no choice. When I faked my death, I had some help. I stayed with Molly here and there because she already knew, and my relationship with her is is…different for ours.” He paused.

You were hanging on every word he said. You could tell he was being sincere, and even though you were upset, you understood. If leaving Sherlock meant protecting him, you would do it too.

He cleared his throat and started again. “Molly was a safer option. They would have expected less of a reaction from her. And if things were to go wrong…” Trailing off, Sherlock squeezed your hands. You knew what he was trying to say, and you didn’t dare breathe. “You were not someone I could lose. It couldn’t have been you. So yes, I stayed with Molly, but I worked constantly to make it so that I could come home to you.”

You couldn’t take it anymore. “Sherlock,” you whimpered, pulling him to his feet by his collar and back to you where he belonged. He followed suit quickly like he was reading your mind.

For what seemed like the first time today, you were truly taking him in. He was just as beautiful as he was the day he left you. You reached up to brush away a stray curl from his eyes and smiled at the way he seemed to try and follow your touch.

There were so many things that you couldn’t be sure of, but this is something you’d always know to be true. You loved Sherlock, terribly, terribly, so. If loving him was the only purpose you ever found in this lifetime, you would be sure not to fail him.

You were lost in other when the sound of footsteps climbing up the stairs drew your attention. Sherlock followed your gaze as you watched John enter the flat from the living room.

“Is everyone okay up here? There was a lot of yelling and then it got pretty quiet…” As he rounded the corner to the kitchen, he stopped in his tracks at the sight of you braced against the counter with a small amount of space between you and Sherlock that he must’ve recently graced you with because you could barely move before. His hands rested on your hips and your hands had found solace on his shoulders. John looked like a deer caught in headlights before he covered his eyes with his hands and made to walk back out, determined not to ruin the moment that all of London was waiting on.

“Fuck, I’m sorry! Don’t mind me, pretend I was never here!” He called out as he dashed back down the stairs so quickly you thought he had fallen and you were sure you heard him say to someone, “I told you so!”

You couldn’t help but laugh at the whole situation and when you looked back at Sherlock, you realized he was already looking at you. Even after everything today, you still caught yourself feeling nervous under his heavy gaze.

“So, it’s okay when you stare but not when I do?” You teased, hoping that he couldn’t see the blush you could surely feel. Sherlock squinted his eyes at your comment as if he didn’t understand what you meant but gave you a devilish smile all the same.

“I’m sorry.” He wasn’t. “But you are confirming that you do stare at me, right?”

You were torn between smacking the smirk off his face or kissing it, whatever compelled you the most and right now it was a tie. Rolling your eyes, you brought your hands down to his arms and gave them a squeeze. Not even realizing you were thinking out loud, you whispered something about having déjà vu. This caught Sherlock’s attention, and he moved tiniest bit closer to you. “Déjà vu? How so?”

Cursing yourself under your breath, you laughed and dipped your head down between the two of you, laughing at how ridiculous all of this was. “Jeez, it’s been years now. I had the most realistic dream that’s stuck with me all this time.”

Sherlock tsked at you and moved to bring your head back up so that he could properly see your face. He cupped your cheeks and in the most familiar way and just like in the dream, you were breathless.

“Go on,” he urged, voice like velvet, “tell me what happened in your dream.”

You all but melted under his gaze. Sherlock, in any form, would always have this effect on you it seemed. His thumb brushed along your lower lip as his own parted. Physically he was with you, but mentally he was far away committing this memory to only a place he could see.

“Use your words. I’m paying raft attention, aren’t I?” Once again you thanked Mrs. Hudson and her choice in countertops because if it was any less sturdy you were sure you would collapse and bring him down with you. On second thought—

Any coherent thought was lost to you when Sherlock nosed your cheek, and you couldn’t help the gasp that left your lips or the words after.

“I told you I loved you, Sherlock. That’s what happened in the dream.” Your words were spoken so quickly in the effort to chase after his lips but he held you still, waiting and wanting in front of him.

You whined like a child. None of anything that happened today was fair to you, but one kiss and you would forgive all of London for keeping your detective’s secret.

“Well, I guess the only proper response to that is for me to tell you that I’ve loved you for ages, my dear girl.” He smiled against your skin and you thought that this was it. You had officially lost your last marble, and this was the delirium finally setting in. You welcomed the insanity happily.

“Say it again, please. I need to hear you say it again.” You begged, everything hitting you at all at once.

“I love you,” he murmured, his eyes never leaving yours. “I love you, and it’s only ever been you. It couldn’t be anyone else but you. You…didn’t you know that?” His eyebrows rose up and you stopped him in his tracks. That was Sherlock for “are you dumb?”

It was then that you decided you were done with talking before he had the chance to say anything smart. You pulled him down to you so quickly that you missed the shock that flashed in his eyes when your lips finally met. After years of yearning and pining for the man in front of you, you finally had him right where you wanted him. There were so many things you wanted to say to him, but no words would express how you truly felt about him and lucky for you, Sherlock was more of a hands-on learner.

When you finally broke apart, you got to admire the man of your every hour in all his glory. The mussed hair and kiss swollen lips really added to his already suave look and you couldn’t help but smile like an idiot. “You’re handsome. So handsome, seriously, it should really be a crime. I can finally tell you that without any shame.”

He returned your smile tenfold, and you thought if you could make his eyes crinkle like that just one more time in your life that it would be a life well lived. He acted as if he was mulling your statement over, rolling his bottom lip between teeth. “You could’ve mentioned it before. It might’ve helped me make my deductions much sooner.”

You slapped him on the shoulder but then worked on smoothing his shirt out while he watched you with a gentle fondness that he reserved just for you. You still had so many questions that you wanted answered but you knew those could wait. Something had been generous enough to answer your most asked prayer and you weren’t about to be ungrateful for even a second.

Placing one last (for now) kiss on his cheek, you led him to the door to the flat and swung it open. “Hey, has Mrs. Hudson seen you—”

As if on perfect cue, Mrs. Hudson shrieks so loudly that any bad memory you have of her yelling is now a good one.

“Sherlock!”

#bbc sherlock #bbc sherlock fanfiction #bbc sherlock imagine #bbc sherlock x reader #bbc sherlock x you #sherlock holmes #sherlock x reader #sherlock holmes x reader #sherlock x you #sherlock imagine #sherlock #sherlock has feelings #sherlock holmes imagine #sherlock holmes fanfiction #reader insert #fanfic #luxwrites #bucky x reader #au bucky barnes

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rocicrew · 2 years ago

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i just have to yell about naomi for a second,,,, naomi ‘i don’t believe in causes’, naomi who run from them, who rejected every leadership position, because she she’d already paid the price of following a person like that and it scarred her for life. naomi who wanted a place to belong, who wanted a family. it was what drove her to marco and his crew in the first place and then she managed to do it right the second time at the roci. who would not die for ideals be it causes or motherhood but would die for her family. her trauma from the beginning of her life still affects her and she retracts to herself everytime she’s wounded. she knows she never comes out unscathered but she comes out healed to the degree that she can. who argues and pushes for the non violent plant partially because she doesn’t believe violence is the answer but also because she’s lost far too much. who wanted to spent the rest of her days quietly with holden on luna or titan.

but when that crumbles, i think part of her knew from that moment things would never be the same. she begun mourning then, and it stayed a part of her. while she placated herself with a dream of her family back together on the roci for months if not years. even after clarissa died, and amos was awol, and alex and bobbie were constantly in different systems from her and then chances of seeing holden again became dimmer and dimmer. she clung to that idea to survive hiding in her little box. but even she knew that that was simply a dream and would not become a reality. duarte offers part of it to her on a silver plater, turn your self in and you’ll wake up next to holden for the rest of your life. in a prison of course, grand and open, but a prison none the less. she could’ve done it. said yes and kept living in a box but in jim’s arms. but she couldn’t. (partially because thing she’s held on tightly throughout everything is her agency, her ability to have an agency)

and because it wouldn’t be the same as retirement no matter how it may seemed as an idea. saba’s loss was sudden, but i think in that moment she decided what she would chose above else. the woman who run from causes, who valued family, the one she chose anyway, despite what everyone told her, chosing the fight on her own terms and in her own way. and with the power vacancy she can push that forward like never before. it’s a huge development for her character wise, it’s a huge amount of healing from marco to stop letting that fear keep her back especially after reverting to old coping mechanisms. because she might hate attention, and power in and of itself, but the opportunity is far too big not to act and if they play it right, they could at the very least even the playfield with an enemy that seemed unbeatable. how she speaks of a front others placed on her as a now leader but actually understands how much of her own choice that was.

the groundwork was there from her choice in BA, to defeat marco even if it meant losing filip. only now she actually stepped up. she knows she’s changed, and she knew that was the moment to let the dream go. just as she knows even if they all manage to get back on the roci together, none of them will be the same.

the cost she always feared, she now looked in the eyes and let it go. because it’d already happened, and she never had a way of stopping it.

#reading tiamat's wrath /#naomi nagata #expanse spoilers #the expanse spoilers #expanse book spoilers #the expanse book spoilers #tiamat's wrath spoilers #FAMILIES CHANGE IT CAN BE HARD AND SAD BUT WE BEAR IT #i'm only halfway and her arc is making me iNSANE #i don't even know how coherent this is #i just NAOMIIIII #i didn't even intend this to be so long #idk if i wrote down all my thoughts it's just #her latest chapter wrecked me #how she accepts this position how she things of her little fantasy of her family one last time and lets it go\#i'll revisit this after i finish the book

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corpsedaydream · 4 years ago

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paint wars part 2

OKAY HERE IT IS! PART TWO TO PAINT WARS

if u haven’t read part one, i’ll link it right here

word count: 3k (yikes it’s a long one)

_______________________________

paint wars part 2

Things had been rough lately.

Real fucking rough.

You missed Corpse so much. You hadn’t spoken to each other since that fight at his apartment and that was fifty-four days ago now, almost two thirds of a season you’d been without him.

“I miss you.” You spoke aloud into the emptiness of your apartment, noting that the time on your phone now said 12:01am. It was officially now day fifty-five without speaking to him.

You swiped away all your notifications on your lock screen, ignoring everything and everyone that was trying to reach you right now so you could look at the person who was ignoring you. You wanted to look at the photo that was still your wallpaper. That first photo you’d ever taken together.

You went to change it on day thirty-eight of not speaking. On night thirty-seven of not speaking you’d gone out with your friends, they’d finally convinced you after a whole month of trying and you got absolutely wasted. So of course you’d called Corpse. But he didn’t answer, not any of the fifteen times you’d called. So that next morning, when you woke up hungover and saw that same lock screen photo and not one response from him, you told yourself you were going to change it. You tried to tell yourself you were angry, but it was just a coping mechanism to ignore the hurt that had been tunnelling through your heart since being without him. You spent an hour scouring tumblr and twitter for some aesthetically pleasing lock screen, but you didn’t save a single one. Nothing could compare to that photo of you and Corpse.

You then started to wonder if he’d listened to any of the voicemails you’d left the night before. You couldn’t remember them exactly, but you knew you definitely left four of them and how badly you wanted to know if the curiosity became too much to bear and he’d listened to them.

And he had.

On night thirty-seven, while you were out drinking, Corpse was in a deep sleep. He hadn’t been sleeping a whole lot lately, so finally, he’d crashed hard that night and slept through the calls you’d made to him. But even though he wasn’t aware of the calls in his sleeping state, you were still present in his dreamland. Every adventure his brain took him on was with you, maybe it was something that kept him asleep, the fact that you were right there in this fantasy. You were talking to him again, he could see your smile, hear your laugh, reach out and grab your hand, he could kiss you again. It was happiness. But then he woke up and he went to reach out for you in his bed, still caught up in the false wonder his dreams had provided him, only to find it was just him and reality slapped him fully awake. You weren’t there with him. You hadn’t been for a number of weeks. He missed you.

On day thirty-eight, when he spotted the missed calls from you on his phone, he cursed himself for being asleep and missing it. But would he had answered had he been awake? He wasn’t sure. So instead, he heard you speak to him for the first time in so long, even if it was through a voicemail you had left in the space of him not answering your calls.

“Oh, fuck- oh my god.”

That was it. That was the first voicemail, there was a lot of background noise but he had heard you so clearly. In your drunken state, you didn’t know what to say, so that’s what you had left with him, until you called back and left another.

"Hi.” You started it simple. He had the phone clutched so tightly in his hand, the device pressed so firmly against his ear, he didn’t want to miss a word. “I- I don’know what to say.” He noticed the slight slur to your words then, you were drunk when you had called. “I’m’a just go.”

You hung up again, but alas, there was another.

“Can I just ask... are you ignoring me?” Your voice was so meek, his chest hurt at the sound of it. He almost went to say no, but this was a one sided conversation, he’d missed the opportunity. “I miss you.” You hung up again, and he had to stop himself from replaying it over and over again to hear you say that you missed him.

But there was one last voice mail.

“I should stop calling, huh?” You sighed and he could picture you with a sad pout, your eyes all droopy with a mix emotion and alcohol. “But, I just want’a talk to you.” You confessed, then he heard another voice call your name in the background before they spoke to you and he listened. “(Y/N)! Here you are, what are you doing? That guys wondering where you are, he’s fucking hot-”

Corpse hung up then, he didn’t want to hear anymore. Jealousy was surging through him as the unwanted images of you with someone else plagued his mind and he threw his phone across his room. Wishing he hadn’t of started listening to those fucking voicemails.

What he didn’t know, though, is how the rest of that last voicemail went.

“I really don’t care.” You’d told your friend at the mention of the guy. Yeah, he was attractive and he was buying you drinks, but you wanted no one except Corpse. “Give me a sec.” You’d told your friend before walking away again, bringing your phone back to your ear to talk to the only person you wanted to talk to right now, even if he wasn’t on the other end of that call. “I hope you didn’t hear that, but if you did, don’t worry it. I’m g’na go home now.” You sighed and looked up at the night sky, there was no shooting star, or really any stars at all because of the light pollution from where you currently were, but you were still wishing that by some magic happenstance, Corpse would pick up his phone and speak to you again. “I wish I was going to yours.”

On day thirty-nine you cried so hard. You thought you had made it past this violently sobbing stage, this was exact state you’d cried yourself to sleep to each night for the first few weeks. Your heart was in so much pain, it was torn apart and you swore only one person had the power to stitch it back together, but he wasn’t there. You hadn’t heard a single thing from him. Were you two still together? Had you broken up? You weren’t even sure. But on day thirty-nine you cried that hard again because Corpse hadn’t responded at all to your calls or voicemails, so you convinced yourself he truly wanted nothing to do with you.

You’d been avoiding searching his name on social media, knowing it would send you into a spiral and you’d overthink every little thing but on day forty-two you’d noticed on twitter that he was playing games live. He wasn’t live himself, but you watched someone’s stream just to hear him again. You cried again doing this, because he was being exceptionally quiet, he wasn’t his normal self, he barely laughed once.

You wished you hadn’t clicked on it. The guilt you felt was already immense, but hearing him so not like himself made you feel even worse for causing all of this. You stopped watching, you couldn’t bear it. You knew you were to blame for all of this, you pushed him too far, you couldn’t believe how stupidly you had acted, you knew better and you did it anyway. The self attacking thoughts kept swirling your mind until you gave yourself a headache.

On day fifty-six of still not talking to each other, you ventured out to the beach with just your best friend. She’d been there for you a lot lately, she also felt bad about that night, but you tried to assured her it was your own fault. She didn’t know Corpse like you did, she didn’t know him at all, that’s why you felt to blame for not stopping the idea before it was too late.

“You should put sunscreen on.” Your best friend told you. You were laying on your towel in the direct sun, enjoying the warmth blasting into your skin, you hadn’t been to the beach in such a long time.

“Yeah.” You answered her, but you knew you weren’t going to. Another time, you would have, you knew the familiar sting of sunburn well and you normally put it on to look after your skin, but you hadn’t really been taking care of yourself too well lately, you just didn’t care enough.

On night fifty-six, you stood in front of your bathroom mirror looking over your body. You’d spent a lot longer at the beach than you realised and now you were burnt so badly and as red as a tomato. “Fuck.” You said out loud, turning and looking over your shoulder to inspect your back, it was just as red. You should’ve worn sunscreen. You left your bathroom to go find your aloe vera plant, only to find that it was dead. “Fuck!” You repeated, the one hope you had to help heal your skin even slightly quickly vanishing. “Oh, fuck. What am I going to do?”

That’s how you found yourself heading towards a 24 hour store to purchase whatever aloe vera cream or gel you could find, you knew it wouldn’t be as good as the plant itself, but you needed something. It was late and you were anxious as you neared the shop, you knew about this place from Corpse, he would often go there at odd hours to get whatever he needed. It was close to his place and you hadn’t driven around this area since that disaster of a night.

You squinted your eyes as you walked in and the harsh fluorescent lights pierced into your eyes after walking in from the night time. You were walking quickly and you told yourself it was because you were embarrassed about your skin being so burnt and you didn’t want anyone to see you like this, but it was really because you were so anxious over the thought of who you could potentially run into in this shop. Your swift steps brought you to the skin care isle and you let your eyes scan the shelves for the aloe vera you so desperately sought out.

“(Y/N)?”

You froze completely and you swore you even felt your heart stop beating. Hearing his voice speak your name again felt like lighting had struck right through you. This couldn’t be real, this had to be your imagination playing some sort of sick joke on you. Slowly, you turned towards the direction his voice had come from and sure enough, there he was. Dressed in all black, a beanie on his head and a mask over the bottom half of his face, your eyes locked with his. There was a pull in your chest, your heart had heard him, too and it wanted so badly to be with him, to be healed by him. You had thought up this scenario a million times over these past fifty-six days, of what would happen had you and him had a run in like this and in every single one you had so much to say, but right now, you were speechless.

Before you had a chance to even try to say anything if you managed to stop being stuck in silence, Corpse spoke again.

“Fucking hell,” He neared you and you sucked in a quick breath at his sudden movement. “Look how burnt you are.” You were wearing tights and an oversized hoodie, so your entire body was covered, but your face was just as burnt and clearly he had noticed.

This was another aspect that didn’t fit into your scenarios you’d thought up about this moment. You’d imagined you would’ve look amazing. But instead of looking like some beautiful mermaid, you were the same colour as Ariel’s hair from The Little Mermaid. “I know, don’t look at me.” You huffed and dropped your head down, letting your beach waved hair fall around your face.

“You didn’t wear sunscreen?”

“Obviously not.”

“That was silly.”

“I know.”

“Are you sore?”

“Yeah.” It felt so natural to have this back and forth with him. It was brief, but it was enough for your heart to kick back into gear and speed up.

He stayed silent for a prolonged moment so you looked back to his face and his eyes were on your face but it was his turn to glance away then and you took the opportunity to really soak in his side profile. You’d even missed just being able to look at him.

“Why are you here?” He asked you.

“I need aloe vera and I knew this place would be open.”

“You’re not using your plant?” Butterflies fluttered inside of you that he remembered a simple mundane fact that you preferred the healing touch of the actual plant for sunburn as opposed to what was bought at a store in a bottle.

“It died.”

Corpse suddenly looked back to you and much to your surprise, he laughed.

“Why are you laughing?!”

“How do you kill a succulent?”

“You know I’m not good at gardening and shit like that.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d be able to kill a succulent.” He laughed harder and you started to smile, he was teasing you but it felt so right. And hearing his laughter filled you with a warmth you’d been missing.

“Shut up.” You told him, but you were beginning to laugh too. “It’s hard to keep plants alive.”

“(Y/N), succulents are pretty much impossible to kill.”

“Okay, I get it, I didn’t purposely murder my aloe vera plant.”

“Oh, baby.” The pet name slipped so easily from his lips but it caught you both off guard, so the both of you stopped laughing and your postures stiffened.

Briefly, your eyes met but each of you darted your vision elsewhere. However, neither of you made no effort to move away from one another.

“Sorry.” Corpse said softly.

“It’s okay.” And it was, so okay. You wanted to tell him that hearing him call you baby was all you’d been wanting to hear again over these almost fifty-seven days without him. “I should really get this aloe vera gel on me, though.” You really didn’t want to leave him, but you couldn’t stand in this store forever.

“Are you sunburnt all over?” He asked.

“Yeah.” You sighed

And just as instinctively as the pet name had slipped out, his hands started to move towards the sleeve of your jumper. But he stopped himself when you flinched slightly and he quickly realised what he was doing. “Sorry, can I see?”

“I mean, you can, but I don’t want you to do it because it does really fucking hurt. That’s why I jumped, not because I don’t want you to touch me.” You answered him quickly. “I do want you to touch me- wait, I mean, no.” If your face wasn’t already red from the sunburn, it would have become red then from the blush you could feel forming. And if your skin wasn’t in pain you would have facepalmed yourself. “Sorry.” You apologised then.

“It’s okay.”

Shaking your head, you began to gently slide the sleeve of your big hoodie up.

“Fuck, (Y/N).” Corpse cursed, concern filling him as your skin was practically glowing from the burn it had copped. “You can’t do that to yourself.”

“I know.”

“How long were you at the beach?”

“All day pretty much.”

“You’re that burnt all over?”

“Yeah, I mean, some spots are worse. I think my back and shoulders are probably the worst. They hurt the most.”

He moved to step around you then, disappearing out of your sight as he was now standing behind you. “Can I?”

“Yeah, just be careful.”

And he made sure to keep his movements cautious, he decided on looking from the top, his hands grabbing the neck on the back of your hoodie to pull it back ever so gently so he could inspect. His eyes widened in a combination horror, worry and sympathy. He’d seen you get sunburnt before, but never to this extent. “Oh my fucking god.” The contrast between where the strap of your togs sat over your shoulder, blocking a sliver of your skin from the sun to keep it its natural colour versus the red that was brought from the burn was insane. “It looks like someone has painted you.”

“I mean, I guess the sun did. Just in a really painful way.”

“You’re not planning on going to the beach anytime soon, right?” Corpse carefully released your hoodie then and stepped in front of you once more. Distress was so present on his face, despite most of it being covered. He was so worried about you in this moment.

“Definitely not. The only thing I’m planning on is not going outside in any sunlight until my skin is healed.”

“Living like me.”

“Guess so.”

“My aloe vera plant is alive.” He stated.

“Wow, you’re really just going to flex that right now? Trying to kick me while I’m down.” You joked back, assuming he was teasing you.

“No, I mean...” He trailed off, his eyes struggling to stay on yours as he continued. “You could come over and use it, I know you like the real stuff better and I could help do your back, or wherever you can’t reach.” He was nervous, but he really didn’t have to be.

You could feel it happening, your heart beginning to heal.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Do you want to?”

“Yeah.”

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